You just can't beat America. I mean, unless you are the North Vietnamese army or something. But for a good old-fashioned barbeque-filled weekend, full of kids eating ice pops, and fire crackers, and weiners on the grill, there's just nothing like it. For some reason, I have had almost the same experience on the fourth of July for many years running. It goes like this: I get invited to a party where I hardly know anyone. Some people show up there with liquor and get really drunk. Some people show up with fireworks, which get set off in a halting manner. They cook about ten times as much food as each person might need. Traditionally at one of these events, I eat some watermelon. This year was all that, though it wasn't quite as hot as it usually is, since out here it doesn't get that hot. Well, it does, but not around here, in the local mini climate. San Francisco is chilly and cool at around 60, which I consider perfect, but Berkeley, where we went, was more like 80, which is warm but not ridiculous. On the weather report, they said it was 104 somewhere, but I don't know where, probably like an hour or so out of town where the desert temperatures really get up there.

At night, we watched Spellbound, the Alfred Hitchcock movie. It was a nice set up to today, when we went to the theater and watched Spellbound, the documentary about spelling bees. While the first Spellbound is suspenseful, it is in a stylized fifties kind of way, about a guy whose identity gets switched and kills someone. The spelling bee one tracks about 7 kids through a national contest, which is a real nail biter. The line up of two movies with the same name was just a coincidence.

Earlier in the day, we went to a street fair, which is kind of set up for me to get a headache, since I can't stand street fairs. But nonetheless, we went to a street fair, which featured jazz music. I like jazz enough, at least I can listen to Miles Davis and enjoy it, but not street fair fusion, which is what was playing there, amid the low smoke of the grilling sausages, and the throngs of people there. But going to the street fair was kind of a prerequesite to get to Japan Town. Japan Town is full of Japanese people, selling Japanese stuff. So that made for some hijinx, going through all the products with the mangled english copy on them. Which was fun for a while.