Bay Area Blog Pulse

Who says stoners aren't productive and ambitious? At one point yesterday there were three posts in a row about the medical marihoonie: A jailed dispensary owner writes from a Fresno jail where three fellow advocates are also locked up, Charles "Eddy" Lepp stands trial this morning and faces four life sentences for growing cannibis and Mountain View looks to be the first town in Santa Clara county with a dispensary ordinance on the books.

Speaking of Northern California politics, there's a new blog on the beat -- NorCal Politics. The blogroll reads like a whos-who on the local lefty scene, including one of our faves, Generik. Jay Allen writes about packing out what was packed into Burning Man, and the BLM has verified that the playa is clean. And the Knight-Ridder reporter Dion Nissenbaum who was recently held captive in Gaza? Contra Costa Times Editor Chris Lopez shares Dion's memo about the experience.

On the business side, we've got more action on the three-way fight between Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. Is it AOL plus Microsoft, or AOL plus Google and Comcast? Of course, a quick call to Time Warner might take a little wind out of the dealmakers' sails. In the meantime, Yahoo has closed their chat rooms to tykes under eighteen -- guess they have to go to Yahooligans now or something. And SFist Ted muses on the lessons learned from the dot-bomb.

Update: Eric Lin dropped us a line over IM with a sordid tale of laptop thievery at a local cafe in the Western Addition, and just sent us the link to his blog post.

Photo of Red Bull Air Race competitor by J. Gilbert.