Earlier today I had to call 911 from the brand new VTA/BART Berryessa station. When the operator asked me for the address, I could only give the bus stop ID number because it didn’t have a street address and there wasn’t one listed at the building. Fortunately, help had been called but there was a sincere problem. One: Why don’t 911 operators know the 511 Bay Area stop ID numbers. Two: When I called VTA to ask about it the initial response was to have the call routed to BART police BUT the problem was when BART police did show up the officer said the bus stop was NOT his jurisdiction. Third : while I was trying to figure out the bus stop address I asked a VTA transit operator and they did not know guessing it was 931 on the side of the building this conflicts with the information I just received from VTA customer service showing the bus stop as 1601 ??? Third: yes, BART police would be helpful INSIDE the BART station but this was a medical emergency for an ambulance -isn’t this a NEW facility for both VTA and BART (where’s the defibulator? ) finally, while this happened where was the alwaysabsent except for events VTA Security Allied Security officer? Fortunately the woman did get medical help and I went on my way but in the event of a more severe emergency what is the address?

I Saw You is an anonymous “man on the street” column. Email your rants and raves about co-workers or any badly behaving citizens to iSawYou@metronews.com, or send to 380 S. First St, San Jose, 95113. Submissions should stick to about 100 words.

People are finding all kinds of things to do while they’re stuck at home: binge-watching Netflix, playing board games, doing jigsaw puzzles, learning a new instrument.

And many are growing pot, often for the first time. So many, that the companies that supply home-growers are having a hard time keeping up.

Oakland-based Harborside is among the relatively few dispensaries to offer cannabis clones, the plant cuttings that both hobbyists and professional growers often start with.

“People are waiting three hours for their clones,” said Pedro Fonseca, a general manager for Harborside.

All three of the chain’s Bay Area dispensaries—in Oakland, San Leandro and San Jose—sell clones. (A fourth shop, in Desert Hot Springs, does not). The customers wait not because the shop is backed up, but because it’s never certain precisely when the stock will arrive. The fact that they’re willing to wait that long is a testament to both the strong demand for clones and the tight supply. If they were to leave, they might be out of luck for at least several days.

“We expect to get about 2,500 clones this weekend, and in two or three days, they’ll be gone,” Fonseca said.

Another reason people wait: Harborside doesn’t offer delivery of clones, because the risk of damage during transport is too great.

People are so hungry for clones that the stores have asked the chain’s wholesale farming division, Harborside Farms, based in Monterey County near Salinas, to let them sell its clones. Normally, they are sold only to manufacturers, which then grow the plants at their own facilities before processing them into concentrate for use in vapes and edibles (many of which are, in turn, sold at Harborside’s dispensaries).

“They’re flying off the shelves,” said Tomas Levya, an assistant cultivation manager at Harborside Farms. Demand, he said, is up for both homegrowers and the growing operation’s usual corporate customers.

Businesses all along the supply chain report the same.

“We have sold four times the amount of soil this year than we did all of last year,” said Ellis Smith, co-founder and board chairman at American Cannabis Company, based in Colorado. “Business is just exploding, and we can’t keep up. It’s a good problem to have.”

ACC’s main business is in consulting cannabis and hemp companies of all kinds. But a few years ago, it got into the supply business and it sells a lot of soil; specifically, a ready-to-use potting mix called SoHum Living Soils, which Smith referred to as “the Chia Pet for cannabis.” As such, the soil is particularly attractive to newbies, since cannabis can be a tricky plant to grow even in the best circumstances.

Homegrowing has become so mainstream in recent years that ACC has deals to sell through the online stores of Home Depot and Walmart. Growers of tomatoes and other plants can and do use the soil, which Smith said is marketed in two different packages: one aimed at pot growers that sports the word “cannabis,” and “a Bible Belt version” that doesn’t.

ACC sells to professional growers as well as hobbyists, and Smith said he’s been getting more questions from the second group lately. Smith, Fonseca and Levya all said the most common questions they get concern watering. Many new growers do it wrong, by not watering enough, by overwatering, or sometimes, by not watering properly. One grower sent him pictures of her plant after watering it, and he noticed that the soil was nice and wet, but not at the stem.

“She said somebody had told her to do that ‘so that the roots will reach out for the water,’” Smith said. There are a lot of myths like that in circulation, he noted, adding: “Everybody’s an expert, I guess.”

When choosing clones or seeds, many newcomers are “looking for something that’s easy to grow,” Levya said. With clones, they might pick an older variety that’s already about 15 inches tall, as opposed to the more-common clones that are less than half that height. Or they might start with so-called “autoseeds,” which, unlike their more-traditional counterparts, don’t need to be induced into germinating via careful manipulation of their exposure to lighting. (For growing tips, check out Bay Area stalwart Ed Rostenthal’s website at edrosenthal.com).

The other major question is: indoor or outdoor? There are many considerations, but in general, it’s easier to grow outdoors if that’s possible, since you don’t have to worry so much about temperature and humidity in order to control pathogens and pests. You also don’t have to worry about lighting.

But time is running short for anybody choosing between the two.

“Now is the time to plant outside,” Levya said.

Over the weekend, one or more large groups of armed men targeted and robbed a long list of Bay Area cannabis dispensaries in what appears to be a long-planned spree.

Remarkably, most of the dispensaries in Berkeley, San Francisco and Oakland seem to have been hit, reportedly along with some manufacturing and cultivation facilities. Some sources said every single pot retailer in Oakland was targeted, although that couldn’t be confirmed at press time.

The Oakland dispensary ECO Cannabis has a side business, EC Security, which mostly serves ECO itself, protecting its dispensary as well as its East Oakland cultivation and manufacturing facilities. The company’s website features a photo of a bunch of bad-ass-looking dudes holding assault rifles, along with a bad-ass-looking German Shepherd. Whoever knocked off ECO Cannabis on Friday night either didn’t know about those dudes and that dog—or simply weren’t intimidated by them.

When CEO Kevin Aheasy got the alarm, “we called the cops, and we called our security guys,” he said. The security guys got there first, but it was too late. “There wasn’t a lot of vandalism, but they got product and cash,” Aheasy said.

In a way, ECO was one of the lucky ones. Harborside in Oakland was hit three separate times. Magnolia Wellness, also in Oakland, was hit twice.

The astonishing string of crimes occurred while Oakland and cities across the country were under siege by protests, riots and looting. Shops in Sacramento and in Southern California were hit, as well as others across the country. It’s not yet known whether any of the sprees in other locales are related to the ones in the Bay Area, which most observers believe were carried out by the same people in dozens of locations.

One of the East Bay’s worst-hit victims was Oakland’s Magnolia Wellness.

“20 men with guns,” CEO Debby Goldsberry said on Sunday. “We lost everything.”

Well, almost everything. On Sunday night, the shop was hit again. It wasn’t clear as of Monday whether the same people were responsible for both crimes. On Monday, Goldsberry was shell-shocked, and uncertain of Magnolia’s future.

“We’re a mom-and-pop shop,” she said. “We have no nest-egg. We have no Canadian backers or Big Cannabis money.”

Goldsberry, like other victims, said that while the crimes seemed well-planned, the perpetrators didn’t seem very bright. Cameras in some shops, including Magnolia, registered their faces and  license plates. A security agent was on hand during the first break-in, but fled the scene upon seeing how many armed men were entering the shop. They seemed to be having fun, Goldsberry said. “They danced on the desks before flipping them over.” They also shot the place up, and made off with computers and other electronic equipment.

Nonetheless, Goldsberry managed to find some empathy for her victimizers.

“People say it wasn’t political and that it had nothing to do with the protests,” she said. “But I think it did. The same conditions that led to the killing of George Floyd led to this.” That is: a system that marginalizes, and even kills, Black folks. “Some of these guys maybe sold cannabis their whole lives” before legalization, she said.

Dona Ruth Frank of Oakland Organics on Shattuck Avenue said some of the blame lies with the Bureau of Cannabis Control, which published the names and locations of all of the state’s legal licensees on its website.

On Monday, the United Cannabis Business Association, which represents dispensaries, announced the BCC had disabled the license-search function.

Reports that some cultivators and manufacturers had also been hit could not be independently confirmed by Monday night, but Aheasy said he knew of two East Oakland cultivation sites that were targeted.

Controversial national dispensary chain MedMen announced it would close all of its stores temporarily until the unrest passes. Three of its Los Angeles shops were hit over the weekend.

Goldsberry had an ominous message on Monday for her colleagues across the Bay Area.

“I fully expect them to come back tonight,” she said.

Maybe we’ll eat beans and
emit noxious gases

Maybe we’ll start taking a bunch of online classes

Maybe we’ll drink lemonade every day at 5

And listen to the folk singers
on the Facebook Live

—Dan Bern
“Til The Quarantine Is Thru”

It was a bit of head-scratcher when ABC’s Good Morning America declared this the “Golden Age of Quaranstreaming” in a story this month. Since the phenomenon began just two months ago or so, this is technically the only age of quaranstreaming.

But it’s easy to see what they were getting at. Though Facebook Live launched in 2016—and had already claimed 8.5 billion broadcasts by this year—musicians, comedians and other performers around the world have taken to the platform in unprecedented numbers during the coronavirus pandemic (to a lesser extent, they have also been broadcasting on other platforms such as Instagram Live, Twitch, and YouTube Live) as their tours and other gigs were cancelled.

And audiences are tuning in; Facebook reports that the number of Facebook Live viewers in the U.S. rose by 50% from February to March alone.

So something never before seen in pop culture is indeed emerging—even if, as Santa Cruz-based singer-songwriter Dan Bern alluded to in one of his livestreams recently, the details are still a bit fuzzy.

“It’s going to be a historic night,” said Bern as he launched into a wild set on May 13 that was part of the “In the Meantime” livestreamed music series from HopMonk Tavern in Novato. “I don’t know how yet. That’s what we’re here to find out.”

A couple of days later, Bern tells me that one-hour set wasn’t the only livestream he did that night.

“After I did that one, I did an hour on Instagram Live, and then I did probably four hours on Facebook Live,” he says. “Usually I’ve been announcing them, but I just thought, ‘It’s late, what the hell.’”

Around the time California’s shelter-in-place order was handed down by Gov. Gavin Newsom in March, Bern began performing on Facebook Live five nights a week, sometimes three or four hours at a time. Though he’s scaled that back somewhat, it’s not by much. Far from burning out on them, Bern is finding that these virtual shows—long considered an extremely poor substitute for performing in front of a live audience—have a certain thrill of their own.

“It’s exhilarating,” he says. “It’s hugely dependent on the interaction, as it always is at a live show. These are live shows, but the interaction now is not people yelling or walking around or making funny faces, it’s the things they type. And you can read their thoughts in almost real time, which in some ways is even more immediately interactive. It’s funny, people will come up to me after shows and say ‘I wish you had played blah blah blah.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, I’ll play it tomorrow night. But I’ll be 300 miles away. You should come!’ But here it’s like you’re reading their minds in real time. They type, ‘Black Tornado,’ and you can play it. Without that, I would play for like 45 minutes. But it just kind of goes and goes and goes, and somebody says something, and somebody else has an idea and that triggers something, and it’s great.”

Bern’s livestreams even inspired what may be the very first album to come out of the pandemic, Quarantine Me. (It was released March 31, a month and a half before Charlie XCX’s How I’m Feeling Right Now, which was erroneously declared “the first quarantine album” by some media outlets when it was released on May 15.)

“That album was I’d say 90% facilitated by the fact that I started doing these shows right away,” says Bern of Quarantine Me. “The songs just kept coming for the first two or three weeks of this, examining different sides of the thing. I don’t think I would have bothered making an album of them, except people seemed to want to hear them, like ‘How can I get these?’”

There have been plenty of huge music-biz names performing live for a virtual audience during the pandemic; for instance, the “One World: Together at Home” event last month curated by Lady Gaga and featuring musicians like Lizzo, Billie Eilish, Elton John, Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder. Benefitting the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund, it was streamed not only on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and Facebook, but also on traditional broadcasters like CBS, ABC, and NBC.

While such star-studded benefits represent a number of noble causes, many working-class musicians are relying on the money they can raise during their shows—usually in the form of donations or tips via PayPal or Venmo—to get them through the pandemic in a world where some experts believe we won’t see a return to bigger live shows until 2021 (or until there’s a vaccine—whichever comes first). Several of the musicians I spoke to used the word “generous” to describe viewers’ contributions during their shows.

But in the world of quaranstreams, the once-gaudy production values of the superstar shows now look a whole lot more like everyone else’s.

“It is totally the Wild West. And it’s a real leveler of the playing field,” Bern says. “There’s no gatekeepers. Famous people, obscure people, they’re all on the same platform. We’re all busking, and whether somebody’s going to throw in a quarter or not depends on the value of what we’re doing.”

Festivals Go Virtual

For William “Goodwil” Rowan, quaranstreaming has also meant the eradication of the physical boundaries that normally separate artists in different parts of the world. Best known in the South Bay at the founder of the Pacific Art Collective in the early part of the 2000s, Rowan has brought the same multi-disciplinary approach that fueled PAC’s shows to his weekly quaranstream show Pacdemic (which returns Saturday, May 30 at 6pm). Each livestream features as many as 30 musicians, DJs, poets, comedians, visual artists, and more, and is a fundraiser for Rowan’s nonprofit Humanigrow, which is based in the Bay Area but has a global approach that includes pioneering the “Keep Cambodia Clean” campaign in 2017.

Rowan remembers how PAC sought to unify artists and musical genres in San Jose at its events in a way that hadn’t previously been done. “That wasn’t happening back then,” he says. “Everything was, ‘Are you into hip-hop? Are you into poetry? Are you into visual arts?’ I was like, ‘Why don’t we just do a show where we’re all grooving together.’”

Though PAC is now defunct, the name “Pacdemic” is clearly a sly nod to the group, and indeed, Rowan wants to capture the same spirit—but it also adds a new global angle that has artists from around the world performing in various time slots, while most of the crew for the show operates in the Bay Area. The May 30 show, for instance, will feature artists from the U.S., U.K., Australia and Thailand—where Rowan found himself stranded during the pandemic after international flights were cut off, though he says he certainly doesn’t mind. (“It’s not ‘Waah, I’m trapped in Thailand,” he says. “Who would say that?”)

Organizing artists from around the world has definitely had its challenges.

“Sometimes, I’m like, ‘Do you prefer to stay up late and do a 3am set, or get up early and do a 7am set?’” he says of scheduling. “This is something that never would have been possible in a physical concept.”

Also rather ingenuous has been Pacdemic’s use of Zoom for its livestreams. Instead of emphasizing Zoom’s ability to spotlight one performer at a time, Rowan went the opposite way, featuring windows of all of the various performances, and allowing viewers to click on the ones they want to see.

It was kind of a revolutionary concept.

“We pretty much taught Zoom how to use their own platform in the art world,” he says.

But there were plenty of pitfalls, too. In its second show, Pacdemic was “zoombombed” by a large group of people unleashing racist and homophobic tirades.

“It was pandemonium,” says Rowan. “I had one of my producers in the Bay Area saying, ‘Cut the feed! Cut the feed!’ And I was thinking, ‘What kind of people would do something like this?’ It was heartbreaking.”

They did cut the feed, and when they returned for a third show, they had put safeguards in place to avoid that kind of attack.

But Pacdemic shows haven’t lost their loose, wild feel, which Rowan savors.

“It’s insane,” he says. “It’s so fun.”

One feature San Jose’s SoFA Music Festival, which hosts a virtual festival every Saturday, has added to increase its own interactivity is a “virtual hang” that allows musicians and fans to socialize after the shows.

“It’s kind of cool that this has rewritten how we connect with people,” says Santa Cruz musician Lindsey Wall, who performed at a SoFA festival this month.

While the low-fi quality of the livestreaming format was once a source of ridicule among live music fans,  Wall thinks it’s actually one of the best thing about them, especially for musicians who were once intimidated to play for the webcam.

“I feel like it’s kind of taken the pressure off a little, and given artists more of a platform to try out what we’re working on right now. It’s a little more raw and organic,” she says. “I’ve been so inspired by all the musicians putting themselves out there and playing things not-so-perfectly.”

Variety Hours

The most compelling and watchable recurring quaranstream out there right now may be the weekly Family Quarantine Hour broadcast by Illinois musician Ike Reilly and his “Holy Family House Band” (a joke based on his song “Ex-Americans”). Since Reilly’s band was social distancing, he decided to use his three late-teen-to-twentysomething sons and one son-in-law—all of whom were staying in the same house as he and his wife (or a couple of doors down), like a demented Brady Bunch—for shows. He hadn’t raised any of his sons to follow in his footsteps as a musician; in fact, he’d advised them against it. So none of them had had lessons of any kind, although 25-year-old Shane Reilly had already begun writing songs, which he now performs with his father as part of the sets.

“They’ve just been immersed—it’s like going to basic training,” he says of his sons on the shows. “They’ve gone from not really knowing how to harmonize at all to being able to sing, harmonize, take lead on songs and perform on what’s kind of like live TV. Granted, there isn’t the same pressure, but there is pressure. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think that they had soul. I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t think they were good.”

Besides the songs, the best things about the Reilly livestreams are the crazy but all-too-relatable family dynamics. A quintessential example came last week: As Reilly intensely performed one of the most emotionally devastating lines from “Born on Fire,” a song he had written for his son Kevin—“I can’t leave you no money/I can’t leave you no land/I can’t leave you no faith/I lost the little I had”—all three sons came out and began dancing ridiculously behind him.

That’s his livestream in a nutshell, I tell him.

“You know what, it is,” he agrees. “It’s a total lack of respect, total disregard for any kind of decorum.” Then he starts cracking up. “Actually, you know, I have to say, they know every song. They’re very interested in what I do.”

Reilly says his shows (which return on Saturday, May 30) have been getting between 1,200 and 1,900 viewers live, and then more than 25,000 views in the following 48 hours that he leaves them up. He’s been getting a lot of feedback from fans, including this text from David Lowery, founder of the legendary Santa Cruz band Camper Van Beethoven (who Reilly often tours with, in addition to Lowery’s other band Cracker): “You and your family basically need your own variety TV show. It’s like a fucked-up Partridge family, while remaining family-friendly. You have the best livestream going.”

A Laughable Format

While a lot of musicians can at least see an upside to livestreaming, even as they acknowledge the awful context of the pandemic that made quaranstreaming necessary in the first place, comedians are a different story entirely. Comedy sets rely on the immediate reaction of a live audience—hearing laughter makes a joke seem more funny, while anyone who’s seen a late-night talk show in the coronavirus era knows that not hearing it can make one seem decidedly less funny. Santa Cruz comedian DNA is facing this conundrum with his own online comedy.

“What do I have to rest on? Where are my laurels? I don’t have these songs,” he says, comparing music livestreams to his own. “I watch my friends, a lot of the guys in the NorCal scene, that broadcast daily or at least once a week, and I love the songs. It’s the best. My buddy Tim Bluhm from the Mother Hips, he does it on this boat in Sausalito, and it’s so nice to watch. But nobody wants to hear about how airplanes are weird right now. That doesn’t work. I mean, what works? So I’ve got a new kind of what I call ‘quarmedy.’ It’s not comedy. I’m leaning into this kind of Kaczynski-Unabomber-on-his-third-manifesto persona.”

He has to deal with that issue in an even bigger way after having turned his Santa Cruz comedy club DNA’s Comedy Lab into a virtual studio that broadcasts ticketed shows featuring comedy sets from comedians in their homes several nights a week.

“Rarely is anyone standing up,” he says. “Matt [Lieb] and Fran [Fiorentini] stood up, but usually it’s not even stand-up comedy. We’re sitting down. I’m in my house. You’re in your house. It’s very intimate. And I find that it’s almost impossible to ignore that we’re in a quarantine. It’s such a big elephant, it has to be addressed. So my comedy over the last eight weeks has evolved into somewhere between a therapist and a host. I will get kind of emotional sometimes. I just start talking about how it’s hard, because it is hard. You see some of the headliners that we have address it. I think the Puterbaugh sisters ended with ‘Hey, it’s going to be okay.’ Little messages of hope.”

What he’s realized, as some musicians also told me, is that the very business he’s in has changed.

“It’s like I’m a TV studio now, and I’m producing a TV show. Zoom, Zooming, none of those words make any sense to me, you know? This is a TV show. And some people do stream it to their TV. That freaked me out, when I realized some people are watching this on a big screen.”

One thing is the same with musicians and comedians alike—the importance of the interactive element.

“All the comedians can see the chat room, and the audience is extremely vocal in there. I mean, they’re heckling, they’re asking questions,” DNA says. “And that can never happen at a real stand-up comedy show. You don’t want the audience that engaged. But now we want them as engaged as possible. So if you’re a comedy fan and you can see whoever your favorite comedian is that we have, and you can talk to them? I think that’s a really neat feature for an audience member that you can never get at any other stand-up comedy show.”

Where to Find These Livestreams

Dan Bern: facebook.com/danbern

Pacdemic: facebook.com/pacdemic

SoFa Saturdays: sofamusicfestival.com

Lindsey Wall: facebook.com/lindsey.wall.376

Ike Reilly: facebook.com/ikereilly

DNA’s Comedy Lab: dnascomedylab.com

There’s been lots of chatter over what the cannabis industry might look like after the Covid-19 pandemic passes.

Most of the time, the attention is focused on how business is doing. So far, things are looking somewhere between “not bad” and “actually pretty good, considering.” Or, people wonder, will states hold off on moves toward legalization or regulatory reform as lawmakers concentrate on dealing with the fallout from the virus? In California, anyway, that’s looking pretty grim. Deeply desired cuts in pot taxes likely won’t happen until next year, if at all.

But there’s another question that probably can’t yet be answered yet: Will the “green rush” end, leading to a cannabis business that is less shallow, less celebrity-focused, less mercenary and less comparable to the buzz-driven, dot-com boom of the late ’90s, with its lavish spending and bacchanalias, terrible business models and, ultimately, its ghastly flameout at the turn of the century?

Observationally, the desire for a more stable, if perhaps somewhat less “exciting” cannabis industry seems to be swelling. I’ve been talking to people and watching Zoom meetings among cannabis professionals, mainly folks of the old-school variety, and a lot of them seem pretty fed up with all the hype and nonsense. The owners of High Times, stung by falling revenues and fleeing executives, recently decided to add cannabis retailing to its core magazine business, a move that has puzzled many observers and angered others.

Politico on Sunday published a long, deep examination of MedMen, the company perhaps most emblematic of the hype-driven aspect of the cannabis business, and its founder, Adam Bierman. The headline: “Lavish Parties, Greedy Pols and Panic Rooms: How the ‘Apple of Pot’ Collapsed.”

Before the pot industry started to collapse last year, the arrogance was thick at MedMen, which has turned out to be much less like Apple than like WebVan, the mega-hyped dot-com grocery-delivery company that didn’t just lose money, it lost money on every sale before inevitably flaming out in 2001. (Politico compared it to a more recent crash-and-burn: that of the remote-workspace provider WeWork).

MedMen was sued by employees alleging foul labor practices. It was sued by stockholders alleging self-dealing. It was sued by its own former CFO alleging everything from stock manipulation to outright fraud. Bierman reportedly had a panic room built in his house, using company cash, which he also allegedly used to buy Teslas and Cadillacs. He resigned in January.

It’s hard to know what will happen with MedMen now. But it already will go down in the annals as a symbol of the early days of the legal-weed industry: a meteoric rise and a spectacular crash.

Its woes reflect the precarious status of the cannabis business: legalized by states but still criminalized by the federal government, its position makes traditional bank financing impossible and puts companies at the mercy of a patchwork of regulators.

While the Trump Administration has deregulated right and left — for instance, allowing polluters to go hog wild — the Food and Drug Administration isn’t effing around when it comes to cracking down on companies selling supposed cures for the COVID-19 virus. Several of those targeted companies make CBD.

There is zero evidence that CBD (cannabidiol, a component of the cannabis plant that doesn’t get you high but appears to have some medicinal properties) can “cure” COVID-19 or even ameliorate any of the symptoms. As recounted in last week’s cover story, lots of charlatans and crazies on social media have been making such claims. Former NFL player Kyle Turley supposedly gave up his stakes in a couple of cannabis business after getting a warning letter. He did that, he said, so he could keep making the loony claims on social media. Priorities.

But there were plenty of others that, lacking any celebrity star power, didn’t get nearly the same level of attention for coming under the government’s gaze. For instance, an outfit called Indigo Naturals, based in Carmel-by-the-Sea, got a letter from the feds on April 6 that read in part: “The FDA has observed that your website offers cannabidiol (CBD) products for sale in the United States and that these products are intended to mitigate, prevent, treat, diagnose, or cure COVID-19.”

The letter quoted a claim from the company’s Web site: “There’s so much worry and panic today about COVID19/Coronavirus. We should not panic but take some extra care of ourselves to boost our immune systems. … Read our new blog post about how CBD and natural supplements can boost our immune system.”

That claim and several others are now gone from the site. On its Twitter page, which has eight followers, the company no longer makes claims about CBD at all, but is now sharing its enthusiasm for hydroxylchloroquine, which Donald Trump and some of his supporters have been promoting as a potential cure for the virus, despite the fact that there is as much hard evidence as there is for CBD’s virus-killing powers: zero. “Learn why hydroxylchloroquine could be a total game changer!” the company tweeted, along with the hashtag “#realDonaldTrump.”

Native Roots Hemp, based in Wisconsin, got a warning letter that quoted one of the company’s blog posts with the headline, “Don’t Fear the #CoronaVirus FIGHT it with us! Soap, immune boosting oils & more!” That post has been removed, along with whatever other claims the company might have made about CBD and COVID.

Another letter recipient, CBD Online Store, based in Laguna Hills, tried the old “just asking questions” ploy. For instance, it had said on its Facebook page: “Can CBD help with Corona Virus? Possibly! But one thing is for sure, it will help you relax when everyone else is panicking.”

Even the latter claim is not “for sure,” but there’s a lot more evidence for CBD’s calming effects than there is for its COVID-curing powers. CBD Online Store got its warning letter on April 7. On April 10, it posted a video on its Facebook page about CBD’s “anti-inflammatory” and immune-boosting properties, prefacing it with this statement: “With all that is going on with this pandemic, we have to be careful what we say about CBD and the immune system, so we will preface this article with this: ‘All the statements on this site have not been evaluated by the FDA, nor are they intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.’”

I’ve talked to tons of people in the CBD business, including lawyers and marketing consultants. All of the legit ones follow a simple rule: don’t make any health claims at all, lest you draw the attention, and ire, of government officials who can put you out of business.

A couple of years ago, I talked to Daniel Shortt, a lawyer with Harris Bricken, one of the country’s leading cannabis-focused law firms. He told me then that enforcing CBD claims was a “low priority” for the FDA. That has clearly changed thanks to the pandemic. But even back then, Shortt said that that when it came to health claims, “the worst cases are ‘CBD cures X disease.’” But, “it doesn’t have to be that explicit to get the attention of the FDA. It will enforce the rules for much less.”

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, top first priorities should be health and safety, and taking care of basic needs. But once those needs are addressed, maintaining some semblance of normalcy is important as well.

Grammy Award-winning Ragazzi Boys Chorus has made great creative strides in that regard. While group rehearsals are out of the question for now, the organization is putting technology to work so that many of the program’s 251 students can continue their studies.

In typical times, class instruction focusing on music theory is followed by 90 minutes of group-chorus rehearsal, explains Kent Jue, executive director of the Redwood City–based Chorus.

“That’s all about [students] making music together, and improving their own personal musicianship and vocal development in a group setting,” he says.

But with shelter-in-place rules in effect, those group activities aren’t possible. So the team of instructors at Ragazzi Boys Chorus decided to pivot, setting up a new instruction and rehearsal regimen via the Internet. The new program was deployed in only three days.

“A large majority of our boys have enough access to utilize the platforms,” Jue says. “Most of our work right now is done via our website; they can access our remote-learning plans.”

Jue and other instructors are in the process of contacting all of the kids in the Chorus.

“It’s less about compliance, more about ‘Are you doing the assignments?’” he emphasizes. “We just want to make sure that they’re okay.”

And he concedes that the concept of remote instruction can be challenging for some.

The organization is doing what it can to make the remote instruction as accessible and effective as possible. The first step was to create and record accompaniment and part-learning tracks, “so that the kids can access them and learn and review their music at home on their own,” Jue explains. Each student can then make audio or audiovisual recordings of himself singing along with those tracks, sending them back to his instructor for feedback.

Ragazzi Boys Chorus has 10 ensembles in all, with seven instructors. Jue has 30 boys in his ensemble, and the response to this new learning model has exceeded his expectations.

“I’ve listened to 132 different recordings that they’ve sent back,” he says. “And I’m thrilled by that.”

Most of the online interaction has been one-on-one, between instructor and student. But Ragazzi has organized an online group activity as well. That didn’t work well for educational purposes, but Jue doesn’t mind.

“For building community, I think it did a very nice job,” he says.

Putting accompaniment tracks online is not new, Jue admits—but the benefits have become readily apparent.

“It has been on my mind; it just hadn’t been as much of a priority as it is now,” he says. “In many ways, this is an opportunity that [our students] wouldn’t normally get. Kids who thrive on individual attention are really thriving in this new model, because they’re basically getting individual voice-coaching lessons.”

The kids who are drawn to technology are seeing this as an opportunity to showcase some of their strengths, Jue says. He believes that the individual instruction helps cultivate students’ “emotional empathy and its expression to a live audience.”

Born of necessity, this new approach may well influence how the Ragazzi Boys Chorus does things in the post-pandemic era.

“I think that we’re going to continue to offer the online learning portal,” Jue says.

Coupled with group practices, remote learning will create an even more well-rounded experience for the students.

May concert appearances have already been canceled, and other dates—including the Chorus’ July summer camp program—are in doubt. But Jue and his colleagues at Ragazzi Boys Chorus are still looking toward the future.

“If we could get back today, for example, we could create a concert within three weeks,” Jue says. “Because the music is already ingrained in them.”

And he’s proud of his organization’s response to difficult times.

“Our families have stuck by us and are engaged with our work,” he says. “And we’re doing the best that we can to continue our learning with our boys.”

I understand the need to make a living, but there’s more at stake here than dollars and cents. So, seeing the flashing, neon “OPEN” sign in the window of your beauty salon presented, for me, a moral conundrum. Should I snitch you out? Through the window, I could see you styling a silver-haired client—clearly someone old enough to be disproportionately vulnerable to the dreaded virus. I literally stopped in my tracks to mull over whether to call 3-1-1. Ultimately, I decided against it because of how loathe I was to get anyone tangled up in the criminal justice system over a misdemeanor. Plus, I figured that the flashing light in your window would signal another, perhaps less conflicted, passerby to alert the authorities.

I Saw You is an anonymous “man on the street” column. Email your rants and raves about co-workers or any badly behaving citizens to iSawYou@metronews.com, or send to 380 S. First St, San Jose, 95113. Submissions should stick to about 100 words.

I saw you. You were sitting next to me at the wedding—the one we were all concerned about attending, given the novel coronavirus pandemic. Well… most of us were concerned. You were just running your mouth, doing everything in your power to bring our polite conversation back to the topic of guns. Perhaps you fancy yourself a tough guy, determined to keep this country great by any means necessary, including going out of your way to shake the hand of every person you encountered, as if your arrogant disregard of common sense public health practices proved your patriotism. You are truly the worst kind of American.

I Saw You is an anonymous “man on the street” column. Email your rants and raves about co-workers or any badly behaving citizens to iSawYou@metronews.com, or send to 380 S. First St, San Jose, 95113. Submissions should stick to about 100 words.

What do you get when you combine offbeat tap dancing, exaggerated Broadway arm gestures and over-the-top facial expressions and mix it in a 30-something-year-old at a bar with an open microphone? That’s right! A karaoke hog that over-performs the shit out of songs the rest of the bar could care less about. At some point, you have to let go of your dream of being a star. The harsh truth is that you’re a nine-to-fiver now, in a room full of other nine-to-fivers, and the group of friends you brought with you (clearly it was your idea to karaoke) is formulating any half-assed excuse to get the hell out of here without hurting your feelings. So instead of making this Saturday night about how you should’ve gotten the lead in your community college’s rendition of Les Mis, how about we sing off-key in solidarity? Let’s just drink to how we all were supposed to be something else and pick a number the rest of us can sing along with like Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” so maybe we can forget about life for a while?

I Saw You is an anonymous “man on the street” column. Email your rants and raves about co-workers or any badly behaving citizens to iSawYou@metronews.com, or send to 380 S. First St, San Jose, 95113. Submissions should stick to about 100 words.