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A Thin Line
America the Beautiful 2 and a new eating disorder center reveal how we slip into dieting dilemmas.
Last weekend, The Avengers raked in $100 million from 4,349 movie screens, for a total two-week gross of more than $373 million. Its budget: $220 million. Big numbers. But big deal. Last Friday evening, Monterey ...
Homeless, Harmonious
Shelter Outreach Plus and San Jose Symphonic Choir collaborate on a concert in Monterey to benefit outreach.
There are plenty of obstacles Shelter Outreach Plus confronts as one of the oldest homeless services providers on the Monterey Peninsula – hunger, fear, stigmatization, stereotyping and insensitivity among them. So it shouldn’t be a ...
Wrestling Tongues
After a long hiatus, the annual DLI Language Day is again open to the public.
A great golden dragon bobs and weaves before an awestruck crowd. The beat of Chinese drums keeps the time of the graceful dance. Costumed people with poles glide beneath the satin dragon skin, moving in ...
Through Rose-Colored Glass
Local sea glass collectors find treasures – and peace – along Monterey Bay shores.
Rob Ellis sets out in the muted late-afternoon sun, searching for glass for it to shine through. He plucks a clear piece from the tide line, then tosses it back because of its sharp edges. ...
Big Macs and Marathons
The astonishingly average record holder for most marathons laces up for Big Sur International.
Imagine waking up not long after the downtown bars make last call. Then imagine having to drive through darkness and foul weather for hours in order to make it to the starting line in time ...
Wheels Turning
New Bikes Not Gangs class, in partnership with Salinas youth center, gears up for first session.
When Korey Ericson was 5 years old, his father spread out the parts of his first bike in front of him on the patio. “You’re going to learn to assemble this,” Korey remembers him saying, ...
Zits and Bugs
Business Regional plan contest generates intense ideas, including technology to fight acne and track pesticides.
The other day, a few young area entrepreneurs caught a fever – which was a good thing. A very good thing. Last month Ryan Hambley, Ben Holber and Darius Sadeghi appeared at the “fever pitch” ...
Planting Power
How one Seaside resident has grown a blighted patch of land into a garden and more.
A neglected patch of land once sat at the entrance to Seaside on Fremont Boulevard at Canyon Del Rey. Most passersby didn’t notice it. Others probably looked the other way. When Mary Wilson first moved ...
Squid Fry 4.05.12
Squid Speaks
POPULAR GUY… Lonely Squid was prowling Facebook the other day – then recoiled all eight tentacles at once. That’s because Squid came across the virtual forum for that thing everyone in Salinas is whispering about: ...
Trippin’ on Jellies
Monterey Bay Aquarium expands on the jelly obsession with its spectacular new exhibit.
Translucent, alien-like Aurelia labiata swarm in the water. Staring at the palm-sized blobs – some soft pink, others cloudy white – pulsing through the abyss is a psychedelic experience. This is one of six new ...
Bean Burrito Bagel Master
An enthusiastic home baker crafts Jewish comfort food out of frustration and inspiration.
Monterey’s Steve Souza started baking bagels out of a specific kind of anger. About five years ago, he received a bread maker from a friend after expressing interest in yeasts and crusts. But he had ...
Math Is Your Daddy
A brave tribe of calculating kids take aim at MATHCOUNTS state finals.
The quotient of two consecutive positive integers is 1.02. Find the sum of these two integers. Now. Many people fumble at totaling a tip. To ask them to do some algebra could qualify as cruel. ...
Heroes Real and Fictional
A magnetic Marina man defies cerebral palsy to conceive a novel and inspire others.
Spend enough time with Jonathan Schanz, and you see a telling transformation take place. The initial impression – of a thin 26-year-old man with halting speech, prominent cheekbones, curled tongue and arm muscles contracted tightly ...
Running 100 Miles for Fun
Locals travel well beyond marathons in preparation for the Western States century race.
Monterey’s Brian Robinson had been running for 12 hours when he vomited. “I was scared because I had never experienced being nauseous,” he says. “It devastated me.” Instead of rah-rah support, his wife and pacer ...
Antiques, Reimagined
Milestones, a still-young store filled with eccentric finds, sets up shop.
The billiard balls on the retro-deco carpet and spooky anatomic model in the storefront are the first clues Milestones ain’t your grandma’s antique shop. “We don’t do tea cups,” says co-owner Cam Wilde. “We do ...
Getting Scrappy
There is such a thing as a professional scrapbooker – and one lives among us.
Salinas’ Melissa Coventry, owner of Legacy Paper Arts, is a working entreprenuer, which isn’t terribly surprising. It’s the work, scrapbooking, that is. Forget the construction paper and stickers of old. Coventry’s layouts take the craft ...
Hair Peace
Larry Zellers uses his Boomerang Hair Studio to help locals find acceptance and relief.
Larry Zellers crafted no fewer than 29 wigs for PacRep’s new production of Hairspray, which opened last month at the Golden Bough Theater. But the job didn’t stop there. “The high school kids are all ...
Smoke Alarmed
A real-deal local chimney sweep talks of smokestack stereotypes and fire prevention.
If the thought of chimney sweeps triggers a pretty motion picture of Dick Van Dyke singing “Chim Chim Cheree” in Mary Poppins, don’t mention it to Jerry Forbes. “That’s fantasy,” grunts Forbes, who owns Morrill ...
Spearfishing Meditation
Local freedivers hunt both seafood and serenity.
Bryan Mabrey slides off the side of a red, 16-foot Tarpon kayak. He’s a half mile from shore, 24-inch plastic fins strapped to his feet. Armed with his favorite spear gun, he’s hoping an olive ...
Gray Hair Hip Hop
A Pacific Grove woman earns national TV appearance with surprisingly lively dance.
Silver-haired Pagrovian Carol Kuzdenyi wasn’t supposed to earn the big audiences by dancing hip-hop on YouTube. She’s a master out of the San Francisco Conservatory, a choir director and piano and voice teacher based in ...
The Invisible Michelangelo
Dong Sun Kim’s murals quietly capture the beauty of his adopted country.
Dong Sun Kim is a stealth artist. As he guides his brush around a pencil outline of a woman posing against a spectacular, wall-spanning Monterey Bay vista, he reveals that he’s making this work of ...
Very Fast Gas Relief
Local pioneer of aerodynamic motorcycles aims to ride without foreign oil.
Like a lot of people, 69-year-old Craig Vetter begins his days at a local coffee shop just down the road from his house in Carmel Valley. It’s how he gets there that’s different. He drives ...
Steinbeck’s Poker Game
Inside Doc Ricketts’ lab with the Jazz Guy, the Psychologist, the Hotel Guy and the Roughneck.
Sandwiched between the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Intercontinental Hotel sits a shack. Lights burn inside it, back-lit silhouettes move behind the curtain-drawn windows, and this hole in the skyline, which was once known a long ...
Frozen Volleyball
A hardy bunch of beach players celebrate 20 years of ‘frosty palm tree’ tournaments in Carmel.
It’s a Saturday in November when a local crew shows up at Carmel Beach wearing costumes which will never be confused with gold medalist Misty May’s beach-volleyball bikini. One guy wears a black beard, a ...
Trail to Heaven
Big Sur Land Trust’s latest pathway project charms locals, leads to Palo Corona.
Strolling Carmel Valley’s new South Bank Trail on a sunny autumn morning, Eileen Cross recognizes the runner who bounds past with Zen-like focus. “I see her every time,” Cross says. But she’s surprised not to ...
Letterman Show
How a Carmel shop dominates the specific art of high school jackets with enthusiasm.
California Custom Logos is hard to find. It hides in an obscure back corner of a strip mall, past a pizza parlor, hair-and-nail salon, frame shop, grocery store and a fitness center, down a small ...
Tuning Up
Music therapy heals the ill and calms Soledad prison inmates in real, measurable ways.
Doctors didn’t think a 32-year-old survivor of a brainstem stroke could even hear, much less respond to the world around her. She’d lost all mobility, except for blinking, and her voice. But Seaside’s Cathy Rivera, ...
Super Sub, Sunken Ship
Plumbing the backstory of the Monterey Bay ‘Mystery Barge’ with help from a visiting vessel.
“Life support is functional,” says pilot Tym Catterson into the hydrophone. “We are ready to dive, dive, dive. Over.” The message travels through the water as sound waves from the little yellow submarine Antipodes to ...
Butterfly Food Fight
Nectaring experiment at P.G.’s Monarch Grove Sanctuary creates quite a flap.
As monarchs alight on the eucalyptus and pine trees of the Pacific Grove Monarch Grove Sanctuary, Bob Pacelli digs into the black soil. He removes a shrub in a plastic pot from one of many ...
Life of Smiley
Harrison Library brings in Jane Smiley to launch an impressive lineup of author appearances.
Carmel’s Harrison Memorial Library, which is sustained through donations, is lucky to have the support of the Carmel Public Library Foundation, which raises money for “every book, CD, DVD, all the services, equipment, resources and ...
Change Your Name Game
One writer eyes the path taken by Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe and Spike Lee.
Many – if not everyone – have pondered a new name. More of us than ever employ alternative handles for Twitter and Facebook. But few look into what it takes to go about legally re-naming ...
Cut and Rumble
A local barber uses motorcycles (and metaphors) to help out strangers.
Books like Falling into Grace by Adyashanti and Love by Mother Teresa aren’t usually the type of literary fare one finds in a men’s barber shop. But Fred Reynolds isn’t your average chap with scissors ...
Together We Ride
Rideshare Month hands out cash, joins other AMBAG efforts to take cars off county streets.Theodore Lawrence
Sasha Tepedelenova is trying to give away money. She’s been looking across the asphalt, from car to car, pump to pump, for more than an hour on this October day, searching for car poolers to ...
Water and Words
Bestselling author Clive Cussler headlines Camp SEA Lab Annual Dinner in Pebble Beach.
Sometimes it starts to feel like it’s all been done before – especially when you meet someone like Clive Cussler, who served in the Korean War, founded the National Underwater and Marine Agency and has ...
Enter The Spiderboy
A Monterey man shares his passion for tarantulas with everyone who will listen.
Vincent Pizzo sleeps soundly at night, but at the foot of his bed is a cabinet full of creatures that stalk other people’s nightmares. In separate plastic enclosures live around 90 mature tarantulas, hairy spiders ...
Heart of a Memory
An engineer-turned-entrepreneur turns fingerprints into treasured artifacts and even memorials.
Fingerprints, nature’s epidermal signifiers, are often associated with caution-taped crime scenes and the worst kind of criminals. Sometimes, they form messy tracks on oft-used objects. At others, they determine the cause of a death and ...
Debut Bonfire Heights assembles speakers who have changed the world with vision and verve.
It seems so simple. A small, basic lantern, little more than a flashlight, but bright enough to illuminate a small room. In a place like Kenya, though, it can mean everything: a chance to study ...
Canny Athletes
Analyzing achievement through the Triathlon at Pacific Grove.
After another mouthful of salt water, before a peek above clawing kelp reveals a surge of sea washing over the 60-some swimmers nearby, and right around the moment a second overhand right from a swimmer ...
Reel Treat
Monterey Underwater Film Festival pulls in a school of superior artists and their award-winning work.
Most people who find themselves in the ocean will probably try to avoid sharks. Berkley White tries to get close enough to touch them. The owner of Monterey’s Backscatter Underwater Video and Photo, which has ...
LULAC Look Back
Crecencio Padilla’s new book on the League of United Latin American Citizens is loaded with local civil rights history.
T ransforming decades’ worth of news clippings, letters and notes into an accessible archive is no easy feat, but Crecencio Padilla has succeeded with his self-published LULAC Legacy in Monterey County, a comprehensive history of ...
Bonsai Freedom
How a big paralyzing problem found a tiny sculpted escape.
I t took a long, anxious night spent lying face down on his lawn in the pouring rain before Dennis DeGray realized he would never move the same again. On a wet October evening four ...
Type Cast
Salinas’ Jerry Wallace taps out a fascinating—although endangered—existence as a typewriter repairman.
O nce a high-speed business tool, the typewriter has become a decorative bookend, a quaint relic. Some crafty folks see the machines as nothing more than art project fodder, shopping for cheap typewriters just to ...
Crazy for Life
For Pebble Beach’s Primo Waldsmith, scribbling his strange stories of pro boxing, murder and Moscow is mandatory.
What would your life look like if you put it on paper? How would you tell the stories that haunt, tickle and heal you? If you’re Robert “Primo” Waldsmith, you pour the contents of your ...
Going With the Grains
Rusty Croft has constructed a career – and a Travel Channel program – out of sand.
Imagine for a second a sculpture of the Tower of Babel. It rises from the earth on a massive base decorated with ancient Mesopotamian designs. In the middle, a tapering, round structure spirals upward like ...
Different Wavelength
Edrick Baldwin changed more than a tired stereotype.
He’s the anomaly. There are plenty of surfers in Monterey that can paddle out and get barreled, but there’s a smaller list of dudes that can move to Hawaii and command respect over there. Smaller ...
Flying Home
The World Disc Golf Championships come to Monterey County, a hotbed for disc history.
The Monterey Bay Stinging Jellies Disc Golf Club caught a case of the Kevin Costners. If we build it, they reasoned, they will come. As with Field of Dreams, it worked, only with fewer ghosts ...
Tagging a City’s Identity
Scott Lydon spent a year researching Salinas’ graffiti “problem” and found something unexpected.
Hideous. Modern art. Criminal. Free expression. Graffiti can inspire strong, divided reactions within a community, leading to disagreements over what it is, whether it has purpose, and what to do about it. For recent CSU ...
History in the House
How a humble Pacific Grove property changed the course of computing.
T here is a decent case to be made that much of the fate of the modern world can be traced back to a modest Victorian in Pacific Grove. That’s because the computer operating systems ...
The Fast and the Furious
A trifold look at the 101st California Rodeo Salinas most fans don’t have a chance to observe.
A few seconds. That’s how long a typical rodeo event lasts. A successful bronc rider only has to stay atop his bucking horse for eight. The fastest steer wrestler pins his calf to the ground ...
Inside Track
Looking at the Red Bull MotoGP from the photo pit provides a new reckoning of the breakneck race.
Andrew Wheeler compares motorcycle racing to ballet. “It’s like dancing on a knife edge at higher speeds,” he says. “You can relate to their form, on a human level.” This is what inspires him to ...
No Ordinary Artistic Angle
Aleks Raskin finds inspiration for his unique “photos” in an aborted biochem career, and meditation.
While around three dozen quazi-photographic images burst loudly from canvases hanging on the white walls of Aleks Raskin’s gallery, incense burns peacefully in one corner and the graying artist stands in another, twirling two Chinese ...
Skin Close
Jon and Susan Baker both got their first tattoos later in life, but their uncanny commonalities don’t stop there.
Susan Baker didn’t get her first tattoo until after 60. Same goes for Jon Baker, her husband. At the time of their first tattoos, though, the couple hadn’t started dating, nor reconnected since high school. ...
Raising the Sand Bar
A look into the Aquarium’s newly re-minted Open Sea gallery.
On a huge circular touch screen, visitors tap a tiny image of zooplankton and it swells in size, ready to be spun with a flick of a finger for 360-degree study of spiny antennae and ...
Who’s Your Daddy?
Figuring out who their forefathers are drives a dedicated group of genealogists to discovery.
Gary Carlsen was cleaning out his attic in 1990 when he came across a pile of family heirlooms. Among them appeared a box of his mother’s things, where he chanced upon a book. He didn’t ...
Igniting Invention
A range of locals tap innovative Kickstarter website to chase their creative dreams.
A college student seeks just enough money to film a mini-documentary. A photographer pines for publishing funds. An arty nonprofit venue needs a reboot. Unfortunately, the struggling artist’s life isn’t so romantic. That’s where Kickstarter.com ...
Flag For a Fallen Uncle
As Flag Day nears, a young Pagrovian keeps his tribute to his late soldier hero flying.
On a cloudy morning in Pacific Grove, three fifth-grade boys, one holding a carefully folded American flag, make their way out of a Monterey Charter School classroom and head for the pole in front of ...
Worming My Way In
A food-waste rookie learns to dig vermicomposting.
Call me Lloyd Christmas, Jim Carey’s character in Dumb and Dumber, who boasts, “I got worms!” Only unlike Lloyd, my dream isn’t to open a pet shop, but to keep food scraps out of landfills ...
Space Case
As the shuttle makes its final passes, local star-gazing events accumulate for summer 2011.
Asilomar Beach is a superb place to scope out heavenly and not-so-heavenly bodies. On a dark, cloudless night, planets, meteors, and even the Space Shuttle go zipping by. But there are no shortages of summertime ...
Animal Attraction
A new blog embraces the creatures the county loves.
Researchers have not isolated a definitive reason why an individual with the YouTube handle ChinTubeHD took two small chinchillas, Soju and Saki, placed them in wine glasses and set the romance that ensued to soft ...
Extraordinary Warrior
Fieldworker, wrestler, high school senior Sofia Martinez attacks cultural norms with style.
On a morning so cold she couldn’t feel her hands, Sofia Martinez picked peas until her thumbnails fell off. But it wasn’t until she ran her overflowing pail of peas to the foreman that she ...
Crazy Cute
Cindy Muscarello’s new Lala Originals drip with her eccentricity.
She wakes up at 3am and immediately jumps out of bed. She sketches a design and selects the fabric, color, textures and feel. Bam. A scarf is born. This is Cindy Muscarello, a woman so ...
Just Skidding
Extreme safety training occupies the unseen side of Skip Barber Racing School.
Accelerating to 80mph – then coming to a complete stop – or turning a trio of 360s on a wet road doesn’t sound like your typical driving school. It is at Skip Barber Racing School’s ...
Fashioning a Fever
Examining the manic obsession over area newcomer Forever 21.
If you know any remotely fashion-savvy young women you’ve probably been hearing the buzz about a place called Forever 21 for weeks. Now, around 21 days after Forever 21 opened its doors at Del Monte ...
Well-Versed
P.G.’s Poet-in-Residence Barbara Mossberg can’t stop thinking—or spreading—poetry.
Many poets find inspiration in their surroundings. But seldom is that setting the DMV. While standing in a serpentine line at the Department of Motor Vehicles just the other day, Pacific Grove Poet-in-Residence Dr. Barbara ...
Hot Wheels
The smokingest sport in town, roller derby, readies for a fast-moving rematch in Marina.
Torn stockings, heavy makeup, leopard print undergarments and colorful tattoos blur by. The smacking of polyeurathane wheels echoes off the curving, crosshatched roof. A sell-out crowd pours in from the damp night and fills bleachers ...
One Woman’s Wild Ride
Carmel’s Herma Smith Curtis is a personality who rubbed elbows with history.
Hitler patted her head in Vienna. She dodged bullets and survived the Nazi occupation in Austria. She later served cocktails to celebrities. And she eventually became a woman who many called the Queen of Real ...
Haley Storm
A Big Sur photographer releases an acclaimed new book full of gripping decay.
If Bruce Haley’s been there, chances are you haven’t. In his 23 years as a professional photographer, the Big Sur resident has sought out the hinterlands of the globe, traversing such regions as the rebel-held ...
School of Thought
New MPC class, sustainable design nonprofit EcoLogic prioritize places of learning.
Lazy Lucy is slumped in a school chair. Her classroom’s air is thick and stuffy. The box-like space lacks natural light. Her cross-multiplication isn’t going so well. She craves escape. While Lazy Lucy is fictional, ...
God and the Gangster
A once-made mob man shares his story with Salinas.
Michael Franzese’s entry into mafia life was greased by his bloodline. His father, John “Sonny” Franzese, was an underboss of New York’s Colombo crime family, one of five ruling families. (The New Jersey branch of ...
Bloody Crucial
How CHOMP’s Blood Center draws upon a community to save lives.
Inside a small, white-walled room, a tall, raven-haired woman covers a series of questions. Have you come into contact with anyone with hepatitis? Have you been outside the United States in the past 12 months? ...
Heated Delivery
Fire-balling Olympic pitcher and Salinas native Monica Abbott helps celebrate Steinbeck.
Driving up Highway 101 north at 65mph, Monica Abbott figured her car must be smoking and ready to explode. Why else would the woman driving alongside her be frantically waving and screaming? “[The woman] yells, ...
Waves of Change
Upstart Wahine Project gives little local girls big confidence.
Setting aside my inclination for self-preservation, I turn my back on crashing waves, and paddle my way toward shore. The surfboard lifts, moving much faster than I expected. I now know my fear of death-by-surfing ...
Old Men and No Sea
A group of weathered fishermen now share coffee and stories instead of the ocean.
The Sicilian fishermen of Monterey used to spend their morning hours scouring the bay in boats in search of the day’s catch. But now a core group of the men sit at a large wooden ...
Channeling Personality
Access Monterey Peninsula toasts 10 years of diverse public TV.
It’s maybe the most eclectic, relevant and radical channel you’ll see on television – and you own it. The mission of Monterey’s community TV station AMP (Access Monterey Peninsula) is to wedge a chunk of ...
Green Gold
New (and booming) Eco Carmel proves sustainable can be profitable.
Kristi Reimers wasn’t like most 13-year-old girls. In her free time she would stand in front of Longs Drugstore – when most of her peers were poring over US Weekly and BOP Magazine – handing ...
Tree From Space
Forty years ago a Monterey resident orbited the moon with the Apollo 14 astronauts.
We all carry things: keys, cell phones, wallets. We carry our memories, goals and dreams. On vacations we carry toiletries and (hopefully) fresh underwear. So it stands to reason that astronauts are allowed to carry ...
Punking the Junk
One man wages a humble war against an army of unwanted mail.
In the late ’90s box office bust The Postman, the year is 2013, post-apocalypse. America has been decimated by war, and those that remain have to contend with unsavory bands of armed rogues. The unlikely ...
Get Involved
Public Citizen
ONGOING XMAS TREE RECYCLING | COUNTYWIDE – Recycle Christmas trees in areas where Waste Management is your local garbage provider. Trees must be cut into 3-foot pieces. Waste Management also maintains a number of drop-off ...
Old School
Enterprising OLLI program gives more of our elders the education they always wanted.
Ruben Dozal, who dropped out of school at age 11 to begin working in the fields, figured his shot at higher education was pretty much kaput. Not so fast. “I never had the chance to ...
Special Edible
Salinas' Internet sensation owes much of his fame to a healthy diet.
Snappy Shelly Steinbeck cracked 1 million web views Dec. 31, making him, according to Salinas Public Library spokespeople, the most famous turtle on the web. See what he eats—and what else makes him tick—at the ...
Special Edible
A look at the many respectable restaurants that launched during the year gone by.
Just months ago, there were no incredible crepes being made by the Viva La Crepe chefs or unbelievable biscuits from Toast Carmel Valley, no rolls coming from the folks at Sakana Sushi or pints from ...
Top Picking
Ag Against Hunger fuels food banks with discarded nourishment.
Ag Against Hunger is the ultimate example of a simple idea – one spark – put into great action. Without the Spreckels-based nonprofit, 11 million pounds of produce would have ended up in compost heaps ...
What’s your most entertaining short story from your past?
Asked at the Maiden Publick House in Big Sur.
Follow-up: What’s the best story you’ve made up to get out of work? ASHLEIGH POLAND | Bar Manager | Big Sur A: I get gas and there are cops all checking me out. After I ...
Brezsny's Astrology
Free Will Astrology
Aries (March 21-April 19): “Just because everything is different doesn’t mean anything has changed,” said writer Irene Peter. That should be cautionary advice for you in 2011, Aries. From what I can tell, it will ...
The Public Voice
Public Citizen
ONGOING ONE WARM COAT | MONTEREY – The Girl Scouts of Monterey Bay are collecting gently used coats so they can be cleaned and given to someone in need. Children’s coats are especially needed. Bring ...
Images as Everything
Exploring a year in portraits helps reveal a community’s identity.
Sometimes you have to follow your subject for hours – through vineyards, a cave, a jeep ride (or seven) and into a hidden, dark cellar – for the one candlelit moment that captures his or ...
The Facebook furor, Bach rocks in Carmel, Dylan’s defiance and why California is still cool.
Call it the year of lame-duck achievements. Without attempting to gild the lily, 2010 ended better than it began. Here’s hoping the new year will bring us better times – and better luck. That said, ...
Opinion: One man’s take on his culture’s stereotypes
¡Ask a Mexican!
Dear Mexican: I live in a suburb of Dallas, am super-white, and make decent money. Naturally, I have a Mexican gardener/lawn dude who works his ass off, has 14 brothers and sisters in Guanajuato, employs ...
Pulling Strings
Chamber Music Monterey Bay changes the string quartet game
Joseph Haydn, the father of the string quartet and the man credited with creating chamber music as we know it, probably didn’t foresee his compositions performed in a loungey coffeehouse. He would have been pleased. ...
If you could be the 4th wiseman, what gift would you bring?
Asked at Paris Bakery in Monterey.
ALMA HEREDIA | Paris Bakery Employee | Los Banos A: I’m thinking about peace because my son is in Afghanistan. So I’d teach him the lesson of peace to make the world a better place ...
Get Involved
Public Citizen
ONGOING ONE WARM COAT | MONTEREY – The Girl Scouts of Monterey Bay are collecting gently used coats so they can be cleaned and given to someone in need. Children’s coats are especially needed. Bring ...
Brezsny's Astrology
Free Will Astrology
Aries (March 21-April 19): “There’s always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in,” wrote novelist Graham Greene. I’ll add to that: There are at least three moments in adulthood ...
Continental Shift
Two locals plan a way to change the lives of Africa’s young women.
O n July 4, 2007, Suad Ali met Robert Pacelli at a barbecue in Monterey, 15 years and continents away from the first time their paths crossed. Back then Ali, now a Monterey resident, was ...
Special Edible
This is bacon like you've never seen it.
Between the chicken-fried bacon, chocolate-dipped bacon, bacon cream cheese and bacon-wrapped scallops, it'd be understandable if you thought that this whole bacon thing was peaking. It's not. See how much more deliciously absurd it's getting ...
Culture Club
The Salinas-J. Edgar Hoover connection, a CSUMB grad’s Sundance success and David Ligare’s artistic accomplishments…
HOOVER DAMNED?: Dustin Lance Black is on the phone and he’s ready to do battle—politely but firmly—with the forces of evil. The North Salinas High School graduate who won the Academy Award for Best Original ...
Fight Night
Photos and video from the Winter Brawl of mixed-martial arts at the Fox Theater in Salinas.
Despite the rain, the Fox Theater Salinas was full of heavy-hitting mixed-martial arts action during the Winter Brawl hosted by Central Coast Throwdown. Local fighters Jonathon Gaxiola and Adrien Olivas both won their bouts and ...
Strong Like Onyx
A pioneering program prevents tragic ends for victims of cancer.
Onix, the mother of a 4-year-old daughter, works full time as a housekeeper in Carmel. She, like 55 percent of families living in poverty in Monterey with a female head of household, doesn’t make a ...
Brezsny's Astrology
Free Will Astrology
Aries (March 21-April 19): I vividly remember seeing singer Diamanda Galas in concert. Though classically trained, she didn’t confine herself to mellifluous melodies and elegant tones. She was a whirlwind of elemental sound, veering from ...
Winging It
A very fancy sort of Victorian birdhouse causes a flap in Carmel Valley.
When the once-rollicking housing market suddenly collapsed, and took with it the livelihoods of many of its talented contractors and builders, many craftsmen sat frustrated by their sudden wealth of free time and corresponding dearth ...
Fox Fight
The Winter Brawl brings sanctioned MMA fighting to Salinas.
The headline sucker-punches the holiday season: “Santa Claus will be arriving early handing out beatdowns to all the lucky mma fans!!!!!!!” Anyone who’s been to a mixed martial arts fight – or seen one on ...
