Thursday, August 25
Interview with Shepard Fairey
First, a question that’s been going around. Are you coming to the opening? No. I'm not. I just have too much on my plate to come. I'd like to, but it's not going to be ...
Arty Party
Dozens of diverse artisans and local resident artists keep West End’s creative heartbeat thumping.
Artists have worked in Sand City for decades, but at the beginning, many were living illegally in empty warehouses. When Sand City changed the West End zoning from heavy industrial to mixed-use, artists came crawling ...
Moon Music
Jam band vets Moonalice lead a big-name, two-day lineup of free music.
Last year’s West End Celebration featured internationally renowned Mexi-Cali outfit Los Lobos. This year, the names – which include Southern rockers Truth & Salvage Co. (Saturday at 2:30pm), folkster Jackie Greene (Saturday at 4pm) and ...
Leading the Flock
The work of street artist and accidental celebrity Shepard Fairey highlights West End Celebration.
Less than two weeks ago, much of the bottom floor of The Independent (formerly The Design Center) was a dusty space dominated by cement and emptiness. Today it’s a Valhalla of intricate portraits crafted by ...
By The Numbers 08-25-11
Real Estate
$1,517,000 Recent Sale 24702 Upper Trail Rd., Carmel Built: 1949 Size: 2,674 square feet Features: 3 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, 1-car garage Amenities: Fireplace, deck, barbecue area, breakfast bar, tub with jets, 2 dishwashers and ovens ...
Short Film Complex
Big Sur Short Film Series building to a climactic gala finish.
When it comes to Big Sur International Short Film Screening Series, even the popcorn is special. The organic kernels are popped fresh on a stove top with help from a combination of canola and extra ...
Brezsny's Astrology August 25-31, 2011
Brezsny's Astrology August 25-31, 2011
ARIES (March 21-April 19): I predict that in the coming weeks, you will be able to extract an unexpected perk or benefit from one of your less glamorous responsibilities. I also predict that you will ...
Monster Group
Scary Larry and friends lay down some big Louisiana blues at Sly’s.
To see Scary Larry and the Monsters perform is to wonder what exactly is so damn scary. It can’t be his fluid picking on electric guitar, which comes as he leans way back and closes ...
Fast Learners
CSUMB focuses on cross-school collaboration to boost student success.
It takes an energetic presence to keep a classroom crammed with 90 remedial math students engaged. Fortunately Hongde Hu, chair of CSU-Monterey Bay’s Department of Math and Statistics, has the energy of 10 teenagers. On ...
Good Walls Make Good Neighbors
Vinyl barrier brokers truce between enviros, homeowners on the Carmel Lagoon.
Walls have been notoriously divisive in Germany and Israel, but a vinyl flood wall in the Carmel Lagoon might finally forge peace between the area’s feuding homeowners and steelhead advocates. At least that’s the hope ...
One Day
Time Warped: One Day struggles to fully capitalize on a clever concept – or does it?
Following the same template as the ingratiating source novel by David Nicholls (who also wrote the screenplay), One Day charts 20 years of a relationship’s ups and downs in one-day blips. Touching down on the ...
Westie’s Besties
Top regional bands complement national names for a West End Celebration that will be the best free music festival all year.
Local fave musical flavors like the cello-fueled ADHD punk rock of Tornado Rider (performing Saturday at 1pm) and the expert, timeless blues of Mike Beck & the Bohemian Saints (Sunday at 1pm) have made their ...
Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark
Shadow Games: Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark wins with spooky gloom and solid acting.
The haunted house thriller can sometimes feel like a lost art, especially with advances in visual effects making it easy to conjure spirits out of nowhere. But like Insidious earlier this year, Don’t Be Afraid ...
Community forum on Regional Project leaves most questions unanswered.
The message was tightly controlled at an Aug. 23 community involvement forum on the Regional Desalination Project. The event at Monterey Plaza Hotel was sponsored by project partners California American Water, Marina Coast Water District ...
Stunner Summer
The iconic Henry Miller Library inches closer to the end of a historic season with The Dodos.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers, MGMT and John Waters represent a sliver of the goodness that took pay cuts to perform at the revered Henry Miller Library in just the last few months. With the ...
Street Talk 08-25-11 asked in front of Book Haven in Monterey.
What is the story of your life?
Follow-up: What are you crazy about? JIM HENNING | Canvasser | Santa Cruz A: I took a roundabout way of discovering music in order to go to composition school. I look up to people like ...
The Regional Desal Project for Dummies
If you don’t follow the Peninsula’s wonky water saga, think of it as our own ridiculous reality show.
The devoted fans who followed Arrested Development through its three twisting seasons know why it won six Emmy Awards. But drop-in viewers had a hard time decoding its tangled subplots and nuanced dialogue – a ...
¡Ask a Mexican! 08.24.11
Dear Mexican: Lately, we have been trying to lighten the mood around the office with delicate bits of international confections. Just the other day at my birthday celebration, I quite insisted on a lilac-toned bomb ...
Happy Trailers
Marina council mulls rent control for mobile home parks; property managers resist.
A multi-year saga pitting Marina mobile home residents against their property managers may finally be approaching resolution, as the City Council prepares for a September vote to finalize an ordinance keeping rents flat at all ...
Get current with the Regional Desalination Project drama series.
Editor's Note: This timeline picks up near the end of Part I, which details the Monterey Peninsula's water history from the pre-1880s to June 2010. March 2010: After months of closed-door negotiations, California American Water, ...
Get Involved
Public Citizen 08.25.11
THURSDAY 8 | 25 TURTLE CONSERVATION | WATSONVILLE – The Elkhorn Slough Coastal Training Program presents a workshop for regulators and biological consultants on western pond turtles, with training on the biology and conservation. 9am-5pm. ...
Letters To The Editor 08.24.11
Open for Questioning I wish to thank you for your ongoing coverage of the Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority’s (SVSWA) evaluation of our innovative, non-incineration plasma gasification technology as an alternative to landfilling (“Proposed trash-zapping ...
Veteran combat doc turned author finds death isn’t the only measure of risk on the battlefield.
The human costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are high – and hidden, due to advances in combat medicine, and this masks the ferocity of these conflicts. In Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: A ...
Keeping the Faith
Leon Panetta talks to NPS and DLI about budget cuts, terrorism and cyberwar.
Leon Panetta struck a personal note during his first hometown visit as Secretary of Defense. In an Aug. 23 talk at the Naval Postgraduate School, Panetta recalled memories of washing dishing in his father’s Monterey ...
Squid Speaks.
WATER RUNS CLEAR… And in the spirit of that liquid transparency, ever-earnest activist Margie Kay of Castroville wants an itemized list of exactly what the Monterey County Water Resources Agency paid consultants RMC a half ...
Mundos Café
A pair of brothers seduces the Peninsula one sandwich at a time.
The guy that recently won the Food Network’s “Next Food Network Star” competition came up with a universally relatable concept for a new show: “The Sandwich King.” The theme behind the show Jeff Mauro will ...
Salinas housing prices are about to plummet again.
If you noticed the word Salinas popping up in the national news about a week and a half ago, you undoubtedly noticed it was more bad news for the nation’s lettuce capital. An outfit called ...
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 ...
Buckle Up, Baby
Chewing through Car Week and a salumeria to swear by.
There was a Dos Equis ex-racer deathtrap that dubbed itself The Most Interesting Car in the World and a truck wrapped entirely in tin foil called The Baked Potato. At Quail Motorsports Gathering, Chef Julio ...
Sand City looks to the future with a new perspective on its annual community festival.
Earlier this month, vibrant green paint covered a formerly homely patch of wall in central Sand City thanks to a team of artists who conjured a West End mural in the space of a half ...
Thursday, August 18
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 ...
Walkin’ Blues
Despite a lifetime battle with cerebral palsy, Watsonville’s Jake Nielsen has been able to take his talent on the guitar to sky-high levels.
For Jake Nielsen, cerebral palsy and playing the blues are somewhat interchangeable. “I grew up with hard times,” he says. “It’s hard having to use crutches cause you have to overcome a lot and I ...
Get Involved
Public Citizen 08.18.11
ONGOING OPEN SPACE GRANTS | PENINSULA – The Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District will award $75,000 in grants to community groups or local agencies to improve neighborhood parks, protect open space resources or preserve coastal ...
Letters To The Editor 08.18.11
SNAP Judgement So Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) wants a private group to take a website down (“Congregants take accused priest’s defense to the web,” Aug. 4-10). Amazing how far they’re willing ...
Street Talk 08.18.11 (asked @ Costco in Sand City.
)
If you could create a sculpture of anything, what would you create?
Follow-up: What would you write on Scribble Hill in Seaside? Joann Burns | Retired | Seaside A: I would sculpt a bust of my mother out of marble because my mother was a beautiful person… ...
Car Week Coolness
The Concours d’LeMons rusty buckets offer Car Week a chill pill counterpoint.
Casting his eyes over the 18th Fairway at Pebble Beach, Alan Galbraith witnessed the pursuit of perfection. He saw why car fanatics routinely call the Concours d’Elegance the pinnacle of the automotive world, why they ...
A veiled threat of litigation from desal partner Cal Am.
When we last left our little buddy the Desal Hydra (also known as California American Water, the Marina Coast Water District and the Monterey County Water Resources Agency – the hapless partners in the $400 ...
Squid Speaks
SHINE A LIGHT… The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency – usually a bunch of goodniks pursuing vital work in Monterey Bay – seems to share Squid’s belief that government should be transparent, that there should ...
It's Car Week Again in Monterey
Car Week Crib Sheet
This week dozens of the flyest Lamborghinis in the land will gather in Los Angeles for one big sleek police-escorted race up the state to the Monterey Peninsula. If such a scene strikes you as ...
Taste Sensations
Reflections on Sweet Elena’s recipes, Wubeez and veggie Vietnamese.
It might be the culinary equivalent of a secret Big Sur trail. It delivers mind-trampolining experiences drawn from simple but powerful fundamentals. It’s been there seemingly as long as time, but remains almost hidden, beautifully ...
Sweet Death
Sugar is not only making America fat, it’s poisoning the people.
New figures released by Trust for America’s Health paint an increasingly fat picture of the U.S. Twenty years ago, not a single state in the union had an obesity rate higher than 15 percent; today, ...
Can-do Cowboy
Actor-author-country music star Trace Adkins brings his many hats to Monterey County Fairgrounds.
Trace Adkins knows how it feels to work 12-hour days, sweating his ass off under an unforgiving sun. The country music superstar used to make his living performing labor-intensive duties, including a decade-long stint working ...
Another Earth
Parallel Pooper: Another Earth fails to make it out of its own sci-fi field of gravity.
Shaky science fiction shacks up with a corny redemption tale in this Sundance Film Festival double award-winner. What emerges is a film with a potent signature image, a swirl of half-baked ideas about the possibility ...
Fright Night
Monster’s Ball: Vampire remake flick Fright Night mixes horror, sexiness and humor.
It’s a rare thing, but sometimes digging up the past and giving it another spin is a good thing. I haven’t seen the original 1985 Fright Night, but I have seen lots of ’80s flicks ...
Unsettling the Hills
Monterey County Bank pays up in settlement over bad loans at Monterra.
What began as a dream of a lucrative hilltop luxury paradise in the 1990s has become a divisive subject for bean-counting lawyers and bankers as they divvy up the remains of defaults and debt at ...
Street of Dreams
A local firm wants to make downtown Monterey the next great shopping district.
Big arrows and bright icons on Del Monte Avenue’s signs direct visitors to Cannery Row, Fisherman’s Wharf, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium – all top-notch destinations, none in downtown Monterey. “Why is Alvarado Street not ...
Proposed trash-zapping plant in Gonzales moves forward, but not without questions.
The high-tech replacement for the Johnson Canyon Landfill in Gonzales is moving forward, with the Salinas Valley Solid Waste Authority set to select a firm to begin the project’s California Environmental Quality Act review process ...
Grounded Plans
Lawsuit and airport’s district chair say $42 million safety plan won’t make flying safer.
Nervous fliers may be familiar with the runaway plane scenarios that can play through the mind at takeoff or landing. Such passengers may take comfort in cushiony installations that have been added to runways at ...
¡Ask a Mexican! 08.18.11
Dear Readers: Your faithful Mexican is putting the final touches to his coming magnum opus, Taco USA: How Mexican Food Conquered America (out April 2012) and is thus at the rancho, getting handmade tortillas made ...
The Iowa Straw Poll, a pricey test of organizing capacity, has a strange influence on American politics.
A day after Saturday’s Iowa Straw Poll results came in – Michele Bachmann edged out Ron Paul, with Tim Pawlenty a distant third, just ahead of Rick Santorum and Herman Cain – Pawlenty pulled the ...
By The Numbers 08-18-11
Real Estate
$1,500,000 Recent Sale 1275 Cantera Ct., Pebble Beach Built: 1972 Size: 3,013 square feet Features: 3 bedrooms, 3.5 bathrooms, 2-car garage Amenities: Two fireplaces, landscaped, patio, deck, chef’s kitchen Seller: Dorothy Anne Thomas Buyer: Lorry ...
Stone Creek Kitchen
Rockin’ Food : Stone Creek Kitchen assembles a hit list of retail cooking tools, gourmet hot food and cheffing classes.
Stone Creek Kitchen is the kind of place that requires some serious time to dig in. So I blocked out half my day in order to seize the grand experience, and was left with the ...
The Sound of Glass
Famed contemporary classical composer Philip Glass establishes a local legacy with his Days and Nights Festival.
Philip Glass’s life is akin to that Johnny Cash chorus, “I’ve been everywhere, man/ I’ve been everywhere, man.” He was born in Baltimore in 1937, and, steeped in a music-rich childhood, entered the University of ...
Brezsny's Astrology August 18-24, 2011
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Time magazine asked Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough why he started writing a biography of Pablo Picasso but never finished it. McCullough said it was because the famous artist turned out ...
Taking the Wheels
Getting up to speed with the truck drivers, an overlooked but fundamental Car Week fixture.
The Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance attracts car lovers from far and wide. But they wouldn’t have anything to look at if it weren’t for the truck drivers transporting those million-dollar vehicles. And it turns out ...
Thursday, August 11
Kiwi Songbird
New Zealand native returns to her love of the outdoors with her new album.
Singer-songwriter Jackie Bristow, playing solo acoustic shows at the Henry Miller Library on Thursday and Plaza Linda on Friday, recalls composing her own music on the piano as early as the age of 15. “It ...
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 ...
Brezsny's Astrology August 11-17, 2011
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Dr. Larry Dossey thinks we shouldn’t just automatically dismiss the voices that speak to us in the privacy of our own heads. Some of them may actually have wise counsel, or ...
By The Numbers 08-11-11
Real Estate
$750,000 Recent Sale 3162 Bird Rock Rd., Pebble Beach Built: 1955 Size: 1,736 square feet Features: 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2-car garage Amenities: Two fireplaces, vaulted ceilings, study, utility room, fenced yard Seller: Won Pyung ...
On Point
Eyeing the new Old Bathhouse, real Car Week values and steak.
There’s new life at an old landmark. A handful of sunny Pacific Grove city officials, local businessmen and construction workers gathered next to the volleyball courts at Lovers Point last week for free hot dogs, ...
Hanabi Japanese Restaurant
Hanabi Japanese Restaurant creates a fairytale sushi story in the Artichoke Capital of the World.
Love is stronger than looks. Take it from Beauty and the Beast, who taught us that one can learn to love despite hairy body parts and general grotesqueness. So it goes with Hanabi Japanese Restaurant, ...
Letters To The Editor 08.11.11
Coal v. Nuke I am amazed at the resourcefulness of the Japanese after the tsunami and nuclear disaster (“A Study in Resolve,” Aug. 4-10). The sister aquarium to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Aquamarine Fukushima, lost ...
¡Ask a Mexican! 08.11.11
Here is my problem: I was raised in a typical gabacho family. My siblings and I all enjoyed a typical gabacho relationship. We are close as cats. I phoned my brother year-before-last, and was gratified ...
Memory Lane
The Parties reignite the British Invasion with guitar-pop bliss and psychedelia.
John Lennon, perhaps the cultural poster child of the era, once said, “The thing the ’60s did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It ...
Shot in the Arm
Schools hurry to meet state orders on whooping cough vaccines.
The Seaside Family Health Center was swarming Aug. 8 as parents scrambled to get the state-required pertussis (or whooping cough) vaccines for their kids before the Aug. 10 start of school at Monterey Peninsula Unified ...
Styrofoam Stigma Grows
Ban on polystyrene foam packaging heads inland to Salinas.
Styrofoam blows – and litters as it goes. That’s the main motivator for bans on polystyrene foam packaging in the cities of Carmel, Pacific Grove, Seaside, Monterey and Del Rey Oaks, and the unincorporated county. ...
Bleeding Budgets
County social services tense up as budget axes swing.
Kathleen Adamson says a perfect storm is brewing. The executive director of the YWCA of Monterey County speaks anxiously about cuts to the funding sources that keep local social service agencies afloat, even as they ...
Get Involved
Public Citizen 08.11.11
FRIDAY 8 | 12 GUERRILLA GARDENING | CARMEL VALLEY – Join Carmel Valley Village Improvement Committee in touring a guerrilla garden, where neighbors transformed a small piece of CalTrans offramp property into a spectacular park. ...
Congregants take accused priest’s defense to the web.
The plea on the website is simple, direct and even a little bit biblically poetic. “A thief,” the website states, “has entered our home and kidnapped a favorite relative in the middle of the night. ...
Squid Speaks
BRASS ONES… Squid envies the human male only one thing, and that’s exterior testicles. So many opportunities exist for scratching and rearranging that Squid sometimes longs for a pair of Squid’s own. It would also ...
Street Talk 08.04.11 (asked @ On the Beach Surf Shop in Monterey.
)
What stereotype do you break?
Follow-up: What stereotypes do surfers experience? MICHELLE BAKER | Teacher/Manager | Marina A: As a snowboarder I’m considered a punk-ass bitch, so I try to be as nice as possible to skiers. New Wave: The ...
Hypocrisy abounds as credit rating agencies decide to act hard-nosed without good economic reason.
As you might have heard – considering the entire political establishment has spent the past 72 hours debating it – Standard & Poor’s followed through on their threat to downgrade the federal government’s credit rating. ...
Enter the Shocker
Filthy genius John Waters talks Henry Miller, Justin Bieber and what shocks even him.
Some 40 years ago, a slender young filmmaker with a pencil-thin moustache and a crude sense of humor borrowed $10,000 from his parents – his grandmother gave him his first 8-millimeter camera when he turned ...
Bathtub Gin
Dipping into Royal Baths further proves that San Francisco’s nouveau garage rock scene is becoming its own genre.
Royal Baths is making waves within the San Francisco psychedelic garage rock scene, a scene that has been booming for the past few years with bands like The Fresh & Onlys, Thee Oh Sees and ...
The Help
True Colors: The Help registers a resounding success with powerhouse performances and an uncluttered storyline.
There are the movie-movie pleasures of The Help, the stuff of simple cinematic entertainment, the stuff we go to the movies for. The magnificent performances. The fresh narrative. The unsentimental direction that lets you feel ...
Sarah’s Key
Sad Truth: Sarah’s Key turns audiences on to arresting characters persevering through onerous but dramatically different obstacles.
Two parallel stories from different eras intertwine and inform each other in Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s film, which is based on Tatiana de Rosnay’s best-selling novel. The structure is a delicate balancing act, since one story is ...
Watered Down
Governor’s appointments could end debate, but not strife, on ag runoff rules.
After two years of stagnation, rules on agricultural runoff for the Central Coast could finally flow Sept. 1, when the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board meets in San Luis Obispo – if Gov. ...
Conventional strawberry growers face fumigation limits.
While sweet berries line grocery store shelves, conventional strawberry growers are anticipating challenges on multiple fronts when it comes to fumigating their fields this summer. Methyl bromide, long an essential in strawberry growers’ pesticide cache, ...
Thursday, August 4
Squid Fry 08.04.11
Squid Fry 08.04.11
DO UNTO OTHERS… Squid’s been known to pick a fight every now and then, but Squid’s squabbling shenanigans don’t hold a candle to the antics of the board at Marina Coast Water District. After board ...
A Study in Resolve
Michelle Magdalena’s journey to tsunami-ravaged Japan led her to believe she is viewing a most patriotic time in the world’s history.
Pacific Grove-based photographer Michelle Magdalena Maddox stepped off a train in the Japanese coastal town of Ishinomaki, and took a giant leap of faith. She carried only an umbrella and her camera bag, loaded with ...
Street Talk 08.04.11 (asked @ Peter B’s in Monterey.
)
What would you do without power for weeks?
Follow-up: How do you feel about nuclear energy? KIRBY DUNAWAY |Boat Wright | Monterey A: Well that’s kind of a f***ed up question because I live on a boat and I don’t have power so ...
Give the Desal Hydra an inch. Just see what happens.
Starting in the 1990s, Laura Joffee Numeroff and Felicia Bond produced a series of adorable children’s books based on the premise that if you give a creature one treat, it will not only develop a ...
Get Involved
Public Citizen 08.04.11
ONGOING CARS FOR TECHNOLOGY | MONTEREY – The auto tech program at Monterey Peninsula College is seeking four-cylinder Japanese or hybrid engines for study. To donate, 655-5507 or MPCFoundationInfo@mpc.edu. MUSEUM VOLUNTEERS | MONTEREY – The ...
Time for Real Liberals to stand up and kick Team Dem to the curb.
The U.S. might as well have defaulted. Regardless of where you stand politically, the deal to raise the federal debt limit came too late for the U.S. to achieve its main objective, avoiding the downgrading ...
Going Places
From Hollywood to Egypt, the most-decorated Steinbeck Festival yet traverses diverse and verdant territory.
Take a big overriding theme, shoot it through the prism of John Steinbeck’s life and works, and refract it over several days in many different directions. That’s how the Steinbeck Festival goes down. It does ...
Rock Star Son
A father reflects on the worldwide success of his kid’s band, MGMT, which makes its Big Sur debut Wednesday.
Electro-pop psych-rockers MGMT gained mainstream attention and acclaim in the blink of an eye. Shortly after Benjamin Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden signed with Columbia Records in 2006, the duo began to appear on top ten ...
Electronic Boom
Down the Rabbit Hole festival packs in electronic music lovers for a camp-out concert at Monterey Fairgrounds.
Electronic dance music and Ohlone ritual seem to make a strange pairing. For Anarchy Productions, the team behind the one-of-a-kind Rabbit Hole music and art festival this weekend, they go together like a caterpillar and ...
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 ...
Opinion: One man’s take on his culture’s stereotypes
¡Ask a Mexican! 08.04.11
Dear Mexican: A few years back when I was in high school, my social studies teacher and the leader of our high school M.E.Ch.A. club had deep resentment toward the Spaniards/conquistadors that killed hundreds – ...
Space Case
Local author Dan Linehan’s new book explores the galaxy of private space travel.
In the near future, people other than astronauts will travel regularly into space. Not long after that, some will live on settlements among the stars. And it looks like these developments won’t come from NASA ...
Letters To The Editor 08.04.11
Saving the Raccoons Thank you for including the SPCA’s voice in last week’s article (“Cute or Evil: A quest for raccoon truth,” July 28-Aug. 3). Unfortunately, the article left many of your readers believing SPCA’s ...
Hazarding Guesses
Relicensing for Diablo Canyon nuclear plant is on hold, but seismic studies draw critics.
Months after a massive earthquake and tsunami devastated northeast Japan, the full impact of a wrecked cooling system at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant likely won’t be known for years to come. Meanwhile in ...
Rockin’ Rollers
The Dough Rollers play Alt Cafe in Seaside.
Jack Byrne, son of Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin, and Malcolm Ford, Harrison’s son, met in a New York City club. Their chemistry was a product of hate and love. “We hated everybody there so ...
Independent bookstore to fill Borders void, build community in Salinas.
The city of Salinas will finally get a bookstore, when a new branch of Morgan Hill-based BookSmart moves into the National Steinbeck Center. Colleen Finegan Bailey, the center’s executive director, says selecting the independent bookstore ...
The Seedy Side
How the Ninth Ward is using gardens to sow unlikely hope in New Orleans.
In the syrupy charm of New Orleans’ garden district or the debauchery of the French Quarter, you might think the city has recovered from the trauma of Katrina. Streetcars are running, music is playing, and ...
Marina Coast’s Missing Money
Former Fort Ord Developers owe the district big bucks. So why aren’t they paying up?
Buried deep in the files of the Marina Coast Water District is a curious and unresolved story involving project developers on the former Fort Ord who defaulted on payments to the district to the tune ...
Voodoo Love
How to heart New Orleans, a new P.G. eye catcher and quality Cuban.
The reason I fell so in love might’ve been the “bounce dancing,” when women – and, amazingly, some men – move like there’s a grease fire on their asses and Louisiana hot sauce in their ...
By The Numbers 08-04-11
Real Estate
$1,425,000 Recent Sale 24723 Dolores St., Carmel Built: 1972 Size: 2,000 square feet Features: 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2-car garage Amenities: Ocean view, walnut floors, stone fireplace with bronze mantle, balcony Seller: The Coomer Family ...
Disaster Floats
Tsunami debris is slowly making its way from Japan to California.
Monterey Bay beachcombers, mark your calendars for next summer. That’s when the first of the debris from Japan’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami might begin washing up on our shores. Or not. Experts have different ...
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Highly Evolved: Rise of the Planet of the Apes stuns with its effects, its empathy and its ethics.
You will believe apes will rise. What you may not believe is how much this unexpectedly lovely movie is more about tender emotion between ape and human, and between ape and ape, than it is ...
Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
Hip-Hop History: Beats Rhymes & Life tracks the rise of Tribe Called Quest.
Actor turned first-time documentarian Michael Rapaport mostly keeps himself off camera in this admiring portrait of the seminal ’90s hip-hop outfit A Tribe Called Quest. But his voice – an upper-register whine that pitches even ...
Brezsny's Astrology August 4-10, 2011
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): Symbolically speaking, there is a Holy Grail hidden close to you, and you know it, but you haven’t been able to find it. The Grail is a golden chalice filled with ...
