Sammy Obeid decided two years ago to do stand-up comedy for 1,000 consecutive days. If all goes according to plan (no panic attacks, measles, etc.), his Tuesday show at the Blue Lagoon will be number 829. The show is part of a new weekly comedy showcase hosted by local comedian DNA. We caught up with Obeid on the phone before a show at the Laugh Factory in Long Beach, Calif.

The Santa Cruz needle exchange has moved for now, but the debate over its future is far from over. It has been two months since city attorney John Barisone came down with a case of political amnesia and said he’d never heard of the 20-year-old institution.

After Santa Cruz’s violent crime spike that started with a drive-by homicide and culminated in the shooting of two SCPD officers, here are five signs of change in the Santa Cruz landscape.

Erik Larsen was living in the Lower Ocean area and working in Beach Flats as a community organizer in the ’90s when he got to know Loran “Butch” Baker—a smiling, jovial police officer who took a neighborhood-based approach to keeping people safe.

“He was a really good cop,” Larsen says. “Butch embodies everything anyone would want to know about a community officer. He was a really good guy, and Santa Cruz lost a really good police officer.”

“Our department’s in mourning,” an emotional Kevin Vogel said Tuesday Feb. 26. The Santa Cruz Police chief addressed reporters just after sunset. “This is a horrific day in my career as police chief and for our community and for our police department.”

Kristen Cederquist’s Santa Rosa Plum Preserves taste as sweet and wholesome as a fruit pie home-baked by Doris Day, topped with an American flag and finished off with a swirl of whipped cream. Cederquist, who owns Santa Cruz’s Serendipity Jams, began making jams with grandma at age five and hasn’t looked back.

Ken Collins has been talking nonstop for fifteen minutes. His voice is getting hoarse, and the cold he fought off a day earlier sounds like it’s coming back. “This is a small surf city with big city problems. It should never have gotten this bad,” he says.

Poundstone rose out of the stand-up scene in Boston, and came to national attention with her TV appearances and award-winning HBO special in the late ’80s. These days, she is a frequent panelist on NPR’s Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, an avowed asexual and an unapologetic crazy cat lady. We caught up her via a phone interview as she prepares to perform at the Rio on Friday, March 1, 2013.

If 75 bus-riding cyclists fought with a few hundred kids over a pot of money, who would win? That’s pretty much what unfolded at Santa Cruz City Hall last week. During a Regional Transportation Commission meeting, commissioners had to choose certain transportation programs for grant applications through the county’s Regional Surface Transportation Program.