Traci Hukill

Staff Writer

UCSC Profs Win Chopra Award

Nancy Ellen Abrams and Joel Primack, photographed in April 2011.

The message came last fall from a secretary at the Chopra Foundation in Carlsbad, Calif. Deepak Chopra wished to speak to them. Would it be all right if he called? UCSC lecturer Nancy Ellen Abrams and professor Joel Primack—she’s a philosopher, he’s an astrophysicist—aren’t your standard readers of Chopra, whose 60–odd published books include titles like Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and Manifesting Good Luck Cards: Growth and Enlightenment.  Chopra, however, had become a reader of Abrams and Primack. Their books on cosmology, The View from the Center of the Universe  and The New Universe and the Human Future , had made an impression on him, and he wanted to get the word out.

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Corny Fun and Good Harmony in ‘Plaid Tidings’

The Plaids do their holiday take on 'Matilda' in Plaid Tidings. Photo by Jana Marcus.

Not everything went well for Mom on this holiday trip out West. First there was the missed flight, and then there was the other missed flight, and then the fellow passenger who blabbed all the way to Chicago. But Saturday night at the Cabrillo Crocker Theater, things started to look up. That’s when the four stars of Plaid Tidings launched into “Strangers in Paradise,” followed closely by “Sh–Boom,” “Mambo Italiano” and a slew of jazzed-up holiday numbers as only a quartet of clean-cut fraternity brothers from 1950s middle America could perform them.

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Credit Unions See Boost from Bank Transfer Day

Occupy Santa Cruz protests outside local bank branches. Photo by Samantha Larson

As we steam toward Bank Transfer Day this Saturday, Nov. 5, local credit unions are staffing up and making extra copies of their application forms. Indeed, it seems that L.A. art gallery owner Kristen Christian’s initiative—to dump your lyin’, cheatin’, extra-fee-chargin’, bailout-hoardin’, refi-refusin’ corporate bank and cast your lot and your shekels with a locally owned bank or credit union—is already yielding some results locally.

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PRFF: Fantastic Voyage

Family of the Wa'a shows Sunday at the Rio.

It looks serene in the footage, the long slender fiberglass canoe and its outrigger slicing through sapphire water or filmed from below, silhouetted against the clear green of the shallows. The oars move in rhythm, the paddlers bend their broad backs to the task. And it is, in fact, quiet—if not exactly peaceful.

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