The Olympic sport of curling involves two teams of players carefully sliding large stones down an icy lane while “sweepers” use brooms to polish the rocks’ gradual paths toward a target.
There will be no curling shown at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.
News
America’s Invisible Immigrants
Author Gabriel Thompson may have spent two months cutting lettuce (no one says “picking lettuce,” as he discovered) in the blisteringly hot fields of Yuma, Ariz., for his new book, but he had his first glimpses of the backbreaking work of immigrant laborers just outside Watsonville. “I grew up surfing Manresa and Sunset Beach,” says the Cupertino-raised Thompson, a contributor to the New York Times and the Nation. “I’d often drive through the strawberry fields just off of Highway 1, and I would just pull over and watch people work. I would be very curious about what it was like to do the work and who the people were. It seemed like a completely foreign place.”
Free Downtown Parking Over
Like pull-tabs and 8-tracks, free parking will soon be a thing of the past in downtown Santa Cruz.
Great Pacific Garbage Patch Bigger than Anticipated
Researchers studying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have reached a disturbing conclusion. It’s a lot bigger than they originally anticipated. Giora Proskurowski of the Sea Education Association says that the reason scientists have miscalculated is the wind. It tends to push the plastic down from the water’s surface to the upper ocean. After studying the phenomenon he realized that there’s about as much plastic in the next 9 meters of ocean as there is in the top 1 meter that has been studied.
Twitter Gets Spiritual
“Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.” It’s a quote attributed to Tenzin Gyatso, known around the world as the 14th Dalai Lama. It’s also just 58 characters long, perfectly tweet-sized, as are so many others of the Dalai Lama’s insights. More quotes like this could soon become available from the source himself—on Twitter. It’s not just for devotees either. As the Dalai Lama said: “If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it” (88 characters).
Grateful Dead Archive to Feature in ‘The Atlantic’
UCSC’s Grateful Dead Archive hasn’t even opened for business yet and it’s already getting plenty of attention. It will be the focus of a feature article in the March edition of The Atlantic. The article spotlights the academic and scholarly impact that the archive will have on a wide range of disciplines, some of them unexpected. Sure, music historians and ethnomusicologists will be interested, and the Dead were a historical phenomenon—the voice of a generation.
Women Ventures Project Training Women for Construction Jobs
The Women Ventures Project in Santa Cruz County is using federal stimulus funding to train women for careers in construction.
Santa Cruz Takes on Plastic Bags
Santa Cruz joined San Jose, San Francisco, and other cities in the Bay Area yesterday when the council endorsed a ban on single-use plastic bags and a fee on paper bags. Plastic bags, which do not decompose, are a major source of litter, filling coastal areas and rivers before they make their way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In the Bay Area alone, people use an estimated 3.8 billion bags every year. On average, they end up in the trash just 12 minutes after people get them.
Replacing Santa Cruz City Manager Dick Wilson
In a city where constant change is the only guarantee, Santa Cruzans have been able to count on one thing for the last 28 years: that City Manager Dick Wilson would show up to work every day, a steady hand at the tiller keeping the city on course. During his tenure, the tall, soft-spoken Wilson answered to more than a dozen city councils, steering city staff through an earthquake, an expanding university and more budget crises than just the most recent one. When Wilson retires in July, he’ll be leaving the Santa Cruz City Council with what Mayor Mike Rotkin calls “the most important decision the council will make in its tenure.
Israel Deserves A Break
Nazi propaganda films were made to convince the world that Germany was a peace-loving nation that was forced to attack Poland. With the creation of the web and the access to 24-hour “news,” it is so much easier to spread lies and half-truths.
