Stormy seas lie ahead for proponents of the city’s plan to build a desalination plant, and the name of the thunderhead is UC-Santa Cruz. On March 7, the Santa Cruz County Local Agency Formation (LAFCO) decides whether or not to extend water rights for the university’s proposed expansion into the North Campus natural reserve area.
Soquel Shaman Brant Secunda’s Chocolate Quest
Shaman Organic Chocolate bars are the total package. Delicious, organic chocolate, every $3 bite of which goes to help maintain the endangered indigenous lifestyles and traditions of the Huichol Indians of Mexico.
Sinbad on Striking Balance: Still Edgy, Still Clean
Anyone who’s grown tired of watching videos of famous dead comedians should google Sinbad, the performer many people forgot was still alive. They’ll find a genuinely talented comic (if funny in a different way than you thought when you were 7) with a unique knack for skewering human nature while keeping the jokes clean.
CORRECTED: City, Activists Stand by Separate Desal Initiatives
When Santa Cruz Mayor Don Lane read local activists’ ballot initiative to put desal to a vote, he says one thing caught his attention. It had to do with timing. Lane agrees with a host of activists that Santa Cruz voters should weigh in on whether or not to build a $100 million-plus desalination plant on the Westside to increase the fresh water supply. But they agree on little else—including when to hold the vote.
No Heroes: Banff Film Fest Winner Tests The Genre
As the camera pans away from the glare of the rising sun, jagged white and blue ice peaks fill the screen. The tallest catches the first pink light of dawn. In the foreground we see a climber encased in his red down survival spacesuit. He is walking very, very slowly, inching up a steep knife-edge ridge toward us. As the scene shifts to slow motion, we can see that he is stumbling.
Banff Film Festival Santa Cruz Schedule
Two nights of adventure and environmental documentaries benefiting the UCSC Recreation Department.
In The Heart of Africa
Hendrik Coetzee was not a man easily dominated. After he led the first expedition from the source of the Nile in Uganda to the Mediterranean—a 4,100-mile trip he undertook in 2004 to show the humanitarian situation in that part of the world—some people griped that he hadn’t started at the true source of the storied river. The next year he traveled the extra 465 miles from Kagera to Lake Victoria to silence his critics.
Tar Sands vs. the Spirit Bear
One Sunday last November, while 10,000 people encircled the White House to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, judges at the Banff Mountain Film Festival were giving an award to a powerful documentary about a less well-known pipeline.
Song of The Colorado River
In a sense, photographer Pete McBride has been preparing to make Chasing Water all his life. Raised on a cattle ranch in central Colorado, he grew up working hay fields irrigated by the snowmelt that carved the Grand Canyon and slaked the thirst of the Southwest. “I often used to think about water,” he says in the film. “I wondered how much went into our fields and how much returned to the creek… I wondered how long it would take irrigation water to reach the sea.”
Vinocruz Pouring it On
With the boldly colorful acrylic artwork by W.M. Vinci currently adorning two walls and hundreds of wine bottles providing the rest of the visuals, Vinocruz offers more sensory bombardment than ever. Steve Principe, who with partner Jennifer Walker re-opened the popular downtown wine tasting depot in late August, is still fine-tuning many attractive new features.
