Santa Cruz’s annual weekend of mycological mayhem begins on Friday night this year with a lecture and cooking demo.
Reservoir Level Belies Water Needs
The heavy rains have almost filled Loch Lomond, and another storm could bring it past the spilling point, but that doesn’t mean the county’s water problems have evaporated. According to the Santa Cruz Water Department, the reservoir can hold 2.86 billion gallons of water, and it is just 80 million gallons short of that because of the extensive rains. “But that doesn’t mean we’re out of trouble,” water department chief Bill Kocher told the Santa Cruz Sentinel. The district’s customer base is growing, but the capacity to store water is not growing along with it.
Drink Up, Power Down
The overhead light is buzzing, and so are the inhabitants of the living room. Pencils, dice and character sheets are strewn everywhere. How long have my friends and I been playing this game of Dungeons and Dragons? Eight hours? Ten? A collection of slain Red Bulls, Rockstars and Monster drinks adds to the increasing body count of goblins, skeletons and giant spiders, and as the quest continues, the dungeon master cracks open yet another energy drink.
The Exhibitionist: Southland Holiday
I always loved winter holidays because Dad would take us somewhere we’d never been to do something we’d never done. Wherever we found ourselves, we’d go to a museum. We went to museums of art, history and science to learn about ships, neon and archaeology; we visited raisin museums, roadside museums—what vivid worlds we explored!
Jerry Brown’s Choice
I recently asked my friend Angela Oh, defense attorney and Buddhist priest, what she thought about the karma of Jerry Brown. She paused for only a moment. “His karma,” she replied, “is to inherit the collapse of so many institutions his father built.” Infrastructure decay. Traffic congestion and pollution. Water shortages. More prison inmates than state university students.
Kids’ Theater Program Launches
It’s not easy being Ugly. That’s “Ugly” as in “duckling,” the “aesthetically challenged farmyard fowl” rejected by everyone except for his mama in Honk!, the musical adaptation of the famous story in which a young swan finds himself rejected by a family of ducks.
Scotts Valley Hotel Facing Foreclosure
There is plenty in the news about homes facing foreclosure, but little about other properties. That may soon change. Lenders are foreclosing on the Scotts Valley Hilton for an unpaid debt of $16.8 million. Though some estimates place the number of hotels in California in distress at about 1,000, this is the first hotel in Santa Cruz County to actually face foreclosure.
Alpo Goes Missing
Over the past few months, SantaCruz.com has reported on the dearth of food in the city’s food pantries and how that affected the holiday season. But people aren’t the only living things to go hungry in these times of need. Many animal lovers are struggling to feed their pets too, which is why the local SPCA launched its pet food pantry 10 years ago.
Franzen at Santa Cruz High
2010 was a banner year for Jonathan Franzen. In August, the author released his fourth novel, Freedom, a piece of literature so deftly crafted it instantly garnered him the kind of attention usually reserved for movie stars and heads of state. He graced the cover of Time Magazine in September (the first living writer in more than a decade to do so) above the headline “Great American Novelist.” He appeared on Oprah, where the daytime talk show Queen-pin heaped on the praise and the two buried the hatchet after a 2001 dust-up regarding her selection of his novel The Corrections for her Book Club.
County Has First Homicide of 2011
Santa Cruz County experienced its first homicide of 2011 on Sunday. The victim, Jose Alfredo Coronel, 32, was stabbed in the chest in Watsonville shortly after midnight. Police transported him to the hospital, where he died of his injuries. There were no reports of disturbances in the area before the stabbing was reported, and police have yet to find the murder weapon. They do not, however, think that the murder was gang-related.
