Month: August 2012

Although no longer a bike rider because the roads around Ocean Beach scare me, I usually support those people that have the nerve to ride their bikes along Cable, Sunset Cliffs, and Bacon. But my sympathy ends when I follow the rules and the biker doesn’t.

A case in point: I was traveling down Cable Street towards a meeting on Voltaire when I came to a stop at Santa Monica and Cable, …

Here are some short articles recently published about Ocean Beach and its denizens.

Ron – the Rock Stacker

Dave Rice, at the San Diego Reader tells us about Ron, the OBcean who stacks rocks in his “spare” time. …

Two Women Seriously Injured in Fall from Sunset Cliffs

Two women were seriously injured Saturday when they fell off Sunset Cliffs near Ladera Street in South OB (haha – Point Loma).

Raccoons Give OB Tenant and Property Manager Headache – Was it the Cat?

The raccoon noise at the Maggards’ Narragansett Avenue apartment in Ocean Beach began in early May. They were often awakened around three in the morning to a racket above their bedroom.

We’re Reminded Why OB Has Lifeguards – OB’s Deadliest Day at the Beach

The Voice of San Diego reminds us in an older post of theirs why we have lifeguards at all.

Having just gotten off the phone with Richard Dhu, program manager at the San Diego River Park Foundation, I found I had to totally re-orient the article I was writing about on whether his clean river program rousts the homeless from the San Diego River area. It does not do that, he said.

I had called him because of a U-T San Diego article written by Mike Lee about the Foundation’s latest river clean-up. In his article, posted July 27th, Lee – it appears – misrepresented what the Foundation is doing. In his opening sentence, Lee spells out his perspective:

“The San Diego River Park Foundation is launching a yearlong cleanup initiative in the Mission Valley Preserve to reduce homeless camps and garbage that gathers along the river’s lower stretch.” (My emphasis.)

“That’s not what we’re doing,” Richard told me this morning when I asked him about Lee’s article. Richard told me that is not what he told Lee. There is nothing about dealing with the homeless in his group’s mission statement, plus, Richard said, they receive grant monies and not any for rousting homeless people.

Yesterday – July 31 – witnessed a page right out of the annuals of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin – pranksters from the Yippie days of the Seventies: several newspapers, including the prestigious LA Times and our local San Diego Reader, ran stories about how the US Attorney in San Diego, Laura Duffy, was starting to target pharmacies for illegal sales of drugs. (See this story from San Diego Free Press.)

The stories were sent to the media by emails that purported to be from Duffy’s office. But the emails were discovered to be phonies and Duffy had to send out her own email saying so. Hours later at a press conference, Americans for Safe Access, a national advocacy group for medicinal cannabis with a local chapter, announced that they were responsible for sending out the false emails. Eugene Davidovich, the head of the local chapter, stated that it was a “satirical” way for his group to call attention to the federal crackdown on medical marijuana dispensaries. He called it civil disobedience.