Month: September 2012

By John Lawrence / San Diego Free Press
I wrote a previous article in the San Diego Free Press about genetically modified (GMO) foods. One might ask, “What is the purpose of genetically modifying a food item.” Is it to enhance the flavor? Is it to make it more nutritious? Well, no, not really.

The sole purpose of modifying corn and soy products is to make them resistant to pesticides and herbicides. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy seeds grow into plants that will not be killed when Roundup is sprayed on the soy field which kills every other thing in the field EXCEPT the Roundup Ready soy plant.

It’s the week after Labor Day and the Carl DeMaio attack machine is in full force, with SuperPac-funded ads in the works designed to keep pounding away at Bob Filner while DeMaio furiously tries to repackage himself as someone palatable to moderate Democrats and Independents. This will involve things like lying to San Diegans about his environmental record, spending big money to woo Latino voters, and hoping that some local Democrats are terminally stupid enough to buy his “independent” populist reformer act. While I have written extensively about DeMaio’s right wing think tank pedigree, it never hurts to revive the historical record, particularly when we can count on the local news to fail on all counts in this regard.

A dozen community volunteers showed Saturday for the Green Store and OB Rag clean-up of the Gateway Project. We began about 7:45 and went till 10:30 or so.

Weeds, weeds, weeds. We hacked, shoveled, dug, pulled weeds by the hand, raked, sweated … and … we ensured we didn’t take or pull flowers and native plants. But there was a lot of dead stuff, some trash, but a lot of work was needed to make the place less of an eye-sore and more of an inviting place for OBceans. One guy came by and said he weekly toured the site and picked up trash.

By Kali Kat / Special to the OB Rag

With the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street just around the corner on September 17, and many other cities’ occupy anniversaries falling in the weeks just after, like Occupy San Diego’s one year anniversary on October 7, the question being begged is:

“What is the current state of the Occupy movement?” If you go down to the Civic Center or your local City Hall, are people still living there?

The Occupy movement, including Occupy San Diego (OSD), is still alive and well, but no, there are not people still living there – well not people flying the Occupy flag anyways.

It has finally come down to this: the weed-strewn corner lot at Sunset Cliffs Boulevard and West Point Loma can be tolerated no more! The Gateway Project is an embarrassment to every OBcean who cares about how the community looks.

Community volunteers will be assembling tomorrow – Saturday, September 8th – in the morning at the lot and will be attacking the weeds with a vengeance. The clean-up is being sponsored by the Green Store and the OB Rag – and organizers are expecting 30 volunteers to show up. Most of the work will be done between the hours of 8 a.m. and noon.

After discovering that a plastic bag takes over a 1000 years to break down, San Diego Reader writer Eve Kelly – who’s is a mom – decided to do a search for re-usable sandwich bags. A friend of hers had told her that “one child makes 60 pounds of lunch trash per year.”

Eve answered:

“Imagine the amount of plastic a school throws away yearly. And the amount of money we moms spend on that stuff. Time to look into some reusable sandwich bags.”

So Eve set out to find stores in San Diego that offer such an exotic thing as a re-useable sandwich bag. She found one in OB’s People’s Organic Food Market.

By Carolyn Zellander

This November, Californians will their first opportunity in more than 30 years to abolish the death penalty. Last April, Proposition 34, also known as the Savings, Accountability, and Full Enforcement for California Act (SAFE California), qualified for the November Ballot. If approved by voters, the new law will convert sentences of death row inmates to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

ACLU Opens up Office to Educate and Mobilize Latino Voters

This Friday, September 7th, up in northern San Diego County in the City of Escondido, there will be a ribbon-cutting celebration of the opening of a pedestrian plaza.

On the City’s official website, the new Plaza is advertised as:

“a destination for people of all ages to sit and relax, visit local businesses or engage with members of the community in a vibrant public space.”

It’s interesting that city officials are pushing the plaza as a “vibrant public space” because the whole issue of public space – and free speech – …

The headline says it all.

Early Thursday morning, a paraplegic skateboarder apparently tried to hitch a ride on a passing big rig. The truck then made a turn, running over the 36 year old man – unidentified at this time – who suffered very serious injuries. The incident occurred at the intersection of Bacon Street and Santa Monica Avenue about 2:00 a.m.

Widder Curry does more than blog here at the OB Rag and at the San Diego Free Press. She also is a wonderful chef and writer of cookbooks. Here are three of Widder Curry’s ‘end-of-summer’ recipes for your enjoyment. Judi is currently publishing her third cookbook – all recipes created in her southern Ocean Beach home.

Easy Jambalaya

Come inside …

The Ocean Beach Planning Board has been challenging the City of San Diego of late for granting variances to property owners along the 5100 block of West Point Loma Boulevard – which allow the owners to bypass the Ocean Beach Precise Plan – which is OB’s development guidebook.

Here are a series of articles we published on the issue – come inside.

Editor: The following hilarious article is lifted word for word right out of the July 1968 issue of the San Diego Free Press, and it is not satire nor tongue-in-cheek.

O. B. “Citizens” Aroused

The solid citizenry of Ocean Beach are aroused. For some time now, there has been a virtual state of war existing between businessmen and merchants, on the one hand, and hippies on the other. The growing hippie community in OB has been met with growing alarm on the part of the established citizenry.