Month: October 2012

One day I checked into facebook and found the question:

“What if when we die the light at the end of the tunnel we see is just us being pushed out of another vagina.”

My first thought was “Oh, God, I hope not.”

I mean if I were on Let’s Make a Deal and had in my hand a certificate guaranteeing me a rebirth in a new body, I’m going with whatever is behind curtain number one. Because when I depart I will have left it all in the Milky Way just like leaving all I had on the court in my basketball days.

So, I don’t care if Wayne Brady says “Oh, Ernie, you could have had another life but you’re going home with a one day supply of Alpo!” After jumping around like I had won the lottery I’d run off and rent a dog for a day.

One vagina exit is enough for me, thank you very much. The mere thought of reincarnation tires me.

Report from Meeting on Monday Night – October 8th – at Tower Two

By Celeste
Around 30 or so people crowded in the Tower Two Café on Monday’s meeting on creating the OB Citizens Patrol. Tim Nolan, owner of the cafe, had recommended that people who sign up for patrols carry a flashlight. He also suggested having a siren to scare people away. He reinstated several times that the patrol is set up to PREVENT not to PROVOKE and anyone “misbehaving” would be asked to leave the patrol group.

He also suggested that the patrols take place on Friday and Saturday nights in two 3 hours shifts. The first shift would begin at 9pm-midnight, and then midnight-3 am. He would like to have 3 or more people in a patrol group, patrolling a 2 block square (depending on how many people show up). The area that would be patrolled would be Newport Ave to West Point Loma Blvd, and Cable Street to the beaches.

By Nadin Abbott

Occupy San Diego reached an important milestone this weekend. Occupy San Diego is now one year old, and like all children, it has learned a lot this year, but also achieved quite a bit.

The weekend saw a series of events, some low key, some going back to it’s roots in the streets, celebrating the fact that OSD is still here. The first event was at Balboa Park on Saturday afternoon.

When I reached the Park I was no longer surprised to see San Diego Police coming in to talk to an Occupier. Well, so what is new? Same old, same old – right? This time, the officers had cause. No, not the usual we saw over the course of last year. They had a call, from another occupier, reporting what can best be described as a domestic dispute. Given the Occupier in question wore a Guy Fawkes costume with knives (which I could not tell at a distance were plastic either), the cops showed up in force. This is standard.

Moreover, while the Police kept an eye on Occupy, like they do on every demonstration that happens in this town, they also kept their actual contact to a minimum, and kept their distance.

By Ronnie Cummins / Alternet / Oct. 4, 2012
Is it possible that Whole Foods wants to ride the GMO labeling popularity wave while it quietly works behind the scenes to prevent Prop 37, or any other GMO labeling law, from passing?

After months of pressure from the organic community, including thousands of its customers, the leadership of Whole Foods Market on September 11 endorsed Proposition 37, the California Ballot Initiative to require mandatory labels on genetically engineered foods. But the endorsement came with “reservations” and inaccuracies. It also included the false claim that company policy precludes Whole Foods and its executives from providing much-needed financial support to Prop 37, a campaign that consumers – the very people who have made WFM and its executives wildly profitable – overwhelmingly support.

During the recent meeting at the OB Woman’s Club over concerns about the sexual assaults, I was surprised by the “anti-police” attitudes by many attendees, having lived in OB for a number of years with no major complaints.

That is, until the other night.

Perhaps SDPD resents the proposed Citizens Watch or are under pressure for not publicizing the recent sex crimes, and are responding aggressively to allegations of insufficient patrol units. But, what happened to me was uncalled for . . .

I rode my bike to Apple Tree Market, was unknowingly “red lighted” for a block and detained in the parking lot by two cops. I saw the flashing lights and thought they were responding to a crime at the grocery store, until they walked in my direction.

Roger and Yasuko’s Shop Help Make OB What It Is

Bernie’s Bicycle Shop has been an Ocean Beach institution for almost 45 years. That’s a long time in a town that is celebrating it’s 125th Anniversary!

Current owner, Roger Lovett, had been a regular customer of Bernie’s since he was a kid. Not every grown up can claim they bought the bike shop they used to hang out in when they were little. When Roger bought the shop in it’s original location on Voltaire and Ebers in 1989, he was jokingly threatened by long time customers to retain the original name of Bernie’s. And so he did.

Two years later in 1991, he moved the shop to it’s current location at 1911 Cable Street (used to house the Sunshine Surf Shop). Twenty-one years is a long time in a town that has seen too many businesses close in just the last few years alone. There used to be 4 bike shops in OB but most have closed.

Chris Hedges gave this talk Sunday night – October 7th – in New York City at a protest denouncing the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. The event, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was led by Veterans for Peace.

By Chris Hedges

Many of us who are here carry within us death. The smell of decayed and bloated corpses. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of children. The sound of gunfire. The deafening blasts. The fear. The stench of cordite. The humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life. The loss of comrades and friends. And then the aftermath. The long alienation. The numbness. The nightmares. The lack of sleep. The inability to connect to all living things, even to those we love the most. The regret. The repugnant lies mouthed around us about honor and heroism and glory. The absurdity. The waste. The futility.

I was asked by a friend to write something about Ezell Singleton who passed away this past September. I said I would put some words together, basically, because I’m not one to say “No.”

But I don’t know Ezell. And I love to tell a story well. So I tried to do a little research and ended up mistakenly deleting what little information I found. There was something in it, though, about Ezell being the first African American to do something or another, I don’t know, but it was sports related which leads me to this: when I say I don’t know Ezell, I mean I’ve never met him in the flesh but his name surely isn’t new to me as he’s nestled comfortably in San Diego sports history.

The first time I heard about him was at my barber shop soon after I had come to town in 1962. His name came up in an animated conversation about “Who Was the Baddest Athlete to Ever Come out of San Diego.”

Last week in the New York Times Adam Nagourney noted in his article on Proposition 32, “California Is Latest Stage in the Battle Over Unions,” that:

By design or not — and some union officials said they believed it was by design — the fight has forced unions to divert money from what had been their top priority: winning approval of an initiative by Gov. Jerry Brown to pass temporary tax increases to head off nearly $6 billion in new cuts in state spending.

“Labor has to stop everything it is doing to defend against this,” said Peter Dreier, the director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. “It’s pretty effective in forcing the unions to spend a lot of their resources to stop this from passing.”

And labor certainly has gone all in to defeat Proposition 32, making that their top political priority this fall, not the passage of Proposition 30.

Have you missed Judi Curry’s bloggings? We have.

Judi writes the Widder Curry column and often does restaurant reviews and other musings of life here in OB and on the Peninsula. Yet she has not been filing any columns of late.

And there is a darn good reason why she’s not writing these days – she just had surgery on her left hand and is left typing with only one hand for a while.

Shinpei Takeda, the artist who designed and produced the artistic and newly-constructed comfort station on the beach at the foot of Brighton Avenue, has come out and defended his use of quotes from the OB Rag. And in doing so, he calls for the beginning “of a dialogue” on “individual freedom of ideas, opinions and artist expressions.”

Takeda earned a nomination for an Orchid Award from the San Diego Architecture Foundation for the artwork of the comfort station, which will be announced this month.

In a brand new post at sdnews.com – the online version of the Beacon – Takeda has responded to some accusations made recently by an OB man upset with some of the quotes, which was reported by the newspaper.

By Kenny Goldberg / KPBS / October 1, 2012

Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996. But today in San Diego County, many patients are having trouble getting their hands on the drug. That’s because all of the openly operating storefronts that sell marijuana have been shut down.

In response, activists in four local cities have placed measures to authorize medical marijuana dispensaries on the November ballot. But even if the measures win, patients might ultimately lose.

Vey Linville has severe emphysema. He needs bottled oxygen to survive. When Linville was first diagnosed, doctors told him without a double lung transplant, he’d soon be dead. Linville got his affairs in order.