Month: January 2013

This is another in a series of random interviews with OBceans while the author has a firm belief that everyone has a story worth telling.

Meet Helga Staalhane – on loan to OB from Norway. She has lived here for six months and is in a masters program in Sociology at San Diego State University on a student visa. I met her at NewBreak the other day and she agreed to be interviewed and have her photo taken for the OB Rag (the photo is a prerequisite for the interview, as living in OB is also).

It happened again today. I “met” a man online that sounded like a nice person. He had many of the attributes I am looking for in a companion, or so he said, and I agreed to meet him for lunch in a well-known restaurant in North County. (He lives in San Marcos and it was a good halfway place for us to meet.) We were both early; another nice attribute. He obviously had been there before, not because the waitress recognized him, but because he knew his way around the restaurant and we sat at “his favorite table.”

By Women’s Energy Matters

Parties to the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) investigation of the San Onofre nuclear generating station outage are crying foul over ongoing procedural delays and a narrow Scoping Memo issued Tues. Jan. 28th.

Women’s Energy Matters, the Coalition to Decommission San Onofre, United Public Workers For Action and Michael Aguirre charge that both seem designed to force southern California customers to pay even higher rates in the next couple of years to fund Edison’s reckless plan to restart one of its severely damaged reactors —instead of getting immediate refunds for the year the nuclear plant has been offline.

In a recent interview with online media, Councilmember Kevin Faulconer – who represents Ocean Beach and the Peninsula – reconfirmed his strong support for the 30 foot height limit. The recent debate about the height restrictions in San Diego’s coastal zone must have caught his eye, and he wanted to make his positions clear.

Most everyone by now in OB has heard about the little puppy that fell 80 feet off Sunset Cliffs earlier this month. Well, the 3 month old Chihuahua mix is healing – has a new name of “Clifford” – get it? – and will be ready for a permanent adoption by humans very soon.

The Department of Animal Services is now accepting applications for his adoption – and their deadline is Saturday, Feb. 2nd.

Those of you that have been reading my articles for the past few years, probably will remember that I am a widow. My husband of 46 years died September 21, 2009, from lung cancer. Yes, he was a smoker, or was for 30 years of his life. He gave it up for 34 years but it was still the cause of death. Whether it was caused by his smoking or living in Los Angeles for the first 39 years of his life, or working in a school where he helped install the asbestos in the ceiling so it could open on time we will never know. And the reasons for his death are not germane to this article.

You’ve noticed the large mural on the north side of the old Apple Tree Market over the years, I know. You know, the one that faces Santa Monica Avenue. It’s been there for literally decades.

But now that Apple Tree has moved on and the building is up for lease, what’s to become of the mural? Ken Keegan, the main artist and facilitator of the mural has contacted the OB Rag searching for information on the fate of the mural.

By Brigitte Taylor

I love the idea of cycling all over town and the trend to encourage people (and currently women, in particular, to ride bikes.

Ideas are great, but as a result of biking in Mission Valley, Old Town, North Park, Downtown, College Area, City Heights and various parts of the city, I definitely have a new take on what it means to share the road with vehicles. I used to ride my bike frequently until I was knocked off by a driver. Thankfully, I was not injured but after that, I limited my rides to mountain biking and bike paths where road sharing is not an issue.

By Steven Wishnia / Alternet

Preserving the main legal barrier to medical marijuana, a federal appeals court on Jan. 22 rejected a lawsuit intended to force the Drug Enforcement Administration to move marijuana out of Schedule I, the federal law that classifies marijuana as a dangerous drug with no valid medical use.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 that the medical-marijuana advocates who filed the suit—Americans for Safe Access, a California-based patient-advocacy group; the Coalition to Reschedule Cannabis, Patients Out of Time, and four individual medical users, including Air Force veteran Michael Krawitz—had not proved that the DEA’s decision to keep marijuana in Schedule I was “arbitrary and capricious.” The court held that marijuana had failed to meet the five standards the DEA sets for drugs to qualify as having a valid medical use.

Height Limit Critic Sparks Debate But Important Exemptions Need to Be Acknowledged

This is the first part in a two-part series on the latest debate about the 30 foot height limit.

New Year’s confetti and the champagne glasses used celebrating the end of 2012 – a year that marked the 40th anniversary of the 30 foot height limit in San Diego – had barely been cleaned up when the assault on that height limit began. It all started in a January 3rd Voice of San Diego article questioning any positive attributes of the 30 foot limit.

Not exactly like a “D-Day” type assault, but more like a tunnel being dug – a tunnel designed to undermine the coastal height limit of 1972, writer Andrew Keatts questions the basic character of the height limit, declares that its essential rigidity will be necessarily and periodically questioned by a city yearning to break free, and gives voice to its critics. The critics believe that because of the 30 foot height limits, all kinds of problems plague San Diego, with rents and property values at the coast being too high.

In 2011 OB Woman’s apartment damaged by neighbor’s fire, legal pot found, she’s arrested and son taken from her

Editor: There’s been some renewed interest in a November 2011 incident that occurred in Ocean Beach, resulting in the arrest of Larissa Nearing – aka Larissa Danielli- aWe repost it here.
By Toni Samanie / Salem-News.com

Larissa Nearing’s story is a poignant illustration of what can happen when you are busy living your life.

On November 3, 2011, Larissa began what seemed like a routine day. She had taken her baby to daycare in the morning and then went to work.

In the wake of President Obama’s electoral victory and inauguration much of the political analysis has been about the continued chaos inside the Republican Party. With some establishment conservative figures openly questioning whether it was good for the party to continue to be dominated by the hard right, some in progressive circles have been downright giddy, as they have watched the circular firing squad proceed. While this is surely entertaining sport, the more important battle may be happening inside the Democratic Party.