Month: November 2019

By Geoff Page

In October of last year, I did some checking on why the Sunset Cliffs Park project was not yet finished. I contacted the city and the emails that follow tell the story. I’m not using the person’s name because there is no reason to cause him any difficulty as some of his responses might. This is a really sorry tale.

Oct. 16, 2018 – the response I got to my initial inquiry:

The contractor has been waiting for some materials that required a long lead time to obtain. These materials are scheduled to be delivered on site next week. The contractor intends to resume working full time on site starting this Friday or at the latest on Monday October 22nd.

Planting will begin the first week in November and will be done in two phases. Planting will likely continue through January, weather permitting.

The Ocean Beach Planning Board appealed the city’s Dog Beach ADA Ramp “Improvement” Project. This appeal goes before the City Council on Tuesday, November 19, at 2pm.

Readers are familiar with this story. It is true that the OB Planning Board “is going toe-to-toe with the City of San Diego” over the city’s plans to spend $1.1 million upgrading an accessibility ramp onto Dog Beach in OB. The OB Rag has been covering the issue since it appeared before OB planners in early August (see our report here) and was shot down with a 12-1-1 to vote, and our writer, Geoff Page, examined the issues involved and came up with this conclusion:

By Marjorie Cohn/ Truthout / Nov. 18, 2019

As former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified in the House impeachment inquiry to evidence of abuse of power by Donald Trump, he tweeted insulting allegations against her in real time. Trump’s tweets defensively attempted to justify his decision to abruptly pull the veteran diplomat out of Ukraine two months before her scheduled departure date.

His decision to recall Yovanovitch was part of Trump’s pattern of corrupt behavior of tying foreign policy decisions in Ukraine to his own political interests.

Residents of Ocean Beach and Point Loma may want to know how the San Diego Airport is working to reduce noise.

If so, there will be a public workshop on the update to the Part 150 study process, Thursday, November 21 from 4-7 pm at the Airport Noise office, 2722 Truxtun Road in Liberty Station.

Restaurant Review

Dirty Birds Bar & Grille
1929 Cable Street
Ocean Beach, CA 92107
619-241-2922

“Positively Negative or Negative Positivity?”

By Judi Curry

Have you ever stood over a sink where one side had hot water in it and the other side had cold water in it and you have your hands in both sides of water? If you haven’t let me tell you that the brain does not really know how to register the sensation. That is how this review will pan out – good and bad equates to what?

It was another get-together of three widows going out to lunch together on a relatively cool, windless day. There are many new restaurants in the Ocean Beach area, and I remember a long time ago eating at a Dirty Birds somewhere in San Diego. As I recalled, the food was good, but we never went back, probably because it was far from our house.
First of all there were over twenty people in the restaurant when we walked in.

By Jim Miller

Mike Wise hates the Sixties.

Last week in an odd, contextless opinion piece in the Washington Post , Wise let loose his word hoard in a strange screed bemoaning what he sees as a wave of naïve nostalgia about the much maligned and romanticized decade. In sum, the piece is his chance to “tell everyone to stop the revisionist history and shut the hell up.”

What seems to have set him off was a Janis Joplin revival and a 60 Minutes feature on research into psychedelics. A sample:

Interest in hallucinogenic drugs has rarely been stronger. The Oct. 13 episode of “60 Minutes” featured Johns Hopkins University’s ongoing psilocybin research studies.

We just heard some sad news: the Electric Chair hair salon may close. The Ocean Beach hair salon has been on Newport Avenue since 1984; it first began with Paul Bolton in a hole in the wall with only two chairs.

Then Paul and his spouse made the big move into its current location, 4944 Newport Ave, #A. Over the some 35 years the establishment has been through as many changes as some people change their hair. Yet it’s been a mainstay on OB’s main commercial boulevard for all this time.

A renovation project to a small, old house on Sunset Cliffs Boulevard has new problems. The renovation to the building was approved by the OB Planning Board September 4, but the owners – who are not living there – say they are now waiting for the Coastal Commission to approve their construction. In the meantime squatters have taken over the home, neighbors claim.

Guoc Nuygen bought the property at 2068 Sunset Cliffs but wanted to renovate. During the renovation, however, something happened and too much of something was removed or taken down. After a field inspection was triggered, Nugyen had to have the roof replaced and finish the interior remodel – and now he needed a Coastal Development Permit; he had to have the city confirm it and have it approved by the OB Planning Board.

By Ernie McCray

Life. Is there anything more precious? I think not.

But it can be crippling at times, for an extended period of time or, in moments, like the other day when I clicked on a picture of my kids, all of them.

My first impulse was to smile because they were smiling and looked lovely to me.

Then, suddenly, instead of making my face look like theirs, I was failing at holding back tears, shuddering, in that moment, as I realized I was looking at the images of four people when, for years, the answer to “How many kids do you have?” was “Six.”

Jon David Guerrero, the suspected serial killer of homeless people, has been ordered to stand trial on 15 counts of murder, attempted murder and assault on 13 victims, most of whom were homeless, in a brutal 2016 crime spree. At the conclusion of his preliminary hearing last week, Superior Court Judge Kenneth So found sufficient evidence to bind him over for trial.

Guerrero, 42, is suspected of very gruesome killings of his victims, including driving railroad spikes into some of them, setting two on fire and bludgeoning several on the head with hard objects.

He is charged with four counts of murder and a special circumstance allegation of multiple murders, in the deaths of Shawn Longley, 41, – a man who was homeless in Ocean Beach,

There’s a new article in the Press Enterprise from Orange County that reports SeaWorld San Diego plans to use 500 aerial drones to create images in the sky above Mission Bay. First, SeaWorld plans to do a test run of the aerial drone light show in early February.

The aquatic park has already submitted a proposal to the California Coastal Commission for a test run of the drone show. The dates for the test run are on select nights from Feb. 4-18.

If successful, SeaWorld probably will employ the drones as a replacement for part or all of their nighttime fireworks.

The Seaworld drone show will use 12-ounce Intel Shooting Star quadcopter drones designed specifically for aerial shows.