Category: Columns

The 99% and all that stuff
is a movement that’s all about US
and with that in mind
one might opine
that many of US
can remember times
when we could barely
pay the rent
and when the rent
was made good with all good intent
the food money
was gone…spent.

Shades
5083 Santa Monica Ave.
San Diego, CA 92107
619-222-0501

I have never done a review of “Shades” restaurant. I don’t know why not. It is one of my favorite Ocean Beach Restaurants; I am a member of their “Regular’s Club” – spend $100 and get $5 off your bill. (The nice thing is that the $100 does not have to be spent at one time because it is accumulative.) Whenever I have out of town guests I always take them to Shades. The view is magnificent; the food is good; and the noise level is bearable.

I probably would not be doing this review now if the service was not so slow that afternoon when one of the members of my widow support group and I went there for lunch. It was the 3rd anniversary of her husband’s death, and Shades was always a favorite with her and her husband. We arranged to have lunch together and then go up to Ft. Rosecrans to “visit” with our husband’s. (They are in one of the walls fronting the bay and very close to each other.)

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s overwhelming recall victory could signal the demise of the middle class nationwide.

As Doug Porter aptly observed in his election post-mortem last week, big money spoke loudly in the big races on June 5^th. This is nothing new but what happened in Wisconsin was truly historic. It was a soul-crushing defeat—not unexpected, but a gut punch nonetheless. Labor’s loss in the recall battle against Governor Scott Walker will surely go down as a key sequel to the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike for unionized public sector workers in America. Indeed, Governor Walker clearly said that he wanted to emulate that model, and he just won a very big battle in the war against collective bargaining in the United States.

Why is the PATCO strike so significant? After Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers and crushed their union in 1981, it sent a signal to corporate America that it was open season on labor.

Originally published in the San Diego Free Press

Banking giant can’t explain money mysteriously missing from student’s account.

In some of the articles I have written for the OB Rag and now the San Diego Free Press I have alluded to having foreign language students living with me to hone their English speaking/writing skills. I have housed over 350 students since 1992 and currently have a 29 year old Korean young lady and a 19 year old Swiss man living with Buddy and me.

This story revolves around Monica, my lovely student that has been with me for over seven months. Her English is very good but she does not think so. Listening and interpreting is still difficult for her but she loves to learn and is very bright. She wants to return to Korea and become an English teacher or a translator. I think that both are doable because she is so eager to learn.

Double Standard: Women on screen are always required to look their sultry, sexy best. Not so for their male counterparts.

From San Diego Free Press / June 7, 2012

Over the weekend I caught the movie X-men on TV and I have to say that women are really starting to get on my nerves. For those who are unfamiliar with the story (is that possible?), X-men is an action adventure about love, revenge, super human capabilities, violence and acceptance. And lots and lots of sex.

The characters don’t actually have sex in the film. In fact, there’s only one scene where you think it might happen, but no, it’s just a steamy kiss that’s been a long time coming.

Restaurant Review of “BGR”
3960 West Point Loma Blvd. Ste J
619-222-7300

I noticed BGR for the first time on Memorial Day when I went to have a manicure and pedicure in the shopping center that used to house “Longs Drugs.” (In actuality they opened just before Christmas in 2011.) The line going into the restaurant was huge and when I asked the manicurist why the line was so long she told me that they were giving free hamburgers and cheeseburgers away to celebrate the holiday. (I found out this evening that they offered the promotion from 11:00am to 1:00pm and again from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. They gave away 493 burgers and made 47 malts!)

Today my grown daughter told me that the same restaurant was offering a promotion and suggested that I might want to check it out. Unfortunately – or fortunately as it turned out – I could not go at lunch time but could go for dinner – so she, her daughter, and her daughter’s two children and I piled into two cars and headed to the restaurant.

“Thai Time Bistro Thai Food”
1830 Sunset Cliffs Blvd.

After cooking dinner for 12 people last night, I decided to take one of my students and go out to dinner tonight. We found our way to a restaurant I have been to many times, and knew that my student liked Thai food so it was a natural.

We arrived about 6:50pm on a Saturday night and although the restaurant was not full there was a lot of action taking place. We were “sort of” greeted by the manager and left standing as he sat another patron. After seating them he came back to us and showed us our table. We sat for a few minutes, and one of the female’s that help serve the food brought us water (with lemon slices.) For the first time since I have been dining at Thai Time there was also a small bowl of warm fava beans served as an appetizer.

Sometimes when I’m feeling mellow I can’t help but reflect on the good moments in my life, on the things that make my heart sing. Being an actor, and a patron of the arts, theater is high among the list of things that energize my existence.

And there is a performing arts company in town called Mo’olelo (story in Hawaiian) that is dedicated to staging dramas that inspire us, no matter our ethnicity or creed or what we believe, to seek and embrace ways to respect each other for who we all are: human beings.

They are dedicated to such ideals in every play, going about it in a community-focused, socially-conscious way, seeking always to provide significant roles for actors of color and to allow the company to serve communities that are traditionally under-served in American theater. I especially appreciate that they visit classrooms to ignite students’ imaginations and prepare them for theater-going experiences before they see the plays. That’s walking the talk to me.

It’s no secret that marriage is in decline across America.

For example, a recent PBS report noted that only half of U.S. adults are married, an all-time low. And of today’s Americans, only 72% have been married at some point, down from 85% in the 1960s.

But a lesser-known fact is that our country’s marriage declines have not been distributed evenly across the population. Poor people, in particular, are much less likely to get hitched than they were just a few decades ago.

“Expresso Pizza – Ristorante Italiano”
1776 Sunset Cliffs Blvd., San Diego, CA 92107

For the past twenty years, my husband and I – when he was alive – housed foreign language students in the United States to learn to speak English. Over those twenty years, more than 360 have lived with us in an “immersion” program. Currently I have two students – one from Korea and one from Switzerland. I was very surprised with my Swiss student told me tonight that he had never had Italian food in a restaurant in the United States. So…since it was Wednesday night – Farmer’s Market Night – I thought we would try Expresso Pizza on Sunset Cliffs because I didn’t want to fight the traffic from patrons leaving the OB area.

The restaurant is really two parts: one to place orders to go and the second adjoining part a dining-in establishment. Our waitress welcomed us and told us that we could sit anywhere we wanted to sit. After being seated she asked us if we wanted to start with water and bread. We did.

When a good friend of mine – a gourmet chef that teaches several culinary classes in the San Diego area – asked me to join her for lunch the other day, I was delighted to accept. I met her at her house in North Park about 11:15am so that we were one of the first patron’s at the restaurant when it opened at 11:30am.

The restaurant could easily be missed if you did not know where you were going. The name is on a sign high above eye level; and the entrance is very unpretentious. Upon entering into a darkened room, with the hostess desk and the bar on the left, I was immediately struck with how long and narrow the room was, and it reminded me of many of the restaurants in San Francisco. There was an outside eating area on the right, but because it was overcast and damp we elected to eat indoors.

We were seated at the farthest seat at the back of the dining room, up against the wall that obviously housed the kitchen. (I say “obviously” because we could feel the vibrations from the kitchen on the wall nearest to where we were seated.) It was not distracting; we just knew it was there.

In my column last week, I pointed out what Scott Peters’ accepting the endorsement by the New Democrat Coalition meant. Specifically, I outlined the history of the Democratic Leadership Council and its transformation into the New Democrat Coalition and noted that these organizations have been the chief engines behind the Democratic Party’s shift toward a far more business-friendly orientation. I also observed something that even Bill Clinton’s former advisor Robert Reich has recently written about—that the Clinton administration’s loosening of economic regulations as a result of this ideological shift helped grease the wheels for the great financial train wreck from which we are yet to recover.

This ideological shift in a large chunk of the Democratic Party was made possible by a web of corporate interests funding the DLC and its NDC offspring in order to influence policy on both sides of the aisle. It is, I argued, just as important to note these ideological and economic networks inside the Democratic Party as it is to look at the well-funded think tanks behind folks like Carl DeMaio.