OB Rag

We have just learned yesterday, that one of greatest friends of Ocean Beach has passed. Mike Berrill – who lived for decades with his wife Sue and daughter Amanda on Saratoga Avenue in Casa Berrill – had been in poor health recently. We are deeply saddened for the Berrill family and for Ocean Beach.

Mike Berrill was one of the original founders of that quirky – but oh-so-OB group – the Ocean Beach Geriatric Surf Club– also known by its much longer, original handle, the Ocean Beach Geriatric Surf Club Precision Marching Surfboard Drill Team and Gidget Patrol.

Originally posted at San Diego Free Press

San Diego seems to be in love with dogs. We have dog parks for big dogs and dog parks for small dogs. Dog owners, complete strangers to each other, stand on street corners in North Park with their pets and discuss the details of life with a shar pei or bichon frise while said animals enthusiastically explore each others nether portions.

Editor: According to this Surfline report of Surfrider’s “Morning After Mess” clean-up of County beaches on July 5th, 77.3% of the “trash” was found on Ocean Beach sands. See for yourself …

From Surfline / July 5, 2012

Over 500 volunteers from around San Diego County arrived at five area beaches this morning to assist in the annual post-Fourth of July Morning After Mess clean-up effort, coordinated by the San Diego County Chapter of the Surfrider Foundation. By midday, Surfrider volunteers had recovered 2,607 pounds of trash and 191 pounds of recycling which otherwise would have been washed into the sea.

The Coalition to STOP TPP continues its week of actions with 2 more conference sessions (Friday evening and Saturday late afternoon), a rally at noon on Friday and a major “Pot’s and Pans” March on Saturday.

• Friday, July 6, 12:00 noon rally at Hilton Bayfront

• Friday, July 6, 6:30 – 8:30 pm

Peace Resource Center: 3850 Westgate Place, San Diego, CA 92105

• Food Freedom or NAFTA on Steroids

Come and Meet Ben Burkett, President of the National Family Farm Coalition

Editor: On July 19th, the full San Diego Planning Commission will vote on whether to deny an amendment to Open Space land to accommodate a power plant being proposed very close to Mission Trails Regional Park. A local citizen – Stephen Goldfarb – sent a letter to the Planning Commission and some elected officials outlining ten reasons to deny the amendment. The content of that letter is as follows:

Preface. I was in the audience at the Planning Commission June 28, 2012 meeting. I would like to comment on several matters. I am also writing in anticipation of the July 19, 2012 Planning Commission meeting when a vote will be completed as to denying implementation of an amendment to zone land dedicated to Open Space conservation to heavy industrial use to accommodate a power plant.

It is unclear at this time whether only the two Commissioners who were not present at the June 28 meeting will vote, or whether all Commissioners may vote anew.

Introduction. The issue of denying the applicant initiation of an amendment to install a large power plant on environmentally conserved East Elliott land is unusual for several reasons.

San Diego In World Spotlight Due to Trans-Pacific Partnership Negotiations

By Lori Wallach / The Nation (Article appeared in the July 16-23, 2012 edition)

While the Occupy movement has forced a public discussion of extreme corporate influence on every aspect of our lives, behind closed doors corporate America is implementing a stealth strategy to formalize its rule in a truly horrifying manner. The mechanism is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Negotiations have been conducted in extreme secrecy, so you are in good company if you have never heard of it. But the thirteenth round of negotiations between the United States and eight Pacific Rim nations will be held in San Diego in early July.

The TPP has been cleverly misbranded as a trade agreement (yawn) by its corporate boosters. As a result, since George W. Bush initiated negotiations in 2008, it has cruised along under the radar. The Obama administration initially paused the talks, ostensibly to develop a new approach compatible with candidate Obama’s pledges to replace the old NAFTA-based trade model. But by late 2009, talks restarted just where Bush had left off.

Every year for the past several, there’s a whole lot of soul-searching done by OBceans when they survey the gooey mess left over from the July 4th traditional OB Marshmallow War. There are usually calls to ban it outright and much gnashing of the teeth as volunteers struggle to clean up the beaches, the streets, the monuments, the …. everything else that got caught in the targets of marshmallow throwers.

In 2009, the OB Rag did a poll of readers on whether the tradition should continue.

… 69% of the respondents to the OB Rag poll want the Marshmallow Wars tradition to continue, although nearly half of those want some kind of controls placed on the event by volunteers, whereas 27% believe the event is out of control and want it to end. 3% wanted to study the issue. At that time we had 62 respondents.

Here, then is the OB Rag’s Archives on the OB Marshmallow Wars, collected over the last several years – several of these articles have some tremendous comments, so make sure you read them as well. (Click on the the headlines.)

• Who Started the First OB Marshmallow Fight? by Frank Gormlie, July 4, 2009

• Veteran’s Memorial Clean-Up Slated for This Saturday – July 18th by Jon Carr, July 17, 2009

Thousands congregated in Ocean Beach for a colorful fireworks show – even more so considering the malfunctioning mishap Downtown – and the decades-long traditional marshmallow fight. Young couples, teens, older folks and families all took part, armed either with their own bags of marshmallows (sold for $3.99 or less from various prepared vendors along Newport Avenue) or scooping up whatever fallen artillery they could find. The warfare didn’t wait until the fireworks finale, though things heated up dramatically afterward.

The event is a wonderful thing to have so close to home. One significant downside was the amount of trash – especially the plastic – that was left on the beach. If something could be done about that, this would the harmless, uniquely OBcean experience it was meant to be.

Go here for the photos (editor apologizes as he can’t figure out a way to transfer photos from Free Press directly.)

All photos by Annie Lane.

Really? What is going on over at the U-T San Diego today? Some weird stuff, I’m telling you.

First, Doug Porter over at San Diego Free Press (and our sister online publication) discovered that the U-T was recycling old news on the front page of today’s edition, July 5th. Right there, in the lower left hand corner of the paper’s front page was an article entitled “Jamul Writers Discover They’re on the Same Page” by U-T writer Steve Schmidt.

So what? It’s an interesting little human-interest story.

The trouble is, as Porter figured out, the story is a re-run – its being touted as “news” but it originally was published on June 19th by Schmidt. It’s downright re-cycled news. Geez! It’s almost two and a half weeks old!

Early on in my life, as a child, as far as religion goes, HELL plagued me like a recurring nightmarish dream. The first time I heard of that infernal place my heart sank in fear. “You burn forever?” I asked, followed by “forever forever?” And since the answer was always in the affirmative, HELL weighed heavily in the farthest corners and deepest canyons of my imagination, fueling my apprehensions pretty much on a daily basis and one Sunday morning, a few days before my 9th birthday, I became “saved” – somewhat in the manner of a soldier with bombs dropping all around him waving a white flag.

I can still see myself sitting in the pews, waiting like I did every Sunday for Reverend Kendricks to entertain with the cadence and rituals of Black Baptist Ministers, the play with words, the rhythmic prancing, the blotting of handkerchiefs against a sweaty brow.
That morning Reverend Kendricks began slowly with

“Let me tell y’all somethin’ this mornin’, brothers and sisters. And it is par ti cu lar ly important that you sinners sittin’ out there listen to what I, in the name of the Lawd God Hisself, have to say. Now, I didn’t say in the name of Joe Louis, did I? Naw, sho nuff didn’t. Uh uh. I ain’t talkin’ about the Brown Bomber because the Lawd would knock him out in a second and keep on steppin’. The Lawd ain’t due to be messed with. I wonder if y’all know what I’m talkin’ about this mornin’?

By John Lawrence / San Diego Free Press / June 30, 2012

As a young twenty something ingenue at JP Morgan Chase, Blythe Masters was the inventor of the Credit Default Swap (CDS), the financial instrument responsible for almost destroying the global financial system in 2008. Warren Buffett called CDSs “financial weapons of mass destruction.” But exactly what are CDSs and how did they function to almost bring down the entire global banking system?

CDSs came about from JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and other large banks’ desire to offload risk and thereby strengthen their balance sheets. They would then be in a position to do more deals due to the fact that they would not have to keep so much collateral on their books to back up their deals. If a loan or bet went south, someone else would be responsible for paying off on the insurance policy, not them.

Thus they could increase their profits by doing more and more trades without having to worry about paying off on any of them if anything went awry. That would be some other institution’s responsibility. A CDS was an insurance policy. Furthermore, you wouldn’t even have to be directly involved as a party or counterparty. You could purchase a “naked” CDS. This is like betting on a horse that you don’t own and have no financial stake in or responsibility for.
For the remainder of this article, please go to San Diego Free Press.

by Micaela Shafer Porte / San Diego Free Press

Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion by Alain de Botton, Pantheon Books (Random House), New York, 2012

Hey, all you enlightened people– for summer reading, check out this author, Alain de Botton, and his latest book, Religion for Atheists. Funny, provocative, insightful, engaging, even “cool,” de Botton is everything you could want in a rising new-age philosopher from London via Oxford and Switzerland.

Euro-intello, yes, but he probably wishes he were a surfer dude. Who doesn’t? Don’t worry about stumbling over some of the vocabulary; it’s just for fun (but go ahead and look up that word, you’ll learn something) or you can just read the pictures, pictures on every page.

For the remainder of this, go to San Diego Free Press.