OB Rag

Every year it seems that the infamous Ocean Beach Marshmallow Fight expands itself to even more and more areas along the beach front. This year, it went down (or up) Newport Avenue further than some had ever seen it during previous years.

Plus marshmallows were thrown at cars and other vehicles cruising onto Abbott from Newport. Is this a new development?

The Ocean Beach Hotel has a mascot that’s American as surfing and apple pie: a 1949 Desoto woodie wagon. Owner Rich Grosch, 66, bought the seaside hotel at the corner of Newport Avenue and Abbott Street in 2003 and three years later he found the woodie.

“You gotta have a woodie with the beach hotel,” he said. He found the car online, listed at Hemmings.com by the owner in Santa Barbara.

With national unemployment rates at 9.1 percent, it might be hard to imagine that there are companies struggling to find workers. It is especially hard to imagine that these companies would be in the manufacturing industry, an area hit hard by the recent recession and on the decline in the United States for more than 30 years.

By Kit-Bacon Gressitt / Excuse Me, I’m Writing

You know that thing we used to have to do at the end of summer, the thing that whopped you upside the head with the brutal inevitability that vacation was over, that tar-bubble popping adventures and rhubarb-sucking loll-abouts were done, done and gone with the finality of a bee between your naked foot and the clover that enticed the insect to its death and you, to your hopping pain?

There’s a series of reports by Voice of San Diego reporter Emily Alpert published over the weekend that states that schools within the San Diego Unified system – including Point Loma High and Dana Middle School – misspent federal monies earmarked for disadvantaged students.

Seven years ago today I was sitting on the tarmac in Los Angeles waiting for my plane to take off. I had booked a red eye flight to San Juan Puerto Rico, where I would spend the month studying bomba, a popular dance form, and immersing myself in all things Puerto Rican.

I was traveling post 9/11, meaning that the country was on alert this particular 4th of July for possible terrorist attacks. The thought gave me pause as I imagined my fellow countrymen and women gathered at cookouts, watching parades, and celebrating a national holiday. I also imagined myself, a tiny creature, strapped inside a relatively small metal object flying across the continent and then out to sea for the next seven hours of my life.

Progressives can love our country without loving the Empire built in our name; we can celebrate the day as a day of revolt against the rich and powerful.

Can progressives be patriotic? The short answer is: yes, but it really depends on how you define “patriotic” and “patriot”.

According to Merriam-Webster, “patriot” is “one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests.”

If that’s the definition we go by, then the answer is ‘no.’

So we need to redefine what “patriot” means in this new world of instant communications, of empire, tea parties, the Arab Spring, failing eco-systems, of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, of millions of unemployed, of ecological disasters that affect us all.

Every 4^th of July, I make sure to fit in a few minutes to put on one of my favorite Dave Alvin songs, “4^th of July” (which is better known as an X song). It’s a bittersweet tale of two lovers trying to make their way through life. After pulling a holiday shift, a man comes home from work to find his lover crying in the dark and he ponders their fate:

On the lost side of town
In a dark apartment
We gave up trying so long ago.
On the steps I smoke a
Cigarette alone.
The Mexican kids are shooting
Fireworks below.
Hey, baby—it’s the fourth of July.
Whatever happened
I apologize
So dry your tears
And baby—walk outside
It’s the 4^th of July

by Howard Zinn

On this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.

Is not nationalism — that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder — one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?

Yes, it is true. Baseball great David Wells has been hired as a pitching coach for Point Loma High School and its baseball team. The former Padre and Yankee player, PLHS Class of 1982, was a big star while at our local high school, and named as the CIF Player of the Year.

MINNEAPOLIS — Minnesota began what is expected to become the broadest shutdown of state services in its history early Friday, after Republicans and Democrats there failed to agree on how to solve the state’s budget woes in time for the new fiscal year.

And so, on the eve of a holiday weekend, residents were likely to find the state’s parks, historical sites and the Minnesota Zoo closed, hunting and fishing licenses no longer being issued, and that state’s lottery system and racetracks unavailable.

by George J. Janczyn / Groksurf’s San Diego / July 1, 2011

The City of San Diego’s IPR (indirect potable reuse) study, now officially referred to as the Water Purification Demonstration Project by the Public Utilities Department, just passed a major milestone: the Advanced Water Purification Facility needed for the project is completed and operations have begun.