OB Rag

If you’ve been on Cable Street lately, you can see what’s going on.  The City’s pipe repair project is inching…

by George J. Janczyn / Groksurf’s San Diego / March 23, 2011 What drew me to the San Diego City…

Editor: In TV parlance, a “showrunner” is a person who handles the daily operations of a television series. Here is an interview with Shawn Ryan, the showrunner for “Terriers” – the great 13-episode TV series filmed in Ocean beach last year.

by David Chen / SlashFilm / March 25, 2011

Shawn Ryan is one of the most exciting people working in the entertainment industry today. With an ear for crackling dialogue and a penchant for labyrinthine, satisfying plots, Ryan re-invigorates any genre he touches. He created the hit FX show The Shield, and was the showrunner on Lie To Me, Terriers, and The Unit. His newest show, The Chicago Code, airs on Fox on Monday nights and it’s one of my favorite new shows of 2011. …

“My girls, my pretty ones, going down through the air. They hit the sidewalk spread out and still.”
~Triangle Shirtwaist Company Assistant cashier Joseph Flecher

At quitting time on a Saturday one hundred years ago, a fire began on the eighth floor and raged through the ninth and tenth floor of the Asch building in New York City where 500 workers, mostly immigrant teenage girls were trapped in their Triangle Shirtwaist Company workrooms. One of the ninth floor exit doors had been locked, the fire escape collapsed, and the elevator, filled beyond capacity with fleeing workers, stopped working. The tragedy was compounded because the Fire Department ladders only reached to the sixth floor, and their safety nets deployed to catch the falling bodies broke under the weight. Yet the fire was quickly brought under control and within a half hour it was all over.

The following article was originally published on March 24, 2011

This coming March 28th is the 40th anniversary of the infamous “Collier Park Riot” – an event that reminds me of the refrain from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” which claimed: “… hardly a man is now alive who remembers that famous day and year, ….”

And like the pre-Civil War America to whom Longfellow penned his famous poem, the Ocean Beach of the 21st century has forsaken its very own history that made it what it is today – a celebrated iconoclastic corner of the hippie counter- culture that has consciously set itself apart from mainstream Southern California. And it is true, that hardly a man or woman now alive who lives in Ocean Beach remembers that famous day when the youth of the community stood up to “the Man.”

by Jeoffry Gordon, MD, MPH

Our country is at the edge of a precarious cliff that presents the biggest danger to the survival of our democracy than anything since the Civil War…….Or like Wiley Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons – we may have run off the precipice already – but it just has not yet sunk in. The problem is one of domestic social justice and economics.

By John Lawrence / Will Blog for Food / March 22, 2011

In an article March 18, 2011 in the San Diego Union Tribune, Qualcomm said “it would spend $975 million to build a factory in Taiwan to manufacture low-power Mirasol display screens for e-readers and smart phones.”

However, there is a caveat. Qualcomm would like to imply that, if it could repatriate the $9.8 billion in cash it is holding offshore without paying taxes or at a sufficiently reduced tax rate, it would build the factory in the US instead thus creating jobs.

by Don Bauder / Scam Diego – San Diego Reader / March 21, 2011

Union-Tribune employees are wondering once again just who will own their company, or whether the U-T could be folded into a conglomeration of Southern California papers.

Two management missteps fomented the worry.

Darrell Issa has a long history in the tech industry, with close ties that continue today — and have recently gotten him in some trouble . More personally, he’s also a notorious tech junkie, unable to resist fiddling with new gadgets and the tech toys of everyone around him. So if anyone should understand how important net neutrality is, you’d think it would be Darrell Issa. But instead, he’s been steadfast in walking the corporate conservative line, adopting the favorite industry astroturf demand .

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — State lawmakers called on California utilities Monday to delay efforts to relicense nuclear power plants until the companies complete detailed seismic maps to get a true picture of the risks posed by earthquakes and tsunamis.

State senators raised sharp questions about whether California’s nuclear plants can withstand a major natural disaster such as the one on March 11 that has left Japan scrambling to control radiation coming from some of its reactors.

We’re talking about true legislative sadists looking to go medieval on America.

By David Sirota /AlterNet / March 21, 2011

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said that states are the “laboratories of democracy.” Oft repeated over time, the aphorism has helped impart legitimacy to the rough and tumble of state lawmaking. We’ve heard “laboratory” and we’ve imagined staid scientists in white coats rigorously testing forward-thinking theories of societal advancement.

It’s certainly a reassuring picture—but there is a darker side of the metaphor. States are indeed laboratories. The problem is that today, those laboratories are increasingly run by mad scientists.

The vibrations of peace, calm, and freedom that dwell in Ocean Beach drew me here time and time again. Each time I visited this small little beach community the desires of my heart were loud and clear. Each visit more pleasant than the previous. Over the course of eight years I was drawn to the shoreline of Ocean Beach for healing, rest, reflection, and renewal. No other town I’ve been to in this country welcomed me unconditionally the way Ocean Beach has.

Deciding to sell my home in the desert to rent here for double what my mortgage payment was may have sounded unwise to some. Yet I was drawn here by powers beyond my human understanding.