OB Rag

By Lori Weisberg / San Diego Union-Tribune / Dec. 14, 2022

Restaurants in San Diego’s beach areas are facing a tough new regulation for outdoor dining that will now require them to replace any lost parking they occupy on public streets.

The new requirement, approved Wednesday by the California Coastal Commission, threatens to upend plans by beach-area restaurateurs looking to retain outdoor seating areas they had erected in the street during the pandemic, when mandated indoor dining closures sharply curtailed business.

There’s still lots of snow in San Diego’s mountains, as evidenced from this screen grab

The half-brother of the slain insurrectionist from San Diego was granted probation after a jury convicted him in November of a misdemeanor battery count and a hate crime allegation.

Roger Witthoeft, 34, was found guilty of the hate crime because he struck a Latino San Diego Gas & Electric worker in Point Loma and shouted racial slurs at the man. He was also convicted of violating the victim’s civil rights. The worker was directing traffic around a work site at the intersection of Voltaire Street and Mendocino

The Fusion Breakthrough Suggests That Maybe Someday We’ll Have a Second Sun

By Bill McKibben / The New Yorker – Reader Supported News / Dec. 13, 2022

In the meantime, we need to use the sun we’ve already got. On Tuesday, the Department of Energy is expected to announce a breakthrough in fusion energy [it did]: — scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have succeeded for the first time in making their complex and expensive machinery produce more power than it uses, if only for an instant.

The San Diego Union-Tribune ran a guest Op-Ed on Tuesday, Dec. 13 with an online headline of “Empty bike lanes a telling comment on who has clout in San Diego.”

Bill Slack, a retired former university administrator who now lives in Golden Hill, asked a pertinent question after seeing hardly any bicycles along the bike paths on 30th Street which he frequents often:

Is this a monumental rip-off perpetrated by a very small but clearly well-organized special interest group of biking enthusiasts?

Slack continues:

The final design for the Ocean Beach Library has been unleashed by the City. The current “art deco” entrance is being preserved in the $11.9 million expansion of one of San Diego’s oldest neighborhood libraries, originally built in 1928.

Construction won’t begin, however, until the winter of 2024. Completion is expected the spring of 2026.

The expansion, when completed will include 4,300-square-feet and will require the removal of the annex building. Facilities in the new library will include:

“Especially around the holidays, the vintage street lamps in Loma Portal are hard to miss.”

The Peninsula Newsletter of the PLA is looking into the “unreliability of the vintage street lights” in Loma Portal. But they’re also looking into what the city’s plans are for them – given the controversy in over the unannounced replacement of their historic streetlamps.

By Kathy Blavatt

I had been given a golden mermaid! This discarded beauty lay beneath many ornaments and decorations. You never know what you will find in a friend’s discarded box.

All I could think of was how cool! The O.B. mermaid has come home!

My creativity kicked in. All I could think about was making a festive water display for the golden mermaid. I quickly unpacked my holiday bobbles and treasures. Right before my eyes were:

Part II

By Colleen O’Connor

The State of the Union is fragile.  The ingredients for more chaos, violence, domestic terrorism, convictions for “seditious conspiracies,” fraud, mistrust, and outright disdain for the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law are already baked in.

No one should be surprised by the speed, undesirability, stupidity, or horrific events and Marquee targets that may present themselves.

Thus, the big predictions.  Neither Biden nor Trump will be the U.S. President in 2024.

The number of houseless people in downtown San Diego reached a record high for the fourth straight month in November, according to a count conducted by the Downtown San Diego Partnership.

November’s count found 1,706 people sleeping on sidewalks and in cars along downtown streets, up from 1,660 from October and increasing the monthly average for the year to 1,485.

The numbers increased by more than 50% from the same time last year, when the count was at 1,124.