OB Rag

When Greta Thunberg met Margaret Atwood… on Zoom

This is what happened when teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg and veteran author and environmentalist Margaret Atwood were brought together on a radio station.

Editordude: Here’s two views of sports in 2020: sports should have been halted during the pandemic versus ‘everything was weird – except who won.’

2020: The Year Sports Should Have Stopped

In this awful year, sports didn’t deliver normalcy. But they did nudge us toward justice.

By Dave Zirin / The Nation / December 2020

This cursed year of 2020 should be remembered as the time when sports was put in a meat grinder, mixed with all manner of offal and served to us as hope.

Professional sports, we were told, represented a “return to normalcy” in a time that was anything but normal. “The games must go on” was the mantra, with athletes presented as “essential workers” by sports leagues and colleges desperate for their billion-dollar fix of television cash.

By Allison McNearney / Daily Beast / Dec. 27, 2020

Since the beginning of time, humans have sought to stage-direct our environment. The drama of history may have proceeded through act after act, but the trickster in the story has remained the same: the weather.

Over the centuries, our methods for trying to control the elements have gotten ever more sophisticated, and outlandish. We’ve tried to dance the rain down, blast precipitation from the skies, give the atmosphere an electrical wake-up shock, and seed the clouds with chemicals to bend them to our will.

The pseudo-science of what was later dubbed pluviculture, or man’s attempt to artificially bring about rain, began to develop more rapidly in the early 20th century.

The San Diego Sheriff’s Department reports that there are more than 400 active cases of the coronavirus among its inmates — or 11% of the total jail population, plus hundreds of staff members have also been infected.

Critics of how the Sheriff’s Department is handling outbreaks at its facilities include inmates, deputies and the head of the union that represents jail workers. And sheriffs are still arresting people for minor crimes and bringing them into the jails.

The total number of COVID-19 cases has exceeded 1,000, which includes more than 500 active infections among inmates and employees, according to data on the Sheriff’s Department website.

There’s been a total of 757 inmates infected with the virus so far in 2020. This includes 414 active cases. Another 114 inmates have been placed into isolation. Among deputies and staff,

Restaurant Review

Soi-OB Thai Street Food
1916 Cable St.
Ocean Beach, CA 92107
619-230-5885

By Judi Curry

When this restaurant first opened, Soi-OB Thai Street Food, my foreign language student – Hitomi – and I were there the first week. We both really enjoyed what we had, and went back several times until she moved to Los Angeles in July.

Last night I decided it was time to try it again, so went on-line to set up a delivery of a few items. Now that I do not have any students, I am not trying as many items as I did in the past. However, tonight one of my tenants – George – was home and he joined me in my tastings.

I ordered a Tom Kah Soup, with mild spices, and just vegetables.

by Ernie McCray

Someone on Facebook posted “What’s the best Christmas gift of your life?”

My answer was swift: a bike.

I’ll always remember the Christmas it became mine. It was in 1947 when I was nine.

That morning, though, I was down as down could be. Because my mother had led me to believe (and she had never ever deceived me) that this Christmas there would be a bicycle under the Christmas Tree for me. But when I woke up that was not the reality.

I was crushed, to say the least, and I couldn’t hold my feelings inside and if my family had been an ass whuppin’ kind, my mother had a reason to tan my behind…

And after a little time of me giving my mother and the world a piece of my mind she says to me, giving me “the look” mothers flash when they’ve had enough of your ungrateful ass: “Shut your mouth and put your new jacket on. We’re going to Sergeant Hudson’s house to wish him a Merry Christmas.”

A friendly reader wrote us and suggested the OB Rag offer this post as one way for input to our council member, Jen Campbell.

Campbell’s office just recently emailed constituents looking for feedback for District 2 budget priorities.

Here is the link to the Campbell survey.

By Judi Curry

Many years ago I worked with a teacher named GiGi that taught Office Skills to our Job Corps Students. GiGi was outgoing, fun to be with, and about 45 years old. One year she invited about 15 of our staff members to her home in Tijuana to make tamales for Christmas. I am pretty sure that none of us had ever made tamales before – and I am almost willing to bet that none of have made them since!

I wish I had pictures of the scene, but I will do my best to recreate it for you. When we walked into her huge living room/ dining room, we found that she had prepared different fillings for the tamales – pork, chicken, fruit – for a typical Christmas tamale – cheese and beef. Imagine seeing all of these in huge pans on 10 long tables in her house!

By Thomas Ultican / Tulican / Dec. 19, 2020

Democracy and free universal public education are foundational American ideologies. They have engendered world renowned success for our experiment in government “by the people”. Two new books – Schoolhouse Burning by Derek Black and A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door by Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire – demonstrate that these principles which were integral to the American experiment are shockingly under serious attack by wealthy elites.

After his father Fred died in 1967, Charles Koch took a disparate set of assets – a cattle ranch, a minority share in an oil refinery and a gas gathering business – and stitched them together. Today it is the second largest privately held corporation in the world. In the excellent 2019 book, Kochland, Christopher Leonard states, “Koch would eventually build one of the largest lobbying and political influence machines in US history.”

The Recall Jen Campbell campaign must be official – now that both the San Diego Union-Tribune and The Beacon have reported on it. (In contrast, the lowly OB Rag has been reporting on it for over a month.)

The recall effort is not only official, it now officially has an opposition group that has formed to oppose the recall, to counter the signature gathering petitions, to contradict those efforts. It is the “Contra Recall” group.

As the U-T reported, the recall campaign “gained significant momentum since Campbell was elected council president” on Dec. 10 by a very narrow 5-4 vote – which split up the Democratic super-majority on the council. As per the U-T: “Leaders of the campaign say they’ve been flooded with donations and offers to volunteer from across the city since the Dec. 10 vote ….”

Plus, the recall campaign now has a bit larger profile since former Councilwoman Barbara Bry has lent her name to it. The issues that have angered coastal residents of District 2 about Campbell are not new