OB Rag

The Ocean Beach Town Council has a new logo.

After the OBTC launched the Logo Design Contest which gained 9 entries, members voted online and chose this design.

Restaurant Review
Kabob Village
3145 Rosecrans St.
San Diego, CA 92110
619-226-2524

Hours – 11:00am – 10:00pm, all week

My former student, Monica, left it up to me to decide where to go, and I thought it would be fun to introduce her to food that she has never tried before – hence the Kabob Village – for Greek and Mediterranean food. We arranged to meet at the restaurant at noon on Sunday.

The inside is open and spacious, and wonderful, quiet mood music was playing.

By Peter Zscheische / San Diego Free Press

For those who read Jim Miller’s recent articles recounting the unfortunate splits in the local Labor movement, it may seem they result from just personal differences among labor leaders. Jim reported the events that led the AFL-CIO, the parent organization of the Labor Council, to take over the council and restore it to functioning as it should.

However that came about, that is what the AFL-CIO as the parent organization is supposed to do. It will be hard work.

By Geoff Page

There are many ways to describe what the Peninsula Community Planning Board’s regular monthly meeting on Thursday, July 20 looked like – kabuki theater, theater of the absurd, comedy of errors, keystone cops – are a few that come to mind.

Somehow this collection of reasonably intelligent people, meeting at the Pt. Loma Hervey Library, managed to vote against a motion to deny a project and then voted against a motion to approve the same project. The applicant and several audience members were left looking totally confused by this non-outcome. In 11 years of experience with this planning board, this reporter has never seen anything like it.

Jennings Street Project

The OB Rag staff is happy to announce that our recent summer fund raising has surpassed our goal by over one-third.

Our goal was $1000 and we received $1,360 over the week of the campaign. This is simply great – it makes us feel wanted and appreciated to know that our readers and supporters stepped up.

We had 25 individual donors – 17 at least from OB and Point Loma – for an average donation of about $54 – which is just awesome. Eight people donated $100 each, and we had one donation of $5 from Reno, Nevada.

On Sunday, July 23rd, the OB Rag suffered an attack by a suspected bot originating from an IP address in the city of Irkutsk in the Russian Federation.

Between the hours roughly 8 am to 10 am, two articles in particular received the bulk of the hits (4700 hits in total), all coming from a single IP address.

Assemblymember Todd Gloria will be giving a legislative update at the OB Town Council meeting on Wednesday, July 26th. Gloria, a Democrat, was recently elected to the California Assembly after a long stint on the San Diego City Council. He remains a popular figure in local politics, and usually adds a bit of wit to his public addresses.

Everyone’s invited to the monthly public meeting, which begins at 7:00pm and is held at the Masonic Hall, 1711 Sunset Cliffs Boulevard.

The OBTC will also announce its OB Community Grant awards, going to selected local organizations, groups, and persons that promote the general betterment and beautification of Ocean Beach and the welfare of its residents.

COME INSIDE for the official agenda

By South OB Girl

Jeff Clark, owner of Thrift Trader, is tragically in a coma after being hit by a train in Little Italy.

On June 24th, Clark was hit by an Amtrak train in Little Italy near W. Hawthorne Street and California Street.

His store in Ocean Beach, Two Dollar Thrill on Newport Avenue along with all Thrift Trader locations — have now closed after the tragedy.

What would we do without wishful thinking?

Not much apparently. According to some of the most recent science on the way our brains work, the Zen Buddhists and psychoanalysts are up against it. No matter how much we try to focus on the present, we’ll be pulled away by the Utopia of the next moment.

As a New York Times piece on some of the most recent science of the brain explained:

[I]t is increasingly clear that the mind is mainly drawn to the future, not driven by the past. Behavior, memory and perception can’t be understood without appreciating the central role of prospection. We learn not by storing static records but by continually retouching memories and imagining future possibilities. Our brain sees the world not by processing every pixel in a scene but by focusing on the unexpected.

It was a rocky road for development projects that came before the Project Review Committee last Wednesday night. The panel – a sub-committee of the OB Planning Board – was to review four projects, but no one showed to present two of them, a third was handed back to the developer owner with significant design suggestions, and the fourth was so complex it was punted to the full board to deal with.

No one showed up during the meeting at the OB Rec Center representing either the 5018 Narragansett project or the controversial Abbott- Muir condos (although one person did for this project did show after the meeting had been adjourned). This means these projects will probably be kicked to the bottom of the pile – a long list of development projects making their way to the OB Planning Board’s agenda.

6 “Green Streets” Planned for Downtown

By Michael-Leonard Creditor / UrbDeZine

The idea for grand pedestrian routes through downtown San Diego is not new.

In 1908, John Nolen famously had vision of a Promenade from Balboa Park to San Diego Bay along what is now Cedar Street.

Just imagine how that would be today if it had been implemented 100 years ago, with the beautiful County Administration Building at the bottom of the gentle hill from Park to Bay. Sometimes I think ‘so many opportunities lost’ should be San Diego’s motto.

But, in the fertile minds of planners, this idea hasn’t died. Now, they are being called Green Streets, and six are planned for downtown.

By South OB Girl

Last Friday July 14th saw the official opening of Botanica Home and Garden at 1909 Cable St. The shop is right on the busy stretch of sidewalk between Newport Ave and Santa Monica Ave and was the location of the long standing former tenant the Loan Ranger Pawn Shop.

Owner of Botanica Home and Garden, Caitlin Brooks, has always had a love of plants. She has previously worked at garden centers and nurseries, and she has now turned her love for plants into a business.