OB Rag

It’s been an amazing 3 days for the OB Rag!

We have now raised $1,200 since Friday morning, July 15th – so in just 3 days, we have surpassed our week’s goal of $1,000. Wow! The out-pouring of support and sense of sponsorship among our readers and fans has been humbling and inspiring all at once. And there’s a definite sense of relief.

Many of the contributions have flowed in from our OB readers. Thanks so much, everyone. We’ll keep the campaign going the rest of the week, of course, …

By Jim Miller

Where we live is who we are. Surely, the country, state, city, and neighborhoods we occupy profoundly shape us, but does not the house craft our being in the most intimate of ways?

Gaston Bachelard observes in The Poetics of Space:

“For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.”

Hence, the kind of space we choose to live in has a particularly profound impact on our identity. Bachelard again notes,

“Thus the dream house must possess every virtue. However spacious, it must also be a cottage, a dove-cote, a nest, a chrysalis. Intimacy needs the heart of a nest.”

The following article appeared in the 1969 print edition of the San Diego Free Press. It has been transcribed from the microfilm at the San Diego Public Library.

By John Lawrence

As Frank Pace says in the Foreward to Dynamic America: A History of the General Dynamics Corporation by John Niven:

“In 1960, ours is the most powerful of nations, intimately involved in all the earth’s daily business, the major bulwark against communism and so most threatened.

From these times to the present, during our growth, from an insular agrarian society to the world’s political and industrial leader, the position of the United States in world politics has determined, almost exclusively, the flow of product research and development from General Dynamics.“

It’s Our Summer Funding Appeal!

Michael Turko – of Turko Files – once called the OB Rag “the conscience of OB“. We love that moniker and wear it with pride.

But you know what? We’re broke. And we need help right away to keep going.

Even with our shoe-string budget, we do have costs – and occasionally we pay our writers – but right now we have practically run out of operating funds and must turn, as we do once in a while, to our readers, fans and supporters to help us ‘keep it all goin”.

At this point in the middle of July we have to steer our efforts away from being the online citizen journal for Ocean Beach and Point Loma and focus instead on fund-raising.

There’s a whole bunch of posts and articles in the works … like :

From abc10News:

A man was detained and was being questioned in connection with an assault on homeless man in Golden Hill early Friday morning that investigators believe is linked to four other brutal attacks earlier this month that left three men dead and a fourth gravely injured.

Shortly before 4:30 a.m., a 55-year-old man was beaten while asleep in the area of 19th and C streets. San Diego police officers responded and found the bloodied victim with significant trauma to his torso, San Diego police Capt. Dave Nisleit told reporters in a morning briefing.

He was transported to a local hospital but is expected to survive.

A little before 5:45 a.m., a man was taken into custody in the area of Laurel and Brant streets in Bankers Hill. Nisleit confirmed the detained man was being questioned in connection with the attack. His name was not disclosed.

Kilowatt Brewing on Cable Could Open by the Fall

There’s another brewery – or rather, beer-tasting room – coming to the Newport Avenue area of Ocean Beach.

This will make the 4th beer place on or right off Newport Avenue either having just opened recently or in the works.

Chris Calva and his partners will be opening Kilowatt Brewing in the former motorcycle shop (former skate and surf shop) at 1875 Cable Street, next to the alley, and next door to the tire shop.

Popular Voltaire Eatery Had Faced Stiff Rent Increase

A popular restaurant on the 4900 block of Voltaire Street in Ocean Beach, O’Bistro’s, has closed and is moving – probably over to the bay side of the Peninsula.

It was quite a shock when I heard about it. Their Euro-beach cuisine was a favorite of good friends and north OB will certainly lose one of its more high-end eateries.

I caught John – one of the owners – on a lunch break while packing up in the interior of the now-closed establishment at 4934 Voltaire. Chairs stood on tables, boxes were taking over the floors, and the moving truck stood close by. After expressing my condolences, he reassured me they will be opening up again probably close to Rosecrans, over the hill from OB.

The rumor that O’Bistro had been hit with a rent increase was true, it turned out. John explained the background.

By John Lawrence

Part 1: 110 Pages of Gobbledygook
Part 2: Lipstick on a Pig

Section 35.0109 Additional Tax Imposed

The Chargers want the City to create a separate Fund, the Convention Center Expansion and Stadium Fund, which will borrow money from Wall Street in the form of Bonds and be firewalled off from the City’s General Fund. So it’s like a separate entity for which the City is not responsible at all, but the City has to create it.

The BIG question is, “Will Wall Street go along with this?” The monies flowing into this fund come solely from an increase in the Tax On Transiency (TOT) of 4% (or is it 6% as stated in the proposal?).

If these monies aren’t sufficient to make the payments on the $1.15 billion in bonds that this “entity” (not the City, mind you) is responsible for, then what happens? Who’s left holding the bag?

By Frank Gormlie

Perhaps you’ve been too busy with summer to notice, but there’s been a ‘quiet’ debate going on recently in certain circles – including the op-ed pages of the San Diego Union-Tribune – over the future of Fiesta Island.

Fiesta Island – you know that flat and sandy piece of land that juts out into Mission Bay – it’s not really an island as it’s connected with the rest of San Diego by a narrow land bridge with an asphalt road – where people bike, do day-camps on the sand, water or jet-ski, or take their horses, have fires in the firepits, – oh, and who take their dogs to the great off-leash area on the Island.

The land of Island Fiesta itself is what’s left from all the sludge dredged up during the 1950’s development of Mission Bay Park.

There’s been for years an ongoing debate between dog owners who have formed a group Fiesta Island Dog Owners (FIDO) and others who want to see Fiesta Island developed with “improvements”. And the now the debate is ramping up ….

A homeless man was brazenly attacked with a hammer Wednesday morning, July 13th, around 6 a.m. in downtown San Diego.

The victim was walking on the sidewalk when a stranger ran up to him and hit him on the head with a hammer and then took off. This happened at 10th Ave. and G Street in the East Village.

When 10,000 people camp out together at the Rainbow Gathering, staying groovy can be a challenge.

by Livia Gershon / Atlas Obscura / July 11, 2016

When I wandered into an internet forum for members of the Rainbow Family of Living Light and started asking about going to their long-running national gathering, the responses were friendly, but a little unnerving. In the midst of a series of messages about Rainbow etiquette, one person briefly noted that “some bad things have a potential 2 happen. If ya ever have trouble just yell ‘shanti sena’, & some help will be on the way.”

Hey, did you receive your big invite to the really big Donald Trump “Victory” fundraiser? No?

It’s only $25,000 a seat.

It’s over in Rancho Santa Fe – Wednesday, July 13th – at some private homes, and it’s being chaired by Jenny Craig, Geniya and Papa Doug Manchester and other bigwigs apparently in the Trump column.