OB Rag

By Norma Damashek / San Diego Free Press

How about taking a break from our city’s inane preoccupation with a behemoth sports palace for the San Diego Chargers?

And let’s give ourselves a break from the fiasco called a “Convadium,” a zany proposal to link a convention center annex to a new football stadium just down the street from our 18-acre ballpark. Talk about blocking pedestrian access! Talk about walling off the heart of downtown!
What self-respecting city in the USA would fall for such a ludicrous proposal?

So let’s NOT to take a break from simple questions like: Why are we even thinking about cramming a mammoth new football stadium into our modestly-proportioned, pedestrian-starved downtown streets? What rational person would want to do such a dumb thing to our city? Are we nuts, or what?

And while we’re at it, how about taking a clean break from convoluted (fraudulent?) financing schemes involving hotel taxes and bonds and subsidies and giveaways that inevitably come back to bite San Diego taxpayers and residents?

By Ernie McCray

Over a week ago I tortured my 77-year-old muscles and bones standing for the better part of 4 hours at the San Diego Convention Center, “Feeling the Bern.”

But Bernie made me forget my discomfort and lifted my spirit high when he said “The status quo just isn’t working for us”: something I’ve felt all my life considering the long row my people have had to hoe to get a break in the USA.

I’ve been up against the status quo, in one of its many forms, starting when I was in kindergarten, wanting to jump out of my skin, as we five-year-olds stood singing “I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair” over and over again, like we were Irish tenors, until we got it right. At some point I yelled, in my budding rebel voice to Sister Mary Benedict (forgetting, in the moment, that my knuckles would pay for such an outburst big time): …

Reader Rant by Former Member of the OB Planning Board:

It’s very ironic that as the OB Rag has been writing about restaurants taking over public space on Newport Avenue, one of our public institutions – the lifeguards – now is taking over public access space.

The pictures attached show the lifeguard station in the process of installing a fence surrounding their parking lot. This fence will also block a public sidewalk that is extremely heavily used to access the beach directly across from the curbcut on Abbott (I myself use it – or used it – multiple times every day). As far as I know they’ve done this without any public notice or input.

6-8 years ago, I believe, the Lifeguards and the City of San Diego, presented a plan for a new lifeguard station. That plan had a big wall around the entire property and concerns were raised by OB planners then about restricting access to the beach as well as creating a compound look at the focal point of our community.

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Seaside Pho & Grill
1005 Rosecrans St., #101
San Diego, CA 92106
619-487-9844
www.seasidepho.com

I have lived in San Diego a long time. Except for a few months when my husband and I lived in Chula Vista while looking for a permanent place, over 45 of those years have been in the Pt. Loma/Ocean Beach area. I have watched restaurants come and go; some quickly; some stay for a while.

“Seaside Pho & Grill” has located in a spot that has had two other restaurants there over the years. The first restaurant that I was aware of was “La Playa.” It was one of the first reviews I ever did and that was in 2010. Unfortunately it closed a year or so later. The next restaurant to open in that spot was “Gabardine” in 2012, and it closed its doors in 2014. Both restaurants had wonderful food and Brian Malarkey is an experienced restaurateur. Yet, it was not successful.

Now comes “Seaside Pho & Grill.” It is owned by a married couple – Thuy Nguyen and Waco Williams. The majority of recipes on the menu are family recipes from Thuy. (She was not there when my Japanese student Hitomi and I ate there recently, but Waco was and we had a delightful time talking to him after our meal.) Waco told us that the “Garlic Butter Wings” was an original recipe from Thuy’s grandfather!

By Jim Miller

Today is opening day and with it, if history is our guide, what is most likely another season of futility is born. Having grown up a Padres fan, this is par for the course as the Pads have only gone to the postseason five times and have a meager .463 winning percentage over the life of the franchise.

They are, in short, losers.

So why go? Why will I be sitting in the stands this afternoon as the Padres take on the Dodgers hoping against hope that the outcome will be different?

Sports psychologists inform me that my addiction to losing baseball might have some rough consequences. As Larry Stone reports in “The Psychology of Being a Sports Fan,” researchers have found that “When your team loses, it’s like you lose a part of yourself, because your identity is so merged with the identity of the team and the fan community . . . Sports in the U.S. makes such a difference in people’s lives, a loss can be distressing.”

A not-so-common idea for a building that belongs to us

By Jeeni Criscenzo

For three years, 150,000 square feet of space in downtown, belonging to the citizens of San Diego, has stood vacant. Each night, for these past three years, impoverished human beings have spread their cardboard beds on the brass inlays of the terrazzo at the entrance of the old Central Library on E Street.

But any suggestion that this place could provide shelter for homeless people is dead on arrival, so I won’t be wasting words on that idea. But I do think we need to come up with a fair and just use of this building that retains the spirit of its original reason for being built. After all, it belongs to us, if we are willing to fight for it and put a little imagination into its transformation.

* Parrot Shooter Apprehended After Pellet Gun Misfires
* Homeless Hold “People’s Court” and Dish-out Sentences to Thief and Ear Slashers
* FAA Re-Routes Airplane Take-off Routes Over La Jolla and Coronado
* City Crews Decide Torrey Pines Are Not in Danger of Falling – Plan to Plant New Torries

AND MUCH MORE INSIDE…

From Portland’s TriMet to Atlanta’s MARTA

By Hutton Marshall / SanDiego350.org

Not all public transportation systems are created equal. Across the country, there’s a huge gulf between bumper-to-bumper black holes like Los Angeles versus cities like the subway-happy New York City, which boasts 660 miles of rail transit.

Many of the cities we now see as pinnacles of functional transit became that way out of utility. New Yorkers, for example, have come to see their expansive subway system as a way to escape fierce blizzards and even fiercer rush hours.

Today, however, many cities have come to see public transit as an important tool in growing in a sustainable, environmentally conscious manner. The 2015 and 2016 climate change reports increased the importance of efficient transit.

By John Lawrence

Classical economics divided income into two types: earned and unearned. Earned income came from productive labor combined with capital investment. Unearned income was considered parasitical and consisted of rent, interest and dividends.

It was not considered as adding to GDP but as subtracting from it. It was money made by manipulating money much as feudal landlords made their money in what has been called a rentier economy.

By Ernie McCray

(Written for the closing of the Social Justice Conference at City College)

“Black Lives Matter”
is heard
from a chorus of voices
in a protest in the street.
“All Lives Matter”
someone screams
from a car rolling by
on the street,
in denial
that Black Lives Matter
wouldn’t have come to be
if All Lives Matter
had ever been a reality
in this country
at any time
or any place.

By Will Falk / San Diego Free Press

After two months of struggling to write anything coherent about pinyon-juniper forests, I was on the verge of giving up.

Members of the group I am campaigning with to stop pinyon-juniper deforestation began brainstorming about applying for grants to support the campaign. Many of the grants they discovered required us to demonstrate that pinyon-juniper deforestation harmed wildlife populations, poisoned water supplies, or had a tangible effect on human populations.

Thinking that I could support our grant application process with an essay, I sat down many times to write about the countless beings that call pinyon-juniper forests home. But, I never wrote anything worth reading.

It took me a long time to figure out why.

Mainstream Media Miss Total in Numbers Game of Deaths

The two dead parrots found Easter Sunday at a church in Point Loma bring the total of dead parrots found in the OB and Point Loma area since February 19th to 9. The 2 on Sunday, March 27th, were found at the All Souls’ Episcopal Church on Catalina Boulevard. A parrot expert stated that it’s rare to see two dead parrots in the same area – so human causes are highly suspected.

Somebody continues to kill these local parrots, some of which are endangered species, and so far, authorities have not publicly stated that they have any suspects.

In the meantime, our local mainstream media are seemingly avoiding publicizing the true total number of parrots that have been found dead since mid-February.

We perused the local media reporting of this OB and Point deaths of the latest deaths, two near-threatened red-masked conures, and found that the most useful articles were …