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Archives for June 2012

Sex in San Diego: Are you a prude?

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by Mrs. Grundy

The word “prude” comes from the French. Traditionally, it meant something along the lines of “honorable woman.”

Today, dear Wikipedia explains that “prude” refers to a person of any gender who is “concerned with decorum and propriety, significantly in excess of normal prevailing community standards.” Particularly when it comes to sex and nudity, a prude “may be perceived as being more uncomfortable than most.”

This suggests that determining one’s level of prudishness involves a comparison to current community norms. And when it comes to sex and nudity, the community’s norms are hard to pin down — especially in a major metropolitan community like San Diego.

Still, I believe it is possible to delineate some sex-related norms across San Diego — and therefore, to calculate the extent of a given San Diegan’s prudishness.   [Read more…]

The New Morena District Certified Farmers’ Market

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The new Morena District Certified Farmers’ Market opened Tuesday, June 19, 2012, from 3 – 7pm with 75 booths exhibiting the wares of 45 vendors to the delight of a crowd estimated by Brian Beevers, Market Manager, to be approximately 3,000 people! Among those attending were Lori Zapf, Republican, Member of San Diego City Council representing the Sixth District.

Vendors included local merchants of coffee, fruits, vegetables, baskets, nuts, berries, prepared foods, including BBQ, fresh drinks, flowers, clothing, fish, roasted corn, cupcakes, pasta, jams, object d’art, honey, plants, olives and bread. Two musicians played guitar and a percussion instrument.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line – San Diego Teacher’s Union Dissidents Mount ‘Just Say No’ Campaign on Concessions

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June 20, 2012 – Today’s Big Story is the deal announced yesterday between the San Diego Education Association (SDEA) and the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD). Negotiations over the past three weeks produced a proposed settlement that would purportedly save (SDUSD) $68 million, return 1372 pink slipped teachers to classrooms in September, defer a series of pay raises promised by the district two years ago, and extend five unpaid furlough days for an additional two years. Two weeks of additional furlough days would be added next year if two new state tax measures fail in November’s general election. The anticipated settlement comes just days before the Board of Education is scheduled to adopt a final budget for the 2012-13 school year. It must be supported by more than 50 percent of union members, plus school board approval. The SDEA will begin a campaign this week to educate teachers about the agreement via phone calls, electronic posts and meetings. One gets the sense from press accounts that this is all but a done deal…

But wait a minute!… The Breakfast Club Action Group, a dissident teachers group spawned by concerns that the SDEA leadership was being less than forthright with the rank and file union members, is crying foul. Saying that the SDEA leadership approved the pact in a session closed to membership, the group posted an essay on its website calling the proposal a “horrible deal” that amounts to a 17.42 % pay cut and disputing the claim that the number of rescinded pink slips is real.   [Read more…]

Helping Jazz 88.3 Cop a Plea

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The other day
I was kind of lowriding down the street,
feeling about as cool as a 74 year old
could ever hope to be,
listening to some sounds
on Radio Jazz 88.3.
Ramsey Lewis, more specifically,
running his fingers over a keyboard,
as per usual,
ever so funkily,
with a spacey
other world type vibe…   [Read more…]

Incorporating the Mind

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By Lucas O’Connor
By now, most of us agree that the concept of treating corporations as people has, in practice, been a disaster. The flood of corporate money into elections since Citizens United has been just as bad as advertised, deference to the supremacy of corporate health as national health continues to rise, and still the very concept remains just as laughable now as it’s always been. But it isn’t just the straightforward threats to a functioning electoral system or a stable economy that should be worrisome. This march towards corporations-as-people ultimately challenges how we see ourselves and what we value in our lives.

The argument that corporations are people inevitably spills over into what the role of people are in our society. Corporatizing that concept will, over time, reduce individual people more and more into nothing more than instruments of profit. That means that quality of life goes out the window, it means value that doesn’t show up on a balance sheet is dismissed, and over time we give up on building anything into our lives or communities that don’t make money.   [Read more…]

Coffee, City Heights Style- A Blend of Cultures in Every Cup

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It probably should come as no surprise that the diverse community of City Heights delivers up equally diverse coffee drinking experiences. The one unifying quality to the coffee here is a certain “robustness–” this is City Heights after all. If you love the smell of coffee, the taste of coffee and the experience of drinking coffee in unpretentious cafes and restaurants, City Heights delivers on all counts.

I began my week with a hot Vietnamese coffee, pâté chaud and sharing a Vietnamese Special sandwich with my husband at Café Doré, so hot Vietnamese coffee with espresso and condensed milk it is for this week’s coffee column. The cafe is located in a strip mall off of University Avenue that includes a busy laundromat, a couple of Asian markets and a check cashing store.   [Read more…]

The Starting Line — Demonstrations, Caravans and Twitterstorms, Oh My!

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June 19. 2012—Grass roots activism around the world leads the news wrap up today. In San Diego, cities around the world and in cyberspace citizens are and have been expressing their frustrations and hopes for a better world.

National Robin Hood Day demonstrations…. Rallies in San Diego and 14 other cities across the country at noon today kick off a national campaign to institute a Wall Street tax that would produce billions for the public good. This Financial Transaction Tax, called the “Robin Hood Tax,” is a levy of less than half of a percent on trades in derivatives, stocks, bonds and foreign currencies. According to the campaign, economists estimate that $350 billion could be raised each year for health care, jobs, education, infrastructure and various other needs, which may help rejuvenate the economy. The campaign states that it is pushing for “a tax for the people.”   [Read more…]

Lights in the Darkness of Mount Soledad

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By Frances O’Neill Zimmerman

A veterans’ group led by the owner of the La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club wants to light up inky-dark Mount Soledad nights and is seeking official approval next week for this unprecedented alteration to the highest viewpoint on the west side of the city of San Diego.

At stake is encroaching light pollution within our urban area and maintaining Mount Soledad as a sacred dark space for viewing the night sky — shooting stars, unusual planetary alignments, spectacular moonrises, eclipses of the moon. Generations of San Diegans and visitors to San Diego have experienced the beauty of the nighttime sky and the 360-degree panorama of the city below from atop Mount Soledad.   [Read more…]

Young Wall Street Traitor Joins Occupy Wall Street

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Wall Street “Quant” Alexis Goldstein Joins the Opposition

Wall Street recruits young, just out of college computer science majors and mathematicians to become “quants” whose skills are used among other things to predict when pension funds are going to make huge trades so that Wall Street can jump in ahead of them and do deals effectively raising the price the pension fund must pay or lowering the profit they might make.

One such young twenty something quant was Alexis Goldstein. Goldstein devised trading software for Deutsche Bank and Merrill Lynch. She has divulged some of Wall Street’s most closely held cultural secrets such as the phrase “rip the client’s face off” which means selling some derivative “solution” to a naive client such as a convent of nuns in Europe at a huge profit to the trader and to Wall Street while convincing the client that it’s the best deal they ever made. Sometimes they refer to these clients as “muppets.”
  [Read more…]

Pacific Beach Planning Board Tackles “Garage Morphing”, Lifeguard Stations, and Less Beach

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By Sub-Committee / Special to San Diego Free Press

The second, and last, item on the agenda of the very recent Pacific Beach Planning Board sub-committee for the re-development of the North Pacific Beach lifeguard station at Law St. was to do with a complaint from some local resident at some other local resident for erecting a temporary car shelter, of the canopy type, I imagine, and morphing it into a more permanent garage in their driveway or front yard, without a permit, of course.

This must also be the sub-committee for code compliance. The committee members seemed of a mind to propose a change in the city “garage morphing” building codes, rather than trying to enforce existing city ordinances, (“morphing” anything into something else is the best way to get around all these ridiculous governmental laws they keep making!) and as a second thought, suggested calling “the TURKO Files” to complain, as Mr. Turko seems to be the only one willing to question bureaucratic policies, and actually get something done about it… thank you Mr. Turko!   [Read more…]

Election of Birther to the Bench Proves Voters Unworthy of the Responsibility of Selecting Jurists

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Asking voters who know nothing about judicial candidates, and usually fail to do any research of their own is a recipe for disaster.

Well, looks like we’ve done it, San Diego. The electorate has spoken, and the electorate has chosen a completely unqualified individual to serve as a Superior Court judge in San Diego County.

Gary Kreep is a lawyer who decided he wanted to be a judge. Relatively harmless in and of itself, until you find out a little more about him. First, he is the founder of the United States Justice Foundation, an innocuous sounding name (aren’t they always?) for an organization that is dedicated to TEA Party causes and the advancement of right wing religious causes. They are anti-abortion, anti-gay, all conspiracy theory all the time whack jobs.   [Read more…]

Making a Case for Public Space in San Diego, Tuesday June 19

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When we talk about public spaces, parks and beaches are probably the first things that come to mind for many of us. It is easy to overlook our streets, alleys and sidewalks, which are in reality the most ubiquitous examples of public spaces. Because they are not destinations they become invisible to us. Are there other public spaces that we are equally oblivious to, and are they worth a second look? Can those existing spaces be made more inviting, more functional and safer?

The San Diego Architectural Foundation is hosting a Pecha Kucha which will examine those questions. Nine different presenters will show twenty slides each, but can only talk about them for twenty seconds. This is a fast tempo way to encourage a lively public discourse about serious quality of life issues.   [Read more…]

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