Sat 20 Feb 2010
In this desert landscape, a scraggly group of spectators gathers around wooden picnic tables and plastic lawn furniture. A lone kid runs in circles around the group, desperately dragging a kite behind him. A few feet away, a ragged pink windsock dangles limply in the breeze. For miles around, the dry, scrubby hills of Horseshoe Bend Recreation Park, near the edge of Yosemite, seem abandoned — a vast wilderness of sagebrush and rattlesnakes, baking in the summer sun.
Free as a Bird Now (East Bay Express, June 21, 2006)
Thu 18 Feb 2010
Sometimes you need to get away from it all, and Vegas and Disneyland just aren’t far enough away. That’s when you reach for your passport and your travelers’ checks and head for some distant paradise. Nothing compares to the giddy thrill of trekking through uncharted jungle or lying on a tropical beach.
The Agony and the Odyssey (East Bay Express, May 24, 2004)
Wed 17 Feb 2010
Manuel de Paz is a short, bespectacled man from El Salvador with a scruffy goatee and a round, friendly face that belies his turbulent past. He’s lived in the United States for almost two decades, though he still speaks with a slight Spanish accent. Dressed in jeans and a black turtleneck, he looks casual as he walks around the basement offices of the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, where he works as community outreach coordinator.
Sanctuary from the Storm (The East Bay Monthly, December 2007)
Mon 15 Feb 2010
They call it the Iron Triangle. It’s an impoverished south Richmond neighborhood, wedged between the Union Pacific Railroad tracks and Interstate 580, that the rest of the city sometimes would rather forget. The streets are threadbare and abandoned; weeds burst through cracks in the sidewalks. The homes here have high fences around their yards and iron bars on their windows. Just walking down the street can be deadly. Gangs work the streets here and many young, jobless men spend their days selling drugs from doorsteps. Many of them have been to jail; many of them expect to go back.
Breaking the Cycle (The East Bay Monthly, December 2007)
Sun 14 Feb 2010
Whenever news breaks, the first people on the ground, before reporters arrive, are ordinary folks with cameras. Citizen journalists have played an important role in getting us the first glimpses of developing news, from the London transit bombings to the Southeast Asian tsunami to the Virginia Tech massacre. With the advent of YouTube as a hub for video-sharing, there’s finally a venue outside the mainstream media where amateur journalists can distribute their videos to a wide audience.
While professional journalists have used the service to distribute documentaries, the nature of citizen reporting on YouTube still remains very time-and-location specific, more a matter of catching an event, something fleeting and out of context, than of telling the story behind it. Last week, YouTube announced Project: Report, a journalism contest that aims to change that.
Can Pulitzer Contest Boost Serious Journalism on YouTube? (PBS Mediashift, September 25, 2008)
Thu 4 Feb 2010
Katie Senser stumbled across her first geocache by accident.
She was picnicking with friends at Bald Rock, a barren, wind-swept expanse of granite overlooking the Feather River outside Oroville north of Sacramento. It’s a quiet, eerie place, where the wind howls mournfully as it whips through the craggy formations and the only evidence of human activity is small depressions in the rock, worn over centuries, where the local Maidu Indians ground acorns into meal. But it soon turned out that Senser, a Chico art student, and her companions weren’t the first visitors this century.
Hunters and Geo-Gatherers (The East Bay Monthly, February 2010)
Mon 1 Feb 2010
Cases in which employees allege they were forced to work through legally mandated meal or break periods are taking off in the already fast-growing niche of wage-and-hour litigation.
No Break in Worker Suits (California Lawyer, February 2010)
Wed 13 Jan 2010
When I was a kid, my grandmother delighted in telling us about the ghost that haunted her childhood home back in Germany. Every night, she said, the family heard mysterious rattling on the staircase from dusk to dawn. I never really believed her—and, from the way she told it, she didn’t really believe in that ghost, either—but it made a great spooky story. And ever since then, in the back of my mind, I always hoped that someday I’d meet a ghost for myself. Because, well, you never know.
You Never Know (The East Bay Monthly, January 1 2010)
Mon 11 Jan 2010
In a Concord backyard, Sandy (no last name) lugs an animal carrier into a small wire pen. She opens the door and four long, skinny animals slink out—Sandy identifies them as Puff, Hawley, Boo, and Walter Frederick “Fred” Ferretude. Puff, Boo, and Fred waddle around exploring, sniffing the ground, but Hawley doesn’t want to stay put. She scratches at the dirt with her long claws, hoping to dig her way out of the pen to explore the rest of the yard. These are ferrets: cute, clumsy—and illegal. California is one of only two states where it is against the law to own a pet ferret.
“Not everyone knows about ferrets,” Sandy says. Sandy can’t give her full name, because she’s harboring wanted fugitives. “But everyone in the ferret underground knows.”
Furry Fugitives (The East Bay Monthly, January 1 2010)
Thu 7 Jan 2010
Well, since it’s now the beginning of 2010, why don’t we look ahead…no, I mean back? Here’s a short vignette from last year’s Synthesis when I looked forward at some of the nifty things expected to happen in 2009. I was excited about the release of the “Red Sonja” remake. Who doesn’t love a good barbarian flick?
Looking Forward (January 2009)
And why not take a look EVEN FURTHER back, where I fondly remembered the great overlooked films of 2008?
Year in Review (December 2008)
