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Ever wonder where to take your dog for breakfast? Consider Aldo’s. It was recently voted the “favorite breakfast restaurant” for man’s (and woman’s) best friend by voters in the

Someone ought to give Robert Norse a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Back in 2002, Norse was ejected from a City Council meeting for

Santa Cruz is definitely a tourist city. But what do we know about the people who visit here? This was the subject of a study conducted by the Santa Cruz County Conference and Visitors Council with the goal of gaining insights into how to better market to tourists and increase visits to the area, especially in the off season.

Some schools, like the University of Bologna or Oxford, have traditions stretching back centuries. Their ancient buildings are the centerpiece of their cities, and those cities are recognized as international treasures. But as the Roman poet Juvenal pointed out, “Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.” That is why a rustic setting is so ideal for an institution of higher learning. It is also probably why Forbes magazine listed UCSC as one of the most beautiful campuses in the world.

Those that listened closely Thursday evening around 6:45pm might have heard a dull thud that echoed around the county. That was the sound of several dozen jaws hitting the ground inside the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors Chambers when the California Coastal Commission voted unanimously against the city’s Arana Gulch Master Plan and its controversial paved bicycle path, a decade and a half in the planning.

Burt Levitsky left New York more than 30 years ago, but the streets of Manhattan still pulse to life in his realist oil paintings. Trained as an illustrator and Madison Avenue ad designer, Levitsky recalls working on ad layouts by day and coming home to paint all night. Studying with Frank Reilly and Max Ginsburg, Levitsky mastered contemporary realist imagery that was always haunted by the moods and hustle of urban life. There’s a lot of George Tooker’s ennui and Thomas Hart Benton’s vitality in his ambitious portrayals of people embedded in their metropolitan landscapes.

Donald Carl Peter got off easy. The former manager of a sober-living house in Santa Cruz already had 26 convictions against him dating back all the way to 1980.

The unemployment figures for January are out, and they are startling. About 15 percent of the population of Santa Cruz—almost one in every six people—is jobless. By way of comparison, the jobless rate in all of California is 13.2 percent; nationwide, it is 10.6 percent. According to the Employment Development Department, the figure is significantly higher than the past record, 14.6, back in 1993.

Customers coming into Santa Cruz Stoves & Fireplaces sounded alarm bells. “There’s a kid outside the store with cans of paint,” they fretted to employees. “He looks like he’s going to spray the walls!” Spray the walls is exactly what Elijah Pfotenhauer was intending to do. It was late 2006, and Pfotenhauer had already established himself as a talented Santa Cruz muralist with two other projects, one depicting dancers on the former Motion Pacific building on Front Street and another at the former Santa Cruz Teen Center on Laurel. With slide show.

Tuesday evening, the Santa Cruz City Council voted to limit the number of medical marijuana dispensaries in the city to two, effectively putting a moratorium on any new pot clubs.

Police throughout Santa Cruz County are on the lookout for a group of vandals that has been smashing home windows with rocks.

Matthew Moore didn’t carry a sign at last week’s student protest at UCSC. With a walking stick in one hand and his dog’s leash in the other, he stood in a grassy field near the university entrance at High and Bay streets and watched while hundreds of his fellow students demanded the university lower its fees and restaff its departments.

Suppose someone came to your home, demanded you give up your dining room for an important project, and said your family would still be able to live in the home but would have to accept the intrusion and the loss and just, well, get on with your life? Suppose when you asked why, the answer was to fight global warming?

Berkeley’s paratheatrical Real Astrologer-mystic, Antero Alli, originally discovered Timothy Leary’s eight-circuit brain model of intelligence increase while reading Robert Anton Wilson’s book Cosmic Trigger. Those three characters—Leary, Wilson and Alli—function as a trilateral commission providing a toolbox of modalities that, when applied, might actually help people increase their intellects in a number of ways. The re-definition of intelligence comes in a holy trinity of three words: absorb, integrate and transmit. That is, the ideas in this book must be absorbed, integrated and transmitted—not just absorbed—for the model to have any usefulness.

Most people don’t know it yet, but San Jose is widely acclaimed as a world leader in podcar development, with Mountain View coming in at a close second. That’s why the city has been chosen to host “Podcar City: San Jose, Innovating Sustainable Communities,” an international summit on electric podcars, organized by the International Institute of Sustainable Transportation. The event will take place at City Hall, October 27-29.

Who can forget Eric Clapton’s stellar performance on MTV’s “Unplugged” series, or the doleful sounds of Kurt Cobain with only an acoustic guitar? Anger transformed into angst. As the late, great Elliot Smith once said, “If you play acoustic guitar you’re the depressed, sensitive guy.” And that could be just what the Abbey Coffee lounge on Mission needs.

Yesterday Santa Cruz.com reported that school administrators were anxiously awaiting “The List” of “persistently low-achieving schools” across the state. The list is out, pending final approval by the California Department of Education, and the Bay Area did not do so well. About 20 schools, three of them in Santa Cruz County, found themselves on the List.

A 7-year-old boy was shot and a 20-year-old man was stabbed in the Cabrillo Lanes bowling alley in Watsonville on Friday. Both victims are listed in stable condition. Police arrested Jordan James Micias, 20, and Abraham Santoyo, 18, for the attack, charging them with gang-motivated attempted murder.

Dogs may be returning to downtown Santa Cruz as the board of the Downtown Association prepares to vote on whether to ask the city to repeal its longtime ban on dogs along Pacific Avenue. Until now dog owners have been forced to take their pets to more canine-friendly spots on the Westside and the Harbor.

It has all the tension of Oscar night, except there is no little gold statue in the end. In fact, the results are worse than winning a Razzie. School administrators and teachers across California are waiting breathlessly today to see if they made “The List,” and are cited as the “187 worst performing schools in the state.” Superintendents and principals have already been informed, but for everyone else, the news will come at 10am this morning.

The creative genius behind Capitola-based Just Cake and the winningest baker ever to rock a cake on Oprah shares some facts about her life—including one very strange irony.

There’s good news for businesses in downtown Santa Cruz. After two and a half years of recession— National Bureau of Economic Research claims that the downward trended started in December 2007—things are finally looking up. Downtown has suffered significantly in that time not only from the recession but also because of a negative image as a center for gang members and the homeless.

Ramona Cash is a cute, punky looking brunette you’d expect to see modeling skirts and bikinis in a skateboard fashion catalog. Over coffee in downtown Santa Cruz, she parts a section of her professionally highlighted hair to reveal an inch-wide heart-shaped bald spot from where her friends precisely ripped the hair from her scalp.

As a small procession made up mostly of university students made its way down Pacific Avenue yesterday, some onlookers were unimpressed.
“Seems pretty meager for a protest,” one man said, watching as a banner passed that read “We are the Budget Cuts.” What he, and perhaps many Santa Cruz residents, didn’t know is that the meager procession had broken off from a group of at least 400 students, faculty and workers who had been picketing since daybreak at the main entrance to UCSC. In a rare coalescence of solidarity between the town and the gowns, the university protest was, in the form of this small group, merging with a community demonstration to save public education.

Fed up with rising fee costs and slashed department budgets, UCSC students staged a massive protest on campus Thursday as students across the nation demonstrated against what many see as higher education becoming unaffordable.  With slide show.

A lot has changed since Kate Fisher locked eyes with Henry Schwab at a Phish concert in 1997. She was a Deadhead peddling Indian textiles; he was a Greenpeace activist touring with Phish’s nonprofit arm the Waterwheel Foundation. And yeah, yeah—they grew up, got married and had kids, but Fisher’s clothing line Synergy grew up with them, culminating with her new downtown Santa Cruz storefront, Synergy Clothing, which opened in January.

The SCPD has issued a traffic advisory warning drivers that they could face delays getting around town today.

At a meeting yesterday, the Santa Cruz City Schools Board of Trustees agreed to lay off or reduce the hours of as many as 130 full-time and temporary teachers to make up for its $5.2 million deficit. The decision came after the teachers unions’ refused to offer any concessions on pay and furloughs. Teachers affected include 57 full-time and 23 part-time K-12 educators and 50 adult education teachers. The Board also voted to cut the hours on every adult education program in the county in a move described by Board President Rachel Dewey Thorsett as “the worst case scenario.”

The SCPD has signed up with Nixle, a free and secure alert notification system, which will allow officers to send text messages to registered users.

Sometimes it seems like stabbings are a daily occurrence in Santa Cruz. Even the police are picking up on it now. SCPD Spokesperson Zach Friend now says that, “As we saw with the tragic death of Tyler Tonario, when you engage in a verbal altercation that you maybe think is just a verbal altercation, or could be just a simple fist fight, it’s now turning into tragic stabbings more and more.” Other police officers are pointing out that knives have become the weapon of choice among teens, replacing good old-fashioned fist-fights.

Within the next two decades, books as we know them will likely become curiosities, artifacts of an old way of life. Paper books, which set forth ideas in a linear manner, have already given way to the omni-directional, multi-media internet as a means to reach and teach the rewired human brain in the digital age: goodbye, printed newspapers and textbooks; hello, “Please enter your library card number to download Fahrenheit 451.

When Lara Marotta decided to open Twist last summer, “with no money and Facebook,” it was all about the clothes. In the Pacific Avenue storefront where she used to run Galla Cabana before selling it several years ago, her concept for a high-end consignment store stocked with designer labels began to take shape. Sophisticated Ralph Lauren dresses and Gucci jackets would hang next to playful Free People sweaters and shimmering Bebe halter tops, carefully chosen fashion pieces at a fraction of the original price. With slide show.

After the last box is packed and the moving truck pulls away,
I have to face it. I have to say the word, “Goodbye.”
Goodbye to all the hundreds, maybe thousands of men I wrote with at Soledad prison, at Salinas Valley Prison, who wrote out their pain.

With bicycle commuters featured in both Sierra Magazine and the New York Times, it seems that we have finally come to a consensus that more bicycling is good for human health, for reducing traffic congestion and for the environment. The question is, how to encourage people to use bikes more, especially for the short trips that comprise so much of our transportation? (More than a third of all car trips are under three miles.)

On a sunlit winter’s day following a long and rainy week, Jean Brocklebank and Michael Lewis trudge through the soggy soil and tall grasses of Arana Gulch in Santa Cruz, talking about their group’s upcoming case before the California Coastal Commission on March 11. Suddenly Brocklebank stops and lays down the situation as she, and doubtless other members of the Friends of Arana Gulch, sees it. “This not a case of environmentalists versus environmentalists,” she says. With slide show.

It’s no secret that Santa Cruz’s public library system is facing a deficit. Just about every public service in the county is. The real problem is that they don’t know what to do about it anymore.

The school’s board met last night to discuss strategies to deal with $3.2 million in state funding cuts, with disabled and disadvantaged students among the first to suffer. Programs at the new Stroke and Disability Center and the Extended Opportunity Programs and Services assisting students facing language, social, or economic challenges will be reduced considerably. According to state law, faculty and staff to be laid off because of the budget cuts must be notified by March 15.

Could racial tensions be seething beneath the surface of UCSC. Some school officials are worried that they are after an image of a noose was found scrawled on a bathroom door in the Earth and Marine Sciences Building. The image was accompanied by the words “lynch” and “San Diego,” the latter a reference to racial tensions at UCSD two weeks ago.

Britton, a long-time critic of county politics and planning, says he decided to throw his hat in the ring to prevent Coonerty from running unopposed.

Darling House owner’s brother returns to California from overseas to tackle the two-thirds majority problem and his old opponent, Jerry Brown. With video.

After 35 years serving local pets, the Adobe Animal Hospital in Santa Cruz will shut down for good today. A staff member explained that business has been suffering because of the recession;  fewer pet owners can afford to bring their animals to the vet.
The Adobe Animal Hospital was especially popular because it offered low-cost veterinary services to its clients. These included not only cats and dogs. The clinic once did a brisk business treating horses, but fewer people are keeping horses these days because of the steep costs involved.

Gamers from around the world are being lured to UCSC, not to play but to learn.

In the lawn in front of the mother-in-law unit where I live, the tumultuous winter rains of January had filled up a depression where a tree stump had been removed. I’d really enjoyed the way things sprang to life all around after the rains, the way overnight a long dormant bush had suddenly come alive with a hundred thin woody fingers reaching out over my sidewalk, or the abrupt appearance of sturdy mushrooms caps popping up through the wood chips. I’d particularly enjoyed lying in bed listening to the happy guttural expositions of toads, imagining them gleefully loping beneath my windows in the dark.

The 8.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Chile early Saturday prompted tsunami warnings along the entire Pacific coast of the United States. In Santa Cruz, beaches were closed as a precaution. That didn’t stop hundreds of onlookers from crowding the Municipal Wharf and West Cliff Drive in an attempt to see the oncoming waves, which began to hit shore around 1:45pm.

Beaches throughout the county were closed Saturday following an 8.8 magnitude quake in Chile.

In June 2006, 25-year-old Dominic Gill set out from northern Alaska on a tandem bike named Achilles and headed south. Way south. His goal: to reach the southern tip of South America in 18 months, picking up random strangers along the way. Armed with bear spray, a video camera and a questionable sense of sanity, Gill rolled out of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and into the bleak tundra with a small British flag fluttering encouragingly behind him. He had just one rule: “I never asked anyone to get off!”

On a rainy January morning more than 13 months ago, teams of local government workers and volunteers tromped through the soggy corners of the county and counted homeless people as part of the 2009 Santa Cruz County Homeless Census and Survey.
On a similarly rainy afternoon just last week, the fruits of that effort were finally presented to the Santa Cruz City Council.  The reason for the delay? “Time and availability.”

Sure, the state’s budget is a mess, unemployment is skyrocketing, and Anthem Blue Shield is making its customers sick over its proposed price hike. That’s no excuse for dropping the f-bomb. Deficits be gosh-darned!

The controversial Arana Gulch project passed its penultimate major hurdle yesterday when it received a nod of approval in a report by the Coastal Commission.

Santa Cruz City Councilmember Tony Madrigal is concerned about how the current recession will have a lasting impact on teenagers. In these very formative years of their lives, many are forced to do without such basic staples as food, shelter, iPods, Wii’s, unlimited texting and clothing. That is why he has teamed up with Classic Cleaners to launch a community effort to help needy teens get to their proms in the style that they are accustomed to. They are launching the Prom Dress Drive.

The 45 UCSC students who occupied Kerr Hall in response to a 30 percent tuition hike have been summoned to appear before a council.

What do you do for a living? 
What don’t I do? I work for Whole Foods Market Santa Cruz, have been a bartender at El Palomar Restaurant for the past 17 years, tend bar at Cypress Lounge and surf big waves for fun.

The Olympic sport of curling involves two teams of players carefully sliding large stones down an icy lane while “sweepers” use brooms to polish the rocks’ gradual paths toward a target.
There will be no curling shown at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

Author Gabriel Thompson may have spent two months cutting lettuce (no one says “picking lettuce,” as he discovered) in the blisteringly hot fields of Yuma, Ariz., for his new book, but he had his first glimpses of the backbreaking work of immigrant laborers just outside Watsonville. “I grew up surfing Manresa and Sunset Beach,” says the Cupertino-raised Thompson, a contributor to the New York Times and the Nation. “I’d often drive through the strawberry fields just off of Highway 1, and I would just pull over and watch people work. I would be very curious about what it was like to do the work and who the people were. It seemed like a completely foreign place.”

Like pull-tabs and 8-tracks, free parking will soon be a thing of the past in downtown Santa Cruz.

Researchers studying the Great Pacific Garbage Patch have reached a disturbing conclusion. It’s a lot bigger than they originally anticipated. Giora Proskurowski of the Sea Education Association says that the reason scientists have miscalculated is the wind. It tends to push the plastic down from the water’s surface to the upper ocean. After studying the phenomenon he realized that there’s about as much plastic in the next 9 meters of ocean as there is in the top 1 meter that has been studied.

“Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.” It’s a quote attributed to Tenzin Gyatso, known around the world as the 14th Dalai Lama. It’s also just 58 characters long, perfectly tweet-sized, as are so many others of the Dalai Lama’s insights. More quotes like this could soon become available from the source himself—on Twitter. It’s not just for devotees either. As the Dalai Lama said: “If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it” (88 characters).

UCSC’s Grateful Dead Archive hasn’t even opened for business yet and it’s already getting plenty of attention. It will be the focus of a feature article in the March edition of The Atlantic. The article spotlights the academic and scholarly impact that the archive will have on a wide range of disciplines, some of them unexpected. Sure, music historians and ethnomusicologists will be interested, and the Dead were a historical phenomenon—the voice of a generation.

The Women Ventures Project in Santa Cruz County is using federal stimulus funding to train women for careers in construction.

Santa Cruz joined San Jose, San Francisco, and other cities in the Bay Area yesterday when the council endorsed a ban on single-use plastic bags and a fee on paper bags. Plastic bags, which do not decompose, are a major source of litter, filling coastal areas and rivers before they make their way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In the Bay Area alone, people use an estimated 3.8 billion bags every year. On average, they end up in the trash just 12 minutes after people get them.

In a city where constant change is the only guarantee, Santa Cruzans have been able to count on one thing for the last 28 years: that City Manager Dick Wilson would show up to work every day, a steady hand at the tiller keeping the city on course. During his tenure, the tall, soft-spoken Wilson answered to more than a dozen city councils, steering city staff through an earthquake, an expanding university and more budget crises than just the most recent one. When Wilson retires in July, he’ll be leaving the Santa Cruz City Council with what Mayor Mike Rotkin calls “the most important decision the council will make in its tenure.

Nazi propaganda films were made to convince the world that Germany was a peace-loving nation that was forced to attack Poland. With the creation of the web and the access to 24-hour “news,” it is so much easier to spread lies and half-truths.

“Orange is the happiest color,” Frank Sinatra famously said. He obviously didn’t see Soquel Creek last week, when it started to emit a warm orange glow. State Fish and Game officials are still trying to discover the source of discolored water.

Cyclists talking or texting on their cell phones could soon face the same penalties as drivers if State Representative Joe Simitian has his way. The author of California’s hands-free law believes that cyclists “should have the same rights, laws and responsibilities” as drivers when it comes to following the rules of the road.

A 15-year-old boy was arrested in a stabbing that took place on Encinal Street yesterday. Police are still investigating what happened, though they say that the boy and his victim, a 31-year-old man, were involved in a physical argument before the boy stabbed him.

After Sen. Maldonado failed to be confirmed as lieutenant governor two weeks ago, Laird’s plans to run for his seat are up in the air.

Money is running out on the Teen Center, and unless it can raise $75,000, it may have to close its doors for good.

Foreign language students at UCSC and the faculty who teach them are up in arms over a decision by the school to cut back on foreign language instruction.

An Eastside mockingbird, sailing lessons at the harbor and other scenes from a past life in Santa Cruz as recalled by former Metro Santa Cruz editor Tai Moses in her blog,

Yesterday news organizations reported that the recent health report for California counties noted that the prevalence of liquor stores per 10,000 people in Santa Cruz County is twice as high as in any of the neighboring counties.

The proposed dinner train between Santa Cruz and Davenport could be in trouble. The original plan was to use state funding to purchase the train tracks and add hiking and bicycle paths along the tracks. Any planned passenger service would be postponed until some future date.

Love it (on a still Saturday morning) or hate it (while racing up Highway 17 late for work), fog is a crucial part of life in Central California. Now a new study on coastal fog by researchers at the University of California-Berkeley has shown a significant decrease in the iconic Northern California weather phenomenon. That’s potentially very bad news for our friends the redwoods, which get an estimated 30-40 percent of their moisture from fog.

When you think about the Santa Cruz music scene, the first thing that should come to mind is probably the Grateful Dead. After all, UCSC is home to the most important Dead archive in the world. But a Canadian filmmaker found another musical phenomenon that makes Santa Cruz tower above the rest: the ukulele. Perhaps it indicates close ties with Hawaii. After all, another SC icon, surfing, is also associated with that state and Santa Cruz.

Santa Cruz County ranked 8th in a survey of the healthiest places to live in California.

What do you do for a living? 
I’m a writer/artist/social media enthusiast with an interest in a lot of things. I write three blogs and am anticipating the position of Director of Miscellany for a new start-up currently being funded.

In January, as part of an effort to tackle the budget deficit, Gov. Schwarzenegger proposed eliminating California’s 6 percent gasoline sales tax and replacing it with a 10.8 cents per gallon excise tax. While that might seem like good news for consumers, it comes at a high price.

The New York Times Magazine traced the origins of the words “cellar door,” which, it turns out, is considered an exceedingly beautiful pair of words. Local poet Stephen Kessler, however, isn’t convinced.

The SCPD is reporting that the number of calls it received in 2009 was the most ever for a single year—85,774, or 1.5 calls for every resident.

Improving existing infrastructures is listed as top priority by everyone in government, from the president to the governor to the mayor.

It’s pretty much a no-brainer. Tough and yappy as they may be, chihuahuas have very little chance against larger predators like mountain lions.

Peter Meehan remembers when the only two companies making organic chocolate were Newman’s Own Organics, the company he co-founded in Aptos with his business partner Nell Newman, and the Switzerland-based Rapunzel. In what some might consider an unfortunate if principled decision, Rapunzel was sweetening its chocolate with molasses rather than refined sugar. “It was a very challenging piece of chocolate to eat,” Meehan recalls.

It may be the dead of winter, but summer is already on the minds of Watsonville city employees—specifically the June budget and the potential $5 million hole in it. At the Feb. 9 city council meeting, financial director Marc Pimentel blamed declining property taxes and the state and national budget crisis, but he also pointed out that police and fire overtime were a major stress on the city coffers.

How bad does a pesticide have to be before the California Department of Pesticide Regulation locks it up and throws away the key? We’ll soon find out. Last week a scientific review committee released a report on the fumigant methyl iodide, created by chemical company Arysta as an alternative to methyl bromide in strawberry fields.

Santa Cruz is a pretty happy place. In fact, it’s happier than most major cities and towns in the U.S., ranking 14th overall. That was the finding of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which was released yesterday.

It turns out that Obama and Bush are cousins—umpteenth removed, but cousins nonetheless. And their extended family includes everyone from Bill Clinton to the Roosevelts to Lincoln to Jefferson to Washington, etc.

A pipe bomb found on the beach yesterday was taken to Central Fire Station No. 1, where it was finally detonated. It took two hours for the local bomb squad to complete the task.

Back in 2002, Watsonville’s city council voted against the fluoridation of its local tap water.

What do you do when you win a diamond ring? Propose with it, of course. That’s what Karl Tunis did when he and his fiancée Erica Lund won a 1.02-carat Lazare diamond ring valued at $12,000.

Santa Cruz-based Big Buddha, Inc., the maker of Buddha Bags, was sold to Steve Madden Ltd., it was announced last Friday. The eco-friendly bag company, founded by Jeremy Bassan, had a reported $13 million in sales last year. It was sold for $11 million. Read more at the

Humans having made such a mess of things, it’s natural to suspect animals know something we don’t about almost everything. So in honor of the cosmic alignment that has the Year of the Tiger beginning on Valentine’s Day, we turned to the animal kingdom to see what wisdom we might glean from the swimming- flapping-prowling set on the subject of love.

South African Chris Bertish won first place in the Mavericks Surf Contest after conquering huge 40-foot waves that many surfers said were the biggest ever for the contest. With slideshow.

What do you do for a living?
I am the program director of the Beach Flats Community Center, where I
have the distinct honor of working to improve the living and social conditions of families living in the Beach Flats neighborhood.

Car lovers, hang on to your driving caps: this Labor Day weekend, Surf City will play host to the first Santa Cruz Concours d’Elegance at Chaminade, drawing gorgeous luxury automobiles and muscle cars from all over the Bay Area like a giant magnet of cool and giving Pebble Beach one less thing to lord over everyone else.

The wait is over. The California Energy Commission announced Thursday that a $16.5 million grant would be awarded to the 14-county alternative energy financing program CaliforniaFIRST.

If the new plan succeeds in expediting stalled state funding to buy the Union Pacific rail line from Davenport to Pajaro, the recreational use of the line could be operational in two years.

Santa Cruz County has been unable to raise enough money for the 211 service, which connects callers to health and human service assistance.

Fed up with panhandlers and loiterers, downtown merchants are suggesting their own kind of vigilante justice.

Paul Husted doesn’t go by his old name anymore. He’s had it legally changed to Charles Lindbergh, Jr. The homeless former insurance salesman, who now lives with his wife Adua in an Ocean Street motel room, claims that he is the long lost son of aviator Charles Lindbergh.

This year, Valentine’s Day happens to fall on the same day as the Chinese Lunar New Year, so while Westerners are holed up in dim restaurants or sobbing softly into their pillows at home alone, the Chinese will be out blowing shit up and ringing in the Year of the Tiger. Naturally, we had to wonder what year 4707—according to the Chinese calendar—has in store for love.