LosGatosObserver.com

Some snippets of conversation from the recent Penny University meeting at the Calvary Episcopal Church.

After disappointment one year ago, Alejo boosters finally got their day.

Two years ago Planet Cruz launched into orbit. Today it’s a standing-room-only party with fans at the ends of the earth. Comedian Richard Stockton explains how his spaceship landed here and why it’s parked—for now.  With slide show.

The exciting finale of our mini-documentary on the Aztecas. (Video after the jump.)

The continuation of our mini-documentary on the Aztecas. (Video after the jump.)

Gina Castaneda stands along the sidelines inside the cavernous Soccer Central Indoor Sports arena in Watsonville, shouting to the teenage boys in the purple uniforms tumbling back and forth on the field. “Buena, buena, Jesus!” she yells. “Baja las manos!” With slide show and video.

Looking back, James “Pops” Lee’s loved ones say they now read a lot more into things that, at the time they were happening, seemed like nothing special. Lee’s son Bob dwells on the first time he met Fenita Caldwell, a medical supplies saleswoman in her early 40s who lived down the street from his father on Dolphin Drive in Aptos. “She seemed like a sweet lady, professional, highly educated,” he says. “She said, ‘Oh, I love old people.’ I look back on that.”

As we careen toward a swampy future without ice caps or polar bears, some scientists have put their stake in carbon sequestration—essentially storing atmospheric carbon someplace where it cannot contribute to the greenhouse gas effect or to climate change.

Come celebrate Climate Action Day and help spread environmental awareness with these activities.

DR. STEPHEN SCHNEIDER is a climatologist, a senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University and a 1992 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” recipient. Writer Jessica Lussenhop caught up with him to discuss the 350 concept—which refers to reducing our current carbon dioxide load to the sustainable figure of 350 parts per million—and more.

Some 600 people, many with gray ponytails, fill the auditorium at the Sonoma Country Day School. Their earnest metal water bottles clank as they settle into their seats. A short film plays, featuring ugly potato puppets portraying John and Yoko in bed. Instead of protesting the Vietnam War, the two are protesting climate change.

The Santa Cruz County Treasurer helps demystify a bandied-about phrase: the business net receipts tax.

Body-heart sensing camera has already helped firefighters make rescues

San Jose-based company moves quickly after Fairfield Inn approval in Santa Cruz.

But not before they trashed the only student-owned building on campus, say graduate students.

Two passers-by become heroes before anyone had even called 911

Philip Horne, owner of E-Smokey Treats, pulls what looks like a ballpoint pen out of a jar on his coffee table and takes off the cap, revealing a red LED light where the pen point should be. He puts the other end up to his mouth and takes a drag.

Hundreds of students and faculty members joined the staff of UCSC on a one-day strike to protest budget cuts, furloughs, and impending tuition hikes.

Santa Cruz is feeling the recession. Numbers released yesterday by the by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the county’s per capita GDP was $32,887, down from $33,674 in 2006.

Because of budget cuts, Coral Street shelter meals now cost 50 cents.

SLIDESHOW: Budget cuts, layoffs and increased fees inspire hundreds to gather at campus entrance.

Michael Hart is a 30-year-old U.S. Coast Guard veteran with eight-and-a-half-years of active duty under his belt, during which he served on a 210-foot security cutter based in Miami Beach doing search-and-rescues and drug interception in the Caribbean. Once a month, he returns to the naval base in Alameda to run drills with the reserves. But come today, the first day of class at UCSC, he’s just another sophomore.

After a drama-filled feud with its fired promoter, the Watsonville Strawberry Festival turns a profit.

“Best Dressed Goat” contest brings the 2009 Santa Cruz County Fair to a close.

Watsonville wetlands come under the protective jurisdiction of the Land Trust of Santa Cruz

Logistics, not politics, determine that participants will not be allowed to light up

For an increasing number of students, yoga wins out over other more convention sports

An inside look at the center, filmed just prior to the final closure on September 15.

As Coastal Cleanup Day gears up for its 25th anniversary of beachcombing for cigarette butts and bottles, Save Our Shores marine debris program coordinator Emily Glanville says there’s good news and there’s bad news. “Our beaches are looking pretty good these days,” she says. “We’re seeing less trash being left on the beach. Our data from the summer of 2008 showed quite a bit more.”

Everyone always talks about wildfire investigations, but nobody does anything about it.

The newest survey from the Public Policy Institute of California shows a desire for change, but not a clear path to it.

After ten years, Santa Cruz AIDS Project is forced to shutter its Front Street drop-in center.

You’d think the easiest way to find out about the effectiveness of “coworking”—the phenomenon whereby work-at-homers, freelancers and other indie business strangers elect to set up shop in a building and find out what happens—is to ask the coworkers (not to be confused with the tradition-bound drones known as “co-workers”) themselves. Trouble is, they’re all too busy working.

President of the Sunrise Rotary Club hopes to raise awareness by raising a house.

Watsonville law enforcement surprised but delighted by positive news.

Inside the central kitchen at Pajaro Valley Unified School District in Watsonville, food service workers arrive at 6am to prepare the daily lunch shipment. Donning aprons and hair nets, the lunch ladies stand in assembly-line fashion as they remove individually-wrapped frozen chicken patties from cardboard boxes, sandwich them between two buns and place them along a conveyer belt where they are shrink-wrapped for delivery to the district’s schools.

One son’s ailing father reminds him to take a different look at the health care debate.

Despite attempts to settle out of court, the dispute between surf club founders and a former member’s grandson appears to be heading for the courtroom.

Researchers at the UCSC Wiki Lab have come up with a new extension that will help users navigate between reliable and less reliable information found at the website.

Firefighters from Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties were able to contain two small fires that erupted near the Mount Madonna School in Summit.

Since April, the emergency room has not had to close at all, thanks to a series of new measures initiated by the hospital.

Appointment will fill Monterey County Supervisor Dave Potter’s seat on the 12 person commission.

The sound of fire engines, walkie-talkies and helicopters may be endemic to the Lockheed fire, but so is the sound of an imaginary cash register ringing every time another engine roars into town. Though Cal Fire did not lose personnel in the latest state cuts, $27 million was lopped off its 2009-10 budget, and more than likely each of the local fire agencies that pitched in to battle the flames had its own troubles at home at budget time.

When District 27 Assemblymember Bill Monning hosted a town hall meeting about two weeks ago with the Campaign for Sensible Transportation, the table seemed set for a conversation on planes, trains and automobiles and the budget cuts to public transportation. But when County Treasurer Fred Keeley showed up, it became clear that the dialog on our abysmal budget deal has already left the station. After a budget session that gutted not just public transportation but every service imaginable, the two seemed to be trying to channel frustration into a call for major tax reform.

This weekend the Cabrillo Music Art & Wine Festival turns 18 years old—legal and ready to party with 14,000 of her best friends (by last year’s count).

Number crunchers calculate what it will take from local government to re-patch the state budget.

Scientists are setting sail for garbage island.

Police round up suspects after months-long investigation of another homeless man’s stabbing.

It started out, simply enough, as a celebration of the crop that put Watsonville back on the map. The Monterey Bay Strawberry Festival had enjoyed 14 summers of peace and prosperity in various locations in and around town, where many of the men and women who pick the county’s top crop live and work, and where nationally renowned apple orchards had once reigned supreme.

In the wake of the budget crisis, both the Commission on the 21st Century Economy and California Forward are trying to channel the same passion with which Californians cried “don’t cut us” into “change us.”

Not-so-stealthy cat burglars foiled after a rooftop heist at Zelda’s in Captiola.

Former Red Cross volunteered caught with thousands of pornographic images of children.

Local governments join 200 cities around the state to put the brakes on forced lending.

I’ll level with you. I walked into the Single Professional Society’s first ever Santa Cruz Cougar Night at the Scotts Valley Hilton last week thinking it would be a convenient anecdotal doorway to my personal opinions on the term “cougar.” Those are, in a nutshell, that the term has been fallaciously embraced by single women over 40 as some kind of womanpower thingy. Allow me to remind everyone: the term is not flattering.

Underneath the front porch of a house in Santa Cruz—the kind of comfy family home that has very thick wall-to-wall carpeting—there is a secret room accessible by a crude path of boards laid over the steep dirt incline under the deck. “They’re out of the house, in here,” says Brad Loofbourrow as his 13-year-old son Tristan opens the door to the small, hot room. This is where Tristan keeps Ellen, Rachel, Shelby, Bruce, Sahra and H.P. “He names them all,” says Brad. “They’re his friends.”

Author Mary Roach studies the people who study the nasty.

Doing the nasty has never been so clean – Pure Pleasure in downtown Santa Cruz has just earned its stripes from the Department of Public Works as the only Green Certified sex toy shop in the entire Monterey Bay area.

In Watsonville, within certain circles, it is a well known fact that if your wife or parents kick you out, or if you’re down on your luck, or if you just don’t want to be found, you can go down to the river levee. There, hidden along the banks of the Pajaro River in the brush and high grass, out of sight from the apartment complex windows and the prefab homes with their Dish Network satellites, you’ll find the casitas–little houses–built from tarps, bungee cords, tree limbs and blankets, constructed and tended to by a chronically homeless population of monolingual Spanish speakers. If you have nowhere to go, on the levee it’s possible to get a bite, maybe a beer and, if you get there early enough, even a bed. Most nights, that is, except for the night of March 25.

Yeah, you heard me.

Santa Cruz County Bank announced today that it will be joining big boys Bank of American and Bank of the West in accepting state issued IOUs, plus do customers one better.

Last Thursday, as the County Board of Supervisors picked over the last remaining scraps of unfinished business in its 2009-10 budget, the board was asked to accept a 6 percent reduction in LAFCO’s budget. County Administrative Officer Susan Mauriello read off the amount—$5,913—to a few sad guffaws. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” someone quipped. “Every little penny counts,” scolded Mauriello.

“I can tell just by looking at this that this is cocaine,” says senior criminalist Meghan Kinney. She’s pointing to a computer readout of numbered lines, each corresponding to different chemicals found in a sample that’s just gone through the gas chromatography-mass spectrometer at the Freedom Crime Laboratory in Watsonville.

At the final city council meeting on Watsonville’s budget Tuesday night, city staff managed to pull off a small miracle, to the surprise and delight of many of the assembled nonprofits.

“Guys,” calls out Kelvin Fountano, president of the World Body & Fitness Association. “Make sure when you go onstage your wear your number on your left side.” Left side, on the left. The words ripple through the dimly lit Rio Theatre auditorium as family members and trainers fuss over bodybuilders of all sizes at Saturday’s Santa Cruz Bodybuilding and Figure Championships in Seabright. “This isn’t one of our biggest events,” says Fountano. “But it’s one of our funnest.

Under the punishing rays of the late afternoon sun yesterday, Supervisor Neal Coonerty stood outside the Chevron gas station at Ocean and Soquel in a full suit and blew off steam from another long day of budget decisions by waving a small sign to passing cars that read “Families First.”

Animal rescuers are scrambling to rehabilitate starving toddler sea lions.

As Watsonville prepares for not one but two strawberry festivals after a bizarre falling out between city officials and Modesto-based festival promoter Leslie Peterson, residents, nonprofits and local businesses are left puzzling out the aftermath.

Virgil E. Robinson, a sporty, boyish-looking 42-year-old in a matching “Possibility Advocate” cap and long sleeve T-shirt, sits across from Hannah*, a recent divorcee who has been slowly losing control of her mortgage.

In honor of Doggie Drive-In’s film selection of the month, Beverly Hills Chihuahua, the Crepe Place was offering $3 well margaritas to the small gathering of Woofers & Walkers members assembled on the patio.

How do local surfers feel about Surfer Magazine naming Santa Cruz the number one surf spot in the country?

Last Friday at the open house for Santa Cruz AIDS Project’s brand new offices, staff and guests were all smiles, congratulations and thank-you’s over the renovation of 313 Front Street. But the truth behind the move was never far from the surface.

It’s been a little over a week since Watsonville’s city council approved a series of tentative agreements that will whack the city employees’ work week down to four nine-hour days, creating an overall 10 percent reduction in cost to the general fund and a service blackout one day per week, likely Fridays.

All parents know that their little bundles of joy deposit big bundles of . . . undesirable material in their adorable little pants multiple times a day. Santa Cruz parent Karen Nelsen and her friends knew that firsthand.

Yesterday’s Board of Supervisors meeting had all the charm of divorce court when it arrived at its final piece of business for the day–determining whether or not to deep-six the Building, Accessibility and Fire Code Appeals Board.

While some 200 outraged protesters crowded around the Clock Tower in downtown Santa Cruz in reaction to Tuesday’s California Supreme Court ruling upholding the Prop. 8 constitutional ban on same-sex marriages, roughly 20 miles away in the Watsonville City Plaza, a small group of 20 people stood along Main Street yelling, “Honk!” at passing motorists and waving signs.

Thirty-four teams have already been fired. Now it’s time to find out who gets hired this Friday on the season final-erhm, rather, at the final dinner and judging portion of the first annual UCSC Business Plan Competition.

Falling out of a tree is not as easy as it sounds. Not if all that’s keeping you from a faceful of fiddleheads some 40 feet below is a thin cable. “This one is like the bunny slope,” our canopy tour guide, Steve Richards, assures us. “Enjoy the zip.” And then he tips off the edge of the wooden platform built treehouse-style around the trunk of a living redwood tree and whizzes across a 158-foot zipline, his shadow dancing along just behind him in the sunlit brush below.

Gov. Schwarzenegger warned us heads would roll if the May 19th budget package failed, and the Healthy Families program is looking like it may be one of the first.

It is easier than ever to watch, create and share pornographic images and text, and as the first generation of web-savvy teenagers who have always had the instant gratification of DSL, who get cell phones as soon as they’re old enough to talk and who’ve never used air quotes with the word “blog,” their knowledge can easily be applied to creating their own porno paradise. Which leads to the question, can this be bad for them?

It seemed like plenty of folks at Monday night’s monthly Building, Accessibility and Fire Code Appeals Board meeting were anticipating fireworks, including a sheriff’s deputy who said, very sweetly, that he was there to “keep an eye on things.”

Teresa Rodriguez brushes an orangey-red polish onto a client’s fingernails and says, “I’ve waited years to go to cosmetology school, and then they opened one in Watsonville. It was a dream come true.

Meggan Anderson, a lithe, redheaded vegan, braved overcast skies and 60-degree breezes today outside O’Neill’s in downtown Santa Cruz, clothed only in pasties, bikini bottoms and a lot of green and gold body paint

Although NPR science reporter and UCSC alum Richard Harris is in town to discuss the dangers of climate change, there are some things ‘round these parts he doesn’t mind hot. “I must say I always drive down Mission and see if Ferrell’s donuts is still around,” he says. “The old fashioned came out at 10:30 at night and we used to get them piping hot.