LosGatosObserver.com

To thirsty patrons, a bartender is a hero with a thousand faces: analyst, confessor, entertainer, clown, crush, captive audience, authority figure, giver of all good things, withholder of same, fount of wisdom or trivia—even friend, for all we know (and hope). When we walk in the door and perch on that barstool, we see someone with godlike powers to make us happy. Someone wise. Someone who’s got it all together. With slide show of photos by Dina Scoppettone.

With the murder of 16-year-old Tyler Tenorio looming over them, the Santa Cruz Police Department stepped up its anti-gang operations to avert any trouble on Halloween

Dozens of men and women paraded through Watsonville on Sunday, calling for an end to the violence that violence that has claimed 80 lives in the town over the past 16 years.

Despite fears of violence, thousands of costumed holiday revelers packed downtown Santa Cruz on Saturday night to celebrate Halloween. Captain Steve Clark of the SCPD said that the event was generally quiet, with very few arrests, though he added that this year more people than usual people chose to attend house parties instead.  With slide show.

More cops, streetlights and security cameras are on tap in Santa Cruz following a rash of violence that saw a blatantly public shooting at Pacific and Laurel streets on Wednesday night.

On Wednesday, the Academic Senate of UCSC took a stand again the budgetary cuts imposed throughout the UC system.

With Santa Cruz residents already showing signs of stress because of increasing violence in the city, the SCPD has decided to hit the streets in force this Halloween.

Paulo Luna, a suspect in the fatal stabbing of Tyler Tenorio two weeks ago, is believed to have fled to Mexico.

Morton Marcus, whose outsize presence animated and at times dominated Santa Cruz County’s literary culture for most of the last 40 years, died peacefully at home after a long illness early in the morning of Oct. 28.  He was 73, and seemed both younger and older—younger because his attitude toward everything was one of boyish enthusiasm, and older because the amount of living he jammed into his years would have taken several lifetimes for anyone less charged with creative energy.

I never met Mardi Wormhoudt. In the late 1990s, when I was getting my start in journalism and relegated to the sandbox of features writing, I would hear her name uttered in the newsroom and wonder at the hallowed tone employed by my usually cynical hero-colleagues. In the same way children take cues from their parents, espousing essentially baseless opinions about frivolous aunts or shiftless uncles, I came to understand that Mardi Wormhoudt was one of the good politicians. I didn’t know why. I just accepted it.

The rape of an elderly woman last week and the murder of a local high school student by gang members seem to have people on edge. About 30 protesters interrupted a City Council meeting last night, waving signs and demanding that the city do something to address public safety.

Santa Cruz City Schools trustees will be voting tonight on whether to approve a new school lunch program. The proposed program will feature food prepared from scratch from locally grown produce. The decision will come earlier than planned because a transition period, during which lunches were provided by Revolution Foods of Oakland, was found to have been misbudgeted.

Deborah Berkson of Santa Cruz turned down the chance to drive her son to school in a brand new Prius. The winner of this year’s Drive for Schools fundraiser decided to take the cash prize—$25,000—instead. 

LAST Saturday, on 350 Day, the International Day of Climate Action, which forward-thinking people everywhere celebrated with carbon-neutral acts of faith in a sunshine-powered future, I was awash in a sea of smelly detritus from the past, flailing around in musty tides of old shoes, T-shirts, plastic Christmas decorations, screws, Tupperware, plastic soap caddies, collectible figurines.

Automobiles may be a convenient way of getting around, but they are one of the greatest sources of greenhouses gas emissions in the world today. That’s why a group of local climate activists decided to put the car—represented by a beat-up old Honda—on trial for all the problems it has caused.

Dozens of families have fled their homes to escape a 600-acre wildfire in Summit area of the Santa Cruz Mountains. Some 100 homes were lost in the same area in May of last year.

Robert B. Reich explains why the Dow is hitting 10,000 despite low consumer spending.

Tyler Tenorio, 16, was stabbed to death on Friday night after he and his friends got into an argument with a group of gang members gathered outside the 7-11 at Chestnut and Laurel streets.

The 14th Annual U.S. Open of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu drew hundreds of competitors to the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium this weekend for a chance to compete with the best at the sport.

The internet has become a drain on business at Lulu Carpenter’s. According to cafe owner Manthri Srinath, patrons plug their laptops into wall outlets and then spend hours sitting at the tables, but this prevents other customers from finding a seat. As one customer explained, “If you spend $10 and sit for three hours, you are preventing three customers from each spending $10 and only sitting for one hour.” To avoid this, Srinath covered the outlets on one of the walls and turned off the power on the other walls.

A half-dozen people occupied the Humanities 2 building at UCSC last night, leading to a confrontation with campus police that resulted in a pepper spraying and one arrest.

Ten questions for the Santa Cruz Derby Girl known as Brawley Parton.

It was hard not to take the earthquake personally. That October Tuesday, my newspaper, The Sun, which I had started three years earlier in a surge of journalistic urgency and entrepreneurial folly, was on deadline, preparing to go to press the following morning.

“Perseverance, dear my lord, keeps honor bright,” wrote William Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida, and it is a lesson that’s been taken to heart. Despite the perfect storm of financial difficulties faced by Shakespeare Santa Cruz and UCSC, the company’s artistic director, Marco Barricelli, and UC Santa Cruz Dean of the Arts David Yager have decided that the company will carry out its 29th season.

Fearing strong currents, mudslides, flooding, and falling branches, authorities closed 14 state parks in Central California yesterday, seven of them in Santa Cruz County. The parks are: Big Basin Redwoods State Park, Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, Lighthouse Field State Beach, Natural Bridges State Beach, New Brighton State Beach, Seacliff State Beach and Sunset State Beach. The parks are expected to reopen today, pending local conditions.

It was the worst storm in decades. In just 24 hours, Santa Cruz received 3.16 inches of rain, shattering the 1957 record of 2.49 inches, while parts of the county saw as much as 10 inches of rain.

Pondering the zombie phenomenon, author David Sirota speculates that it has something to do with our powerlessness to stop financial disaster, even after an election that some believed would fix everything.  “Here we are, with virtually nothing changed,” he writes, “watching the same zombie crises indomitably stumble forward.”

Post-quake Santa Cruz wasted no time coming up with irreverent slogans about the disaster it had endured—bumper stickers like “Shift Happens” and “It’s All Our Fault” popped up all over town in the months after Loma Prieta. In the same spirit, the town commemorates the 20th anniversary of the 7.1 monster this weekend by both thumbing our noses at the San Andreas Fault and engaging in some healthy introspection about what exactly happened at 5:04pm on Oct. 17, 1989 and how far we’ve come since.

Oct. 17 will mark 20 years since the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed about one-third of downtown Santa Cruz.

Board members and volunteers with Santa Cruz County Habitat for Humanity converged on Dawn Lane in Soquel yesterday armed with a golden shovel.

UCSC doctoral candidate Christopher Barkan explains why student protesters won’t be satisfied with mere budget reform. “What is needed is a broad social movement,” he writes, “to articulate a new collective vision for the future that will replace this era of narrow special interests and for-profit social engineering.”

A 17-year-old youth was in serious but stable condition on Friday after he was stabbed in a gang fight in downtown Santa Cruz.

Do you have any ideas about how local libraries can improve their services? Teresa Landers wants to hear about them.

A shark advisory has been issued for a five-mile stretch of Santa Cruz County beach, running from Seacliff to Manresa state beaches. The warning comes after three great whites sightings were made on three consecutive days in the area. On Thursday, a fisherman filmed a shark near the Seacliff pier in Aptos. He later told reporters that he had seen the shark the day before too. The following day, researchers saw a shark swimming off Manresa State Beach. They estimated it to be 16 feet long.

The founder of the Breakaway College Access Project is into roast beets with truffle oil. He is not into people who don’t clean up after their dogs in parks or beaches.

It was just a matter of time before Santa Cruz joined the ranks of cities across the country celebrating local culinary talent with Restaurant Week. In New York, Boston, Los Angeles and San Diego, chefs were joining together for a week each year to entice diners out of their routines and into cosmopolitan restaurants where they might discover exotic new flavors and textures. And those cities are not the cradle of sustainable produce or home to unique viticultural appellations.

With widening between the Fishhook and Morrissey complete, planners set their sights on the Morrissey-Soquel segment of Highway 1.

Two men, ages 29 and 38, were knifed in a public restroom yesterday evening in yet another stabbing incident in Santa Cruz.

District attorneys from Santa Cruz and eight other counties have launched a lawsuit against three companies claiming that their products contained hoodia supplements as a weight-loss aid.

A nominee to the post of Santa Cruz Poet Laureate ponders the necessity of the office.

“California, I’ll be knocking on the golden door,” could be the new motto of UCSC this week.

County officials in Santa Cruz are fed up with the stalemate with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over how to fix the Pajaro River levees. The Army has offered $163 solution to repair the aging levees, but county officials led by Supervisor Tony Campos say that this is not enough, and demand a more thorough overhaul of the system. Since their negotiations with the Army have gotten nowhere, they decided to raise the stakes a notch by appealing directly to the federal government.

The Janus Community Clinic, a non-profit organization based in Santa Cruz, is adopting a new approach to fighting heroin addition: a virtual reality world.

All of Central California, including the Santa Cruz coast, is under advisory for a minor tsunami, following the 8.0 earthquake in American Samoa yesterday.

Some 200-300 people gathered in San Lorenzo Park this Saturday for the annual WAMMfest.

The Aliberti Construction building on Swift Street has long been a popular target for Keith Haring wannabes devoted to spray-painting their way into the art world.

Drivers parked on Bay, Lennox, and Palm streets were in for a surprise when they returned to their cars this weekend.

San Francisco-based Bank of the West announced that it has purchased the Pacific Avenue branch of Wachovia Bank for an undisclosed price.

The remainder of the staffmembers of Women’s Crisis Support-Defensa de Mujeres have found themselves in an untenable situation.

It may be the first day of classes on the calendar, but the staff at UCSC is preparing to strike today to protest enforced furloughs and fee hikes agreed upon by the UC Board of Regents.

Once, 41st Avenue was the pride of Capitola. In the past 10 years, however, this has all changed, and taxable sales have dropped 24 percent.

This was no peaceful family outing. When police pulled over Jesse Peters, they were following him for suspicion of drunk driving, and nabbed him because the female passenger, Sarah Maria Pippo, wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. When police searched him, they found a loaded .22 in addition to meth. When they searched her, they found another large stash of meth—67 grams—hidden in her panties.

The Police Department had some dire news for members of the Santa Cruz Neighbors group. The 60 participants in a public meeting were told that Pogonip was the county’s “meth capital,” with some shocking figures to back that up.

With state funding slashed by $50 million, UCSC can’t afford to squander money, or see the groups that it funds squander it. That was the stated reason for the school to cut all funding to the Arboretum.

Usually attorneys end up arguing if and how much to punish people who violate the law. This week, Santa Cruz attorneys decided to work together instead and find a solution so that the law is upheld.

The median home price in Santa Cruz county has begun to dip, after rising steadily since February.

Watsonville students will soon have a whole new range of snacks to choose from at the end of the school day. For four days a week, teens from the Jovenes Sanos youth organization will operate stands outside the schools, where students can buy a cup of berries for just 50 cents.

This summer, when Santa Cruz planning commissioners rejected plans to build a new Fairfield Inn on the Westside, off Highway 1, they said that the design was “cheap” and “ugly,” hardly the way they wanted to greet tourists about to enter Surf City. But at least one councilmember is considering approval over planning commissioners’ objections.

UCSC’s Extension in Silicon Valley program is preparing to unveil a new facility in Santa Clara on Oct. 1.

Lola is one lucky dog. The one-year-old chihuahua was put in a box and thrown into a ravine, but managed to survive the ordeal and was reunited with her owner. Andrew Ariola Corpus, 19, the UCSC student who abused the animal, is not as lucky. He could get up to a year in jail, as well as counseling and community service.

Watsonville police are investigating the shooting death of a man in his 20s who was killed on Carey Avenue on Tuesday night.

Yesterday, Congressman Sam Farr announced that Santa Cruz County will be receiving $913,560 in federal stimulus funding to assist its Juvenile Probation Department.

Santa Cruz County’s schools showed an improvement in academic performance, based on the results of the 2008 standardized tests.

Ryan Coonerty and Jeremy Neuner, two of the principals of entrepreneur magnet NextSpace, make the case for a health care system that isn’t tied to employment. “Ensuring that entrepreneurs have health care coverage will be a critical ingredient for our economic recovery and our future,” they write.

Peter Koht, economic development coordinator of Santa Cruz, opened the Gov2.0 Expo Showcase in Washington, D.C. by describing the UserVoice website he helped create for the city.

Organizers of this year’s WAMMfest at San Lorenzo Park are once again asking the city to consider lifting its ban on smoking in public parks for the medical marijuana festival.

A 38-year-old woman walking by the corner of Lincoln and Chestnut streets was assaulted from behind late Sunday late night.

First theft, then flu: the football team at Harbor High School hasn’t had a good season this year.

Santa Cruz’s climate change coordinator Ross Clark announced that the city has succeeded in reducing its carbon footprint by 25 percent since 1996. Emissions are now lower than they were before the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. Clark attributes the success to an effective recycling program and the introduction of more energy-efficient appliances. The only failing was in transportation, where emissions have actually increased by 13 percent since 1996.

The Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County has broken ground on its new $9.3 million center in Aptos. When completed in 2010, the 10,000-square-foot center will be a hub for philanthropic activity throughout the region.

A man was stabbed in a fight that erupted on the dance floor of the Margaritaville restaurant early Sunday morning, shortly after midnight. Police are currently investigating the cause of the fight and whether it was gang-related. The victim, who suffered multiple stab wounds, was later released from Dominican Hospital.

Take the Bay Area out of California. Give it statehood and a constitution. Move there. Be happy.

Health officials in Santa Cruz County announced last night that they will be receiving the first batch of H1N1 vaccines as early as Oct. 1 and no later than mid-October.

A woman who was walking alone downtown early Wednesday was able to beat off an attacker by kicking him in the groin and biting his finger.

Phillip Berman, Chair of Biomolecular Engineering at UCSC, has been awarded a five-year, $3.5 million grant from NIDA (the National Institute on Drug Abuse) to develop an AIDS vaccine.

According to Santa Cruz City Councilman Ryan Coonerty, the intersection at River Street and Highway 1 is the city’s “No. 1 funding priority for the last couple of years.”

Capitola officials who charge the city for meal reimbursements will have to start cutting back. The city is reducing the amount it will reimburse employees for meals when traveling on business.

The directors of two local water agencies defend a desalination project in Santa Cruz County, saying it would make up for water shortages, not serve as a Trojan horse for growth. “It is not designed, or intended, to accommodate UCSC growth or higher densities than current land use zoning,” they write.

In February, amid a rash of newspapers shutting down across the nation, the media was abuzz with reports that the San Francisco Chronicle may be the next major paper to fall victim to the Internet. Now, however, both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are preparing to launch Bay Area editions, which would focus on news and events in the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland area.

Residents of the Dominican Oaks Retirement Home didn’t realize that they were living with a war hero. Violet Wierzbicki, an unassuming woman in her nineties, hardly looks the part. But she will soon be awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest decoration awarded to an individual who performs an outstanding act of service to the country’s security, prosperity and national interest.

Yesterday, Lockheed Martin recognized the valiant efforts of local volunteer firefighters to put out the Lockheed blaze by donating $10,000 to the Bonny Doon Volunteer Fire and Rescue.

Last night, the city of Santa Cruz enacted a wide-ranging public smoking ban, eliciting cheers from some and jeers from others. The ban covers all of Pacific Avenue and West Cliff Drive, as well as Beach Street between the Santa Cruz Municipal Wharf, all municipal parks, the Wharf, outside dining areas (including bars and coffee shops), and within 25 feet of any door or window used by the public. The ban was passed unanimously by City Council.

The $787 billion federal stimulus package includes $1.5 billion for transportation infrastructure projects. If everything goes according to plan, the Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit Commission will be receiving $71 million of that. The money would be spent on a series of projects intended to reduce energy consumption and improve bureaucratic efficiency. It would also generate more than 300 jobs in the coming year.

Most protests in the news this summer featured angry demonstrators spouting political rhetoric, with some even brandishing weapons. At a protest in San Lorenzo Park yesterday, demonstrators brandished freshly made pasta and plenty of leafy greens. With Congress about to reauthorize its child nutrition program, the demonstrators held an “Eat In” to improve the quality of school food.

In an effort to save the county $300,000, a county court in Santa Cruz and another in Watsonville will be closed on the third Wednesday of every month beginning Sept. 16.

It’s a simple idea but it solves a major problem. Even when bicycles have a light for night riding, motorists coming toward them from the side often have a hard time noticing them. Three Santa Cruz cyclists found the perfect solution.

Not every freelancer is bubbling over with entrepreneurial zeal. Some do it because their industry has steadily shaved off staffers and outsourced tasks in order to save money. For others, child care or similar work-life considerations are at the root of the decision to freelance—blurring the line over whether freelancing, with its sporadic pay and other associated brutalities, is a matter of choice or necessity.

The lights downtown went off for 90 minutes on Saturday night because of a suspected power surge. Some 2,000 customers of PG&E lost electricity in an area extending from Soquel Drive near Dominican Hospital to Pacific Avenue.

It’s hard to believe that Rwanda, a nation nearly destroyed by civil war 15 years ago, has it over Santa Cruz in the eco-conscious department, but there it is: it and 18 other developing nations have banned plastic bags. We haven’t.

Travis Rebbert, the new coach of the Harbor High School football team, has been cleared by police of suspicion in the theft of $25,000.

The City of Watsonville is adding 38 new speed limit signs around school zones as part of a crackdown on speeding.

Pogonip may be popular with people out for a brisk stroll, but anyone who veers off the most popular trails could run into a heroin or coke deal. Chief Ranger John Wallace says that the number of drug deals taking place there is so enormous that people are making their way down to “Heroin Hill” from Silicon Valley. Over 100 drug-related arrests have been made in the area since this past May.

In the 15 months that he’s been in office, UC President Mark Yudof has not made many allies. According to the UC Union Coalition, some 98 percent of employees who participated in a week-long straw poll voted no confidence in him.

In a garage in a middle-class neighborhood at the edge of Santa Cruz, the improbable is happening. Decades after he created some of the most enduring images in the genre, the artist whose name is virtually synonymous with Santa Cruz Skateboards is once again drawing pop-eyed monsters, warhorses and nubile mermaids for skateboard decks so the youth of today can thrash in style. Jim Phillips is back. With slide show.

Santa Cruz poet Ellen Bass writes about a near miss in this monthly installment of locally inspired verse.

Santa Cruz residents are waiting to hear which of their favorite parks will be closed due to budget cuts. While no specific parks have been named yet, it is all but certain that at least some of the county’s parks will be among those closed to the public shortly after Labor Day. About 100 of the states 278 parks are scheduled to be closed, and the state has already stopped accepting camping reservations for all but 20 parks.

Professor Craig Haney of UCSC is one of the foremost experts on the death penalty, particularly in California. A study that he just released found that Californians still support the death penalty by an overwhelming 66 percent, but that this number has decreased considerably since a 1989 study, in which almost 80 percent supported the death penalty.

Fallen power lines are believed to be responsible for a small wildfire in Boulder Creek yesterday between Highway 9 and Logan Creek Road. No mandatory evacuations were required, and the fire was quickly brought under control.

Citing the dangers of second-hand smoke and the number of cigarette butts littering the streets and beaches, city leaders in Santa Cruz will meet Tuesday, Sept. 8 to extend a smoking ban through much of downtown.