Month: March 2007

“Students Against Malaria”

I had forgotten I took this shot weekend before last at the Davis Farmer’s Market. Word on the street is this group gets into it frequently with the “Students FOR Malaria”…

"Students Against Malaria"

But I kid the kids. Riffing on this last night my wife and I realized there aren’t very many better options… Student Fighting Malaria sounds good at first until you realize it also sounds like they have malaria. Students For the Eradication of Malaria is precise but wordy.

So if you just tell yourself that it’s against in the sense of “in hostility to” and not in the sense of “disapproving of,” it probably is your best bet. It just sounds and looks funny.

Jackpot’s..err..I mean..Didley Squat’s Gear Stolen by Thieving Dicks!!

(Author’s Correction – The gear did not belong to Jackpot, but to their friends Didley Squat, and Jackpot helped pass along the alert.  I stand by the accuracy of the “Thieving Dicks” part, unless the brigands are revealed to be ladies.  In that case, I will issue a correction to “Thieving Cunts”. – Stickie)

This always pisses me off. Musicians and other artists have a tough life, and I can’t think of anything more professionally devastating than having your gear ganked by some fucking fuckity fuck fuck.

Local faves Jackpot have issued an alert. Please keep an eye out….

$2,000 Reward for the return of stolen goods
No Questions Asked

Last night, Friday March 9th, at 9:15 PM, various pieces of recording equipment, instruments, and laptops were stolen from a vehicle at the intersections of J St. and 48th St. We request the help in recovering these valued items in exchange for $2,000 – No questions asked.
The recovery of these items is extremely important as they have high sentimental value to us. We have no hesitation in exchanging the items for cash.

PLEASE CONTACT US WITH ANY LEADS OF ANY SORT
Contact:
Stuart Nishiyama
Valmuten03@yahoo.com
916-996-9611

Melody Mundy
merry.melody@gmail.com
530-400-8223
and/or

Matt Wrenne
mwrenne@hotmail.com
916-912-0251

The Temporary End of the World: Peet’s Closing

Newsflash:  The Lyon’s Village Peet’s coffee will soon be closing for a major remodel.  Dates and times have not yet been fixed but you can already hear the Country Day moms shrieking with fear.  I join you, CD moms.  What will I do for the weeks that Peet’s will be closed?  Oh wait, I work a block away from their downtown establishment.  Alright, emergency passed, I’m ok.  But it’s still a shock and I’m not sure if the sky will ever be as blue again.

Thank you, Tenebrist, for the info and don’t go blabbin’ to Bob Shallit if you know what’s good for you.

Isn’t the Metro Chamber supposed to support local business?

Interesting item in the News&Review regarding the Sacramento Metro Chamber of Commerce’s decision to award a contract for its Web site redesign to a non-Sacramento company — without ever giving the locals a chance to bid:

Meet Don Linville, a partner in the local Web developing firm Black Dog Studios. Back in 2005, Linville received an inside tip that the Sacramento Metro Chamber was planning to redesign its Web site in 2006. Like most chambers of commerce, Sacramento Metro’s mission is to facilitate local business. Linville, a dues-paying member, waited patiently for the Web site upgrade project to come up for bid, fully expecting the job to be awarded to a local firm.

Except that never happened. The project never came up for bid, and Linville recently discovered it had been awarded to Chamber Weblink, an Indiana-based vendor that specializes in providing technology services to chambers of commerce. In a word, the job had been outsourced.

Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that Black Dog has done some of my Web work — because I do support local business whenever I can. So, I know Linville and I know Henry, the handsome retriever who is the J Street firm’s official Black Dog and also its VP of Public Relations and Marketing.

But still, I gotta wonder: If an entity like the Metro Chamber that’s supposed to be supporting area businesses can’t be counted on to do so, what good is it? Linville is still wondering, too.

Henry, for his part, had no comment.

La Terraza: Old Sac’s Answer to Chevy’s

There are so many Mexican restaurants in this town that, when I write about them, I go for mass quantity and group them up in a few quick reviews like here, and here. But every now and then, one Mexican eatery stands out as a solitary beacon of either greatness or super-not greatness (God, I’m a scintillating writer). La Terraza, to my great chagrin, finds itself in the latter group. From service to atmosphere to food, this place fails spectacularly.

La Terraza (literally translated as “the terrorist” which seems like a pretty poor name for a restaurant) sits high above the tourist choked streets of Old Sacramento on the corner of 2nd and K streets. While this is not a bad place for a restaurant, I wouldn’t consider it a great place for a restaurant either. To me, Old Sac is best known for its parking difficulty (recently made more difficult by new meters and longer enforcement periods(good job Old Sac, way to drum up business)) and the suprisingly large amount of mass arrests that take place there during weekend evenings. So, from a local’s point of view, you have to be offering something pretty special to get me to head across 3rd street (Did someone say banjo jam?). Whatever a restaurant could offer to get me to broach the Old Sac/New Sac border, La Terraza doesn’t. Continue reading “La Terraza: Old Sac’s Answer to Chevy’s”

Calif. Study: MySpace.com Linked To Poor Grades

CBS13 reports that a Fresno State professor, clearly possessed of superhuman intellect, has completed what must have been thousands of hours of painstaking research and concluded that MySpace.com accounts can be linked to poor grades among high school students.

Hey Daniel, I smell a big lawsuit in your future!!! Think of your good friends at The Sac Rag when your ship comes in. These t-shirts are literally not moving themselves.

The skinny on the fat

News10.net reports that California is moving to ban the use of trans fats in restaurant menu items.

The bill is being challenged by restaurant owners across California who worry the trans fat ban will force them to use more expensive alternative oils that could change the flavor of their food for the worse.

Why is it that I can hear sac-eats’ stomach grumbling now as it ponders a world without artery clogging, heart attack creating, yet oh so creamy industrially created as a side effect of partial hydrogenation of plant oils – a process developed in the early 1900s and first commercialized as Crisco in 1911, trans fatty acids?

“It’s going to be a big fight,” said Terri Mead, manager of Sacramento’s Pancake Circus Restaurant. “We don’t want them telling us what we can and can’t use in the restaurant.”

You tell’em Terri (a nay sayer from the Pancake Circus? Get out…). We don’t want those health freaks telling us what to do. Next thing you know we’ll have the government telling us that we have to maintain a certain level of “cleanliness” and “freshness” in order to “pass” a random “inspection” or face being “shut down”.

As someone who just threw back 3 or 8 zero trans fats per serving Tagalongs, let me just say that I don’t miss the trans fats at all.  And if it is good enough for our Girl Scouts of the USA, it’s good enough for me.

Eat like a mob boss

Maybe I’m just too big a fan of “The Sopranos,” but when I noticed baked ziti on the menu board at Cafe Milazzo, I just had to go for it. I could just hear Carmella telling Tony, “there’s some ziti in the ‘fridge,” and him grunting in reply.(Small and weird aside: One of the characters in “The Sopranos” sports a version of one of the names in la mia familia. My cousins can’t decide whether to be happy or horrified at this.)

Or maybe it wasn’t “The Sopranos” at all, but me just jonesing for the way Nonna used to make it. And the ziti? Perfect, with lots of gooey Mozarella and a tangy tomato bite. Better than Nonna’s, really, but probably not better than Carmella’s.

SNR website revamped; Mayor admits railyard purchase misstep

I’m getting a little behind here, working on launching a new website called BLUE MAG, an entertainment wing to my online mansion. Enjoy…

So a completely new look for the News & Review website. I think aspects of it are very attractive but it seems to me to be way too busy.

A great railyard story in last week’s issue as well. Mayor Fargo thinks that Thomas Enterprises didn’t bargain hard enough to get Union Pacific to move the tracks to accomodate the new infrastructure.

“Union Pacific should have moved their tracks. They could have done it. It would have been easy. … It’s a little bit of a sore subject, because we had hoped that our partners in all of this would be stepping up a little more, but the reality is, we wanted to get this done badly.”

So had we, Heather.

Mike Dunne Falls for Thai Food Trap

I laughed out loud when I saw Mike Dunne’s writeup of our old friends at Ruen Thai.  What particularly stuck out was this little gem:

The name rang a bell. I get more phone calls and e-mails about this or that exciting Thai restaurant than for any other kind of place, and over the past year a disproportionate number have been about Ruen Thai.

And yes, Mike had the soup.