In my house, it’s notable when Sacramento is mentioned on TV or in a movie, even in passing. When it happens during one of my favorite TV shows it’s practically cause for a gala event at Spataro. On last night’s “Veronica Mars” our gal is on the case of the missing boyfriend: Sully, from Sacramento. Don’t think we didn’t cross our fingers and hope V, Wallace and the gang had to make a field trip to pick up some clues from the downtown plaza or the Crocker!
Author: CoolDMZ
"X-ray vision to see in between / Where's my kimono and my time machine?"
Are there any other kind?
Snark is not always fun and games. Sometimes the camera must be turned on the less savory parts of life. For example, the Bee’s coverage of the man currently being sought for several assaults on women contains a sidebar about other serial offenders that includes their media nicknames, like Anthony Ray Starks, nicknamed “Cowardly.” You know, unlike the courageous men who typically commit this particular crime.
Real-time traffic cams
This is pretty cool… the County Dept. of Transportation just went live with real-time traffic cams on different intersections around town. Here is Watt & Fair Oaks, for example. (They aren’t kidding about the video taking a few seconds to load.) Neato!
Family style eats at Giusti’s Place
Casual family dining
at Giusti’s Place
My sister was married last weekend in the romantic Sacramento river delta. As part of the weekend festivities a big group of us headed over to Giusti’s Place, a family-run restaurant on the river in Walnut Grove that has been serving casual family-style Italian since 1910, making it the oldest bar and restaurant on the delta. Giusti’s is located in a rickety, cobbled together building propped up on a riverbank, and the atmosphere inside is of your typical bar and grill. The bar’s notable feature is that the ceiling is covered with hats (and apparently the inside is covered with cool dudes).
Those “real estate investor” signs…
Amanda Levy of Metroblogging Sacramento asked on Saturday what we have probably all wondered for a few months now…
I was just exiting the 80 by P Street in downtown Sac…I saw a sign for Real Estate Investor…make 10K to 20K per month…has anyone EVER made money by calling the numbers on one of those signs and signing up???? Seriously!!!
You’ve seen these hand-written signs, correct? I always assumed the reason he/she needed an apprentice was because he/she was clearly so busy making billions and billions of dollars in Real Estate to find a way to get those signs printed all professional-like!
Tower, Copeland’s bargain shopping
I have yet to follow the arrow guys to Tower Records or the Copeland’s at the downtown plaza to see what sort of outrageous deals I can find. I am in need of some running shoes and in need of spending as close as possible to $0 on them. I’m thinking the week after Thanksgiving the Copeland’s discounts will creep into the 80% range but I’m also thinking that shoes that can give me the support and stability I need will be in short supply in my demanding price range. Also I would like to pick up some CDs and books on the cheap. Anybody out there been to either of these stores lately and willing to report on the bargain shopping environment? Tower seems to have dropped percentages off their signs so I can’t tell how far the scale has slipped on that.
(On a side note I just realized that there should be a rating system for us bargain shoppers, akin to the clapping popcorn guy. Would it just be a scale composed of cheap skate graphics?)
New crime mapping tool on KCRA
Mike Teselle reports
KCRA rolled out its Crime Tracker tool just in time for Halloween this year, and RonTopofIt just pointed it out to me this morning. It is a mashup of Google’s ubiquitous mapping service, and it works way better than the SacPD’s Crime Mapping tool, although I’m sure the SacPD’s offering is more inclusive and updated faster. One thing I have always loved about the SacPD’s tool is the ability to search by neighborhoods, not just Zip codes — this link, for example, shows you residential, auto, and business burglaries in the Ben Ali neighborhood (which is apparently a microhood between El Camino and Marconi on the West side of the Capital City, who knew). To get a similar map on KCRA I had to use an address, 1941 Iris Ave, and I get all of the crime hits (including Invasion of Privacy). But the ease of searching by Zip, intersection, or “Landmarks” on the KCRA site makes it worth a look.
New Commuter website
Just got an email from our building’s transportation coordinator about a new website, Sacramento Region Commuter Club. Who doesn’t want to explore alternative transit solutions and be part of a neato club at the same time? I hope we get decoder rings. If you’re interested, check out the registration and see if your employer is on the cool kids list.
Sandy Smoley’s arena post-mortem
TZ of Sactown Royalty is making all us bloggers look bad by getting like, interviews and stuff. Using the phone even! He’s got some quotes from Sandy Smoley, Chairwoman of the Yes on Q & R campaign.
On the incredible margin of defeat:
“80-20 is huge. That was startling to me, the magnitude. … But if people don’t understand a measure, they vote no. … With the Maloofs pulling out, it was way overwhelming.”
That’s one way to put it, Sandy. Another way to put it is that when people don’t want their taxes raised, they vote no on raising their taxes. Yet another way to put it is that the voters understood your idea plenty, and just decided they didn’t like it.
I’ll go ahead and give Smoley credit, she probably means that the voters didn’t understand it because it was poorly written and not well thought out. The Maloofs pulling out did make it harder to understand what was going on–hard to understand why the stewards of our public trust would leave so much out and still expect a yes vote.
Post-debacle announcement tonight
TZ of the irreplaceable Sactown Royalty (and sometime Ragger) says to expect a major announcement from proponents of the widely-assumed-DOA arena ballot measures tonight, presumably as the votes are being counted. With special guest Roger Dickinson on the fiddle? (Wait a minute, who would vandalize the article about Nero? Why would facts be in dispute? Are there Roman fire deniers out there that I don’t know about?)
The Sac Rag 
