Things are still tough all over for a lot of folks, and I’ve (fortunately) been in hiring mode in recent weeks. Following up on last November’s post, here are some tips from an employer’s perspective. The bottom line is to make yourself stand out in only the good ways, minimize any potential embarrassing or awkward moments, and follow through.
How can the folks at Bonney Plumbing live with themselves, knowing their new radio jingle COMPLETELY rips off the old Sacramento 
Union one?
No long-term Sacramentan could ever forget the Union’s “Four forty-four fifty five five five. That’s the number for the classified!” Fast forward a couple of decades, and now Bonney is singing the “four forty-four” tune. That is SO not cool.
This might go down in the annals as one of the landmark copyright cases. I’m just reminded so much of that Vh1 interview of Vanilla Ice explaining that “Ice Ice Baby” has one more quarter note (actually, I think it’s a hemidemisemiquaver) than Queen’s “Under Pressure.” And I quoth, “See Queen’s is din din din dindindindin, and mine is din din din dindindindin ch.” (The “ch” is the high hat — you know, with the souped up tempo. I’m on a roll; it’s time to go solo.)
Note to Mr. and Mrs. Bonney (who seem like lovely people, by the way): Just don’t touch the old “GET IT NOW! AT FLORIN ROAD TOYOTA” with the entire staff singing along, and we’ll be fine.
A big, brainy Right Awn! to Mira Loma High School students Andrew Chen, Rishi Kulkarni, Edward Lee, Sriram Pendyala and Heather Yee (and Coach James Hill) for taking the championship at the 19th annual National Science Bowl.
They win a trip to the International Science School in Sydney, Australia this summer. If they are named the best high school scientists on Earth, they will compete and surely lose in the Milky Way Science Bowl, where Geminids have won for most of the past millennium.
Today being the first Saturday in May, it is Free Comic Book Day at participating comic book stores all over the U.S. and Canada. You just walk into a store and walk away with a free comic book. Though you can’t enjoy a trip to Comics & Comix, you can use the FCBD website’s bookshop locator to find a participating location.
Some pretty fun sounding titles are being offered this year. This one called Resurrection sounds good and comes with a preview of Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen series. I recommend the Atomic Robo title, and of course you’ll probably need to get their early if you want to score a copy of the Brian Michael Bendis-penned Avengers book.
What were you planning to do today, just sit in your house and not get free comics?
Earth Day is a birthday. On April 22, 1970, twenty million Americans joined together to promote a healthy, sustainable environment and gave birth to the modern environmental movement. Today, we celebrate activism, community development, and altruism. We celebrate a growing empowerment among people who believe that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness includes a healthy environment and that habitat preservation includes every one of us. 
At age 39, environmentalism is gaining general acceptance. We drive hybrid cars and leave carbon footprints. As more people learn of the universal importance of healthy living, they see beyond the “environmentalism” stereotype of hemp granola munching hippies versus the corporate suits. Today, the suits are eating hemp granola to control their cholesterol and the hippies run companies driven by sustainability, green energy and corporate responsibility. Groundbreaking laws, such as the California’s Global Warming Solutions Act and Senator Steinberg’s Sustainable Communities Strategy may steer a 21st Century California toward a healthier future in a cost-effective manner. On the federal level, the new administration is working to reverse eight years of practices that were disastrous to clean environments and healthy habitat.
Come celebrate with your community. Sacramento Earth Day 2009 will be at Southside Park this Sunday from 11-6. Walk, bike or take public transit. More than 100 vendors and booths will educate you on amazing new technologies and ways you can save money and make your life greener. Delicious, healthy food will be widely available with music, entertainment and fun all day, including classic rock jam band Deadlocke and reggae grooves from Zion Roots.
As the Bee reports today, administrators at several schools in the Elk Grove school district are going “old school” to motivate their kids to take standardized tests this spring — as in segregating them by race for motivational speeches:
Students at Laguna could go to any rally they wanted, but the gatherings were designated for specific races – African Americans in the gym, Pacific Islanders in the theater, Latinos in the multipurpose room.
What incredible bad taste and stupidity on the part of the district. If their concern really was to allow staff to “talk about test scores without making any one ethnic group feel singled out in a negative manner,” why not take ethnicity out of the question! Why not give all the kids a pep talk about how they can all do better?
At last night’s SCUSD board meeting, during which the board voted to close 4 schools, the thing that really caught my attention was member Jerry Houseman’s comment on the proposal for school closures. He took the opportunity to rail against the Tax Day Tea Party protests and Fox News, yelling at the assembled school parents and other taxpayers that the reason the district is in such dire straights is that people in California don’t want to pay taxes. The prospect of an elected official — charged with spending millions of taxpayer money — browbeating his constituents to cease their resistance to higher taxes while they have the gall to take advantage of a public service like education, is pretty frightening. I think perhaps he was out past his bedtime.
Continue reading “UPDATED – Jerry Houseman’s pro-tax rant VIDEO”
After a marathon meeting this evening the Sac City Unified School Board has voted to close four schools for the upcoming school year. The board decided to spare Mark Hopkins — which had been on the chopping block as of Wednesday — but that school will most likely close after next year. Genesis High School, and Alice Birney, Lisbon, and Thomas Jefferson Elementary schools will close; the district believes this will save $1.5 million.
SCUSD announced today that open enrollment for SCUSD is being conducted this week, and parents will be notified next week.
Previously: Via the SCUSD Observer blog we learned that the SCUSD Board of Education held an emergency special meeting on 3/26, but sent the announcement about the meeting and distributed the agenda at 3 p.m. that day, in violation of the board’s own policy requiring 24 hours public notice of a special meeting. Nothing gets CoolDMZ fired up like not giving proper notice about meetings. The board posts video of its meetings “the next business day,” but go figure, the video of this meeting has yet to be posted (as of 3/31).
It’s been a while since I’ve last posted, but I just have to say that those Pottery World radio ads are really annoying. I will not go to that store based on how lame the copy is and how shrill the woman is doing the VO.
The Sac Rag 