Category: Misc

SNR Picks Sac’s Best Sites

Perusing the newly released Best of Sacramento list over at the Snooze and Review (get it?) I am not surprised to see that The Sac Rag’s acquisition of the top spot in the hearts and minds of Sacramento’s online set is going to have to continue to work the grassroots approach. Lots of press for Heckasac as Best entertainment blog and readers-choice Best Blog (beating out frickin Weintraub, wow). Two of the award-winning sites hit us up with semi-frequent linkage (Heckasac and Uneasy Rhetoric) so maybe this well deserved attention for those bloggers will give the Rag crew a little indirect lovin’.

At least, that’s how I was thinking until I found the results of Reader’s Choice best local Web site:

NapkinNights
http://sac.napkinnights.com
2. Suckramento.com
http://www.suckramento.com
3. Sacramento Midtown.com
http://www.sacramentomidtown.com

Well, zero out of 3 ain’t bad. Do not click the first two, but click the third for a nice laugh (unless you designed that site, in which case, nice work. Great job.)

On an unrelated note, though, thank you Chrisanne Beckner for giving me the answer to a riddle by exposing A&A Imports as the source of the strong and enticing donut smell at McKinley Park.

Back to School?

Note: The following commentary is from Mrs. TopofIt’s perspective as an educator in Sacramento county.

“Did school start already?” This is probably what many of the officers sent to pick up these “parents” heard this week as Sacramento County held its 10th annual truancy sweep. This time of year school offices are buzzing with new enrollments…those who just realized why their neighborhood was so quiet during the day or why their child suddenly had no one to play with. School is tricky like that. Just sneaks up on you. And with such high expectations of having your child attend 180 days of it, come on, get real. So who cares if you have missed 30? That’s not so bad, right? The real fun lies in the excuses. As a teacher, you hear them all. These range from a simple missing of the bus to grandma’s doctor’s appointment. You can’t really expect a child to attend school when grandma has to have her cataracts dialated? Who could concentrate? Better just stay home.
Continue reading “Back to School?”

All Eyes on “the Cruiser Chick”

Cruiser Bike
Cruiser sans chick

Way back when, you know, in April we did a post about The Walking Dude phenomenon. Well, today as I walked to lunch with a co-worker I cemented a new phenomenon, The Cruiser Chick. This gal or gals (you can be the judge) is seemingly everywhere in midtown at once. She has black hair and wears bangs and a ponytail. She has a piercing or two along with various tattoos, sometimes obvious, sometimes not so obvious. The bike morphs from having a basket up front to being green to having fenders and back again. Where is she going? How did she get from Alhambra and Capitol to BeachHut Deli in less than the time it took me to get there by car? And why was Locke so calm with a gun pointed at his head…oh, sorry, wrong blog…I will bring a camera with me, I promise, and photograph our two wheeled maiden of midtown. I challenge you to do the same.

Check This Out

I thought it would be fun to test out sac-eat’s “reticular indicator” theory by asking you, our loyal Rag readers, to pay attention to how many check cashing stores you come across this week. Extra credit will be given to those that take notice of how many said stores are next to convenience/liquor stores.

Please comment with your findings. Now try not to think of a banana!

Attention Local Ipod Users

Interesting term I learned the other day: reticular indicator. A reticular indicator is something that is around you but you don’t notice until someone points it out to you, and then you see it everywhere. Like the Toyota Prius. There were a lot on the road, but when they started getting more press and that kinda hippieyuppie friend of yours bought one, you started noticing them a lot more. Didn’t you? Anyway, I just got myself an IPod and I’ve noticed that just about everyone who isn’t pushing a shopping cart has one. So, to the local angle. If you happen to be using the Griffin ITrip FM adapter with your IPod in the Sacramento area, I’ve found the station with the least amount of interference and the best IPod signal is 97.5. If you don’t have an IPod, or aren’t using the ITrip, then please, ignore. But now that I’ve pointed it out, you won’t be able to ignore it. Will you?

To Label Me Is to Negate Me… From Standing, Sitting, Walking…

Came across this blog today that I feel may pique a few of our reader’s interest.

Some lowlights include:

  • …preventing labeled gang members from “standing, sitting, walking, driving, gathering or appearing, anywhere in public view or any place accessible to the public”

  • …most criminal activity involving graffiti, possession or sale of drugs and weapons, vandalism, assault and theft involving nonwhite assailants are labeled as gang-related.

    • Continue reading “To Label Me Is to Negate Me… From Standing, Sitting, Walking…”

    Keeping Score

    I thought it might be appropriate at this juncture to start keeping track of the types of places Sacramento-area people don’t want to see in their neighborhoods. If we can figure out what the common theme is among these places, maybe we’ll get more insight into what makes Sacramento tick. So, presenting these places in the order that engenders the most snark:

    Hooters
    Mosques
    Churches
    Malls

    What’s next… car dealers? Well, actually, yup.

    Any theories?

    The Not-So-Friendly Skies

    Had an opportunity to fly this weekend and discovered a few things that seemed to be sacrocentric (can we start using this new non-word? I kind of dig it). Air travel in general is a stressful experience. Between the delays, the security checks, the tight quarters, it can all wear thin on one’s temper. But at what point do people just flat out give up and start being absolute nut jobs? And do they only lose it in the 916?

    My wife and I board our plane from Sacramento to Denver. Everything has gone swimmingly so far and I was actually very impressed by the ease in getting to our terminal from the parking lot. However, this ease was quickly worsened when we attempted to find our seats. Now I have to make some assumptions here. That the folks boarding this plane were from the Sacramento area and not making a connecting flight from some other town. I also have to assume that, being a Saturday morning, these folks were not traveling on business and/or were not otherwise anxious to get to where they were going. That is, I was experiencing people at their best.
    Continue reading “The Not-So-Friendly Skies”

    Hurricane, Shmurricane

    Following CoolDMZ’s post from a few weeks back, I had to comment on this article from News10.net.

    It’s a disaster experts know is coming, and it could dwarf the effects of Hurricane Katrina.

    We live in earthquake country…sure, we knew that. Is it important to discuss earthquake preparedness? I think so. Is it necessary to bring down the victims of hurricane Katrina along the way? Even if you don’t watch the news regularly, or read the paper, or browse the internet, I think it is safe to say that most Americans, especially those of us out west pretty much get what happened in the gulf coast. There’s no need to “bring it home” by attempting to scare the bejeezus out of us with this doom and gloom, might as well not go to work in the morning, earthquake prediction crap.

    Not to mention that it’s pretty insulting to those who have directly suffered from this disaster. You think you have it rough in New Orleans? You ain’t seen nothing yet, in the next 20 years we’re gonna have a tremor that will blow the socks off your little storm…maybe, we think, well, we predict. We’re two for three so far!

    Spray now, we’ll discuss the details later

    Wanted to follow up on the WNV epidemic from a few weeks ago. It turns out that it is going to be very difficult to determine whether or not the abrupt spraying of pesticide over our homes even worked! According to a sacbee.com article, “it may be impossible ever to draw firm scientific conclusions on how much the pesticide treatments helped to stem the West Nile virus.” Apparently, this has a lot to do with budget restraints on the vector control agency.

    I don’t want to go off on a rant here, but aren’t budgets the sort of thing you work out in advance? Like, maybe a year or so? Perhaps when we were told last year that this virus was out there and potentially could hit us hard if we didn’t wear long sleeved shirts, spray on the DEET, and stay inside during peak skeeter hours, the powers that be could have also been preparing themselves fiscally. Realizing that this could get to a point where mass spraying of potentially cancer causing chemicals would be required.

    I don’t know, just seems a little Bush league (pun intended) to drop this stuff on us with no real, shall we say, exit strategy? (hey, we’re kicking it up a notch here at the rag so work with me!)