Jessica Lussenhop

Staff Writer

Watsonville Prop. 8 Protest Small but Significant

While some 200 outraged protesters crowded around the Clock Tower in downtown Santa Cruz in reaction to Tuesday’s California Supreme Court ruling upholding the Prop. 8 constitutional ban on same-sex marriages, roughly 20 miles away in the Watsonville City Plaza, a small group of 20 people stood along Main Street yelling, “Honk!” at passing motorists and waving signs.

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Zipping Through the Redwoods

Leadership Santa Cruz County executive director Dave Vincent comes in for a zipline landing. (Photo by Curtis Cartier)

Falling out of a tree is not as easy as it sounds. Not if all that’s keeping you from a faceful of fiddleheads some 40 feet below is a thin cable. “This one is like the bunny slope,” our canopy tour guide, Steve Richards, assures us. “Enjoy the zip.” And then he tips off the edge of the wooden platform built treehouse-style around the trunk of a living redwood tree and whizzes across a 158-foot zipline, his shadow dancing along just behind him in the sunlit brush below.

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Local Teens Talk About Porn

Illustration by Jeff Drew

It is easier than ever to watch, create and share pornographic images and text, and as the first generation of web-savvy teenagers who have always had the instant gratification of DSL, who get cell phones as soon as they’re old enough to talk and who’ve never used air quotes with the word “blog,” their knowledge can easily be applied to creating their own porno paradise. Which leads to the question, can this be bad for them?

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Building Code Warriors

It seemed like plenty of folks at Monday night’s monthly Building, Accessibility and Fire Code Appeals Board meeting were anticipating fireworks, including a sheriff’s deputy who said, very sweetly, that he was there to “keep an eye on things.”

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