This year’s Memorial Day wasn’t quite the usual scorcher, but the line for $3 bottles of water at the Civil War reenactments at Roaring Camp in Felton was nonetheless a 30-minute ordeal.
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Zipping Through the Redwoods
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.
Skydiving Over Santa Cruz
It’s the most beautiful day I could have picked to jump out of an airplane. Eighty-five degrees at early evening, light breeze out of the west and 13,000 feet between me and the ground.
State Parks Key to The Staycation
Last week’s election results accentuate the bizarre circular dynamic of an economic downturn that is driving people to vacation locally at our phenomenal parks and beaches that operate using funds from a state budget that is dramatically shrinking due to in large part to…an economic downturn.
Healthy Families: A Fraying Safety Net
Gov. Schwarzenegger warned us heads would roll if the May 19th budget package failed, and the Healthy Families program is looking like it may be one of the first.
Local Teens Talk About Porn
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?
Running Meter 3
A bit of topical doggerel.
Its High Time for Progressives to Support Progress
Liberals in Santa Cruz have created a crippling double bind. On the one hand, they want the city and county to provide services to the poor; neighborhood amenities; good wages and job protections for city and county workers. On the other hand, they oppose, virtually every development project that comes along.
Poisons Found in Birds of Prey
Walk in any direction in Santa Cruz and chances are you’ll come across a box of rat poison before long. The small, plastic cartons look like overgrown Roach Motels and are usually found near trashcans and alleyways, pressed flush against a wall. Inside are any of a number of toxic concoctions. The worst contain anti-coagulant chemicals that, once ingested by a rodent, cause internal bleeding and eventual death. What’s less known about these deadly rodenticides is that they are potentially lethal to other animals, especially birds of prey, for which rats and mice are a steady meal.
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.”
