Influential local photographer and advertising executive Peter S. Carter died last night after a fall on the stairs of his Victorian home. A gifted strategist, he advised valley political and business leaders and operated a successful advertising agency for many years, reinventing himself as a photographer of social events as the industry changed.

Political theater, like a good novel or legend, needs strong central characters. Last Friday, we saw the district attorney ride in like Sir Lancelot, with Queen Guinevere by his side, to mete out a quick and final blow to the morally depraved Saxon,  in this case George Shirakawa, Jr.

If it were only that simple. The triumph of Good over Evil story line quickly morphed into a human tragedy as the county supervisor fell on his sword, resigned his position, agreed to plead guilty and attributed his betrayal of public trust to a gambling addiction.

The 567-acre Coyote Highlands project goes before the County Planning Commission at its 1:30 p.m. meeting today. The proposed subdivision would add 25 homes to an area that is considered historically significant and environmentally sensitive, prone to such natural hazards as earthquakes and landslides. The properties contain watersheds and wetlands, and the new homes will be able to be seen from the valley floor.

We’re sad to announce that Leigh Weimers has passed away at the age of 76. Warm and easygoing, Leigh was a much beloved figure in San Jose who wrote a column for the San Jose Mercury News for 47 years. Leigh went into the hospital a month ago for congestive heart failure and was scheduled for heart surgery this week.

Members of Operating Engineers Local Union No. 3 showed up at 4pm Sunday to close the cement and asphalt plant at Graniterock’s A.R. Wilson Quarry. Aggregate Division Manager Jack Leemaster looked none too happy with the surprise when he drove up in a white pickup truck 45 minutes later. “My understanding is they had a pretty good sized order going out tonight,” said one plant worker, resting his placard’s pine stick on his shoulder. “Three hundred tons for night paving.” Twelve hours later, things would get worse for Graniterock. Before Monday crews punched in to start their weeks, picketers descended upon the company’s recycling plant at Monterey Highway and Capitol Expressway, at the sand and gravel facility in Hollister and at Graniterock operations in San Jose’s Berryessa district, Redwood City and South San Francisco.

A key piece of evidence has disappeared in the Mercury News rack theft caper. At least one news rack in the Mercury’s possession vanished as the San Jose Police Department prepared to commence a criminal investigation into the daily’s dumping of its competitors’ racks. Mercury News executives offered no explanation for the disappearance—only that they had “triple checked” the yard.

There are two kinds of thieves: ones who own up to their actions when caught and those who make up facts to justify their thievery. The Mercury News executive team has chosen to go the route of lying thieves. Luckily, no one is really fooled, and the ethical character of the group running the Bay Area’s daily newspapers is now on display for all to see. The emperor has no clothes.

In a small courtroom on the fifth floor of the Hall of Justice, Jeff Rosen made the final arguments of his last trial as a hands-on prosecutor on Tuesday. With thin fingers, he karate-chopped the air like a symphony conductor cueing the string, brass and percussion sections, except the players here were three accused murderers. “The buyer, the middleman, the hit man,” he called them.

Past San Jose mayors have used the annual State of the City speech to announce big projects or initiatives.  Commandeering a broke city, however, limits Chuck Reed to talking about already dry cement like the swoopy new airport terminal or trumpeting minor capital spending projects, such as fixing the convention center’s leaky roof or reopening the Happy Hollow Zoo with a renovated Guinea Pig Island.  When it comes to mayoral speeches in San Jose, no detail is too small.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom delivered an optimistic message about California’s prospects to members of the San Jose Rotary Club Wednesday. With a Kennedy-esque call to “renew the spirit of imagination” that has defined the state, the candidate for governor called California “a state not just of dreamers, but of doers and entrepreneurs.”

More enlightened police strategy appears to be taking hold in downtown San Jose´s entertainment zone. In the past, aggressive law enforcement tactics resulted in large numbers of public-intoxication arrests and lawsuits from club owners and members of the public, as well as packed council hearings, heated public debates over racial profiling and complaints of economic damage to downtown’s business community. Faced with community uproar, fiscal issues and political pressure, SJPD seems to have gotten the message.

There’s something profoundly wrong with an economic system that sells homes cheaply then takes them away from young families; that encourages wasteful energy consumption while fuel prices double and ExxonMobil serially breaks corporate profit records ($12bn last quarter). And there’s something immoral about a political order that allows its leaders to invade countries on pretext then fails to hold them accountable; that end-runs international and constitutional principles on torture and incarcerating the innocent while endeavoring to globally spread its values.

Two giants of San Jose’s jazz world died in late August within a week of each other. One was tall and always immaculately dressed, a Bellarmine-educated pianist, raised in the Santa Clara Valley and married into one of its wealthiest and most prominent families. The other was round and simply dressed, a working drummer who kept time for musicians like Cab Calloway and Mike Bloomfield in the hardscrabble clubs of New York and New Orleans. Both were passionate about music. Henry Schiro was the well-dressed impresario who booked performers; Sammy Cohen was the drummer who fought for fair compensation as head of the local musician’s union.

If all goes well, San Jose could be the headquarters of the world’s coolest car company. The maker of high performance electric cars is interested in a piece of land near San Jose’s Water Pollution Control Plant for its central manufacturing and R&D facility. On Aug. 19, the city council is slated to vote to direct the city manager to pursue a deal with Tesla Motors.  The facility, according to insiders, would directly employ more than 1,000 workers and create an ecosystem of more than 10,000 jobs.

“C’mon you can blog in the limo,” ringleader orders me as I get yanked off the front lines of the most boring election ever. The front lines at that precise moment, 11 to 11pm PST, means a balloon-festooned Carlos Goldstein’s restaurant in North San Jose that smells like refried beans. The quartered quesadillas in the warming tray have permabonded to each other so that they peel up in clumps. 

I wanted to see this celebrated fence with my own two eyes to understand what all the controversy has been about—why it ran in the Rose Garden Resident, then as the lead story of the Mercury News’ local section, followed by a piece on San Jose Inside. The media fascination with a minor boundary squabble, cast in the David and Goliath mold of big, bad developer versus the trampled neighbors, appeared at first read like a bit of media sensationalism.  So I drove up San Carlos Street for a site visit to the as yet unnamed townhouse construction site in a part of town that is definitely not the Rose Garden neighborhood, as articles have claimed.