It started with a fruit stand more than seven decades ago, and emerged as one of the landmark local grocery stores in San Jose, with branches in Silver Creek and Santa Clara. On February 8, Cosentino’s will be shutting its doors one last time. The reason, according to Dominic Cosentino, is not just the economy but the shifting purchasing habits of Americans over the last few decades: “Everything is favoring the big-box stores today.”

Eighteen months after leading the local battle against gay marriage—and shortly after an aborted plan to move to Tracy and run for U.S. Congress—Larry Pegram promised that his campaign for San Jose City Council would be about fixing the city’s pressing money troubles, not social issues. Since that time, Pegram has emphasized his commitment to balanced budgets and cited his own credentials as a professional financial planner.

City Manager Debra Figone held a press conference late last night to announce that the San Jose budget deficit, long estimated at $116 million, is the result of an accounting error and a misplaced decimal point. The real deficit is one order of magnitude smaller—just $11.6 million. Figone attributed to the error to the furloughs imposed on city employees: “With fewer employees and less time, no one has gone over the figures until now. It really does make a difference where you put the decimal point in your Excel spreadsheet.”

San Jose hockey fans must deal with a conundrum this afternoon, as the United States and Canada battle for Olympic gold. Do we root for the US team, or root for our home team?

Four San Jose Sharks—Joe Thornton, Patrick Marleau, Dany Heatley and Dan Boyle—make up the backbone of Team Canada. They have been key to Canada’s success, working together in what TV announcer Kenny Albert has called “the San Jose connection.” Only one Shark—Joe Pavelski—is playing for Team USA.

Last Friday a thousand notables from high tech companies, public utilities, hospitals, local governments and NGO’s filled 96 tables at the McEnery Convention Center to hear about the State of the Valley according to the 2010 Silicon Valley Index, released by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.  “The Index has a lot of bad news this year,” said Russell Hancock, Joint Venture’s president.

Back in 2006, Jorge Trujillo was allegedly beaten up in San Jose by two strangers, Daniel Miller, 19, and Edward Sample, 20, wielding baseball bats. He managed to stumble away from the scene, and got over a mile away, bumping into cars along the way, according to police. Finally, someone called 911 and reported him to the police. When they arrived, Trujillo refused to speak with them or even let them approach, so the officers did what they were trained to do: they tased him. Trujillo died in hospital the next day.

With the murder trial underway in San Jose, the question being asked is to what degree did the tasing contribute to his death? Would he have died from the beating alone, meaning that Miller and Sample are guilty of murder, or was it the tasing that pushed him over the edge.

You gotta hand it to Carly Fiorina. Love her or hate her, you can’t help watching her Internet-only ad, and that’s what campaign ads are all about—getting eyeballs. Described as everything from an SNL skit to what would happen if the kid from The Omen directed Teletubbies, it’s already gotten 375,000 hits in Youtube, and the number keeps going up and up.

It was an emotional morning for Jeff Zarillo, 36. At a trial being watched across the nation, he described how he loved his partner, Paul Katami, more than he loves himself, and how he only wants to have “the same joy and happiness” that his parents and brother have in their marriages. Zarillo was the first witness in the Proposition 8 trial, which opened today.

No one questions whether Peter Friess did a great job turning San Jose’s Tech Museum of Innovation around. He might claim that much of that is thanks to the work of Birgit Binner, a graphic designer he hired as a consultant, whose job was “to establish The Tech Museum as an immediately recognizable brand.” The problem is that Birgit Binner, who receives a $400,000 salary for her two-year contract, is also Friess’s wife.

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San Jose isn’t notorious for teens killing teens. But recently there have been two such slayings: one on Halloween night, and the Nov. 10 homicide of a Santa Teresa High School student. The accused could face life imprisonment without the possibility of parole because the U.S. Supreme Court is currently deciding if that is legal. 

These two events were of interest to state Sen. John Vasconcellos, who represented Silicon Valley in the California Legislature for 38 years. While chairing virtually every important Assembly committee, and then for five years in the state Senate, Vasconcellos focused on youth in crisis. He championed higher education, mental health initiatives, community-based conflict resolution projects and funding for California’s poorest performing public schools.

The problem isn’t the police; it’s the people. That’s the underlying theme of a controversial editorial that appeared in Protect San Jose earlier this week. The piece was written by attorney Terry Bowman, who represents one of the officers involved in the videotaped beating of Vietnamese student Phuong Ho this September.

Young Bay Area artist Wayne Jiang was born in Guangzhou, China, and came to the United States at age 15. He earned his degree in illustration at SJSU and works as a fine artist and graphic designer. He now lives in Pacifica, but his period of residence in San Jose has resulted in a group of loving images of the city that are now on display at the Leonard and David McKay Gallery at Pasetta House in History Park.

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Having Joan Baez open the series of high-profile weekend concerts might seem an odd choice at first, but it turns out to have been a brilliant programming decision. Her bicultural background (her physicist father Albert Baez was from Puebla, Mexico), local residence and iconic stature as an international political activist and singer certainly provide her with the credentials to fit the festival opener role. However, the great service she performed for the festival as a whole in her concert was to strategically place the traditions of Spanish-language songs (from Mexico, Spain, Chile and other Latin American countries) firmly within the context of her explorations of the “Great American Songbook,” thus affirming her own dual cultural background while illustrating and informing the intellectual and philosophical cultural crossroads the festival has become. 

It’s San Jose Inside’s weekly open forum, where thoughts on any topic are welcome. What’s on your mind?