It’s graduation season, and tassels are being turned in high schools, community colleges, vocational programs and universities all over the South Bay. This year, a friend of mine who I first met seven years ago when he was locked up in the max unit of juvenile hall (I was giving writing workshops through a program called “The Beat Within”) got his high school diploma and is now taking classes at De Anza College. He was the kind of youngster that was always quick witted, which probably got him more trouble than anything else, but this year, his gift for gab was rewarded, and he was the commencement speaker at his graduation. He was even on the evening news when they did a segment on graduations, which was a bit of redemption for him since the last time he was on TV, he was kicking in a newspaper stand during Mardi Gras years ago.

City Hall Diary

Last week, the council spent 90 minutes deliberating the sale of a 0.19 acre parcel of surplus downtown property for $450,000. The current tenants, the Arab American Community Center and the Indochinese Refugee Center, are nonprofits who pay $12 a year in rent (month to month) on an expired lease. They were notified in January 2006 about the city’s plans to sell the property.

Complaints of “Gamey” Chicken Marsala

San Jose’s favorite romance, between City Hall peregrine falcons Carlos and Clara, came to an ignominious end yesterday after three employees discovered that they ingested most of the birds after complaining that their weekly Thursday lunch special of chicken marsala tasted “gamey.”

IN THE TRAVEL writing business, one always runs across those service-type articles with titles like “72 Hours in Casablanca,” “A Weekend in Montreal” or “Three Perfect Days in London”—the point being that the reader should be able to easily replicate the author’s experience. Since nobody anywhere has bothered to enlighten us with a “Five Hours in Alviso” exposé, allow me to furnish an example of how just such a piece might begin.

Food for Thought

The new Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) array of interstellar listening devices located near Mt. Lassen should have caught humankind’s attention and imagination. With the special radio telescopes coming online, the Mountain View-based private nonprofit organization is greatly improving its ability to detect evidence of life elsewhere in the universe. SETI’s efforts and the work at the Lick Observatory in discovering planets outside our solar system make Santa Clara County the center of our planet’s search for alien life forms and worlds that can sustain them.

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is a favorite quote of many who discuss history. Most likely said first—and best—by poet and philosopher, George Santayana, we should remember it in San Jose.

In the course of the next two weeks, San Jose’s civil and criminal courts will be discussing the use of Tasers by law enforcement. This week in federal court, the Salinas Police Department and Taser International faces a jury in the case of a Salinas man who died after he was stunned 30 times by Taser-wielding police officers.  The trial will be closely watched by San Jose attorneys and future plaintiffs who are aiming for their day in court against Taser International and the San Jose Police Department.

As I picked up the paper on Saturday morning amidst my latte and bagel, I perused the business section to see that the City of San Jose has now approved Santana Row to seek developers to build and lease over 150,000 square feet of office space. I know this site is very downtown-centric and has received flack for it, but am I wrong in getting a quizzical look on my face when I read this?

An Open Letter To Google’s Executives

Dear Google Executive Team:

Why doesn’t Google come to San Jose? The city is making plans to expand its convention center, and the 17-story Sobrato Building is up for sale again (you know, that beautiful, cobalt-blue building that sparkles in the sun).

City Hall Diary

In a prior blog I wrote about the “mystery” of closed session meetings. These meetings occur every Tuesday morning and cover real estate, litigation and labor negotiations. In addition, everything covered at the meetings is confidential. Last week, the city council voted to release a revision of a closed session memo for public distribution called “Confidential Legal Advice Related to Imposition of Appropriate Conditions in Land Use Approval.” This memo was released on May 16 so it could be shared with the general public and the development community.

Officials Act Swiftly To Prevent Spread Into Brains

Just hours after water officials banned boats in county reservoirs to protect the water supply from an invasive shellfish, Kim Roberts, the Executive Director of the Santa Clara Valley Health and Hospital System, ordered the supervisors quarantined after an aggressive mollusk was found attached to several of their heads.

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.

BEGINNING this weekend at Discovery Meadow, San Jose gets its first primordial high-tech preview of what’s to come during next month’s second biennial ZeroOne (01SJ) Global Festival of Art on the Edge. In conjunction with Black Rock Arts Foundation, artist Peter Hudson and a squad of at least 50 dedicated pals have created Homouroboros, a 24-foot-tall, 30-foot-diameter spinning zoetrope that depicts 18 life-size monkeys swinging from branch to branch in a circle around the tree, eating an apple fed to them by a serpentlike hand. The interactive steel and aluminum sculpture debuts Saturday from 4 to 6pm and will close a month later.

As a longtime baseball fan, I can understand why it’s known as the “game of inches.” I had no idea that the same rule applied to the real estate development industry. Neither did 17 residents of the Rose Garden around the old Fiesta Lanes site under development into high density housing by ROEM Builders of Santa Clara, until they received a letter from the company last month.

It seems that this council, most of it anyway, means what it says; it held the line against the conversion of five acres of industrial land to housing. Nice job, team.  The war will never be won until developers believe that the council will not buckle under the joint pressure of too much money and too little staff backbone. It must be won battle by battle.

On May 12, 2008, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office dropped the charges against the last of the “Eastside Six”—a group that faced numerous misdemeanors and felonies from an incident on Cinco de Mayo, 2006. But don’t let the romantic lefty throwback name fool you; these were not a bunch of armed Black Panthers planning a City Hall takeover, but, rather, peaceful community activists who were only armed with cameras and bullhorns.