San Jose Inside

Silicon Alleys

THE URBAN BLIGHT exploration junkie is currently on sabbatical documenting a recent bender that you will see shortly, so until then he has appointed his cousin, the industrial wasteland explorer, to humbly provide a substitute travelogue.

Food for Thought

Like our use of gasoline, natural gas, electrical power (Did you know 50 percent of the electricity on the national grid is generated by coal?) and oil-based products like plastic, we Americans use water with reckless abandon. Yet, water is becoming a scarce commodity in the Bay Area these days, made worse by the drought conditions we are experiencing.

San Jose Vice Mayor Dave Cortese recently fired off a guest column in the Evergreen Times, hammering the Valley Transportation Authority (he sits on the board) for suspending progress on the Eastridge light rail extension in his district. Cortese says the $334 million project was promised to voters when they approved Measure A, the sales tax measure for a variety of transportation projects, in 2000.

I have a friend in town this week visiting from Ireland. It’s always interesting to see our town from an outsider’s perspective. He is well traveled, has lived in various American cities before, including New York, Chicago and San Francisco, and so he is aware that there is life outside his little green island. But when we were talking about what he wanted to do when he was here, I thought I had better take him to San Francisco or else he’ll be bored; it won’t be chic enough in the South Bay and there won’t be enough to do. 

I thought that arenas and baseball stadiums brought out the most dramatic, intense, and even incendiary discussions, but I stand corrected—for now. It seems that currently in our valley, the mention of BART is enough to send many normally sane blokes to the ramparts, girded for battle.

City Hall Diary

…well, actually, I toured District 2 with Councilmember Forrest Williams. However, sometimes people mistakenly call him by the actor’s name instead. Who could blame them? Councilmember Williams has star power; especially driving his Batmobile Mercedes. Councilmember Williams is very energetic and shared many stories about District 2 with me. He does his morning jog up the local hill and eats oatmeal every morning. I hope to have his energy as my hair grays.

The weekly open forum for saying what you think about anything and everything.

SanJoseInside.com Among Those Blocked By Chinese Gov’t

Angered over the Chinese Government’s decision to limit access to the internet, Metro Newspapers and its affiliates Metroactive, Metro Silicon Valley, SV411, SanJose.com and SanJoseInside.com have decided to vehemently protest the affront to free speech by staging what they are calling “venue-hugging” at certain sites used for Olympic events in and around Beijing.

San Jose Police have confirmed that Eric Hernandez, the former Cindy Chavez intern convicted in March of hacking city government emails, was arrested Tuesday for assault and battery. According to police spokesman Sgt. Mike Sullivan, Hernandez allegedly attacked and beat a man at the Alma Community Center.

Coinciding with the 2008 presidential election, Dr. Seuss has posthumously thrown his hat into the ring with a new art show, “Dr. Seuss for President,” at the Peabody Gallery in Los Gatos, featuring never-before-released politically charged prints of Seuss’ work.

Unbeknownst to some, several of Dr. Seuss’ books contain deftly veiled sociopolitical commentary in-between the lines. The Lorax, for example, was a seminal piece of modern-day environmentalist literature, written in 1971 an as argument for corporate responsibility and resource conservation. Years earlier, 1958’s Yertle the Turtle was an argument against fascism—Seuss even once admitted he modeled the Yertle character after Hitler himself.

Abetted by the Adobe Systems-funded group 1stACT Silicon Valley, San Jose’s Office of Economic Development and Redevelopment attempted last month to introduce an ordinance to regulate newsracks in the downtown area—without talking to a number of local newspaper publishers. Although the advocates of uniform news boxes spent time with the publishers of daily papers, they failed to contact free newspaper publishers.

This past Friday night, and again on Saturday, searchlights announced the reopening of the Cuccini nightclub under its new name, Sabor, thanks to a stay of execution issued by Judge James Emerson on July 18. The Superior Court judge issued a Temporary Restraining Order that prevents the City of San Jose from pulling the club’s entertainment permit.

Well, we are on the cusp of another big decision about the future of our valley and our region. Are we going to commit to the biggest transportation project in our history and vote to approve a one-eighth-cent sales tax to raise billions of dollars in a push for rail transit?