A taste of Soquel Vineyards’ five gold medal-winning Pinots
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Striking Gold
Stomp Making Sense
Las Cafeteras’ physical, exuberant sound and storytelling brings a traditional style into the 21st century
Doon From the Start
How a sleepy north county enclave kept it rural.
Barring Improvement
Recent inmate death reignites concerns about county jail system
Throwing It All Away
Everybody’s for recycling, right? So why are we all doing it wrong? Our reporter gets down and dirty to uncover 10 secrets that will finally make the recycling process make sense
Cross Country
Why the best guitarist in American country music is a Brit
Aquarius Calling, Humanity Rising
Aquarius (11th sign after Aries) is the sign of service—serving one another, building community. Aquarius is fixed air, stabilizing new ideas in the world. When new ideas reach the masses the ideas become ideals within the hearts and minds of humanity. Air signs (Gemini, Libra and Aquarius) are mental. They think, ponder, study, research, gather and distribute information. For air signs, education and learning, communicating, writing, being social, tending to money, participating in groups and creating sustainable communities are most important. One of the present messages Aquarius is putting forth to the New Group of World Servers is the creation of the New Education (thus thinking) for humanity—one based not on commodities (banking/corporate values) but on virtues.
Humanity and Aquarius
Aquarius is the sign of humanity itself. We are now at the beginnings of the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Humanity (rising). The “rising” is the Aquarian vision of equality, unity, the distribution and sharing of all resources and of individual (Leo) creative gifts for the purpose of humanity’s (Aquarius) uplifting. This is the message in the Solar Festival of Aquarius (at the full moon) on Tuesday, Feb. 3. We join in these visions by reciting the World Prayer of Direction, the Great Invocation.
Tuesday’s solar festival follows Monday’s Groundhog Day, or Imbolc (ancient Celtic fire festival) the halfway mark between winter solstice and spring Equinox). The New Group of World Servers (NGWS) during these two days are preparing for the upcoming Three Spring Solar Festivals: 1. Aries Resurrection/Easter Festival (April); 2. Taurus Buddha/Wesak Festival (May); and 3. Gemini’s Festival of Humanity (June). Aquarius and the new and full moons together are the primary astrological influences behind all of humanity’s endeavors. The NGWS are to teach these things, calling and uplifting humanity. Join us everyone. (301)
From The Editor
Plus Letters To the Editor
Portrait of the Artist
‘Mr. Turner’ captures a brutish, observant artist living in a brutish time.
From The Editor
Plus Letters To the Editor
Striking Gold
A taste of Soquel Vineyards’ five gold medal-winning Pinots The trio of winemakers at Soquel Vineyards has been winning awards for a while now. But nothing like what happened a few weeks ago at the recent San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Winemakers Jon Morgan, and brothers Peter and Paul Bargetto, who specialize in Pinot Noir made...
Stomp Making Sense
Las Cafeteras’ physical, exuberant sound and storytelling brings a traditional style into the 21st century The members of Las Cafeteras are featured in the 2008 Oscar-nominated documentary The Garden, about Los Angeles activists attempting to save the South Central Community Garden from bulldozers—but don’t look for them on the soundtrack. “We’re in there being beaten by...
Doon From the Start
How a sleepy north county enclave kept it rural. There isn’t any “there” there, which makes it hard to zero in on where Bonny Doon starts and ends. Northwest of Santa Cruz, inland and northeast of Davenport, west of Felton—but without a post office, city hall, or even a general store, you can’t tell when you’ve...
Barring Improvement
Recent inmate death reignites concerns about county jail system When a Watsonville woman died of cardiac arrhythmia in early November in Santa Cruz County Main Jail, people took notice. The county jail system had already found itself at the center of controversy when the county Grand Jury released a report in May of last year criticizing...
Throwing It All Away
Everybody’s for recycling, right? So why are we all doing it wrong? Our reporter gets down and dirty to uncover 10 secrets that will finally make the recycling process make sense Craig Pearson uses two strange words to describe his job. “I’m away,” he says when people ask what he does. “People just say they throw...
Cross Country
Why the best guitarist in American country music is a Brit Country music wandered out of the hills of the Southeast in the 1920s. Tricky themes of troubled love, booted wranglers and working-class values played out on the front porches and dusty roads of bucolic America until country music became the most listened to genre in...
Aquarius Calling, Humanity Rising
Aquarius (11th sign after Aries) is the sign of service—serving one another, building community. Aquarius is fixed air, stabilizing new ideas in the world. When new ideas reach the masses the ideas become ideals within the hearts and minds of humanity. Air signs (Gemini, Libra and Aquarius) are mental. They think, ponder, study, research, gather and distribute information....
From The Editor
Plus Letters To the Editor There’s a fair amount of cognitive dissonance going on in the way we think about recycling. For sure, the idea makes everybody feel warm and fuzzy, especially here in Santa Cruz. It’s one of those rare movements that pretty much everybody can get behind, other than corporate execs who still value...
Portrait of the Artist
‘Mr. Turner’ captures a brutish, observant artist living in a brutish time. THERE’S A SCENE in Skyfall where Daniel Craig’s James Bond is meeting with his quartermaster (Ben Whishaw) at the British National Gallery. Our hero is seated in front of J.M.W. Turner’s 1838 painting “The Fighting Temeraire.” It depicts a ship, once part of the...
From The Editor
Plus Letters To the Editor The natural landscape of Santa Cruz County is a big part of why so many people want to live here. Not everybody loves the beach, it’s true, and I guess there might be someone somewhere who doesn’t like the redwoods. But if you don’t like the beach or the redwoods, you...