‘Muppets Most Wanted’ keeps the recently rebooted franchise alive
You know you’re not in Kansas anymore when a movie features a Tony Bennett-Lady Gaga duet and a homage to Ingmar Bergman in the first 15 minutes. Welcome to the fractured fairy tale world of The Muppets, returning to the big screen in, Muppets Most Wanted, the second installment of their recently rebooted franchise.
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New study analyzes the local availability and marketing of food, alcohol and tobacco
Adults may pay little mind to the barrage of advertisements plastered on the exteriors of corner markets and liquor stores, but children take them in—unhealthy messaging and all, says Dr. Lisa Hernandez, health officer for Santa Cruz County.
Almost 2,000 hens from Northern California need to be placed in new homes or face execution
Approximately 1,800 chickens from a Northern California farm that have aged past their egg-bearing prime—about 1-and-a-half to 2 years old—need to be placed in homes before the second week of April or face certain death by poison gas.
When a farmer’s chickens stop producing an economically viable number of eggs, the birds are routinely put down. In California, the common means of death is by gas.
Kim Sturla, executive director for Animal Place, a rescue organization headquartered on 600 acres in Grass Valley, helped to create a unique program in which the staff proactively contacts chicken egg farmers across the state and requests that they give their “spent” hens over to them as an alternative to the death sentencing. Animal Place then works with the SPCA and various animal shelters, such as the one belonging to Santa Cruz County, to place the chickens in new homes. Animal Place dubs these collaborators their “flock partners,” Sturla says.
Viognier 2012
A trip to Loma Prieta Winery is well worth a visit. Situated at about 2,600 feet in the Santa Cruz Mountains, it is like being on top of the world—and the view of the Monterey Bay is spectacular. Loma Prieta’s wines are wonderful, which makes it even more worthwhile to take a jaunt to their impressive property.
The Apache Relay explores new sonic territory on third album
When it came time to record its third album, The Apache Relay made the bold decision to shake things up a bit. The self-titled release, which arrives April 22, marks a departure from the pop/indie-rock sound which characterized the Nashville band’s sophomore album, 2011’s American Nomad, and earned the band a spot in the lineup on Mumford & Sons’ wildly popular Gentlemen of the Road Tour in 2012.
Jack Bowers has had an impressive career so far. The local musician first entered the scene in the 1970s with electric folk-rock band Oganookie. “We used to play at the old Catalyst, where Bookshop Santa Cruz is now, every Saturday night,” Bowers recalls. Back then, there were far fewer bands in the area, so steady gigs and a loyal following weren’t hard to find. “Our band lived up on a commune up in Brookdale in the San Lorenzo Valley,” he says. “We used to gig with Asleep at the Wheel and Commander Cody—we knew how to have fun.”
Every 20 years, Time magazine depicts people in their 20s as “lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow.” This time the target is the Millennial generation (Americans born between roughly 1980 and 2000, with Baby Boomer parents). According to (cough, cough) the Boomer-run media, twentysomethings/Gen Y/Millennials are narcissists.
Whatever.
The Santa Cruz journalism scene would not have been as contentious, creative, or subversive in the 1970s and ‘80s without Buz Bezore. And it wouldn’t have been nearly as much fun. When Buz sauntered off to the newsroom in the Great Beyond last week, Santa Cruz lost a little piece of itself.
I met Buz years before either of us landed a job in the newspaper biz, when we were both students at UCSC. We had a two-quarter, multi-media class together at College V (now Porter) called The ‘20s and ‘30s in America; we read Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Gertrude Stein, and we watched a lot of movies in class—Busby Berkeley musicals, crime melodramas, screwball comedies.
Monterey author offers pointers for effective communication in new book
We can all recall a time when we reacted poorly in a social situation—whether it was in response to an insensitive remark, a missed curfew, a sudden change of plans, or otherwise. While hurtful words and damaged feelings are natural reactions to such emotional triggers, Dr. Carl Alasko, a recently retired psychotherapist based in Monterey, believes he has the answer to gracefully navigating these situations.
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