Late the other night my friend Joan called from the Cachuma Lake campground and asked excitedly what the string of lights was that had just tracked across their sky. Was it a UFO? Luckily, I had heard about Elon Musk’s latest launch of about 60 small satellites as part of Starlink, a satellite-based internet. I […]
Imagine yourself sans that iPhone in your back pocket — ahem, permanently glued to the palm of your hand if we are being honest — or countless work Zoom meetings where you pray that no one requires you to click the “Start Video” button. Imagine not being among the 18% increase in year-over-year in-home data […]
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Petra Beumer, owner of the Mindful Eating Institute in Santa Barbara, is also in the digital detox camp, but also knows that there are many in the South Coast community looking at themselves in the mirror and aren’t happy with the pandemic pounds they’ve added over the past 14 months. According to the American Psychological […]
My “first outside adventure” in a year (a trip to L.A. to visit my hermetically sealed mom on display for her 90th birthday doesn’t count) was on February 20, 2021. My fellow community activist, board member, and civically minded neighbor John Nicoli texted me a message: “You still looking for a shot?” he wrote, “Available […]
It is no accident that the words “kin” and “kind” are related — quite apart from the fact that Hamlet’s first words, “A little more than kin, a little less than kind,” refer to his ambiguous relationship with the man who has murdered his father and taken his place. Even today, there is understood to […]
Many of the signs we see throughout our lives are telling us not to do certain things (whether we might want to do them or not). One of the most common says, “NO TRESPASSING” – although this might confuse some people, especially children, who are taught (as I was in public school in Toronto) to […]
Republicans have railed against deficit spending for decades. But, every Republican president since 1981 has increased the Federal deficit. Only the Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama have lowered it. When the Democrats are in office, the Republicans oppose any plans to increase government spending, claiming that we can’t afford it. Even though they have no […]
One of my favorite parts of one of my favorite movies is the scene in Citizen Kane in which Susan Alexander, Charles Foster Kane’s “discovery,” is making her debut as a singer in the grand opera house he has built for her in Chicago. (Incidentally, I always wondered just what that opera is, and learned […]
The recipes – tied to each season – in Santa Barbara-based lifestyle doyenne, cook and gardener Valerie Rice’s forthcoming cookbook Lush Life: Food & Drinks from the Garden are absolutely mouth-watering. Broken into seasons, don’t let that stop you from preparing leg of lamb stuffed with feta and oregano, Hope Ranch mussels with chorizo and fennel, or Indian-spiced […]
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It appears to be something out of the Alfred Hitchcock flick The Birds for residents on Finney Street on the Summerland cliffs. The nesting cormorants who have been chased off of the eucalyptus grove aside the 101 with mylar balloons have changed just moved nesting plans just down the beach. People are pissed. Much more […]
Last month, I wrote about The Big Yellow House – now the big white house – which evoked lot of reads and plenty of memories for many people. In one of our early morning Facebook Messenger chats, Wullbrandt texted me photos of one of the old Green Gables restaurant (pre-Big Yellow House) jackets he wore, […]
A true Montecito treasure, Brad Bartholomay (November 29, 1949-December 23, 2020) went on to greener pastures in the sky a few months ago. I meant to note his passing, but was waiting for word from his beautiful daughter (Fiesta flower-girl-turned-architect) Schuyler Leigh Johnson, who I do believe got caught up in the whirlwind of grief, […]
Belated birthday greetings to Bert at the Summerland Post Office. We appreciate you!
Last Thursday, the Montecito Water District and Montecito Sanitary District held a joint strategic planning meeting to discuss options for a joint effort to recycle most of the 500,000 gallons a day of treated Montecito wastewater, now being dumped into 35 feet of ocean water, 1,500 feet off Butterfly Beach in Montecito, a practice whose […]
