March Madness is heating up this week in Anaheim, where UCSB’s Gauchos are among the college basketball teams facing a do-or-die scenario. It is the national pastime at this time of year-hundreds of teams striving to earn one of the 64 berths in the NCAA tournament that begins next Thursday, March 15. They will be seeded No. 1 through No. 16 in four regions, an orderly picture that will become mish-mashed in a matter of hours when the first upsets occur.
Engaging in not-so-subtle competitive chest-thumping, the City of Santa Barbara’s Redevelopment Agency explained how it repossessed an affordable condominium from an owner who’d twice started methamphetamine-related fires and illegally obtained a loan on the property.
Anew idea is circulating among green building proponents about remodeling: The greenest building is the one that is already built. In other words, an existing home is a great place to start a green building project-in fact, it’s the ultimate recycling project.
The Santa Barbara Public Library System has selected Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins to launch its first family- and youth-oriented Santa Barbara Reads program.
During the first scenes of a movie, do you ever wonder what universe it might inhabit? What laws are in effect? Some movies seem rooted in the real, some the fantastic; most display a blend of filmmaker obsessions and form demands we gradually figure out-from slapstick modes to the rainy nights of noir. With Joel Schumacher, an unevenly good director who lives in Carpinteria today, I often just feel disconnected.
A City Council subcommittee embraced a series of campaign finance disclosure reforms that would grant Santa Barbara residents online access to information about how much city council candidates were getting and from whom.
The 3/6 announcement that a pair of bald eagles laid an egg in a nest on Santa Cruz Island has some biologists hoping the species may yet make a comeback in the Channel Islands.
Even this company’s name is defiant: If there’s one noun in the English language that isn’t ordinarily plural, it’s “universes.” Obviously, these guys don’t play by the rules.
Davis Buss is one of the leading lights of evolutionary psychology, a controversial discipline holding that human psychology was designed via natural selection to solve problems faced by ancestors who lived in hunter-gatherer societies way back home in the Pleistocene epoch.
When you have become the world’s best-known classical musician well before turning 40, what is left for you to do? When he took the first step in creating the Silk Road Project in 1998, Yo-Yo Ma seemed to have little to prove and not much motivation to change his routine: Wake up in a luxurious hotel suite in some world capital, practice for a few hours, then perform in front of yet another distinguished (and sold-out) audience.
