News-Press owner Wendy P. McCaw is not content having merely a bee in her bonnet. As befitting someone of her exalted status, McCaw has a whole hive living there. Maybe this fact explains the extraordinary longevity of a story-the sad saga of the News-Press meltdown-that has more legs than a herd of centipedes.
One Friday afternoon late last August, Bruce Caron, a one-time urban anthropologist turned multimedia consultant, was projecting a very scary map on a wall of the University Club, Santa Barbara’s citadel of tradition and accomplishment. The map, prepared by UCSB’s geography department, was of downtown Santa Barbara. But it showed a very different city from the one we now know. It predicted what Santa Barbara would look like if Greenland’s vast prehistoric ice sheets were to melt, causing the world’s sea levels to rise about 21 feet. Contemplating this cataclysmic possibility were Santa Barbara Mayor Marty Blum and two well-respected scientists from UCSB’s Bren School of Environmental Science: David Lea and Darren Hardy.
WAITING FOR THE OTHER SOCK TO DROP: I don’t know much about art, but I know what I don’t like. What I don’t like is the high-handed manner in which the people behind the Center for the Performing Arts have been acting. No doubt, they’re a great bunch. No doubt I’d like them a lot if I spent any time with them. And no doubt, I’ll love it when their wet dream comes true and the Granada Theatre is rehabilitated to its once and future splendor.
Tuesday was a bad day and I needed a jolt, so I tuned in to the president’s State of the Union speech. During the president’s six years in power, I’ve managed to condition myself to Pavlovian perfection; every time he opens his mouth, I erupt in a foamy fury of expletives that foul the air for miles around.
I’ve always hated interviewing Bill Wallace. His thoughts come rushing out in short, quick bursts. His fat-to-verbiage ratio is notoriously low, and even in short exchanges, Wallace is apt to make countless shorthand references to bureaucratic pressure points that I should understand the relevance of, but too frequently do not.
WILD AND IMPETUOUS: To steal somebody else’s line, fasten your seatbelts-it’s going to be a bumpy ride. That’s because Brooks Firestone has just taken over as chairman of the board for the county Board of Supervisors. Lurking beneath Firestone’s effervescently upper-crust and ebulliently enthusiastic exterior beats the angry heart of a hot-tempered wild man, who’s impetuous, impulsive, and impatient to boot. And did I mention thin-skinned? Whatever epidermis Firestone once had appears to have been scraped off years ago, and it definitely shows.
Though this week’s city council meeting saw the possible allocation of further Granada Theatre money pushed back to Ja. 30, future requests may be bet with stipulations from city councilmembers.
In the hushed chambers of Santa Barbara’s U.S. Bankruptcy Court, developer Bill Levy‘s intricately crafted house of cards came crashing quietly down late Thursday morning, leaving a small army of investors and creditors holding an empty bag on $90 million worth of promises.
In the singular Perry Mason moment of the Santa Barbara News-Press case against the Teamsters, embattled editorial page editor Travis Armstrong on Tuesday all but accused lead Teamster organizer Marty Keegan of stalking him. In a federal hearing room, Armstrong testified he was the acting publisher at the time of the suspicious incidentpublishers Wendy McCaw and Arthur Von Wiesenberger having left for the Mediterranean-and that he was having trouble sleeping.
If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, maybe the reverse is also true. Maybe we can get somewhere better-if not actually good-by riding the coattails of overweening egomania and shameless opportunism. I know it sounds unlikely, but no matter what, you gotta have hope. I say this having watched Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger Tuesday night as he squinted nonstop for 24 minutes into a glorious future, delivering his much-heralded State of the State address to the California Legislature.
