Imagine you decide you want to own a restaurant. Not any restaurant, but a prominently located and heavily trafficked restaurant on State Street. Let’s say, like most business deals in Santa Barbara, it doesn’t happen overnight. In fact, it takes seven months to negotiate the purchase, during which time you find out you’re expecting a baby. One would think this scenario ranks fairly high on the list of life’s stressful situations.
Santa Barbara City police are in the midst of an enforcement campaign against homeless people loitering by the Cabrillo softball
If you can’t get out of town this summer for an official vacation, why not act like a tourist in your own backyard? Besides the obvious attractions like our beaches and shopping, Santa Barbara is brimming with cultural and historical tours to suit just about anyone’s fancy. Here are some of our favorites:
John Pittman, a major player in Santa Barbara architectural circles, died on 7/29, succumbing to lung cancer at age 75.
1) Today, the name Ralph Nader is more likely to evoke anger than affection in the minds of Bush-bashing liberal Americans. Following Al Gore’s loss in the 2000 presidential election, Nader became a scapegoat for the problematic eight-year reign of W-and perhaps rightly so.
The fast-growing Big Sky Documentary Film Festival is ready for submissions through September 1. The fifth annual event, which features a nonfiction competition for features, shorts, mini-docs, and best American West doc, will occur February 14-20 in Missoula. For more info, see bigskyfilmfest.org.
ThisWeekinHistory
DJ Fenstar will be spinning vinyl at the Contemporary Arts Forum’s Let’s Dance! Forum Lounge. The event takes place in conjunction with 1st Thursday and features a screening of Dance for Camera, a collection of the best dance sequences in film as selected by audience members at European and North American film festivals.
The August 31, 2007, issue of Wine Spectator (already on the stands) brought good news to 10 area restaurants, all winners of the magazine’s coveted best wine list awards. Once again, the Wine Cask (813 Anacapa St., 966-9463) led the pack as one of 76 international Grand Award winners “given to restaurants that show an uncompromising, passionate devotion to the quality of their wine programs,” not to mention a minimum of 1,500 selections.
Spain had claimed California 242 years before the Spanish finally paid attention to Santa Barbara. But Russian hunters from the north were showing interest in the area’s fur-bearing animals, the English were beginning to explore California’s shores, and it was time to protect Santa Barbara from foreign invasion.
