1. Ranger danger: Park may get ax

    The city's park ranger positions are once again on the chopping block as Oakland seeks to close a $42 million deficit. The City Council heard recommendations for budget cuts from Mayor Ron Dellums on Tuesday night — among them eliminating all park ranger positions and replacing them with city police.


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  2. Thousands flock to Rockridge street festival

    • Published:
      1. The Montclarion, October 02, 2008
    • Metainfo:
      • 548 words
      • 18.3 inches

    AN ESTIMATED 15,000 to 20,000 people flocked to College Avenue on Sunday to enjoy live music, fashion, food, drink and family-oriented entertainment at the annual Out & About in Rockridge '08 street fair.


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  3. Agency plans grand finale for 'Seed to Harvest' campaign

    Doing good and eating well, Bay Area Community Services will celebrate its harvest of cash and a charitable commitment to sustainable food next week. BACS invites the community to commemorate the final phase of its summer-long "Seed to Harvest" fundraising effort, which has raised nearly $100,000. The proceeds will go toward a green cause — funding the nonprofit organization's switch to sustainable, farm-to-table practices for its Meals on Wheels program.


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  4. Parking permits just got pricier

    A City Council committee approved a hike in parking permit fees and recommended the "inefficient" permit program for a performance audit. The Finance and Management Committee on Tuesday voted to increase fees for residential and business parking permit applications and renewals, which have remained constant since the program's inception in the 1980s.


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  5. Residents discuss Village beautification plan

    • Published:
      1. The Montclarion, September 25, 2008
    • Metainfo:
      • 451 words
      • 15.0 inches

    Hills residents met to discuss a Montclair Village beautification project that is years in the making — and as yet unfunded. If resident pleas are heeded and the initial plans implemented, villagers can expect decorative sidewalks and planters, signature signage and banners, doggie drinking fountains, new trees and improved pedestrian safety through additional lighting and higher profile crosswalks.


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  6. Ex-Peace Corps volunteer describes experience in Georgia

    • Published:
      1. The Montclarion, September 20, 2008
    • Metainfo:
      • 633 words
      • 21.1 inches

    There are many different Georgias. A Macon, Ga., native offered testimony of this reality and his experiences as a Peace Corps volunteer in that other Georgia, the Republic of Georgia, at the Oakland Public Library's Rockridge branch Monday night.


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  7. Attacking litter by land and sea

    By land and by sea, Alamedans will clean their shoreline during the 24th Annual Coastal Cleanup Day on Saturday. The event usually brings out several hundred local volunteers each year who join tens of thousands of Californians in beautifying coastal and inland waters throughout the state. Last year, more than 60,000 volunteers collected some 900,000 pounds of trash statewide, according to the Coastal Cleanup Day Web site.


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  8. Review of The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball

    • Published:
      1. The Fanzine, August 05, 2008
    • Metainfo:
      • 1277 words
      • 42.6 inches

    There is a certain hedonistic pleasure I derive from watching a baseball game on television, from first pitch to final out. Many find the couch-potato approach to ballgame spectatorship augments what is seen as an inherent, lamentable slowness in the game, and prefer to experience the screen version in a public place, often with alcohol and other people, like a sports bar.


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  9. Mass Deception

    While the profile of the relief pitcher has shifted significantly in recent decades from unusable starter and last-gasp late-inning replacement to high-paid lynchpin closer, set-up man, and set-up set-up man, the bullpen notoriously remains a bastion of clubhouse quacks and irregulars. Cordoned off in irregularly designed, hard-to-see and hard-to-see-from quarters of the modern ballpark, relief pitchers usually have very little reason to corral their eccentricities.


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  10. Review of A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow

    • Published:
      1. Pleiades, January 01, 2008
    • Metainfo:
      • 855 words
      • 28.5 inches

    Inasmuch as Noah Eli Gordon plays a kind of sensual archaeologist to the worn-down landscapes of language in his new collection, "A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow," the title is a gross-fangled reflection of his poetry's more dainty excavation of the referent. He scratches away at bones, words, colors, and semi-quavers buried beneath the cracked land that obstructs like the dizzying sheen of the systematic modes Benjamin called "language"—the visual arts, mathematics, spoken and written English, etc.


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