Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

Our family is “going fishing” — literally, with our son — but kudos to The Center for the Arts for bringing Sandra Bernhard to town this weekend. Here’s a blast from the past:

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Editor’s note: Katz’s Deli in New York is legendary. Here’s an email I received from them:

We are so excited to announce Katz’s Delicatessen’s 125th Anniversary celebration weekend!

Friday May 31st- James Beard Award winner Danny Bowien of Mission Chinese Food, Bill Telepan of Telepan, Joey Campanaro of The Little Owl, Market Table, and Quality Clam, along with Pastry chef Sarabeth Levine will be the chefs interpreting Katz’s Delicatessen staples for a Shabbat dinner with all proceeds benefiting Henry Street Settlement!

For tickets, please CLICK HERE.

Saturday June 1st- 125th Anniversary Community Celebration continues, stop by and see live music from our stage inside Katz’s, with festivities that will run all day

Sunday June 2nd- we will be participating in the DayLife Festival on Orchard Street between East Houston and Stanton Street for another fun filled day of events. Come watch or enter the first ever Katz’s Delicatessen World Pastrami Eating Championship! There are 3 amateur spots to fill, if you think you can do it, sign up now!

If you want to eat ALOT of pastrami enter our eating championship HERE.

Follow us on these NOW, and all anniversary weekend to keep in the loop!
Facebook- Katz’s Delicatessen
Twitter- @katzsdeli, #katzs125
Instagram- Katzsdeli

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My wife and I watched the public hearing on Measure L expenditures in Nevada City between the Giants’-Colorado baseball game. We are NCTV regulars.

The meeting was “nearly deserted,” as The Union accurately stated. There will be no citizen’s oversight committee on Measure L was the bottom line. The Council will handle that; after all, that’s why they were elected (or in the case of two of the five, appointed) was the rationale.

The City Manager reiterated his spending recommendations, and the Finance Director got up and spoke A LOT.

The Council managed to interject our name — “The Pellines” — into the conversation a few times (we wondered if it was “code” or something), because we happily hosted a meeting of some neighbors who were concerned about Measure L with some City Hall folks.

One of them was at the meeting, and he was well spoken, noting that Grass Valley formed a citizen’s oversight committee for its sales-tax measure. The City Hall folks couldn’t remember the other neighbor’s name, though she has lived here for years. Still, it was a respectful discussion last night.

The issue all along has never been whether to support a sales tax; it has been whether a tax that isn’t targeted toward certain expenditures is prudent public policy. (We were big boosters of the street-repair tax).

Sure enough, it looks like Measure L is going to be a “piggy-bank” for a lot of causes — from a courthouse study to more ergonomic chairs at City Hall. I hope it works out for all of us, and the money is spent wisely. The good news is that it can build up the city’s dwindling general fund reserve.

Thanks to my neighbor Wally and the owner of J.J. Jackson’s for showing up. (She was well spoken about somehow reinvesting into the businesses that generated the sales tax — something my wife brought up as we discussed our own ideas before the meeting).

I wondered about a new downtown parking structure, something that’s been discussed off-and-on for years, or money for tourism (that’s what Grass Valley did), but none of that came up.

Meanwhile, in another world, the Giants rallied to beat the Rockies after being down 6-0, an exciting comeback. Matt Cain got the win.

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One thing I enjoy about our community is that people live happily in “parallel universes.” It happens all the time — in business, social settings and politics.

In January 2012, we pointed out how social media in our community got the jump on the Humpty Dumpty fire in GV. The nighttime fire was reported in real time on Facebook, generating more than 200 comments, including first-hand video and photos from “citizen journalists.” It was a watershed in local social media reporting. The write-up is here.

Yet at the same time, in a parallel universe, The Union proudly announced today an in-house award from its Nevada-based parent, Swift, for, guess what? “Best breaking news coverage” among newspapers in the chain for coverage of the Humpty Dumpty fire.

Good going to both!

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This is on the agenda for the Grass Valley Planning Commission on Tuesday, May 21:

Subject: A proposed amendment to the General Plan Circulation Element, to add a policy that specifies that Level of Service (LOS) E is acceptable for six intersections in the historic downtown area

Location: 1) Mill and Neal Streets; 2) West Main and Mill Streets; 3) West Main and Church Streets; 4) West Main and School Streets; 5) Bank and South Auburn Streets; 6) State Route 20/49 Southbound ramp and Bennett Street
Applicant: City of Grass Valley
Zoning/General Plan: Various
Environmental Status: Reliance of two previously certified Environmental Impact
Reports

The proposed project is an amendment to the General Plan Circulation Element. The
specific amendment is the addition of one new policy which implements Circulation Element Implementation Program 7-CI (IP7-CI). IP7-CI allows the City Council to adjust the level of service standard at certain intersections after the City performs an analysis of the factors listed in the program. As part of this project, the City performed the analysis with respect to Implementation Program 7-CI and found it is necessary to relax the LOS standard at the six intersections listed in the following proposed policy:

The staff report is here.

Background:
Level of service (LOS) is a measure used by traffic engineers to determine the effectiveness of elements of transportation infrastructure.

Level-of-Service E describes operations at capacity. Flow becomes irregular and speed varies rapidly because there are virtually no usable gaps to maneuver in the traffic stream and speeds rarely reach the posted limit. Vehicle spacing is about 6 car lengths, however speeds are still at or above 50 mi/h(80 km/h). Any disruption to traffic flow, such as merging ramp traffic or lane changes, will create a shock wave affecting traffic upstream. Any incident will create serious delays. Driver’s level of comfort become poor.[1] LOS E is a common standard in larger urban areas, where some roadway congestion is inevitable.

More information is here.

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Editor’s note: Two sailboats is enough for a family of three, even lifelong sailors. We bought ours (a Catalina 22′ named “Fantasia”) but inherited the other from my wife’s Dad. It is a gem. We spent some money on refurbishment after it sat in his backyard for years, and we have enjoyed sailing it at Scotts Flat Lake and Lake Tahoe. It was an emotional decision to put it up for sale on “Latitude 38,” the bible for sailboat enthusiasts. And we received an amazing response this week. After reading this, I think we should hold onto it.

Shannon,

I built your boat. I didn’t expect to see one trawling the Classy Classifieds here in California. I figured they were all on the Gulf coast or up in Baltimore which is where the owner of the company managed to sell most of them. At the time I was living on a dirt road outside of Amarillo, Texas and raising heck out in the desert. I found a boat shop that looked pretty cool, Blue Water Boat Works, and took a job there. It was Dave Autry’s business. Dave staked his company (as he had done before) playing pool. He and his wife Linda ran the company. A born-again Christian (and great guy) named Doug Crow was the shop manager. Except for making the bowsprit I did your mahogany work (including installing toerails etc. and the bowsprit), mounted all your deck rigging, did the main seal between the hull and deck, mounted the rudder, etc. There was a carpenter in the woodshop who worked with Dave making the patterns etc. Dave and Doug usually did the running rigging. The Imron on your mast was sprayed in the fiberglassing chop booth. For 1980 that’s one heavy boat. There were about 6 guys who did the fiberglass work. They poured a lot of chop and roving into that boat. Given the price of oil (hence resin) Dave didn’t make much money on those boats (hence a good thing he could play pool). I imagine blisters have been few and far between. It’s not got much draft but with the full keel it tracks like a train. The self tending cutter made it really easy for novices to sail. It’s a pretty fair hull. It had a baby sister design with a smaller, similar hull that was cat rigged. I’d not heard of a Blackwatch since I left Texas not long after your boat was built. I don’t know what happened to the company or how many more boats were built after I left. I hope she’s treated you well. Good luck selling her.

David

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(click for larger image)

“Twitter has the capacity to ignite revolutions and enable small acts of kindness, but there’s also a darker side to the microblogging network,” according to Mashable.

“Floating Sheep, a group of geography academics, created the ‘Geography of Hate,’ which maps racist, homophobic and ableist tweets in the U.S. After searching for all geotagged tweets in North America between June 2012 and April 2013, students at Humboldt State University manually read and coded the sentiment of each tweet to determine if a specific word was used in a positive, negative or neutral way. In a blog post, Floating Sheep cited ‘dyke’ as an example: While the word is a homophobic slur against lesbian people, it can also be used positively (e.g. “dykes on bikes #SFPride).

“In total, over 150,000 geotagged tweets contained a hateful slur that was deemed negative. Using the data, Floating Sheep determined the ratio of hateful tweets to overall tweets in each county.

“‘Hateful tweets were aggregated to the county level and then normalized by the total number of tweets in each county. This then shows a comparison of places with disproportionately high amounts of a particular hate word relative to all tweeting activity,‘ the group said.

“Orange County, Calif., for example, has the highest absolute number of tweets containing slurs, but due to its high level of overall Twitter activity, the hateful tweets are less prominent, and therefore are not that conspicuous on the map.

“Floating Sheep has three main categories of hateful tweets — homophobic, racist and disability — under which are subcategories for specific slurs.

Click through the detailed map, here, including our area.

And for in-depth analysis of the results, read the entire blog post, here.

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