life on the central coast, early december version

Let's see. I've missed a bunch of interesting stories in the last month . . .
Two youth reports came out in the same week and nobody thought to look at them together. One: youth crime is down in general. Two: local schools report a signifigant increase in disciplinary action (suspensions, expulsions). In the last few years, there have been policement assigned to nearly every high school and several middle schools and elementary schools.

It has been reasserted that the University can lergally do anything it damn well wants to in terms of growth with or without county approval, but they've decided that they'd better maek a show at least of listening to "the community" which is feeling old and pushed around lately. It's not a simple issue. There really are some limited resources in this little county: limited fresh water, limited land, limited transportation. So when the University grows there's a lot of pressure in those areas. On the other hand, the state just keeps growing -- entirely due to immigration: if it weren't for the children of immigrants we's have a negative growth rate (I do not point this out to bolster some stupid anti-immigration argument, just to wedge in an aside that birth control is actually working here). And as the state keeps growing, the number of young people to educate and the number of researchers to employ just goes up, right? and so the University has to grow. I say twistthe University's arm to pay for the desalination plant and a backbone light rail and a more rational solid waste recycle/landfill etc. program, and maybe something about power generation too, and then welcome the lads and lasses with open arms. They're our children.

So the most-unaffordable communities study has come out again, and we've slipped! We're now the seventh most unaffordable community in the country. I didn't catch all the other places in the top 10, but a bunch were in the state: San Jose/Silicon Valley, Salinas, Merced, San Diego I think, and of course San Francisco. Was LA in it? I forget. Unaffordable is a comparison of housing costs and wages, so there are places with more expensive housing that fall lower in the list if the people who live there are all wealthy.

The newspaper reports that the defeat of Arnold Schwarzenegger's Proposition 78 "puts $18 thousand in each classroom" locally, but really there's no new money there -- that's money that was there that hasn't been taken away! This is how they always talk about money for the schools. Every budget item is "new" money for the schools, but it almost never really is. Oh, and after decades of school districts locally being pressured to split up fso white neighborhoods can be out from under the burden of having to share with other neighborhoods that aren't so white, the local districts are looking into ways to merge various functions for economies of scale. I've always said the county was too small for eight school districts (three of which are one-school districts!), but now I'm suspicious that the "economy" will be laying off craft workers, not administrators, and those administrators who will be laid off will be trtenches-dwelling vice principals in charge of standing around at bus loading time and stuff, rather than the top guys.

Big University scandals about special perks and bennies given to top administrators, including the recently arrived and just departed chancellors of UCSC as well as one from other campuses. Some jerkoff commentator attributed it to a cabal of lesbians rather than regular old-fashioned old-boy patronage and corruption with some women in it as well as some men.

We had out first power-outing rainstorm yesterday, but now it's cold and clear. No chanterelles yet, but a satisfying bunch of boletes and a calyptrata.

Newspaper articles, one day after the other: local flower growers are fighting it out tooth and nail witrh foreign flower growers: but flower peddlars make a better living than you'd think they would.

And there you have it. Life on the Central Coast. Minus a couple-few murders and burglaries, I guess, and the natural deaths of notable people.

I forget whether I reported last time about Medicare deciding that Santa Cruz is still a rural county. I just looked up the population density: 222/square kilometer. Less than half of Santa Clara County, but dang, Siskiyou's got something like 1. More to the point, they pay "rura;" doctors some outrageous amount less than "urban" doctors, and well, we know what costs are like here.

I wonder if the real consideration is that our doctors treat farmworkers? And so therefore should be paid less no matter what? If so, that's creepy.

But I think it was just they didn't want to pay more, period, and so they didn't, because they can do what they want.

Pride and Prejudice

So every few years they make a new Pride and Prejudice. There's always something to look for: some take on the characters, some point about society or gender, some esthetic thing.

This year's model presented a parade of extremely shy boys. D'Arcy is clearly miserable and shy from the moment he walks in: Collins has Asperger's: even Wickham is sincerely tongue-tied and has to work up his courage when he's doing his con-man thing (the Wickham-Elizabeth relationship is truncated). Bingley is clearly one of the Weasley brothers. It was not the sexiest D'Arcy ever, but he was my absolute favorite. You know the speech "I love you against my better jedgement?" This is the first time I've ever seen it delivered -- except in "Bride and Prejudice" -- where I didn't want to kick D'Arcy's teeth in. He stumbles over it, rushing to get it out of the way, blundering and stuttering, and you can tell it's something he thought he was supposed to say in order to be honest, and his devastation is really sweet. He's not as surprised to be turned down as other D'Arcy's have been, but he's more shocked, since he hadn't really planned any farther than getting his little speech out.

Another thing in this year's model is a kind of robust pastoralism masquerading as realism. I liked it, but I like to sing songs like "Country Life" and "All the Little Chickens in the Garden" too, so I think I was being pandered to. Anyway, the dancing was the best dancing I've ever seen in a Pride and Prejudice: a bunch of country gentry really having a good time. And the Bennet's house is better than ever, too, because usually you can't tell by looking at the Bennets that they are quite poor, and in this one you can, though they always seem to have too much food on the table.

Alas, though they seem to have gone to some trouble to conjure up nineteenth-century minds for the actors to portray, pretty credibly I think, they still for some reason utterly neglected to get any nineteenth-century body language down except during the dance scenes. And the last scene, just before the credits, is inexcusable.

Kiera Knightley does the big eyes part right, but she always looks like she's about to drag those Empire gowns on to the soccer pitch. I understand she's supposed to be a little hoydenish, but she doesn't look like a tomboy: she looks like Kiera Knightley.

Donald Southerland's take on Mr. Bennet is that he's suffering from some deep-seated depression and hiding in his books and butterflies. I can't express what it is about this that is different from other Mr. Bennets. Oh, he seems to love Mrs. Bennet, and not just tolerate her with amused contempt like the other Mr. Bennets do. Mrs. Bennet is a little less stupid than in other productions, a little more clear-eyed about the danger her giorls are in, though she's still a goose.

And they still didn't get Mary -- in the book she's very accomplished on the piano, just overly academic and boring in her delivery, not actually grating.

But Charlotte Lucas takes the prize! And she makes getting Collins look like that's the prize!

Lucy-Bob says check it out. Goose fu and gratuitous naked marble sculpture.