Uneasy Rhetoric

Zwahlen Images posted a whole passel of photographs of Sacramento at night over on the Skyscraper Forums.  Check them out.

It’s the most wonderful time of the year. A time of heat, a time of grilling, a time of emptying your wallet of its contents for just a little taste of the world’s best salmon.  But if you’re trying to eat locally, like, within a hundred miles of Sacramento, don’t bother reading on.

Copper River salmon is back, and it’s as expensive as ever: $29.99 a pound at Taylors. Unfortunately, at those prices, I’m almost afraid to cook it.

I first tasted Copper River salmon when I lived in Oregon where, even though we were awash in local salmon, grocery stores would hang big banners proclaiming the availability of this Alaskan wonderfish.

What makes it so great? Copper River salmon tends to have redder flesh than most wild salmon. It’s more oily, more fatty. The taste is much stronger, so if you’re not a fan of fatty fish, you might want to avoid it. I love the stuff and have it at least once, and usually only once, a year. I’ll probably wait to see who else gets it, if I can get it for a few dollars less a pound, and I’ll probably only buy a half pound (a four-ounce cut of this fish will go a long way).

It will be baked, lightly seasoned with olive oil, salt, and pepper. I won’t risk this fish on the grill.

LivingInUrbanSac has decided to walk the walk and after talking to a set of movers and shakers, has pulled together a neighborhood meeting on how to make Fremont Park a better neighborhood park.

Fremont Park was an important, if somewhat underutilized, part of my childhood, so I’ve always looked at it and its chronic problems with crime and homelessness (problems that are probably blown a little out of proportion) through rose-colored glasses.

So if you’re the kind of person who believes that the downtown/midtown residential districts should be vibrant places to live as well as to cruise through on your over-priced one-speeds as you try to look cool and groan about Starbucks, you owe it to yourself to attend.

I’ll be there if I can juggle work and family commitments:

Wednesday June 11th, 6:00pm at William Land Elementary School (12th & U)

Sacramento Regional Transit has a golden opportunity to raise its profile and it has dropped the ball.

One of the myriad ways CalTrans is suggesting people avoid the whole I-5 mess during the next couple months is by taking transit. Granted, those likely most affected by the construction will be those living north and south of town, and as we well know, RT doesn’t serve any neighborhood very well that didn’t exist prior to the early 1970s (and even then, some of those it doesn’t serve so well). Nevertheless, transit should be one alternative.

RT could take the I-5 lemons and made lemonade. It could work with the North Natomas TMA or on its own to provide additional lines of service into that area. It could put more buses onto some of the main lines affected by the I-5 closure and increase service frequency. If enough people rode these buses and found them useful, perhaps these could become permanent changes. At the very least, RT could be using Fix I-5 as a marketing opportunity — a chance to convince people to ride the bus.

Instead, RT chose to ignore the fruit basket. Like an increasing number of people, I get my information from websites. If I wanted to find out what RT was doing to play its part in helping Sacramento cope with the temporary loss of a major freeway, I would visit www.sacrt.com, and I would find…nothing. As of this evening, RT’s website does not mention the I-5 project. Even when I click on “Rider Alerts,” I don’t find any information.

Area transit services are little better. Yolobus has no information on the I-5 closure, but Etran posted the alternate information for its affected route. Yuba-Sutter Transit has a link to the Fix I-5 project, but, as far as I can tell, no additional information. The North Natomas TMA posted information about how the closure will impact its shuttle service.

With oil prices on a permanent upward trend, and with ridership already way up, here is yet another opportunity to get people to start that arduous cultural shift away from the single-occupancy automobile.

Quo vadis, Regional Transit?

Reed College, alma mater of Barbara Ehrenreich, Gary Snyder, and yours truly, bests the previous historical record by one month. A scholar, researching an article for the alumni rag, stumbled across an old recording in the Reed library of Alan Ginsburg reading the first section of “Howl.” This recording predates the previously believed-to-be-earliest recording by a month.

Listen to the recording.