Community
For East Bay residents who don’t already ride BART, today may be the day to start. In a bid to win back the riders it has lost during the slumping economy of the last several years, BART has declared this week “Try BART Week,” and is offering a wide array of valuable prizes to lure riders to their trains—starting right here in Oakland.
The signature teal color of an old-school iMac stood out among a hodgepodge of items. There was a Sierra Nevada box filled with torn packaging envelopes, complete with stamps and postmarked dates. The one-man crew of 21 Grand—a downtown Oakland gallery and performance space—was purging everything that had accumulated in storage for the last decade, but the venue’s “emergency rummage sale” a couple of weeks ago wasn’t just an effort to collect a few bucks. It was to make the month’s rent.
Computer animation sprang into public consciousness in 1995 with Pixar’s film, Toy Story. Fifteen years later, the studio has turned out nearly a dozen feature length films from its East Bay headquarters, and now kids at an Oakland middle school are getting a chance to get in on act of animating. Listen to the full story on Oakland North Radio.
Oakland Tech head coach Delton Edwards, or Coach D, as he is warmly known among his program, is always around. 24-7 and 365 days a year, he likes to say. “Always,” says the 48-year-old. “You know how you bond with something? A lot of those coaches, they were a big influence on my life.”
As the Giants hosted the San Diego Padres on October 3, a long white banner peeked above the right field wall of AT&T Park. The sign, attached to the rigging of a yacht anchored in what Giants fans call “McCovey Cove,” did not support either team. Instead, the banner spelled out a political message in black block letters: Free Johannes Mehserle. Strung along the base of the boat was another banner listing a website, Justice4Johannes.com.
If you have a car—preferably one that’s insured, reasonably new, and clean—starting in January, it could make you money every time you park. All you have to do is let a few strangers drive it. This kind of car-sharing is not unheard of in California, but a new state law is about to make it easier to rent out your car when you don’t need it.
Oakland’s Asian Cultural Center forum brought the ten mayoral candidates together to share their views on issues important to Asian American communities including equal language access, crime prevention and business revitalization.
A complaint recently filed with the Oakland Public Ethics Commission has raised a debate about whether contact with a public official by a business leader constitutes lobbying. The complaint alleges that six prominent Oakland business leaders have lobbied their governmental officials without being registered to do so.
The Oracle Arena was filled with powerful music Saturday evening, as Bay Area church choirs competed before an enthusiastic crowd of 10,000 in the annual “How Sweet the Sound” gospel choir competition.