Columnists

The new year is ushering in the good, the bad and the ugly of wine trends. Some of the following will no doubt fall into more than one category.

Medical insurance used to be so simple. Expensive, but simple. We paid bucketloads in monthly premium dollars, and for that I got to go see the doctor where I deposited the "co-pay." How easy was that?

"An evil action cannot be justified by reference to a good intention." - St. Thomas Aquinas

Society and the media lead us to believe that having lots of money and material things is the ticket to happiness. Recent research suggests otherwise.  Let’s look at money as an example.  

While shopping over the holidays, I ran into an old friend. "It's great to see you, but you're literally half the person I remember," I told her. She had dramatically lost weight, having recently undergone a gastric bypass - a stomach stapling surgery performed on obese people to rapidly lose weight.

On Sunday, Jan. 15, Bethany Community Church will host its third annual prayer breakfast honoring the great U.S. civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It will be held at 8:30 a.m. in the Gavilan College Student Union Cafeteria; admission is $25 for adults and $15 for children.

In 1957, musical theatre was dramatically changed with the Broadway opening of multi-award winning "West Side Story". Leonard Bernstein's music and Jerome Robbins' choreography raised the bar for musicals forever.

Does anyone remember the chaos some predicted when the calendar propelled into the year 2000? Now here we are 12 years later, welcoming the New Year.

Four years ago, I wrote a column promoting California's high-speed rail project. I believed then, and I believe now, that linking cities throughout the Golden State with a bullet train that travels from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours will provide tremendous economic benefits. Unfortunately, a lot has happened with HSR that has tarnished much of my optimism for the project.