Let’s talk local, first, as we often do. A couple of things have been going on in Nevada City that pertain to the town’s relationship to it’s tourists and its residents. Broad Street is the tourist district with its bars and restaurants and shops with overpriced artsy-craftsy merchandise for the tourists. I don’t mean to say that’s a bad thing. It’s this town’s bread and butter. If those tourists didn’t come here, this town would have been toast at least 25 years ago. The one business left on Broad Street which exists to serve the local residents is Bonanza Market, the ownership of which recently has changed. I hope the new owners are able to understand the subtle relationship their business has with the locals and the tourists. If they don’t, that building will soon be filled with tourist trinkets.

The city council just had a bit of an argument about an ordinance prohibiting the use of ground floor space in the downtown historical district for offices. That ordinance passed on a 4-1 vote. Steve Cottrell, as he often is, was the dissenting vote. What the council apparently wants is to keep the real estate agents out of the downtown area and keep it an exclusive enclave of bars, restaurants and tourist trinket stores. Considering the rents on Broad Street, it’s hard to imagine why a real estate agent would set up shop there, anyway, unless he or she already owns the building.

At the same time, what they call the Seven Hills district of Nevada City, the south side of Deer Creek, is crowing about a little sprucing up and new businesses opening. Nothing wrong with that, but this is the area that the tourists don’t know about, the place where the local people do business. If the tourists and the businesses which cater to them end up finding that side of town, too, the rest of us will end up in the Brunswick Basin, or worse, in Grass Valley where they shoot you for making an illegal turn. This could get ugly.

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Heard there was a major sweep of pot busts on San Juan Ridge yesterday, and the feds were involved. Don’t know details yet. We’ll probably have plenty to say about that next week.

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If you keep track of local news, or even if you just drive down Highway 49 through Grass Valley, you know that the big heart and the slogan that used to be painted on the back of the Del Oro theater are gone, and there’s been a lot of discussion about what to put on that wall in the future. Last week, The Union ran a story based partly on a letter from one of the guys who painted the old heart, a guy named Ron Ewerth who now lives in Georgia. He said, "Keep it simple. It’s a sign, not an oil painting." Personally, I’d prefer art over a sign. In fact, a blank wall would be preferable to advertising. It’s the most visible thing in Grass Valley from the highway. The city would be foolish not to put art there. You can see signs anywhere.

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The Union ran a listener’s poll last week about medical marijuana. The question was how much pot should people be allowed to have, and this is hardly a valid sample of public opinion, but I was a little surprised by the results. Out of 873 responses, only 286 said that none should be allowed, while 378 said people should be allowed to have all they want. The question, of course, pertained to people who have the medical recommendation, but I’m guessing that the two extremes are ringing in on the weed in a more general way, and the results suggest that even in this very Republican part of the world, the majority favors legalization. A little political action would seem to be the next step here. Maybe if you people weren’t smoking so much weed . . .

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A story made the rounds in the corporate press last week that this guy named Bush who thinks he’s the president told a couple of Palestinian bigwigs a couple of years ago that God told him to invade Iraq. Naturally, the White House issued emphatic denials, and simultaneously, the Bushwhacker made a televised speech in which he denounced the "radical Islamic empire" and claimed that the U.S. had disrupted at least 10 planned terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11. He provided no details. He even repeated the notion that occupying Iraq has some connection with fighting against this radical Islamic empire.

Most of the world recognizes, of course, that Dub’s line of talk is preposterous, but what’s interesting about the "God told me to do it" story and the speech which followed is the invocation of the deity in each. We western, Christian types always have assumed that the Islamic world sees it’s conflict with us as a Jihad. We are the infidels. By saying God told him to do it, then referring to the radical Islamic empire, Dub appears to be acknowledging that American soldiers are killing and dying in Iraq because it’s the Christians against the Muslims. It sounds radical and irresponsible, but it sure changes the subject from oil.