The four Democratic candidates for the 4th congressional seat will be in South Lake Tahoe on Nov. 16.
The forum will be at Lake Tahoe Community College in the board room from 6-8pm.
They will be talking about their views relating to the Lake Tahoe Basin, its issues and environment.
The seat is currently occupied by Republican Tom McClintock. The primary is in June, with the General Election in November 2018.
· Community Soup Night is Nov. 16 from 5:30-7:30pm at Coffeebar at Squaw Valley. BYO bowl and spoon. Proceeds go to Tahoe Food Hub and Slow Food Lake Tahoe. Soup and bread are $5, salad is $2.
· There will a flu clinic Nov. 2, 3-6pm at Lake Tahoe Airport. No appointment needed. Individuals must be 6 months of age or older. Cost is $10, though no one will be denied due to inability to pay.
· Art Mulcahy and Roadside Flare, the independent rock/country touring band, will be at Hard Rock Lake Tahoe’s Vinyl Showroom on Nov. 11 at 9pm. Tickets are $10. Must be 21 or older.
· Douglas County Public Library is hosting “Beauty and the Beast” (rated PG) on Nov. 4 at 2pm in the Minden Library meeting room. The movie and popcorn are free.
· On Oct. 31 from 11am-11pm there will be a fundraiser at TahoeAleWorX for the Junior Pee Wee Viking football team that is going to the Best of the West Championship on Nov. 11 in Santa Clara. They are trying to defend their title.
Publisher’s note: This is one of a series of stories about Lake Tahoe area athletes who hope to compete in the 2018 Olympics in South Korea.
By Kathryn Reed
PARK CITY, Utah – In a sport where fractions of a second can make the difference between being on the podium or not, what one wears can impact the final outcome.
“We were playing catch up the last few years with suit development. Now we may have something better,” Travis Ganong said.
Ganong, who was born in Truckee and calls Squaw Valley ski resort home, knows all about fractions of a second. At the Sochi Olympic Games in 2014 he placed fifth in downhill. He was 0.31 seconds from bronze, 0.35 from silver, and 0.41 from gold.
Will a better engineered racing suit make the difference? Maybe.
He and other U.S. Ski Team members were in North Carolina in August testing suits at the wind tunnel there. In a sport where speeds can reach 80 mph, aerodynamics and weight are the fine details that complement the athleticism required to compete at the most elite level.
Russia was Ganong’s first Olympics. He also competed in super G, where he placed 23. Since then, he has been on the downhill World Cup podium four times.
Travis Ganong is more confident in his ability to medal at the 2018 Winter Games. Photo/Kathryn Reed
At the U.S. Ski Team media summit last month in Utah, Ganong talked about how much different the course will be in PyeongChang, South Korea, compared to Sochi. He called the 2018 course “mellow,” “not that steep” and “not scary.” He also said it’s fun, there will be no room for error and that it will look great to the television audience.
While there is a new team event for the alpine racers, Ganong is opting not to participate, but instead is focusing on downhill and super G.
This time around Ganong will have experience to count on. Tactically, he said, he now knows when to push and when to hold back. Before it was all about going 100 percent.
“The mental part is what separates athletes,” Ganong said. “Now it’s easy to flip a switch when I need to go faster.”
His girlfriend, who skis for the Canadian team, is one of his sounding boards. “She’s my best mental coach,” Ganong said.
Teammates and those who helped define men’s skiing in the United States are also integral to his development. While they will be competing against each other for a spot on the team going to South Korea in February, there is a solidarity between them.
Ganong’s peers came up with the American downhiller vest. That jean vest circulates among the guys based on who placed the best. Patches and artwork have been added. It’s a source of pride to wear it in public after a race.
“We are a band of brothers. We try to beat the Europeans. We work together,” Ganong said.
Daron Rahlves, the most decorated male skier in the U.S. in downhill and Super G, calls with encouragement. He, too, lives in Truckee.
It is Truckee and Squaw that are still home to Ganong. He trains there in the off-season.
Skiing is what he knows. He was 1½ years old when he first hit the slopes. Today he wants to give back to the sport. He’s doing so by being a mentor to athletes at the Squaw Valley Academy. There are also two scholarships in Ganong’s name.
Ganong wants to instill in these youngsters a sense of enjoying the whole mountain and not just focusing on gates.
“I want to bring the fun back to ski racing,” he said. While he doesn’t see being a coach in his future, what Ganong does envision is “sharing the passion” of skiing and racing with generations to come even while he pursues his dreams to be the top downhill racer in the world.
By Lesley Bannatyne
Imagine. Pre-electricity, no moon. It’s late October, and the people whisper: This is the season for witchery, the night the spirits of the dead rise from their graves.
The wind kicks up, and branches click like skeletal finger bones. You make it home, run inside, and wedge a chair against the door. There’s a sharp rap at the window and when you turn, terrified, it’s there leering at you—a glowing, disembodied head with a deep black hole where its mouth should be.
It’s just a scooped-out pumpkin, nicked from a field by some local boys and lit from the inside with the stub of a candle.
Halloween in early 19th century America was a night for pranks, tricks, illusions, and anarchy. Jack o’lanterns dangled from sticks, and teens jumped out from behind walls to terrorize smaller kids. Like the pumpkin patches kids love today, it was good fun—until it wasn’t.
As America modernized, mischief turned to mayhem and eventually incited a movement to quell what the mid 20th-century press called the “Halloween problem”—and to make the holiday a safer diversion for youngsters. If it weren’t for the tricks of the past, there’d be no treats today.
Halloween was born nearly 2,000 years ago, in the Celtic countries of northwestern Europe.
Immigrants from Ireland and Scotland brought their Halloween superstitions to America in the 18th and 19th centuries, and their youngsters became the first American masterminds of mischief. Kids stringed ropes across sidewalks to trip people in the dark, tied the doorknobs of opposing apartments together, mowed down shrubs, upset swill barrels, rattled or soaped windows, and, once, filled the streets of Catalina Island with boats.
But when early 20th-century Americans moved into crowded urban centers, pranking took on a new edge. Kids pulled fire alarms, threw bricks through shop windows, and struck out against adults in general. They demanded sweets and threatened vandalism if they didn’t get them.
Some grown-ups fought back. Newspapers in the early 20th century reported incidents of homeowners firing buckshot at 12-year-old pranksters. “Letting the air out of tires isn’t fun anymore,” wrote the superintendent of schools of Rochester, N.Y., in a 1942 newspaper editorial. “It’s sabotage. Soaping windows isn’t fun this year. Your government needs soaps and greases for the war.” That same year, the Chicago City Council voted to abolish Halloween and instead institute a “Conservation Day” on Oct. 31. The Senate Judiciary Committee under President Harry S Truman recommended Halloween be repurposed as “Youth Honor Day” in 1950. The House of Representatives neglected to act on the motion, but on Oct. 31, 1955, in Ocala, Fla., a Youth Honor Day king and queen were crowned at a massive party sponsored by the local Moose Lodge. As late as 1962, New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. wanted to change Halloween to UNICEF Day, shifting the emphasis to charity.
By that time, the real solution was already gaining in practice. Since there were children already out demanding sweets, why not turn it into it a constructive tradition? Teach them to politely ask for sweets from neighbors, and urge adults to have treats at the ready. The 1952 Donald Duck TV cartoon “Trick or Treat” featured Huey, Dewey, and Louie, who, with the help of Witch Hazel’s potions, get Uncle Donald to give them candy instead of the explosives he first pops into their treat bags.
The transition could be slow. On one episode of “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” costumed kids come to the door, and Ozzie and Harriet are baffled. But food companies —Beatrice Foods, Borden, National Biscuit Company—quickly took notice and got into the candy business, and even tobacco companies like Philip Morris jumped in. Halloween candy and costume profits hit $300 million in 1965 and kept rising. Trick-or-treating—child-oriented and ideal for the emerging suburbs that housed a generation of Baby Boomers—became synonymous with Halloween.
For those nostalgic for Halloween mischief, all is not lost.
Query the MIT police about the dissected-and-reassembled police car placed atop the Great Dome on the college’s Cambridge campus in 1994. Or ask the New York City pranksters who decorated a Lexington Avenue subway car as a haunted house in 2008. The modern Halloween prank—be it spectacle, internet joke, entertainment, or clever subversion—is a treat in disguise, an offering that’s usually as much fun for the tricked as it is for the trickster. For that, Americans can thank the long line of pranksters who came before us
Lesley Bannatyne’s latest book, “Halloween Nation,” was nominated for a 2011 Bram Stoker Award; “Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History” celebrated 25 years in print in 2015. In 2007, Bannatyne and collaborators set the Guinness World Record for largest Halloween gathering, a title they held until 2009.
By CBS-13
Health officials say three high school students in El Dorado County have been infected with viral meningitis.
The El Dorado Union High School Districts says the three teens are students at Ponderosa High School. Health officials are now taking a look at where the kids traveled in the school and are working to inspect those areas.
Animal Coalition of Tahoe and Tahoe Beach Retreat are teaming up to offer a unique event for South Lake Tahoe. Doggie Dive-In is an opportunity for dogs to go swimming in the Tahoe Beach Retreat pool before it closes for the season.
The Doggie Dive-In will be Nov. 4 from noon to 2pm. If your dog isn’t a big swimmer or if you don’t have a dog, you’re still invited.
It’s $5 per dog to swim, and all proceeds support the ACT spay-neuter program.
The 3rd annual TBR Blizzardfest & Pray for Snow party on the beach will be that Saturday from 5-10pam.
ACT is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, all-volunteer corporation that operates the only low-cost spay-neuter program in the South Tahoe area.
For more information on the Animal Coalition of Tahoe Doggie Dive-In, email info@tahoeanimals.org.
By Mark Glover, Sacramento Bee
Jose Medina has Nov. 1 circled on his calendar, because “that’s the day the gas goes boom.”
More to the point, it’s the day that a 12-cent increase in the base gasoline excise tax goes into effect statewide.
Senate Bill 1 was signed into law earlier this year by Gov. Jerry Brown, who vigorously supported the measure that will raise more than $52 billion over the next decade to help pay for extensive road-improvement programs statewide. Public transit and other transportation programs likewise will benefit.
By Tony Berendsen
The moon is the Earth’s natural satellite, created as the result of a Mars-size object colliding with our planet billions of years ago. It is the most noticeable celestial object in our sky besides our star the sun, and is visible at night and during the day.
The moon causes the tides that mariners have timed for ages, inspired poems of love and creepy stories of lunatics. It has also inspired a generation of humans, timed with the development of rocket technology to test our ability to adventure beyond our precious atmosphere and walk on the moon’s surface.
Oct. 28 was International Observe the Moon Night. Thousands of people all over the world took part in a worldwide effort to take note of the moon, observe it through telescopes, and remember the recent history of it exploration by humans.
Many like myself grew up in a time of space adventure – not science fiction stories in books for movies, but the reality of sending astronauts into space to explore the moon. Astronauts became the heroes of a generation, spurring interest in science, math and engineering.
The Challenger Learning Center of Northern Nevada joined with UNR to put on a local event for Observe the Moon Night. They offered telescopic observing of the moon through university telescopes, and a showing of the documentary film “Mission Control, The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control.”
If you want to so some observing on your own, by eye, binoculars, or using a telescope the Astronomical League offers lunar observing programs. The programs are a great way to learn to recognize features on the moon, and learn about them at the same time. If you complete the requirements for observing per their rules they will even award a certificate to you acknowledging your effort.
Another great way to learn about the moon is to download a lunar viewing app on your phone or tablet. There are a lot of great free apps too. Not only can they tell you the dates of different phases of the moon, but maps show the names and locations of lunar features.
On July 20, 1969, humans first set foot on the Moon. It was an amazing event for humans to accomplish, venturing beyond our atmosphere, breaking the gravitational bonds of our earth. We walked, drove, planted a flag, collected rocks and soil during our visits.
Tony Berendsen runs Tahoe Star Tours. He may be reached at 775.232.0844 or tony@tahoestartours.com.
The Truckee Community Christmas nonprofit organization is beginning its annual collection.
The group for more than 25 years has provided help in the form of a large box of food items, grocery store gift cards, toys and coats to individuals and families identified as the most in need during the holiday season.
This program, which vets recipients and depends on the generosity of locals, will benefit several hundred Truckee families, teenage moms and their children and low-income or homebound seniors.
Here are ways to help:
In addition to goods and services, help is needed to sort and pack donated items at the SELS school gym on Donner Pass Road on Dec. 21 and 22. Toys will not be wrapped this year. The food drive needs assistance from volunteers too.
For those who prefer to give a tax-deductible contribution, checks may be mailed to Truckee Community Christmas, PO Box 2955, Truckee, CA 96160 or go online to donate or for more info.
California State Parks will kick off the Tahoe Fire and Fuels Team fall prescribed fire program on Nov. 1.
If conditions are favorable, prescribed fire operations will take place in D.L. Bliss State Park on the southwest end of Lake Tahoe. This operation was originally scheduled for earlier this month, but was delayed due to resource needs elsewhere.
Smoke may be visible and is expected to last through the week. To receive prescribed fire notifications, send an email to pa_ltbmu@fs.fed.us.
Before prescribed fire operations are conducted, agencies post road signs around areas affected by prescribed fire, send email notifications and update the local fire information line at 530.543.2816.