The Padres checked the first box on their offseason to-do list when they hired Craig Stammen as their next manager. The second box is larger, louder and unavoidable: finding enough starting pitching for Stammen to employ. Every club at the Las Vegas General Managers’ Meetings this week claimed pitching as priority No. 1. A.J. Preller has said the same before. But this autumn the need…
San Diego has a long memory for war and a short memory for dissent. That’s not an accident. This city supplied ships, pilots, technicians, and Marines for Vietnam the way Pittsburgh once supplied steel. The war was not somewhere else. It was here, in the barracks, the flight lines, the shipyards, the college campuses, and the neighborhoods that lived on deployment schedules. What we don’t…
San Diego County Sheriff Kelly Martinez is a politician dressed in a badge, pretending to uphold the law while peddling fear and dodging accountability. On Tuesday, in a move as predictable as the sunrise, she declared herself above the will of the people she supposedly serves, all in the name of bending the knee to ICE—Trump’s personal deportation squad. San Diego County supervisors made their…
It rained a lot this past winter. However, as we all know, that hasn’t always been the natural state for the arid San Diego region. It took Charles Hatfield to make it rain 109 years ago in San Diego. The only problem was he couldn’t make it stop. A deep dive through the San Diego Historical Society archives courtesy of the OB Rag reveals the…
Hail Estonia! Wait. What? Estonia opened an honorary consulate at La Jolla on January 24, 2019, later moving it to downtown San Diego. The Estonian honorary consul in the San Diego area is Dr. Michael Corey Chan, and the address of the consulate is 330 13th Street #2111 San Diego, CA, 92101. Give him a shout-out at 858-717-6379. “Honorary consuls with their energy and network…
Parades rolled through many American cities on Veterans Day, Nov. 11 honoring the anniversary of the end of World War I on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, what once was known as Armistice Day. None of those parades, however, featured tributes or remembrance of one of the war’s oddities made all the more poignant by today’s tensions…
When I contemplate the present condition of America, I am struck dumb by the sheer theater of it all — the gilded spectacle, the red-hatted congregation, the rallies that thrum like tent revivals for a man who believes himself chosen not by Providence but by poll numbers. We have suffered under the reign of Donald Trump as our forefathers once suffered under monarchs — and…
Agriculture values rose by just over 1% to $1.67 billion, and vegetable and vine crops thrived in San Diego County’s Annual Crop Report released this week. The new Crop Report, which covers the 2024 growing season, showed the county’s list of Top 10 crops changed slightly from the previous year, with “Vegetables, Other” jumping over lemons into fifth place, just behind avocados. The Top 10…
Daylight saving time: It’s backward time again when clocks step off one hour at 2 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 2, 2025. Don’t forget to do the right thing clockwise or you’ll be out of sync. Californians early Sunday will join most of the nation in the yearly ritual of switching their clocks an hour forwards and back on daylight saving time. Will they be allowed to…
As people in the U.S. prepare to turn back their clocks on Nov. 2, I find myself bracing for the annual ritual of media stories about the disruptions to daily routines caused by switching from standard time to daylight saving time. About a third of Americans say they don’t look forward to these twice-yearly time changes. An overwhelming 63% to 16% majority would like to…