The Benicia City Council will hear an update on California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) actuarial issues at Tuesday’s meeting. According to a staff report by Finance Director Cindy Mosser, the city provides retirement benefits for employees through its participation in CalPERS, which allows the city to spend roughly $5.5 million per year to fund […]
Council to vote on pension trusts at Tuesday’s meeting
A Different Drummer: Ready and able to disable cable
We’re considering cutting our television cable. We feel like we bought the buffet ticket, but are only eating the soup and salad. We tasted the other morsels, and we enjoyed being free to do so, except that it wasn’t free. I posted our intentions online and received a flurry of encouraging and instructional responses. It […]
Jeff Burkhart’s “Rhyme and Reason”: The REALLY BIG Rhyme & Reason Summer Sales Event
Extra, Extra; Poems for sale! For lovers, friends and cousins Get ‘em while they’re fresh today They’re cheaper by the dozen Here’s a way that you can help To raise the GDP Just take a little bread you’ve earned And send it on to me I can write you poems of love Or I can […]
Dennis Lund: Trump the Puppet? Words speak louder than action, it seems
President Trump’s recent European tour created an uproar from the anti-Trumpers that has surpassed election night 2016. The outcry, over comments to Putin, has not previously been seen or imagined in recent history. One member of the deranged left, Congressman Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) asked for a coup d’état in his tweet: “Where are our military […]
Arts Benicia brings out the glass for new juried exhibition
If its newest juried exhibition is anything to go by, Arts Benicia has a heart of glass. That is a compliment, as demonstrated by the creative ways artists from all over have chosen to incorporate glass. If you need proof, it can be seen in the exhibit “Cutting Edge— Nontraditional Glass,” which opens tomorrow in […]
Voice of the Village: Do you want the rest of your life to be better?
By Lois Requist I continue to learn from my friend Judie Donaldson, as I did with her column last week about attitude adjustment and what older people prefer to be called. Because there has been so much negativity around growing older, it may be that a phrase everyone likes hasn’t been invented yet. Village Movement […]
The Truth About Cruising (Part 9): Employees, codes and more
The Benicia Fullosopher Cruise ship employees The Crew: I cannot ever express enough appreciation for the extremely hard-working crews. Some ships have crews from sixty different countries. Others ships have a particular job done by a crew from a single country. For example, all the waiters might be from Indonesia and all the cabin crew […]
Poetry Corner: Ranjit Gill “Chasing a Butterfly”
Chasing a butterfly constantly out of reach I feel the need to dream I keep struggling and striving to improve, not just surviving. “The time is always now,” I remind myself whenever I feel I’m stuck. And no, I ain’t on drugs. And I ain’t on god. I need to be myself. Screw everything else. […]
Poetry Corner: Nina Serrano “Smoke No. 2 July 2018”
The wind shifted today We get a break from the smoke of 32 thousand acres of forest burning and maybe plastic and other toxics too When the fire started the sun turned red Liz looked up and called it a Chinese Lantern as we drove north along the freeway Not knowing what was happening between […]