Weekend Links: Nov. 11-13
Meteorite mysteries, Dusty triumphs, and 8 other stories to consider in your quest to understand the Golden State
Greetings from What is California? HQ, where we are refreshing election results every hour on the hour and still shielding our eyes from the gory demise of Proposition 27—the online sports betting ballot measure that went down in the most brutal, lopsided defeat of any ballot measure in more than three decades: 83% no to 17% yes. Ouch! Maybe next time, bookies. (Kidding—there will be no next time.)
Meanwhile: Happy Veterans Day, everyone! 🇺🇸 🫡 ❤️ I hope you get a restful, reflective three-day weekend.
Welcome to new subscribers and followers!
It’s been amazing to see so many new folks following, sharing, and listening to What is California? here on Substack, on Twitter, and wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m grateful to have you here, and I hope you’ll stick around! If you like the show and the newsletter, please consider rating and reviewing What is California? on Apple Podcasts and/or sharing What is California? among like-minded folks.
ICYMI: This week’s podcast
This week’s podcast features Dan Walters, the veteran (and I mean veteran) California political columnist for CalMatters. We previewed this week’s election, speculated about Gavin Newsom’s political future, and looked back on Dan’s 50 years of covering the State Capitol and its habitués. Listen, share, and subscribe wherever you get podcasts!
On with the Weekend Links
Meanwhile, I hope you'll consider checking out some of these nifty California stories if/when you are so inclined.
NOTE: I try to link to stories that are not behind a subscriber-only paywall. If you can, please consider subscribing or donating to news organizations that provide this essential California coverage.
Sacramento honors a homegrown World Series champ as mayor declares ‘Dusty Baker Day’ - Darrell Smith, The Sacramento Bee
The Houston Astros deservedly remain in the long, dark shadow of their 2017 cheating scandal, but there is this silver lining to their recent return to World Series glory: The upstanding and all-around terrific Dusty Baker—a native Sacramentan and former World Series winner as a player with the Los Angeles Dodgers—won his first title as a manager after nearly 30 years serving five Major League teams. Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg promised an upcoming Dusty Baker Day in the city to honor the future Hall of Famer, who at 73, became the oldest manager to win a World Series. Congrats to Dusty! I’ll wear my Giants cap to the parade. To the rest of the Astros: Booooo.
Someone in California won the $2 billion Powerball jackpot - Laurel Wamsley and Ayana Archie, NPR
Who would have thought that as we wrap up a brutal 2022 for sagging Silicon Valley giants and plummeting IPOs, it’d be easier to make a billion dollars in California by winning the lottery than being a tech company? But there you have it: “One very lucky person won Monday's record-setting Powerball jackpot — worth $2.04 billion,” Wamsley and Archie report, adding that a lump-sum payout would yield a $997.6 million windfall. The documentary about that person’s life 10 years from now will be amazing. Also: “An additional $156 million, raised from ticket sale profits, will go to California public schools,” according to The New York Times. And for selling the winning ticket, let’s hear it for Joe’s Service Center in Altadena!
Check it out: Shafter's city-run library becomes its own success story - Steven Mayer, Bakersfield Californian
Some more good public library news from Kern County! Just a few weeks after young readers compelled local officials to block a plan to turn a library in McFarland into a police station, the town of Shafter has generated its own biblio-centric success story: “Shafter Library & Learning Center, which is now owned and operated by the city of Shafter — with help from Bakersfield College and continuing community support — is open five days a week, 11 hours a day,” Mayer reports. “That's more hours than the county's crown jewel, the Beale Memorial Library in Bakersfield, which is open 20 fewer hours per week than Shafter's.” That’s even more than our libraries in Sacramento—and I’d bet more than numerous other, much larger California cities as well. Way to go, Shafter! 📚📚📚
Musk’s SpaceX Dismantles Hyperloop Prototype, Puts Up a Parking Lot - Sarah McBride, Bloomberg
Cue “Big Yellow Taxi” (or the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” theme, depending on how Elon Musk’s Twitter folly is going today): The prototype tunnel for the ultra fast, underground Hyperloop transit network—“a roughly mile-long white cylinder running along Jack Northrop Avenue near the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. office in Hawthorne, California,” McBride reports—has been torn down. The project has been “indefinitely shelved,” McBride adds, with the sad upshot: “[L]ast week no trace of the Hyperloop tube remained on Jack Northrop Avenue. A team of workers wearing hard hats dug and made measurements. A local city council member said parking spots for SpaceX workers would soon line the street in the spot where the tunnel once ran.” (h/t The Verge)
They used to call California ocean desalination a disaster. But water crisis brings new look - Hayley Smith, LA Times
Look, let’s get real: There’s not enough water for 40 million Californians to survive, let alone thrive, in the years ahead. It isn’t there now, and thanks to our stubborn dependency on fossil fuels and the resulting climate impact, it isn’t forecast to be there any time soon (if ever again). So! It’s either a future of parched Mad Max landscapes up and down the state, or it’s… this: “Experts are already experimenting with new concepts such as mobile desalination units and floating buoys, and at least four major plants will soon be operational along the state’s coastline.” Get ready for marine ecosystem carnage and briny discharge polluting shorelines, but hey: At least Kourtney Kardashian and Sylvester Stallone will have green lawns.
California businesses are leaving the state at double the rate of previous years - Tessa McLean, SFGATE
Presented without comment: “There were 153 companies that relocated headquarters in 2021, more than double the 75 that left in 2020 and more than triple the 46 that exited in 2018, according to a recent report from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The conservative think tank said economics was the primary cause of relocation, citing other states’ lower regulation, lower taxes, and lower cost of living. […] McKesson, the biggest U.S. drug distributor and number nine on [the Fortune 1000 list], left the state in 2018 for Texas. The Lone Star State is the most popular for relocations — Tesla, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Charles Schwab all left for Texas in the past three years.”
Oversimplified flag of California - Kim Gyuseok (aka “East-Conference8628”), Reddit
Mike McPhate, who writes and publishes the indispensable daily newsletter California Sun, found this jewel on the r/vexillology subreddit. Its designer described it as “oversimplified,” but can I just say it’s… kind of perfect? It’s perhaps missing a little bit of green, but I also want this as a tattoo or a t-shirt or a sticker or all of the above. Even our flag could stand a little California-style reinvention and imagination every now and then.
What if California seceded from the United States? - Chris Cilizza, CNN
Remember Calexit, when an activist (later found to be living in Russia) sought a California break from the U.S. in the wake of the 2016 presidential election? The country’s long, spirited secessionist strain prevails on this podcast speculating what would happen if the Golden State became the Golden… Nation? Country? We’d need our own currency (Joanies? Twains? Tupacs?), a whole new thicket of global trade and immigration policies, and a national anthem (take your pick from the NYT’s California Soundtrack), among a zillion other basics. It’ll never happen technically, even if politically and economically speaking we’re kind of already there, but it’s good fun chaos to think about, anyway.
Which Gavin Newsom Will Run for President? - Josh Koehn, San Francisco Standard
This is the piece I’ve been waiting for: A warts-and-all scan of Gavin Newsom’s political assets and liabilities as he plans his imminent run for president. The assets are not nothing (e.g. housing efforts like Project Roomkey and Homekey, and a unique discipline; “I’m genuine when I say: A wife and kids have matured that guy so much. He’s completely different,” said one source who worked with Newsom when he was San Francisco mayor), but the liabilities… hoo boy: “A polling expert told The Standard that Republicans would love to see Newsom run for president in 2024 not only because of San Francisco and California’s national reputation as a hellscape beyond repair[…], but also because Newsom’s approval ratings go down dramatically after a polished first impression,” Koehn reports. When Dan Walters said on this week’s episode of What is California? that Newsom is “an oppo(sition) researcher’s dream,” this is what he meant.
And finally…
'Heard a big bang': Nevada County man wonders if meteorite destroyed his house - Michelle Bandur, KCRA
—WITH—
NASA: Fireball seen across NorCal Friday did not touch ground - Alex Bell, ABC10
I watched most of this first story gaping with disbelief: A house in rural Nevada County burst into flames on Nov. 4, prompting a fire call at the exact time “fireballs” (thought to be from the Taurids meteor shower) streaked through the sky. The homeowner escaped (but lost one of his dogs, RIP) and says he’s unsure of what exactly happened to prompt the catastrophic “big bang” he heard. Meanwhile, as fire investigators look into the cause of the blaze, ABC10 in Sacramento followed up with NASA, which said the meteorites disintegrated before hitting the ground. NASA added that the largest of the meteors were seen in Siskiyou and Lassen counties—hundreds of miles north of Nevada County. (And even if a meteorite had hit Earth, it would have been “cold,” not on fire.) It’s confounding! Can’t wait to see where this wild story goes… watch this, uh, space (sorry) for more. ☄️ 🤓
RELATED: Amanda Bartlett at SFGate takes an even deeper dive into the mystery: “While the fireball was observed on the same night as the Taurids meteor shower, NASA said on Facebook that it was not part of that event.” 🤯
Thanks for reading, and have a safe, happy weekend! 🐻 ❤️
-Stu