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Top Stories: Nov. 10, 2009SJ Whole Foods; RDA Budget Crisis; USO at SJOby Danny Wool on Nov 10, 2009Chestnut Wins Again! "Hail, Gastronome, Apostle of Excess, Well skilled to overeat without distress! Thy great invention, the unfatal feast, Shows Man's superiority to Beast!" (Ambrose Bierce) Joey Chestnut, San Jose’s gastronome extraordinaire, set the culinary pace by winning a brand new competitive eating competition in Las Vegas. The man who holds world records for eating everything from hot dogs (68 in 10 minutes) to matzoh balls (78 of them) and from asparagus (8.6 lbs., tempura fried) to waffles (23 in 10 minutes) won the first-ever meatball eating contest, scarfing down 50 in just 10 minutes for as cash prize of $1,500, a new world record, and possible indigestion. That's a meatball every 12 seconds—a daunting feat indeed—and the prize did not come easy. The challenger and second place winner, Pat Bertoletti, managed to get down 49, in an exciting gobble to the finish. They were both well ahead of the third-place winner, Sonya Thomas, who only managed to finish 42 (though it must be said that, weighing in at 105 lbs., that too is quite impressive). But the winner of the day was Chestnut, whose awe-consuming effort was indescribable to some, indigestible to others. Read More at ABC 7. Whole Foods Coming to San Jose Whole Foods Market, the organic, haute-crunchy natural food retailer, will be opening its first store in San Jose this August, on the corner of Blossom Hill Road and the Almaden Expressway, across from Almaden Plaza. Originally planned for 70,000 sq. feet, the size of the new store will be reduced considerably, to just 50,000 feet. A second store, closer to downtown is already planned, and construction will begin after this first store is launched. Whole Foods is a nationwide chain, with 275 stores across the country. Of these, 28 are located in Northern California, including one in Campbell, one in Los Gatos, a huge store in Cupertino and new stores in Santa Cruz and Capitola. While some observers see the launch of the San Jose branch as an indication of an improving retail market in the Silicon Valley area, David Taxin, a partner in the Meacham/Oppenheimer brokerage firm is not convinced. "Whole Foods was committed to these locations," he says, "and signed their deals a long time ago, before the economy started to teeter." At the same time, Whole Foods was recently at the center of a national controversy, when its CEO John Mackey wrote an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal, coming out against the government's planned health reform bill. This confirmed the view of many Whole Foods critics that the company does not really reflect the values of most of its consumers, who are often associated with liberal causes. There are, however, many advantages to Whole Foods as well. Unlike most retailers, the company supports the Fair Trade movement, the company has strict policies on how suppliers must treat their animals, and the stores hold regular "5 Percent Days," in which 5 percent of their profits are donated to local charities and educational institutions. Read More at the Business Journal. Michael Read More at Bluejay.com. RDA's New Budget Spurs Controversy When Harry Mavrogenes, Chair of the San Jose Redevelopment Agency, presented his new budget to City Council, County Finance Director John Guthrie summed up the response of many county officials and city councilmembers: "The agency is technically insolvent. ... You owed us last year and you cannot pay us." The new budget for 2009-2010 proposes to defer its $68 million debt to the county, and replace them with annual payments of just $2 million a year. This comes on top of a proposed $132 million operating budget. But Mavrogenes is not entirely to blame for the RDA's financial woes. It is expected to pay the state $75 million over the next two years to help it cover its own deficit. To make that payment, it wants to borrow $40 million from San Jose's housing fund, even though Housing Director Leslye Krutko was very straightforward in her response: "We don't have cash." The proposed new budget will be the topic of a public hearing at City Hall today. City Council will vote on the budget on Dec. 8. Read More at The Mercury News. USO to Get Permanent Home at Mineta The USO will be getting a permanent new home at Mineta Airport's new Terminal B Concourse this afternoon. After 18 years of shuttling between locations, a 2,000 sq, foot site will be dedicated today, Serviced by volunteers, the USO's new home will provide the 11,000 soldiers and other military personnel who pass through Mineta every year a lounge, kitchen, library, and restrooms. The city will collect a token rent of $1 for the space. Read More at the Business Journal. Murdoch Takes on Google News Rupert Murdoch is no fan of the internet or the idea of free content. The media mogul who owns Fox News and the Wall Street Journal does not want his content floating out there in cyberspace, where everyone can get it for free, and he especially doesn’t want news aggregators (and this is one of them) to summarize his news stories and post them online, with links back to the original. Instead, he has a vision of the internet where everyone pays for content—or at least his content. He adds that people are less likely to click on ads if they follow links from sites like Google News to get to Murdoch's sites. It's the old-new question of how to monetize content on the internet, when just about anyone can find it for free. The newspaper industry, even more than the music industry, is among the hardest hit, with major newspapers closing every day. Google says it's not to blame. A spokesperson for the search engine giant said that they send as many as 300 million clicks a day to newspaper websites, and that the information they provide is "just enough" to interest people in clicking on the full story. This is not enough for Murdoch, who is now considering blocking Google from accessing and listing his sites at all. One could only wonder whether that is truly to Murdoch's advantage—after all, how will people find the latest Glenn Beck zinger if they can't Google or Bing it? That could be why Murdoch announced last week that his plans to charge for access to all his sites could be delayed. And for Murdoch, Google is only the beginning. He eventually plans to challenge the entire fair use doctrine in court, though this could likely work to his detriment. After all, as Techdirt points out, News Corp takes pride in its own aggregators. And one can only wonder whether his business model for Myspace will survive without the $900 million in advertising revenue that Google guaranteed to the social networking site in 2006, especially after the company laid of 30 percent of its workforce this June. It looks like Murdoch will have to think this all through before he makes any decisions. Read More at Forbes. Read More at NBC Bay Area. Read More at NPR. by Danny Wool on Nov 10, 2009 |
 San Jose's Joey Chestnut is now the meatball king. |
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