Wading In

Suisun residents welcome to shop here By Kelvin Wade | | July 31, 2008 16:09 In looking over Save Our Suisun's Web site, I see the group lists quite a few reasons to recall the current Suisun City Council. Of course, the obvious reason is the council's approval of a Wal-Mart Supercenter to be built on Walters Road. If councilmembers had voted the group's way, there would be no recall effort. And for that heresy, the punishment that SOS seeks to mete out is political death. But I wouldn't count on it. What's happening in Suisun City is not exactly new. It's a recent tactic of the anti-Wal-Mart crowd. When the Rosemead City Council approved a Wal-Mart Supercenter in 2005, angry citizens voted two councilmembers out of office, replacing them with anti-Wal-Mart candidates. Then the group Save Our Community launched a recall effort against the remaining councilmembers. In September 2006, Wal-Mart opened its Rosemead supercenter and, shortly afterwa...

Why not an amendment on divorce? By Kelvin Wade | | July 24, 2008 15:33 With a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman on the November ballot, this editorial page has seen some back and forth on the issue. Unless one is just a stark-raving homophobe, opposition to gay marriage is mostly rooted in religious belief. We don't want to put a societal stamp of approval on something we consider to be a sin. We don't want the 'gay agenda' to advance. Many Americans secretly agree with Pastor John Hagee, Pat Robertson and others that tolerating homosexuality results in things like 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and wildfires up and down the state. A Field Poll in May found that, for the first time, a bare majority of Californians supported same sex marriage. Another Field Poll this month found that 51 percent oppose Proposition 8 which would ban gay marriage. This is a big change from eight years ago when 61 percent of Californians vote...

Surveillance cameras may prove helpful By Kelvin Wade | | July 17, 2008 14:49 The city is testing a new surveillance camera system downtown. Five cameras have been installed in hopes of deterring, detecting and investigating crime. The system will undergo its first big test with the Tomato Festival next month. So how do you feel about Big Brother coming to Fairfield? Video surveillance in America has nothing on the British. The British are the most watched people on earth with more than four million cameras, one for every 14 people. It's ironic that the country that gave us George Orwell's 1984 would embrace such Big Brother tactics. But Brits love their CCTV system and feel safer because of it. Other European countries have followed Britain's lead and we're not far behind. By now, we're used to being on camera. If you think about how many times you've been videotaped in your life, it's staggering. You can't walk into a department store, supermarket or...

Conditions threaten fair's success By Kelvin Wade | | July 10, 2008 16:03 The Solano County Fair, shortened to five days like last year's, is under way. While fair organizers hope to see an improvement over the 28,921 paid admissions for last year's festivities, they may be sorely disappointed. I hope I'm wrong, but conditions have conspired to keep many potential fairgoers home this week. While gas prices have dropped a tad, they're still outrageous. Will Fairfield, Vacaville, and Rio Vista families load up their cars and head to Vallejo with these gas prices? Of course this points to my feeling that the county fair should take place in Fairfield. It's centrally located within the county and we are the county seat, after all. Shouldn't it be here? But that's a column for a different day. Money is tight. There's a lot of belt tightening going on. To be fair, organizers have done a great job keeping ticket prices the same as they were la...

Click the picture to read my review of the new Will Smith movie, Hancock.

Ice Cream Man no longer a superhero By Kelvin Wade | | July 03, 2008 16:57 Something has happened to the Ice Cream Man. When I was a kid living in Virginia, the melodic music carried on a summer breeze would signal all kids to halt what they were doing and run as fast as their Chuck Taylor Converse would carry them into their homes to finagle money from their parents for the Ice Cream Man. With fistfuls of coins, kids would come flying out of their houses, smoke contrails behind them, flagging down the truck. The Ice Cream Man drove a big truck with colorful pictures and descriptions of the sweet frozen treats he sold. When the truck stopped, the Ice Cream Man would step out of the truck wearing a crisply pressed white uniform. He wore gloves on his hands and had a shiny chrome money changer on his belt to give you change with. Depending on what you wanted, he would open up various secret compartments on the truck. A Neapolitan ice cream sandwich here, a cherry ...