View our online photo galleries from the Best of the Santa Cruz County 2024 Party, hosted by Cruz Kitchen & Taps. View our party slideshow ..read more

Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a couple dozen boxes towering over a corner of Atlantis Fantasy World! Normally, this inventory would already have been entered into the system and on the shelf ready for busy hands to flip through. However, this week’s haul is poised and ready for the comic shop’s busiest day of the year: Free Comic Book Day. “In 2007 we ordered 4,800 comics to give away,” Atlantis Fantasy World owner Joe Ferrara explains. “This year we have over 8,800. So it’s grown and grown and grown over the years.” Since its inaugural launch in 2007, Free Comic Book Day is ..read more

There’s a cartoon in the 9/9/22 New Yorker that shows salmon jumping upstream over rocks with leopards, pelicans, crocodiles, raccoons, lions, alligators and wolves catching them in mid-air. In the foreground one bear says to another bear, “You just had to Yelp this place, didn’t you?”  It is a short walk from where you park on Farmer Street to the bridge over the new $2.3 million rebuild of the Fall Creek Fish Ladder (see How to Get There below.) A ten-minute walk at most. I park along the road, observing where the No Parking signs start. Their Neighborhood Watch probably includes polic ..read more

All eyes are on Porter Wayne Hoover. He’s sitting in the bright conference room at Housing Matters on Coral Street, across the way from his residential unit at Casa Azul. Hoover sports a trucker cap and a denim jacket as cameras and lights are set up across from him, ready to give him their undivided attention. It’s February 2024 and Hoover, 53, is telling his story for Housing Matters’ Community Voices series. The interviews are meant to highlight the lives of formerly unhoused people in order for others to connect with them, and are posted to the Housing Matters website. During his intervie ..read more

ARIES March 21-April 19 The world’s record for jumping rope in six inches of mud is held by an Aries. Are you surprised? I’m not. So is the world’s record for consecutive wallops administered to a plastic inflatable punching doll. Other top accomplishments performed by Aries people: longest distance walking on one’s hands; number of curse words uttered in two minutes; and most push-ups with three bulldogs sitting on one’s back. As impressive as these feats are, I hope you will channel your drive for excellence in more constructive directions during the coming weeks. Astrologically speaking, y ..read more

Brad Kava | Good Times Editor It looked like the new cannabis dispensary at the old Emily’s Bakery site on Mission Street was approved…but all of a sudden there’s been a fear campaign against it, with educators claiming it’s too close to schools. It’s not. It fits within the legal requirement of more than 800 feet from a school. But for whatever reasons, people are using fear tactics to shut down not just any dispensary, but one started by WAMM, the people who fought hard and risked jail to provide cannabis to people who were terminally ill back before it was legal for everyone. As anyone who ..read more

SAVE WAMM Santa Cruz school superintendent Kris Munro sent a letter to parents warning of a catastrophe: a proposed cannabis dispensary, partly owned by a nonprofit that provides affordable medicine for patients with cancer, multiple sclerosis, pediatric epilepsy and more — WAMM (Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana/WAMM Phytotherapies) — that would open on Mission Street at Laurel at the former site of Emily’s Bakery. Though the City Planning Department and Planning Commission both authorized this project, the City Council will vote on May 14 to possibly reverse the decision. The public s ..read more

Cathy DeLeon started working at Lipton in 1978, and says her many years spent in management there gave her the insight and momentum to go back to school and get a degree in business. She also had a passion for baking she chose to nurture, taking classes at Cabrillo College to level up her pastry game. Her combined baking and business acumen made her the perfect candidate to found Norma Jeans in 2005. DeLeon describes the ambiance as cozy with French accents, welcoming and relaxing—“like walking into your own house.” Local coffee and loose-leaf tea complement handcrafted pastries based on DeLe ..read more

Make no mistake. The Diablo sauce on the scariest chicken wings in greater Santa Cruz will burn themselves into your memory. (And win you six free wings if you eat four in 2 minutes.) But there are plenty of other things—and more important things—about Evil Wings’ food truck that stick with me, particularly the dimensions of their comfort food and the amount of fun their core crew seems to be having, which are both sizable. The big and bold offerings include over-the-top crepes, messy burgers, Philly cheesesteaks, fried chicken sandwiches, onion rings, hard shell tacos, tortas, tostadas, ques ..read more

Obviously, we should all feel bad for the MedMen employees who are now out of jobs after the once-seemingly-high-flying company finally declared bankruptcy last week and announced that it would wind down operations. But that aside, anybody who wants to see a healthy, thriving legal-cannabis industry should breathe a small sigh of relief over the news. Or at least we can hope that MedMen’s demise is a harbinger of change. Cultivated Daily thinks it is: “The halcyon days of young, inexperienced founders raising millions on bold promises to build flashy-yet-unprofitable cannabis companies are ov ..read more