A blog about Technology, News, and Kern County.
Address: 1707 Eye St. Bakersfield, CA 93301 Member Since: May 14, 2007 Last Signed In: November 19, 2009 Profile Views: 2906 Blog Views: 186741 Bakersfield not so giving, magazine says Secret menus at Bakersfield restaurants Videos galore of local marching bands Shocker: Bakersfield not safe for pedestrians Does Ryan Mathews deserve Heisman consideration? Bakersfield man with colorful record in middle of billion-dollar Chevron dispute Mobile haiku puts Bakersfield in new light Songs do more than namedrop Bakersfield Pedro Martinez taken back to his Bakersfield Dodger days Fresno piles on the hate for Bakersfield May 07 June 07 July 07 August 07 September 07 October 07 November 07 December 07 January 08 February 08 March 08 April 08 May 08 June 08 July 08 August 08 September 08 October 08 November 08 December 08 January 09 February 09 March 09 April 09 May 09 June 09 July 09 August 09 September 09 October 09 November 09 Submit your local links to bakosphere@bakersfield.com. Bakersfield Observed CompuDave greener bakersfield 
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Looks like local talk radio host http://www.kernradio.com/sh...>Inga Barks is getting her shot at a national audience.
According to KERN radio, she is at some sort of caucus event in Iowa and will be filling in for Mark Levin tonight from 7-9 p.m. Inga's got a local radio show every morning (I think she still shares Fridays with Scott Cox) and at one point had a show up in Fresno. She's also been on Fox News a few times, if I recall correctly. Any Inga biographers out there know if she's filled in for another national host before? -- Davin McHenry, web editor
There has been another spate of local teachers busted for illegal stuff, from making meth in the classroom to engaging in adult activities with students.
For good or ill, those stories have been big hits and not just with our audience. The alleged meth-making teacher story was linked to from Fox News' web site that quadrupled traffic on the story. The story about the Garces teacher was linked on Fark.com [click here to see Fark users' comments on the story] and so far has tallied about six times the traffic a popular story would get. -- Davin McHenry, web editor
I stumbled across some blog posts about Bakersfield that kind of shocked me:
Bakersfield SkyWatch News Blog Keeping an Eye on our Environment (Huh? Someone here actually cares about the environment?) Housewife in Bakersfield Reflections on life in Bakersfield from a Swedish housewife. In Swedish. (Wow! We do have Europeans in Bakersfield! ) triphow.com Restaurants in Bakersfield, California (What! A tourist in Bakersfield?) Enjoy! --Mary Russo
Andrew Leonard, author of Salon.com's "How the World Works" blog on globalization, wrote about the larger implications of the rise and fall of David Crisp in a post on Wednesday titled " Fake it until you make it: A housing flipper saga."
He gives a quick rehash of the sordid details we locals are already too familiar with, but concludes by pondering the underlying lessons of Crisp's case: "But what does it all mean? How many other David Crisps ran wild in the great housing boom of the early 21st century? How many of the collateralized debt obligations made out of repackaged subprime mortgage securities were built from loans made to similar scammers? Certainly, there are details to Crisp's story that can safely be dismissed as "extreme." But as he told the Bakersfield Californian in 2006, as a real estate agent just starting out he bought a Corvette he couldn't afford and hired an assistant he didn't need because his strategy was to fake it until he made it. And there's something emblematically American about that credo, which holds just as true for hedge funds and investment banks as it does for Bakersfield real estate agents. We love the former waiter who transforms himself, à la Horatio Alger, into a mogul. But we also love stomping all over him when he screws up. "Obviously, David Crisp's family should be at the top of the list of people who should not be bailed out by the homeowner rescue plan to be announced by President Bush on Thursday. But what makes the whole housing saga of such enduring fascination is that the mess partially caused by Crisp and a million other small-time flippers got big enough to threaten the health of the entire economy. You could argue that every single would-be homeowner who misstated their income or took on a loan that they knew they couldn't pay or simply mistakenly believed that they would be able to refinance before the bill arrived should be left to twist slowly in the wind. But if the consequences of doing that grease the overall economy's slide into recession, who ends up really paying the price? Them, or all of us?"Fake it until you make it, it's the American way. Whether you're David Crisp, or Citigroup. And when you stumble, somebody will be there to lend a hand, because as Benjamin Franklin once noted, if we don't all hang together, we will most assuredly all hang separately."
--Jason Sperber |
