Okay, here’s something we may not have admitted before, which is that Metro’s 2023 Year in Review issue was inspired by Esquire magazine’s annual Dubious Achievements awards, a tradition begun in 1962 to recognize “stupidity, mendacity and general corruption.” We, of course, have enough of that around here to fill a field full of apricot drying trays.
In other words, while the news stories below are actual events, faithfully chronicled as they appeared in local media, it is not your run-of-the-mill summary of the year’s biggest stories. Rather, it’s the journalistic equivalent of Sunnyvale’s now defunct Weird Stuff Warehouse, a garage sale of marginal information whose main value is to shed light on the dismal state of things, which when we laugh about them, isn’t all that bad.
January
Annie, Get Your Insurance Policy
On New Year’s Day, San Jose became the nation’s first city to require gun owners to buy insurance. The city’s bold move made headlines across the country and was cheered by gun-control advocates while sending “gun rights” proponents into fits of apoplexy. The radically innovative solution to the mass shooting phenomenon got no traction, however, even in California. Nearly a year later, no gun owners have paid fees, insurance companies still haven’t figured out how to write a policy and no one has been fined for failure to comply with the new ordinance. Meanwhile, a favorite bedtime game for San Jose residents is to ask one another “was that a gunshot—or a firecracker?”
Big Garlic Era Marks Milestone
Gilroy farmer Don Christopher, whose legacy was to transform the South Valley city–and the U.S.–to garlic singularity, died at 88. As residents and employees grieved the titan’s loss, there were other reasons to shed allium tears. The iconic Gilroy Garlic Festival never recovered from a 2019 mass shooting by the troubled grandson of late former Santa Clara County supervisor Tom Legan, who was scandalized but not convicted three decades earlier of allegedly molesting his 12-year-old daughter in the family spa. Chinese-grown garlic, meanwhile, continues to flood the world market, undercutting prices with inferior bulbs while Christopher’s 80% market share erodes.
February
Work From Mansion
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who pioneered today’s virtual lifestyle 30 years ago by coding the original Netscape browser, spurred a flurry of discussion about WFH culture with his observation that “the idea of sitting in an apartment in front of the screen with DoorDash and Tinder is not a good life.” The billionaire investor in remote technologies like Skype and Slack postulated, “You get to sit in your studio apartment in front of your laptop and good luck. You’re cut off from everything else.” Andreeson presumably no longer fights daily Silicon Valley traffic to get to his Menlo Park office. In late 2021 he bought a Las Vegas property for $36 million and a Malibu mansion for $177 million.
Search Engine De-optimization
San Jose’s hopes that a new downtown corporate campus would put the city on the Google Map like a massive missile-shaped red pin devolved into another patch of fields cleared of beloved old bars and dancing pig signs alongside parking lots, empty warehouses and auto body shops, waiting for market conditions to re-align.
Google’s 2019 Downtown West project secured city council approval in 2021. However, amidst the mass decision by employees everywhere that offices are “sooo 2019,” Google reassessed its timeline. By, like, a decade or more, we figure.
The stalled project shed a bit more light on Google’s larger issue of $500 million in charges to reduce global office space and comes after the company’s most severe cost cuts in nearly 20 years as a public company. Though still in limbo almost a year later, Google swears it will proceed.
March
Silicon Valley Bank Bites the Big One
The run on high-flying Silicon Valley Bank made news all over the world. The second largest bank blowup in U.S. history put Sunnyvale, Santa Clara and San Jose back in the news yet again. This publishing company, once a client who had observed its unethical behavior first hand, was surprised the show had lasted as long as it did. Meanwhile, those without a bank account just sat back and put some popcorn in the microwave.
The Blood Test Lady Walks
On March 17, Elizabeth Holmes walked hand-in-hand with her boyfriend down South First Street, where our offices are located, near Original Joe’s. Her parents, Christian Holmes IV and Noel Anne Daoust, accompanied. The rise and fall of Theranos, the now-defunct company Holmes deployed to drain investors of hundreds of millions, was richly documented. At the Federal Building, Holmes had already been sentenced to 11 years in the slammer. This time, though, she was back in the neighborhood to try and get a better break. It didn’t work.
We’re Reclassifying the Seven Grand as an Advertising Expenditure
In late 1994, four members of the San Jose-based American Beethoven Society paid $7,300 for a lock of hair purported to have been snipped from Ludwig van Beethoven’s scalp on his deathbed in 1827. For the next nearly three decades, the lock would occupy a place of honor in an exhibit at San Jose State University’s prestigious Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies. Then in March, a new scientific paper daylighted. It concluded, based on new DNA research, that the San Jose State center’s memento was not Beethoven’s, but rather from an Ashkenazi Jewish woman. The study further suggested that hepatitis, not wine goblet lead preambled Beethoven’s death. The lock remains at San Jose State, with the mystery of its origins now deepened.
April
Can You Hear Marty?
April 3 was the 50th anniversary of the first cell phone call in 1973. Half a century ago, Motorola engineer Marty Cooper made a call from a sidewalk in New York City. The phone was about the size of a loaf of bread and weighed 2.5 pounds. At the time, Cooper did not know the San Jose film festival Cinequest would bring him on stage for a Maverick Spirit Award in 2014. At every Cinequest since then, fans have watched clips of the speech Marty gave at that event in the California Theater. He came on stage with the original phone, or one like it, and recalled how the battery only lasted one hour, which didn’t matter because you couldn’t hold the thing up any longer than that. Yet in the welter of Silicon Valley history, Cooper rarely gets mentioned. CNN wrote about the 50th anniversary, but Cinequest gave him his due first.
The 49ers Take a Leak
Santa Clara Councilmember Anthony Becker was indicted by a grand jury for leaking the contents of a grand jury report on the San Francisco 49ers’ influence on local politics to local media and the team’s public affairs director. The report focused on how the Niners spent via PACs $2.9 million in 2020 to elect three candidates, including Becker, to the Santa Clara City Council. If convicted, Becker could face up to four years in jail and the 49ers will lose a reliable vote on the body that oversees its stadium lease.
Driving While Wargaming
Even though a National Transport and Safety Board (NTSB) investigation found that 38-year-old Apple software engineer Walter Huang was playing the “Three Kingdoms” video game moments before his Tesla auto-steered into a Mountain View traffic barrier, his family’s wrongful death suit wended its way through the Santa Clara County Superior Court system. Making the case even weirder, Judge Evette Pennypacker ordered Tesla CEO Elon Musk to testify after the carmaker refused to authenticate videos of Musk talking about the company’s driver assist system, suggesting they could be deep fakes.
May
Rhymes with Cindy Go
Less than six months after Cindy Chavez sought to lead San Jose, San Diego’s bilingual La Prensa newspaper broke a bombshell story on its X (Twitter) feed that Chavez was the top candidate for a $300,000 county administrator position, and was about to be hired. But then her solid support from labor leaders and Democratic politicians in San Diego began to unravel when San Diego County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher was caught in a sex scandal and tried unsuccessfully to postpone his resignation from the county board until he could cast the deciding vote to hire Chavez. San Diego supervisors scheduled a special election to replace Fletcher and decided to wait until December to hire a new county administrator. Chavez, a former labor council executive, is a close ally of Lorena Gonzales Fletcher, another former labor group manager turned elected official—and Nathan Fletcher’s wife.
June
Zuck on This
Silicon Valley demonstrated the maturity of its leadership when Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg challenged one another to a cage match. After Musk tweeted that he would be “up for a cage fight,” the Meta CEO posted a screenshot of Musk’s tweet with the caption “send me location.” Musk responded with two words: “Vegas Octagon.” Musk upped the ante by calling Zuckerberg a “cuck” and proposing “a literal dick measuring contest.” Yuck.
Pepperoni Robot
The robotic pizza revolution was not televised. In fact, it went straight from the oven to the trash can. A word to all budding entrepreneurs out there. If Fast Company calls your project, “one of the biggest flops in Silicon Valley history,” well, it probably is. And this was a disaster from the start. Now, sometimes we don’t mind paying $4.45 for a bad slice of pizza. You get what you pay for. Which is why $445 million for robotic arms and “smart ovens” inside food trucks just to make pizza for lazy tech bros in Mountain View was probably a bit too much. Zume Pizza went absolutely nowhere fast. The problem? There wasn’t a problem. Nobody needed this in the first place. We’ll be happy to give Tony & Alba’s our $25 instead.
July
She Fell for the Ketchup Scam
Three teenagers knocked on a caller’s car window at 1:45pm on Los Gatos Boulevard, according to the Los Gatos-Monte Sereno Police Department as reported by the Los Gatan. They tell her there was blood on the back of her vehicle. When the driver exited the car to check and discovered that it was ketchup, the teenagers snatched her wallet from the vehicle.
Freshman Destroys Stanford’s President
Theo Baker, a Stanford University journalism freshman, broke a story in the school’s paper that led to the resignation of the university’s President Marc Tessier-Lavigne. The story revealed that neuroscientist Tessier-Lavigne co-authored research about Alzheimer’s disease that contained manipulated imagery over the course of a decade and spanning multiple publications, and then his associates failed to correct the record. The university consulted a third-party agency to investigate the incident, which led to Tessier-Lavigne’s resignation.
August
Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift, Poof!
The city declared Beyonce its honorary mayor, continuing a tradition from the Taylor Swift show a month earlier. We are gratuitously including this item because every news media outlet in America is required to say something about Taylor Swift. We understand repeating her name is good for SEO and web traffic. Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift.
Soul Saves Church
“I couldn’t take it any longer,” construction executive Jim Salata said as his crews trespassed on a downtown site to remove plastic bagging that covered the First Church of Christ Scientist on St. James St. Proving the adage that no good deed goes unpunished, city bureaucrats considered fining him for trespassing. “I know Jim Salata means well, but a crime is a crime,” San Jose City Councilmember Omar Torres told the Mercury News. A couple months later Torres changed his mind and nominated Salata for his District 3 community hero award.
September
Inform This
San Jose City Councilmembers Pam Foley and Omar Torres and Santa Clara Unified School District lashed back at Informed Parents of Silicon Valley, a group seeking to restrict sex education at local schools to “age appropriate” content. The conservative group, associated with former San Jose City Councilman Larry Pegram and the local Republican party, has been leafleting local schools and seeking to advance aligned candidates to positions on local school boards. Foley and Torres introduced a resolution saying “efforts to marginalize LGBTQ+ people have no place in our city.”
Di Dies
Dianne Feinstein, U.S. Senator from California, more specifically from San Francisco, passed at the age of 90. She was elected to the Senate in 1992 as a Democrat. The oldest sitting U.S. senator as well as member of Congress, Feinstein was also the longest-serving U.S. senator from California and the longest-tenured female senator in history at the time of her death. Prior to serving in the Senate, Feinstein was San Francisco’s first female mayor.
Gun at Church, Meow
Los Gatos Town Attorney Gabrielle Whelan tells the Town Council Sept. 5 that staff agreed to walk back its concealed-carry ordinance in the face of gun lobby pressure. The pistol promoters threatened to take the town to court if it pressed ahead with efforts to keep guns away from public transit, places of worship and civic buildings where government business isn’t conducted. Lawyer Monstadinos T. Moros, who represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association, told the weekly Los Gatan the parties struck a compromise, adding he believes gathering-places are safer when gun owners carry lawfully in-secret. “I carry at my church,” he boasted.
October
Heat Horror
Century-old temperature records came crashing down as pre-Halloween temperatures around the Bay Area soared into the high 80s and low 90s. The UN called 2023 the hottest year on record.
Homestuck
Another record was set in October as mortgage interest rates crested around 8%, the highest rate in 23 years. That means if you were thinking it’s a good time to sell your home and buy another, or want to refinance your payments, well, just sit tight.
Another Flawed Housing Element
On Oct. 2, tony enclave Los Gatos submits another Housing Element to the State that would prove to be defective. For the past couple years, the community has been transfixed over the drawing-up of the residential development plan, which was supposed to be finished by the end of January. Community meetings generated reams of paperwork outlining the views of pro-housing advocates who want to see housing stock significantly increased, alongside comments from upzoning opponents, who fear unchecked residential development will erode the upscale municipality’s unique ambience.
November
Someone’s in the Kitchen
Former cop Matthew Dominguez allegedly did some inappropriate bad things. The ex SJPD officer, who was shown the door last year after allegations that he masturbated on a police service call in the kitchen of a citizen and groped a detainee while buckling her seat belt, was subsequently arrested for hit and run.
Would You Like a Seat?
Congresswoman Anna Eshoo opted out of a 17th term, setting off a scramble for her seat. Without missing a beat, Assemblyman Evan Low and County Supe Joe Simitian jumped into the race, and ex-San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo quickly joined the fray, along with Saratoga city councilman Rishi Kumar and three others. The heavyweight matchup promises to be one of the most watched events of the spring season.
Video Announces Nothing
The biggest political non-announcement of the year came Nov. 2 when County Supervisor Cindy Chavez posted a YouTube video that “while I won’t be running for mayor of San Jose, I wanted each and every one of you to know how grateful I am to you.” The longtime pol and labor union political leader had twice run for mayor and lost, first to Chuck Reed and the second time to Matt Mahan.
Why Do Humans Run this Company?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was dumped then reinstated as the artificial intelligence firm’s head in a board battle that transfixed both humans and runaway cognitive algorithms, both on earth and in cyberspace.
Go Musk Yourself
X (formerly Twitter) head Elon Musk continued his rollercoaster ride as a social media titan by reposting a antisemitic conspiracy to his highly followed feed. The move caused a fast exodus of some 100 of the service’s advertisers. In typically mature fashion, Musk told the advertisers trying to pressure him into less frequently endorsing hate speech to “go fuck yourself.”
It Didn’t WeWork
Once worth $47 billion, WeWork finally filed for bankruptcy protection on Dec. 7. For some, the schadenfreude was palpable. In a pure example of everything wrong with Silicon Valley, investors with way too much money threw even more money at the business equivalent of a cult leader. As many observed from the beginning, WeWork was never a “tech” company. It was a real estate scam led by a messianic figure, and one that predictably bamboozled many people. With San Jose’s perpetual crush on real estate developers, the city welcomed the office-space gambit.
December
Pay Different
Deciding they were underpaid, members of the Palo Alto City Council raised themselves 60% in what their local weekly cheekily described as “one of its fastest salary negotiations in recent history.” Councilmember Ed Lauing, in arguing for the pay bump, pointed out, “We’re just a different town because of the size of the budget, the size of the organization, the separate responsibilities that we have for water treatment plants and the whole ball of wax.” The lone dissenter on the 6-1 vote, Greg Tanaka, told the Palo Alto Weekly, “We’re all part-time politicians. This is a hobby for us, for the most part.” Conveniently, Tanaka’s about to term off, so his vote to deprive himself of a minor economic windfall in appreciation of his public service is effectively moot.
Curtain Call
The Tabard Theater announced that it had lost its lease at San Pedro Square. Other local theaters stepped up and offered stages to homeless productions in process.
Paying Dues
Foster City-based developer Z&L Properties faced foreclosure on two downtown highrises for neglecting to pay homeowner association dues for its unsold units at 188 West St. James Street. The 640-unit double highrise also was slapped with mechanics liens by stiffed contractors and the company attempted to sell off its land at the former Greyhound bus station in downtown San Jose.
Santa’s on His Way
Fired Santa Clara City Manager Deanna Santana, despite being paid $785,000 for not working for a year, filed a claim against the city saying that wasn’t enough. Her final annual base pay was $469,000. Despite being the state’s second highest paid and least worked city manager while on administrative leave, Santana shamelessly feels the city should have paid accrued vacations, holidays, sick time and management leaves during the time she was being paid to do nothing.
Before being fired Feb. 2022, Santana made her way around City Halls in the Bay Area. Former deputy city manager in San Jose, city administrator in Oakland, city manager in Sunnyvale and city manager of Santa Clara. Maybe Santana can get advice from her current employer, MissionSquare Retirement–of which she is acting CEO and president.
