Hang 'Em High

For Cinema St. James, the San Jose Downtown Association screened a movie once a week outside in the famous downtown park. And why, might we add, is St. James Park one of the most well-known spots in all of San Jo? Because it was the site of the last lynching ever in California, in 1933. Brooke Hart, son of a prominent San Jose family, was kidnapped and brutally slain by two dudes, who were eventually caught, jailed and lynched. So what film did the Downtown Association show on Oct. 5 in St. James Park? Hang 'Em High.

Honey, We Verbed the Sun

Government transparency became such a hot topic in secrecy-prone San Jose that politicians began taking extreme liberties with the English language. Vice Mayor Cindy Chavez and three colleagues created a "Sunshine Reforms" package that was designed to derail a more expansive package of reforms by mayoral rival Chuck Reed. Reed, who called Chavez's package a "partly-cloudy-with-occasional-sunny-breaks ordinance," endorsed an ordinance self-branded by the Mercury News, though a Sunshine Ordinance had actually been proposed by Metro seven years earlier. Top honors in the sunshine wars, however, go to incoming Vice Mayor Dave Cortese, who transformed it into an active verb, saying "we haven't even sunshined all the financial analysis" during a discussion of the Evergreen industrial rezoning plan.

Build It and the Lawsuits Will Come

Olympics? What Olympics? With impeccable timing, Dr. John "I Married Rich" York of the 49ers scuttled San Francisco's Olympics bid with his announcement that the team was opening negotiations to move to Santa Clara. Aggrieved Baghdad-by-the-Bay pols immediately screamed foul and sought legislative help to keep their lovable losers on a wind-swept promontory far south (but not that far south) of downtown S.F. Meanwhile, the Oakland A's pulled a similar stunt with their projected sidle down the East Bay to a vacant lot in Fremont. Spurned San Jose takes solace in the Sharks' fast step to the new season.

Bush Behaving Badly

As usual, our president gave better entertainment for the dollar than any performer alive. In July, at the Group of Eight summit, W solved the Lebanon/Israel crisis: "What they need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit." In July, in a moment straight out of The Office, the irrepressible harasser-in-chief attempted to massage the shoulders of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Would he have tried a move like that on Bismarck? It was quick, it was public and it was embarrassing seven ways from sundown; and then it was ready for repeat plays on Youtube. "The only way we can win is to leave before the job is done."—W sorts out Iraq; Nov. 4, 2006.

Humiliating Kazakhstan

Without droning on about the particular humiliations heaped upon the nation of Kazakhstan by Sacha Baron Cohen's brilliantly wrought character Borat, let us simply point to the country's response, which included ads in The New York Times, U.S. News and World Report and The Economist and commercials on CNN trying to undo some of the PR damage that Borat has done—and the movie is still hilarious.

Private Matters

In its campaign to combat child porn, the U.S. Department of Justice asked Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and AOL for lists of frequently searched terms. While three supplied the information quickly, saying no personally identifiable information was involved, Google went to court to avoid sharing information about users' search habits with the government. In March, federal judge James Ware ordered Google to cough up a narrower set of data for 50,000 random sites. Even unidentifiable information, however, can sometimes be tracked. In August, AOL apologized for releasing search activity for an unidentified user that a researcher was able to match to a woman in Florida. First Amendment advocates could take some small comfort, however, when Apple abandoned its two-year legal effort to obtain the identity of a blogger who posted confidential company information to a website. Seems that blogs have some of the same free-speech rights as traditional media, courts agreed.

Room With a Vroom

While Silicon Valley boosters struggle to catapult the South Bay over our more established neighbor to the north, we are slapped with the unavoidable reality: we will always play second fiddle to the closest thing that America's got to a European city. This year, the reality came in the form of the second running of the San Jose Grand Prix. Even after experts roundly dismissed the economic impact numbers ($42 million!) that city leaders peddled, those same leaders resorted to word-of-mouth support from selected downtown business leaders to justify city subsidies to the race organizers. And who could forget the full-page Merc ad (probably paid for by the city's subsidy) that the Grand Prix organizers put out attempting to refute the numbers. The fact that, in Silicon Valley, a car race that caters to second- and third-tier cities becomes one of the year's biggest controversies is, of course, testimony that no matter how hard we push ourselves, we won't ever pass up San Francisco.

Funtwo Uncovered

The investigative might of The New York Times was deployed to uncover one of the great mysteries of the year: Just who was it playing a rock god version of the Canon in D Major by 18th-century composer Johann Pachelbel on YouTube? The masterful chord work was attributed to the handle Funtwo, a T-shirted virtuoso who sat on his bed with the brow of a baseball cap covering his eyes as he looked down at his frets. By August, the video clip had been viewed more than 7 million times. Breathlessly, the Times reported that Jeong-Hyun Lim, a 23-year-old in Seoul, Korea, had recorded the canon.

Peace Through Boredom

San Jose's "safer streets through boredom" plan pays dividends on the hushed, overpoliced streets of downtown at night. By favoring generic chain restaurants over independents and dance music over live-music venues, San Jose has created an aggressively boring city that all but empties of people once the sun goes down. Faced with a docile population that doesn't stay out too late, criminals have headed for the mean streets of Cupertino, Campbell, Sunnyvale and Los Gatos for a more hospitable atmosphere.