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News From Silicon Valley's Neighborhoods Seven Heaven Gilroy officials know how to get criminals out of town: have the police shadow them until they slip up. Psychic Fare Willow Glen--Goddess be praised! According to the clairvoyant scholars at the Academy for Psychic Studies on Lincoln Avenue, 1999 is shaping up to be a prosperous, scandal-free year in the Glen, with laurels fluttering down around the heads of the gifted students at Willow Glen High School and a surge of new arrivals in town. Not that the fin du fin de siecle will be a perfumed walk in the park--more traffic and further gnawing on the bones of our national leaders will taint the lovely view--but in general, Glenites may expect a pleasant and relatively trouble-free year. Residual Smoke Sunnyvale--Here in the outlaw West it's hard to keep a good Marlboro man down. And with hundreds of smokers for every citation-writing long arm of the law, a handful of bars in Sunnyvale and Cupertino remain as smoker-friendly as ever. In some cases they're allowed to do so by formal exemption. In others, it's a matter of survival. Those establishments who have embraced the year-old ordinance, by contrast, maintain that their customers like the smoke-free atmosphere better--and they have the teeming business to prove it. Mutt Hut Los Gatos--A dog's life just got a little bit safer. Thanks to a new state law increasing holding periods for stray dogs and cats at animal shelters, local officials are anticipating a need for an expanded county facility. At the same time, the Humane Society, which currently contracts with the county and eight cities, including Los Gatos and Saratoga, is announcing a new mission to become a "no kill" shelter. So the Humane Society is terminating its municipal contracts in July 2000 and recommending that the county build a grand new animal shelter, whose employees the Humane Society will help train. [ Metro | Metroactive Central | Archives ]