San Mateo County Health System will hold a free whooping cough vaccine clinic. The number of whooping cough cases in the County has reached nearly eight times the number at this time last year.

The clinic will be held on September 18 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at the Health Administration Building, Room 100, located at 225 37th Ave. in San Mateo. All residents ages 7 and older are encouraged to get vaccinated, especially those in close contact with newborns who are too young to be vaccinated. No appointment is necessary, and residents will not be asked to show I.D.

Half Moon Bay resident John Robert Alexander, 56, has been arrested in Bridgeport for a string of California bank robberies, reports the Auburn Journal.

On Aug. 27 Alexander allegedly robbed the Bank of America on High Street in Downtown Auburn. He was then connected to nine other robberies in the Bay Area and Placer County, including Rocklin and Roseville.

The first robbery occurred June 2 in Mountain View.

Alexander had been called the Posse Box Bandit. A Posse Box is a brand and type of clipboard that has a storage compartment connected to the board.

The Review is reporting that Alexander was well-known locally as an actor in the Coastal Reportory Theatre, having appeared in plays that included “Tommy”, “South Pacific”, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”, “Over the Tavern”, and “Oklahoma”.

On Saturday September 11th, The Visionary Edge will present a day-long FRESH event including a community Farmers’ Market Potluck followed by a sneak preview screening of the new documentary FRESH: New Thinking About What We’re Eating. The film will be introduced via skype by the director, and a panel discussion that highlights what is going on in our county to enhance a healthier food system will wrap up the evening. 

FRESH celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. Each has witnessed the rapid transformation of our agriculture into an industrial model, and confronted the consequences: food contamination, environmental pollution, depletion of natural resources, and morbid obesity. Forging healthier, sustainable alternatives, they offer a practical vision for a future of our food and our planet. FRESH presents a vision of the possible by profiling heroes all over the country who are changing the way we eat. If Food Inc. was your wake up call, FRESH is your call to action.

Start with a community potluck at 6

Movie-goers are encouraged to start their day FRESH with a visit to the Coastside Farmers Market on Saturday morning from 9:00-1:00 and take advantage “Secret Ingredient” deals on fresh, organic, locally grown and produced food to include in the first-ever Coastside Farmers’ Market Community Potluck.  The Community is invited to bring a dish to share – or simply come to sample and vote for your favorite creation of the evening.  Compostable sampling kits will be available by donation to The HEAL Project – and include 4 chances to vote for your favorite concoction of the night. The winner will receive a shopping spree at the Coastside Farmers’ Market.  The Farmers Market Potluck, hosted by The Visionary Edge, Coastside Farmers Market and Community United Methodist Church, begins at 6 PM at CUMC, 777 Miramontes at Johnston.

We experience poor DSL service from AT&T.  Because I work from home and use the Internet extensively, it is vital to me that DSL service function properly.  Comcast does not service this area.  If you also have DSL service in or near the Miramar area, you probably are experiencing DSL problems also.

I am reaching out to you because I believe that we are more likely to cause AT&T to make the necessary investment that would provide good DSL service if we all share a common understanding of what the issues are, and know how to effectively act on that information.  If you get your service from Coastside.net you are also affected by these issues because AT&T provides the basic connectivity.  My hope is that this letter will give you the information for you to discover if your service is substandard, and the instructions on how to navigate AT&T will allow you to add your voice to mine in requesting an improvement in service quality for this neighborhood.

Symptoms are any of the following: Internet videos such as YouTube and Netflix do not play smoothly; web pages take a long time to load; downloads go very slowly; voice conversations using Skype do not work well and/or your modem lights frequently turn red.

The main reason for poor DSL service is that AT&T’s central office (often referred to as the CO) is too far away, in downtown Half Moon Bay.  DSL is not supposed to reach this far.  However, before moving here I contacted AT&T to verify that DSL was available for this neighborhood, and I was told that 3Mb/s was available.  Based on that information we moved in.  The first problem, then, is that AT&T’s sales team is selling a defective product.  AT&T can make this right by investing in additional equipment.

Coastside Campfire & Community Sing-Along join us at the Outback @ Cameron’s Corral, coming up:

• Tuesday, Aug 31, 7:00 - 9:00pm
• Sunday, Sept. 12, 5:30 - 8:00pm
• Sunday, Sept 26, 5:30 - 8:00pm

Good-spirited music for all ages, featuring contemporary and classic songs to sing together. Words provided, instruments encouraged. Hot beverages & good food available, plus FREE S’MORES! Dress warm, come hungry, & sing well!

Cameron’s Pub @ 1410 S. Cabrillo Hwy, just south of downtown Half Moon Bay For more information, lyrics to the songs, and a forum to suggest songs, go to: http://coastsidecampfire.com

Judge for the Annual Members show will be Paul Bridenbaugh, art professor and gallery director at Skyline College.
The “52nd Annual Members Exhibition” opens Friday, September 10, in the Main and West Gallery with a reception from 7 to 9 pm.  Winners will receive cash awards and four exhibition winners will exhibit their work in the East Gallery of next years members show.  Music will be provided by Vivace and the Jazz Cat Combo.  The exhibition will run through October 17.  The Art Guild of Pacifica has been presenting exhibitions by its artist members for fifty-two years with no sign of stopping.  Described as a gift to the community, this organization is entirely volunteer-based.  The Art Guild of Pacifica serves as a forum for local artists and holds several exhibitions each year in the West Gallery of Sanchez Art Center.   

Showing in the East Gallery will be last year’s recipients of the 51st Annual Members Exhibition Awards.  Nancy Hall, Tanya Lin Jaffe, Alice Kelmon, and Roger Thoms were selected for the award in 2009 by DeWitt Cheng, noted Bay Area artist and arts writer.

For more information visit http://www.artguildofpacifica.org.

Neil’s guest is Matt Grocott, the San Carlos councilman who ran this year for a seat on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. Matt didn’t make it to the run-off but he did manage to obtain almost every newspaper endorsement in the County. (The Half Moon Bay Review was one of two newspapers which did not endorse Grocott). Matt talks about the race, his views on planning and his vision for the coast. The video runs about twenty minutes.

These record-breaking chill days of this particular “summer” continue to inspire fantastic outfits of many layers, and have me thinking that looking to  traditional summer comforts like refreshing sorbets or rich, cool gazpacho for relief from the weather’s insults may not be the best course of action if recovery from chill-blains is my goal.  Which it is.

As most all of us have surely noticed there is not much of a need to cool off these days, but the tomatoes are coming on anyway, albeit slower than in years past, spinach has had little reason or opportunity to bolt and so is lush and plentiful as are the summer squashes, eggplants and multi-hued potatoes.  Access to that spectacular palate of flavors and colors (and a v-blade slicer from Toque Blanche)  make for quite colorful way to layer up a fresh lasagne,  serious bucket of ratatouille or a tricolor potato gratin topped with slow-roasted heirloom tomatoes.  

Now, in normal years I’d be waiting to make dishes like these until fall when the days are shorter,  the nights a bit cooler but the tag ends of later tomatoes are still coming to Market; full-hipped, ripe and tasty, but a bit blowsily past their prime, kinda like your hostess. But in a year like this when most folks can’t seem to coax their zucchini to blossom let alone overproduce, it seems like a good idea to move the comfort food season into what one Mr Clemens referred to as the Coldest Winter he ever spent anywhere. 

Open Street Maps is a self-described “Wikipedia of Street Maps”: a complete set of local street maps that anyone can contribute to.

On Saturday, August 14, at 10am,  Bay Area OSM fans will converge at LaDiDa in Half Moon Bay for a mapping party [Meetup].  Bring your GPS or cell phone with GPS software—or borrow a GPS from the organizers at the event.

OSM’s goal is to create an open-source map of the world’s streets. Commercial street maps (such as Google, Yahoo, MapQuest, and Bing) are copyrighted by one of two companies (TomTom or Nokia). OSM got its start in Europe, where copyright restrictions made it impossible for developers to create new systems on top of existing map data.

I’ve been personally contributing to OSM for more than a year by cleaning up their maps of Montara and adding points of interest. Most of the Coastside maps have been created using US Census data and are already quite good, but parts of them are out of date, incomplete, or incorrect.

I’ve been using EveryTrail’s free iPhone app for my work, but there are other apps available for iPhone and Android. I recommend downloading a GPS app and practicing recording your tracks between now and the 14th. Or just bring a GPS or borrow one at the meeting.

You’ll get help uploading your tracks and updating the map based on your data.