Robert Price
Robert Price: Smile! It’s only an interview (and a glimpse of the real world)
When I was 17, I flitted from one job to another on the most trivial of pretenses. Fast-food fry cook, furniture delivery man, sprinkler-installation ditch digger.
Robert Price: Another day, another Kern River swimmer lulled into drowning
Christi Abshire knows the Kern River. She grew up in the town of Lake Isabella, fishing, rafting and kayaking on local water. As a teen, she spent summers working as a guide for a Kernville commercial river-rafting outfit, regularly briefing tourists on what to do if they're pitched into the frothy maelstrom.
Robert Price: Recall election delay just might be bad news for Ken Weir
To some, it might look like Ken Weir is suddenly off the hook. The folks campaigning to recall the Bakersfield city councilman have admitted they're struggling, within the narrow time frame they've been given, to collect enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
Robert Price: Bakersfield chainsaw massacre still smarts
It might as well have been a crime scene. The cottonwoods lining the dirt road running through the Rio Bravo Ranch had been brutalized, half their lush canopies amputated like gangrenous arms. And the perpetrators were still at work at the scene of the maiming, seemingly oblivious to the horror they had wrought.
Robert Price: Stranded once too often, this traveler wants feds to pay attention
It was 3:30 in the morning when Jack Turnbull's bus pulled in to the Greyhound station. From all appearances, the town of Florence, S.C., was still asleep — and unfortunately, that included the bus station itself. It was locked tight, lights out, no pay phone in sight. Turnbull stood alone on the sidewalk, stranded.
Robert Price: School suspensions a concern, bad data notwithstanding
The numbers were almost too staggering to be believable. In just one year, the Bakersfield City School District had seen a near-tenfold spike in the number of student suspensions related to violence or drugs.
Robert Price: Privacy is a one-way street in consumer-corporate relationship
The customer service representative placed me on hold. I had called the financial-services company's toll-free line with questions about my 401k account, and now the rep had to step away to fetch some information.
13 years without missing school? Somebody take his temperature
Congratulations to Jonathan Lee Happel, who made it through 13 years of school without missing so much as a single day of instruction. That's an achievement that points to a single-mindedness of purpose, a succession of competent campus registrars and unusually good luck. Not necessarily a rock-solid immune system, though -- that's rarely the case even with students who always, unfailingly, make it to class. It certainly wasn't the case with Happel.
Needles just the latest town to consider 'breakaway' course
Here's an idea that's foreign to most Californians: the concept of a "breakaway" region. And I mean foreign, literally. Secessionist movements are something we usually read about only in the international section of the newspaper. South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transdnestr -- places few of us had heard of before they decided to break away from whatever country they've unwillingly been a part of. (In this case it's Georgia, itself a one-time breakaway republic.)
Summer's sonic spam: Irksome ice-cream trucks after nightfall
Back in the days when I was regularly hurdling neighbors' hedges barefoot, trying to head off the Good Humor Man before he turned the corner, ice cream trucks were an indispensible part of the summer experience.
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