The meeting is open to the public and you’re encouraged to speak.

MCC members will read the forum topics and discussions, and can ask for clarification of comments. However, California’s open meetings law (the Brown Act) forbids them from engaging in a substantive discussion of the issues except with proper notice at an MCC meeting.

You can’t comment on this message, but you can comment on the associated topic in the MCC forum.

Join the nation in celebrating and learning about migratory birds.  A day of fun and learning for the whole family.  Learn about bird migrations from North America to Central and South America.  Activities include exhibits and arts and crafts.  Learn ways to help birds; enjoy a guided bird walk and activities for children.

Location:  Half Moon Bay State Beach Visitor Center, 95 Kelly Avenue The event is free. Parking fee is $6 per vehicle.

Presented by California State Parks and Sequoia Audubon

http://www.sequoia-audubon.org
http://www.parks.ca.gov/default.asp?page_id=531

The highest scholastic honor given by Pop Warner is the National First Team, which includes the top 35 football players and top 35 cheerleaders from each grade level.  Fewer than ten players from the 6000-member Bay Area Peninsula Pop Warner League achieve this recognition each year.  Joseph Lowman received this prestigious award for 2008.  Sean McCaffrey, Nathan Seaton, Neal Seaton, and Ryan Segervall were named to National Second Team. 

To achieve this recognition, players had to accomplish outstanding academic performance in school as well as demonstrate excellence in non-athletic activities and responsibilities such as honors classes and school awards, after-school classes, community service, and special projects.  Second Team includes the top 1,000 scholar-athletes from each grade level from approximately 360,000 Pop Warner participants across the United States.

The Coastside Cougars Pop Warner teams will be recruiting for the 2008 season now until practice begins on August 1.  More information is available at http://www.coastsidefootball.org/

Coastside has a tradition of being represented within this prestigious group, past Coastside football players, Zach Schuller, 2006, and Drew Bollman, 2005, received National First Team recognition.  Nathan Seaton and Joseph Lowman, along with Daniel Custer, Evelyn Moseley, Nicholas Moss, and Daniel Welch received National Second Team or National Honorable Mention awards for 2007.

In March of 2008, the Pacific Northwest Region Pop Warner organization recognized 1,000 players/ cheerleaders out of 20,000 participants in leagues across Northern California and Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska for academic achievement.  In addition to the National scholars above, who were also named to the Regional First or Second Teams, Regional Honorable Mention Scholars from Coastside included Justyne Beck-Dewilde, Christopher Bradley, Devon Canty, Marshall Egger, Joseph Erdie, Jamin Hines, Blake Kastl, Spencer Meyer, Patrick Meyers, Dominic Pintarelli, Jacob Spaeth, and Daniel Welch. 

In February, a total of 58 Coastside cheerleaders and football players received scholastics awards at the Peninsula League level, recognizing academic achievement and community service among some 6,000 participants from the greater Bay Area.

Our Coastside national scholars are invited to the national scholastics award banquet, held in alternating years at Disney World and Disneyland.  Pop Warner began as a junior football conference founded in 1929 by a stockbroker named Joe Tomlin, who wanted to help Philadelphia youth and young adults.  Glenn Scobie “Pop” Warner, who had coached football at Stanford, where his teams won three Rose Bowl championships, became associated with the program in 1934, and by 1938, the organization had grown to 157 teams.  After a decline during World War II, the Pop Warner Conference became more focused on youth.  During the 50’s, the group caught the attention of Walt Disney, who promoted Pop Warner with a TV show.  Expanding coast-to-coast, by the late 1960’s, the organization totaled over 3,000 teams across the country.  Cheerleading was introduced and grew rapidly during the 1970’s. Today, the organization is the largest youth football, cheer, and dance program in the United States, and has over 5,000 teams and about 360,000 participants, ages 5 to 16 in eight age/weight classifications, in 41 states and several countries around the world.  The organization also focuses on building scholarship and community service.  Pop Warner Little Scholars requires boys and girls to perform satisfactorily in their schoolwork before allowing them to participate on the field.  It also recognizes outstanding achievements in scholastics and community service through special awards at the local league, regional, and national levels.

The Coastside’s Pop Warner Association, now known as the Coastside Cougars, has fielded youth football teams and cheerleading squads since 1969.  Scott Jones and Mike Berger were on the first Coastside Pop Warner team, with head coach Al Shue, and continued to play football through high school.  Cheerleading parents handmade the jumper outfits when cheerleading was added in the early ‘70’s.  In 2007, 60% of the HMBHS varsity and 50% of the HMBHS frosh/soph football, as well as 50% of HMBHS varsity and frosh/soph cheerleaders started out in the Coastside Pop Warner Football and Cheer program.

Last year was an outstanding one for the local teams.  In 2007, the Coastside Pop Warner Cheerleaders competed at the Shoreline Amphitheatre Cheer Invitational Competition for ages 5 – 14. The Coastside Midget team (11 – 15 year-olds) won 1st place in the Peninsula Championships and advanced to 1st place in the Northwest Regional Championships in Santa Clara, defeating a team that traveled from Washington State. The Pee Wee team (9 – 12 year-olds) placed second in the Peninsula Pop Warner League Championships and advanced to the Northwest Regional Championships in Santa Clara, where they placed third by winning a game with another team from Washington state.  The Mighty Mites football team (7 - 9 year-olds) played in the Peninsula Pop Warner Regional Bowl in Hollister. 

I’m not entirely sure how to report this, since I was running in this race.  Speaking only for myself, I was always running with the goal of improving MCTV and not against any particular members or nominees of the board. So, I’m happy to congratulate MCTV’s new board members and wish them well as they take the station into the digital age. I still have a lot of ideas for improving the station and its service to the community, but I’ll save that for another time.

Candidate, votes

Jack Prejza, 62 (elected)
Chris Madison, 60 (elected)
Whitney Brooks, 61 (elected)
Barry Parr, 25
Darin Boville, 22
Scott Boyd, 25

Resolution to amend the MCTV bylaws

Yes, 57 (passed)
No, 22

Event Host Committee: Mayor Jim Vreeland - Councilmember Pete DeJarnatt - Councilmember Sue Digre- Councilmember Julie Lancelle - John Curtis - Bob Pilgrim - Barbara Arietta

Saturday, May 10, 2008 Time:  1:00 PM- 2:30PM
Sanchez Concert Hall
1220 Linda Mar Boulevard, Pacifica

Nathan Southern of All Movie Guide says “As the curtain rapidly fell on the 20th Century, his holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet, grew so deeply troubled by the state of the modern world that he invited 40 pivotal Western thinkers to his secluded home in Northern India’s Himalayan Mountains, for a lengthy and pointed brainstorming session on the problems of contemporary society and how to solve them most effectively. Foreseeing the importance of this event, documentarist Khashyar Darvich joined the group with an 18-member, 5-camera crew in tow (sponsored by the Wakan Foundation for the Arts) and sought to capture the event on film. This yielded some 140 hours of video footage, edited down to feature length for Darvich’s documentary Dalai Lama Renaissance. The film preserves, in 80 minutes, the most insightful, illuminative and engaging dialogues from Gyatso’s conference.”

Synthesis participants from the film, locals Nancy Margulies and Gary Warhaftig, along with another bay area participant Barry Rosen, will conduct a Q & A with the audience after the screening.

The event will be held on Saturday, May 10th at the Johnson House Depot.  Doors will open at 7:00pm, event begins at 7:30.  Advance tickets $10, door $15. Call 650-560-0200 for information and reservations.  

“I narrated Dalai Lama Renaissance,” says actor Harrison Ford, “because I believe His Holiness is making a positive influence in our world.  For me, the film represented an opportunity to continue assisting the optimistic efforts of an extraordinary individual.”  

The film also features two of the starring quantum physicists from the hit documentary “What the Bleep Do We Know,” physicists Fred Alan Wolf and Ami Goswami. Also appearing in Dalai Lama Renaissance are Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith (founder and director of Agape International Spiritual Center, who appears in the film The Secret with Wolf), ground-breaking social scientist Jean Houston and author/radio host Thom Hartmann.                                                                 

According to Jean Miyake Downey of the Kyoto Journal “This is a revelatory documentary about the “Everyman” journey from egocentric consciousness to something more sublime. The film follows forty global experts in their fields who traveled to Dharamsala to advise the Dalai Lama. The first scenes reveal a hilariously clashing hootenanny of mild-mannered Engaged Buddhists, solemn Catholics, gabby physicists intent on demonstrating the convergence of quantum physics with ultimate reality, New Agers dressed in purple, social change visionaries, and progressive economists, all engaged in “synthesizing” and “witnessing” brain-storming to collect all their brilliant ideas to present to the fourteenth Dalai Lama. This well-educated and well-mannered group then revolted against their endlessly patient facilitators, in a gray-haired inverse variation of the “Lord of the Flies.” Throughout the chaos that ensued, each player was shown as confronting her or his own ego, as much as they confronted the facilitators and fellow participants. Their conflicts with each other, and most of all, with their own egos were actually uplifting, as they struggled to be truthful and respectful while their “bubbling over” clashed with the facilitators’ attempts to create some order out of the unwieldy explosion of dialogue.  

Then something broke open.  

Tenzin Gyatso, the Dalai Lama, who kept referring to himself as nothing but a “simple monk,” spoke. And, what he said, and the way he said it sounded like a clear, clear bell that shattered all the clashing mental abstractions, and brought attention back to the human level… I saw the transformations of the participants simply becoming more of who they really are, as whatever was obscuring their inner radiance fell away. i actually felt as if I was feeling some of that myself, as if these wonderful energies were emanating from the small movie screen . .  Compassion. Joy. Happiness. Even while suffering in participation and/or witness with and struggling to address the world’s problems “

Says Vanderpool of The Visionary Edge, “The Dalai Lama made clear that his priority is “to promote basic human values.” He suggested that the only solution that ultimately would be successful, is one that supports all people, both Tibetans and Chinese; that anything that creates harm in any way for any person, he could not support.  One of the Synthesis participants, Elizabet Sathouris, after witnessing the conflict within the Synthesis group, suggested the importance of getting in touch with our own ”inner Tibets” before they could effectively work on the outer Tibet.  Of course, to affect lasting change that brings peace to the planet, both must be done, the inner work as well as the outer.”

According to director-producer  Kashyar Darvich “At first, we expected great thinkers would solve the world’s problems. Halfway through, we realized the story was about the inner journeys of the Synthesis participants. What happened when the Dalai Lama spoke became the story; it even became the film’s title, Dalai Lama Renaissance.”

Says Jean Miyake Downey of the Kyoto Journal “This film is a startlingly original, revelatory documentary, a beautiful and fresh window on the Dalai Lama.”  

Located in Half Moon Bay, The Visionary Edge is a transformative arts and events organization committed to inspiring all to create a wiser, more sustainable and compassionate world.