Davisville

Joel Davis is a hometown Davis journalist whose book “Justice Waits: The UC Davis Sweetheart Murders” played a key role in solving the 1980 Davis kidnapping and murder of “two stellar kids,” UC Davis students John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves. In December 2012, 32 years to the month after the slayings, a Sacramento Superior Court jury convicted Richard Hirschfield of first-degree murder for killing Gonsalves and Riggins, who were both 18.

He spent his time in Kurdistan, the less-violent northern part of the country, working with Kurds, Shias and Sunnis. Pearson describes both tension and reasons to hope—hotel guards with AK-47s, and a lively democracy. A few years ago he went to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Afghanistan is probably next. “Davis,” he says near the end of the show, “needs to get out and see the rest of the world.”

Davis film critic Derrick Bang returns to Davisville this week to talk about some of the big December movies, including The Hobbit debuting Dec. 14, and Quentin Tarentino’s Django Unchained “southern,” which opens on Christmas. We also take up related questions about movies, such as the continuing slump in ticket sales. He blames the degraded experience of going out to a movie, including the pre-show commercials and mediocre presentation—but says the three Davis theaters do a consistently good job in sound and projection. Maybe that’s a selling point for a city banking on arts and entertainment as a major draw for downtown. We also get Bang’s take on the best, and worst, holiday movies through the years. His list of the best is thin on recent titles, compared to his list of the worst.

For my Halloween show, I thought it’d be fun to talk with the people behind Cool Patch Pumpkins at the north edge of Dixon, just southwest of Davis. Guinness World Records says the farm has the world’s largest temporary corn maze (53 acres this year, with a path 2.5 miles long). Cool Patch co-owner Matt Cooley obliged, and told me things about the farm I hadn’t read or heard before. For example: They end up with a lot of shoes. Some pumpkin hunters amass so much gummy clay on their soles after a trek through the patch, they abandon their footwear next to their cars when they leave. Other facts: The Cooleys (Matt and his brother Mark) thought about adding a mud pit, to go with the hay bales, scarecrows and corn bath; they might move the maze south of Interstate 80, and/or offer two mazes, one harder than the other; and Matt gets calls in the middle of the night about or from people lost in the maze. People ask him if the maze is haunted, and he says no, except if you’re out there alone in the night amid the rustling stalks, and a bird suddenly takes off skyward near you … yeah, it can be scary.