Farming is a big deal around here. Yolo County is home to one of the best academic ag programs in the world at UC Davis, and the Capay Valley north of Davis is an organic showpiece. Besides, we all eat! We all use materials that come from agriculture. Today’s guest is Brad Hooker, recently of UC Davis, and now the associate editor and founder of the new California bureau in Sacramento for the Agri-Pulse news organization. We talk about water, Silicon Valley’s interest in farming innovations, cannabis as a legal crop, UC Davis research, the importance of data, and other subjects from the ag beat.
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Today’s show is a story about a train with 183 riders that never reached its destination. The reason why it didn’t is also why this train became a national story – and it’s a story for Davisville because the train normally stops in Davis. My guest was one of the people aboard, my daughter, Megan Buchanan (I was onboard too). She’s also the young woman whose kid-entertaining ukulele playing in the lounge car was recorded by another passenger and went a little viral. No injuries were reported from this trip, the power, water and food held out, and a lot of people were helpful – but that’s not to say this was an anxiety-free sojourn in the woods. The story starts on a Sunday evening with snowflakes falling at the train station in Eugene, Ore., as the Seattle-to-L.A. Coast Starlight began what was supposed to be a 13-hour overnight trip to Davis. Instead, the train spent more than 36 hours stuck in a small mountain town.
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You probably don’t spend much time thinking about the government of Yolo County. Even so, the county does things we need them to do—in areas like public health, the environment, the jail and roads—and decides policies that govern the area. So, the work matters. This spring the county is working on its plan to guide the next few years, and they want your ideas and suggestions on what should be in that plan. Today’s guest, county Supervisor Don Saylor, talks about the information they’d like to get, and how they’ll use it.
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Ean Kimura & Erick Fierro, both second-year students at UC Davis, are part of the standup comedy scene in Davis. It’s not a big scene—Yelp’s list of 10 top comedy clubs in Davis stops at nine entries, and lists just one location that's actually in town—but we learn more about it on today’s show. We also talk about why Fierro and Kimura enjoy making people laugh, the UC Davis standup comedy club (possibly the same one Hasan Minhaj started), what makes good standup comedy, what happens when you bomb onstage, and more, including the t-shirt cannon bit they presented on the first edition of their KDVS campus radio station show In the Meantime (8 a.m. Mondays).
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Comedy and chronic pain might not seem to have much in common, but on today’s program, they do. UC Davis Continuing Lecturer Karma Waltonen teaches seminars on writing & performing stand-up comedy, among other subjects, and on Jan. 31 she’ll present her one-woman show “Chronic Pain: A Comedy,” at the UC Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center in Sacramento. Waltonen has wonderfully eclectic interests – her expertise ranges from The Simpsons to Margaret Atwood – and her sense of humor and comic timing, backed by her clear respect for the serious aspects of her subject, make this an engaging interview.
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Like other cities, Davis is home to people who have no home. And so each year the Interfaith Rotating Winter Shelter, a project of Davis congregations (mostly churches), offers overnight shelter and food to the homeless for a week at each of 10 locations. It runs from December to mid-March. Linda Scott, co-chair of the shelter and a longtime volunteer, talks about how it works, what it offers, recent changes, the main cause of homelessness among the people they serve, and the contributions of their 1,500 volunteers. The shelter helped about 140 people last year.
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Bob Dunning moved to Davis in the early 1950s, began writing for the Davis Enterprise in 1969, and started producing his daily column in 1976. At that pace, he has probably written more words about Davis than anyone. Ever. On today’s show we talk about the column, the idea that the Enterprise could use additional local voices like his from a greater variety of people in Davis, what he thinks Davis needs most, and his memories of sharing a stage with Bob Hope at the legendary comedian’s fundraiser for the Davis Senior Center in the 1980s.
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Doug Hatton has appeared as Santa Claus at events in and around Davis for 22 years. On today’s Davisville he talks about the experience, what Davis kids ask for, the time a girl asked for an ATM for her room, how he manages expectations, and the enjoyment he gets from doing it all. Listening is important, he says, kids can sense if someone really wants to talk with them, and yes, his beard is real.
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CommuniCare, which began as the Davis Free Clinic in the 1970s, provides primary healthcare and related services to about 10 percent of Yolo County’s population. If people can’t pay, they still get care. How did a clinic that used to fit in a converted house downtown grow into a set of healthcare centers that are critically important to local healthcare? Robin Affrime is part of the answer. She was CEO of CommuniCare for 19 years until retiring this fall, after starting there as a volunteer 35 years ago. On today’s Davisville she talks about CommuniCare, what it does, how it grew, the role it plays in local healthcare, and offers her ideas on how she’d approach the perennial problem in U.S. healthcare: how to pay for it all.
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In August 2014, author Julia Scheeres and Thom Bogue spoke at the Avid Reader about her book, “A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Jonestown,” and his memories of the remote South American camp of the Peoples Temple where 918 people were killed or committed suicide one day in November 1978. Bogue, then a teenager and now mayor of Dixon, was one of the relatively few survivors. Scheeres’ critically praised book draws on previously unavailable recordings and records from the temple, which once had a major presence in San Francisco. They talk about it in this 2014 interview on Davisville.
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