UC Davis greenhouse expert Garry Pearson reports back from Iraq
Mon, 12/10/2012 - 5:30pm | Bill Buchanan
Twice this year, Garry Pearson has gone to Iraq as part of a program to help Iraqis grow more vegetables. He oversees about 160 research greenhouses at UC Davis, and an ag project recruited him as a technical expert. On today’s Davisville he talks about what he saw. Pearson wanted to “see what’s going on [after the U.S. war] ... It’s my own natural curiosity. I know I have technical skills that can be passed on to different people, if it’s presented in the right way. On the ground my experience was just meeting the people everyday, the day-to-day folks. I got the opportunities to be out and to mix.”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.
Today’s guests are Brianna Owens (far left) and Steph Hankinson from Common House Productions, a new theater troupe that is producing its first show, "The Woman in Black," in Davis. The play will debut at 8 p.m. on Halloween, in what they describe as a "huge, really creepy" backyard with a campfire pit on Loyola, and run through Nov. 11. Owens and Hankinson, vets of local theater who met at Sacramento State, are co-directing the play. On Davisville they talk about "The Woman in Black," their plans for Common House, why they created a new theater company, the co-operative structure of their enterprise, why they opened with a strong narrative story where the sound is a defining part of the experience, and what they’d like to do next.
Today’s subject, water, could not be more basic. Everyone who uses water in Davis is going to pay more for it, probably significantly more, in the next few years. The reasons why, and how this might all play out, are among the points we cover in today’s discussion with Joe Krovoza, the mayor of Davis and vice chair of the Woodland-Davis Clean Water Agency. This complex subject goes back years. It involves issues of where Davis gets its water, potential partnerships with Woodland or West Sacramento, conservation, a great deal of analysis by the citizen’s Water Advisory Committee, and more. Tune in for a rundown on how we got here, and what might happen next.
Fraud, online and otherwise, exists in Davis as it does anywhere. But the local experience isn’t always the same as it is in other places--for one thing, two years ago our town was visited by the 
