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volume 131, number 70
wednesday, may 23, 2012
Downtown Davis named a Cultural Arts and Entertainment District Three new art pieces unveiled at Flourish Davis movement
By ANI UCAR
Aggie News Writer
Concluding the struggle to expand art in public places fought by community members, artists, and gallery owner John Natsoulas, the Davis City Council on May 15 unanimously voted to make Downtown Davis a “Cultural Arts and Entertainment District.” Davis is among the first 20 cities in California to carry such a title. Currently the city has publicly displayed 18 pieces of art, all of which are part of the transmedia art walk. Of that total, 16 of the pieces are sculptures and two are murals. Natsoulas and his team plan to have 40 pieces exhibited in the public domain by January 2013. In an effort to restore the arts in Davis, Natsoulas has worked diligently at gaining community support and involvement. “This is all about creating community,” Natsoulas said. In celebration of the newly named district was the
Flourish Davis movement created by Natsoulas himself, held this past Saturday. Joined by Mayor Joe Krovoza, Natsoulas and his supporters unveiled three new pieces downtown. Two of the three new pieces are Susannah Israel’s new sculpture “Circus” and the California State colleges “Collaboration” piece. The third stands as the world’s first interactive mural envisioned and executed by Davis artist William Maul in collaboration with the Davis mural team, located on a wall fronting the E Street alleyway behind Peet’s Coffee & Tea on 231 E St. Titled “It Can Happen Now...TO YOU,” the towering mural highlights a scene of an actress screaming from the old horror movie The Devil Thumbs a Ride. Beneath the graffiti-proof gloss lies a small silicon chip known as a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag. Through the free mobile Evan Davis / Aggie
See FLOURISH, page 2 Susannah Israel’s piece, Circus, was just unveiled in Davis last week as a part of the Flourish Davis event.
New Entrepreneurship Fund gives student businesses a helping hand ASUCD grants new program $6,000 By ADAM KHAN Aggie News Writer
Last quarter saw the inception of ASUCD’s Entrepreneurship Fund, a new $6,000 grant established to support undergraduate business ventures and promote innovation among the undergraduate class.
The program runs on a twoquarter system in which winning applicants are picked from a diverse pool of business proposals and can be allocated up to $1,500 in funding. These projects, as stated on the Entrepreneurship Fund website, are supposed to be “socially-conscious businesses” that are aimed to “recog-
nize a social problem and use entrepreneurial principles to organize, create and manage a business venture that helps to achieve social change.” The Entrepreneurship Fund, as drafted in ASUCD Senate Bill 100, is organized into the entirely student-run Entrepreneurship Fund Special Committee, which in turn is divided into two sub-
committees. First, a selection committee comprised of various members of ASUCD, alumni and faculty is responsible for reviewing applications, conducting interviews and determining the recipients of the funding. Second, an entirely student-run advisory committee is responsible for
See BUSINESS, page 2
Farmers Market Vendor of the Week: Affi’s Marin Gourmet Family recipes passed down for 25 years By LANI CHAN Aggie Staff Writer
Who would have guessed that an eggplant dip could have developed into a culinary business of such scale? Over 25 years ago, the Panahi family developed a recipe for a special kind of baba ghannouge, an eggplant dish popular in the Middle East. Today the exact same dish, which Affi’s calls Aubergine, is available every Saturday morning at the Davis Farmers Market along with a complete line of dips, sauces and crackers that feature Middle Eastern and Mediterranean flavors. Made from fresh and natural ingredients grown in Fresno, Affi’s Marin Gourmet products are a family legacy, carrying the same flavor combinations through the generations. The Aggie sat down with Anton Bozcagna, manager of the Affi’s Marin Gourmet stand in Davis, to get a glimpse of the company’s history and what it has become today — all because of a revolutionary baba ghannouge recipe. “If the recipe ever changed that would be a riot,” Bozcagna said. “It’ll always be the exact same recipe. We’re not allowed to touch it.”
The products
The Aggie: What’s the Aubergine like?
Today’s weather Sunny High 81 Low 53
Bijan Agahi / Aggie
Affi’s Marin Gourmet developed an original recipe for baba ghannouge called Abergine. Bozcagna: The Aubergine is this really fantastic thing. It’s made from four different types of eggplant, grilled over mesquite and then finished with a really fantastic olive oil. Everything is done by hand, which makes it expensive, but it guarantees a certain quality. It’s not mass-produced, so each batch
Forecast As Davis continues to warm up, cats have started to prowl around my apartment with increased frequency. Can we say that the number of cat sightings around Segundo is directly proportional to the current temperature? I say yes! Kenneth Doss, atmospheric science major Aggie Forecasting Team
can be very different. All the eggplants are grown in-house and don’t even have common names, just scientific ones. They are very special eggplants and it tastes like that — the store-bought eggplants will not taste
See FARMERS, page 5
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News iN Brief
Lecture today on teaching evolution in public schools Glenn Branch, deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, will be giving a talk on evolution in public schools today in Haring Hall. The talk, titled “Defending the Teaching of Evolution in Public Schools: After Kitzmiller — What?” will take place in 2205 Haring Hall from 7 to 9 p.m. The talk was organized by the UC Davis Science Policy Journal Club after legislation challenging the teaching of evolution was proposed this year in several states, including Tennessee, Indiana and New Hampshire. Colin Cunliff, a physics graduate student and member of the Science Policy Journal Club, says that the controversy keeps arising because opponents of evolution don’t need to win court cases. “They keep losing court cases like Kitzmiller v. Dover, but that doesn’t matter,” Cunliff said. “All they have to do is generate enough controversy that high school biology teachers are intimidated into watering down their instruction on evolution, or avoiding it all together.” The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) found that 97 percent of its members agreed that humans evolved over time. However, a recent report by the National Science Foundation found that only 47 percent of Americans think that humans developed from earlier species of animals, and only 61 percent think that scientists generally agree that humans evolved over time. The case of Kitzmiller v. Dover occurred in 2005, when 11 parents of students in the Dover Area School District of Pennsylvania sued the school district for advocating intelligent design as equally viable as evolution. The court decided that intelligent design is not science. “[After Kitzmiller v. Dover], we’re really entering a third phase, involving proposals to disparage and belittle evolution while remaining silent about any supposed alternative,” Branch said. The talk is free and open to the public. –– Amy Stewart
New research shows that there might be some health hazards associated with wearing skinny jeans. Watch out hipsters! Check out the evidence on Yahoo! News. Amanda Nguyen