Old headlines are too good for dead fish wrappers. The aged Napa Valley Register headline describing the pretentious plans for seven-story buildings and 3,200 residential units as Shangri-La could be readily replaced with Xanadu.

Now that my high school basketball career has come to a close, I want to personally thank those who have made the experience most memorable for me.

Back in January, former President Bill Clinton came to Napa to promote his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton’s run for the Democratic presidential nomination. During his speech he was very clear that any talk about a vice president was not only premature but detrimental to her campaign.

Leslie Rudd properly deserves a huge vote of appreciation from the entire valley community, not just for the very generous gift he has donated to St. Helena but, equally important, for the leadership and foresight he has displayed in recognizing and advancing the role of arts in our educational system. There’s hardly any serious disagreement about the opportunity the arts offer our children for the full, rich life we all seek. Unfortunately, because artists create a work-product which is hard to define, difficult to measure, and not amenable to our customary means of assessing value, the cultural community traditionally has a hard time making the case for investing money in it. Consequently, the unique gift that the arts give to us and to our children is usually among the first to be sacrificed when, for a thousand sorry reasons, budget deficits loom and money becomes scarce. But there’s no way of avoiding the issue. Even though the price of our neglect is often submerged for years, it’s always there, it’s mammoth, and it can be frightening.

On behalf of the Alta Heights Student Council, we would like to thank everyone who supported the Mat Castanon memorial car wash on March 2. This car wash was held in honor of Mat; his little brother Giovanni; his grandmother Aurora and her friend Eutimio, all of whom perished in a tragic fire several weeks ago.

The front-page story of your March 11 edition, “Unlicensed drivers pull away from court, get pulled over,” piqued my interest.

Should it come to it, Vallejo would not be the first American community to declare bankruptcy. Since the Federal government changed the rules allowing for municipal bankruptcy during the Great Depression, many local governments have sought that protection.

Watching the Elliot Spitzer situation unfold in New York, and having been the subject of some bullying myself lately, it brought to mind the whole issue for me again. It may seem like a rather mundane question, but the truth is that it is a big important question that we as a society have had a lot of trouble dealing with.

Here's a link to the article that sparked the Question of the Week.