Ray Wylie Hubbard, James McMurtrey, Sam Outlaw and others to appear at the 99 Music Fest in October, a celebration of the roots of Americana music in a town that gave birth to "the Bakersfield Sound"

 * ... MUSIC FESTIVAL: If you are into celebrating the roots of American music make sure to mark your calendar for Saturday, Oct. 10, when the 99 Music Festival will be held at the CSUB amphi-

theater. This promises to be a dynamic lineup of true "Americana" music playing on two stages in a city that played such an important role in shaping the sounds we love. A partial lineup of the acts include Ray Wylie Hubbard, James McMurtrey, Sam Outlaw, the Roustabouts and Truxton Mile. Tickets are $40 and will go on sale Aug. 7 at 99 musicfest.com.

* ... HEALTH CARE: Beverly Lamb shared this bit of soon news about her son, who recently visited a doctor in the Los Angeles area. "He asked where my son was from, when he told him Bakersfield the doctor told him he had practiced in Bakersfield for seven years. He said he loved his patients here, they listened to him, followed his orders and never argued with him. He said his patients down there come in with notes and reams of print outs from the internet and question everything. He said it takes him 15 minutes to convince them he knows what he is doing and then they complain about the wait."

 * ... SPOTTED: On Twitter was this: "I never make plans until I know how I am getting out of them."

 * ... BRISCOE: Erin Briscoe, long time morning anchor with KERO-TV (channel 23) is leaving after seven years with the station. No official word on where she is going but I have been told she will end up at cross-town rival KBAK-TV (29).

 * ... PANHANDLER: Lu Granillo was stopped at a traffic light downtown when he saw a pan handler with his sign asking for money. "He then set his sign down and proceeded to count the money he had collected in full view. It was quite a haul. He seemed to be quite proud of himself."

 * ... SEVEN OAKS: Castle and Cooke has unveiled plans for its latest expansion in the Southwest, called Highgate at Seven Oaks. Highgate is located on some 443 acres at the corner of Ming Avenue and Allen Road and will eventually include a new Highgate Elementary School scheduled to open in 2018.

 * ... MEMORIES: Linda Welch dropped me a note with this memory of a man who kept exposing himself at the old JC Penney's store downtown. "He was in the basement one day and decided to awe a young associate," she said. "We he did she said, 'Sir, the little boy's department is on the mezzanine.' He was never seen again. What an ego buster!"

Monday's Bako Bits: Is anyone else sick of the political attack ads that have flooded the airways? And veteran reporter Steve Swenson shares his battle with pancreatic cancer

 * … POLITICS: Is anyone else sick of the political attack ads that have flooded the airways? You'd think there would be weightier issues than how many times Pedro Rios voted while serving on the

Delano city council, or if Andy Vidak had suddenly "sold out" to the Sacramento politicians. But polling shows attack ads work, so get ready for another couple weeks of the incessant negativity.

 * … SEVEN OAKS: Hats off to the Seven Oaks homeowner who took things in his own hands after someone's dog kept leaving unwanted presents behind on his lawn. The homeowner put a small sign in the yard reading: "Is it really that difficult to pick up your dog's poop? Be a good neighbor!!" Ah, first world problems behind the gates.

 * … STEVE: Did you catch the essay by Steve Swenson in Sunday's Californian about his battle with pancreatic cancer? Steve spent 33 years as a reporter so it's no surprise that he writes with such honesty and wit, but this piece was moving in its authenticity and candor. Here's hoping Steve has many years left swinging his golf clubs and making that birdie now and then.

* … ENDEAVOR: It was so nice to see so many organizations reaching out to Endeavor Elementary School after someone burned down its playground equipment. This is one of the many things that gives this community such heart. Said Jay Stodder: "As published in the Californian Thursday,  several groups have stepped up to help pay for Endeavor Elementary  School's playground that was recently destroyed by arsonists. Among them is my place of employment, the Gaslight Melodrama in Rosedale. We're adding a benefit performance of Witches of Westchester to our schedule: Thursday October 24, 7 p.m."

 * … SCAMS: Yet another reader weighed in on this panhandlers who hit us up for money at local gas stations. "Another funny thing happened at that same station about a year ago. I was filling my car with gas when a gentleman with a young girl walked up to me and said that his wife and son were in an automobile accident near Fresno. He and his daughter needed bus fare to go to Fresno to be with them in the hospital. About two weeks later, the same gentleman at the same station approached me and said that his mother was near death at a hospital in Fresno and he needed bus fare hoping to visit her before she died.  I said, 'I'm sorry to hear that so much tragedy has happened to your family recently. Two weeks ago you needed money to go to Fresno to see your wife and son in a hospital in Fresno.'  If looks could kill… He left the station without talking to anyone else."

* … MEMORIES: Ronal Reynier is one reader who enjoys it when we reprint old front pages of The Californian. A recent one from 1911 raised a few questions for him:  "Where have they gone?" he asked, referring to all the small communities in the valley. "In this issue they print about Toltec and the Catholic Colonization in the Rio Bravo district. In this era each oilfield and farming area had their own small village. Most are long gone or swallowed up by other cities such as Bakersfield; but the names live on. The most common live on in our daily lives as areas we know of as Rosedale, Greenacres, Rio Bravo, Smith's Corners, Greenfield, Heck's Corners, or how about Mexican Colony?  Its been in the news a lot lately; how many of you have ever been to Tupman? From a 1916 map of Kern County I counted 47 that are no longer there."

Bakersfield is among the fastest selling home markets and another example of some really bad homophobic form at a local bar

 * ... HOME MARKET: The average home in Bakersfield stays on the market just 44 days before being sold, putting our town on the list of cities with the fastest selling home markets. According to Realtor.com, our median home price of $149,500 "is the lowest on this list, except for Detroit, and only a little more than a fifth of the median price of a San Francisco house. Only 1,815 houses were listed on the market, a decline of more than 47% from a year earlier. Meanwhile, the 44 days on the market is a drop of 22.8% from a year ago, compared to the national average of 9.67%. The labor market is far weaker in Bakersfield than it is in some of California’s healthier local economies, with an unemployment rate of more than 14% in June, compared to about 7.5% in San Francisco and 8.2% in the United States."

* ... BAD FORM: Ty Shaffer was enjoying an evening at Tahoe Joe's Sunday when he witnessed an extreme case of bullying mixed with homophobia. "This wasn't a kid bulling another kid, this was a grown adult bulling two other grown men he claimed where gay... This man was at the bar and told these two men that he was going to take them out to the parking lot and kick their asses." A couple in their 50s intervened and sure enough the bully turned on them and tried to grab the woman, only to be deterred by her husband, who got into a tussle with the bully. "The fight was broken up. The older man left with a gouge above his eye from the fall.  He and his wife said that people at any age need to stand up for others and put bigots like this guy in his place. By the way I overheard the bully say he was going to call the cops on that man and have him jailed. Really, didn't he just commit a hate crime? Typically response from a bully!"

* ... HALLOWEEN: Another seasonal oddity from my correspondent Craig Holland. "Facebook friends are bemoaning the fact that Wal-Mart and Target already have Halloween costumes for sale." In August?

 * ... BAKO FAMILIES: Sean McNally of Grimmway Farms tipped me to this tidbit about the first cousin of former Fresno State football player and now New York Giants Bear Pascoe: "(His) first cousin, Kathleen (Pascoe) Clerou, recently had a baby girl named Lucile Pauline Clerou after the matriarchs of two great longtime Bakersfield families.

* ... SPOTTED: Jon Bennett is a resident of Seven Oaks and regularly spots a young man driving a gray Buick Ranier SUV who has the bad habit of tossing trash out his window into the street. "He has been tossing trash all around the neighborhood for months even after being confronted by numerous residents," he told me. "Some people are just jerks." In fact, Bennett sent me a video of the young man doing that, callously throwing trash out the window of his silver-gray SUV.

* ... SEVEN OAKS: And speaking of Seven Oaks, the old truism "all politics are local" is alive and well even at homeowner associations across our community. Which is why I found it interesting that an old friend, retired dentist Robert Smith, is running for the homeowner's association board of directors at Seven Oaks Grand Island. Bob is trying to increase homeowner influence and threw his hat into the ring for the August 22 election.

* ... QUAKE MEMORIES: Marjorie Poore Payne shared with me her memories of the 1952 earthquake, when her family was living at their dairy farm in Lamont. After the "big July shaker," Marjorie's mother took the children to the then-famous Union Avenue pool. "My mother stayed while we swam for several hours until, over the loud speaker, it was announced that everyone should get out of the pool and go home that there had been another big quake. We did return home to Lamont to find that waterlines were broken and major damage for the operation of the dairy barn. My dad had to truck in water for the cows and of course have a generator to milk the cows. The memories still linger and every July and August I remember that unexpected and most frightening event."

A dismal report card on Kern County's children: so is it really "Life as it should be?"

With all due respect to my friends over at Vision 2020, sometimes it's hard to look at the statistics and believe in Bakersfield's unofficial motto: "Life as it should be." That said I do recognize this is a message of aspiration if not reality, and I am all for putting our best foot forward when we promote all that is good with our community. And certainly if your view is from Grand Island in Seven Oaks or Old Stockdale, it would be hard to argue that this is as good as it gets. But we all know the stark reality of our community, and it hit home as I reviewed the 2009 Report Card from the Kern County Network for Children. This is the real work of Vision 2020, beyond slogans and bumper stickers, and that is focusing on those issues that will determine what we will be tomorrow, not today. Of course when I look at these dismal statistics, I can't help but think about all the other issues - adult illiteracy (25 percent!), obesity, drug use, smoking, rampant diabetes, poor diets, lack of education, etc - that form concentric circles around the issues facing children. And who is tackling those? (You have to believe education - or the lack thereof - is at the root of all of our ills)
Vision 2020 is only an advisory group, but let's hope our elected officials are listening to their recommendations and not just paying lip service to these folks who volunteer their time to improve our community. So here they are, the highlights from the 2009 Report Card on the state of Kern County children. Brace yourself.

Among the findings:
* More than half of Kern County children are Latino (54 percent), followed by Caucasian (35 percent) African American (5 percent) and Asian (3 percent)
* Single mother households are the majority of single parent homes. Sixty-eight percent of single parents homes are headed by mothers.
* Grandparents are increasing their role as primary caregivers in Kern County. Four percent of kids under 18 are being cared for by their grandparents.
* Child abuse here is more prevalent than other parts of the state. In 2007, we had 17,157 referrals for child abuse and neglect for a rate of 69.1 per 1,000 children, higher than the state rate of 49.2.
* In 2007, 5,187 children were abused or neglected in Kern County. That gives us a rate almost twice the state average.
* Our media family income was 28 percent less than the state and 24 percent less than the nation. It was $44,469 in Kern County compared with $62,040 in the state and $58,686 in the nation.
* Latino and African-American kids have higher child poverty rates than other races. Together these groups comprise 60 percent of Kern's total child population but they comprise 79 percent of the total children living in poverty.
* Six out of every 10 public school children receive free or reduced price school meals.
* Good news: the overall rate of births to teenage mothers has declined since 2000.
* Bad news: the high school graduation rate is getting worse. For the 2006-2007 school year, the graduation rate was 73.5 percent, compared to 80.6 percent in the state.
* One in four Kern County high school students dropped out of school for an adjusted four-year dropout rate of 25 percent, higher than the state average of 21 percent.
* Juvenile felony arrests for violent crimes have increased 44 percent since 2005.

Kit fox terrorize Seven Oaks golfers!

Spotted this sign in the mixed grill of Seven Oaks Country Club, evidence enough that the wily and endangered kit fox is more than a match for our local golfers. Seems the fox (and there are lots of them not only on the golf course but at Cal State Bakersfield as well) have figured out where golfers keep their snacks and are stealthily snatching them out of the carts or bags while the golfers are on the fairway. Just goes to show the recession isn't the only thing to beware of these days.