This year, on the 40th anniversary of the release of the movie, the city of Modesto is taking note with a month long celebration in June they’re calling Graffiti Summer. And the man who made the film is coming home to be grand marshal of the Classic Car Parade.

California’s Department of Water Resources is scheduled to release new floodplain maps in July, and when it does some areas around Stockton that were designated for 100-year flood risk will be raised to 200-year flood standards. That could have major implications for insurance and future construction.

It’s called the Bay Delta Conservation Plan and at the heart of it is a pair of giant tunnels, some 40 feet in diameter and 35 miles long. The price tag: about $14 billion. The goal is two-pronged, according to Nancy Vogel of the Department of Water Resources. First, to help protect the fish.

At first, it was known simply as Project X. That project turned out to be a new Amazon fulfillment center, and when Amazon came calling, Molina said, “It was an opportunity for us to showcase plans we’ve had to be shovel ready.”

The tragedy at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., has focused a new and more intense light on the gun control issue.

All it is right now is talk. And yet the current debate over the possibility of stricter gun control legislation is already having an effect. An effect, it is probably safe to say, that those in favor of more gun control laws never wanted or expected.

U.S. Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Turlock) heard a lot of what he described as the same rhetoric “we’ve had in the past” during President Obama’s State of the Union Address, but there were parts of the speech that got his attention.

You could hear the collective sigh of relief sweep across the country when, like a movie cliffhanger, Congress managed to rescue the country from the very brink of the so-called “fiscal cliff.” 

The good news is the economy is heading in the right direction.

Imagination. Creativity. Entertainment. It is the art of film. But for a film festival, that’s only part of it.