Haflich was so impressed with his experience, he found himself asking why San Luis Obispo didn’t have a similar organization.

In order to remedy what he considered San Luis Obispo’s lack of bike help, Haflich, along with Cal Poly graduate Brian Kurotsuchi and friend Kylie Mendonca started the SLO Bike Kitchen six months ago. They saw it as a way to help community members learn about their bikes and how to fix and maintain them.

Haflich and Kurotsuchi both loved bikes and talked about them regularly at the coffee shop that Kurotsuchi worked at. Soon,they started talking about the idea of bringing a bike kitchen to San Luis Obispo.

Now that it is up and running, the bike kitchen is a place where bicyclists can meet to share advice and tools for a low cost.

The idea of a bike kitchen is not new; there are similar organizations in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Cruz. They are known as kitchens, churches or co-ops and they offer a variety of services. Some operate like regular bicycle shops and sell brand new parts.

“(The bike kitchen is) supposed to be a community resource center for people to work on their bikes,” Kurotsuchi said. “You can’t go to a bike shop and do that.”

“The important thing about the SLO Bike Kitchen is that we’re not trying to compete with SLO bike shops,” Kurotsuchi said.

Instead, the kitchen uses donated parts and tools, and focuses mainly on educating the people who come to their workshops instead of selling new parts to make a profit.

“Most people don’t know how to fix their bike,” Kurotsuchi said. “Now they have people there to help them.”

While Cal Poly offers a similar resource for student bicyclists, the bike kitchen members wanted to start an organization that was not affiliated with the campus. Many people don’t know it’s there or they don’t want to go because they feel it’s oriented toward students, Haflich said. The members wanted to create an organization that didn’t have the barriers of a university-affiliated program.

Besides its daily operations, the SLO Bike Kitchen holds periodic workshops to teach people how to care for their bikes, and also offers advice for bicycle safety.

But seismic retrofitting put a damper on the area’s largest costume shop, as Costume Capers was forced to leave its downtown home on Chorro Street after 23 years and quickly relocate.

Owner Debi Hernandez knew the retrofitting would force Costume Capers to move, but the abruptness of it took her by surprise.

“I felt it was a little unnecessary and kind of unreasonable,” Hernandez said of the moving process, which took them to 2146 Parker Street on the edge of downtown.

The shop was given notice in February that it had just 60 days to find a new place and be completely out of its old building.

“Sixty days was the bare minimum that they legally had to give us,” Hernandez said. “It took us nearly the entire 60 days to find a new place to lease.”

The search for a new building was a lengthy process for the shop, which Hernandez said did not fit the mold of many buildings available at the time.

“I don’t think we’re a shopping center sort of business,” Hernandez added.

The potential impact of retrofitting on the face of the downtown shopping area is yet to be seen, but Hernandez sees a grim future for many of the small, locally-owned shops.

“A lot of the little small mom-and-pop type stores like ours are having to either go out of business or move out of downtown,” she said. “If you’re in a place where you don’t get a lot of walk-in traffic, it’s hard to keep things going.”

Costume Capers may not suffer as much as other closing downtown businesses because they have carved out a special niche of the market and are the only shop in the area offering their costume rental and retail services, Hernandez said.

While the new building has limited floor space, Hernandez sees many aspects of the building that will be an upgrade to the old location by the time the shop is completely organized.

“The vertical space is really nice and makes it feel larger,” she said. “We have a dry cleaner type conveyer that will allow us use a lot of the vertical space. It’s also an easy building to find, and we have our own parking. It’s a lot better parking situation than we’ve ever had in the past.”

While a costume shop seems like it would be more of a seasonal success than a year-round profitable business, Costume Caper employee Sharon Doran explained that it is a vital part of the theatre community.

“The San Luis Obispo Little Theatre is doing a production of ‘Ray,’” Doran said. “The production spans from the ’50s to the ’70s. We’ve provided all the costumes for that. So that’s anything from a shark skin suit to a leather ’70s jacket and go-go boots. They rely heavily on us for that kind of stuff.”

Doran said she enjoys working for the shop and suggested anyone with an eye for old fashion trends would enjoy coming in.

“It’s really an eclectic collection of inventory,” Doran said. “It’s basically a fashion museum. There are garments here that are over 50 years old. It’s really cool if you like fashion.”

But what if drinking alcohol wasn’t forbidden to the pre-college crowd?

The Amethyst Initiative is a petition signed by more than 100 university presidents and chancellors nationwide that supports lowering the drinking age from 21 to 18. It reasons that binge drinking would decrease if young people didn’t try to hide their alcohol consumption and thereby drink rapidly and unsafely.

It also acknowledges the obvious fact that students openly ignore the law and drink anyway. No one gets carded at a party, and most students think the law is irrational and willingly disregard it by buying booze for younger friends.

However, Cal Poly and its president Warren Baker openly oppose the initiative, saying that lowering the drinking age will result in more deaths among the under-21 demographic and more automobile accidents.

For a university with an above-average rate of alcohol consumption among its students, and among the highest in the CSU system, it seems odd that they wouldn’t want people to learn their tolerance before coming to college. After all, it reflects poorly on universities and supports the “Animal House” image of college being a nonstop party zone.

According to surveys taken of about 1,600 incoming students, 46.5 percent of Cal Poly students report drinking alcohol multiple times per week and 8.7 percent drink almost daily, the Mustang Daily reported in May.

It’s not like people magically become safe consumers of alcohol when they turn 21, or that they can’t be responsible if they are younger. In that one tick of the second hand that signifies the end to their outlaw days of drinking illegally, do they have wisdom imparted on them that convinces them to drink moderately and make good choices?

That would be nice, but the truth is, there’s absolutely no difference between an 18-year-old binge drinker and a 21-year-old binge drinker. It’s experience with alcohol that leads to good decisions; how many 30-year-olds get pulled over for driving under the influence?

Some assume that lowering the legal age will cause earlier binge drinkers.

Vice President of Student Affairs Cornel Morton told The Tribune that students would “be overwhelmed by the allowance of alcohol from the start of their college experience” and “developmentally, they’re not where they can do it safely.”

Only three of 33 players graduated from last year’s Mustangs, who finished 11-4-4 overall and third in the Big West Conference at 6-2-4. During the season, Cal Poly won or tied 11 straight. The streak was highlighted by a 2-1 upset of defending national champion UC Santa Barbara before a crowd of 7,143 at Alex G. Spanos Stadium, shattering the program’s 11-year-old attendance record of 2,694.

After just missing out on a College Cup appearance, eight starters from that team are back, including 2007 Big West Freshman of the Year and Soccer America Freshman All-American David Zamora, a forward who led the Mustangs with six goals and five assists for 17 points.

Such a high carryover has led to a No. 24 ranking in the College Soccer News preseason poll.

“The team in general feels confident that we can make the playoffs this year for sure,” sophomore forward and 2007 All-Big West Second Team member Kyle Montgomery said. “We all know we have the talent - it’s just a matter of putting it together.”

The season opener is 1 p.m. Sunday at Spanos Stadium against Air Force, which went 5-12-1 last season.

“(The Falcons) are probably pretty direct in how they play,” Cal Poly head coach Paul Holocher said. “They’re going to be a handful.”

A date Holocher said his team is especially excited for is an Oct. 17 welcoming of UCSB that will take place on the anniversary of the two teams’ historic last meeting in San Luis Obispo.

Holocher said he’s hoping to again rewrite the attendance mark, shooting for at least 8,000, as Fox Soccer will nationally televise the game.

“We play a pretty attacking brand of soccer with a lot of focus on the quality of our passing,” Holocher said. “I think it’s fun for the fans to watch and I think it made a lot of people soccer fans last year.”

Much of the Mustangs’ renewed energy comes from the leadership and experience of returning seniors - some of whom have already accumulated up to 60 games under their belts.

“With our senior class, this is going to be my third year working with these young men,” Mustangs assistant coach Brian Reed said. “It’s (Holocher’s) fourth year working with three of them because (seniors) Julian Alvarez, Jeff Meyer and Anton Peterlin came down with (Holocher) from (UC) Santa Cruz.

The collaboration suite also allows students to share calendars, documents, RSS feeds and address books with their peers and faculty.

“These tools aren’t meant for people to e-mail just for the heck of e-mailing,” said Linda Sandy, information services infrastructure director at ITS. “It’s truly about your academic experience.”

Cal Poly’s current e-mail service, Oracle, has received criticism over the past five years of the school’s contract for being slow, unreliable and overflowing with spam.

“I never really liked the web client,” Sandy said of Oracle. “But I know where they were going and I think they would have eventually changed it.”

At noon Friday Oracle e-mail services will go down and the transition to Zimbra will start with an expected completion date of Tuesday, Sept. 2. The calendar implementation will come in late October or early November.

“It’s been a lot of work and we hope that it’s perceived as a benefit to the campus,” Sandy said.

The department expects minimal problems with the switchover after having completed two full “test migrations” from start to finish.

ITS enlisted campus technical support coordinators to assist in reviewing and testing the project, and has reviewed other campus implementations from places like Stanford and Texas A&M to assess the best switchover methods.

For faculty, staff or students who need guidance with the new interface, “hands-on” training will be available in the Robert E. Kennedy Library, room 510B until Friday, Sept. 5.

“People can go in, look at it and sort of get a feeling as to whether they think they’re going to have any problems or just get their questions asked,” Sandy said, adding that she anticipates mostly staff and faculty will take advantage of the labs.

Smiling sweetly, he hands out stimulus checks aimed at getting consumers to spend more, saying it is their American duty to kick-start the economy by continually buying more junk from China.

On the other hand, he slyly tries to pass euphemistically-named legislation like the FDA Globalization Act of 2008 - a bill he claims aims to ensure “the safety of the Nation’s food, drug, medical device and cosmetic supply in an increasingly globalized marketplace.”

The FDA Globalization Act, drafted by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), will empower the Food and Drug Administration to raise an army of regulators and indiscriminately charge exorbitant registration and regulatory fees for any companies under the oversight of the FDA.

Moreover, what this act really does is target small businesses that are already struggling to get started in a downed economy. For example, it charges a $2,000 annual “registration fee” per cosmetic company: an amount that no doubt can be the make-or-break difference for any small at-home business just attempting to get on its feet.

As if taxing the incomes of self-starters isn’t enough, the government now steps in to arbitrarily fine them for their attempts at the American Dream. With the passage of this act, the Food and Drug Administration will be at least two grand richer for every business it regulates and that much more empowered to do so.

Two thousand dollars is a drop in the bucket for the massive corporations that support these regulatory bills, but for any mom-and-pop store trying to make it in under the watchful eye of the FDA, it can mean the end.

Whenever the government interferes with free enterprise, my mind immediately goes to the many promising young business men and women we have at Cal Poly and at universities around the country. I can only imagine that slapping what is in effect a several thousand dollar fine onto their start-up costs will kill many dreams.

What will happen to the chemistry student looking to start her own line of organic soaps and shampoos? Or the young business student who sees the potential in an import-export business to bring European food supplements into the States?

The FDA Globalization Act of 2008 will force small businesses to pay an additional fee just to stay in business, yet it yields neither them or consumers any additional benefit.

Certainly the reasoning that will be sold to consumers is that their elected officials are only watching out for their best interests by passing ever-stricter regulations on personal care products. The congressional leaders behind this will undoubtedly say they’re only concerned about the “good of the people” (as if it’s the government’s job to regulate commerce in the first place).

Although the teams had met all but one season from 1946 to 1967, their first reunion in 39 years ended in a getaway that shocked most of the 20,974 at Qualcomm Stadium, as trespassing Cal Poly became the seventh Football Championship Subdivision (then Division I-AA) team that year to topple a Football Bowl Subdivision (I-A) bigger brother.

The memory will be vivid for both teams as they open their seasons against each other at the same site at 6:30 p.m. Saturday.

“That’s a game that we’ll always remember,” Aztecs senior linebacker Russell Allen said. “It’s definitely something that we’ll remember when we’re out there on Saturday.”

Cal Poly knows full well.

“They hate our guts,” Mustangs head coach Rich Ellerson said. “They’re going to try to right a wrong, and we’ve got to see if we can return to the scene of the crime and play our best football.”

Fourteen current Mustangs were at that scene, including eight starters (five on offense and three on defense), compared to 13 Aztecs, only three of whom started (two offensively and one defensively).

“We’ve got a good number of people who were there and felt what it was like to play in an NFL stadium,” said Cal Poly senior wide receiver Tre’dale Tolver, the brother of J.R. Tolver, who as an Aztec led the FBS in receiving yards per game in 2002. “It’ll help calm the demeanor in the locker room and help the young guys know what to expect.”

While Ellerson pointed out the “personnel picture has changed dramatically for both,” there figure to be strategic carryovers.

“Their offense is the same offense, their defense is a similar defense,” Ellerson said.

One of the key personnel differences Ellerson alluded to is quarterback. Although each team’s is different from 2006, Cal Poly will start senior Jonathan Dally, who last season finished second in the FCS in passing efficiency while adding 763 rushing yards. He’ll be facing the reboot of a defense that finished 115th of 119 FBS squads in yardage allowed a season ago.

The next time you are in need of a good old-fashioned belly laugh, look no further than your computer. Hilarious comedy sketches are a click away at ThoseArentMuskets.com, a Web site created by UC San Diego graduates Michael Swaim and Abe Epperson.

“Those Aren’t Muskets!” is a young comedy troupe with “nothing to lose, and everything to prove,” led by head writer Swaim, who attributes the name of the group to a line from Star Trek. He says that after watching their “Star Trek rap,” all shall be revealed.

This is a site that is definitely geared toward the open-minded-and-not-easily-offended, as most of the material could be considered offensive and inappropriate for, say, a family gathering or child’s birthday party. Some of the videos find their basis in topics such as below-the-belt glitter (which is heaving, silent-laughter funny), explicit Pictionary (clever and amusing) and of course Swaim’s commentary on non-visible porn. (Just watch. It’s awkward and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.)

The quality of the filming and humor is surprising. This site is worth at least an hour of uninterrupted viewing and appreciating the level of inappropriate situations and language.

Swaim said that he and Epperson decided to do Internet sketches after pondering thoughts of indie movies and festival shorts because they figured it was the best way to get noticed by Hollywood.

“We both knew we wanted to do some film projects after school, and decided that we were the perfect yin-yang of powers. He had cameras, lights and the knowledge to use them, and I wrote and performed,” Swaim said. “We wrote and filmed five sketches, designed the site and went live. It’s been about a year since then and we’re inching ever closer to breaking into film and television, which is certainly where we want to be.”

Swaim’s brother, Cal Poly architecture sophomore David Swaim, also had a hand in the success of the site, appearing in one of Musket’s most notable sketches.

“David was the star and central premise of one of our best sketches, ‘Chops,’” Swaim said. “That one got us fourth place in Sketchies II, a Youtube sketch competition that had about a zillion people enter. He shot for two days in a row almost non-stop…it was brutal, and he did a phenomenal job.”

“Chops,” as previously mentioned, and “Clitter” are two videos to check out to ease yourself into Musketland. It is hard to pinpoint the funniest sketch, as there are a variety of topics and offending criteria to choose from.