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The South Valley Running Club will hold is monthly club social this Thursday, Aug. 9 at 6 p.m. at the Granary in Morgan Hill. This is going to be a good one and not to be missed.

The  annual Bill Flodberg Mt. Madonna Challenge  will be held this year on  Saturday August 25th. Tracy Christensen is the marketing director for the race and describes it this way:

LONDON – On the first day of the rest of his life, Michael Phelps slept in. Really in.

LONDON – The fastest race in the history of man sounds like a riot. There is nothing quite like this in sports. More anticipation than the Super Bowl, more people watching in person and on TV than any prizefight.

LONDON – The broader picture was lost to Quanitta Underwood on Sunday, obscured by her loss to Great Britain's Natasha Jonas as women's boxing made its Olympic debut. "History doesn't mean anything to me," said the lightweight, one of three boxers representing the United States in London. "The gold medal meant more."

Always interesting to see how government operates when the kitchen gets hot – and the proposed Cordoba Islamic Center in San Martin is a scorcher. Santa Clara County planning department staff, after beaucoup studies and years of back and forth with the project’s backers recommended approval. Percolation tests were done, the regional water board said A-OK, concluding flood issues were phantom and … and then came the flood of public opinion. Three meetings were set – all lined up in a row this week. The San Martin Planning Advisory Committee, the South County Joint Planning Commission and the Santa Clara County Planning Commission. But the flood came. And it wiped out the staff recommendation for approval – at least for now. More tests are needed to address the latest concerns voiced by the public is the official government word. Really? Years going through government bureaucracy and “more tests are needed”? Wish I could say I was surprised. Can say that I feel for the project’s backers like Hamdy Abbass, a Gilroy Rotary Club member, and Sal Akhter, a Morgan Hill resident for 20 years. Five years ago – way back in 2007 – the Muslim community, which meets regularly in Morgan Hill’s community center, held an open house to reach out to the community. Said Akhter at the time, “We’ll talk a little about our membership, who they are, how long they have lived in the community. We are people who have been here 20, 30 years, and not immigrants who just came and started something new. … I guess (the project) is controversial, but I don't understand the controversy. We have our principles we go by that we are a tolerant nation and so forth, but I think sometimes that tolerance gets tested. And then trying to bridge those gaps and create better understanding is the best thing to do.” Well, the court of public opinion is the harshest of all and getting beyond it to the point of true understanding can be a very tough thing to overcome even if you’ve been working at it for years.

Cameron Mackintosh’s “Les Miserables” has returned to the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco as a revamped  25th anniversary production with a first class touring company. And it has brought just about everything with it from its Broadway production.