RoundUp: Don't Quit Your Daydream
Comparison shopping at local groceries, Ned Kahn's connection to the "Other Oppenheimer," a sign of the times, and more
Local Grocery Shopping Comparison
Douglas Wallace was curious about how different Sebastopol grocery stores price the same item so he decided to do a comparison study of ten of the same items from Fircrest, Safeway, Whole Foods, and Pacific Market. He published this comparison on Substack and then promoted it on NextDoor. Here are the numbers for October 2025.
Wallace’s one-person study found Safeway to be the most expensive, a somewhat surprising result. Fircrest was the least expensive. Probably more interesting was the variation of prices for the same product at each of the stores. Wallace has gotten a number of comments from readers such as remarks that Safeway’s prices are lower if you are a member.
In an interview with the Sebastopol Times, Wallace told me that he shops regularly at Fircrest Market. “I wanted to create a baseline and compare prices,” he said. He selected four stores that he could walk to from his home. He didn’t include Lucky’s for that reason but he may do so in the future. “My biggest challenge was finding the equivalent product at all stores,” he said. “I wanted to include bread on my list but there’s not a common brand of bread available at all of the stores.” For that same reason, it’s hard to compare prices at Community Market against other stores.
“My impulse to prepare this price comparison came from a sense that we consumers are powerless to the forces of inflation, supply chains and politics,” he said. “Perhaps this little tool can give us a sense of empowerment.”
When I asked Wallace about himself, the answer was even more surprising than anything in his comparison of grocery stores. “I’m a recently retired federal worker - I worked for the US Department of Commerce for 28 years,” he said. “During that time I worked at US Embassies across North Africa and the Middle East including Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.” Wallace speaks Arabic. “My last foreign post was Australia before I moved to Sebastopol in 2018 and directed the Dept of Commerce office in San Francisco,” he added. Wallace looks pretty happy on an old tractor.
Wallace plans to update his grocery store comparison on a monthly basis.
Sebastopoll: Your Go-to Grocery
Our Sebastopol Times poll can only offer five choices, so Community Market was left off.
Making the invisible visible
Artist Ned Kahn had a full house at Hopmonk Abbey last Monday for his talk, “The Other Oppenheimer,”which was part of the Science Buzz Cafe series produced by Daniel Osmer.
Kahn believes that there’s a Hollywood movie to be made about Frank Oppenheimer, just as there was a movie about his older brother, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Frank worked with his brother on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, figuring out how to make uranium into a gas in a centrifuge. While these scientists were aware of the dangers of radiation, said Kahn, they were also rather casual about it, as he showed in the following picture of J. Robert Oppenheimer and other members of his team gathering to inspect the pit left behind by a nuclear explosion from the day before. Kahn said that Frank and others carried uranium in their pockets to keep warm.
After the war, Frank Oppenheimer became interested in the research around cosmic rays, which were discovered by accident by Scottish physicist Charles Wilson in 1911. Interested in weather, Wilson built a device to create a cloud in the laboratory — now known as a cloud chamber — and he noticed streaks running through the clouds that formed. He thought he made a mistake and rebuilt the device, but he kept finding these streaks, which were traces of high energy particles called cosmic rays. Wilson won the Nobel Prize in 1927 for his discovery.
Frank Oppenheimer was fascinated by high energy particles and pursued his research at the University of Minnesota after the war. He knew that there were more cosmic rays at higher elevations, and so he wanted to use a weather balloon to take a cloud chamber into the upper atmosphere. Trying to do this, first on land and then in the open ocean, was such an adventure that Kahn believes it would make a great movie. “In the excellent biography of Frank Oppenheimer by K.C. Cole, this story takes up only about four pages,” said Kahn. “But it’s a great story and shows who Frank Oppenheimer was.” He said Oppenheimer’s goal was to make the invisible visible, which was later reflected in the Exploratorium that he opened in 1969 in San Francisco.
Kahn went to work in the machine shop at the Exploratorium and found himself working closely with Frank Oppenheimer. He considers Frank his mentor. He spent a lot of time with Frank in his remaining years, hearing him tell stories about the Manhattan Project and his adventures. Kahn said that Oppenheimer built a cloud chamber at the Exploratorium and he’d find himself staring at it for the longest time, also fascinated by seeing these traces of high energy particles and realizing that they pass through all of us without us noticing.
Kahn said that his own work reflects what he learned from Frank Oppenheimer, combining both science and art. Kahn’s sculpture “Sebastopol Sphere”, which was installed in September 2024, is activated by the wind, making the invisible visible. Here’s an online video showing it up close:
Sebastopol Times covered its installation. You can find online more works from Ned Kahn.
Also on the theme of making the invisible visible, this upcoming Monday, November 3rd, Science Buzz Cafe features a talk by Carl Pilcher, Ph.D. titled “Reality is Not What it Seems: A Scientist’s Journey to the Intersection of Buddhism and Modern Science.” Pilcher was the former Science Director for Solar System Exploration & Director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute at Ames Research. Pilcher says: “In this talk I will share some of my journey as a scientist, new to Buddhism, who has been drawn to the connections between these two approaches to understanding reality.”
Proposition 50: Yes or No
November 4 is a special election in California with just one thing on the ballot: Proposition 50, which is about statewide redistricting.
KQED reports that total spending on Prop. 50 is $119.3M on YES and $44.3M on NO, a total of $163.6M.
In addition, CalMatters reports that “nonprofits, political parties and a billionaire (Tom Steyer) have spent about $26M independent of the major campaigns for and against the measure, calling it “the most of any ballot measure in recent state history.”
A reader sent us the following photo of a homemade yard sign in Sebastopol:
Correction
In our story on the food bank and food pantries, Katie Greaves of the DHS said, “That may sound like a lot of money and it does help. But with today’s food prices, it doesn’t go far or meet all the needs.” She was speaking about the amount of money that people get on CalFresh monthly, not the $1 million the board of supervisors is considering devoting to food aid, which is what it inadvertently sounded like when I (Laura) cut in a late-breaking quote by Lynda Hopkins right before Greaves’ quote. Apologies to both.
Sebastopol Police Logs, October 20-26
The following are crimes excerpted from Sebastopol Police Department daily crime log entries and listed at the time the alleged violation was reported.
MONDAY
8:38 a.m. Burglary from a motor vehicle (felony) at Covert Lane. Investigation suspended, leads exhausted.
3:40 p.m. Minor in possession of alcohol (misdemeanor) at North Main Street. Suspect arrested.
10:25 p.m. Inflicting corporal injury on a spouse or companion (felony) at Bodega Avenue. Referred to District Attorney for review.
WEDNESDAY
9:26 a.m. Extortion (felony) at Laguna Park Way. Pending further investigation.
5:58 p.m. Getting credit by stealing someone else’s identity (felony) in Sebastopol. Pending further investigation.
THURSDAY
12:09 a.m. Served a misdemeanor arrest warrant for an outside agency at High Street. Suspect arrested.
FRIDAY
12:14 a.m. Disorderly conduct involving alcohol and violation of probation (misdemeanors) at North Main Street. Suspect arrested.
5:58 a.m. Vandalism involving defacing property (misdemeanor) at North Main Street. Investigation suspended, leads exhausted.
10:39 a.m. Vandalism involving defacing property (misdemeanor) at Petaluma Avenue. Pending further investigation.
3:37 p.m. Riding a bicycle under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs (misdemeanor) at Petaluma Avenue. Suspect arrested.
SATURDAY
7:02 a.m. Served a felony arrest warrant for an outside agency at Gravenstein Highway North. Suspect arrested.
7:59 a.m. Disorderly conduct, lodging without an owner’s consent, and possession of unlawful paraphernalia (misdemeanors) at South Main Street. Suspect arrested.
SUNDAY
4:33 a.m. Driving while under the influence of alcohol (misdemeanor) and causing a hit-and-run accident with property damage at Sebastopol Avenue and Morris Street. Suspect arrested.
12:31 p.m. Burglary from a building (felony) at McKinley Street. Pending further investigation.
OTHER POLICE ACTION
The Sebastopol Police Department also recorded 176 events requiring police action during the period, such as lost animals, assisting citizens, parking violations, foot patrol, traffic hazards and reckless driving.
Wallace's data chart is a beauty. Plain and informative. We get bombarded with "shaped" information, conclusory presentations, and graphics when a simple array of data points, with clear descriptions and notations does the job. It's like he is an expert or something in this sort of thing. Remember when we used to appreciate experts?
Fircrest is our go-to market. Everyone who works there is helpful and friendly and we can easily find everything we want. It’s good to know that their prices are still the best even after the Hoffmans retired.