The historic Stephen’s Meat Products “Dancing Pig” sign — a San Jose icon that outlived the factory it once advertised — may soon dance again thanks to a successful fundraising campaign to restore it. The Preservation Action Council of San Jose spearheaded the effort to raise $35,000 to restore the vintage electric neon sign on Montgomery Street, near both Diridon Station and SAP Center. The sign, made in the 1950s by the Electric Sign Co. of California, is in the area expected to be impacted by Google’s proposed San Jose development and had fallen into serious disrepair over the past decade.

Still, his appearance has created what Phil Wilson in the LA Times called an “unsettled concoction of excitement, dread and rubbernecking curiosity for GOP loyalists in the state.”, When word came out last week that Bannon would deliver the ballet shoes lace up keynote, Assemblyman Chad Mayes, a former Assembly Republican leader, unleashed a Tweet barrage against his party’s elders, “I was shocked by today’s announcement by the CRP,” Mayes, R-Rancho Mirage, tweeted, “It’s a huge step backward and demonstrates that the Party remains tone deaf and intellectually dishonest with the vast majority of Californians, As in life, you can’t have it both ways and today’s announcement made clear the direction the party wants to go.”..

Choreographed by Cuban choreographer and dancer Alicia Alonso, the ballet about a young peasant girl who dies of a broken heart and then is summoned from the grave comes on the heels of the historic reopening of relations between the United States and Cuba after more than 50 years. Alonso first danced the title role in 1945 in Havana and has adapted the choreography of the classic ballet. Now she has handpicked Jose Manuel Carreño, Silicon Valley Ballet’s artistic director, to dance in select performances.

• The boys still like ballet shoes lace up to get toys a lot more than clothes, and I’m pretty much with them on that one, “Oh, boy, another shirt and tie,” I’m sure I’ll be saying somewhat less than enthusiastically on Christmas morning, And my wife will go off on some long, involved story about how she had to go from store to store to find just the right tie to match the shirt she called taupe but I thought was just brown, Women don’t seem to understand that they don’t need to go to all that trouble, because we can’t really tell if the tie matches the shirt or not! And we’d be just as happy with a tie that featured Daffy Duck, or Bart Simpson or the Golden State Warriors … or Pamela Sue Anderson in her old Baywatch swimsuit..

After the FT story broke, including some undercover video, the outrage was immediate. The deputy leader of Britain’s Liberal Democratic Party, Jo Swinson, called the story “simply stomach-churning.”. “More than 300 rich businessmen were perfectly happy to attend such an event, which shows the rotten, sexist culture still alive and kicking in parts of the business community. Time’s up on this crap.”. “I should imagine” that the charities benefiting from the event “will be appalled that their good name has been sullied in this way,” Conservative Party MP Anna Soubry told the Guardian.