San Diego, Pond Scum, and Crude Oil: Our Mayor Issues an Invitation to Sloganeers
1972 as “America’s Finest City.” But truth be told, financial mismanagement of the city pension fund since the tech boom of the 1990s prompted a few cynics and local pols to embrace “Enron by the Sea” as a more appropriate slogan.
As industry slogans go, many regions have tried, but few have gained the currency of a golden nickname like Silicon Valley. God knows we have tried. We have winced our way over the past two decades through advertising campaigns that spent millions of dollars to brand San Diego as “Telecom Valley,” “Biotech Beach,” and “Technology’s Perfect Climate,” among other things. For whatever reason, sunburn on a tourist seems to last longer.
Outside of San Diego, a shortage of imagination and an excess of imitation have resulted in regional nicknames that try a little too hard to capture some of that silicon magic. The list of wannabes includes Silicon Alley (New York), Silicon Forest (Portland, OR), Silicon Wadi (Israel), Silicon Beach (Australia), Silicon Saxony (Germany), and Silicon Prairie (South Dakota, Illinois, or Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, take your pick). Wikipedia even has a list of places with “silicon” names.
Pond Scum
So in accepting Mayor Sanders’ invitation to coin a biofuels slogan for San Diego, bear in mind that the bar has been set pretty low. Feel free to submit your suggestions in our comment section below. And even though we’re talking here about pond scum as a sustainable substitute for petroleum feedstock, don’t get too crude and unrefined.
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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