Best of Chico 2002

Every year at this time the CN&R editors take on a couple of long-anticipated and related jobs. One is to tally the hundreds of readers’ ballots from our Best of Chico contest and find out who the first-, second- and third-place winners are in each category. The other is to pick some of our personal “bests” and write about them.

To tell the truth, counting the ballots isn’t the very best job in the world. We don’t want to complain because this is a fun, lighthearted, community-based project that readers enjoy, and we’re as excited as anyone to see who the winners are. But, good golly, you should see how the ballots come in, all covered with French fry grease and red ketchup spills, overlapping coffee cup circles and, sometimes, stains that we’d just as soon not try to identify, thank you. And the penmanship—we won’t even go there.

But hey, we know you want to see how your favorite hamburger joint or rock band did in the competition, so we buckled down, valiantly trying to ignore the stains and decipher the writing.

We have fun writing up our own “bests"—the editors’ picks, which begin on the page 23. We admit it, there’s little rhyme or reason to these selections. Each of the paper’s five editors (we have no writers as such, just editors who also write, which must explain something, if only we knew what it was) is asked to come up with five picks, and that’s about it. No parameters, no expectations, just whatever comes to mind. Which is why some of the picks are pretty, well, out there. “Best asteroid scare yet"? “Best place to get dirt on a rival"? Yes indeed.

Oh well, it’s all fun, and some of it is actually informative. And we’d like to thank all who made it possible, especially our award presenter (left), the debonair Abe Baily. Enjoy this edition of the Best of Chico, and we’ll see you again next year with yet another salacious selection.

READERS’ CHOICE

EDITORS’ CHOICE