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Teen stabbed on a busy night downtown

By Bruce Newman
bnewman@mercurynews.com
Posted: 12/09/2012 05:02:19 PM PST
Updated: 12/09/2012 05:06:39 PM PST

SAN JOSE -- On a Saturday evening when thousands of people crowded into a downtown area that has become synonymous with family-friendly, Christmas-themed activities, a 14-year-old boy was stabbed in what police said was a gang-related incident.
The victim, who was not identified by police, staggered from the shadows of a walkway behind the Tech Museum, bleeding http://cheapuggboots.uk85.org/
cheapuggboots.uk85.org from stab wounds to the chest and arm. An employee of Winter Wonderland, a stretch of amusement park rides along Park Ave., called an ambulance shortly before 9 p.m., and waited with the youth near a funnel cake booth. "He just said they jumped him," said the woman, who asked not to be identified, fearing gang retaliation.
Another 911 caller mistakenly said the stabbing occurred at Christmas in the Park, the seasonal mecca in Plaza de Cesar Chavez on South Market Street, which was picked up and repeated by news outlets. Police spokesman Albert Morales said he didn't know the exact location of the stabbing. But the victim was transported to a local hospital with what were later determined to be non-life threatening injuries from a point closer to the San Jose Center for the Performing http://www.nikefeeeruncheap.biz
www.nikefeeeruncheap.biz Arts, where "The Nutcracker" ballet was being performed.
"It was closer to Winter Wonderland, which operates carnival rides, than it was to Christmas in the Park," said Jason Minsky, executive director of the longstanding downtown tradition, now in its 33rd year. Minsky said Christmas in the Park had
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four uniformed officers and two private security guards on duty when the stabbing occurred, and there were http://theuggbootscheap.org
theuggbootscheap.org no plans to beef up security at the event.
"When you have a free event downtown, you're going to get that," Morales said. "The kids don't have a lot to do, and the carnivals do attract that element. It's just a way to get out and, for some of them, to cause problems."
Three suspects were being sought by police, the spokesman said, though they had no further leads since the incident. "They may not even investigate it," Morales said. "We get so many stabbings, this is just another one added to the pile."This time next year, the world will be awash in predictions for 2014.
It's December and the crystal-ball industry has gone into its seasonal overdrive. Everyone and their mother http://www.cheapuggbootsforwomen.co.uk
www.cheapuggbootsforwomen.co.uk is taking to YouTube to tell us what we can expect in the new year. Analysts have flooded the blogosphere with coming trends in tech toys, telephony and travel. One baking-industry group said "boozy soda fountain favorites for grown-ups" will be big and that there may be an aquavit-laced smoothie in your future.
Assuming the rumored world-ending "Mayan apocalypse" on Dec. 21 doesn't pan out, we'll soon know whether 2013 actually brings us the foie gras jelly doughnuts,
heavier-than-normal rainfall in Florida, and that $1,500 Apple (AAPL) TV the prognosticators have been prognosticating about like there was no tomorrow.
"Why do we find such fascination with predictions?" muses Dan Gardner, the Canadian journalist and author of "Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better." "There's a fundamental psychological drive going on here, a basic human need for a sense of control and knowing what'll happen cheap ugg boots
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cheap uggs boots women next, regardless of whether it actually happens or not."
Which, of course, it often doesn't. Take Gene Munster,
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an otherwise respected Apple analyst with Piper Jaffray who for several years has been predicting -- erroneously, it turns out -- the arrival of a full-blown TV set from the Cupertino tech giant. Here's what he sees next year:
"November 2013: An Apple TV comes out. It should cost $1,500-$2,000 and come in sizes from 42 inches to 55 inches."
For being perhaps a bit premature in his predictions, the poor guy has taken a beating in some quarters, including one by blogger Dan Rayburn who wrote: "If an Apple TV actually ships in 2013, that will be a full five years since Gene has been telling The Ugg Boots Cheap
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discount ugg boots us all that an Apple TV was on the way."
Ouch.
It was precisely this Wild West nature of the prediction business that prompted Southern California investment manager Sanjay Ayer to create Pundit Tracker, which he calls "a public online score-keeping service that circles back to see if pundits' predictions came true."
Here's the problem: Pundit A goes on CNBC and predicts stocks will fall 20 percent in the next quarter; stocks instead rise 20 percent, yet Pundit A is soon back on CNBC, "and introduced as an expert without any reference to his bad call," said Ayer, whose site gives a letter grade to the prophets based on their track records. "There's no incentive for anyone to go back and see if the guy got it right. And if the media outlet that had the pundit on in the first place then exposes him when he comes back on, that indirectly discredits them, nike free run cheap
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cheap nike free while luxuriating in the comfort that a prediction provides, said Andy Wood, a professor of communication studies at San Jose State.
"The prediction industry," Wood said, "is based on the belief that someone out there knows the truth. We don't really want to check on what they say later on; we just want someone with the confidence to say, 'Here's what coming."'
Judging by the increasing volume of predictions clogging our inboxes these days, there's a whole lot of stuff coming in 2013. Let's start with baby names. Nameberry.com said the devastating Superstorm Sandy is sure to trigger a tsunami of names about eight months from now with Sandy-like sounds (Cassandra, clean up your room right now!).
FutureTimeline.net said we should expect full-body scanners in every U.S. airport, while restaurant consultant group Baum & Whiteman sees bartenders from San Diego to Boston whipping up "cocktails of pureed and muddled melons, syrups of lemon grass, rosemary, pomegranate, cinnamon, cardamom and ginger."
Some predictions are a bit self-serving. You'll never guess what Performance Insider has identified as the No. 1 trend in 2013 in the performance marketing industry: cheap ugg boots
discount ugg boots
cheap uggs boots women "More brands will invest in performance marketing."
The bottom line, Wood said, is that we're all out there grasping at straws, which soothsayers are all too ready to hand us. "As we lose confidence in so many institutions collapsing around us,'' he said, "predictions reconstitute the belief that some person has a clue. It's a useful and therapeutic fiction, but it's also pleasurable, as long as we don't take it all too seriously."
So will "luscious lemon sorbet" really be the hottest paint color of the new year as the soothsayers over at Benjamin Moore are claiming? Is the East Coast in for a huge earthquake as Pennsylvania psychic Cheryl Lynn is telling her YouTube audience? And will the "personal cloud," whatever that means, truly be the huge tech trend in 2013 that Gartner research analysts said it will be?