You don’t know Jack

Resurrecting the Union: Jump back, Scoopy! The Sacramento Union—which, until its demise in 1994 had kept Sacramento from being a one-daily monopoly town—is making a comeback, albeit in diminished cyber-form.

With its motto, “Getting the news Right for a century and a half” (OK, the slogan’s completely capitalized on the Union’s site, but Bites couldn’t resist), the Union will attempt to resurrect a tradition that goes back to the 19th century, that numbered Mark Twain among its bylined contributors and that featured the kind of up-front conservatism that seems crusty and quaint in these slicker and far more cryptic times.

In a piece on the Union’s Web site (http://sacunion.com), veteran writer Michael Ackley remembers the paper’s battles with the Bee as follows: “‘[T]he buzzer,’ as some of its employees like to call it, always was inclined to throw its weight around, and only the presence of The Union gave politicians and regular folks alike some muscle to push back.”

Other old Union folks on board include writer Larry Irby and publisher Jim Smith, who expects a monthly print-magazine version to be up and running by autumn.

Hollywood North: Sure, the endangered Tower Theatre is a historic landmark, but the still-mighty Crest Theatre will be making history next week when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver attend their first Sacramento movie premiere on Monday, April 19.

The premiere is for the cleverly titled Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius. Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s S&M classic Christ Beyond Thunderdome, will trade his cross for a 9-iron in the film’s title role. The screening will be a benefit for The First Tee, an organization that, according to the media advisory, teaches kids “the core values of honesty, integrity, discipline, sportsmanship, respect, judgment, perseverance, courtesy, responsibility and confidence”—all through golf.

Bites can’t wait to see Arnold, Maria, Senator John Burton, and First Tee Sacramento founder/PGA-award winner Ken Morton Sr. waving to breathless reporters from Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight on the red carpet.

At press time, Christ was not scheduled to appear.

JD in the Box: The notice in The Sacramento Bee was short and sweet—

“Sacramento County Board of Supervisors: Tuesday 2 p.m., board chambers, 700 H St. Public hearing on a liquor license request for a Jack in the Box at 4300 Madison Ave.”

Bites immediately was confronted by images of the fast-food chain’s antenna-ball-headed executive manipulating our brave supervisors with trumped-up blackmail photos of them in compromising situations and then leaving the meeting for a celebratory bash at a nearby Jack in the Box, where the droll executive would be found blotto in the gutter hours later, his drawn-on mouth askew, babbling Donald Trump’s signature “you’re fired” over and over again as his eyes transformed into the telltale X’s that are indicative of sudden unconsciousness in all anthropomorphic cartoon characters.

Shaken yet stirred to action, Bites threw down the paper in dramatic slow motion and screamed a long, echoing “Nooooooo.”

Turns out the liquor license was actually for the Jack in the Box-owned-and-operated Quick Stuff Convenience Store #7726, a co-branded venture that brings together gas, food and tasty liquor. All of which means that Bites will be able to relive those fond memories of that first innocent Jack in the Box experience—in which an encounter with disagreeable late-night burgers resulted in convulsions more extreme than the worst bout of alcohol poisoning—without some clerk trying to super-size Bites’ liquor order.