WINNING PIGS: I'm here to warn you not to confuse a cavy with a rodent. Guinea pigs are cavies, and two Saratogans of that breed are recent winners of national and state awards. That would be Spooks, who is white and was born the day before Halloween, and Rosebud, who is cream-colored and is Spooks' sister.
Spooks won both best of breed and best of show in a California state show sponsored by the California Rabbit Breeders Association; and Rosebud won best of breed in a national show in Grand Junction, Colo., sponsored by the American Cavy Breeders Association.
These remarkable mammals were bred and raised by Joey Gadd, 8, of Saratoga. Joey, a third-grader at Country Lane School, is a member of 4-H and chose guinea pigraising for his project.
Rosebud and Spooks' mother was picked out by Joey and bought from a breeder in Sacramento on the advice of 4-H leader Laurie Lash of Morgan Hill. When the guinea pig grew old enough, she was bred with a male from the same Sacramento breeders. The result produced Rosebud and Spooks, among other siblings.
Guinea pigs live three to five years, are extremely lazy and make excellent pets. So lethargic are the creatures that water is placed at one end of the cage and food at the other in order to initiate some kind of exercise. This conditioning is one of the things that won the awards for her son's project, Anne Gadd believes.
Cream-colored guinea pigs are rarer than most, so Rosebud has something of an edge there. The gestation period is 70 days. Guinea pigs are often pressed into service for lab testing because they and humans are the only mammals who don't produce their own vitamin C.
The other human Gadds are father George and older sons Brendan, 20, and Anthony, 18. Anne Gadd feels 4-H work builds leadership skills and self-esteem, qualities that translate to strengths for the rest of one's life. Debra Lang is the local 4-H coordinator, and the number is 408.374.1711.
NEW ED: Prabhakar Raghavan of Saratoga has been named editor in chief of the Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery. Raghavan is vice president and chief technology officer of Verity, a Sunnyvale software company.
Besides being Verity's technical strategist, Raghavan is a consulting professor of computer science at Stanford and has taught at Yale. He holds a doctorate from UC-Berkeley and a bachelor's in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India.
Several patents and more than 100 papers bear his name. He writes about a variety of fields, including algorithms, optimization, Web searches and databases. Prior to Verity, Raghavan held technical and managerial positions at IBM Research.
The Association for Computing Machinery, which has 75,000 members, delivers tech information and ideas and helps its members transform theory into practice. It holds the industry's leading digital library and portal to computing literature. For more information, visit www.acm.org. Verity software facilitates e-commerce and Web-based sales.
Raghavan is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and serves on the editorial boards of the JACM and the ACM Transactions on Internet Technology.
RESTAURATEUR: The owner/chef of Sharky's Seafood and Oyster Restaurant and Bar in Willow Glen is Jim Latter, who was raised in Saratoga. He has owned the restaurant for 11/2 years. It's on Lincoln Avenue, between Aqui and Blockbuster.
Latter served his apprenticeship in chefdom for five years at Pearl's in Palo Alto. There he devised his signature dish, now the signature dish at Sharky's. It's con nova, a pasta dish with smoked salmon, sherry, cream and vegetables, with a touch of spices and served over linguine.
Latter graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, with a major in P.E. and business management. He went to Lynbrook High and is the son of Lou Ann Latter of Saratoga and Don Latter of Arizona. The manager of the restaurant is Steve Ramona, whose family is also of Saratoga. He went to Mitty, and his parents are Ralph Ramona and Meredith Matta.
SENIORS HONORED: Elvira Durante, 95, and Dolores Cairns, 94, were honored recently in a celebration of Older Americans Month at the Los Gatos Neighborhood Center. Durante is the mother of the owner of Saratoga's Mouton Noir, and one of the signature dishes at the restaurant—Elvira's Duck—was named for her.
SISTER CITY OFFICERS: The newly elected officers of Saratoga's Sister City organization are Peter Marra, president; Don Morgan, vice president; Ron Duffin, treasurer; and Denny Alff, secretary. Joan Gomersall is past president.
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By Mary Ann Cook