St. Fratty's concert sells out in 3 minutes

Author

Carly Heltzel
March 06, 2025

Good morning. It’s Thursday, and I’m reading about a Cheeto that sold for $87,840 at auction and is shaped like the Pokémon Charizard. Onto the five Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and California stories you need to know for today.

1.

Tickets for Cal Poly’s St. Fratty’s replacement concert sold out in less than three minutes. And students were put in the less-than-fruitful waiting room after just 30 seconds. Moments prior, the university announced the EDM artists Galantis as the opener and Zhu as the headliner. There were 5,000 tickets total, free of charge, for a student population of over 22,000; plus, students could claim an extra ‘guest ticket.’ But don’t sweat it yet if you didn’t get one: a waitlist line at the venue will start letting people in more than halfway through the concert.

2.

Parking at the Palm Street garage downtown will no longer be free starting March 10. Visitors will be charged $2 per hour to park in one of the garages 415 spots, the second largest in the city. Changes to other parking structures are scheduled for later this year. SLO’s parking program manager said this is a part of a larger effort to make parking in SLO more “convenient and accessible.” She means by having more spots available, but charging for previously free amenities hardly seems like increasing the accessibility. 

3.

A Central Coast wildlife biologist confronted Elon Musk in Congress — weeks after losing his job at Los Padres National Forest in Musk’s federal worker cuts. The biologist marched up to Musk and asked him “Am I waste?” to which Musk replied “Who are you?” After explaining his role and his disappointment in Musk “destroying” the country he loves, a crowd of Republican lawmakers jeered at the biologist and Musk replied: “I don’t think we need you here.” “He was rude and arrogant and every bit as awful as he looks on TV,” the biologist said after the event.

4.

The UC is under federal investigation into a “potential pattern” of discrimination against Jewish employees in the system. This comes after the Trump administration pledged federal resources to combat the “explosion of antisemitism” following the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in fall 2023. The chair of a Jewish faculty group at UCLA, where efforts to clear pro-Palestinian encampments turned violent last year, said a “thorough and impartial investigation is warranted.” The UC saw similar reports of an increase in anti-Arab or anti-Palestinian bias since the war began, but it’s unclear if that is being investigated as well.

5.

A large-scale undercover investigation from the San Francisco police just shut down a major operation. The future convicts? Smoke shop owners. The crime? Selling illegal flavored vapes. Police spent months targeting 11 smoke shops in SF and buying the contraband merchandise before nailing the king pins. Vape flavors have been banned in the city since 2018 to shut down the youth e-cigarette boom. But reports from 2021 showed that 7.9% of SF’s high schoolers still hit their Juuls.