Toasting a New Link

For 45 years, Jiove Quinci stuffed homemade sausage for his friends and, every so often, for a few private parties. It was a spare-time effort, squeezed in when he wasn’t busy with his workaday world as a unionized retail meat cutter.

His best customer was his son’s best friend--Peter Dunbar, a solar energy system and heating/air-conditioning salesman.

Last spring, they both decided to take The Plunge. They quit their jobs and joined forces, Quinci making sausage, Dunbar peddling it.

So far, they’ve lined up six commissaries and an equal number of butcher shops.

But it’s the sales pitch that’s intriguing: The sausage costs up to 40% more than the competition.

The ingredients: 20% less fat and an undisclosed amount of wine.

Saving Face the No-Risk Way

Without fanfare, the San Diego city manager’s office has decided not to proceed with a proposal to issue up to $400 million in taxable bonds because the deal could eventually prove harmful to the city’s credibility in the financial marketplace.

The proposal was to issue the bonds under a relatively new “guaranteed investment contract.” It works like this: The city would issue the bonds at one interest rate and would invest nearly all of the proceeds--through an underwriter--in a guaranteed investment contract of one or more insurance companies.

The insurance firm then assumes the debt service on the original bond issue, but turns around and sells the bonds to private companies at a higher interest rate than the city issued them for.

Everyone, supposedly, makes out--the city pockets some of the proceeds, the insurance company makes some money and the private firms that buy the bonds borrow funds at a lower-than-market interest rate.

But there is a risk, according to city officials. If the insurance company defaulted on the bond payments, the city wouldn’t be liable but its reputation in the marketplace could suffer.

And that would have hurt the city’s plans to finance such projects as a new central library and improvements in Balboa Park and Mission Bay.

“If they feel it’s too risky, they certainly should not do it,” judged Hal Kuykendall, a local financial consultant who represented a joint venture that wanted to underwrite the bonds. “But when I read the reasons they think it’s too risky, I happen to disagree with those conclusions.”

It was Kuykendall, a former finance director for the San Diego Housing Commission, who first broached the taxable bond issue with city officials last year.

He Used to Be Fat; Now He’s Happy

Our nomination for ad-of-the-week goes to one Anthony Robbins, who’s pushing his book called “Unlimited Power” as well as a seminar next month by the same name.

Robbins touts himself as the “world’s foremost” exponent of NLP--that’s Neuro-Linguistic Programming for the uninitiated--and charges $105 at the door to prove it.

But it was not always peaches-and-cream for young Mr. Robbins, no sirree. In fact it wasn’t that long ago--only 3 1/2 short years to be exact--that Robbins, by his own admission, was “extremely unhappy, overweight and broke, both spiritually and financially. One day I got fed up living this way and became a full-time student of successful living.”

Fostering the Truth, Like Lincoln

No, a story in this business section two weeks ago on the white knight at Western Sun Aviation was not an attempt at informality.

La Jollan Lincoln Foster, the former pizza parlor owner who pumped $400,000 in cash into once-bankrupt Western Sun, was alternately referred to as either Lincoln or Foster.

The Lincoln references were incorrect. Writer’s error.

The Voice of Weakness

No big surprise, but a business communications firm here has found that a majority of women it surveyed acknowledged they had weak speaking voices. And a majority of those women say that they’re either ignored or interrupted during business meetings.

Only 10% of the women with “normal” voices say they’re ignored or interrupted.

“It’s so obvious that the throat is the seat of self-expression,” according to Jana Gardner, who conducted the random survey of 500 working women. “If you hold back with your voice . . . you’re holding back your expression.”

Rocking Her Way to Amsterdam

Joan Levine’s media career in San Diego has been, ah, varied. She’s worked for the San Diego Union, the Reader, the Door, San Diego Magazine, was a free-lance writer for The Times and, most recently, was director of media relations for the La Jolla Playhouse.

She’ll be remembered, however, as San Diego’s first female rock ‘n’ roll disc jockey.

Levine will rock ‘n’ roll her way out of the country next month to become managing editor of a food, wine and travel magazine in Amsterdam.