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• Sean Bonner at blogging.la discovers a parking meter scam run by street people in the toy district downtown. • Tim McGarry, a frequent commenter on L.A. blogs (and here when I...
LA Observed archive
for May 2005
If you don't find what you want here, check another month or search below.
Bob Woodward confirmed this afternoon that top FBI official W. Mark Felt was his famous secret source for several crucial stories in the Washington Post during the Watergate scandal in...
At the end of yesterday's column on the Senate filibuster compromise, L.A. Times political correspondent Ron Brownstein alerts readers that his new wife recently became the spokeswoman for Sen. John...
Guests at Wednesday night's fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton at the Hollywood Hills home of producer Roland Emmerich are being warned not to speak with any reporters. It's part of...
So much for Thousand Oaks and Simi Valley having reputations as the nation's safest cities. A violent Indiana man began killing yesterday in T.O. and shot himself today in a...
Today's Daily Journal leads with a story on attorney Paul M. Sandler, who won a big victory on Friday when a federal jury quickly acquitted political fundraiser David Rosen of...
Fans of the Los Angeles (Not Really) Angels have been watching the saga of Long Beach State pitching star Jered Weaver, who has threatened for a year to reject the...
Ever heard of Angelo Mozilo? He is chairman and CEO of Countrywide Financial Corp., and king of the L.A. Business Journal's list of highest-paid local executives. His take last year:...
Antonio Villaraigosa won't be the mayor for another month and a day, but his election continues to fascinate the media. Two profilish stories this weekend, in the Timeses of Los...
Alan Pavlik, editor and publisher of the online magazine Just Above Sunset, posted some photographs of flags arrayed on graves at the national cemetery in Westwood. It's not clear whether...
Here are some items from the week. Posting over the weekend will be sporadic at best. • Los Angeles magazine celebrated this month's comedy issue last night with drinks, schmoozing and...
Author, urban expert and New America Foundation fellow Joel Kotkin is emerging in the media as the most determined early critic of Antonio Villaraigosa's election as mayor. In this week's...
The council has apparently avoided a fractious showdown over leadership of the body. According to a good source at City Hall, a deal has been brokered under which Alex Padilla...
By this time tomorrow, every grave at Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood will be adorned with a small American flag. Plain markers exist for more than 85,000 veterans and...
Here's the full list, from Abayari to Ziman. Thanks to everyone for the veritable deluge of files this morning. (* Late arrival: Here's the ethics pledge the transition team members...
When the gates finally opened on the access path to Carbon Beach, Jayna Mims and her eight-month-old son scampered across PCH and cut through the estate of mogul David Geffen....
Hal Netkin, the city's shrillest anti-immigrant gadlfy, won't be charged over that driving incident at a Minuteman Project protest in Orange County. Garden Grove police originally arrested Netkin after his...
When aspiring screenwriter Jeffrey L. Clemens sent threatening letters to a couple of federal judges in 2003 and 2004, he was (amazingly enough) given a warning. But after his lawsuit...
The mayor-elect announced Thursday that Bob Hertzberg will chair his transition team of 81 members, among them business and labor leaders, environmentalists, developers, artists, educators, community leaders, neighborhood council members,...
A rooftop wedding downtown, from the 5th and Spring blog. If a few more pics like this get out, the downtown boom is really going to explode. After the ceremony...
Valley dingbat Hal Netkin ran a phone bank during the mayoral election that called voters with automated anti-Villaraigosa messages. He's obsessed with immigrants and the mayor-elect, and on his website...
Author D.J. Waldie writes on today's LAT op-ed page that Angelenos have left big decisions about the community to builders such as Eli Broad, and so the latest scheme to...
Mayor-elect Antonio Villaraigosa won't live in the Windsor Square home that was donated to the city for use as an official mayor's residence. He will continue living on Mt. Washington....
Jeffrey Anderson in the LA Weekly checks in on the father whose family name has figured prominently in two mayoral elections, and finds more questions looming about Horacio Vignali than...
Actually, most of them are already here. The first National Critics Conference begins today at the Omni hotel downtown and runs through Saturday. More than four hundred arts writers, critics,...
Terrorist groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas have raised an estimated $20-30 million a year selling counterfeit merchandise in the U.S., much of it here in Los Angeles, Sheriff's Lt....
Westside developer Mark Abrams has a date in court this afternoon to be arraigned on two felony counts and ten misdemeanors alleging he laundered $21,000 in excess campaign contributions to...
Laura at Kevin's Dead Cat has lost a third of her tongue and undergone surgery and radiation. Last week she had a second tracheostomy (announced by her new husband), but...
Over on Wilshire, the online staff at E! is trying to take back a gossip nugget they posted announcing the collapse of the Jessica Simpson-Nick Lachey marriage. Under a red...
A jury in Louisville sided with KFI evening talk guy John Ziegler, ruling that a former TV anchor who he dated then told tales about on the air did not...
That's what the L.A. chapter of Sisters in Crime is calling its June 11 conference on writing and selling "killer mysteries." Speakers and panelists include Lee Child, Robert S. Levinson,...
The new upscale Latino bimonthly magazine backed by Emmis took over the Hollywood Roosevelt (and a lane of Hollywood Boulevard) Tuesday night. A few hundred people listened to Go Betty...
Friends and supporters of Mayor Jim Hahn who want to hold on to their clout (or at least retain some access to power at City Hall) are busy trying to...
Jet Blue began its new service out of Bob Hope Airport on Tuesday, claiming that 80% of the seats to New York are already booked through the summer. The Daily...
Two months or so after assistant managing editor Jonathan Diamond left to work for City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo, the L.A. Business Journal has clarified the masthead. The other A.M.E., Tony...
Today's Times editorializes about Bill O'Reilly editorializing about Michael Kinsley and terrorists. On the op-ed page: Former "Seinfeld" writer Peter Mehlman sends a message to "the couple who talked throughout...
As I reported (sketchily) back on May 15, former Riordan chief of staff Robin Kramer is taking a lead role in the Villaraigosa transition. She moved into the 15th floor...
In addition to editor Katrina Dewey, whose resignation letter was posted on L.A. Observed last Friday, four other veteran staffers are about to leave the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Melissa...
Sumner Redstone keeps his place on top of the annual Los Angeles Business Journal guesstimate of wealthiest Angelenos. Kirk Kerkorian held on to #2, but the news is that a...
Last week the Ventura County Star got some press for shutting down the increasingly nasty comments being posted by the public on the paper's news blog. The L.A. Times followed...
First, from the swirl of politics. Newsweek puts Antonio Villaraigosa on the cover of Monday's issue, using his landslide election as the peg for a story about Latino power. An...
J. R. Moehringer is not like most reporters at the Los Angeles Times. He wrote his way to a Pulitzer for feature writing in 2000, when he was the Atlanta...
For eleven years, Cindi Burkey was the local voice of NPR's All Things Considered on KCRW. Last month, she got yanked off the air and she says was humiliated by...
With the mayoral campaign now history, I felt motivated to clean out some dead links and reorganize the lineup on the left-hand side of the page. It was long overdue...
We interrupt this blog-free day to pass along the news that Katrina Dewey is leaving as editor of the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Martin Berg, the legal paper's San Francisco...
It's jacaranda time in my neighborhood, and I'll be staring at the computer as little as possible. Back over the weekend....
NBC4's Ana Garcia did an investigative report tonight on sanitary conditions in L.A. gyms, complete with hidden cameras and an outside lab testing swabs collected from workout equipment and locker...
The latest Publishers Lunch Weekly says that Ecco will publish Pulitzer-winning journalist and author Edward Humes' next book, Monkey Girl. It's "about the modern-day Scopes trial taking place in schools...
On his first day as mayor-elect, Antonio Villaraigosa met Wednesday with LAPD chief Bratton, did the Crenshaw photo op I razzed him about yesterday, met with L.A. Unified superintendent Roy...
Santa Monica's news website The Lookout attended the election-night party for Bill Rosendahl in a Venice home equipped with a bowling alley in the bathroom, a glass encased showroom for...
Villaraigosa won at all income and education levels, among men and women, and at all age levels except 65 and older. After all the talk about Bernard Parks and the...
Five of the Times' eleven editorial writers are moving on, most of them getting the word last Friday that change is in their immediate future. All of those leaving were...
The Times is throwing Pulitzers at the Disney company beat in the Business section, hiring two-time winner (and ex-Register reporter) Kim Christensen. Most recently he has been an associate managing...
It's customary for major candidates in L.A. to face the media and take questions the day after an election. Jim Hahn did, showing up at his Wilshire Boulevard headquarters at...
2005 Turnout 30.61%Villaraigosa260,72158.7%Hahn183,74941.3%Final semi-official/City Clerk 2001 Turnout 37.67% Hahn304,79153.53%Villaraigosa264,61146.47% Antonio Villaraigosa swept in by a landslide to become the first Latino mayor-elect of Los Angeles since Cristobal Aguilar in the...
It's kind of rough and thin on compelling content, but at least LATimes.com is trying some new stuff. Snapshots from Election Day have been posted so far from four separate...
Today is — finally — Election Day in Los Angeles. Relatively few will vote, municipally speaking, but at least it was fun, right? The network morning shows, banking on history...
• Finally, someone besides me is upset about the lost hockey season. Holders of those pricey luxury suites at Staples Center are complaining that they have gotten no refund for the...
Starting in September, a new service called TimesSelect will charge $49.95 a year for access to op-ed and certain other columnists, the New York Times archives, early looks at some...
An anonymous, right-side political blog called Informed Sources posts that it has quickly registered the web domain names Villaraigosa2009.com and Antonio2009.com. After Villaraigosa wins the Los Angeles mayoral runoff election...
Sunday's New York Times reported on last weekend's marriage of Ron Brownstein, the LAT politics writer in Washington and CNN analyst, and Eileen Nicole McMenamin, the new communications director for...
Councilman Villaraigosa gets on a bus at 7 a.m. today in North Hollywood and, at least in theory, will keep making stops until the bus lets him off to vote...
The "sex issue" is a tired alt-weekly mainstay. One of the hoarier cliches is the writer who hangs with a stripper (dominatrix, porn actress, pick one) and reports back that,...
The street gang known as MS-13 was born two decades ago around MacArthur Park and now has between 30,000 and 50,000 members in half a dozen countries, various sources tell...
Between Hahn and Villaraigosa, I count thirteen campaign stops at Christian churches today, most of them in South L.A. Both are also working in an appearance (Hahn at 1:20, Villaraigosa...
Legendary car customizer George Barris is putting seventy of his creations for Hollywood and other clients up for auction today at the Petersen Automotive Museum. Barris became world famous for...
On this final Saturday of the mayoral marathon, the boys are heading back to the delis. After stopping in at three Shabbat services, Antonio Villaraigosa hits Art's in Studio City,...
A feature story about the Chinese student body at San Marino High School has promoted an outcry by students and threats of violence against Pasadena Star-News reporter Cindy Chang. Editor...
David Geffen is buying the Malibu Beach Inn on Pacific Coast Highway and plans to turn it into a high-end boutique hotel, the L.A. Business Journal reports on its website....
The San Francisco Chronicle swoops in with two pieces on Steve Wasserman's departure (which becomes official today) from the editorship of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. In the newsfeature...
The mass for Miguel Contreras began with "Amazing Grace" and ended with a mariachi version of "De Colores." In between there was applause from the crowd inside the Cathedral of...
The four key strategists in the race for mayor are studied in today's Times by Carla Hall. They are quintessential political junkies so well-known that, like "J.Lo" and "Britney," people...
Today is when localities learn which military bases are proposed for closure. The talk that has regional economic officials the most nervous is rumblings that Los Angeles Air Force Base...
Joel Sappell, the Times' business editor who oversees entertainment coverage, writes in the Column One slot today about his teenage years working as a Disneyland character. At various time he...
It has been pointed out to me that the bimonthly VenicePaper is on the web now. The May/June issue has stories on the neighborhood council uproar in Venice and the...
Michele Ruiz, anchor of the "Channel 4 News" at 6 p.m., announced today she is leaving the station, according to TV Week. She came to KNBC in 1998 from KTLA....
• Dodgers owner Frank McCourt refinanced his debt today, borrowing $250 million and using it to pay off loans from Bank of America and News Corp. that he needed to buy...
The couple behind ambassadorcats.com have trapped and relocated more than thirty of the feral cats that roam the grounds of the relic Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire. They are trying to...
The horses can sense the finish line in the race to be mayor, and the crowd's on its feet. With less than a week until Tuesday's culmination of all this...
Yesterday's Newsday column quoting friends of LAPD chief Bill Bratton about his New York aspirations was the talk of City Hall and the police department, the Daily News' Beth Barrett...
LAPD detective Will Beall sold the film rights to his novel LA Rex to Scott Rudin, in a deal put together by by Shari Smiley at CAA on behalf of...
LA Weekly political editor Harold Meyerson pens a Powerlines obit of his friend Miguel Contreras on the Weekly website. I imagine it will also run in the paper this week....
Whatever professional relationship existed yesterday between LA Weekly colleagues Marc Cooper and Nikki Finke pretty much flamed out for all to see online. * Afternoon update: The Weekly has withdrawn...
Newsday's Ellis Henican devotes today's column to the idea that LAPD chief William Bratton — he calls the chief "Hollywood Bill" — is preparing for life after Los Angeles and...
* Updated at the bottom... • Villaraigosa called for an investigation of Nick Tonsich, the president of the harbor commission whose financial dealings were the subject of a Times takeout on...
Tu Ciudad, that upscale Latino mag I've been telling you about since January, hits the mail next week (with a May 24 launch party and a June-July issue date.) In...
LA Weekly news features editor Marc Cooper didn't care at all for Weekly columnist Nikki Finke's launch-day blast at the Huffington Post. On his blog, Cooper calls his colleague a...
Screenwriter Eric Heisserer set up a website called The Dionaea House last year and posted a series of correspondence between characters in his horror screenplay. After all, if the Internet...
• Pierce College out in Woodland Hills is offering a course this summer that could be the answer to high gas prices. Fundamentals of Mule Driving, also known as Equine...
Manohla Dargis, taking off from the new Paul Haggis film Crash in her critic's notebok in the New York Times, writes that "Los Angeles is in love with the idea...
Everything except the archives is free, which is good, and the look feels fresher and snappier. It's impossible to please everyone, and I'm sure I'll have more detailed reactions about...
Villaraigosa51% Hahn40%The front runner's lead has shrunk from 18 points a month ago to 11 points now, but the latest (and probably final) L.A. Times Poll found Antonio Villaraigosa...
It's official — the L.A. Times' ill-conceived experiment with charging a fee to read stories about film, music art, culture, style, and books ends at 5 a.m. Tuesday. No word...
* Fresh items are at the bottom, as usual... • This is anniversary week (the second) for L.A. Observed, a fact that the Downtown News dug up and turned into a...
Times columnist Al Martinez has been around a long time. And he apparently has seen quite enough of the current campaign for mayor. His verdict: Unimpressed. Some snippets: Once upon...
Rick Orlov says the worst job is the staffer assigned to shadow the other candidate's events, tape the remarks and try not to get assaulted. For Hahn the duty has...
The first day of the Huffington Post offers blog items from Laurie David, Michael Isikoff, David Frum, David Mamet, Ellen DeGeneres, John Cusack, Mike Nichols and the husband-and-wife team of...
• Sandy Gallin sells his Malibu home for $30 million and only gets second billing in the Times' Hot Property column. Also: Elvira as unhappy homeowner. • Jack Klunder, the Times' new...
On the second-to-last Sunday of the mayoral runoff, the Times doesn't reveal a new poll (maybe Monday?) but does land profiles of Hahn and Villaraigosa focused on the formative...
This weekend's L.A. Times brought two distinct in-house opinions about the future of the medium in which the pieces were printed. On Saturday, media columnist Tim Rutten argued that plunging...
How respected — or powerful — was the late Miguel Contreras? When the news spread Friday that the labor leader had passed away, Mayor Jim Hahn and Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa...
Organized labor's most influential Los Angeles leader apparently suffered a fatal heart attack late Friday. Contreras suffered from type 2 diabetes; most media sources put his age at 52, but...
• Mark at The Elegant Variation lists the top ten things he would do as editor of the L.A. Times Book Review. • Newsweek's website asks if Monday's launch of the Huffington...
Eight months ago, the Jewish Journal's singles columnist wrote a piece arguing against marriage. Seth Menachem ends today's column by proposing to his girlfriend, Carrie. So what's changed? I no...
The Baseball Reliquary in Monrovia plans to induct three more baseball figures into its distinctly non-traditional Shrine of the Eternals in July. The late Dodgers star Jackie Robinson is already...
Hear that roar? Those are the after-burners kicking in on Air Villaraigosa. For the period from April 3 to April 30, the councilman raised $2,211,367 to Mayor Hahn's $763,325. Viewed...
• Friday's City Council meeting was cancelled so those who wish can attend the funeral of slain LAX police officer Tommy Scott. Why do I expect it will be a mayoral...
The television program produced by KCET and three other public TV stations in the state begins its fourth season on a new night — Fridays. Tomorrow's opener airs at 8:30...
Editors of the Times' op-ed page were surprised and chagrined to learn the other day (from the Daily Breeze via L.A. Observed) that Tuesday's commentator Fernando J. Guerra is not...
Longtime L.A. scribe Jan Golab, author of the 1993 book The Dark Side of the Force: A True Story of Corruption & Murder in the LAPD and a writer for...
Commercial services that clean up the detritus at death scenes are in a growth biz. In today's LA Weekly, Christine Pelisek goes around with the husband-and-wife team that created Clean...
Ouch. Harold Meyerson leads today's LA Weekly column with a great Jim Hahn anecdote. Recently, he writes, four Stanford academics studied the effect on voters of a politician's appearance by...
• Longtime Channel 7 weatherman Johnny Mountain joins the rival Channel 2 news on May 8. He will work the news at 5, 6 and 11 p.m. He left KABC in...
One of the assumptions skeptics seem to have made about the Huffington Post is that the celebrity contributors will, inevitably, use their assistants, advisers and agents to polish or even...
Fresh off his LAT Book Prize, Evan Wright has sold his next book, The Seed — about his experience at a drug recovery camp in the 80s that used radical,...
The day after Villaraigosa launched a TV blitz calling his rival an ethical slug, Hahn fired back Tuesday with his own spots that slam those controversial Florida donations that Villaraigosa...
In today's Daily Breeze, David Zahniser looks at the nearly $1.5 million being spent on the mayoral runoff outside the usual $1,000-per-person contributions limit. Legally, the money has to be...
Steve Wasserman is moving to New York. Today's press release is below, followed by this afternoon's memo to the Times staff saying a successor "will be named soon." First, the...
Late on this, but the L.A. Times has hired freelancer Borzou Daragahi for the Baghdad bureau. He was a Pulitzer finalist this year for Iraq stories in the Newark Star-Ledger...
A new website, LAPDauthors.com, compiles links and information on books by almost two dozen current and former Los Angeles Police Department officers, from Bill Parker to Joseph Wambaugh to Bill...
The outgoing L.A. Times Book Review editor may be considering life as a book agent, says Steven Zeitchik on the Publishers Weekly website. [That's confirmed now.] Also, Tim Rutten —...
Wonkette carefully polled her readers, threw out the numbers and declared the winners in the Inside the Bubble Washington Journalism Awards. Her pick for nicest Washington correspondent:...
These things are estimated in the ten years between national census counts, which themselves are purposely off the mark due to political, uh, sensitivities. But by the latest official guess...
Democratic strategist Darry Sragow, a free agent in the mayoral race, turns to the headline cliche to explain Antonio Villaraigosa's new commercial, which began airing Monday. It rips Jim Hahn...
The Lakers invited their TV game-caller, Paul Sunderland, not to return next season. Turns out he was not the second coming of Chick Hearn. Next! Also: I hope that someone...
Today's New York Times carries two pieces on our freeway shootings, a staff news story by Nick Madigan of the bureau and a more personal treatment by author and editorial...
Today on the 14 Freeway near Santa Clarita, gunshots reportedly from a dark-colored low-rider Acura or Honda smashed windows but didn't hurt anybody. Saturday night on the Golden State near...
Ex-mayor Richard Riordan will be on KCRW's Which Way, L.A.? with Warren Olney this evening at 7 p.m. Riordan, who's backing Villaraigosa, will talk about the schools in the mayoral...
Sources at the L.A. Times confirm the buzz that Steve Wasserman is out as editor of the LAT Book Review. There since 1996, he informed his staff on Friday, after...
Later today the newspaper industry releases its latest bad news about circulation declines. An early peek by Banc of America Securities (yes, that's really how they spell it) found the...
PR Week quizzed the LA Weekly's Deadline Hollywood columnist about how she landed at an alternative weekly, what she thinks of other reporters on the entertainment beat, and how she...
This spring Malibu is reading the original Frederick Kohner novella Gidget, inspired by the surfing subculture his daughter Kathy joined at the beach there one summer in the fifties. The...
In Gregory Rodriguez's op-ed piece in today's Times, we get some fascinating personal insights about the men who are running for mayor. I learned that Jim Hahn does not like...
Michael Yamaki, the appointment secretary when Gray Davis was governor and former L.A. police commissioner, has been hired as senior adviser to Sheriff Lee Baca, the Daily Journal says...The Times...
By now everyone should know that more people live in the Los Angeles portion of the San Fernando Valley than in any U.S. city except New York, L.A., Chicago, Houston...
Clinton fundraises in LA
Jim Henson Studios on La Brea became a presidential campaign stop on Thursday.
Brown declares disaster area
The natural gas leak above Porter Ranch now qualifies for various government actions. Story
Performing arts with cheer
Donna Perlmutter closes out 2015 with productions downtown and on the Westside.
