First thing Monday, 10/3

In addition to last night's items on the Times stories by Ken Auletta and the Wall Street Journal, here are some other things you might want to know about:

♦ Getty curator of antiquities Marion True resigned ahead of a Times disclosure that she bought a vacation home in the Greek islands using a loan expedited by one of the museum's main suppliers of ancient art. She already faces trial in Italy on charges of conspiring to traffic in looted antiquities.

♦ Friend-of-Antonio Larry Frank, the deputy mayor for neighborhood and community services who drives a 1965 Valiant convertible, tells why he came over from the labor movement in a Sunday Q-and-Q by Abel Salas in the LAT Magazine: "This is the first time I've crossed over. I've managed to get through my whole organizing career with hardly an enemy. I think it's prepared me for trying to play a role. We have 1,700 elected neighborhood council leaders in our communities. That's just a phenomenal thing. Democracy is messy, but communities are entry points to the profound richness of the city."

♦ Ousted mayor Jim Hahn got together with a half-dozen ex-aides downtown at Pete's and took note of the good press Villaraigosa got last week for being on jury duty. Hahn, to Rick Orlov of the Daily News: "I guess I should have put out a press release every time I was called for jury duty...I think I got called every other year."

♦ Adelphia customer Nikki Finke emails that the cable service ran "Desperate Housewives" only in Spanish last night, just days after going off the air entirely during "Lost." Now there's an innovative way to win over customers.

♦ FullDisclosure.net claims to have posted exclusive video of a racial riot among inmates at the Pitchess Detention Center, part of the vast L.A. county jail system.

♦ Today's L.A. Business Journal has a front-page (meaning free) explainer on the Tribune's billion-dollar tax trouble.

♦ Classic October Santa Anas will return Tuesday. Look out in the hills...

♦ I was wrong last week about the Dodgers finishing with their worst record since coming to Los Angeles. This was their second-worst West Coast season, 22 losses uglier than last year.

Best of the past week on LAObserved:

What the U.K. thinks of Kinsley
Pajamas Media gears up
New muscle at the Writers Guild flexes up
The tax man comes for Tribune
New York Observer on the LAT
Council settles on Gerry Miller to run the place
Andr�s Martinez chats with Nikki Finke
KCRW drops Day to Day
Times smooches Weinsteins with big free ad

Another month: I thought September was a good month for items, and it certainly raised the bar dramatically on the traffic end. New highs in every way they count visitors: thanks for being part of this growing audience, and also for the tons of informative and supportive emails. I plan to get better at acknowledging them, though please believe I read every one unless the spam filters snag it—don't put "free" or anything to do with stocks, pills or sex in the subject line. So, most readers here are regular visitors who click in directly from their RSS feed or bookmarks (they tell me another 4,000 visitors added LAO to their favorites last month). Links on other blogs and websites, however, send a lot of welcome new traffic that is easily counted by the software. Josh Marshall's award-winning TalkingPointsMemo was the top referrer for the month. Others follow, along with assorted September details:

Top referrers for the month:

TalkingPointsMemo
Andrew Sullivan
Washington Monthly
Romenesko
Defamer
Slate
LAVoice.org
Sploid
Political Wire
Jossip

The exclusive report on Michael Kinsley's exit email was the most clicked-on entry of the month, read at least 41,000 times. The most-read items:

Michael Kinsley leaves on bitter tone
Kinsley era ending
Mystery of the stench deepens
Rhonda Miller not going away
That stench is spreading
Ambassador razing gets OK
Stranger in their midst
Rating L.A.'s lawyers
Claude Brodesser clarified

Movable Type gathers every post about selected topics on one page for easy scanning. Some readers click right on these topic pages to quickly catch up. These were the most popular topics with readers in September:

L.A. culture and place
Television
L.A. Times
Los Angeles politics
Books and authors