Weekend shorts

Follow-ups, catch-ups and clearing off the desk for Columbus Day...

 ♦ Sunday's L.A. Times fronts a Steve Lopez column about his violin-playing street person, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, taking in the stage at Disney Hall during a Philharmonic rehearsal of Beethoven's Third Symphony.
 ♦ After taking a little criticism on Friday, the LAT mentions the alleged terrorist threat against Library Tower in the lede of its Saturday story.
 ♦ The Daily News joins in the Adelphia bashing, editorializing about the cable company's latest Spanish-language and dropped-program gaffes: "Enough is enough. These incidents only portray Adelphia as a company in decline that can't even provide basic service."
 ♦ TV Week editor Alex Ben Block has left the mag, Variety says. The former Hollywood Reporter editor (and Herald Examiner city editor) is planning a non-fiction book on the entertainment business.
 ♦ "Commander in Chief" creator Rod Lurie has been replaced as showrunner by Steve Bochco for wanting to show a "rough sex" scene between the President's daughter and a Secret Service agent in the back of a limo, Nikki Finke tells the Drudge Report.
 ♦ Joss Whedon worked hard to produce his film Serenity in Los Angeles, the cover piece in the Times' Sunday Calendar says.
 ♦ Xeni Jardin helped Kevin Sites start his Iraqi war blog when he was at CNN, and pans his new Yahoo project in the LAT's Current section.
 ♦ Veronique de Turenne reports in the LAT Magazine on the bleak prospects for the last Santa Monica Mountains cougars.
 ♦ Rick Orlov sums up the first hundred days of Antonio Villaraigosa's mayoralty in a Sunday piece in the Daily News: "By nearly all accounts, the mayor has made strides...but amid the successes, he has faced some high-profile setbacks."
 ♦ Several of the Los Angeles News Group papers combined Sunday on a package about the social toll of high home prices. Kerry Cavanaugh of the Daily News wrote the main piece.
 ♦ Compton has a Starbucks and another on the way, and is mighty proud of it, the mayor tells the newest reporter in the New York Times' L.A. bureau.
 ♦ Michael Kimmelman profiles L.A. painter Raymond Pettibon for the New York Times Magazine: "A shaggy fellow given to rumpled Oxfords or T-shirts, baggy khakis and tennis shoes, Pettibon has, at 48, after several decades of hard living, the pale, unshaved, sagging face of a handsome man nursing a perpetual hangover."
 ♦ Also in Sunday's NYT, Irene Lacher covers the Disney Hall vows of novelist Francesca Delbanco and screenwriter Nicholas Stoller.
 ♦ 10086 Sunset Boulevard, "The Online Home of Josephine Gillis," is a new anony-blog that has some connection to Rodger Jacobs of 8763 Wonderland. Note the multiple references to Sunset Blvd. the film.