First thing Thursday, 12.22.05

♦ Ed Boks (rhymes with coax) may be the city's new animal czar, but the key player looks to be spine surgeon and billionaire inventor Gary Karlin Michelson. He has, reports the LA Weekly's Robert Greene, "thought through L.A.’s animal problem and has established a foundation that is prepared to pay to have every pet in the city fixed and tracked." Meanwhile, Guerdon Stuckey appealed his firing as animal chief.

♦ Times food writer Charles Perry writes about the comforting familiarity of ten venerable L.A.area restaurants, from Musso's and Du Par's to the Smoke House (in Burbank) and Rae's (Santa Monica.)

♦ That smoke rising over Van Nuys yesterday was the L.A. Fire Department purposely burning down a storage building to defuse fifty pounds of unstable dynamite. Tricky job: They closed the 405, shut down MetroLink and called to the scene twenty-eight firefighter companies, eight ambulances, an arson unit, a helicopter, three Battalion Captains, three Battalion Chief Officer Command Teams, one Division Chief Officer Command Team, four Brush Patrols, one Foam Tender and a Deputy Chief. And it worked.

♦ Bill Bradley in the LA Weekly remembers the night that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger shifted right to become a partisan Republican, instead of what he told voters he would be.