Weekend shorts

♦ Rep. Elton Gallegly of Simi Valley opted out of running again, citing health problems. He made the announcement too late Friday for other candidates to jump in. Times, Daily News.
♦ Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies will get raises of up to 18.5% over three years under a deal that must go to the Supervisors for approval.
♦ County Supes Molina and Yaroslavsky, Assessor Rick Auerbach and Sheriff Baca look to be around four more years after Friday's filing deadline passed without major contenders getting in.
♦ Raphael J. Sonenshein argues in Current that, even though no one on the old Committee of 25 would recognize the Los Angeles establishment today, "because business doesn't run things anymore, it has the opportunity, greater than ever before, to provide leadership in civic reform."
♦ Retired Superior Court judge Delbert E. Wong, a Silver Lake resident who was the first Chinese American appointed to the bench in the continental United States, died Friday night at age 85. He was the father of Kent Wong, director of the UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education.
♦ Virginia Postrel, former editor of Los Angeles-based Reason magazine, donated a kidney to a friend and blogs about it. She's also a new contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly.
♦ Bettie Page lives on.
♦ Mt. Waterman ski area might be revived by the former owner.
♦ They like Milton Bradley in Oakland so far: "He's completely opposite of everything that's been written about him," says A's third baseman Eric Chavez.
♦ Figuring out the future of King Harbor in Redondo Beach.
♦ The City Council will meet the first Friday of every month in Van Nuys.
♦ The L.A. Times on Sunday ran a wire brief on the United Farm Workers union signing a new contract in Oxnard. The union squawked when the Daily News ran it Friday.
♦ Sunday's LAT also runs two flashbacks to the St. Francis Dam collapse 78 years ago, an A section graf and, in West magazine, a passage from Cedric Belfrage's 1938 novel Promised Land. Here's something I wrote about the disaster in 1999.
♦ Contributor line in Sunday's New York Time fashion magazine: "The photographer Mark Segal has a dream: he wants to live in the desert and breed cheetahs. Really. For now he is settling for Los Angeles and frequent trips to Eastern Europe, where he scours the streets for fresh Slavic faces, like the young Czech models on Page 134."