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If you thought the Times would put a Da Vinci Code story on the front page, you were wrong. They put two out front. Click the Buzz for a dose of morning news, including a bad omen for the Brentwood dog park, another political analysis of the mayor's school strategy and the Sheriff's Department gets in trouble for stealing software.
♦ Da Vinci hype: The LAT goes front page with two Da Vinci Code pieces, including Kenneth Turan's review: "While the story plays better on the page than the screen and some of the film's elements work better than others, a proficient Ron Howard version of things is certainly competent if only occasionally thrilling."
♦ Campaign season: "After interviewing five candidates a day for multiple days, semiconsciousness is sometimes the highest state of alertness we can achieve," Harold Meyerson writes in the LA Weekly. But his story will be remembered for the "cavity" remark about Steve Westly.
♦ Takeover king: Mayor Villaraigosa's decision to devote so much of his administration's energy and capital to taking over the schools receives an analytical look from David Zahniser in the LA Weekly.
If Villaraigosa fails to seize control of the district, a sprawling bureaucracy that covers Los Angeles and 26 other cities, he will experience his most public defeat since his loss to Hahn in 2001. If he wins, he just may create a wedge issue large enough to divide, or at least distract, the Democrats and the powerful CTA — political allies for a generation — just as they are supposed to be uniting to defeat Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
♦ Brentwood, this one's for you: Brentwood's dog park—said to be popular with Dustin Hoffman, Kirsten Dunst, and Owen Wilson—and adjacent soccer field are built on an old radioactive waste dump, Michael Collins reports in CityBeat.
From 1952 to 1968, UCLA and the West L.A. Veterans Administration, now called the Veterans Affairs West Los Angeles Healthcare Center, used the land adjacent to and under the park to bury radioactive biomedical research waste. The wastes buried there, according to research records unearthed by CityBeat, include barrels of radioactive tritium and lab wastes, and animal carcasses from Atomic Age-experiments involving the toxic radionuclides carbon-14, zinc-65, strontium-85 and strontium-90, gold-198, iodine-125, cobalt-60, copper-67, manganese-54, xenon-133, indium-113, calcium-47, iron-59, and several others. A central dirt mound of plant-covered debris sits in the middle of the dump, emitting high ambient radiation readings. This reporter, using a nuclear radiation monitor, detected shards of radioactive glass that registered more than four times normal.
♦ Tit for tat: Did politics inspire Councilman Alex Padilla to tweak the mayor's budget? Ya think?
♦ Well looky here: The L.A. County Sheriff's Department has been nabbed for copying 6,000 copies of a program onto its computers but only paying for 3,663 copies. Story is in the Daily Journal.
♦ Turning point: A juror on the Fleishman-Hillard case says testimony by PR exec Steve Sugerman was very persuasive, Doug Dowie flouted the law with arrogance and that the jury wondered why higher-ups weren't being prosecuted too.
♦ Credit due: KPCC's Adolfo Guzman Lopez broke the story about cities in the county's southeast area banding together to push for new governance of LAUSD schools there.
♦ Tables turned: Civil rights attorney Steve Lerman, who represented Rodney King back in the day, faces misdemeanor intoxication and disorderly conduct charges for a Christmas Eve altercation at Mangiamo's restaurant in Manhattan Beach.
♦ Moving up: Marc Cooper of the LA Weekly will become a visiting professor at the USC Annenberg journalism school next fall and associate director of Annenberg's Institute for Justice and Journalism. Also, Annenberg faculty member Judy Muller has earned tenure and elevation to associate professor.
♦ Kudos: Jon Weisman's Inside Baseball gig at Sports Illustrated.com comes with a photo of the Dodger Thoughts blogger.