Supporting Israel
Both the governor and mayor made appearances at Sunday's
rally on Wilshire.
Titan's lakes
Scientists at JPL are pretty sure now that the moon of Saturn has seas of
liquid methane at the poles.
McCourt can't help himself
Pat Jordan's
profile of Frank and Jamie McCourt in Sunday's West stretched mightily to convince us that the Dodgers' owners are victims of reflexive bad press and that they never planned to develop the stadium acreage. Then Frank goes off and quips, "Look around. There are 300 acres here. Great things can be built here. Why not? L.A. is all about the future." McCourt claims the Dodgers were losing $60 million a year when he got there, and he appears to say fuck a lot. A longtime PR exec in L.A. emails me his take:
From the breakfast at the Bel Air Hotel to the gratuitous use of profanity, these people have perhaps the worst feel for PR than just about anyone I've ever seen in this town. Why in God's name would you allow a reporter to listen while your obviously inept flack critiques your interview performance?
Official hotel of the Dodgers
Friday's Jewish Journal did piece on Jamie McCourt and, just like the Times story, it
opens with her at table at the Bel-Air Hotel. She comes off better here, where writer Robert David Jaffee gives her credit for good deeds in the Jewish community.
NYT asks the big questions about Santa Monica Boulevard
Bureau chief Jennifer Steinhauer checks in on the intense parking scene at Clementine's and assesses the result of all that construction: "No Champs-Élysées, but an improvement." Whether traffic will flow any better is of course an
open question.
People who say they could never live in Los Angeles, but cannot quite articulate why, may be thinking about Santa Monica Boulevard.
A two-and-a-half-mile stretch of the famed thoroughfare — an urban piece of the legendary Route 66, and the star of at least one pop song — has been under reconstruction for more than three years. The result: mind-numbing traffic jams and parking shenanigans that have impressed even lifelong residents.
Now, after incessant planning, digging and fulminating, the largest street-improvement project in the city’s history is coming to completion, a year late and more than $20 million over budget.
Three years, 612 trees and $90 million later, many residents and business owners are wondering if this Not-Big Dig was worth it.
“Everybody agrees that it is going to look better,” said Mike Eveloff, president of Tract 7260, a homeowners association. “But will it function better? That is a big question.”
Ripston gets more mail
In response to Joel Bellman's
open letter condemning the ACLU for giving a religious freedom award to the head of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, activists on the other side are urging that emails be sent endorsing the award. The
garden party that Bellman plans to boycott is Sept. 10 at the Brentwood home of Stanley and Betty Sheinbaum.
Cat fight
Supervisor Mike Antonovich's latest weekly animal give-away at the Tuesday Supes meeting
didn't go so well. Rick Orlov reports that a black kitten - "a mean ball of fur named Sylvester" - attacked and scratched Antonovich's face, knocked his glasses askew and climbed up on his back.
But it's a dry heat storm
Mayor Villaraigosa invoked the concept of a "heat storm" for his press conference yesterday to urge Angelenos to conserve power. Heat records for the day were
broken in Woodland Hills (108 degrees), Pasadena (107), downtown (97) and UCLA (93). Kind of surprising that in a hundred years or however long they consider "forever" it has never been 97 downtown on July 23.
Daily Blues in South Bay
Mark McDermott at the Easy Reader
digs deep into the prospects of a sale for the Daily Breeze, and finds a paper that isn't too healthy. Copley's Los Angeles properties lost $3.3 million last year, he says, but wait it gets worse. That includes a $1.7 million profit for The Beach Reporter, with the the Breeze and sister papers the Palos Verdes Peninsula News and More San Pedro dragging things down. Circulation is down to 70,951 from 81,725 in 2001. Still, he calls Dean Singleton the most likely buyer, even after a 1996 run-in that soured the Copley folks on Singleton.
One evening at the Republican National Convention in San Diego in 1996, Helen Copley was holding court at her dinner table when William Dean Singleton, the brash, acquisitive owner of the MediaNews Group, stopped by to pay his respects. Sort of.
"Helen," he said to the Copley newspaper matriarch. "When are you going to sell me that rag?"
He was referring to the Daily Breeze. The paper was believed within publishing circles to have been struggling financially and Singleton was in the midst of a buying spree that began that year with several small Los Angeles suburban papers and, by 1997, would include the Los Angeles Daily News and the Long Beach Press-Telegram and an overall circulation of 450,000 in the area.
The Breeze was a significant piece of the puzzle for Singleton to effectively implement his "clustering" strategy -- owning enough papers surrounding the Los Angeles Times to be able to attract national and regional advertising while realizing cost reductions by consolidating editorial, administrative, and printing resources. It was a slash and burn strategy -- he routinely cut editorial staffs in half while reducing the pay and increasing the workload of those who remained -- that caused one former editor to call him a "bone picker publisher."
I guess they know better
The Times
editorialized Saturday that the closure of one LAX runway for construction work will cause a "jumbo-jet-load of restlessness and discontent." OK, except that the only evidence in the editorial concludes the opposite: the FAA's computer models find there need not be any serious delays. The writer pronounces that not very comforting, but ran out of bullets at that point.
On the campaign trail
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is putting on a health-care summit here today while Phil Angelides discusses his positions on the issue at UCLA.
Kill two birds wth one mike
Both of KPCC's local talk shows, "Airtalk with Larry Mantle" and "Patt Morrison," broadcast from along the border at Tijuana.
Could be an adventure
Looks like Judith Regan is seeking an assistant for her new life in L.A. From the
job posting:
Executive Assistant needed for high-power CEO in media and publishing. Candidate MUST have at least 7 years of executive administrative experience, pay extreme attention to detail, and have a great sense of humor. This is a challenging position with long hours, incredible responsibility, and a great deal of fun; candidate must love to work and be willing to go to any lengths to get the job done. Job does require some personal duties as well as heavy scheduling, travel, expenses, and daily troubleshooting.
Bill Handel
The KFI morning talker who had a great latest ratings book was a guest on NBC4's "NewsConference" on Sunday.
Mako, actor was 72
The co-founder of East-West Players received an
Oscar nomination for
The Sand Pebbles and "is revered as sort of the godfather of Asian American theater."
Prince it is
Local sports scoopster
Brooks Melchior reports that Prince will headline the halftime show of Super Bowl XLI in South Florida.
Ink
Kim and Nathan at the 1947 Project got a
nice write-up for their Pasadena Confidential Crime Bus tour in the weekend Star-News.
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We've got Arnold and Antonio, Frank and Jamie, Ramona and Joel, Mike and Sylvester, and even Bill Handel. It's a full helping of the Morning Buzz for a Monday. Click on the Buzz for all the sordid details, and don't forget to catch up below with anything you missed from the past week of LA Observed posts.
