Weekend shorts

Times columnist Steve Lopez has issues with expending tax dollars and perhaps the last chance to make a citywide community of downtown on Eli Broad's vision to create essentially a shopping mall on Grand Avenue: "Why not turn Grand Avenue into a tree-shaded, pedestrian-only promenade? Or build an all-season, outdoor theater for L.A. Phil rehearsals or Colburn student performances? The possibilities are endless. But instead of creating a distinct sense of place that says something interesting about one of the world's most dynamic cities, we're in danger of building a monument to banality that happened to pencil out for the developer and figures to generate millions in taxes."
New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff's new book, US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man, gets a mixed review in the LAT: "A practitioner of what you might call knucklehead journalism, LeDuff likes to be in the mix and to mix it up...a hit-or-miss sociologist....LeDuff is unsparing, if hilarious." [* Also in the NYT: "As both narrator and subject he is chippy and hostile. Needy and belligerent. At home in obscenity. An erection in print....In the end, we only learn a whole lot about the true and twisted mind of one American man."]
Calitics, a website that covers California politics from the progressive side, has banned political journalist William Bradley, who writes New West Notes and for LA Weekly and Pajamas Media. "Mr. Bradley has chosen to be consistently and repeatedly nasty to those of us who operate Calitics and (more important) our community -- an internet troll in the classic sense," the site's Jeremy Woodburn posts. No response that I can find from Bradley.
Julio Ruelas, first president of the Dukes So Cal — L.A's oldest lowrider car club in continuous existence — died Jan. 21 at age 62. Good of the Times to run an obituary today. The club began in South-Central in 1962, according to this history. Layitlow.com has photos from the large funeral at Forest Lawn and the forums at Lowrider magazine have an appreciation from poster Big_Vato23: "I am sure most of you who ever owned a bomb or were into lowriding knew who Julio was."
Slate's Kevin Arnovitz reacts on his Clippers blog to the coming out of ex-NBA player John Amaechi, writing about slurs the blogger overheard at Angels games last season: "What's always upset me as a gay sports fanatic is the tacit assumption inside the sports world that gay people don't exist in its orbit, neither as participants nor as spectators. Certainly it's widely understood that there are gay people in clubhouses and locker rooms. But the general atmospheric tone has always been that gays are invisible, unless, of course, they botch an easy grounder at third, in which case they're homos."
The MTA might be thinking of reversing course and adding turnstiles to the subway platforms, in the wake of the mercury spill incident.
That videotape from the Carson city council meeting is just the tip of the iceberg of what's going on in the city where four council members and two mayors have been nabbed on corruption charges in recent years. LAT and Breeze
LAPD homicide investigator Mike Coffey, "a detective's detective," retires after 410 cases.
Broowaha interviews LAT photojournalist Glenn Koenig.