Monday news and notes: 2.16.15

Selected items from the media, our in box and other LA Observed sources. Posted occasionally — often in the morning.

The LA Times editorial board endorsed challenger Cindy Montañez over incumbent Nury Martinez for City Council in the Valley's 6th district. "Martinez has done a perfectly adequate job...However, adequate isn't enough. Montañez would be better for the 6th District and for the city as a whole." LAT editorial

The Downtown News endorsed Jose Huizar over Gloria Molina in the 14th district. DTN

City Hall's special interests seem very happy to give money to the effort to move city elections to even numbered years, when they will compete with state and national races for attention and campaign funds. LAT/David Zahniser

Some City Hall politicians backing two measures on the March 3 ballot to move city election dates and temporarily extend term limits could leave office with bigger pensions if the initiatives pass. DN/Dakota Smith

Mayor Eric Garcetti now has a Snapchat account. LAist

Rick Cole, LA's Deputy Mayor for Budget & Innovation, outlines the goals for Garcetti's "Innovation Delivery Team," which recently received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies. The Planning Report

The absence of visible drama in the jockeying to succeed Barbara Boxer (and later Jerry Brown) "does not mean...that nothing at all is happening. California's political industrial complex was still moving inexorably last week, a little less dramatically but no less potently, as it always does." LAT/Cathleen Decker

John Myers and his bosses have revived the weekly state politics podcast he started in 2006. KQED

LA Unified still has a problem of broken musical instruments. KPCC

UCLA and the heirs of Edward Carter are still fighting over the future of the off-campus Japanese Garden in Bel Air. LAT

Former mayor Richard Riordan has a blog called Why I Love LA.

The development company hoping for approval to build an NFL stadium in Inglewood has poured more than $100,000 in campaign contributions to elected city officials. LAT

Garry Trudeau won a Polk Award. NYT

One last Monday David Carr Media Equations column. NYT

Simon & Schuster is going back to press to rush more copies of Carr's memoir “The Night of the Gun,” to market. NY Post

The New Yorker celebrates its 90th anniversary in the current double issue, with nine covers playing off longtime icon Eustace Tilley. New Yorker

Nora Zamichow, a former LA Times staff writer, writes that she learned during the terminal illness of her husband Mark Saylor, the late PR executive and Times editor, that physicians are really bad about communicating the realities of dying. Often they don't even try. LAT Op-ed

My husband, Mark, who died at 58, had an inoperable brain tumor. Yet at no time did any doctor look him in the eye and tell him that he was going to die. They did tell him, at least initially, he could probably live another five years.

Eventually, doctors spouted euphemisms that even I, a former medical reporter, couldn't decipher. Or they hinted, saying, "Treatment isn't going our way," without ruling out the possibility that it might go "our way." Finally, toward the end, doctors said, "Soon consider hospice."

[skip]

When a doctor actually told me that my husband was dying, I asked her to tell Mark, thinking he might have questions that I would be unable to answer. She scuttled off to his hospital bedside and returned so quickly that I knew no conversation had taken place. He was sleeping, she said.

Instead, I told Mark.

Seven reasons why 'Fifty Shades of Grey' almost doubled weekend box office predictions. Thompson on Hollywood

Sasha Stone: "I’m going to the Oscars for the first time in 16 years." Awards Daily

Chef and food entrepreneur Roy Choi on income inequality, jobs, raising the minimum wage and his latest project — the opening of a fast-food restaurant called Loco’l in Watts. Capital and Main

The New York Times Travel section on Sunday led with a piece on visiting Hollywood by LA bureau chief Adam Nagourney. NYT

Hollywood is not a city, town or village (it is a neighborhood in the city of Los Angeles) but a cultural touchstone for anyone who grew up on movies, for those people for whom Los Angeles really means Hollywood, with its celebrities, mansions, swimming pools, palm tree-lined boulevard and movie studios. Those Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movies that ended with the tag, “Made in Hollywood USA" were actually produced on a back lot in Culver City. The Hollywood sign, which draws hundreds of tourists onto the winding canyon roads of Hollywood every day, to the understandable chagrin of people who live there, was put up by Harry Chandler, the visionary Los Angeles Times publisher, to announce the development of elegant homes built on the hill known as Hollywoodland. (The last four letters disappeared long ago.)

Noted: When first published, the story said Otis Chandler instead of Harry.

Be aware: Street closures have already begun around Hollywood and Highland for next Sunday's Oscars.

Josh Kamensky: "Volcano" is a better Los Angeles film than "Crash." Off-Ramp

A national study of Twitter users found they tend to be negative about their public transportation experiences and their fellow riders. But LA Metro was "one of the least hated among the hated public transportation operators." LA Weekly

The only wolf ever documented in Southern California may have been a visiting Mexican gray wolf. LAT

Santa’s Village was once a major Southern California attraction. SB Sun

Former Anaheim Ducks player Steve Montador, 35, was found dead in his home in Mississauga, Ontario. Foul play is not suspected. Montador had a history of concussions and depression. This was his first season away from the game as a player. OC Register, TSN.ca

Aerial photos show the enormous traffic jam at America's biggest port http://t.co/sSJt7lQQi1 pic.twitter.com/VQ50pJywe8

— Fast Company (@FastCompany) February 15, 2015