A brief history of Liberace(s) on film
Scott Marks 4:26 p.m., May 21
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Stories by Joe Deegan
Eat Here and Get Towed
Call it blind loyalty, if you like. For a place to tell me his story, Clark Waters chose the Denny’s restaurant at the corner of Pacific Highway and Hawthorn Street. Only days earlier, he had ...
Keep on Truckin' That Gas
If ever a scheme needs a good euphemism, it’s the Beneficial Use of Digester Gas. Nevertheless, the plan passed its first smell test. The City presented it to the local planning board at its July ...
Portraits of the Perps
A mural at the San Elijo Retail Center in Cardiff-by-the-Sea has gone away. Local artist Kevin Anderson completed the four-by-seven-foot painting a year ago at the request of Commercial Facilities, Inc. The company manages the ...
The Voices Online
In January, I began teaching two philosophy classes, one in the classroom and the other online. “The thing I don’t like about online classes,” says one of my classroom students, “is that you can’t see ...
Rock, Paper, Busted
Many of the more than 100 vendors at Rock Paper Scissors, a consignment store on Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach, have been clamoring for their money after the business stiffed them when it closed in ...
Our Favorite Drinks and Where We Drink Them
There are times, sometimes in the midst of otherwise polite conversation, when it comes out that I make my living writing for the Reader. The follow-up to this revelation is almost never “Oh, that’s right, ...
“Hallelujah!” “Hey, keep it down!”
Many are the tales locals tell of dodge-and-deny tactics the City of San Diego uses to avoid enforcing its own laws. The most common excuses, especially in this time of budgetary woes, are that it ...
Admiral Baker Says No!
Last spring, Lee Campbell was looking for an apt way that Friends of Tierrasanta Canyons might participate in River Days. The celebration is staged annually by the San Diego River Park Foundation and was held ...
Worms Eat My Reader
Some readers want us to eat our words. David Shean worries about what happens when he eats them. “I eventually feed [the Reader] to my worms along with my kitchen scraps,” Shean writes us in ...
Mira Mesa Meets Caltrans
Granted, Mira Mesa needs traffic relief, especially for entering and exiting the I-15. But how does Caltrans justify a project that is likely to increase already dangerous traffic next to a local elementary school? The ...
Use Me, Then Lose Me
For the past ten years, Louie Holton has owned and operated Louie’s pub at Aztec Center at the southeastern edge of the SDSU campus. While serving beer and wine to students weekday afternoons and evenings ...
Canyon Trails Traffic Jam
Trail biking in a north San Diego canyon seems to be running up against its own popularity. Deer Canyon is part of a new preserve in the City of San Diego’s open-space system, whose management ...
Not By Sight, By Touch
Hiro Iwamoto loves to sail. Not so unusual — except for one apparent drawback. He is blind. Before moving from Japan to San Diego two years ago, Iwamoto led a Tokyo team to the Blind ...
Gas Trackers
Kenneth Reisig belongs to a bevy of volunteers who post retail gasoline prices on sandiegogasprices.com. The resource belongs to GasBuddy Organization Inc.’s collection of websites that allow consumers to compare gas prices in cities all ...
Autism at the Eye of the Storm
In the 1970s, a fellow student used to confide in me about his family problems. His little girl had been diagnosed with autism. While he showed plenty of concern for the child, my friend seemed ...
Don't Ask, Just Pay
Ever wonder why public works cost taxpayers so much? Consider the case of one small project, the new Otay Valley Regional Park ranger station and restroom. Under a joint powers agreement among San Diego County, ...
Crow Nuisance, Crow Delight
As children growing up in Riverside, my friends and I were captivated by crows, big birds that were bold. We used to see how close we could creep toward them, while they seemed to contemplate ...
Troublemakers Unlisted
Two days before the June 3 election, MaryRose Consiglio and Tom Sherman emailed a group of candidates running for membership on the San Diego County Republican Party’s Central Committee. “We are sure you have noticed,” ...
Get Out, Stay Out
In February 2007, the Barona Band of Mission Indians sponsored state legislation entitled Unlawful Entry: Tribal Land. San Diego County’s board of supervisors, as well as Sheriff Bill Kolender and District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis, signed ...
Will These Keep the Lights On?
The Sunrise Powerlink gleamed for the first time in Sempra Energy’s eye on November 1, 2002. At the company’s San Diego headquarters, an energy-management expert from Shell Trading gave a PowerPoint presentation highlighting the potential ...
Little Pay, Big Deal
On April 21, local attorney Bob Ottilie went to the city council meeting with a Personnel Department list of salaries made by city employees last year. That day the council would reverse a decision it ...
Paddle Battles
If the worst that could befall sidewalk diners were a swinging kayak paddle whacking margaritas off their table, they’d be lucky. It would be irksome nonetheless. And that is one reason pressure is mounting in ...
Strife Span
You want to construct an addition to your house that requires a building permit. Wouldn’t it be wise to get the permit before buying a detailed architectural plan? The San Diego City Council is proceeding ...
The Principal’s Principles
Correction: Since publishing the story below, the following statements have been disputed by an attorney for the subject of the story, Michael Rood: 1) “Alexandria Melchior thought of Rood as her advertising representative at the ...
Backcountry Building Woes
Paul Sommers promised his mother, when she was dying in 2002, that he would wisely invest the money she was about to leave him. After she died, he began looking for land in East San ...
Saved from Smoke and Flames
Each day, Jim Grant drives from Shelter Island to his job at Hammond and Masing General Contractors in Mira Mesa. On Tuesday morning, December 11, as he approached Midway Drive on Rosecrans Street, he saw ...
Pressing Need
You decide to take the trolley to Tijuana. The day goes well, and you're ready to start homeward. Before boarding the Blue Line, a cup of coffee at the McDonald's Trolley Station in San Ysidro ...
Kensington Terrace: Who Knew?
Developer writes persuasion letter to the San Diego Development Services Department. What else is new? Read on. "Today I was brought into the fold on the neighborhood uprising regarding the Kensington Terrace project," stated Jim ...
The Sun Sets on the Moon Cafe
Mistake. As soon as I mentioned the storyline, the Chinese lady waiting tables in the Gaslamp Quarter's Moon Cafe clammed up. "We don't talk to the newspapers," she said. That was that. Of course, she'd ...
The Lunch of Shame
The School Nutrition Association announced Monday that Biff Burger won the election. He beat Jesse Wrap, Yumi Rice Bowl, Pippa Potato, and Patty Mac 'n' Cheese in the Vote for School Lunch competition. On August ...
Mission Valley Motion Mixup
If you ever suffer insomnia, you might play the streaming video of a San Diego City Council meeting. While you're at it, check whether the minutes of the council meeting are accurate. The video of ...
America's Smartest City
After numerous San Diego Union-Tribune hit pieces, a brand on the city attorney's head now reads "frivolous and futile litigator." No need to heed this guy's advice. Could that be what the city council was ...
Aged Out, Jumped In
Sherrie Ross, a real estate agent, was looking for ways to persuade kids to stay away from San Diego gangs. So she was happy two years ago to meet Travis Stocking at a community-organizing event. ...
Trashlamp Quarter
Imagine the food and trash that restaurants in San Diego's tony Gaslamp Quarter throw away every night. For more than 15 years, an alley on G Street between Fourth and Fifth avenues made things easier. ...
Willful Blindness To Golden Hill
Members of the Greater Golden Hill Community Development Corporation recently discovered a ruse that might help them overcome opposition to assessing their fellow citizens nearly $489,000 in increased taxes. Heretofore the development corporation has not ...
Development on a Slippery Slope
Community height limits for buildings in San Diego will face another test this summer when the San Diego City Council revisits plans for the Pacific Coast Office Building in Mission Valley. At issue is the ...
Public? Private?
As if Grantville didn't have enough traffic problems, local developer Leon Parma wants to build 588 new condominiums, plus new restaurant and office space, on land he owns in the area. The property sits on ...
Where the City Draws the Line
Merrilee Miller, a resident of Goleta, northwest of Santa Barbara, believes she has the right to vacation in a recreational vehicle on the banks of San Diego's Lake Murray. Or to plant banana trees near ...
The Cart-Theft Posse
'Paying a company to return shopping carts that people were taking off our lot got too expensive," says the manager of a supermarket in San Diego. "The truck driver who brought the carts back said ...
Justice, Politics, Paradise
In February, a Nicaraguan court convicted former UCSD student Eric Volz of murdering a beautiful young Nicaragüense he had previously lived with. She was found dead early on an afternoon last November, strangled and hog-tied ...
Live Simply, Share With the Poor
The two friends were engineers, one trained in California and one in the Soviet Union. "He could talk about anything, from mathematics to world literature," says Imperial Beach resident Ralph Sherman of his departed friend ...
Tenants Turn Up the Heat
In 2003, Bruce Francis was driving a taxi late into the night and sleeping daytimes at the Baltic Inn on Sixth Avenue downtown. One day he lodged a complaint. "I told the managers, 'A lot ...
Down by the Levee
Ocean Beach real estate broker David Stebbins is like a man standing in the front row at a theater: when viewers behind him ask him to sit down, he yells, "I paid for this seat; ...
Castaways' Fishy Tale
Some writers are so suspicious. In the January issue of Men's Journal, writer Mike Guy raised new doubts about a story several Mexican fishermen told last summer of being lost in the Pacific Ocean for ...
Don't Park in Our Park
Where do you suppose San Diego Mesa College, which lies in Clairemont on its southern edge, will build a huge garage to solve its student parking problems? Why, largely on Linda Vista canyon land, of ...
Make Room for FIDO
The Mission Bay Park Master Plan of 1994 presented a vision of Fiesta Island's future that was general enough for different decisions to fill in the picture. Recently KTU+A, a local "land planning and landscape ...
Turnstiles for Lake Murray
'They might want to consult history," Jim Brown says of city officials who are trying to overhaul the San Diego Water Department's reservoir recreation program. Brown served as the program's director from 1974 through 2003 ...
Under Covers
Much of the downtown hotel industry gets a "double subsidy of taxpayer support plus public assistance for its hardest workers," Micah Mitrosky tells me. That's one conclusion she reached after taking the Graduate Student Practicum ...
A Park? A Road?
If you think volunteer advisory boards are rubber stamps for San Diego's municipal shenanigans, meet attorney Bob Ottilie. As a member of the Park and Recreation Board, Ottilie has lately been causing heartburn in at ...
Lockup 101
'The first thing that came to my mind," remembers Tom Miller, "was to arm myself with a screwdriver. The Rodney King riots were taking place in Los Angeles, and the tension in the yard was ...
