Content for Wednesday, February 27, 2019
News & Stories

Immigrant shelter near Imperial Beach draws videographers
"This here, so disgusting"
A shelter for legal immigrants in the South San Diego is gaining attention from anti-immigrant activists and local residents who have started a campaign of filming in front of the shelter and confronting the workers ...

San Diego County prepping radical vote counting change
Why we are the slowest in the state
Stung by the slowest 2018 election tabulation in all of California, San Diego's Registrar of Voters is currently looking for a contractor to come up with a brand-new vote-counting system from scratch. "The Contractor shall ...

Diana: Fairy tale to soap opera to tragedy
She was plucked out of obscurity and forced to choose a role she didn’t necessarily want
Diana, a new musical at the La Jolla Playhouse, is running through Sunday, April 7. Given La Jolla Playhouse’s production of Summer: The Donna Summer Musical we might expect Diana to be The Diana Ross ...

“Fat Tuesday” Mardi Gras meets Ash Wednesday
The traditional eating of griddle cakes earned the day before Lent the name Pancake Tuesday.
Mardi Gras, as I’m sure you know, means Fat Tuesday. It was a day to enjoy pleasures that would be forbidden in the season of Lent, which started the next day, Ash Wednesday. But in ...

Ask Sugar
It avoids step-by-step progress and cuts right to the pain.
She’s a published author, working on another novel. She writes at home, cleaning up crayons and de-capping a beer before confronting the computer screen. Phone rings. It’s Steve Almond, editor of The Rumpus. He's resigned ...

Woodpeckers, parrots, and raptors, Sword swallowing and knife throwing, CRSSD festival, Beethoven, The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein
Events February 28-March 6, 2019
Wednesday | 27 Woodpeckers, parrots, and raptors This Bird Festival includes keynote speaker Steve Shunk on “How Woodpeckers Can Save the World.” Southern California’s woodpeckers are critical contributors to woodland ecology. Shunk will demystify woodpecker ...

Poway Mayor Steve Vaus announces for Dianne Jacobs seat
Terra Lawson-Remer and Olga Diaz go after Kristin Gaspar
Tax-funded lobbying The battle to succeed the San Diego Union-Tribune for reportorial relevancy was notched up a bit last week by the Voice of San Diego, the website backed by billionaire Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs. ...

San Diego Reader 2019 Arts issue
Dance, classical music, galleries, street art, movies, theater
Birds sing, elephants dance, and monkeys paint, but only humans turn those activities into art. And only humans evince a bottomless hunger for it: hence the endless parade of pictures on Instagram, stories on Netflix, ...

Readers kinda like those cameras
The law-abiding have no reason to object
Spy cam ubiquity I have all four cameras everywhere (“San Diego’s street lights that spy,” Cover Stories, February 29). It is not a matter of privacy, it is a matter of security. A lot of ...

Notes from four hours in the hospital with a 10-year-old girl who might have appendicitis
A reminder of how suffering twists expressions and robs faces of their beauty
The emergency room teaches you some things and reminds you of others. It teaches you that what looks like an emergency to you — my daughter is weeping from the pain and it’s not letting ...

Abe DeLeon’s 33 years distributing the San Diego Reader
“Having the freedom to drive around the city and hand out the most popular paper in town was a dream job.”
Abe DeLeon delivered the San Diego Reader from 1986 until January of this year. At one point or another, he handled almost every route the paper offered: from Oceanside to Imperial Beach, and as far ...

Did Fox News call Kamala Harris a poser?
Her viability as a presidential candidate may well hinge on her credibility as a connoisseur of both primo ganja and vintage hip hop
Dear Hipster: Do we put 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful and current California Senator Kamala Harris in the hipster hall of fame for apparently having been into both Snoop Dogg and Tupac before either rapper had ...

The Sentenac Birding Trail: from San Felipe Creek migratory bird wetland to smaller resident bird shelter
Enjoy Sentenac Cienega while birdwatching
The Birding Trail was established at a time when San Felipe Creek discharged into a large wetland, or cienega, with intermittent pools of open water. It was an important stop for migratory birds. The pools ...