Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
San Diego Is Chargers' Problem
I kind of like the idea of the Bolts playing in a stadium built above the port's cargo terminal... as long as private investors are serious about not needing public money to pull it off. At least it'll be a money-making move for the Port, as opposed to losing money at the local airport authority over expanding Lindburgh when the headlines read that airlines are dropping routes and San Diego should experience a percentage drop in air traffic. Besides, as cited in #22 above, Spanos has no real reason to leave town until were all grifted out... and as CCDC/SEDC, the post-wildfire cleanup costs, and the rest of local governmental current events show us now, that hasn't happened yet! To think back to a simpler time, when all we had to worry about was Yellow Cab and later being parodied in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World"...— August 17, 2008 7:49 a.m.
San Diego Continues Losing Jobs; Unemployment Rate in July Was 6.4 Percent, Above Nation's 6.0 Percent
There are anecdotal reports that among the local former San Diego residents who could put up with the wait time to cross the border going north (why is it with all of the tourism draw to the south, nobody really has to wait to get into Mexico?), there is now a much tighter apartment rental market south of the border in Tijuana than is currently the case here in San Diego...— August 17, 2008 7:25 a.m.
City council mum on vacation rentals in Pacific Beach, Mission Beach, Pt. Loma
I am wondering how a local ordinance to ban or restrict a home business such as a vacation rental is reconciled with existing state law on supporting the need for more "microenterprises" for spurring economic growth (see http://www.microbiz.org/ for CAMEO: California Association for MicroEnterprise Oppourtunity, complete with California State Assembly whitepapers...)— August 16, 2008 1:12 p.m.
San Diego Continues Losing Jobs; Unemployment Rate in July Was 6.4 Percent, Above Nation's 6.0 Percent
I am assuming that the local unemployment rate would have been higher if more of the recently unemployed had not left town... Does THAT qualify as good news?— August 16, 2008 1:02 p.m.
Sempra spins Sunrise Powerlink in the Union-Tribune
Regarding #169: Yes, even in trying to do the good thing and fight the right fight, leisure is a good thing. Leisure gives you the chance to step back and see things unfolding. As a journalist, you must have seen things evolve over time in this town, article by daily article, that were too darn funny in their own tragic way, from the relative safety of the observer's journalistic distance. And such a list of things the eyes must have seen... The limited experience at City College's student paper under A. Makarushka gave me an appreciation for one who is under public scrutiny, digs herself or himself into a proverbial foxhole, then starts lobbing the kind of self-promoting handgrenades that are guaranteed to attract even more scrutinizing press attention under some increasingly hot lighting. I'll bore you with only one scenario: Two of us student journalists removed from a student government meeting decades ago by college police because both of us had the audacity to take notes of this otherwise-Brown Act-compliant meeting... and one of us actually coughed. (The officers released us when we were out of the door and walked away laughing...) What none of us realized was that in the back corner, a very inconspicuous third journalism student was taking notes of it all, intrigued by our previous articles and editorials on that self-imploding California legislative body on campus. I also had a nice summer journalism seminar that was partly held at the Washington Post while the mayor was on trial for a little too much crack and fun with a lady other than his wife... Sometimes things just happen in front of you, and it's worth writing it down and saving a document/photo or two...— August 16, 2008 12:38 p.m.
Schmooze and Partake
Personally, I'm not all that convinced that atheism is not a religion, as it is not based on a proof that there is no God except to assume that "God is not God" in the first place. Empirically, there does not appear to be a strong argument that God does not exist either, or one must restrict one's empiricism in viewing the entire universe to only our small part of the local arm of the Milky Way galaxy which we are able to observe and record with reasonable accuracy, all within the observational limits of puny humans who tend to be rather oblivious to God's existence or non-existence anyways. Without deductive proof or strong inductive arguments to substantiate its major premise, atheism can only be described as merely a belief, and since it has something to do with the existence or non-existence of God, then it must be a system of religious belief... or something even less organized that that. ---- This preface is merely to state that there is enough greed, lust, theft, murder, and other sin around that atheists don't have to be jealous of other religious or supposedly-religious types who seem hellbent on hogging it all to themselves. There's plenty of that stuff to go around for EVERYONE. Nobody has to waste blog space responding to this one. Just trust me on that. Besides: Atheism exists only because God allows us to imagine it exists.— August 16, 2008 11:33 a.m.
Bad News for Copley, Good for KUSI: Cox Selling Austin, Other Papers Amid Gloomier Newspaper Environment
I am wondering if the ill-health of the Reader's daily competitor puts just that much more responsibility for good timely journalism on the Reader staff...— August 15, 2008 10:24 a.m.
Sempra spins Sunrise Powerlink in the Union-Tribune
Regarding #147: Perhaps this had something to do with the closing argument comment by the government on "corporate arrogance" just before the US v. SDG&E guilty verdicts were returned by the jury last year... including the one for "fraud/false statements in general to government inspectors". ... and it only took another year for the CPUC to reach more or less the same conclusion about the unsupported comments by SDG&E in favor of their proposed Sunrise Powerlink. As long as Sempra Energy shareholders are shielded from the financial consequences of the profound errors in judgment and the lack of a minimal set of public ethics (i.e. "obey the law") of its holding SDG&E, there will be no accountability of any part of that corporation-with-no-soul, and the "corporate arrogance" cited by the prevailing side at the US v. SDG&E federal environmental crimes trial will continue. Maybe that's why a certain public utility spokesperson used a publisher's ink to mention the billion-dollar insurance policy it has in this city's daily paper not too long ago... I wonder if the shareholders missed that little announcement. From the way the share price is holding up, maybe they just don't care until a real vault-busting, non-pass-through-to-customers civil or criminal penalty makes the news. Of course, under California law, when stockholders enjoy the benefits of lawless actions by a corporate holding, then they are by law assuming the risk when the corporation is ordered to pay penalties and the shares subsequently drop in value. It's kind of difficult to see how shareholders can recover value from something like that, when the coporation they own is doing things that were not forbidden and thus allowed by the same dividend-receiving institutional and individual shareholders over the last decade or more (see California Maxims of Jurisprudence in the Civil Code for that line of accountability, one which any judge can reliably fall back on under "stare decisis" when needed). I am holding in my hot little hand a letter from late April 2001 on DA's stationery, telling me that when the County Air Pollution Control District (APCD) finishes its investigation of SDG&E at the Encanto Gas Holder site, there will be a "referral for prosecution". Sure enough, looking at the 2006 US v. SDG&E indictment announcement, one sees that APCD was an investigating agency in that matter that eventually led to SDG&E guilty verdicts last year... so at times I am especially impressed by the DA's office (even if the wheels at the Hall of Justice turn ever so slowly...) Thank you, DDA KID and AUSA MP.— August 15, 2008 10:05 a.m.
Sempra spins Sunrise Powerlink in the Union-Tribune
Regarding post #143: Yes: on the law's face, the Sabotage Prevention Act is now just as applicable to the recent wire-caused wildfires as it is to a helicopter accident due to unobservable power lines & towers. One hopes that the District Attorney's office has been exploring in depth, in the interests of justice.— August 14, 2008 12:37 p.m.
San Diegans pay sunshine tax
If one is to be overpaid, then it's better from the beneficiary point of view to be overpaid a lot... with or without the sunshine! This article makes me want to go back and become an accounting major as a future San Diego CFO, too... anything not to be one of the mere workers on the floor...— August 14, 2008 10:47 a.m.