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First he sold diapers at Kobey's Swap Meet
What a great story -- interesting, funny and scary. Surely there is a name in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the entrepreneurial personalities described here. Imagination, grit, self-reliance, uncritical use of the culture of money and celebrity to advance the bottom line, addiction to the highs of risk-taking and from recognition for financial success. Definitely a different breed from most people.— January 7, 2015 2:14 p.m.
San Diego's job market sucks
These moneyball stats always leave me re-reading the material as if it were a Common Core exercise. Cities, not metro areas? Subtracting the number of unemployed people from the number of job openings? (What if there are more unemployed people than job openings?) Emotional health based on the number of cafes per person? (What about the homeless who hang at Starbuck's?) Like, huh? We KNOW what makes San Diego "America's Finest City" and it has nothing to do with this stuff: it's Paradise Lost, but it's still paradise.— January 7, 2015 1:37 p.m.
Will Walmart hubby take Chargers away?
I don't believe negative truisms about rich/poor or June/January love matches or that regular guys are necessarily greener than oligarchs. I'd bet Mr. Kroenke and Ms. Walton were madly in love before they got hitched. I'm also sure that rich buyers of Montana real estate preserve their vast open spaces better than envious natives who sell off their mineral rights for exploitation at the first good fracking offer.— January 7, 2015 12:22 p.m.
Will Walmart hubby take Chargers away?
Wow, it's amazing how really rich people like to play out here. Who knew there is actually a journal hilariously named "The Walmart 1%?" Or that well-married Missouri-based Kroenke, when visiting Colorado, peculiarly used to stay in the Denver Nuggets' Pepsi Center? Or that Kroenke bought his Malibu home from the Egyptian lover of Princess Diana? Or even that our own SDSU business school is named after developer Corky McMillan who got the Naval Training Center for $1 and then built Liberty Station? That's a lotta amazement in one story.— January 6, 2015 11:25 p.m.
Baja losing U.S.-born tourists
Give Baja Norte a break. It is still an amazing rare place. I know young people -- not punks, people with jobs who love the beauty and solitude of Baja -- who just returned from a magical post-Christmas-week vacation. They drove in a caravan of friends with dogs, camped far south on an isolated beach covered with shells and bleached bones of pelicans and other sea birds, fished and ate their catch, surfed, swam and paddle boarded, hiked in the greening desert, hung out around an evening bonfire. It was a long drive but worth every minute, including the off-road parts. No hassles, no other people of any demographic -- "pristine" was the word. I envy them their experience. The Border wait was an hour forty-five.— January 5, 2015 8:52 p.m.
Peevey in their pocket
Peevey is and was a disgrace and newly-inaugurated Governor Jerry Brown ought to be ashamed for having kept this arrogant hack at the head of the CPUC for such a long time. It's one of several reasons I didn't vote for the Governor last Fall. Foot-in-mouth Picker will be an improvement, but not by much. Let us hope Aguirre and Severson will carry on and prevail, even if it takes years.— January 5, 2015 12:15 p.m.
San Diego in talks to move to Los Angeles
We're not in San Diego anymore, Toto! This will mean no need for sold-out San Diego City Council to approve the massive urban sprawl being planned for One Paseo in Carmel Valley because it will officially have become part of Los Angeles itself! And PR flack Rachel Laing, the former aide to Mayor Jerry Sanders who now works for Kilroy, the LA developer of One Paseo, can be let go as redundant.— January 4, 2015 11:50 p.m.
Kilroy's still here, promising campaign juice
Well said, CaptD! Where's the outrage? People need to wake up to the rip-offs all around us that are being falsely portrayed as economic "progress" or "investment"or "job-creation" by self-serving business groups whose bottom-line is profit and new-media groups whose essential goal is basic survival. Some people live west of I-5 and closer to the city of San Diego, so they may not have followed the proposed massive development of One Paseo in Carmel Valley in North County. What once were open rolling brown hills covered with yellow mustard in the spring, the area was called "the Future Urbanizing District" and then "North City West" and now its name is "Carmel Valley." The hills have been flattened and terraced with houses, multi-lane highways were built and business parks and strip-malls have filled the open space in between. In fact, Carmel Valley is poorly-planned suburban sprawl, unrecognizable from its natural condition 30 years ago. But developers are not done. LA real estate builder Kilroy is going for broke with the proposed huge One Paseo project in Carmel Valley and it has greased the skids for City Council approval with a new political action committee revealed in a required end-of-year filing and discovered only last weekend by the Reader's Matt Potter. Builder Kilroy's PAC gives $$$ to every politician in sight from both political parties and to struggling "non-profit" media outlets like VoiceofSanDiego.org and enlists supporters from the Chamber of Commerce, now run by former top-cop and business-tool ex-San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders. It ain't right, but Kilroy's PAC is even fronted by public relations tweeter Rachel Laing who used to get her taxpayer-paid salary from Mayor Sanders' City Hall where she knew and worked with many of the same City Council members who will vote on Kilroy's One Paseo behemoth. Laing actually dared to say last Fall that public opposition to her Kilroy employer's One Paseo project is not really grassroots." As I said, where's the outrage?— January 4, 2015 1:41 p.m.
A bad year for good movies
Thanks for your service, Scott! I missed some of these movies, but I appreciate that you remembered "Alan Partridge" with wonderfully funny Irishman Steve Coogan from early in the year. I went twice to understand the icy modern-day spying in "A Man," set in super-photogenic Berlin with disheveled humane spy Philiip Seymour Hoffman, but once was enough for aptly-named "Nightcrawler" and the horrifying business-model creepiness of Jake Gyllenhall as a TV news film freelancer. Linklater's "Boyhood" was most remarkable for its warm-hearted depiction of lifelong affection among the characters and their personal resilience than for the director's much-discussed gimmick of filming the lead actor over many years. "Tracks" also had a sub-theme of generosity among all characters depicted which softened the heroine's great journey.— December 31, 2014 10:27 p.m.
The Interview leaves no “Suk,” “Poon,” or “Dong” unturned
To have to watch this film -- and at the Digital Gym, yet -- well, it's asking too much. Still, while it's too perfect that such puerile crap causes a genuine international incident, I'd hate to be incinerated on account of it.— December 31, 2014 9:31 p.m.