Snow Tempest

The election of Antonio Villaraigosa as Los Angeles mayor continues to have a "musical chairs" effect through city politics, as the players jockey for better seats to get their issues heard. This time it's the unions aiming for the political equivalent of floor seats at Staples Center. Los Angeles Tenth District City Councilman Martin Ludlow has been nominated to head the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. The labor federation has to find a...

The ability to "read" customers is a pleasant attribute in a neighborhood bookstore. A gentleman, whose name we did not catch, at Chevalier's Books on Larchmont Boulevard helped us select a birthday present for a friend. Armed with basic information — likes nonfiction, considering a career move to teaching or counseling — he made entirely appropriate suggestions. The first, Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag, would have been relevant given our friend's...

Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Lab has successfully steered its Opportunity robot out of a Martian sandpit. The sandpit wasn't the Mars mission's first glitch: there was the time last year that Opportunity's twin, Spirit, kept rebooting and wouldn't phone home, a Mars Polar Lander that crashed in 1999, and, most embarassingly, a Mars Orbiter exploration satellite that crashed into Mars in 1999 because engineers measured some things in meters and others in yards. Things seem...

When the biggest splash your public relations firm makes involves getting itself itself in the headlines on charges of fraud, that's probably not a good sign. Two former executives at the Fleishman-Hillard public relations firm, Douglas R. Dowie and John Stodder Jr., were accused yesterday of inflating the number of hours for which they charged the city for the firm's work, and of working on projects for former mayor James Hahn on a contract...

The funny thing about reading The "Grand Avenue Plan," preliminarily approved last week, is pondering how often in the last century developers have felt the need to shift the functions of various districts, as though downtown LA were one of those party-favor puzzles in which you slide the little tiles around the board until a picture comes into focus. Certainly something needs to be done with the area — what ought to be a...

We discovered on a recent hike that rattlesnakes are out in full force in Los Angeles this season. On a usually tranquil path in Temescal Canyon, a fellow hiker announced, "There's a mad rattlesnake at the end of this trail." More passing hikers described the snake and its rattle and provided details: the snake was at the bottom of the trail, near the creek, under a tree. A young man of about 18 displayed...

Nick Pacheco has announced his candidacy for LA City Council Member from District 14 in Northeast Los Angeles. Pacheco held this position two years ago, then lost it to Antonio Villaraigosa, who will now be vacating it to become mayor. The LA Times suggests that school board president Jose Huizar and state senator Gil Cedillo are also likely candidates for the seat. What do these guys stand for? Judging by a recent interview with...

We've tried various combinations of trains and automobiles to get to our plane flights, but one of the better options for the money for getting to Los Angeles International Airport is the city bus, if you can pack light. The Metro web site's trip planner recognizes "LAX" as a destination, so all you have to do is type your address or the closest intersection in the starting point box, "LAX" in the destination box,...

When the Veterans Administration asked for public comment on what to do with the prime piece of West Los Angeles real estate that is Veterans Park, it stirred up plenty of passions, but most of the debates argued selling off bits of the land to pay for improvements to the rest versus keeping the place as quiet as usual. How about making this Federally-ownded land more inviting to the public? Theoretically, the place benefits...