The 113th Congress is to be sworn in today, ushering in 14 new faces. Then, what issues are ahead for California in 2013? President Obama's new immigration policy could ease separation time for immigrants and their American families, and dialect experts convene in Boston for a conference about the development and new trends in American English, plus much more.
A look at the biggest issues ahead for California in 2013
For once, here in California, a budget crisis is not at the top of the agenda. And 2013 is not an election year.
Here to tell us which issues will be in play at the Capitol this year, we're joined by John Myers, political editor for the ABC affiliate in Sacramento.
The 113th Congress to be sworn in today
Today is moving day in Congress. Whatever you thought of the old Congress — that would be number 112 — you'll now have a new class to blame for fiscal cliffs and the like.
And there's a lot of activity in the California delegation with 14 members leaving, either because they retired, or failed to be re-elected.
That means 14 new faces taking the oath of office as the 113th Congress is sworn in. KPCC's Washington Correspondent Kitty Felde joins us from the Capitol.
Obama's new immigration policy to ease family separation time
The Obama administration made a big change to its immigration policy yesterday. A new rule issued by the Department of Homeland Security aims to reduce the time immigrants are separated from their American families while applying for residency.
It could affect 1 million of the estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally.
Alvaro Huerta, an attorney with the National Immigration Law Center in L.A. joins the show to fill us in on the new policy.
Dialect experts convene in Boston to track evolution of American English
From the drawls heard in Texas to the dropped R's of the northeast, dialects abound in America. Each year, the American Dialect Society holds a conference to study the latest information on the subject.
This year's meeting in Boston begins today. Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society joins the show.
Al Jazeera sale marks end of Current TV's bold experiment
It's official. The Al Gore-founded cable news channel Current TV has been sold to Al Jazeera. The purchase gives Al Jazeera the opportunity to establish a bigger presence here in the United States.
But it also marks the end of what was once thought to be a bold experiment in a new approach to television programming. For more on the short life, and death of Current TV we're joined now by Brian Stelter, who broke the story for the New York Times.
The Dinner Party: Denny's Hobbit menu, the first morse code, King Louie’s blood
Rico Gagliano from the Dinner Party talks with Alex Cohen about the Hobbit menu at Denny’s, the first emergency morse code sent to ships, and the discovery of King Louie’s blood on a handkerchief.
Jamie McDonald attempts to eat every item on the Denny's Hobbit menu:
Denny's commercial for their Hobbit menu:
Fiscal cliff deal extends big tax breaks for Hollywood
Many of Hollywood's elite will be paying more in personal income tax under the new rules that were part of the fiscal cliff legislation. But the corporations that rule Hollywood came out as winners. The bill retained some pretty sweet tax breaks targeted specifically at entertainment companies.
For more on this, we go to Ted Johnson, political and legal editor at Variety.
After bankruptcy, Tribune Company expected to sell assets
If you're from L.A., the Tribune Company has probably played some kind of role in how you get the news. Tribune owns the L.A. Times, several other local newspapers and KTLA channel 5, and outside of California, it owns dozens other television stations and newspapers including the Chicago Tribune.
But now the Tribune is expected to sell some of its assets. The company just emerged from bankruptcy on New Year's Eve, in fact. Media analysts predict it will try to streamline its business.
Joining us now is Andrea Murphy who covers privately-held companies for Forbes.
Blind architect finds inspiration in loss
Architects rely on imagination to help them see a building even before it's built. For Chris Downey that skill is essential. He designed buildings for 20 years, but then he lost his eyesight. Using special technology he's managed to continue his career in architecture and help design buildings for the blind. The California Report's Scott Shafer has this story.
For the first 20 years of his career, San Francisco architect Chris Downey had an impressive but mostly typical portfolio of work -- university libraries, wineries, aquariums, theatres, homes -- those kinds of things.
But his life was turned upside down at age 45. It began with changes in his vision. He noticed it while playing baseball with his son, Renzo.
"Everything else around was perfectly clear," Downey remembers. "It was just the ball that was moving and I couldn't ... it was just a fuzz."
Downey ignored it until he couldn't any longer. He went to an optometrist, who said his eyes were fine. Then he went to see a neurologist who ordered an MRI. The news wasn't good.
"Sort of a golf ball-sized tumor right at the optic nerve," Daley says. "And it sort of squished them, pushed them and really stretched them out a good bit."
It wasn't cancerous, but the tumor had to go. There were two options. One was radiation, which would destroy the optic nerve. Instead, he opted for surgery, which is a safer option, but not without risk. In the hours after the operation, his vision was fuzzy as expected.
"The second day I woke up and sight was partially gone. It was almost like a water line straight across above both eyes where it was dark above, and the same fuzzy vision below," he says. "So I was taken back to ICU, and the next time I woke up it was all gone."
The news was devastating, but when Downey was 7-years-old, his father died after surgery to remove a brain tumor. So he knew things could have been much worse.
Still, when a social worker who visited Downey in the hospital suggested he think about another line of work, it did not go over well. Instead, he went back to the office less than a month later.
"It's almost like getting back to work before everybody else could draw their own conclusions of, 'Oh, you can't see. You can't be an architect,'" Downey says.
There's never a good time to lose your sight, especially for architects. But it was 2008 and many people, including Downey, lost their jobs as the economy sank into recession. It was not a good time to hit the streets looking for work, especially when seeing was not an option.
"The business side, you can do that. The economics, you can do that," Downey says. "It's the creative side, it's the drawing, that was the real challenge."
Downey isn't easily deterred. He set out to learn a way to draw and read drawings -- the creative part of architecture. The key turned out to be a printer that could generate embossed drawings.
"So instead of printing ink on paper it basically pushed a raised line -- a series of dots -- to create a tactile image," he explains.
And Downey had a visual library, an imagination full of drawings and buildings. He just needed a way to put his visual disability to work.
His first project was working as a consultant with architects designing the new Polytrauma-Blind Rehabilitation Center at the V.A. campus in Palo Alto.
"That was a huge leap for those firms to hire me as a blind architect. It was like, are you kidding," he laughs.
The building will serve vets who are blind and visually impaired. Using his own experience as a now-blind architect, he helped the design team understand what it's like to navigate a three-story facility without being able to see.
"It's really easy with sight to go straight down the middle of the space and to end up at the other side or to end up at the bottom of the stair," he says. "Piece of cake. Not so easy if you can't see it. So the simple thing of 'go straight' is challenged if you can't see what straight is."
Among the architects Downey has worked with is Dennis Sullivan, director of design for a firm in San Francisco. Sullivan calls Downey one of the best communicators he's ever met in architecture, a skill he thinks is even sharper now his focus is unfettered by visual clutter. He adds that while Downey can't see, he takes full advantage of his other senses, something most architects don't do.
"They don't design with smelling. They don't listen to the way a building feels. They don't design with this concept of emotion," Sullivan says. "Touching, feeling, walking. What is that emotional experience? And so he rekindles it. He brings that back to life."
Chris Downey rents space from an architecture firm in downtown San Francisco. He's still reimagining his life and career as a consultant. Working with design teams, he's helped develop housing for the blind in New York City, a new clinic for an eye center at Duke University and another in San Francisco.
"To be successful as a blind person, you can't walk around thinking, 'Holy crap I, can't see!' That doesn't get you very far," Downey says.
Downey says he and his son have figured out a way to still enjoy baseball together. And he's taken up a new sport that doesn't require vision -- rowing.
He and his wife Rosa, who's also a designer, recently traveled to Italy, where he sang with a church choir in Rome, Florence and Assisi.
Downey has rediscovered music since losing his sight, just another way he's making the most of a situation many would see as less than ideal.
"It's like I'm more excited about architecture than I was when I was sighted," he says. "And I'm more excited and thrilled with life. I might be weird in that regard but it's just an incredible experience."
Since losing his sight, Chris Downey has connected with two other blind architects -- one in Lisbon, Portugal, the other in Chicago.
His New Year wish for 2013 is growing his consulting business into something more financially sustainable by leveraging his disability into an asset.
For more from The California Report, visit their website.
San Francisco-area woodworker crafts new instruments, sounds
There are guitars and cellos and banjos. Then, there's the "sympathetic cannon" or the "ox".
Those are some of the instruments designed and built by California wood worker Sung Kim. In his studio he creates musical devices that look and sound like nothing else. The California Report's Rachel Dornhelm has the story.
Sung Kim's workshop is in an industrial office park north of San Francisco, where forklifts move pallets in and out of giant garages. The last thing you might expect to hear there are the plaintive cries of a string instrument coming from a workshop.
But one recent morning, the architectural woodworker and designer takes a break from furniture making to pull the bow across the strings of one of his instruments.
It's not a violin or cello or anything you'd recognize. The instruments Kim points out in his cavernous workspace you've probably never heard of: the ox, the nun's horn, the holy water sprinkler.
You haven't heard of them because Kim invents them from the sounds he imagines he'd like to hear and from hybrids of instruments he's seen.
He shows off one -- the nordenfelt. It is shaped like a long wooden box and sounds like an electrified harpsichord. But the twist is the way the keys are laid out.
"You can get three different rhythms going at once if you're so inclined," Kim explains. "African music was what inspired this one. You get this really nice hammering sound."
The box has three strings pulled taut along its neck, and the keys pop up from below, like the targets of a whack-a-mole game.
"[The keys] are actually what hits the string," Kim says. "Historically, clavichord was a piano, like a piano, where basically it was a hammer that hit from below."
Kim was a punk rock-loving teen in Washington D.C. when he first started building his own guitars. But things changed when he was 21, and he heard a recording of Indian sitar player Ravi Shankar.
"My head kind of split in half," Kim says. "And I was like, 'wait a second! I've been focusing on this western instrument, and there's the rest of this world with all these sounds, all these instruments and all these different approaches that I've been ignoring.'"
Recently Kim has been working with animal hides. On one instrument, he stretched a hide taut over a faceted frame, so it looks like one of Picasso's cubist violins.
Mostly though, Kim creates with wood. Right now he's working on the body of a new instrument, hollowing out a piece of Alaskan yellow cedar -- his favorite for sound boards. Kim's instruments can take anywhere from days to years to complete.
Kim learned his skills at a young age, working side by side with his father, a Korean-trained builder. He says there wasn't much talking, but in retrospect, being tossed into the work without detailed instructions was vital to developing his skills.
"It was always, 'OK make this. Do this,'" Kim explains. "At the time it was a little bit irritating. But it teaches you to develop your own style. It teaches you to develop a brain that takes apart, and dissects, how to build something versus this is how it's supposed to be built."
Kim took a detour through another medium -- clay -- in art school. Along the way he met his wife, the granddaughter of a Bay Area ship builder. And now the two families' well-worn tools hang side by side on a wall in his shop.
He says he can tell them apart because the Western style tools are mostly from his wife's family.
"The Asian style ones are primarily from my father," Kim says. "And the thing is that the techniques involved with these styles, they're kind of contrary. So it's nice to mix the two together."
Kim says with Western-style planing, there's a push stroke, where the plane actually goes forward away from the body taking quite a bit of physical strength. Whereas the Japanese style uses a pull stroke, he says, where you're pulling it towards your body, and there's a little more control.
"It's about as different as that. Push and pull," Kim explains.
Kim doesn't make money from his instrument building, but he has incorporated some of the principals into his woodworking business, where his clients range from homeowners to museums.
Kim demonstrates a media cabinet a client just commissioned. A flat-screen TV will rise up from the back via remote control when it is needed, but he says the real innovation is that the cabinet functions as the speaker.
Kim points to the clean lines of the piece.
"This whole thing actually resonates," Kim says. "So the power amp would actually power this to become a giant speaker.
His music is as improvisational as his woodworking style.
Kim and three musicians playing his instruments were featured by the new music collective Outsound this month. Fifteen people gathered to hear his group Hare & Arrow play four instruments: the fawn, the farrier, the nun's horn and the hare.
High school art teacher and saxophonist Brian Peterson was in the audience. He has played with Kim for about two years and says very few people have his combination of inspiration and craftsmanship.
"You know he called me one time," says Peterson, "saying that he had a dream about an instrument where instead of a saxophone, I was playing into it, but it was goat hoof. Like a hoof of a goat, and it had a double reed. And the next week he was actually building it."
Peterson says even seasoned improvisers often have a safe place they can retreat to in their music. But he says it's impossible to do that on novel instruments like Kim's.
Kim says his goal is to make a living selling the pieces.
"Or even to work with a musician and to design an instrument" Kim says. "Say they would come back in a month, and say it needs this. The upper register is too high, it needs more strings, it needs less strings. I would stop doing architectural work. Are you kidding me? That's the absolute dream."
Kim says he's lucky he landed in California ten years ago, where there are both clients for his high-end architectural woodwork and a vibrant experimental music scene.
"California is a place where I always dreamt about," Kim says. "I could not exist -- what this shop does could not exist anywhere else in the world, I don't think."
He says it's only from this geographic home base, that he can explore all the musical terrain he has in mind.
For more from The California Report, visit their website.
Inland Empire a breeding ground for next generation of MMA fighters (Video)
In California's Inland Empire, specificially San Bernardino and Riverside counties, there's a growing subculture of future mixed martial arts, or MMA, fighters.
In case you're unfamiliar with MMA, it's a full-contact combat sport that incorporates moves from multiple martial arts practices like Jiu-Jitsu, wrestling, kickboxing, Karate, among others. Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC, is the professional arm of MMA and it has become very popular since the early 2000s.
Now kids, some very young, are going at it in cages here in Southern California. The study of martial arts is undoubtedly something positive for kids to practice, and it's been known to build confidence, self-esteem and teach kids how to defend themselves. But the aggressive nature of MMA and the reputation of UFC is raising some alarms.
ESPN senior writer Tim Keown, who recently wrote an article about this new breeding ground for future MMA stars, joins the show to tell us what he found.
Interview Highlights:
Why do you think this has taken hold in the Inland Empire?
"I think there's maybe a more accelerated version of it there, they're allowing it to be a little bit more contact. They're bringing the mixed martial arts together, rather than having a kid who's taking Jiu-Jitsu classes and maybe competing at that one discipline. There are a lot of gyms there that are bringing all these disciplines together … But it seems to be in that area whether its because of a socioeconomic reason, there's a lot of kids that their parents believe that they need to learn to defend themselves and they get into this and they put the time in then it seems natural for them to compete."
Is this younger division full-contact like the professional level?
"At the highest levels, at the UFC levels, that's what it is. There are certain rules, it's become refined over the years, which has been why it's gotten to be socially acceptable and more lucrative. At this level that I witnessed, which was between 5 and 15 years old, it's not no holds barred. It's as close to full contact as is allowed, but there are no strikes above the collar bone, there's no head strikes, there's no kicking above the collar bone, there's no punches above the collar bone, there's no body slams — they can't pick a kid up and drive him into the ground — but it's strikingly lifelike.
What was it like to see it for the first time?
"It's a little bit jarring when you first see it, because the kids are so small and what they're doing is pretty violent. I walked into the gym at Laguna Hills High School for a national Pankration meet in September, and one of the first matches I watched was an 8-year-old boy against an 8-year-old girl. It ended with the 8-year-old boy on top of the girl just pounding on her chest, repeatedly. She had sort of long since given up the fight and they did stop it pretty quickly, but its a little bit eye opening. But there's a level of respect and honor between the competitors and the coaches and a martial arts ethic, but the actual what they're doing, it gets to you, you're a little bit surprised at first."
What is Pankration?
"Pankration is an ancient Greek combination of boxing and wrestling that was sort of started for the original Olympics and now it's sort of morphed into this sport that allows kids this age to compete without full contact, and with a few safeguards that allow them to not be as violent as full UFC MMA fighting. If someone's in an arm bar, they stop it quickly, they don't wait until some kid snaps someones arm, they keep a close eye on it. They biggest complaint I heard at these meets was that the fights were being called too soon."
Why do boys and girls compete against each other in these younger divisions?
"Up until 12 the girls compete against the boys for a couple of reasons. One reason is that there aren't enough girls competing at those ages to merit a separate division, and the other reason is that they found that the competitive difference is negligible, there's not really a strength factor at that age pre-puberty, and in fact a lot of the girls that I watched were far better than the boys, they won a lot of the very young matches. A lot of the coaches tell me is that at that age, as any second grade teacher could tell you, that the girls actually retain the knowledge better, they sit and listen and they can put it into practice better than the boys, at least thats the theory in the young MMA world."
What are the parents of these young MMA figthers like?
"Its one thing to say that your 8-year-old son can hit a fast ball, and other thing to say that he can beat somebody up. So there's definitely an ego factor with the parents. There's a certain aggression there, but a lot of it was pretty well behaved, there weren't any huge outbursts that I witnessed. But the parents were intense and I think that part of the reason is that UFC and MMA have just recently become this lucrative sort of mainstream sport and I think that the fact that there are fewer competitors at this age leaves these parents to believe that there's a more direct path for their kids to become professionals."
'Best Of Rivals' looks at the greatest quarterback rivalry in NFL history
This weekend, football fans will be glued to the TV screen for the start of playoff season in the NFL. While the recipe for success for most championship caliber teams is to be led by an elite level quarterback, it never hurts to have a solid back-up.
But, what if a team has two great QBs? You might think it's a good problem, but in most cases the rivalry and resentment it causes rips a team to shreds. From 1987 to 1994, the San Francisco 49ers had that exact problem and not only made it work, they made it win.
Adam Lazarus, author of the new book "Best of Rivals: Joe Montana, Steve Young, and the Inside Story behind the NFL's Greatest Quarterback Controversy," joins the show.