Today on the show, Peter Lee of Covered California on how the state's healthcare exchange differs from healthcare.gov; LA's water wars fictionalized in the iconic 1974 film 'Chinatown'; Owens Valley braces for possible new resource war as LADWP seeks the sun's gold; Major drug trafficking tunnel discovered at US-Mexico border, plus much more.
Peter Lee: How Covered California differs from healthcare.gov
All the media attention being paid to the technical glitches on Healthcare.gov, the federally run website to enroll for the Affordable Care Act, is confusing residents of states that have their own locally-run health care exchanges.
In California, Covered California director Peter Lee has raised concern over the confusion.
Lee joins the show for more on how California is being affected.
Major drug trafficking tunnel discovered at US-Mexico border
Officials announced Wednesday that they had discovered a newly finished tunnel between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico.
More than 100 tunnels typically used for drug smuggling and human trafficking have been discovered in California and Arizona since the 1990s. Some tunnels are super sophisticated with lighting, hydraulics and rail systems to transport millions of dollars worth of drugs across the border without detection.
Elliot Spagat, San Diego correspondent for the Associated Press, joins the show with more.
Napolitano outlines vision for UC system
University of California president Janet Napolitano has announced she'll spend $5 million to help undocumented students succeed in the UC system. That's despite the lack of federal financial aid. Napolitano made the pledge at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco yesterday.
The California Report's education reporter Ana Tintocalis has the story.
LA's water wars fictionalized in the iconic 1974 film 'Chinatown'
This story is part of KPCC's weeklong series exploring the history of the L.A. Aqueduct and looking at the future of L.A.'s water resources. View the whole series
Chances are for you film buffs out there, when you think of the L.A. Aqueduct this is the first thing that comes to mind:
The iconic 1974 film, "Chinatown" is a fictionalized version of the story of L.A. water, but one that's so ingrained in popular consciousness it's almost hard to separate from the truth.
To help us do that is Professor William Deverell, a professor of history at USC who wrote a piece on "Chinatown" and L.A.'s water wars for Boom Magazine.
Interview Highlights:
Q: How many times have you seen 'Chinatown?'
William Deverell: It is slightly embarrassing. I suspect I have seen this movie 50 times.
Q: This scheme to buy up San Fernando Valley and then use public funds to irrigate it, it has kind of become Biblical truth of sorts in L.A.. Fact or fiction?
WD: "A little bit of both. The power elite as characterized in 'Chinatown' was an oligarchic group of investors and public officials. There is no doubt that a lot of land in the San Fernando Valley was bought up at cheaper prices, and then once the water arrived that land, as Jack Nicholson points out in the movie, was worth a hundred to thousand times on the investment.
"The intrigue and mystery of the movie is that the conspiracy is secret. In fact, in L.A. in the early part of the 20th century, that conspiracy is actually quite well known, so it is not really conspiracy, and the vision was if a couple of very wealthy people got even wealthier, but the water came to L.A., the people of L.A. bought it."
Q: But wasn't the true story a kind of trickery? A conflict of interest?
WD: "Well, the Owens Valley story is intricate, and it is interesting that that 'Chinatown' movie does not go there. It does not unpeel that part of the story. The secrecy by which L.A. buys up land with water rights in the Owens Valley is undoubtedly, partly or mostly true. The notion that the Owens Valley farmers were hoodwinked into this, that is a little more complicated. Many of these folks wanted to sell, they did sell, and Los Angeles was there writing the checks."
Q: Was the city as crooked as the scene would lead us to believe?
WD: "One of the issues about Los Angeles and its growth ambitions of the early 20th century is that the figures who built the aqueduct, the figures who decided to channelize and move away the L.A. river, [at] almost exactly the same time, their ambitions are so vaunted and so big. They want Los Angeles to grow and keep its growth pace up.
"Remember, it is growing very rapidly from the 1880s forward. In many respects, there is a ruthlessness to this. There is no question. The growth ambitions of Los Angeles are profound, and they are thinking, in the early 20th century, to build and supply water up until our time. They are thinking about centuries' worth of ambition. Is it mysterious? Is there money made? Are there deals cut? You bet."
Q: Are there parallels between real L.A. figures and characters in "Chinatown"?
WD: "So many people conflate the Noah Cross figure, this remarkably evil, sort of seething evil figure, with William Mulholland when in fact the anagrammatic name is closer to Hollis Mulwray. So the popular perception is that someone with that kind of power that Noah Cross has must be William Mulholland and not Hollis Mulwray. And Hollis Mulwray itself is a complicated name. Yeah, there is Mulholland in there, but there is also Collis Huntington, the railroad titan who does not live down here, but he certainly exercises a lot of power down here in the latter part of the 19th century."
"In many respects, Noah Cross stands for this kind of unanimous, titanic, oligarchical figure, but people have also suggested that maybe he is Harrison Gray Otis, the owner and publisher of the Los Angeles Times and the principal newspaper figure and speculator on the landscape in this period."
Q: How does "Chinatown" reflect and affect what we think about this episode in the history of our city?
WD: "Remember, the movie is 40 years old, and so there is an entire generation of young people who have not seen it. But people my age in Los Angeles, it is a touchstone, a keystone text for presumably understanding the intrigue and mystery of the water wars of the early 20th century. It is not a historical take. It is entirely fictional. It is brilliant.
"I learn something new everything time I see it, but with the new generation of collegiate students who have not seen it, there is an opportunity to offer the movie as a kind of textured vision, cinematic vision of intrigue mystery, etc., and then lay in front of those students the last 20 or 25 years of historical scholarship so they can blend them."
Owens Valley braces for possible new resource war as LADWP seeks the sun's gold
East of Highway 395, the sun rises over the reddish-brown Inyo Mountains. And it sets behind the snow-covered peaks of the Sierra Nevadas. In between and 10,000 feet below, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power wants to put 1 million solar panels on the flat of Owens Valley.
The idea is to solve a growing problem for the utility. L.A. has invested in a big transmission line up to the valley, but these days it's not carrying all the power it can.
KPCC's environment reporter Molly Peterson has the story.
Meet the woman behind LA's Comikaze Expo
If you're wandering around downtown L.A. this weekend, don't be surprised if you bump into Darth Vader, or a zombie, or any number of anime characters.
Some 70,000 comic book, sci-fi and horror fans from around the country are expected for the third year of Stan Lee's Comikaze Expo. They'll be hanging out around L.A. Live and the convention center, pretending they're superheroes, getting celebrity autographs, and explaining themselves to other tourists.
It's not unlike big sister convention Comic-Con, held each summer in San Diego, but one big difference is in who's running the show. Tess Vigeland introduces us to the female chief executive of this heavily "fanboy" event.
It is not every CEO who invites you into her office and promptly shows off a new shipment of stickers.
A new batch of Lisa Frank merchandise has arrived in Regina Carpinelli's Santa Monica workspace and it has sent her into a sticker swoon. In case you are woefully unaware of who Lisa Frank is, she is a millionaire designer of lunch boxes and trapper keepers bestrewed with rainbows and unicorns.
"It is a new wave punk rock poodle on a skateboard with neon poodle hair. Look at the black widow, neon surfboard," said Carpinelli.
It is not the only clue that 31-year-old Carpinelli is a chief executive of a different neon color. Her office boasts all manner of comic book characters, and horror/sci-fi knick knacks, all relevant of her childhood in Temecula.
"I am the only girl out of five boys. Automatically I had to like everything they liked. So, I was reading and watching all the stuff they did so my life was playing Terminator and reading Spider-Man," said Carpinelli. "I wanted to be a pirate, I wanted to be a cowboy. I was always a different kid."
Maybe from the start she was meant to create and preside over one of the newest and most successful comic and horror convention in the country.
Pick almost any week on the calendar and you can find comic convention somewhere in the country, or the world for that matter. But only a handful can boast the attendance of a Comic-Con, which attracts more than a 130,000 fans to San Diego, or now Comikaze, which expects a little more than half that in L.A. this weekend.
It is an impressive number for a convention that sprang from Carpinelli's head just three years ago. And she is not fazed by questions about her high-profile role in a traditionally male dominated geek culture.
"Yeah, I get all the time guys judging me, they do not think I am a real nerd. I never let anything get me down. If people say stuff like 'You are a woman, you can't do it.' Or they call me sweetheart or whatever," said Carpinelli. "It is like, you don't know what I can do. You don't know my income. You haven't even seen my amazing rocket car."
Jonathan London, founder of the website Geekscape, says beyond any other factor, including her gender, what endears Carpinelli to the nerd world is that she is such an ardent fan of their culture, and that is why she founded Comikaze.
"The female place in geek culture has grown astronomically," said London. "We are not territorial about having a women involved in our geekdom. No, welcome it. Bring on the ladies."
Carpinelli had been going to Comic-Cons since she was a teenager, but by 2010 the event had grown so large she could not get tickets. She also resented the expanding definition of a horror/sci-fi convention to include the likes of the musical TV show Glee, as well as the rising price of tickets to the event.
She used $10,000 of her own money to book a room at the LA Convention Center and she started cold calling vendors she had met over the years at Comic-Con. But to get vendors, you have to have more than just a business plan. You have to have celebrities. For months, she pestered two superstars of geek culture, Marvel Comics icon, Stan Lee and character actress, Cassandra Peterson.
Ultimately, both Peterson and Lee showed up at the inaugural 2011 Comikaze as did 35,000 fans. The two then became Carpinelli's business partners.
For Peterson, the question was how yet another expo would draw the necessary crowds. Though she, too, would become frustrated with explosive growth of sister convention itself.
"I have been going to Comic-Con for I don't know how many years. Maybe 30, I think. Since I became Elvira. I saw they kind of reached the saturation point where they just can't get any more people in that town so that is one of the main reasons I got on board, but there are many others," said Peterson. "Now this Regina Carpinelli who runs this, really knows her stuff. She is really smart. She is really a go-getter."
GeekSpace's Jonathan London says he wasn't expecting the first year of Comikaze to be such a hit.
"That is just a testament to how excited Southern California fans are having something where you can just drive down the 10, down the 5 and have a convention in your backyard," said London. "It's what Los Angeles has been waiting for. And I think it surprised even Regina."
It did. She turned that surprise into a business machine that expects some 70,000 customers this weekend. All because her fans believe in brand Regina.
"Comikaze is like my child," said Carpinelli. "Most conventions start and nobody knows who does the show, but everyone knows who Regina is. To them, I am a real person and I am real geek and I am a real fan. So, if there is no Regina there is no Comikaze."
Boogaloo Assassins on their new album 'Old Love Dies Hard'
If you'd like to avoid the traditional Halloween music tonight, you can head to the Commonwealth Lounge in Fullerton. There you'll be able to listen to funk band Myron and E as well as the Boogaloo Assassins, who play a style of music called Boogaloo.
We brought two of the band members in to talk about their new album is called "Old Love Dies Hard."
State Of Affairs: Ron Calderon, union negotiations and more
It's Thursday and that means it's time for State of Affairs, our look at politics and government throughout California. To help us with that we're joined in studio now by KPCC political reporters Alice Walton and Frank Stoltze.
Let's start with a big story that's currently breaking. Last night Al Jazeera America posted what it says is a sealed affidavit related to the investigation into state senator Ron Calderon. Before we get into the specifics of the document, remind us why senator Calderon was originally being investigated.
Let's move onto unions. Negotiations broke down this week between Los Angeles County officials and a union representing 55,000 county employees. These include probation officers, social workers and nurses. At the heart is a disagreement over pay and benefits.
For the past week, SEIU members have been voting on whether to authorize a strike. How likely is that?
Staying with the Hall of Administration for another moment, the Board of Supervisors held a lengthy public hearing this week on oil drilling on public land. With a unanimous vote, the board voided an oil lease between the city of Whittier and Matrix Oil. Why is the county involved and is this the final word on the issue?
Down the street at City Hall, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced this week he would keep in place the general manager of LAX as well as the city's top budget official. Why does it matter that Gina Marie Lindsey and Miguel Santana stay in these jobs?
As these announcements were being made, the mayor was actually in Washington, D.C., stumping for funding for public transit and the LA River. Who did he meet with on this trip and did he accomplish his goals?
Finally, former city controller and mayoral candidate Wendy Greuel has a new job: she's a consultant to the children's museum in the San Fernando Valley. But she's also keeping the door open to future political offices. What is Greuel saying about her future?
Is it Hispanic or Latino? Pew study says most people don't have a preference
The question of how people of Latin American descent choose to be identified surfaced again this week after the Pew Research Center put out a brief report.
Is it "Latino" or "Hispanic" or something else altogether? Do people even care all that much?
KPCC's immigration and emerging communities reporter, Leslie Berestein Rojas joins us, with the latest on this long-running debate.
How to grow a giant, record-breaking pumpkin
Underwood Farms here in California has a humongous pumpkin patch, which happens to grow some pretty big pumpkins. Their largest was about 625 pounds, but that's nothing compared to the pumpkin grown by Tim Mathison, the current World Champion of pumpkin growers.
Mathison joins the show with more on how to grow record-breaking pumpkins.
Experts say important learning lost when letter drills push out playtime
You probably remember kindergarten as a time of finger painting, dress up, and story time. But when UCLA researchers asked today's kindergarten teachers how much play time they allow, almost 80-percent said fewer than 30 minutes a day.
Some even said there was no time at all. KPCC's Deepa Fernandes reports an emphasis on academics in kindergarten - and even preschool - is pushing out play.
'The Electric Mind': Can science help paralyzed people take back control of their bodies?
Now a story about a tragedy, a brave woman, and a possible medical breakthrough.
One afternoon, Cathy Hutchinson was gardening, when she began to feel strange and dizzy. Soon after she passed out. When she awoke she was paralyzed, unable to move or speak.
Doctors realized she'd had a stroke in the base of her brain which essentially severed her spinal cord, so her brain could no longer communicate with her body. But Cathy was still there, able to see, hear and think. But a new experimental technology called BrainGate at Brown University hopes to allow immobilized patients to control robotic limbs with their thoughts.
Jessica Benko writes about Cathy Hutchinson in the most recent issue ofThe Atavist.
Dinner Party Download: Fake blood, Sylvester Stallone art and more
Every week we get your weekend conversation starters with Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam, the hosts of the Dinner Party Download podcast and radio show.
Every week we get your weekend conversation starters with Rico Gagliano and Brendan Newnam, the hosts of the Dinner Party Download podcast and radio show.
Sylvester Stallone art exhibit in Russia
A collection of more than 3o Sylvester Stalone paintings have gone on show at The Russian Museum in St Petersburg.
We have an asteroid defense plan now
The U.N. wants to set up a "International Asteroid Warning Group" to defend the Earthy against any dangerous asteroid.
Ever wonder how fake blood looks so real on screen?
We reveal some surprising ingredients for Halloween. Mixed quantities of corn syrup, food coloring and creamer might help you achieve that real blood look. (Click the link above for a recipe!)