This Week: Learjets, Dinosaur Flatulence and Bake Sales
Tues | JUN 3 City Manager Pat West responds to a projected $17 million city budget deficit—enough to fund four more Lobstergates, buy out six more Acres of Books or purchase 31 homes for Congresswoman Laura Richardson—by promising to encourage city employees not to live as long. Control [...]

This Week: The Firewater Jacuzzi Grotto, Illegal Gardening and Batman
Tues | MAY 27 Soak and shrink.
Wed | MAY 28 Development trouble down in Huntington Beach as American Indians protest the construction of 300 new homes atop an ancient burial ground even after an Environmental Impact Report warns of potentially toxic levels of sacrilegiosity. [...]

This Week: Reggie the Alligator, Freelance Goat Slaughterhouse and the Reekies

Tues | MAY 20 Discouraging news for American dreamers when a Huntington Beach man is sentenced to four months of house arrest for (besides a less phantasmagorical charge involving firearms possession) impersonating a firefighter, a fraud he pursued so enthusiastically that investigators found a “shrine” [...]

This Week: Why Lie? It’s for Beer
Tues | MAY 13 Hundreds of car tires are slashed in San Pedro as part of Now You Have To Ride Your Bike To Work Day, causing thousands of dollars in damage and provoking uncomfortably mixed emotions at American Tire Co., which reported a huge influx of customers and [...]

This Week: Manhole Covers, Disappointed Evilists and Handjobs in the Bushes
Tues | MAY 6 Bad news for beer bums when Joe Jost’s drops Pabst from the roster because of cost. Edging out Listerine and Pruno as a replacement is Busch, which has slightly lower alcohol content and dramatically lower poser appeal. (High Life will also [...]

Mon | APR 28 “Goodbye, palm trees,” reports the Press-Telegram in a story with its first sentence ghost-written by Kurt Vonnegut explaining how a debilitating fungus is about to wipe out a palm-tree population that costs too much to preserve. Replacements for the 2,900 reportedly unsalvageable Phoenix palms infected by fusarium—famous for killing thousands as [...]

This Week: Schoolgirl Underwear, Uncomfortable Symbolism and American Ingenuity

SAT. APRIL 26: GARY WILSON AND KAREN
Mon | APR 21 President Bush appears on Deal Or No Deal as part of the most conceptually unpredictable presidency since Nixon invited a nation to sock it to him and then sent 24,000 troops back to Vietnam for involuntary second [...]

This Week: Long Beach’s race problem, Chernobyl CityPlace and Your Ad Here A$K How!

Tues | APR 15 It begins.
Wed | APR 16 Idiocracy comes alive as President Bush salutes the second-ever papal visit to the White House—the first being to deliver John Kennedy strict instructions for his first term—by sliding over to the [...]

This Week: Potential Nightmare Capacity, Iguana Smuggling and Hell Heat
Tues | APR 8 Historic landmark and restaurant Johnie’s Broiler—mostly demolished in a surprise bulldozer raid last year that received respectful golf claps from developers—gets a new lease on life when Bob’s Big Boy announces a new lease on the property. Although Big Boy has period [...]

This Week: Acres of Books, Slum Futures and Coyotes
Tues | APR 1 Dandy British supermarket Fresh & Easy—with locations in Long Beach, Lakewood and Compton—enters its six month of American operation with crumpet sales somewhere around 70 percent below expectations and a marketing disconnect so severe that the Los Angeles Times interviewed a Norwalk man [...]