What happens when Long Beach ink-slinger Kari Barba doesn’t like her own tattoos any more? She has them lasered away

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
Tattoo artists are their own best advertisements, because they’re almost always rakishly tattooed. But what happens when one of them makes a bad choice? Every tattoo artist is 19 once. What happens to [...]

Shop till you drop

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
Recent news reports have suggested that Al Qaeda operatives are planning to attack Southern California shopping malls during the Christmas rush. This news is—to coin a phrase—terrifying, since bomb-/gun-/pointy-stick-toting terrorists would mean additional competition for mall parking spaces . . . HEY! I WAS WAITING FOR THAT SPOT, DINGUS! [...]

Is the Queen Mary doomed? The Titanic’s reincarnated engineer thinks so

ILLUSTRATION by JOE MCGARRY
It doesn’t take long for Bill Barnes to heat up. Standing in front of about 30 people aboard the Queen Mary, he rails about the Titanic, talking up the ship’s alternate history with dead-set conviction. In between points he jokes and has [...]

How a UFO caught Southern California in a wartime panic

ILLUSTRATION by BOB AUL
Nobody knew exactly what it was up there, and that’s what terrified them: a shapeless orb hanging lifelessly off the coast—poised, it seemed, to obliterate Los Angeles. Some feared it was the Japanese; others felt it was something a bit more extraterrestrial. Nobody [...]

When someone steals your wallet, this is what you pay for

From time to time a Humid Gust of Bad Intent shaped like a female human being may emerge from the bog of eternal deceit and stand immediately behind you in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. How to know? This creature will be returning a [...]

Thoughts on losing, winning and overcoming my inner USC fan
“I can’t go in there.”
I say this from where I sit on the driver’s seat inside my car, to my friend reclining on the passenger side, staring at the neighborhood Albertsons as we pass it in the parking lot. I say this because it’s Saturday, Game [...]

Or, how I learned to stop being pissed at Netflix

ILLUSTRATION by JULIO SALGADO
March of the Penguins was one of the first movies I ordered off of Netflix. I ordered it not because I actually wanted to see it but because I am a weak man and could not fight the demands of friends and media [...]

How my father became an environmentalist without really trying

PHOTO by OLENA KUCHERENKO
A few things my father pioneered:
• Driving a Saab. This was the ’60s, mind you, when cars were still made of steel and driving a foreign car—your Toyota, your Datsun, your VW—meant jokes about war atrocities and Japanese beer cans. The idea of driving [...]

Looking into the (forgotten) legacy of the last governor of Mexican California

PIO PICO by JOE MCGARRY
Strange as it may seem, there was a time in California when everything curved towards God. It was back then that the streets and houses and churches were all planned according to the heaven-sent laws of the Spanish government, when [...]

So why can’t a shooter get any love?

PHOTO by SUSAN SABO
While shooting at the Port of Long Beach recently, I wasn’t concerned when a big black SUV belonging to the Long Beach Police Department pulled me over, lights flashing. Mr. Susan, however, was freaking out. Relax, I told him, we’re not doing anything wrong.
Questions, answers, [...]