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 isn’t about Long Beach, but it’s interesting.
Seems the long-hyped condominium boom in downtown Los Angeles is over, at least for now–the boom is off the rose, you might say (though, clearly, I never would). But the top story on the Los Angeles Times website now covers just that.
According to DataQuick, which monitors real estate [...]

The lawyers finished picking a jury of Beachcomber newspaper Publisher Jay Beeler’s peers, and his trial opened yesterday in Long Beach Superior Court.
Beeler, as we noted yesterday, and as the Press-Telegram’s Wendy Thomas Russell has been telling you, faces two misdemeanor charges–obstructing a police officer and disobeying the order of a police officer–for his alleged [...]

The city of Los Angeles designated it a historical landmark, no shit. Thanks go to Metroblogging Los Angeles! Thanks!

Attorneys started picking a jury Monday to hear Beachcomber Publisher Jay Beeler’s Long Beach Superior Court trial, the Press-Telegram’s Wendy Thomas Russell writes this morning.
Beeler is accused of two misdemeanor offenses–obstructing a police officer and disobeying the order of a police officer–during last year’s tragic fire at the Galaxy Towers condo complex, 2999 E. Ocean [...]

This ain’t Long Beach, but I found myself attracted to today’s Los Angeles Times story on a venerable L.A. Catholic school–Precious Blood Catholic School–for the school’s historic campus and its, er, sanguine moniker.
The place of learning survives virtually intact from its Eisenhower Era beginnings (Class of 1953 was the first) in a converted house at [...]

Testimony yesterday in the ongoing lawsuit brought against Long Beach Unified School District by a group of parents of female gymastics students suggested Wilson High didn’t have to tear up the tumblers’ practice area to create an all-purpose fitness room.
As the Press-Telegram’s Kevin Butler reports, Wilson planned to remodel the gymnasts’ practice room to help [...]

I’m serious. I don’t care about the Hollywood sign and neither should you. If rich extortionists want to try to milk a cool $22 million from LA, let them develop. Actually, this is more than extortion, this is kidnapping. They have kidnapped the virgin chaparral around the sign and now they want a 22 [...]

Seriously, for those that didn’t venture outside yesterday, it was one of the most crisp, clear beautiful days I may have ever seen in Los Angeles. The kind of day that makes athiests weep for answers and people with cameras drive through the mountains for hours with their jaws dragging on the ground.
And the only [...]

(Or, how I’ve now met everyone I’ve ever needed to know)

PHOTO by ROSHEILA ROBLES
I read somewhere that, in the grand artistic scheme of things, being a porn film fluffer is akin to being the guy that walks Ashton Kutcher’s dog. Actually, it’s more like sitting on a crowded LA bus the week before Christmas, waiting [...]