Change Starts Today: President Barack Obama

(Flickr pic by Leafhound.)

Here it is — the inauguration of our 44th president, Barack Obama. Will you be watching at home, listening on the drive to work, scarfing down free Krispy Kremes or attending a local event?

MetBlogs L.A. has a rundown of inauguration festivities in L.A.; the biggest one appears to be at L.A. Live downtown.

In case you’ll be catching it at home — or Tivo’ing it for later viewing, here’s the rough schedule (PT), according to KABC/7:

7 a.m.: Obama meets with President Bush at White House
8:30 a.m. : Official inaugural ceremony begins
9 a.m.: Obama is sworn in as president and delivers inaugural address
10 a.m.: President Obama and Vice President Biden attend luncheon at Capitol
10:30 a.m.: President Bush Depart Washington D.C.
11:30 a.m.: Inaugural parade begins

R.I.P., Universal Tram Ride King Kong

(Flickr pic by SFPhotocraft.)

Sunday morning’s blaze at Universal Studios destroyed several sets and buildings… and also burned down the King Kong portion of the famed studio backlot tram tour.

The King Kong attraction was cheesy, yes. And hadn’t been updated in 20 years. But it was still a main highlight of the tour, and I’m sure the re-enactment of what a earthquake would look and feel like inside a San Francisco subway station was impressive back when it first opened.

The King Kong portion was so old that I got a kick out of the fake news broadcast that ran during it: Rolland Smith, who was lead anchor at New York’s WWOR-TV at the time the ride was created, takes center stage. Why WWOR, of all things? For a brief period in the early 1990s, Universal owned WWOR (Channel 9 in New York), and had rebanded the station as “Universal 9.”

Also, according to this, former NY mayor Rudy Giuliani once criticized Universal Studios for the King Kong feature, which included graffiti painted on fake subway cars.

The attraction (built in 1986) won’t be rebuilt, the L.A. Times reports, but instead be replaced by an all-new feature.

R.I.P., Universal Tram Ride King Kong

(Flickr pic by SFPhotocraft.)

Sunday morning’s blaze at Universal Studios destroyed several sets and buildings… and also burned down the King Kong portion of the famed studio backlot tram tour.

The King Kong attraction was cheesy, yes. And hadn’t been updated in 20 years. But it was still a main highlight of the tour, and I’m sure the re-enactment of what a earthquake would look and feel like inside a San Francisco subway station was impressive back when it first opened.

The King Kong portion was so old that I got a kick out of the fake news broadcast that ran during it: Rolland Smith, who was lead anchor at New York’s WWOR-TV at the time the ride was created, takes center stage. Why WWOR, of all things? For a brief period in the early 1990s, Universal owned WWOR (Channel 9 in New York), and had rebanded the station as “Universal 9.”

Also, according to this, former NY mayor Rudy Giuliani once criticized Universal Studios for the King Kong feature, which included graffiti painted on fake subway cars.

The attraction (built in 1986) won’t be rebuilt, the L.A. Times reports, but instead be replaced by an all-new feature.

In This Age of Cynicism, Why Are We Still So Naive?

In journalism school, they had a saying — “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

Considering we live in an age of cynicism, irony and sarcasm, you’d think it would be harder to pull a fast one on people — particularly high-powered book editors and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.

And yet it keeps happening.

A con man named James Sabatino forges some documents, leading the L.A. Times to run a major article linking Sean “Diddy” Combs to a Tupac Shakur shooting. In hindsight, the docs look pretty shoddy and Sabatino’s story pretty ridiculous. (Perhaps a Google search of Sabatino’s name would have turned up past articles about his scams.)

A few years earlier, it was Dan Rather and his team, as well as the New York Times, snookered by a different set of documents.

Author Margaret Seltzer writes a wild book about growing up in gang culture, a white/Native American woman who’s raised by an African-American woman who goes by the name “Big Mama.” In hindsight, the story was pretty far-fetched. But a book publisher and plenty of reviewers fell for it.

A few years earlier, it was author James Frey, whose book “A Million Little Pieces” wound up being not so much memoir, but more so much fiction.

Fake intelligence convinced this nation to go to war in Iraq. The list goes on.

It’s an interesting question — what makes us so quick to suspend disbelief in some cases? Are we still hopeful enough to dismiss the notion that someone may be pulling the wool over our eyes? In these uncertain times, are we so looking to find success that we’re blind to the red flags that this may not be it? Or, have people always been duped, but it took the Internet age to expose the world’s frauds?

Tupac and Lie in L.A.

The Los Angeles Times is apologizing for their recent piece on the 1994 Tupac Shakur shooting. As first uncovered by The Smoking Gun, the L.A. Times story on the Tupac ambush (two years before he was murdered) was based on some forged FBI documents:

A Los Angeles Times story about a brutal 1994 attack on rap superstar Tupac Shakur was partially based on documents that appear to have been fabricated, the reporter and editor responsible for the story said Wednesday.

Reporter Chuck Philips and his supervisor, Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, issued statements of apology Wednesday afternoon. The statements came after The Times took withering criticism for the Shakur article, which appeared on latimes.com last week and two days later in the paper’s Calendar section.

“In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job,” Philips said in a statement Wednesday. “I’m sorry.”

In his statement, Duvoisin added: “We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck’s. I deeply regret that we let our readers down.”

Times Editor Russ Stanton announced that the newspaper would launch an internal review of the documents and the reporting surrounding the story.

The documents, as shared by the L.A. Times, claimed that associates of Sean Combs (you know — Puffy/Puff Daddy/P. Diddy/Diddy) were behind the shooting, which took place in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio. The docs, and the LAT story, fingered “promoter” James Sabatino to the attacks.

The problem: Sabatino’s a con man, who’s been known for forging documents and assuming fake identities. What’s more, the FBI documents that were the basis of the LAT story weren’t found on any FBI database, were typewritten (the FBI has used computers for three decades) and include horrible grammatical errors.

In hindsight, it seems pretty obvious after reading The Smoking Gun that these docs were more than a tad suspect. Sabatino has attempted to inflate himself into a larger-than-life character in the hip-hop world, when the honest truth is he’s been mostly incarcerated for various crimes for more than a decade.

There is also a tragic element to Sabatino — according to the Smoking Gun, his mother abandoned him as a child. Since then, his desperation for attention has led to all of his various crimes.

Meanwhile, in a story first published on the LAT website Wednesday, the paper says it’s investigating the story and the truths behind it. Yet, strangely, the lengthy piece didn’t mention the reporter, Pulitzer winner Chuck Phillips, for most of Wednesday. The newly rewritten apology, which I assume will run in Thursday’s paper, does.

It also looks like the LAT has removed the PDF files of the documents, which had been posted until mid-day Wednesday; but interestingly, the March 18 live chat Phillips held with LAT readers — in which he discusses the story — is still online here.

The question remains: What made the LAT lawyers skittish in withholding publication of the story for two days after it first showed up on the website? And what made them decide it was OK to finally pull the trigger? (OK, terrible reference.)

Another Political Scandal? Fire Up the Silkscreener

When the Eliot Spitzer/prostitution scandal hit the headlines, I knew the folks at Los Feliz’s Y-Que boutique were probably already designing a topical t-shirt.

Ever since they hit it big with their “Free Winona” shirt, Y-Que has reliably come up with a shirt for almost every celeb and political scandal. And the Spitzer scandal was no exception, as you can see above.

Y-Que is also hoping to make a few extra bucks off the potential Microsoft/Yahoo merger, as you can see above.

Of course, there’s a short life span to many of Y-Que’s designs; the store’s writers’ strike T-shirt has already been marked down from $16 to $10.

Mark Your Calendar: It’s An End-of-the-Line Weekend

There must be something about this weekend: It’s your last chance to catch, see or do several things in Los Angeles. It’s almost as if the city is doing a post-holiday clean up. (And taking advantage of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday to officially wrap things up.)

To boot:

Downtown on Ice finishes up its annual Pershing Square run on Jan. 21. I still haven’t gone this year, so hopefully you’ll see me down there one night this weekend.

The Los Angeles Central Library’s Julius Shulman’s Los Angeles photo exhibit closes on Sunday. (Although, one reader notes via the L.A. Public Library site that it may have been extended a week. But just to be safe, I’d hit it this weekend.)

Virgin Megastore’s Sunset location closes its doors for good on Sunday. (See the post below for more details.)

It’s your last chance to see the final remaining piece of the Ambassador Hotel. The chunk of the Cocoanut Grove that was to be preserved is instead slated to be demolished on Tuesday.

So go out there and see your ever-changing city this weekend!

Where’s Paul Magers?

I tuned into KCBS’ newscast tonight, hoping to hear anchor Paul Magers’ take on Wednesday’s horrific bridge collapse in Minneapolis.

Magers joined KCBS after 20 years in the Twin Cities, where he dominated the ratings as the market’s top anchorman. I figured he might have some interesting insight given his history there. But unfortunately, it’s the biggest news to come out of Minneapolis in years, and Paul is on vacation. Too bad.

Why the L.A. Times Needs a Political Cartoonist

Big local story: The L.A. Archdiocese agrees to $660 million settlement to victims of pedophile priests.

But with no local cartoonist of its own, Thursday’s Los Angeles Times ran a ‘toon from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the matter — including the image of Cardinal Mahoney in a TV set.

Yep, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a cartoonist tackling a big Los Angeles story. And the LAT doesn’t.

By the way, while researching this post, I came across this 1973 Los Angeles Times editorial in which the paper explains why it would no longer endorse political candidates, among other changes:

As The Times has evolved and changed, so have its editorial pages. Once we were highly partisan; now we call ourselves politically independent.

Our outlook on public affairs is skeptical but progressive. We are convinced by experience that progress in the social order has been achieved and will continue. We prefer trial and error to dogmatism, pragmatism and ideology.

Our profoundest allegiance is to the spirit of free inquiry. Our deepest optimism and strongest hopes spring from our fundamental belief in the spirit of liberty and its secure future in the American democracy.

These are general propositions. They are not easily translated into a particular position on any matter of current public affairs. So we try, in these editorials, to examine a question from all sides, to outline it as best we can in a brief space, and then to present our own conclusions. If thereby we persuade others to our view, so much the better. We hope at least to stimulate the thoughts of others.

We have decided therefore that The Times shall no longer routinely endorse candidates for president, for governor, or for senator. We have decided also to move our editorial cartoonist, Paul Conrad, to the page opposite this page. Consequently we shall increase the space given to Letters to The Times.

The piece goes on to rave about then-L.A. Times cartoonist Paul Conrad. Again, reminding me that the paper sorely misses the likes of Conrad (OK, Michael Ramirez, not so much).

Villaraigosa’s Telemund’oh-Oh

(Pic: Getty Images, by way of L.A. Daily News.)

As the Daily News first broke yesterday morning, Mayor Tony V finally ‘fessed up that there indeed is another woman… and it’s Mirthala Salinas, a reporter and anchor for NBC-owned Telemundo outlet KVEA/Channel 52.

The L.A. Times later wrote more on the matter:

Villaraigosa said he saw no journalistic conflict in Salinas dating him while she was covering him. He said that Salinas, whom he called a “consummate journalistic professional,” decided about a year ago that “our friendship had grown to a point where it was necessary to inform her management that she shouldn’t cover me. She did that. And they agreed.”

What’s most interesting is how long it took for this to come out into the open. City Hall was apparently buzzing about Salinas; Villaraigosa staffers, the L.A. Times writes, feared that word would leak out; local blogs speculated over whether Salinas was pregnant; and apparently NBC and Telemundo management in L.A. knew of her relationship with the Mayor. Granted, the L.A. Times grilled him on the state of his marriage last January (and at the time he said it was fine), but until the Daily News’ report yesterday, it remained secret.

Apparently the L.A. Times had been investigating the relationship for some time, as today’s story includes an interview conducted recently — but not yesterday — with a former neighbor of Salinas’:

he Los Angeles Times traced their relationship back at least 18 months.

In November 2005 — four months after he was sworn into office — Villaraigosa was seen one evening by a resident of the Sherman Oaks condominium complex where Salinas lived at the time.

Jean Rouda recalled pulling into the garage about 9 p.m. and seeing Villaraigosa standing alone and buzzing to get into the building. Rouda said she recognized the mayor and was surprised that he had no security guards and that there was no limousine parked nearby. She said she and her niece entered the lobby, where they encountered Villaraigosa, who was wearing a dress shirt and slacks, and was carrying bags of takeout food and a bottle of wine.

The L.A. Times has a whole gallery of Villaraigosa/Salinas pics here.

The big question: Do you care? Is this a private matter? Or as a public figure with the image of being a family man, has Villaraigosa’s image been tarnished? (A juicy affair didn’t have too much of an impact on Rudy Giuliani — hell, he’s running for president!) Vote below, or here.

http://www.polldaddy.com/poll.swf
I suppose the other poll could have asked how Villaraigosa (who famously merged his last name, “Villar,” with his wife’s “Raigosa”) might merge his name with his new honey. Villarsalinas? Villaraigosalinas (my fave)? Villalinas?

Meanwhile, of course it goes without saying (but I’ll mention it anyway) that given how everyone seemed to be following this story, it’s a tad too convenient that the news first broke in one pub — the Daily News — on July 3rd, the day before a big holiday. That means everyone else’s followups ran today — when people are too busy BBQing or heading to the beach.