February 2009 Archives

Of course, the Academy Awards are just getting underway as I'm beginning to type this, and I'm going to miss it again. My girlfriend's mom is having her birthday night and—exactly as we did last year—we're going out for dinner while so many other people are at home watching the awards. It's fine, really. I like the awards but I'm not going to miss them sorely if I don't discover who the winners are real-time. We're just about to leave!

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Raw tragedy from the famous and gorgeous Earl Burn Miller Japanese Garden at Cal State Long Beach today, as the Daily 49er reports on an enormous outbreak of a deadly virus that has totally annihilated the garden's gorgeous koi population. More follows below:

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I'll get this out right now: needless to say, there's good cause to be pessimistic about the state of the Times. Even the most casual observer of Los Angeles media must, by now, be aware of that. There's the near-300 layoffs, the slow scaling back of book and theater coverage, the California Section's demise... It's redundant to into this stuff at depth, especially considering our own SoCal Connected, D.J. Waldie, and Erin Aubry Kaplan have said all this with more grace and knowledge than I could ever hope to muster up. Regardless, though, it's worth mentioning the good stuff when it happens, to give credit where it's due and that's exactly what I intend to do here:

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Thanks to a new internship I'm taking up I've started riding the train. I ride the Metro Blue Line from Long Beach all the way to the end of the line and—like a lot of people riding, I'm sure—overhear the occasional noteworthy event. This happened the other day:

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Apparently this is real? In an effort to teach his well-above-median-income audience a lesson about malaria, Bill Gates unleashed an open jar of mosquitoes into the crowd during this week TED (that's Technology, Entertainment and Design, by the way). As he released the critters he calmly informed them that "I brought some [mosquitoes]. Here I'll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected."

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As an addendum to last December's history of American stampedes, it seems like 2009 has already seen its share around the world. The most notable of these occurred inside a hotel nightclub in Bangkok as the New Year rolled in. The club—Santika—is one of Bangkok's most popular hot spots. The stampede started from a fire inside the club, which led to a giant mass of people running for the club's only exit and left behind 61 dead. BBC has more:

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