Hey, Babe

Re the cover photo (“Cat Snip,” February 24), isn’t it distressing when a castrating woman is drop-dead gorgeous?

Gary Whitlock
via email

Cat Lovers Protest

This week’s cover of the Reader is very offensive and damaging to a lot of people who have had to witness the picture (“Cat Snip,” Cover Story, February 24). Being a real or fake picture, this really isn’t a cool thing to put on the Reader, and for a publication that is usually more open-minded to people’s feelings on certain subjects…

I speak for myself and every cat lover that this is just not right.

Branden
via email

Do It, Don’t Show It

I am a cat lover. I had three cats that lived until the age of 21. Last year I adopted four kittens from Helen Woodward.

Seeing that kitten tied down to the stiff board after it got “snipped” is horrible (“Cat Snip,” Cover Story, February 24). Why do you think that is a good cover shot? Yes, being “snipped” is a great thing, but to display the kitten tied with its paws in that position is concerning. I was with my children, and they were very upset.

Name Withheld by Request
via email

For Shame!

I am very upset about the cover (“Cat Snip,” Cover Story, February 24).  It is inappropriate to put a dead feline prepped for a necropsy on the front cover reading “Cat Snip” for all ages to see whether you believe it is for educational purposes or not. It should be recalled, and shame on you.

Christina
via email

The cat was alive and had just been spayed. — Editor

I Love Irony

Just a note to say how much I enjoyed your hypocrisy of juxtaposing Don Bauder’s highlighted comment (“City Lights,” February 24) chastising newspapers for reporting “titillating items regularly” with the equally prominent “Stringer,” “Caught on Tape,” about the man accused of videotaping a 12-year-old girl taking a shower! Or were you just trying to make his point in an ironic fashion?

Anthony Solare
via email

The Light Side of TJ

I would like to comment on the article that was published in the February 24 Reader, “Yonder Lies It: Messages from Tijuana” by Lorena Mancilla. The title of the article is “Rehab: A Public Nightmare in Tijuana.” Here we have, once again, another article in the paper depicting a sordid side of the city. And many, many, many articles appearing in the Reader seem to focus on the dark side or a sordid side of the city.

It would be nice for readers to know that there are thousands of Americans living in the Tijuana area — the Playas-Tijuana area, Rosarito Beach — who feel that Tijuana is a very beautiful place to live. There’s a lot of art, there’s a lot of wonderful activities, there’s a lot of natural beauty. Many Americans feel that as a retirement place this is a wonderful place to live, and many people don’t see, or seem to feel that they see, all the violence that the paper suggests is all around them. But most importantly, this is a city that has many wonderful things, and it’s unfortunate that the media seems to dwell on the negative aspects.

Any city — Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago — has some very, very, very bad areas, and if these areas were publicized as much as the bad things in Tijuana are publicized no one would probably ever visit the United States either. So this is just a thought from an American who has been traveling back and forth to Baja for many years.

Vivian Marlene Dunbar
Playas Tijuana

Creepy Corporations

Creeping corporatism isn’t happening just at city hall (“Sanders on Sale,” “Under the Radar,” February 24). Local business titans are financing a ballot initiative for the next election to change San Diego’s city charter to permit a takeover of the five-member board of education that currently is elected by the people.

A privately bankrolled group called “San Diegans 4 Great Schools” (Irwin Jacobs, Buzz Woolley, Rod Dammeyer, and others) has paid signature gatherers in mall parking lots to qualify their radical measure for the June ballot. They hope to add four appointees to the board of education, limit elected boardmembers’ scope of authority to small districts rather than present citywide responsibility, and officially restrict elected members’ terms of office. San Diegans 4 aims to “reform” school “governance.”

As at city hall, this focus on public school “governance” is more corporate self-interest than altruism. Increasing the size of the board of education (and padding it with appointed friends) shifts the number of votes needed to cede public school real estate to advantage wannabe private investors.

Gaining access to public-sector markets of real estate, services, and contracts has been sought by these education “reformers” ever since they engineered the controversial appointment of ex-superintendant Alan Bersin more than a decade ago.

Mall shoppers should just say no to San Diegans 4 paid signature gatherers, and should the measure make it to the June ballot, just vote no to defeat it at the polls.

Frances O’Neill Zimmerman
La Jolla

Stay MADD

To Paula Myers, the director of the MADD Victim Impact Panels (“No VIP Cred,” Letters, February 24).

The reason the Reader did not, as you write, “do research or contact” you was for the sake of keeping you MADD. You’re entitled to your name. If you’re not MADD anymore, you’re gonna lose your benefits drastically in this economy.

Mike W.
via email

Money From Drunks

I was glad to see an article on DUI (Cover Story, February 17) and only wish the victim, “Edward,” would not have been so hard on himself and instead been aware of and focused on the real truth about the DUI money machine, which the cops, the DMV, the courts, the tow companies, the insurance companies, and certainly the army of attorneys are using to steal millions of dollars annually from the state’s citizens under the great disguise of legally enforcing the law.

The DUI money machine is the single biggest government-sponsored scam — hiding behind the sacred cow of law enforcement — ever to be perpetrated on the American people.

The real truth about a DUI is that no two DUIs are the same, yet the fines and the punishment are exactly the same unless a fatality or bodily injury results, which heightens the offense from a misdemeanor to a felony, and rightfully so.

In the meantime, a guy like Edward makes a simple wrong lane turn or perhaps has a taillight burned out or leaves a bar at closing, and these guys are all lambs headed for the DUI financial slaughterhouse, as a cop can stop anybody for almost no logical reason at all, and if they have had so much as one drink, the cop can and often does suggest a totally unnecessary sobriety test, and more often than not the cop arbitrarily decides the person flunks the test (which is rigged against the driver in the first place) and is drunk enough to arrest him/her for DUI, and one more sucker is sucked into the DUI money machine. And the $10,000 rip-off, all sanctioned and encouraged by the government legislature supposedly there to protect its citizens against blatant financial abuse, cranks out another DUI! Easy money and legal, but deliberate entrapment to the extreme, to say the least!

A DUI in most cases has become nothing more than a way for the attorneys and agencies involved to steal legally. Of course, some DUIs are certainly warranted, but the vast majority of them are neither warranted nor necessary, other than to produce revenue for the cash-starved government and the agencies that feed off this legally corrupt abuse of the citizenry.

The DUI money machine is a perpetual cash cow that just keeps getting fatter at the expense of the very people it is supposed to protect and serve.

Be sure you check your headlights and taillights before your next visit to your local bar! Even better, don’t drive past ten at night. You can’t tell who is behind you until the red lights come on, and you are about to be found guilty until you spend $5000 to $10,000, a night in jail, and a year of court hell to prove you might just be innocent. The foundational legal premise our justice system was founded on (innocent until proven guilty) doesn’t apply to DUIs! You drink, you drive, you’re guilty! Don’t waste your hard-earned money trying to prove otherwise. Welcome to the perpetual DUI money machine.

Bill Fadden, M.A.
San Diego

No Looky-Loos

I’ve just got around to trying to read your cover story from the January 20 issue, “That Rug You Found in a Dumpster Is Worth $125,000,” by Jay Allen Sanford. I’d like to make two comments, and this is after I’ve seen all sorts of letters back and forth about the article since then, and I was finally curious enough to go back and try to read the thing.

My first comment is, in June of 2010, my wife had a couple of tickets to Antiques Roadshow in San Diego, and we went down there, and we thought the tickets would let us go into the building and watch the show being taped, but when we got there we found out you had to bring something with you to get in. And I could have brought a couple of old things from around the house, but we didn’t know that. So, anyone else, just a warning.

Second comment is — and I haven’t seen this mentioned in any of the letters since the article was published — but you’ve got a discontinuity in the thing. Look at the last sentence of page 28 and the beginning of page 29. It doesn’t make any sense — part of the text is missing. Would you please explain? What the hell happened there?

Name Withheld
via voice mail

Due to a technical error, the text below was missing from the story.

“Pretty soon, they decided that shots of the robot itself were good enough for a one-minute roll, even though there wasn’t going to be an on-camera appraisal.”

That meant Big Loo might appear on the eventual TV broadcast. But what about Duane?

“I signed a release form, still photos were taken, and I was videotaped for a possible spot. But that still didn’t ensure I would be getting on TV.”

Duane returned to the Convention Center later that day with one more item torun through the guessing gauntlet, having scalped an additional entrance ticket.

What’s Up On Stage?

Who is this Homer Hesse, and why do you let him write such drivel about the theater? He’s dreadful. He talks about acting but doesn’t understand it at all.

The February 5 “Stage Whisper” on the Reader’s website is the last straw. He reviews the Death of a Salesman, even though Jeff Smith already has! Why does the Old Globe have two reviews for the same play when other theaters don’t have one? What’s going on at your paper?

If you have a second theater writer, have him review community theaters like Octad-One and Coronado Playhouse. And get someone to write them who knows about theater!

Name Withheld