Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
State auditor attacks SDSU for dearth of student parking
Let me see--SDSU claims to be "landlocked" and built out. It buys up neighboring property over decades and does what with part of it? It develops that land into a high end commercial and retail center complete with a parking garage. But its own students cannot park in that garage because, of course, that is for customers of said high end center. Yet the student parking fees pay the debt on that garage. Sounds like a racket to me. I now begin to grasp the opposition to former president Weber and his designs. If that campus was so short of land it could have started to use it as it bought it--something it didn't do, and made sure that it was employed to alleviate the crowding of its too-small campus. But to do that, it would have had to forego the profits that accrue to a developer/landlord. (Oh, yeah, I know the profits go back to the campus and help support the existing programs. Uh huh.) The purpose of SDSU is education, not property development and playing landlord. It probably does a mediocre job of both of those things. It needs to tend to its knitting, and stop playing real estate games. Its president should be an academic leader, not a real estate tycoon. Evan after buying up all that property on Montezuma Mesa, SDSU still cries that its campus is tiny and inadequate, and must have the stadium property. But what will it do with all that land? Put it to academic use, or develop it? My bet is that the school wants to play developer and landlord again, only this time on a large scale. Does anyone else see the hypocrisy there?— July 4, 2019 10:17 p.m.
No point of market saturation for housing or craft beer bars
Au contraire, Hipster. There is definitely such an upper limit, and it has been reached in many areas. The Reader beer-reporting staff is lamenting the closure of many craft breweries and brew pubs. Saturation has been reached, and there will be more consolidation and weaker operations will be falling by the wayside. John is onto something here, and it isn't going to be good for the local micro-and craft-brewing industry.— July 3, 2019 2:26 p.m.
UCSD heist costs USC $50 million
The Light News had a report on this matter in today's edition. It was not complete, and didn't mention the dollar settlement. Typical. Matt has done a better job of describing the suit and its origins. USC is eating crow these days, time after time. As a brand it suffers due to its many missteps and overreaches. I'm not particularly sympathetic to either university, and battles like this occur all the time within campuses. But to have one "big U" poach from another one is not common at all. There may be some larger implications from this settlement than are apparent or obvious to us laypersons. Biological and medical research is big, big business now, and the stakes are very high.— July 3, 2019 2:19 p.m.
North River Farms not giving up on Oceanside
This level of overt involvement by Rodriguez in the campaign is totally out-of-line. He should/must recuse himself from the vote on approval. Once he became a campaigner for the developer, he forfeited his right to vote on it. I don't think I've ever heard of a city councilman going to such lengths to secure approval of a proposal outside of a council meeting. Well, at least in No County--in So County, . . . (His actions may violate the Brown Act.) But in Oceanside, anything can happen. Maybe, as a first year dumbo councilman, he was never told about conflict-of-interest rules. There have been many fixes on votes from time to time, but parading them publicly this way is unheard of, at least for me. He's left the developer open to more lawsuits about undue influence, and may have cost himself his seat on the council.— July 2, 2019 7:39 p.m.
What Vons, Albertsons, Ralph's customers will do
Hey, well stated. Their pricing is off the scale for many items. With all these other sources, it's a wonder that they have any custom remaining. Oh, when I expanded the list of alternative stores, I plumb forgot Smart & Final. Fifteen-plus years ago it was a "kinda" cash-and-carry wholesale combined with club store-style operation. In the past few years it has morphed into a downscale supermarket. But it is another store to go to when/if the legacy supers are shut down due to a strike. In the past few years, S&F has grown greatly in the number of stores it operates.— June 26, 2019 7:47 p.m.
What Vons, Albertsons, Ralph's customers will do
One powerhouse of an alternative is Winco; so far it doesn't have all that many outlets in the region, but it is adding them. Locally there is one in San Marcos and another in Oceanside. There is also Grocery Outlet. That previous strike was nasty. Pickets and their supporters, such as family members, were doing stupid things like blocking traffic to other stores, and even trying to block streets. Just what they thought that would accomplish isn't clear to me at all. I always thought both sides lost that confrontation. The stores lost customers who never came back and the strikers lost months of wages. The Ralphs store on Melrose in Vista/Oceanside was a fairly sharp operation prior to the strike; afterward the better staffers were gone, and the place just lost its edge. Any connection with that deterioration and the fact that the store was shuttered 2-3 years ago?— June 26, 2019 4:10 p.m.
Kayak goes missing in Bahia Asuncion, then returned
The usual absence of comments to these pieces about life in Baja, like this one, makes me wonder if anyone really cares about goings-on in Mexico. The paucity of comments causes me to ask if anyone gives a s**t. And if the readers of the Reader don't care at all, then why the reports?— June 25, 2019 8:08 p.m.
Vista drunk driver kills drunk pedestrian
Three hours after the crash his BAC was .2, not .02. That means at the time of the collision with the pedestrian it was substantially higher than that. Folks, that's what is referred to as "blind drunk." He would have had difficulty standing up, let alone drive a car or truck. In his case, the DUI prevention course he finally finished did no good at all. He was 29 years old and obviously binge drank until he was utterly impaired. And then he killed an innocent (even if he too was drunk) man. That intersection is not far from my home, and while it is a bit unorthodox, isn't that hard to handle.— June 25, 2019 8:31 a.m.
Mayor O'Connor, Union-Tribune owner, McDonald's heiress on Today show
Thirty years ago, when Matt wrote this description, he must have been really amused. But he kept to the facts and described the routine ways those TV operations operated and still operate. Ah, celebrity. And so two very rich women (can I call them dowagers?) are shunted to the side while the on-air clowns do their things. At that time we were being told that Helen Copley and Joan Kroc were not only the two most powerful women in San Diego, they were the two most powerful people. Then there was the poor Irish girl, Mayor Maureen, who got to hob-nob with the two dowagers. Did that actually go to her head? Her hubby and soon late hubby was rich, and that helped with the campaign for mayor. So, now, thirty years later, the Copley empire is no more. Helen passed it on to her son who sold it in pieces, generally a few years too late to really clean up. And about the time he had dismantled the empire and its heritage, he passed on with no family heirs. The name still is on a few things around town, such as Symphony Hall and the YMCA, but for all the political clout she supposedly had, there's little to show for it. Joan Kroc was far better as a philanthropist than Helen ever was, and her name is also on various facilities that aim to assist the lower-income areas of the city. She also gave money to medical facilities. But that Kroc heritage is fading and fleeting. Mo was, not so long ago, found to have mismanaged a charitable trust set up by her hubby Bob Peterson. Seems she was addicted to video poker and squandered her assets and then started to squander those of the trust. Anyone really remember that much of her time as mayor? I don't. Matt refers to the Faberge egg and Joan showing it off. He mentions three plainclothes cops, one of whom is "Bill." Could Bill have been none other than Bill "Keystone" Kolender, the chief of police at the time? If it was Kolender, why would Matt have avoided mention of that? It wasn't so long until Bill resigned and went to work for Helen Copley. What would have been more natural than for him to show up when those powerful ladies were gathered and play big shot? He was always making plays for publicity and sucking up to the power structure. I really wonder about just who that "Bill" was.— June 11, 2019 10:37 p.m.
Suspect in quadruple murder of Fallbrook family convicted
"They were kidnapped." I hadn't heard that before. All the theories I heard held by the cops were that they didn't leave that house alive. And that makes more sense, in that it is hard to imagine how Merritt could have overpowered two adults and taken them and two little kids to Victorville and then bashed them to death with a hammer. But, we will never know, will we? Merritt then proceeded to get into their house and use the McStay computer to issue checks to himself. That's indisputable and highly incriminating, but the San Diego sheriffs didn't check that out. Why? Well, they didn't think the disappearance was a crime, and they didn't treat the house as a crime scene. Those "sightings" of the family were just about as useful as many other instances of sightings, as in useless. The car at the border was just a ruse, and good police work would have treated it that way. If, somehow, they were fleeing Mexican drug cartel hit men, why head to Mexico? Merritt had access to the house and plenty of time to sanitize it. Since it wasn't treated as a crime scene, no crime scene investigators checked it out. There was plenty of time to clean anything incriminating out of the car, too. Maybe the car was involved, maybe it wasn't. Again, we'll never know. Merritt was, along with family members, among those who raised the alarm about the disappearance. Handy way to deflect suspicion, wouldn't you say? Gore defends the way his department handled the disappearance. Did anyone expect differently? He always is defending the deputies, and he has to do a lot of defending. As to Merritt, when arrested he claimed that he was dying of congestive heart failure. And he said he wanted a speedy trial to clear him. After some months or a year or more he fired his court-appointed attorney because the case was taking too long, he claimed. He wanted to defend himself, and the judge allowed that but appointed advisory counsel because it was a death penalty case. About two years passed and Merritt went back to court to get counsel, claiming that he couldn't mount a proper defense. And that was granted. Each of those changes started the court clock again. For a guy who was dying, he survives, and ended up getting neither a speedy trial nor acquittal. The death penalty in California is moribund. Even if he's sentenced to die, he'll never meet an executioner. He's too old, and we may never see another execution in the state. It should be remembered that California now executes by lethal injection (sometimes called "riding the needle") and not the gas chamber. As far as I know, that method isn't even an option. A guy who killed two small children is almost certain to get the death sentence; kid killers are treated more harshly than other killers. There is so much to this case; Merritt doesn't look hale and healthy, but he's been locked up in San Bernardino for five years. They got the right guy; Merritt dunnit.— June 11, 2019 7 p.m.