Author: Dixon Guizot

From the San Diego Free Press

Erstwhile mayoral candidate turns focus to criminal element from Down Under

Bouncing back from her last-place finish in San Diego’s mayoral primary, District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis announced plans to prosecute members of a “eucalyptus distribution ring” at the city’s world-famous zoo.

The alleged conspirators — including long-time San Diego Zoo residents Thackery, Milo, and Cambee — are all koalas who live in the zoo’s “Outback” exhibit.

“While state law allows koalas to chew eucalyptus if they have a veterinarian’s recommendation,” Dumanis said, “virtually all of San Diego’s koalas consume eucalyptus regularly, and that ain’t right.”

It’s no secret that marriage is in decline across America.

For example, a recent PBS report noted that only half of U.S. adults are married, an all-time low. And of today’s Americans, only 72% have been married at some point, down from 85% in the 1960s.

But a lesser-known fact is that our country’s marriage declines have not been distributed evenly across the population. Poor people, in particular, are much less likely to get hitched than they were just a few decades ago.

TIJUANA, MEXICO — The signs at the union rally were lettered in red and green on a white background, reminiscent of the Mexican flag.

“!Con DeMaio al Norte!”
(“With Demaio to the North!”)

“!Si, se puede, jefe!”
(“Yes, we can, boss!”)

“!Te amos Carl!”
(“We love you, Carl!”)

The setting was a south-of-the-border parade on Tijuana’s famous Avenida Revolucion, where a union representing undocumented workers hoping to migrate to the United States endorsed Republican candidate Carl DeMaio for San Diego mayor.

In the spirit of bipartisanship, compromise, and reaching out to our friends and fellow citizens on the other side of the aisle, here The OB Rag offers its Voter Guide for the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary.

See you at the polls!

A couple years ago, I took a psychology 101 course at a San Diego community college. Our first lesson focused on the history of mental illness and its treatment.

The professor opened by describing a now-extinct illness called “hysteria,” which struck ladies only and featured symptoms from faintness, nervousness, and insomnia to irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and even “a tendency to cause trouble.”

During the Victorian Era, the professor explained, hysteria was enough of a problem to inspire heaps of medical research. And because the illness largely seemed to be stemming from the patient’s mind, hysteria became one of the first “mental” maladies to be studied rigorously by the modern medical community.

So what does any of this have to do with sex?

OCEAN BEACH –Bankers representing News Corporation announced that its Fox News division had agreed to purchase The OB Rag, a local news website based in San Diego.

“With this acquisition,” News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch said in a prepared statement, “News Corp silences an increasingly important voice for social justice and expands its local coverage to boot.”

These days, the recently re-christened UT San Diego seems to be a fan of San Diego city councilman and mayoral candidate Carl Demaio. Pension-hating missives such as this, this, and this suggest the paper’s editors, at least, sympathize with DeMaio’s emphasis on public-employee retirement plans as an apocalyptic scourge facing San Diegans.

It’s not hard to imagine UT San Diego issuing a DeMaio endorsement in the months ahead, particularly if the mayor’s race comes down to DeMaio versus Bob Filner.

But a sea change underlies UT San Diego’s apparent affection for DeMaio. When the two first met in 2005, when UT San Diego was still The San Diego Union-Tribune, the newspaper’s reaction could be characterized as somewhere between skeptical and “pffft.”

CUPERTINO, CALIF. — Giving new meaning to corporate social responsibility, Apple Inc. announced it is “bringing home” more than 700,000 manufacturing jobs currently held by workers in foreign countries.

“As a leading corporate citizen of the United States,” the company said in a press release, “Apple can’t help but feel some sort of responsibility to its fellow Americans. So why not start hiring them?”

Apple plans to spread the employment across ten different U.S. cities, bringing each city an average of 70,000 new jobs, all with full benefits, by the end of 2013.

“We basically just gave our outsourcing team a different task,” Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook told The OB Rag. “Instead of scouring third-world countries to find where workers come cheapest, we surveyed America to find areas where these new jobs would make the most sense.”

Hey, local politics geeks, to celebrate this New-Hampshire-primary Tuesday, let’s morph the candidates for mayor of San Diego with the candidates for president of the United States!

Carl DeMaio seems akin to Ron Paul: a conservative outsider with a quirky personality who seems to enjoy rattling cages on both sides of the aisle.

As a candidate, CarlPaul would sport a perpetual disdain for the effectiveness of government, an admittedly eyebrow-raising characteristic for someone seeking more time as a government employee. Because government sometimes is ineffective, and sometimes worse, CarlPaul’s cranky message would carry more than a little truth and earn the support of a diverse range of disenfranchised folks with axes to grind, including many axes of the not-very-sharp variety.

An osprey was found dead near a Point Loma roost on Wednesday, December 14, just one week after an area resident saw another osprey dead on Sunset Cliffs Bridge.

The two recent osprey deaths on the peninsula come after a dead osprey with a dart in its chest was found this summer, also on Sunset Cliffs Bridge.

Shawn Steele, who lives near Robb Field and frequently observes birds in the area, was driving across the bridge when he saw an osprey carcass in the road on the afternoon of December 7.

“It did not look like it was hit by a car,” Steele said via email. “No loose feathers. I stopped my car and got a good look at it and could not tell the cause of death.”

The music video for Guns ‘N’ Roses’ “You Could Be Mine” concludes with a classic moment where Arnold Schwarzenegger, playing his Terminator character, considers assassinating singer Axl Rose.

When the Terminator’s computer brain deems Rose a “waste of ammo,” Arnold lowers his weapon and walks away, presumably to engage a more worthy target.

In 2010, employing a similar thought process as governor of California, Schwarzenegger changed small-time possession of marijuana from a misdemeanor to an infraction carrying a $100 fine.

Xiang Jo — a 14-year-old laborer on an iPhone assembly line in Suzhou, China — just wanted to pay homage to someone whose vision transformed the world.

Jo had no idea the homage would cost him his job.

The trouble started Thursday morning, when word of Steve Jobs’ death spread through the factory where Jo and dozens of other young Chinese use the toxic chemical N-Hexane to clean iPhone touch screens.