Ah, Deadlines

January 14, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I understand that sometimes getting a story out quickly means that writing suffers, but consider a sentence from this AP piece on an evacuation in Riverside County:

However, Corona authorities, defending their decision to evacuate 508 homes, 330 mobile homes and a recreational vehicle park near Prado Dam, about 50 miles east-southeast of downtown Los Angeles.

The parser's definitely going to fall over on that one. ABC News has a cleaned up version of the same piece.

Numbers and Egos

January 14, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I've mentioned before that Bob Hertzberg's campaign site -- http://changela.com -- is doing a very cool thing with their Daily Digests, a roundup of the day's LA news from both traditional and blog sources. Brian, the Hertzberg staffer who collects the info for those posts, has linked to my site many times now, and I think that's great.

But sometimes you have to wonder, how much is too much? Right now there are five entries on the first page that have to do with me: a link to Sean's blogging.la post talking about blogdowntown, links to parts one and two of my Art Walk coverage at blogdowntown, a link to my post here introducing blogdowntown, and farther up a link to my bit yesterday on the sales-tax debate. If you consider that there are 50 entries on their home page, that means that I am 10% of what's going on in LA today. Even in my deluded fantasies I don't occupy that large a position in LA.

Music: Jim Bianco and the Tim Davies Big Band

January 13, 2005 by Eric Richardson

So tonight Magilla, Kathy, and I hopped on the freeway and took a quick trip up to Hollywood to catch Jim Bianco and the Tim Davies Big Band at King King. Amazing. I saw these two perform together just over a year ago, and all the good memories I had weren't just my imagination. My poor little brain can't understand writing and arranging for a 19-piece big band, but Tim does it unbelievably well and creatively. I need to make it out to one of their monthly shows sometime.

Welcome to blogdowntown

January 13, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I moved Downtown in May, 2004. Since then I've spent a lot of time writing about Downtown Los Angeles, and people have started coming to my blog as a site for info about what's going on there. Eventually I decided that I should probably really have two blogs: one for Downtown stuff and one for whatever else I'm thinking about. And that's exactly what I've set up. blogdowntown will now hold all the Downtown-related content I had previously been writing. My blog, blog.ericrichardson.com, will revert to being just about my life, computers, music, USC, etc. I'll try not to post the same things both places, so if you're interested in both my life and Downtown you'll just have to read both. Both have RSS feeds, so keeping up really shouldn't be that hard.

Sales Tax and the NCs

January 13, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I missed yesterday that the Daily News had printed a piece on how the proposed city sales tax to pay for cops has been presented to neighborhood councils. We just addressed this issue at the DLANC board meeting on Tuesday. A representative from LAPD was there (I can't remember his name... I'm bad at those) and presented, and he was introduced by a girl from the Mayor's office. — Continue Reading...