Howard Owens

Ken Layne has some questions about those mysterious space shuttle pictures.

For some reason I don't entirely fathom, sometime in 1982 I began to hanker for some country music in my life, but it was a very bad time for country music. What little I heard on the radio had gone sappy and boring. None of it had anything to do with my life. I wanted something that fit into my punk sensibilities, but still had some grit to it.

There was a little record store in Lompoc, Calif., where I was living at the time, though it mostly carried the pop-hit crap of the day, it sometimes got in something interesting.

One day, with a sawbuck in hand, I headed down to this store and found an interesting looking LP on a display rack -- barbed wire on the cover, and the band's name etched across the top in faux-wood plank lettering. Rank and File. It looked promising. I bought it.

From the opening strum and twang of "Amanada Ruth" I knew I had uncovered something amazing. This wasn't my daddy's county. There was a propulsive drive that I hadn't heard in country music up to that time (admittedly, I was less familiar with pure honky tonk as I should have been).

But it takes more than a steady beat, steely guitar and the right attitude to make good music. It takes infectious rhythms and catchy melodies. Rank and File aced that test as well.

Then Rank and File seemed to fade into obscurity. Getting busy with college and starting career (and being totally broke through most of the '80s), I lost track of Chip and Tony Kinman (the heart and soul of Rank and File --the original line up included Alejandro Escovedo), but they continued to make music throughout the 1980s and '90s.

A few years ago, the Kinmans formed Cowboy Nation, returning them to the cowboy genre. I remained ignorant of this development until a couple of months ago, when my pal Buddy Siegal wrote about bands third CD, Cowgirl a-Go-Go. I immediately tracked down the band's publicity agent and requested a copy.

Within days, I received the CD and I've been addicted to it since. It stayed in my car for weeks. Since moving it into my home office, I've listened to it at least 5 times for every time I've listened to something else. It's just that good.

The Kinmans have managed to create cowboy music that is at once rootsy and modern. There is something Beach Boy-like in their melodies and vibe, but the tumbleweeds still blow threw their songs. Songs like "Dollar a Day," "Rebel," "Good Old Days" and "Cowgirl A-Go-Go" rock with a punk intensity ("Cowgirl" pays tribute to the Ramones both musically -- pay close attention to the intro -- and lyrically), while graceful melodies highlight "Spooky," "All I Had to Offer," "Full Fathom 5."

Americana has become a big industry over the last few years, but Cowboy Nation isn't likely to appeal to the Ryan Adams crowd. The Kinmans remain slightly off-kilter from the mainstream and far too witty for the high-minded sensibilities of the No Depression coterie.

I started wearing boots again in 1982 (after disposing of them in high school), thanks to Rank and File. Cowboy Nation makes me glad I still own a pair. Cowgirl A-Go-Go demonstrates there's still a lot of verve left in simple songs about life out west.

I'm increasingly concerned about the future of Oliver Perez.

He's a kid with filthy stuff. He has the kind of stuff that could make him one of the elite pitchers in baseball. We're talking Pedro Martinez territory.

And the comparison to Pedro isn't facetious. I've seen both Perez and Martinez pitch. Both are hard-throwers with movement on all their pitches, and they're about the same build.

Last year, Perez, 21, made his major league debut with the Padres. In 16 appearances (15 starts), he posted a 3.50 ERA, posting a 4-5 record with the offenseless San Diego squad. He struck out 94 hitters in 90 innings.

Those are the impressive stats. The less impressive stats are his 48 walks and 17 pitchers per-inning average.

Last year, Perez had a hard time throwing strikes. He often worked deep into counts. Far too often, he was facing hitters with 3-2 counts. As often as not, he struck those hitters out, but a major league pitcher simply can't survive going 3-2 on two or three hitters per inning.

Pitchers, especially guys with slight physiques like Perez, are more likely to develop arm trouble with they throw too many pitchers per inning or too many pitchers per game. Also, major league hitters, even mediocre ones, learn to adjust. Why chase a guy's filthy slider or sweeping curve, if you know he's going to have to eventually groove a fastball.

Finally, pitchers with a reputation for missing the zone are less likely to get the benefit of the doubt from umpires.

All of this conspires to force a young pitcher to throw more pitches, and this conspiracy seems to be catching up with Perez this year.

He's averaging 21.3 pitches per inning and has yet to last past the 5th inning of every game (this, btw, is putting a terrible strain on San Diego's already less than stellar bullpen). His ERA is 9.00, and hitters have posted a .452 on-base percentage (compared to .320 last year) and .693 slugging percentage (.377 last year).

There are also troubling reports, persistent since spring training, that Perez has lost 2-3 m.p.h. off his fast ball. That, as much, as anything, may be driving up that slugging percentage, and also an explanation for the higher pitch totals -- as Perez tries to compensate for the lost velocity (catcher Wiki Gonzalez caught Perez sneaking looks at the scoreboard radar gun start before last) he is aiming his pitches.

Could it be that the Padres rushed Perez to the majors (he went straight from Double A ball last year to the majors, skipping AAA)? I think so. Padres fans can only hope that a return to Portland, or even AA Mobile, will help Perez master his lively arm and cure him of his wild ways.

In this age of increasing plate discipline, pitchers simply must throw strikes and rely on the movement on their pitches to get hitters out. Until Perez is able to do that, he's going to be a train wreck on the mound.

Do you know what I don't like about Cathy Seipp's new blog? You have to register with JournalSpace.com to leave a comment. OK, it was a hassle, so I did it, several weeks ago, and after waiting for my assigned password (took until the next morning to get here), I never got around to going back to leave a comment on the post I was going to comment on. So, now, I was going to leave a comment just now, and I've lost the damn password.

Plus, in registering, JournalSpace.com thinks I want to have a friggin' blog on their site. Um, no. I don't.

Since Matt was successful in hectoring her into starting a blog, maybe he can now persuade her to switch to Moveable Type.

Baghdad Bob is not dead. I repeat. Baghdad Bob is not dead.

The Vinman has found him. Turns out he's in exile in Detroit, and he's already found a new job.

Elvis Costello (one of my major early influences) on U2 (a nearly life-long influence):

"[ … ] when you watch U2 on a [ large ] stage they build something much bigger than themselves. All U2's songs are about love in one way or another. That's a very courageous thing to do. They let go of themselves and when they do a song like One the feeling is unbelievable. I saw seven U2 shows last year and I could not see them enough. Their shows were the only shows I've ever seen that work in an arena. Everything else is bullshit or a trip to the circus."

Via U2Log.

Ara Rubyan has a tip for reporters.

I think it would work for those covering city councils, too.

Ara's tax plan might meet a little more resistance.

I have this framed Elvis poster on a wall in my office. Bought it in Palmdale on a trip to Vegas a couple of years ago.  Haven't touched it since I hung it. I'm sitting at my computer, reading stuff. Nobody is in the house but me. There's no loud music. It's quiet. No earthquakes or hurricanes in the area.

The damn thing just fell out of its frame.

That's gotta mean something, and I'm guessing it's not good.

My anniversary went by, and I didn't even notice ... April 14 marked one year.

When I read stuff like this (via Instapundit), it reminds me of a day in 1995 and I was sitting with a bunch of other journalists at the Society of Professional Journalist convention and saying, "You know what's great about the internet? It gives democracy back to the people. It's going to bring back the age of pamphleteering."

Everybody nodded and slapped their theighs and said, "By God, you're right." But if I had been smarter, I would have started a blog then.

I've been a little giddy all afternoon. Tony Pierce gave me a bit of a staring role in one of his posts. It's a dream come true. Pierce is big time, man.

perhaps you have read howard's wonderful blog that not only sports some level-headed political thought, but great design, and the courage to publish ones own poetry. i admire achievements like those since i dont have the fortitude or ability to do any of those things.

How nice. And Tony sells himself short. He publishes poetry every day. It just looks like prose.

He even provides a poetic  photo essay.

We had a great time, of course. And my wife didn't mind at all having me, Matt and Tony going on and on about Fred McGriff's feebleness, how to pronounce Xavier Nady (it's X-avier, not Zavier), and whether to draft a catcher in the first round of a fantasy draft.

On the drive home, Billie praised Tony at least five times -- He's charming, he's witty, he's kind, he has a generous spirit, etc. She thinks Tony and Matt are both fine men. And they are.

Ballgames are always enjoyable when you're with good people.

I don't think enough people read this post back when I wrote it. I expected Ken Layne to praise it as a damn fine piece of writing, but I don't think he read it. Later, I learned he was down in South America some where doing some dirty deed for the CIA or something at the time I posted the story originally.

Of course, I have more regular readers now, when I'm past 1180 posts, then I was at 271 posts. So why not repost something.

Especially when I finally get a picture of the truck that proves it's all true.

I've only been to Tennessee once. That was in 1995. Billie and I flew into Nashville, stayed with a friend for a couple of days. Then we made our pilgrimage. In our rented Cadillac, we drove down the 40 to Memphis. Graceland. Sun Studio. Beale Street. The cradle of Western Civilization.

Pictured is the Elvis Shrine that has grown next to my desk at work. It started as a simple Elvis doll, which I bought at Graceland. A co-worked decided Elvis wasn't properly housed, so he constructed the shrine you see here. Immediately, other staffers began adding their Elvis-related items. The shrine still grows. The latest additions come from Bob Benz, another one of those Knoxville-based bloggers, and also a boss of sorts.

Being a boss of sorts, when he suggested that I need to make a trip to Knoxville, it wasn't long before I was booking a flight. I'll be in Instaville later in May.

No time, this trip, for a quick swing down to Memphis, but I will be flying into Nashville. Unfortunately, I'll be on the company chit, so I won't be able to rent a Cadillac this time. Somehow, it seems downright sinful to drive through Tennessee in anything other than a Cadillac, but I guess I'll manage.

Men get haircuts. Men do not get hairstylings.  Men go to barbershops. Barbershops smell of Vitalis and tonic, have back issues of Sports Illustrated and Field and Stream strewn about and Sinatra or Martin on the radio.

I haven't had anyone but a proper barber cut my hair for more than a decade.

When I lived in Spring Valley, I regularly went to Norm's in Lemon Grove. It was, in every manner, a real barbershop. Five bucks for a haircut, which included a straight-edged razor around your ears and on your neck (the only effective way to get the short hairs) and an electric hand massage on your neck and shoulders at the end, and for another five bucks you could get a hot-towelled, lathery shave.

That kind of service isn't available in any Ventura barbershop. But I like my barber just fine.

My barber is Phil. Phil has rounded the corner on 90, but still opens up his shop six days a week. It's the same shop, in the same location, that he took over in 1945, right after he returned from the war in Europe. The previous owner opened the shop right after the Great War. In other words, over the last 90 years, there's been a one barbershop at the corner of Ventura Avenue and Main Street and only two barbers have cut hair there.

Phil's shop is filled with the memorabilia of his life -- pictures of him as a young ball player, a ticket stub from the 1966 World Series, family snapshops, various tools and hunting paraphernalia, a crock's head, bulls horns, cups, shotglasses and mugs from places his visited and items customers have given him over the years.

Phil loves music. We share a passion for Louis Prima. Phil vacations every year in Vegas (BTW: still married to the same wife all these years, and she loves Vegas, too). He'll talk local history with me, politics (we're pretty aligned) and baseball. Phil has been cutting my hair for more than four years now. I just try not to go on my lunch hour any more. Getting a haircut from Phil usually takes at least 20 minutes, and if we talk a lot, 45 minutes. And there's usually a customer or two waiting ahead of me.

A few months ago, I sat in the chair with Phil cutting my hair when one of his long-time customers came in. He was 70. He brought a friend, a retired fisherman. He as 102. It isn't often these days that I'm the youngest guy in the room, and I made it by a couple of decades. It felt like church talking with these wise old men.

Phil recently took two months off for rotator cuff surgery. Yesterday I asked him how he felt.  "Great," he said. "Do you have your fastball back?" I asked. "No," he said with a laugh, "but my curve is coming along well."

Phil's a great guy. Phil is the reason men go to barbers.

Journalist are trained, supposedly, to report the facts and not pass value judgments on the news.

If a person says, "I'm against this war," we (well, I'm really no longer part of the "we") are supposed to report that fact. "John Smith is against the war, he said." Reporters shouldn't write, "While John Smith says he is against the war, we don't really know if that what he truly believes."

Of course, there are whole seminar courses in J-schools on "What is Objectivity." It's as much a philosophical discussion and a vocational one. One man's objectivity is another man's bias.

I think by and large, most professional reporters do their best to provide straightforward, honest news coverage. The biases that sneak in are more a product of the natural tendency to see the world through the indoctrination of one's own background than a conscious effort to distort. News reporting is about choosing which facts are the most important, and that is, at the end of the day, a value judgment, and no value judgment is made in a vacuum.

That being said, journalist covering dictatorships have some real hard ethical questions they need to answer.

Much has been made of the CNN dust up and the admission that the cable network compromised its news coverage of Iraq in order to ensure it had a presence in Baghdad.

That is a glaring example of bad news judgment, where a news organization decided to sacrifice its commitment to providing truthful news coverage to its own corporate, profit-driven interest. And if you think this wasn't a profit-driven decision by CNN, to what other end might CNN have made this compromise? A commitment to getting the news story in Baghdad? If so, it was a commitment to report a lie. No matter how truthful might have thought the individual reports in Baghdad were, each report was, in fact, a colossal lie predicated on the fact that the real truth about Saddam's regime was being suppressed -- and we were even being given a hint that it was being suppressed.

But the journalist lies told during this war do not begin and end with CNN. The lies were many and manifold. As Dean Esmay points out (via Instapundit), Nick Kristof told a whopper that was only slightly mitigated by his later disclaimers in his column.

The NYT summary (column now only available for payment of an archive fee):

ABSTRACT - Nicholas D Kristof column says he has concluded from interviews with scores of ordinary people in Iraq that Iraqis dislike and distrust Saddam Hussein, but they hate United States even more and are even more distrustful of American intentions; says while he found few people willing to fight for Hussein, he encountered plenty of nationalists willing to defend Iraq against Yankee invaders; says if Saddam thinks average Iraqi is going to miss him, he is deluded, but if Pres Bush thinks invasion and occupation will go smoothly because Iraqis will welcome Americans, then he too is deluded ...

As we now know, the opposition to the U.S. led invasion was, among the general Iraqi population, shallow at best. In the same column, Kristof admits that the people he talked to were forbidden to talk freely.

Kristof was not the only journalist to fall into this trap. In the weeks leading up to the war, there were several news accounts with quotes from Iraqis -- we don't want this war; we hate Bush; we hate Americans, etc. I took each of those reports with a grain of salt, knowing that no Iraqi had the freedom to say, "Come and rescue us, please," which we know now was the prevailing sentiment of the Iraqi people. But I also saw anti-war leftists propping up their ludicrous anti-war arguments with statements about how we wouldn't be greeted as liberators, how the Iraqi people loved Saddam Hussein and what folly it was to think our soldiers would be hailed with flowers and hugs.

Clearly, the anti-war propaganda the media handed to Saddam Hussein had its intended effect -- to confuse the debate and give ammo to his supporters in the anti-war crowd.

So my question is, if the people living in a dictatorship are unable to freely speak their mind, what good does it do to even report their remarks? Even if you provide a disclaimer that your sources are being monitored by men who will kill them if they misspeak, is it ethical to even quote these people?

What, after all, is the news value in quotes and opinions from people who have no chance of saying what they really think?

Clearly, remarks given under duress are of no news value. The real news of such an interview is that the person was unable to speak freely because of retribution that would be sure and swift if he did.

Reporters covering dictatorships need to realize that the higher ethical calling is not to parrot the regime's line, but to either insist on providing the unvarnished truth or get out of the country. To report only what a dictator wishes is not news; it is, instead, turning such controled news organizations into the puppets of monsters.

I hate spam, and I applaud AOL. UCE has become a plague on the internet and more needs to be done to fight it. Here's to hoping AOL's suit will be successful. May every one of these spamming asswholes be driven out of business and into the poorhouse.

Both because I thought some improvements were in order, and because I've had some requests for changes ... I've done a little upgrade to the comments section of this site.

• I've increased the size of comments. Perviously, you were limited to 4,000 characters. I've increased it to 8,000.
• I've added a counter to tell you how many more characters you can type into the comments field before you've typed too many. Call this the "Matt Welch" upgrade (he was the first of three friends to get screwed by the old code, which would let you write longwinded posts, then through an error because it was too long, causing to lose all your good words).
• I've added the ability for you to opt-out of getting e-mail notifications of new comments being added in that thread. Keep in mind, you are automatically going to continue to get notification of comments you've participated in up to this point (if any new comments are added to the thread), and the opt-out works only for each individual thread ... if you opt-out of one, it doesn't mean you've opted out of all of them.
• I've changed the pop-up for comments so that it opens in the center of your screen, and it is a slightly larger window.
• I've done away with the requirement for a subject line on comments.

So, I hope you guys like the changes.

Yesterday I posted a little story about Isaac Cubillos, the former Daily Californian clerk who is now editor of the East County Californian.

Isaac responds:

Hello Howard,

It's good to hear from you and I hope all is well with you and Billie.... please give her my best. I think of you guys often, you are special people that touched my life very deeply.

I found your site by accident a few months ago and now read the it periodically.

------

For a couple of months, I was coming across stories of interest for East County which I was sending to Jay Harn, the publisher and editor of the East County California. I've known Jay for about five years and never really had a chance to write for him until recently. I learned that the news editor was leaving to become a teacher. So, I applied for the position and was hired on a "let's see if it works out" basis. As it turns out Jay left a week later while I was still in training. It left the new owners of nine-months without someone to oversee the news side of the house. The swift "promotion" to editor came before I could even get my feet wet as news editor.

The community (East County) still remembers the old daily and I still hear from residents say they miss and loved that old paper. You, Billie, Vince, and the others in the '80s and '90s created that tone and admiration from the readership. It's a very big, big shoe to fill for all of us here at the weekly.

In the two editorial meetings we've held, I've shared with the crew old copies of the daily which I still have and the significant role your generation of reporters, stringers and photographers played in the community.

We will work very hard to bring back some small piece of that legacy.

I was very privileged and humbled to have known and learned from all of you.

-----------

I read the piece you wrote on your site about me and want to correct some errors and misinformation that still lingers which you've picked up. There are something things I don't remember before '93. It's like I suffered a small stroke back then. Some things I do recall however.

I remember reading Jo Moreland's piece about the arrest where she quoted some investigator saying that they found me through reading the paper. I've covered enough criminal cases to learn, some cops don't always tell the truth or, at times, stretch it to fit their case. The chief investigator on my case, (not quoted by Moreland) a guy named Madden, who said he was the brother to Coach John Madden, was well aware of where I was, where I lived and worked (he came by several times in his little white government car.) For a while, I kept his card he gave me almost six months before. This info was available to Jo as public record, if she wanted to get the facts correct.

As for the reason why I was clerking.... The case was a big deal (and public) at least six months before I became a temp. I was expecting, as I were my attorneys, to get a day and time to turn myself in. Months went by and nothing. I got tired of sitting at home waiting so I took the temp job, knowing it would be temporary. I remember Vince wanting to buy my temp contract out and cautioned him that I was only going to be there only a brief time. I said the same to Paul Zindell who was taking some of my hours each day to work on building and maintaining spreadsheets for him on the business side of the building.

I did not work on a prison paper. There are no prison papers in California prisons anymore. This dis-information was fabricated by some East County people angered by some of my stories published in La Prensa. Unfortunately, it was reported in the UT, which of course, never bothered to check the facts since they were using their "reliable sources."

There is no "studying" that goes on in prison, unless your getting a GED which instruction is sporadic at best. Oh yes, there are other kinds of studying going on behind the walls, but journalism certainly isn't one of them. Prison, is where you experience two deaths, one of the spirit and the other civic. It is also a place where one can have an epiphany and rebirth can occur.

Two months after release, I started writing for La Prensa San Diego, an English-language newspaper located in Hillcrest.

At the same time, I was a volunteer at the Sacramento-based nonprofit legal defense group Prisoners' Rights Union. It was founded by a priest-turned-lawyer and his parishioners in the '60s. I later became and officer of the nonprofit. I was ad hoc consultant for the Friends Committee on Legislation, analyzing prison bills, and helping to rewrite some suggested bills for a legislator here in San Diego. When the PRU's legal issues editor left. I helped put three issues together for them.

I left La Prensa in 1997, when the publisher wanted me to put some erroneous figures in a story about the Grossmont College budget. I told him I wouldn't do so, and walked out and never returned. I have great admiration for his work as one of the old Chicano Movement "veteranos", but, I would not compromise my work since I know I am one of the most scrutinized reporters in town, specifically because of my past.

I learned a lot from that old man, and love him dearly for the education in street journalism he taught me. "Take off those blue eyes and see through the brown ones God gave you goddammit." Today, the rift between us is too great to cross, I'm sad to say, over that one issue of wanting me to lie in a story.

Over the years as you say, I've won a few awards, including one in 1999 by Hispanic Business magazine, naming me one of the top "100 Most Influential" Hispanics in the U.S. This was for creating the first Hispanic English DAILY news Web site beginning in 1994.

I didn't know that you and Steve Saint put together the original Web site. I will make a point of asking how to get that piece of history on the web page. I'm not sure yet who handles that since it's done elsewhere. Of course, there is lot that I don't know after I left the DC.

Speaking of history, I read your piece about the systematic dismantling of the daily by the owners. I asked what ever happened to the bound copies of the daily paper and the microfiche. It appears that in the final dismantling of the paper, the books and hard copies were tossed, fortunately the microfiche was donated to El Cajon Library.

Again, my very best to you and Billie.

Isaac

I don't know how much to read into this, but one of the best embedded television reporters in Iraq is Bob Arnot, a man who's background includes neither a journalism degree nor time reporting on a daily newspaper, but of all the teevee reporters covering this war, Arnot is the one who reminds me most of an Edward R. Morrow or a young Dan Rather.

Arnot isn't a reporter by training. He is a doctor.

His live reports are Hemingwayesque prose poems. Terse. Tight. To the point. He paints pictures in short, verb-packed sentences. He talks fast, but never hyperventilates or overplays the story (like, say, Geraldo). He gives you the facts with little opinion and hardly a trace of bias, except for an understandable admiration for the Marines he covers. When I heard about the plan to have embedded journalists cover this war, Arnot's reports, with the choppy video phone pictures direct from the front lines, is the kind of reporting I imagined we would get.

Part of what makes Arnot so good is that he seems fearless. He never files a report far from where the actual fighting is taking place. He stands in the middle of an open road or an open field and doesn't flinch. He describes bullet whizzing over his head as if he were telling us about standing on a subway platform as the 5:15 goes by. He is all about the story, not the face time or potential book deals waiting for him when he gets home. For Arnot, it is clearly the moment that matters most, and what that moment means for the men in his unit.

To me, that is just damn good journalism.

Sadly, few if any other reporters seem to take the same approach. In comparison, most reporters are lifeless and fail to capture the context the events they tell us about -- well after the fact. Arnot rarely files after the fact. Where most reporters keep their video phones focused on their photogenic mugs -- except for the rare interview -- Arnot is constantly directing his camera operator to zoom in on this artillery barrage, or that group of young Iraqi males milling about down the road, or the Marine snipers on a roof. Arnot puts the viewer right in the war instead of relying on second-hand summations.

They don't give Pulitizers' for broadcast coverage, but Arnot should get one just the same. Or at least an Emmy.

You can find Arnot on MSNBC.

In any newsroom the clerks play an important role in helping to fill newsholes, gather information and keep a hectic, chaotic office functional. Clerks file obits, keep the police blotter, input weather reports, sort mail, and (in pre-internet days) input letters to the editor. They work for low pay and often deal with scorn or benign indifference from the rest of the staff. At a small paper, few in the newsroom take as much crap as the clerks.

So is it any wonder that during my three years at the Daily Californian in El Cajon, Calif., we had a hell of a time keeping good clerks on staff?

It got so bad at one point that our editor, Vince Kern, took to hiring clerks from a temp service. And the first clerk placed with us by the temp agency was Isaac Cubillos. Isaac was a revelation. For a time, he was the best clerk we ever had. He dressed professionally and with flair; he was punctual and efficient. He was conscientious and devoted to his work. Hell, he even made the coffee every morning.

It wasn't long before Vince decided that he needed to hire Isaac away from the temp agency.

It wasn't long after that, however, that some of us started to get a feeling that all wasn't as it seemed. Isaac started taking longer lunches. A few tasks went undone from time to time. Once in a while we didn't get messages. Then one afternoon when he wasn't at his desk, I answered his phone: "Yes, I'm calling for your editor, Isaac Cubillos," the caller said. "Um, well, Isaac isn't our editor, but I'll take a message." The caller was some PR agent, a reasonable enough call for the clerk to get, and for the PR agent to be confused about his title.

But then we reporters started talking. That caller wasn't the first nor the last to refer to Isaac as the editor. (We would learn later that Isaac was telling PR agents he was editor and receiving free tickets to concerts and plays and other events.)

Vince laughed about it, but we wondered what was going on. We knew next to nothing about Isaac's true background. He was obviously educated, intelligent and cultured. Why was he clerking? None of us could figure it out.

Then Isaac did a good deed for a reader, and that proved to be his undoing. The reader wrote a letter to the editor, which Isaac dutifully typed into the system, and the op-ed editor published. It praised Isaac by name for his help with some trivial matter.

Not surprisingly, law enforcement detectives read our paper, and within 24 hours of that letter hitting print, two detectives arrived in our front lobby.

Isaac, it turns out, was wanted in some San Diego fraud case. Isaac wound up doing about 18 months in jail, but his short time at the Daily Californian changed his life. He was bitten by the journalism bug. In jail, he studied journalism and ran the prison newspaper.

Upon his release, he landed a staff writer job with a Spanish-language paper in Chula Vista. He did some fairly good pieces there, even winning some investigative journalism awards.

But that isn't the end of the story. As proof that life is forever filled with irony, I found out while in El Cajon this past Monday what Isaac is doing these days. Would you believe me if I told you that he is now EDITOR of The Californian, the weekly paper that succeeded our old employer?

Fiction has become reality.

I can't make this shit up, honest.

Of course, not a lot people would believe, probably, that journalism could reform a man, but all evidence suggests that at least in the case of Isaac, it worked. Maybe there is a lesson in that. Or maybe it's just an aberration.

BTW: The Californian should mention on it's "About Us" page that East County Online was founded in 1995 as one of the first three weekly papers in the nation with a web site. Furthermore, I wouldn't mind at all if it noted that the founder was Howard Owens and Steve Saint. I mean, if you're going to give the history of the company, why not give it all?

Here are my final predictions for the 2003 season, which begins today (HUZZA!)

NL West

1. San Francisco Giants
2. Arizona Diamondbacks
3. Los Angeles Dodgers
4. San Diego Padres
5. Colorado Rockies

NL Central

1. St. Louis Cardinals
2. Cincinnati Reds
3. Houston Astros
4. Chicago Cubs
5. Pittsburgh Pirates
6. Milwaukee Brewers

NL East

1. Atlanta Braves
2. Montreal Expos
3. Philadelphia Phillies
4. Florida Marlins
5. New York Mets

AL West

1. Oakland Athletics
2. Anaheim Angels
3. Texas Rangers
4. Seattle Mariners

AL Central

1. Minnesota Twins
2. Chicago White Sox
3. Detroit Tigers
4. Cleveland Indians
5. Kansas City Royals

AL East

1. New York Yankees
2. Boston Red Sox
3. Toronto Blue Jays
4. Baltimore Orioles
5. Tampa Bay Devil Rays

NL Champs: St. Louis Cardinals
AL Champs: Oakland A's

World Champs: St. Louis Cardinals

NL MVP: Albert Pujols, St. Louis
NL Cy Young: Roy Oswalt, Houston
NL Rookie: Xavier Nady, San Diego
Comback: Ken Griffey, Jr., Cincinnati

AL MVP: Alfonso Soriano, New York
AL Cy Young: Mark Muldar, Oakland
AL Rookie: Hideki Matsui, New York
Comeback: Frank Thomas, Chicago

Matt Welch gets his way, and Cathy "I'll never have a blog" Seipp has a blog.

 Gushing Chung canned.

Oops. Looks like who ever is in charge of putting CNN's promotional ads on its website isn't keeping up with the news.

It looks like howardowens.com has picked up a new reader ... Robin Roberts notes that he was born in Ventura County.  Want to know if that counts. For something.

Bombing of Baghdad ... and pursuitwatch.com calls me and notifies me of a police pursuit in LA.  Is there really an LA teevee station showing a car chase instead of the war?

This is funny ... a little fisking of my war blog:

Hometown paper the Ventura County Star is mysteriously getting a lot of MSNBC attention for its sophomoric weblog, which considers Fox News the greatest source of war info. It thinks it's cool because it uses warblogger words, like "fisking."

Let's see, I've never heard of this guy ... but I have heard of Jeff Jarvis.

High praise from Jeff Jarvis, which I appreciate.

When the deadline passes and war is about to start, you want your most serious journalist on the air, right? So, of course, Gushing Connie is on CNN right now.

I've created a war blog for InsideVC.com

Does that make me a paid, professional blogger?