They don’t ask for much - just a good story now and then. Sometimes, a lot of the time, they may not be able to ask, but you can see it in their eyes. Tired eyes that are saying “I can’t make out the words anymore.”
A little more than one month from now, the Metro Expo Line’s final portion will open for business, making it possible to take trains from the far eastern portions of Los Angeles County to the often-crowded beach in Santa Monica. This will come barely two months after a new section of Metro’s Gold Line opened, allowing a simple, cheap 31-mile jaunt from downtown Los Angeles to Azusa. Barely any protests have afflicted any of these projects, which together will have cost many billions of dollars.
Watch the primary election process now playing out both nationally and in California, and you almost have to wonder whether the state and national wings of the Republican Party have made a suicide pact.
My column last week concerning the dust-up between the FBI and Apple over access to the data contained on the phone of Syed Rizwan Farook, the male perpetrator in the San Bernardino killings, brought interesting reader responses from divergent viewpoints. One comment included the confirmation that I am not the only person in Santa Monica still using a flip-phone and highlighted that cell phones might not be operating in a disaster when land lines might still be working.
Just a few months ago, it seemed as if the November election might produce the silliest “silly season” ever seen in modern California politics. But the essential good sense of shoppers around the state appears to have prevented that.
OpEd: That’s my new t-shirt line: “All ‘ism’s Matter” printed on 100% Fair Trade cotton by union workers who all get the same pay, male or female, and are offered healthy vegan options at lunch that never include dolphin.
The next generation of computers, or “quantum computers,” will promise greater power and faster processing speeds once they can draw their computing power from super-cooled molecules, according to the January 29 meeting of the Santa Monica Rotary Club.
OpEd: There’s probably no hope of stopping the revolving door in Washington, D.C. anytime soon. The constant cycle of longtime Congress members and senators moving downtown from the Capitol to take high-paying jobs as lobbyists can only be ended by Congress itself.