Recently in Navel gazing Category

"Walt's a savage!," reporter Robert S. Hong declares after spending a day careening around No Man's Land. It's a label of respect from Robert after seeing the gadget-dripping man in action.

That characterization would strike the many who've met veteran Star-News photographer Walt Mancini as unlikely, however. Good-hearted, generous and kind are the labels usually with the easy-going Pasadenan.

But don't be fooled. He's a fearless, steel-nerved photojournalist and if you try to tell him not to take a picture ... well ... I don't recommend it.

"Just when I think I'm out, they keep pulling me back in."

Because I missed losing half of the most frenetic day in the newsroom ... and because Producer Stuart Johnson made with the puppy-dog eyes, I joined the fine people of KPAS to appear on the new City Beat with the inimitable likes of Tami DeVine, Barry Gordon and Steve Madison of District 6.

Topics included Pasadena Heritage's bid to designate the Central and Lower Arroyo a protected cultural landscape, the YAC and -- as much as I wished otherwise -- Measure D.

City Beat airs on cable channel 55 and streams throughout the week.

At least one thing is right:

Article missed that Yuki trained as a pharmacist in Japan and then applied the principles and knowledge to preparing healthy food with medicinal qualities.

In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to hustle up Fair Oaks early Monday morning to talk to Pastor John McCall while cultivating a cozy internal temperature of 103 degrees.

I'm told today is Thursday. Every moment since Monday afternoon has been a fevered blur and my every slow-stewed sinew aches. In a typical year, only one major malady strikes, but this is like the fourth time since last summer. Janette Williams suggests my plague runs deep and only goes dormant from time to time. But she's Scottish and thus holds many strange, pagan beliefs.

When she stands in as editor, Janette enforces deadlines with cautionary tales of the Kelpie, a "treacherous water-devil who lurks in lakes and rivers."

"If you ever put me on your f*-ing blog again, I'll f*-ing find you!"

Not what I expected to hear on my way over to Europane for some lunch with reporter Molly Okeon.

The source of this threat-so-chilling? None other than Weekly staffer Carl Kozlowski, demonstrating the jocular gaiety that earned him "America's Funniest Reporter," or at least, the domain name.

So much for a sense of humor. Especially the day after his story about NYE on the Boulevard ran with a photo provided gratis by your humble narrator.

UPDATED: Molly R. Okeon threatens to threaten me for excluding her beloved "R."

Hugh Hoyland is angry.

In fact, the Monrovian could be one of the angriest men in the San Gabriel Valley. For decades, no one has listened to his simply presented evidence of greater truths. In fact, many reasonable, yet timid, minds have turned their backs on what is irrefutably the most important issue of the human race.

Much to Hugh's abiding dismay and disapprobation.

On Tuesday, Hugh threw wide the newsroom door, shouted something incoherent (except for the word "myopic") and stormed out.

Long before I worked for the Star-News, stories of the infamous "Mars Man" reached me via my JPLer father and the odd media account. The Mars Man would stand in front of the lab and show up at various events with his placards mounted with photos of the Mars Face and other irrefutable evidence of Little Green Men.

So it was something of a personal treat when Hugh Hoyland camped out in front of the newsroom for 10 days or so last year. He never articulated the purpose of his silent stand, but it seemed a safe assumption that he was sending a message to science reporter Elise Kleeman that her shilling for the corporate-space-Martian-government complex's lies were not going unnoticed.

I wanted to believe, until I walked out to speak to Hugh. Insisting that I wasn't getting close enough to see the truth of his pixelated images, Hugh began screaming when I made a terrible mistake. I smiled at him.

"Laughing? Laughing?!! Just get away from me!" Hugh screamed.

In the ensuing months, Hugh has taken to sending all sorts of affectionate messages to Elise, including the above amiable sentiment.

It's been a big one for the weak's Andre Coleman.

Who knew getting hitched would only be eclipsed by the imprimatur from readers of proctorformayor.com, declaring him the most awesome of Pasadena-area reporters? Mr. 11.2% declares your humble, AP-style-adhering narrator as Mr. 49.7 percent.

Coleman: Don't underestimate my determined, underdog rage. I feel a montage coming on ...

What a bunch of goofs. My Special Day Song is always a hit.

Because I'm hoping beyond hope that Exalted Chairman Tim Brick will return my call for a watery story today, I'm not above calling attention to a recent article to which he hoped attention would be called:

Landscape Architecture, the glossy monthly magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects, this month features the Arroyo Seco as an outstanding example of urban stream restoration efforts. The article stars landscape architects Lynne Dwyer and Rosa Laveaga and prominently highlights the role of the Arroyo Seco Foundation.

Linda McIntyre, the article's author, details recent restoration programs in Pasadena's Central Arroyo and puts them in the context of the larger watershed restoration program and the revitalization of the Los Angeles River.

UPDATED: Tim called two minutes into my conversation with Nancy Long at Pasadena Water and Power. You see, on days like today, none of my morning calls end up returned until late afternoon. And when they do, everyone calls at once. For this reason, I disseminate my office extension (one line only), my work-sponsored cell phone and personal cell phone numbers.

"We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold ..."

With state line looming before me, I'm leveraging some Blackberry action to file a story and do some live vacation blogging. I haven't been able to participate in the family anti-tradition for a few years: Drinking and gambling in Las Vegas.

It's always a fun drive out and a miserable, interminable crawl home. My brother's driving is making me sick. He'll leave a smart comment when he reads this.

I think I'm getting sick. Listening to my congestion yesterday, Mayor Bogaard suggested Brandy. Let the medication begin.

You know the drill ... the system behind the blog was working fine so management decided to "upgrade" it to a newer version, and now many features are broken. Like comments.

So no points for guessing what day the random weekend story about the Pasadena Paranormal Research Society was supposed to run? We're only as good as the bodies in the room, and mine was in bed much of last week.

Flaming apocalypse, eternal twilight war, UUT, global meltdown, Chinese Rose Parade ... now "How to Make a
Gothic Fairy Costume" as prominently linked courtesy of my "iGoogle" news as today's "How To:"

4. Buy or put together your outfit. Use Walmart, Kmart, and thrift stores to your advantage, but don't forget about your own closet. In a pinch the basic black dress that accompanies most witch and vampire costumes will work as a base. ... 9. Wear bold jewelry that doesn't compete with your makeup. Chains and oversized rings are good. Anything occult-looking, like dragons or pentacles, is fun to add to a goth fairy costume. Don't forget hair ornaments, especially if you didn't put colored streaks in your hair.

Other Wiki-How-To's:

How to Be a Corpse Bride for Halloween: "Corpse brides are the perfect thing for Halloween!"

How to Be a Gothic Lolita: "Here's how to not only dress like but be Gothic Lolita"

How to be Goth: "Consider Europe. Goth is still taken seriously there."

Amen.

It's something of a point of pride that I rarely need to draft any "Corrections" or "Clarifications."

The only one I can recall this year was a story misstating the end of former D1 Joyce Streator's term, but that actually might have been in '06.

An off-site editor's attempt to clean up what an admittedly a poorly constructed second paragraph (we call it the "nut graf") changed the meaning to state the City Council went ahead with the emergency declaration. My original construction had something about "poised" to declare an emergency which got changed to "approved."

Fortunately the correx will read "Due to an editing error." You know it was the reporter's gaffe when it reads "Due to a reporting error."

Anyhoo, today's story is posted below with my own note inserted.

There is no copyright on information -- it just is. I do chuckle and sigh, however, every time I see someone copy-paste specific facts lifted directly from my stories.

I'm glad people read our web updates online, especially when they show up on other folks' web pages an hour later. But when they insist on pretending it was their work ... well ... maybe they could help subsidize my paycheck? Believe it or don't, I work pretty hard to cultivate relationships and sources to have an idea of what's going on and get it in the paper and/or on our web site.

Some of us don't wait for press releases to rewrite into a 'story' ... we go out and leverage the relationships we have, the knowledge of who knows what (and how), and experience to ask the right questions of the right people.

Most professional media organizations understand the nature of the work and the why it's important to give credit. From time to time, we'll reference something as "according to the Los Angeles Times" or "the Pasadena Weekly reported ... " And vice-versa.

Why? Because it's honest. It's not our job to deceive. Our business and profession is about straining for an honest representation of facts, not bending it for the sake of trying to look good.

Example: This report on the Rose Parade controversy from abc7.com, which was mostly based on my stories and gave credit when referencing my break of the Oct. 29 meeting:

The Pasadena Star-News reports today that the council will hold a special session Oct. 29 to air out the matter, and possibly take steps.

I don't expect that level of honesty from everyone, I'm just saying. For the record. <.<

Okay, it wasn't all work. I did drink deeply from the Weekly's bounty (read: open bar) last night.

Before it can be used against me ... yes ... that is in fact a pic of your humble host trying to get a taste of Big Carl, PW reporter.

Note to Proctor, this image will self-destruct with disastrous results if saved to your hard drive!!1 ;)

Wow there were some hot hot ads on the blog today that seem to have gotten the attention of management and been pulled.

I was going to say they were hotter than those at PasdenaWeekly.com, but after checking -- they were the same!

OK my excitement over the sexy sexy ads was perhaps ... premature. Turned out I had a trojan running that was swapping out ads on all sorts of pages with much sexier versions.

I'm still confused though, because I received two e-mails complaining about them ...

UPDATE: The trojan is running again, but I'm not about to call a tech. (LOL like we have any!)

So today's story about the Pasadena Enterprise Center is one of those that really should have been reported three months ago when the situation was playing out. I didn't know about it until some of the tenants -- in the dark and anxious about their livelihood -- contacted me with their concerns.

Although the story by Wednesday was ostensibly about the small business owners affected, the backstory is about how the innumerable nonprofits in Pasadena interoperate and compete for resources. The PEC was more or less an offshoot of the PDC, created as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit to manage the center's operations and finances. The PDC rented space, and by all appearances, engineered a hostile takeover of PEC, which took the unusual step of dissolving its legal status.

Still life with Church's chicken in margarita glass

Unfortunately my host's imperative precluded me from hearing the best political gossip, and I only caught some of the deep-dishing corners.

I had some cool schtuff to put up here over the weekend but the companion piece in print has yet to run.

UPDATED: I found my own personal Top-10 list as prepared by The Noticeable One:

TOP TEN ALTERNATE NAMES FOR TODD'S NEW PAD

10. Stalig 13
9. The Shaggin' Shack
8. Fort Awesome
7. Future Material for a Larry Wilson Article
6. Home of the Whopper
5. Heritage Square
4. Not Quite Xanadu
3. Gamble House 2: Electric Boogaloo
2. Pasadena Council District 6.5
1. 95% of his Paycheck

I'll keep doing this as long as one person is reading, but according to our web traffic, Under the Dome is the most-read blog among those published in our three-newspaper group (Whittier, Trib and Star-News). It's actually No. 4 -- the first three are our prep sports blogs, which draw a rabid brand of loyalty and interest.

For anyone who's joined recently, here's a random selection from the past eight months since the January 12 launch:

(queue the blur lines as Steve Keaton says "Remember the one time when Alex got arrested protesting for the ERA?")

After a particularly long council meeting, I said what everyone was thinking: (then) Councilman Paul Little really can talk.

Reviewed how the election campaign played out on the Internets.

Exposed former Councilman/Mayor Rick Cole's youthful over-exposure.

Paul Little demonstrated the commendable quality of being able to laugh at himself.

Witnessed a riveting election.

We waxed on the importance -- but difficulty -- writing about race-related issues.

Explored the Dark Side of the Moon Mayor.

Interjected some sex in response to one strip club's provocative political pitch.

Were surprised by developments on the PUSD school board.

Listened as Paul Little left on a musical note.

Pinned Councilman Chris Holden down on some tough questions.

The complete list.