Letters may be edited for clarity and length. E-mail to le*****@oc******.com, or send to Letters to the Editor, c/oOC Weekly, 1666 N. Main St., Ste. 500, Santa Ana, CA 92701. Or fax to (714) 550-5908.
SHE'S HOT
My “great ass” and I would like to thank you guys for the dubious honor of being named on the list [“Orange County's Sexiest People,” Feb. 6]. The rest of the Register gals (Blythe, Yvette and Zaheera) got a kick out of it, too. One oversight: Irvine reporter Laylan Connelly. She is by far the hottest chick here.
Katherine Nguyen
Via e-mail
Thank you for including PETA's Dan Mathews in “Orange County's Sexiest People.” You're right, Dan is hot! What's sexier than a cute guy who helps animals? Absolutely nothing. Thanks for being in touch with what really makes someone desirable.
Amanda Wood
Garden Grove
HE'S SCREWED
Editor's Note: The following letter is in response to our Feb. 6 Letters page in which we responded to a missive from Donna Locke of “Tennesseans for Immigration Reform” with: “Anyway, good luck with your big push for immigration reform. I imagine you have your hands full with all those fucking Kentuckians sneaking over the borders.”
My mother was a fucking Kentuckian, my grandmother was a fucking Kentuckian, and her parents and grandparents were fucking Kentuckians. We folks with roots in Kentucky take our fucking seriously, and to insinuate that any of us would even CONSIDER immigrating to the backwater of Tennessee is fightin' words! My mother immigrated to California, and married an immigrant from Macedonia and her brothers immigrated first to California, and then, in one case, to Colorado, before settling in Arizona. I am quite proud of my fucking ancestors, though the ones from Indiana are proving, through research, to have been a major pain in the ass.
Kiril Kundurazieff
Costa Mesa
HE LIKES
Sincere praise to Gustavo Arellano for his article on a Placentia history book that leaves out the seamier sides of the city's history [“Can You Say Eminent Domain,” Nov. 7]. I liked how he tied his piece to the city's current schemes to expunge the old Santa Fe neighborhood. My dad used to describe the vibrant life in the Santa Fe neighborhood back in the early 1970s. I suppose such is the nature of this so-called progress: replace something interesting with something bland and ordinary, like an overly immaculate planned neighborhood. I also enjoyed Nick Schou's playful spin on KFI's decision to replace George Noory with the obnoxious John Ziegler [“Alien Cover-up Scores Victory,” Jan. 30]. I do think that there is a conspiracy at KFI to replace all that is cool on their station with lame, cookie-cutter conservatives.
Mike K.
Riverside County
MARKET ANALYSIS
Jim Washburn's article “The Wall-to-Wal-Martization of American Life” [Jan. 30] exposed embarrassing ignorance of simple economics and operation of the free-market system. Wal-Mart is the embodiment of efficient production: economy of scale. Those who mourn the demise of small businesses forget that small-scale operations are more costly and less efficient. We get more value for our dollars by supporting more-efficient (often larger) operations. That's one factor that led to three major U.S. car manufacturers from the dozens which existed in the early days. If you spend less money on products by shopping at a superstore like Wal-Mart, you'll have more money to spend on OTHER products, which support other workers. It's not as if the money you save doesn't get spent somewhere. Those who condemn Wal-Mart are typically anti-business and champion the “rights” of the underclass. Have you ever been to a Wal-Mart? Notice anything about who the majority of the shoppers are? Those low on the income totem pole are their biggest customers. Wal-Mart single-handedly raises the standard of living of low-wage earners!
Bryan Galbreath
Orange
Jim Washburn responds:Here's some even simpler economics—as a consumer, I choose not to do business with companies creating a predatory future I don't want to live in. Yes, the Wal-Mart model is efficient. So are slavery and ant colonies. I should note that your original letter—edited so we'd have some room for articles—claimed Wal-Mart benefits workers in other countries who “choose” to work for Wal-Mart suppliers because it's such a swell opportunity. But many of those workers, like ones here at home, aren't in jobs created by Wal-Mart, but in ones only made harder by their demands. Others are forced to seek factory work after their forests and farms are seized by businesses. So they “choose” 90-hour, gruel-paying jobs in slave-like conditions upon threat of losing even that to workers in other countries as Wal-Mart shops the world to pit the desperate against the yet-more desperate. And at home? They have indeed broken the law, compelling unpaid overtime from already underpaid workers, among other lapses. I'm not suggesting that government stop Wal-Mart—though they should stop giving them whopping tax breaks and incentives not allowed their smaller competitors—but that, just as free-market conservatives argue, the ultimate check-and-balance on business is consumers making informed choices about where they spend their dollars. And Wal-Mart has seen the last of mine.
While I applaud your efforts to publicize the Jan. 28 protest in Long Beach [Nick Schou's “This Little Piggy Whores for Markets,” Feb. 6], characterizing the Los Angeles Times' coverage of the supermarket strike as “pro-management” seems off the mark. You refer to one op-ed piece that was indeed pro-management but neglect to mention the many editorials and letters to the editor that have expressed different views. Also, that the paper ran stories detailing the salaries of both labor leaders (excessive) and supermarket executives (outrageous) on the same page seems fair enough. It's up to the readers to then connect the dots.
Matthew Woods
Via e-mail
Nick Schou responds: I agree that it's up to theTimes readership to connect the dots in the paper's coverage—and in this case, lack thereof—of the supermarket strike. As a member of that readership, that's exactly what I did—connect the dots.
