Contact us via e-mail (le*****@oc******.com), regular mail (Letters to the Editor, OC Weekly, P.O. Box 10788, Costa Mesa, CA 92627) or fax (714-708-8410). Letters will be edited for clarity and length. All correspondence must include your home city and a daytime phone number.
HE'S EXCITED!
I just LOVE the county's new “Just the Facts” effort (Anthony Pignataro's “'Excited!'” July 27)! Now they're emphasizing the “El Toro airport park”! Just wonderful! Acres of green, rolling meadows and play fields, replete with children frolicking in joyful abandon, with 747s thundering 100 to 500 feet overhead every three to five minutes! And lest we forget, the sounds of home prices and school scores plummeting down, down, down through the murky gray skies! My county tax dollars at work!
Michael Smith
Mission Viejo BIRCHER
How beautifully black and white the world of Cornel Bonca is. There are no nuances; people are either “Far Right” (i.e., wrong) or liberal (i.e., right). As usual, the Left (i.e., Cornel) got the facts wrong. How much easier life turns out to be when you can think with your belly rather than your head, isn't it, Cornel? I would like to make a few suggestions and corrections: (1) You claim that you “have to live in Orange County.” Why is that? There might be friendlier places for you, e.g., Santa Monica, San Francisco, New York, etc., etc. (2) Were you referring to the John Birch Society when you say “Bircher”? Or could it possibly be that Mr. Bircher is an even more radical version of Mr. Birch?
Manfred Schneider
via e-mail A person chosen at random from the White Pages responds: I don't know this Cornel person, but I'm guessing that when he says he “has” to live here, he means, naturally, that he “chooses” to live here, even if doing so means he has to put up with assholes who believe they're thinking when they cobble together prefabricated phrases such as “As usual, the Left.”STILL WITH THE DOLLS!
Cleveland, Ohio, 1968. I was a transfixed 11-year-old boy watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like the hominid in the movie, I threw a bone in the air; unlike his, my bone didn't turn into a spaceship. But when mine came down, it was July 2001, and I was eating lunch at Cafe Pinehill in Santa Ana while reading Lisa Boosin's article on state-of-the-art love dolls (“Unreal Doll,” July 6). As I read along, I had to shake off creeping weirdies of being in Boosin's place as she groped the highly detailed merchandise at Abyss Creations. Sure, I could think of countless other ways to blow six grand, but for every person who says he wouldn't buy a Real Doll (or anything else), there's a person who will. Catering to a distinctive niche, indeed. After watching the future robot world of A.I., I wonder if in about a hundred years, the Weekly will do an expos on enhanced robots like Gigolo Joe. Whoever writes that article will take in-depth reporting to new highs (or lows).
M. Alexander
Yorba LindaDOLE TOP BANANAS
Anthony Pignataro's response to letter writer Paul Studier is right on (Letters, July 27)! Let's get rid of subsidies for oil companies (read: your tax dollars helping out Bush's oil buddies) and all forms of corporate welfare. It is horrendous that our money is taken from us by force and then given to millionaires and billion-dollar corporations—like they need to be on the dole. I'm all for free markets, but what we have now is crony-capitalism: powerful politicians elected by wealthy donors who stand to gain from having their boy (or girl) in office, writing laws and regulations that favor their industry or hurt their competitors. I wonder what kind of energy options we would have today if oil companies had to deal with a truly level playing field AND if the just-forming wind and battery industries weren't set back 20 years when subsidized power lines were connected to the industrious but isolated communities who were successfully developing alternatives.
Doug Scribner
Vice Chairman, OC Libertarian PartyGAIA BASHING
If scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis, is right, the earth is like a self-regulating organism. If human participation in that self-regulation is possible, then not only is Lovelock's support of nuclear power a logical alternative to the burning of fossil fuel (which it is), but that support could also be a potential example of a human role in Gaia's self-regulation. If that is true, then OC Weekly is the anti-Gaia: by engaging in sensationalist nuclear-windmill-tilting (the most recent example being Nick Schou's “Anti-Nuclear War,” July 27), the Weekly continues to spread ideas that—no matter how distorted or inaccurate—are bound to resonate at a purely emotional level with some of the more gullible members of society. The fact that some of the gullible are also vocal will almost certainly guarantee that the (air pollution, acid rain, global warming, etc.) misery will be prolonged.
Richard Boyer
via e-mailCLARIFICATION
Wow, so much for the “moron machine” to catch spelling errors on front-page headlines (“True Tales From OC Amublances,” July 20). Maybe the economy shift and unemployment rate hasn't trickled down to OC employees, or maybe your editor was being transported in an “amublance” for head injuries.
Russ [no last name]
Newport Beach A proofreader responds: “Amublances” comes from the roots “amu” (magical [as in “amulet”]) and “blanch” (to make white [from the Old French, blanchir]). It is the antithesis of black magic and is used often in reversing curses, fighting satanic worship and the like. Because of a production error, we ran Victor D. Infante's story about paramedics rather than Todd Mathews' story about the good witches of Orange County. We regret the error.
