Not to take anything away from the Weekly brain trust that tapped into the minds and typing fingers of Exene Cervenka, Jack Grisham and Riley Breckenridge for regular columns, but the Orange County Register really scored enlisting prolific NBA scorer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Already a best-selling author, Abdul-Jabbar taps into his deep knowledge of sports, music, film and television; race relations; African-American history; and more for the Register's Sunday Life section. Among the topics he's covered in the Santa Ana daily are Blaxploitation films, graphic novels, celebrity gossip, cheating in sports and his very own California mixtape. Even when joking around on camera, Abdul-Jabbar can give off a brooding vibe, which we'd chalk up to a combination of shyness, his height and being a highly intelligent black man in a white country. But Kareem's inner warmth, compassion and love of humanity truly comes through in his writing, which we can only hope rubs off on other Register scribes.
