Why Did More Than 95,000 People Vote to Hand Over the County Clerk-Recorder Job to a Convicted Ketchup-Bottle Thief?

On June 5, the voters of Orange County collectively voted to give another four years in office to incumbent OC Clerk-Recorder Hugh Nguyen. In 2014, after winning his first race, Nguyen became the nation’s first Vietnamese-American clerk-recorder in U.S. history. A moderate Republican, he extended his department’s operating hours to include one Saturday per month—thus …

Rhinestones and Twanging Tones Revisits the Flashiest Era in Country Music

The old adage “never judge a book by its cover” probably doesn’t mean much to anybody who values classic country, especially during the era of the Nudie suit. Popularized during the ‘60s and ‘70s, these bold, bedazzled articles of wearable art designed by Russian immigrant Nudie Cohn are nothing if not the finest cover known …

Still Lost in OC: Once-Old Weekling Is Still Old, Still Protesting

“Tonight, I shall make the moon disappear!” If I were Donald Trump’s speechwriter, that would have been the sole promise of his State of the Union speech, followed by 80 minutes of Kentucky Fried Chicken farts, to keep his base happy until they were cowering at his might under the smudgy Super Blue Blood Moon. …

OC Register Beats LA Times One Final Time in their 100 Years’ OC Newspaper War

Today, attorneys representing the Orange County Register will ask a bankruptcy judge in federal court to let Freedom Communications sell its assets to Digital First Media instead of Tribune Publications. The Reg will argue that they don’t expect Tribune to beat an anti-trust lawsuit filed by the feds after Tribune won an auction last week for …

Rose Apodaca Remembers Her Onetime Weekly Column, “La Vie En Rose”

Rose Apodaca wrote La Vie en Rose from 1995 to 1998 before moving on to the big time in LA. Her columns are missing from the Weekly's online archives—sorry, Rose! Posing a naked woman and man on the front cover with their guitars standing in for fig leaves. Calling out the local billion-dollar board-sports industry …

OC Weekly Founder Will Swaim on OC as a Place of Grace, Not an Intelligentsia Joke

Will Swaim is the founding editor of OC Weekly and currently vice president of journalism for the Franklin Center for Government & Public Integrity. Call him Guillermo. So these two frantic, bewhiskered woodsmen hack their way out the back window of the snowbound cabin in which they've been trapped for days—stuck inside this little hut …

An Oral History of OC Weekly, Part 2: September 2000-September 2005

The Weekly began its second five years in September 2000 with a new ownership group. In two months, a new president is elected—kind of. In one year, two buildings fall in New York, and the build-up to wars in Afghanistan and Iraq would follow, and then the bombs rain. But through the national and international …

An Oral History of OC Weekly, Part 1: Sept. 15, 1995-Sept. 2000

Stern Publishing—owned by Leonard Stern, a pet-food magnate whose Hartz Mountain corporation controlled 70 percent of the pet-supply market—bought the Village Voice, the nation's oldest alternative weekly, in 1983. In 1994, Stern purchased the LA Weekly, which then set its sights on Orange County. . . . Michael Sigman, LA Weekly/OC Weekly publisher, 1983-2002: The …