Y2Carlin

Try to pin down comedy legend George Carlin on his personal politics, and he offers this philosophical nugget: “Everybody's fucked.” “I don't have any personal politics; I have beliefs,” Carlin said before hitting the road for a tour that stops by the Orange County Performing Arts Center on Sunday. “I don't see any sense in …

Wipe Out

Photo by Myles RobinsonFor at least one day during July's U.S. Open and Gotcha Pro surf contest, county officials allowed surfers to enter the waves at Huntington Beach, even though water tests showed bacterial levels at the beach exceeded state limits. Water-quality reports obtained by the Weekly show that on July 27, Orange County Sanitation …

With Friends Like These

No, it didn't feel right, lying facedown on the floor wearing nothing but my underwear and the blindfold I'd tied myself. Weird? Sure. But weird I could handle. Weird is standard operating procedure for sorority initiations. Already that week, my pledge class had been forced to sing and dance on tables while fraternity guys let …

An Incomplete History of Gay N Lesbian OC

3 MILLION B.C. The Pacific Ocean begins sculpting Laguna's famous gay West Street Beach. LATE 1700s Over 130 North American natives are documented to include among their tribes berdache, androgynous people classified as neither man nor woman—cross-dressers, basically, but in a spiritual sense. Berdache are plentiful among the Native Americans living at the missions that …

Forbes Play

A colleague at the Weekly World Headquarters had been surfing the Web, looking for the site of presidential hopeful Steve Forbes, when he stumbled upon a site put together by UC Davis students for the 1996 presidential primaries: PEP 96 (moby.ucdavis.edu/ GAWS/pep96). There, he found all sorts of links to Forbes' official 1996 campaign page. …

The Phantom Menace

On a humid March afternoon, U.S. Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) found herself in a rather uncomfortable position:squatting in the heat of a mosquito-filled jungle clearing in Cu Chi Province, a rugged, forested area located a few hours northwest of Ho Chi Minh City, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's sprawling southern metropolis. Sanchez hadn't come …

Kat Killers

It has been a month since officials of Orange County's troubled Animal Control department promised to end a highly controversial method of cat euthanization that often had horrific results. But recent reports from inside the shelter indicate that any rejoicing might have been premature. One shelter veteran described to the Weekly watching the recent euthanization …

The Starbucks Solution

Photo by Keith MayCraggy coffee beans, chipped and charred and blistered, are strewn like spent bullets across the top of a small wooden table at Polly's Gourmet Coffee. Mike Sheldrake is inspecting, arranging and considering them with the comfortable panache of a venerable gunslinger, simultaneously appalled and pleased and fascinated. Sheldrake is 51 years old, …

Changing the Cat Box

After years of pushing and prodding by animal activists, change may at last be coming to Orange County's troubled animal shelter, “an ill-run, bureaucratic relic,” in the words of one former employee, and the subject of a recent, highly critical Weekly cover story (“Pet Hell!” May 14). Officials have announced that no longer will the …

This Generations Updike

You have every right to hate Michael Chabon. One of the first stars to come out of UC Irvine's master of fine arts program, his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh—which is disarmingly innocent in observation, effortlessly sophisticated in style—was a best-seller when he was 24. (He came in under the media radar that picked …

Surfs Unlink

Art by Bob AulWhen the Surfrider Foundation launched its Web site (www.surfrider.org) in 1995, it had a grandiose budget of $0. Last year, that zoomed to $25,000; this year, site producer Mark Babski expects it to hit $45,000, and next year, he's predicting he'll get $60K to run the site. And the great thing, Babski …

Greener Pastures

Over the years, OC Weekly and the Darnel Squad—which eschews shaving, cosmetics, antiperspirant, deodorant soaps and daily showering—have enjoyed a sort of love-to-mock/hate relationship. When a Darnel Squad meeting announcement did not appear in our Calendar mere days after it was mailed, founder Julie Mandrake sent us a blistering letter accusing us of censorship in …