The men who landed on the moon in 1969 left something behind besides a U.S. flag. They dropped off a box of reflectors too.
Four decades later, a UCSD scientist is leading the effort to shoot laser beams at that box to try to poke holes in the theory of relativity.
Yes, Einstein may have been wrong, and not just about his choice of hairdo.
Now back to Earth.
When you have six kids, you deal with public schools for a very long time.
San Diego school administrators might wish über-parental-activist David Page had stopped at one. Or none. “Being held accountable is not a pleasant thing,” a fan says.
Over 17 years, Page “has become a human encyclopedia on the rules that govern funds for disadvantaged kids and a dogged fighter for parents in communities sometimes left out of decisions.”
Alternative newspapers often think of local mainstream daily papers as a piñatas ripe for the thwacking. The weekly San Diego Reader falls into this category: It loves to dish about the U-T and its foibles.
When it got a stern legal threat from the U-T’s owners, the Reader wrote about it with gusto this week.
Now, thanks to a link on a popular media blog, journalists around the world know that Platinum Equity — in the midst of trying to make a $3.6 billion purchase — is mighty sensitive about two dismissed lawsuits.
The Reader’s reaction to the heavy-handed legal threat was as predictable as June gloom. What was Platinum Equity thinking?
In politics, county supervisor wannabes are popping up all over the place. One is veteran school board member — who, by the way, will stay in that position while she runs and afterward too, if she loses — and the other is a congressional aide who’s already planning for 2012.
The U-T, meanwhile, reports on two possible candidates for a seat in North County.
No one has joined the county board of supervisors since President Clinton’s first term.
Over at City Hall, the U-T reports that Councilwoman Marti Emerald withdrew the name of an ethics commission nominee “two hours after a reporter questioned the selection as Emerald is currently under investigation by the panel.”
In other city politics news, San Diego’s pension board today will consider overhauling accounting procedures. The change “echoes earlier and problematic underfunding deals.”
The board won’t vote today, but look for a decision later this year.
Federal agencies have already come to a decision about a program to kick-start the housing market: It needs fixing.
Now it should be easier to buy a foreclosed home with the help of $17 million in government assistance funds earmarked for the county.
Finally, the national media is waking up to the weirdest scary-ocean-creature story of the summer: the hordes of calamari-on-the-hoof keeping local divers out of the water.
One diver has no interest in meeting a five-foot-long surly squid that won’t take “whoa!” for an answer: “I wouldn’t go into the water with them for the same reason I wouldn’t walk into a pride of lions on the Serengeti.”