by Thomas Larson

The dystopian author Mike Davis once wrote that San Diego — the city where I live, 100 condo-packed miles south of Los Angeles — is “arguably the nation’s capital of white collar crime.” In fact, Davis devoted a book to the claim, Under the Perfect Sun, whose thesis underscores the old adage that “San Diego is a sunny place where lots of shady people go.” Davis describes a history of graft and deception in which the city’s business monopolists mingled with landowners and indentured politicians to create a Petri dish for “dynamic, even visionary, self-interest.” Though such revelations have been reported on for decades, this view of the city’s seedy past is a narrative few of the city’s three million residents know. Why? Because the public — numbed by surf culture, sea breezes, and the Pacific Fleet — bought the boosters’ story instead.

Who authored that golden story? San Diego’s “city fathers.” Celebrated padres in a two-century lineup include Father Junipero Serra (Indian enslaver); John Spreckels and Alonzo Horton (foundational real estate developers); George Marston (department store magnate); Ray Kroc (McDonald’s creator); C. Arnholdt Smith (banking czar and embezzler); Pete Wilson (mayor, California governor, author of anti-immigrant Prop 187); John Moores (tech-boom carpetbagger, stadium builder); and the Copleys, father, son, and the son’s second wife who cornered the daily newspaper market for 81 years.

In 1992, the Copleys merged the conservative San Diego Union with the tad less conservative San Diego Tribune. In November 2009, the paper sold to Platinum Equity, an investor group from Beverly Hills. Two years later, Platinum unloaded its prize for $110 million to Douglas “Papa Doug” Manchester (the nickname was given him by his employees), hotelier, banker, developer, same-sex marriage opponent, and major Republican-party donor. Manchester, who is 70, is a multimillionaire; he was divorced in 2009, after a 43-year marriage.

The paper was rechristened the U-T San Diego, and its slogan outfitted anew: “The World’s Greatest Country & America’s Finest City.” Manchester and John Lynch — who has managed and owned radio stations and, with a stake in the U-T venture, is Manchester’s CEO — are fast-erecting a local media empire, buying up the last few daily papers in the county and shifting their news ops onto multiple platforms.

An aggressively acquisitive publisher, Manchester is using his new platform to reignite downtown redevelopment, largely to put up a new stadium for the NFL Chargers. He hasn’t been subtle with this pro-development agenda either. Indeed, in the year since the takeover, Manchester’s heavy-handedness has risen to an ugly national story. Two articles have been widely read: David Carr’s piece, “Newspaper as Business Pulpit,” in The New York Times, and Joe Strupp’s overview, “The Fall of The San Diego Union-Tribune,” at Media Matters.

Previous to Manchester’s ownership the paper was valued by the community, with a long history and four Pulitzers to its credit. One came in 2006 for a series by the Union-Tribune and Copley News Service staffs (reporters Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer were singled out) on the bribery scandal of Congressman Duke Cunningham and his ensuing felony conviction; another, in 2009, went to editorial cartoonist Steve Breen. Opinions clash as to whether the newspaper has been a “well-respected daily.” The morning and evening editions long endorsed conservative policies but welcomed alternative views. Hard news (fires, accidents, crime) marked the paper’s mission.

Since the takeover, the newspaper’s popularity has taken a tumble with subscribers. This is how a typical complaint goes: “Papa Doug is now our official representative of the 1% Club. I’m canceling my subscription. Why should I buy from the 1%er? Besides, he’s against everything I’m for and has the power of his press to tout his point of view.” The numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations reveal an 8.7 percentage drop in the daily and 4.6 fall in the Sunday edition between September 2011 and September 2012. During that same period, the numbers for the Los Angeles Times have grown: 11.9 percent for the daily and 6.2 for the Sunday edition. (Lynch, whose every golf shot zips with topspin, told local NPR affiliate, KPBS, that the U-T’s circulation is “surging.”)

Voice of San Diego, an excellent local nonprofit news organization, first reported that Manchester’s purchase of the paper’s land holdings (13 city acres, valued at $100 million) and his development mania, rooted in core Republican issues, were the driving forces behind the takeover. And that’s true in part. But it’s not the long-term financial goal. Aligning and monetizing local news and entertainment via digital media — the way national news corporations operate — now appears to be Manchester and company’s true purpose. As first-time owners, their grab of San Diego’s newspaper has come about for two reasons: one, to propagandize for a downtown stadium boom and, two, to steer together social media, cable TV, and mobile news apps with professional sports teams, tourist agendas, and the last vestiges of a print-based news institution. In these two directions, it seems, is where the money lies. Lynch predicts their foray will be a “fully integrated media company.” As such it may make “Papa Doug” the Rupert Murdoch of San Diego.

***

After purchasing the U-T, Manchester retained Platinum’s editor, Jeff Light, and laid off just a few employees; since then, he has canned many more. The most notorious incident involved well-respected sports columnist, Tim Sullivan, who was fired after raising questions about the downtown stadium proposal. Manchester has also squeezed coverage (more wire, less investigation and beat — not surprising given the fewer number of reporters) and Mickey Moused the paper’s appearance. Its print layout now resembles its website, boxy chunks with lots of photos, graphics, and headlines and less text, an obvious hint that traditional readers get used to the inevitable shift to digital. (Light was one of the group of newspaper editors who didn’t run the series of Doonesbury strips about a compulsory transvaginal exam, saying, “[D]o words like ‘slut,’ and ‘rape,’ really belong next to Linus and Lucy?”)

Last year, the U-T editorial board published a front-page editorial in January and a follow-up in March that hyped Manchester’s bayfront redevelopment as a “visionary approach.” The project, the paper claimed, will ensure San Diego becomes a “world-class city.” The plan features a stadium built with private and public funds, which, to borrow the great phrase of Neil deMause, author of Field of Schemes, “will socialize the costs and privatize the profits.” Oh yeah, there’s also a small park and a smaller beach thrown in for locals. “San Diego’s glorious downtown waterfront hasn’t come close to realizing its true potential.” Naysayers query, potential for whom? Redevelopers answer, tourists. As if the city, like Las Vegas, must always be for sale to its visitors.

In September of last year, Manchester bought the North County Times, a regional daily, laid off 80 (including two dozen from the newsroom), and folded its operation into the U-T. One reporter tweeted that the new boss told the staff: “He wants us to be ‘positive’ in writing news, and to write nice stories about business owners.” (As self-disclosure: I have personal experience with this company-wide push for positivity. Light once refused to run an assigned book review I wrote when it came back critical of one of Manchester’s Libertarian buddies. Light’s reason, by way of his book editor, was, “When it’s a local author and the review is negative, we don’t publish it.”)

In addition to critical reviews and fleeing subscribers, Manchester has suffered another disappointment: the Port of San Diego nixed his downtown proposal. This past summer, the port re-upped a 24.5-year lease with Dole to unload bananas at the dock terminal that Manchester wants to tear down. (Lynch shot back that he’s petitioning the state to shut down the port’s authority.) In November, the Manchester-endorsed mayoral candidate — a young Republican, pro-development, anti-taxation city councilmember, Carl DeMaio, who also had his own front-page endorsement — lost to an old guard ten-term Democrat congressman, Bob Filner. That a nouveau newspaper baron could not call in his political chips as easily as he thought has left Manchester undeterred: He’s in the running to purchase a portion of the Tribune Company, publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, now that it’s emerged from bankruptcy.

***

It’s no secret that associating yourself with a trusted name is the surest means to self-legitimize. And with Lynch and Manchester’s purchase of the San Diego Union-Tribune, with its long history and four Pulitzers, they have bought some legitimacy. Maybe that’s not all washed away. Dean Nelson, professor of journalism at San Diego’s Point Loma Nazarene University, told me in an interview that despite Manchester’s takeover, “I’m not convinced that the news side has been compromised.” He still subscribes and finds most coverage “issuing from a neutral standpoint.” Some of his students also work as interns for the paper.

According to Nelson, newspaper owners used to abhor internal controversy made public. Strife diluted the fidelity of the audience, cooled the re-ups of the ad buyers. Indeed, playing to that audience with a paper’s integrity, forums, community values, and its reporters’ devotion to “afflicting the comfortable,” worked: it sold papers. But, Nelson noted, “I don’t think going after the largest possible audience is the point anymore.” Now that the owners are experimenting with how news is delivered and consumed, they’re less fearful of alienating audiences and advertisers, in part, because they are cultivating alternate ways to reach them. Audiences and advertisers seem to go wherever the media push them.

It’s hard not to apply this Darwinian transmutation to the U-T power play. Managers of media companies see growth in the shifting technologies of their field and in garnering what was once unwanted attention; conflicts that used to damage the brand now revitalize it. Today, the takeover kingpin craves publicity, loves controversy, wants to “be” the news. To Manchester, it seems, that’s what a paper is for.

Plutocrats once courted positive press coverage with their advertising dollars. Now they buy the means of producing such coverage and produce it with themselves as headlines. The way a newspaper sells its products with less footwork than they did in days of yore is to become the news you cover.

***

To find how the self-interest of news works, we have only to listen to Lynch’s crowing about his and Manchester’s tendentiousness. In an interview with KPBS, he said that as owners, we “have the right to express our core values. We are pro-family, pro-military, and [have] pro-conservative business values. We believe those things have always fired the engine of development in San Diego and the entire country.” His comments ring with evangelical conviction: “I don’t know anybody who is not for those things.” They also ring with a touch of McCarthyism. With the Associated Press, he changed the line to, “Anybody who isn’t” — pro-family, pro-military, pro-conservative — “shouldn’t be living here.”

Harsh, I know. But why be surprised by his pro-American stance. This is the kind of loyalty Lynch and his partner are seeking. Dean Nelson’s nifty phrase for this phenomenon is “tribalizing the communication.” With news organizations, these days, you “only listen and speak to your own tribe,” he said in our interview. “That’s how you maintain your identity. Having a broader ideas-driven [news] organization — that was a luxury of the past.”

Most famously, Fox News has blazed this trail, tribalizing its “communication.” But we’re now well accustomed to that. What’s still fairly new is how fast media tribalization is spreading via multiple platforms as the prime marketing goal for most news organizations. The reason is obvious. Those platforms are turning profits for those who own them or have a stake in their many technology devices: in short, media companies want to make sure their chosen news source comes up on your Android. You would think the way to accomplish this is to appeal to a broad range of readers and users via the professionalism and integrity of a quality news group.

That’s the last thing Manchester and Lynch are after. Theirs is a much more sophisticated target: sports fans whose loyalty to the local team is unquestioned and much easier to tap than their political allegiance. Such fans will click for scores and game updates wherever they are. Add pro-sports to pro-conservative and pro-military as part of the U-T platform. Since the takeover, the paper has more than doubled its sports coverage — on the website, on their cable TV channel (more on that below), and in the paper itself. On any given day, four of the top five e-mailed articles are sports-related — for example, mid-December’s top “trending” story was “How the [5–8] Chargers can make the playoffs,” a plan that ended with loss #9. Here’s an audience base whose numbers tower above those who feel a paper’s weather page, obituaries, and coupons are subscription-worthy. Manchester can only build the downtown sports-and-entertainment megaplex with the fans on his side.

***

Manchester-style media has ushered in another new news tack — socializing the content. In TV and online formats, what is being delivered, in addition to the commercial-rich environment, is less about the news and more of what the source or personality who’s delivering it thinks about the news — better yet, what the source or personality says about the news as he/she conveys it. It’s talk radio applied to TV and streaming video.

To illustrate, I offer one of Lynch’s innovations, his cable-TV station, U-T TV, launched last May. If you were programming a local station with news/weather/sports, morning/midday/dinnertime/late-night, you might adhere to the audience-tested model every local news station in America adheres to: quick undeveloped blips, with pictures, of “news you can use.” Not Lynch. He raided his raw-talk radio shows for “on-air personalities,” giving them unprecedented license to comment on the news they report.

Come 6 a.m., on U-T TV, it’s time for, “Scott, B.R. + Amber,” “a live five-hour personality driven show with topical news, entertainment and captivating guests.” Scott is veteran shock jock, Scott Kaplan. B.R. is an ex-Chargers player, Billy Ray Smith. Amber, who is in her late 20s, is the only one with a degree in broadcast journalism. Kaplan, not unlike the dimwits who surround Ron Burgundy in Anchorman (also set in “classy” San Diego), worked for Lynch on a morning radio show that was canceled a year ago because of sexist comments Kaplan made. (The reason for the firing, unexpectedly enough, gets a full airing on the U-T site.) Not surprisingly, in so far as any of them understands politics, the trio’s right-wing bias mirrors the owners.

Here’s a randomly chosen yet typical segment, post-Newtown shooting, from December 2012. Propped before the “video wall,” Amber reads a breaking story: police have found a 41-year-old mother who’s been stabbed to death; her 8-year-old daughter is critically wounded from multiple cuts. Police say there are no suspects at the moment, but the investigation is ongoing. Scott says, “I guess we’ll have to ban all knives now.” Amber: “And machetes, too.” Scott: “Kitchen knives and butter knives and plastic knives.” To which B.R. replies: “Not butter knives. I’m carrying one right now.” This, in between, bouts of giggling.

So far, the trio is not provoking viewer responses. Not yet. It’s more likely that no one who watches them finds their nattering offensive.

At U-T TV, director of news and programming, J.R. Mahon, describes the morning show as abandoning “the same lead stories” and “the same stereotypical looking people” for something that’s not “boring.” Mahon said, “We’re not separating TV, newspapers, online; we’re integrating content, social media and news on different platforms — and talking to each other while we do it.” OK, but it’s more evident that the talent is talking among themselves so the talk rises only to their level of expertise. Which (by design) is set at sports and tanning.

Is this a viable business model? Let’s say it becomes successful. Ad revenue means the owners do well, and the talent collects a bonus. Let’s says it’s unsuccessful, which is more likely, especially as it’ll never pull an audience as the “Today” show can. No doubt, with their diversified company, Manchester and Lynch will write off the loss. Still, the format is set; nothing needs to change. Welcome to an infotainment program that never improves because news-talk TV requires its hosts be as uninformed as the audience they are speaking to. Which is to say journalists need not apply.

***

The way of the digital takeover, pushing a news organization from print to broadcast to online and mobile media, leads us to a third factor. After tribalizing the audience and socializing the content comes “vocalizing” the delivery. U-T TV producers put up videos and webcams and websites on the video wall as well as run live interviews with other talkers, reporters, and guests, all of it in the same chatty mold. With the talent having so much to say about the news, lifestyle, sports, movies, politics — much of it inane — amounts to a new news product.

What’s more, on-air commentary about the news as news simulates a family (or, if you like, bar patrons, office workers, linked-in groups) who talk while interacting with, or sit in the presence of, the TV or streaming video. The point is, whatever simulates the mediated simulation of life — broadcast with any screen-ready, user-driven, low-info, high-fun interactive form — is where the tied-in want to be.

The most despair-inducing element of Manchester’s new rule is that as the cult of on-air and online personality remakes journalism into a club of the like-minded, a kind of fortress mentality grows around and insulates that club. Case in point. This month Manchester and Lynch tried to get the new mayor to stop the city from issuing fines for compliance code violations, some going back ten years, at Manchester’s Grand Del Mar resort hotel. Every online/print news source in town reported this story, which culminated in an $87,000 fine.

Everyone except the U-T.

Related:
• One Town, Two Newspapers: Will the Real Digital Innovators Please Stand Up?
• The Tiny Newspaper In North Carolina That Scooped Up Journalism’s Big Prizes

Journalist, critic, and memoirist Thomas Larson has been a staff writer for the San Diego Reader for thirteen years. His latest book, The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” is in paperback. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program in creative nonfiction at Ashland University, Ashland, OH. Photo by Joe Wolf.

Stereotypical rich people of days gone by, with their brass-buttoned Navy blazers and exotic European sports cars, used to love to feast upon caviar. Why? Nobody knows, but it had something to do with caviar being a weird and expensive thing from a strange and threatening place: Communist Russia, or Red China — wild sturgeon were already in short supply by the 1950s, when Ian Fleming made his social-climbing civil servant an aficionado of the appetizer. By the 1960s, it was the show-off rich people restaurant appetizer of choice. Then humanity continued destroying rivers and fisheries and whole ecosystems until the Earth’s caviar systems all collapsed. Wild caviar, that beloved snack of princes and those who aspired to be princely, is gone:

To the surprise of many would-be gourmands, the halcyon days of caviar are over. Most of the world’s production no longer comes from such exotic spots as Russia’s Volga River and western Asia’s Caspian Sea. Those supplies are almost completely depleted from pollution, poaching, and overfishing of the caviar-egg-bearing sturgeon.

“Wild caviar is gone, and we can all forget about it,” said Alexandre Petrossian, sales director and grandson of the founder of the 92-year-old French company that bears the family’s name, known worldwide for premium caviar.

What you get these days when you want caviar is farmed fish eggs from the half-rural/half-suburban landscape east of the Sacramento airport. In an area of rice farms and 10-acre parcels scarred with off-road vehicle loops, caged sturgeon produce 22,000 pounds of farmed caviar per year. It’s still expensive, but the Russian names on the tins can’t really change the fact that it’s not much different than the products of a catfish farm.

There’s a little wild caviar left. The Iranian Karaburun is supposedly the “only remaining wild sturgeon that is not considered an endangered species because of the efforts put forth by the Iranian Ministry of Fisheries.” For the bargain price of $2,595, you can have a half-kilogram of the stuff sent to you.

Photo by Dinner Series.

“Fringe,” the only prime time SF show to make it through a fairly natural lifespan without becoming a disaster, concludes tonight. I did not want to love “Fringe,” but it happened anyway. From its beginnings as cheerful but fresh Mulder and Scully redux to its rampaging full-on SF freakout middle period to its dark dystopian final season, “Fringe” avoided the varied and terrible pitfalls of often-great shows like “Lost,” “X-Files,” “Dollhouse,” “V,” “Firefly,” “Heroes” and “Battlestar Galactica,” all of which were either tortured by networks or tortured by showrunners. Or both.

(Sure, on the “natural lifespan” thing: I mean, yes, it is slightly awkward that the show concluded at exactly 100 episodes, the happy syndication mark, but let’s ignore that. Five great full seasons! Let’s hear it for that.)

And now, the show has to end: wrapping up a whole lot of business with a double episode. We’ve had a rough time recently with dramatic TV show endings. The final episodes of “Lost” and “Battlestar” caused a good chunk of their loyal viewers to run screaming through the streets with clubs and torches. After that, the whole idea of the ambitious series finale has gotten a bad rap. It’s almost better to safely sidle out. Keep your dignity, your good scorecard, your happy fans. Resolve some emotional character issues, take care of the season’s big obstacle, everyone gets a hug, ROLL CREDITS. It’s not satisfying, maybe. But at least it’s not enraging. That is, I think, something like what we will get tonight.

Or also Walter dies right off. Kidding! Maybe.

Because we’re definitely not getting a “they were all deaaaad!” or an alternate universe, we’ve been promised. And YET, J. J. Abrams coughed up that it would be “highly unexpected.” Hmm.

And in even better news, the finale returns to its roots. Boom, alternate dimension, Olivia skips over to a different timeline, and it’s back to the Statue of Liberty: it’s thematically beautiful, it’s smart, it thanks the viewers, so thank you back and goodbye.

It also gives them a chance to end the series at literally any point in its own time, or any other time.

HMM.

A few good points from here and there today:

• “Part procedural, part X-Files-like Mystery of the Week (especially in the early seasons), Fringe benefited from the engrossing cadence of the former and the addictive catharsis of the latter. Plus, Fringe’s overarching mythology was rich enough to get lost in, yet controlled, limited, and familiar enough (unlike Lost) that it didn’t veer into the frustratingly arbitrary or absurd.”

• “Let us pause to praise John Noble’s textured performance as Walter Bishop — and his talented potrayals of Walter Bishop, Walter Bishop and Walter Bishop. And Anna Torv? Her work as Olivia Dunham, Olivia Dunham and Olivia Dunham has built a one-dimensional character into a genuine, multifaceted sci-fi heroine.”

• “I’ll reiterate as I often have that I don’t consider endings to be of vital importance to a series as a whole. Whether the Fringe finale is weak or strong is, to me, only a reflection of that episode itself. I’ll count myself as a fan of the show regardless. My hope is that the finale will be more “Worlds Apart” then “Brave New World.” But I also recognize that when all is said and done, in this show about alternate realms and infinite possibilities, some hard choices will have to be made — and not just by the heroes.”

I’m not sure I agree that much with that last, though I wish I did. For me, the last taste of a TV show colors my entire relationship with it, like the last pages in a book or the last bites of pie. Although no matter what happens, I’ll still find it impressive that this show lived for five long seasons and didn’t ever collapse in on itself.

“It’s around the third beer when it hits you. Your bladder feels full and you gotta go — like, now. You head to the restroom, and as you leave, your friend jokes that you’re risking ‘breaking the seal’: You urinate once while drinking and after that, you’ll have to get up every five minutes to pee. It’s an urban myth that even urologists wonder about, as it turns out. “
 — Is ‘breaking the seal’ a real thing?

I in no way intend to diminish the burdens of holding the most powerful position in the world, because clearly time takes its toll on the inhabitants of the office, but take a look at a picture of yourself from four or more years ago. You’re not exactly going gracefully, are you?

Squash, Elysian Fields, Pretty in Pink (the Novelization), Diplo, Juan Orol, Wall Street Freeze Tag and More

A weekend of wonder awaits you, all detailed on our events page. Brr.

Modern Love: A (Likely!) Statistical Breakdown Of The Weekly ‘New York Times’ Column

by Bill Kelley

(2010 to present. All numbers are in percentages; due to overlapping figures may total more than 100.)

• WRITER
• Gender: Female (98.3) Male (1.7)
• Age: Late thirties(ish) — early forties(ish) (97)
• TOPIC
• Modern* (28)
• Love (98)
• SUBTOPICS
• Love (Romantic) (73%)
• Lost (57)
• Misplaced (28)
• Over (13)
• Unrequited (27)
• From afar (33)
• From nearby (9)
• From creepy individual on subway (4)
• From untenured SUNY lit professor** (4)
• LOVE OF
• Self (61)
• Parent (absent) [32]
• Parent (lost) [21]
• Parent (in room down the hall) [47]
• Parent
• Awkward moments with (100)
• Estrangement from (17)
• Things I wish I had told mother/father (46)
• Things I wish I had texted mother/father (11)
• LOVE OF (CON’T)
• Sibling(s) [36]
• Game shows (1)
• Child (88)
• Children (2)
• Children given up for adoption (7)
• Children not given up for adoption (15)
• Children who won’t move out (22)
• Children never had and now, you know, to be quite honest, it’s a little late. Not totally. It’s biologically possible. But you know. (41)
• No Doubt’s second CD (2)
• Pet (14)
• Current (2)
• From childhood (14)
• Lost in custody battle (3)
• Percentage pet is referred to as “rescued” (94)
• JOB/ CAREER OF ROMANTIC PARTNER
• Writer (17)
• Director of playwright workshop (24)
• Unemployed (17)
• Waiter (22)
• Full time (2)
• Part time (20)
• Telemarketer (6)
• Bass player (59)
• Student (18)
• Undergrad (3)
• Grad school (15)
• Unsure (41)
• PLACE OF FIRST MEETING
• Friend’s apartment (14)
• Friend’s wedding (9)
• At a club to see friend’s band (18)
• Online service (43)
• Reason(s) online
• Just, you know, as a lark… (21)
• Friend said she knows someone whose friend met some totally cool guy online. Seriously. (22)
• Coffee shop (3)
• Customer (1)
• Employee (2)
• Work (1)
• Bus station (6)
• School (4)
• LITERARY REFERENCES/ ALLUSIONS (WHEN MADE)
• The Great Gatsby (100)
• COMING TO GRIPS WITH/ TERMS WITH
• Aging parents (13)
• Aging children (12)
• Aging bodies (yours and/or partners/spouses) (17)
• Aging pets (4)
• Aging appliances (16)
• Aging subway system (2)
• Sex (14)
• Body image (13)
• Body language (3)
• Body of water (43)
• Ex
• Boyfriend (88)
• Husband (3)
• Girlfriend (9)
• Partner (17)
• Barista (24)
• Apple store employee (2)
• REALIZATIONS
• Life is precious (1)
• Life is short (2)
• There’s nothing good to eat in the fridge (16)
• I shouldn’t text when someone is standing in front of me (1)
• The Black Keys is two guys (13)
• Coffee doesn’t reheat well in microwaves (71)
• Social media is confusing (1)
• Three year olds need a lot of attention. (13)
• Article of clothing was left in dryer too long (2)
• NBC Sports reporter Bob Costas spends a lot of time on his hair (14)
• Sexual awareness (realization that one is:)
• Gay/lesbian (22)
• Bisexual (28)
• Transgendered (22)
• Straight (3)
• SEX
• Good (2)
• Bad (7)
• Problematic (44)
• Frequent (2)
• Infrequent (2)
• Not sure (62)
• Not mentioned (17)
• TONE
• Wistful (100)
• REGRETS (100)
• Beginning relationship with person (48)
• Ending relationship with person (32)
• Affecting an Australian accent the entire summer between college and graduate school (7)
• CHALLENGES FACED
• Unsettling medical news (12)
• Taking someone’s last name (17)
• Hyphenating name (51)
• Taking someone’s last name without asking (7)
• Taking things for granted (44)
• Taking the last Toll House cookie (2)
• Remembering lyrics (22)
• Finding a dry cleaner (6)
• OTHER PROJECTS
• Writing memoir (81)
• Writing autobiographical novel (72)
• Writing one person show (14)
• Writing play based on life (33)
• Blogging (82)
• Completing online MFA (22)
• FULL-TIME JOB
• Memoirist (12)
• Copy editor (62)
• Yoga instructor (14)

* Mentions iPhone (3G or higher), iPad or Pinterest.
** In two instances, overlap with creepy individual on subway.

Bill Kelley’s television writing credits include David Letterman, Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, George Lopez and five Emmy broadcasts. He’s also written articles for The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times. As a stand-up comic, he appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman.” Photo by Alexandra Lee.

★ Frozen matter, snow or ice pellets, lay on the scaffold tops and some patches of ground, under clouds and fog and cold rain in the morning. By the river, a Trump building’s incinerator released smoke into the thick dampness and it hung there, going nowhere. A heavy, ankle-deep mist was rising from the paving blocks of the apartment entrance and blowing in shreds across them. In the afternoon, lighted windows — in apartments, in offices — looked cozy against the gray. The rain had paused, but the roof was wet. Downtown, the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse was the only whole and solid building on the skyline. Anything reaching higher than its pyramid blurred out on its way there. Uptown, the Empire State Building was gone, so completely gone it was hard to tell where to try to look for it.

NORTH LAS VEGAS — An inflatable space pod to be attached to the International Space Station in a couple of years will be like no other piece of the station. NASA is contracting a private company to build an inflatable space pod for the International Space Station. Instead of metal, its walls will be made of floppy cloth, making it easier to launch (and then inflate). NASA said Wednesday that it had signed a $17.8 million contract with Bigelow Aerospace to build the module, which could reach the space station as soon as 2015.

We were driving to Lake Tahoe, my wife and I, headed north on one of the most breathtaking highways in the world, U.S. 395 along the eastern spine of the Sierra Nevada. The winter sun had dropped behind the jagged mountains and we had already been on the road a couple of hours since leaving Los Angeles. It was time to find a motel and dinner and especially wine.

She said something like, “What’s that light? Is that the next town?” It was very big and very bright, and I had also been wondering if it announced the next strip of traveler services. Or maybe it was a radio tower. But then the light would be blinking, and red, like radio tower lights. And while we were looking at this light, it became a very large black triangular-shaped airship of some kind, hovering nearly motionless over the desert. There were single round lights on each corner, and a huge spotlight beam out of the center — we could see it traveling over the sagebrush on the valley floor about a hundred yards off the road. I pulled over to get a better look at this tremendous shape, but it zoomed past us and became a speck of light in the southern sky before vanishing altogether. When we got to Lone Pine and checked into a motel — the Dow Villa, highly recommended and right under Mt. Whitney — I got online and looked for someone to call. It was the week after Christmas 2001, and at that time an organization run by Robert Bigelow took reports of “black triangles,” supposedly under contract with the FAA. Then, as now, the massive low-flying silent ships were regularly spotted by drivers on the open road.

We filled out an online report at the National Institute for Discovery Science website. Once we were back in L.A., a NIDS investigator called, claiming to be a former FBI agent. And that’s what he sounded like, if you’d ever seen “The X-Files.”

The National Institute for Discovery Science, or NIDS, spent a lot of time and money collecting reports of “Big Black Deltas.” In 2004, it published its inconclusive findings, which made it to Space.com and MSNBC:

A key NIDS conclusion is that the actions of these triangular craft do not conform to previous patterns of covert deployment of unacknowledged aircraft. Furthermore, “neither the agenda nor the origin of the Flying Triangles are currently known.” The years 1990–2004 have seen an intense wave of Flying Triangle aircraft, the study observes. Sifting through reports by hundreds of eyewitnesses, the NIDS assessment states that the behavior of the vehicles “does not appear consistent with the covert deployment of an advanced DoD [U.S. Department of the Defense] aircraft.”

Rather, it is consistent with (a) the routine and open deployment of an unacknowledged advanced Defense Department aircraft or (b) the routine and open deployment of an aircraft owned and operated by personnel outside the Defense Department, suggests the NIDS study.

“The implications of the latter possibility are disturbing, especially during the post-9/11 era when the United States airspace is extremely heavily guarded and monitored,” the NIDS study explains. “In support of option (a), there is much greater need for surveillance in the United States in the post-9/11 era, and it is certainly conceivable that deployment of low-altitude surveillance platforms is routine and open.”

[…] In wrapping up its look at the burgeoning number of Flying Triangle sightings in the United States, NIDS also took into account the work of writers and researchers delving into the topic both in the United States and abroad. Those analyses fall into two camps: One says the Triangles are human-made, while the other says they are not.

Robert Bigelow then shut down his Las Vegas-based Institute For Discovery Science and announced a new company, Bigelow Aerospace. An earlier NIDS study suggested that the triangles were “lighter-than-air, blimp-style craft of the U.S. military’s making” powered by new “electrokinetic/field drives, or airborne nuclear power units.” The silent deltas reported around America in the 1990s and early 2000s may well have been prototypes of the massive airships that have just gone into official production in Southern California. Or maybe these monster blimps that will carry tanks and helicopters to Afghanistan are something altogether different — the black triangles have been seen worldwide for half a century now, with some sightings dating to World War II.

The idea of NIDS fascinated me, both then and now. This was an actual paranormal investigations organization, and the more I looked into it, the more fascinating it became. Bigelow, who made a fortune from the extended-stay motel chain Budget Suites of America, had for years been pouring money into paranormal studies at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. The physics lab at UNLV is named for Bigelow, who also gave $3.7 million to “for the creation and continuation of a program that would attract to the university renowned experts on aspects of human consciousness.” A parapsychologist named Charles Tart was the Bigelow Chair of the program, which dealt with “altered states of consciousness, near-death experiences and extrasensory perception.”

NIDS assembled a team that would go into the field, investigating weird places and strange events. It even purchased a Utah ranch with a history of UFO sightings and “skinwalkers,” a kind of ancient monster which apparently travels through dimensional portals on the property. These things would routinely turn into werewolves and terrorize the ranch’s caretakers and animals. The house itself was a paranoid nightmare, with a long hallway lined with closets that locked from the inside.

The top man at NIDS is a familiar name to anyone who ever waded into these esoteric topics: Retired U.S. Army Col. John B. Alexander, the real-life psychic Jedi warrior in Jon Ronson’s book The Men Who Stare At Goats. Alexander is called “Col. Harold E. Phillips” in longtime Vanity Fair reporter Howard Blum’s book about Reagan-era UFO hunting by the Pentagon, Out There The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials. The rest of the NIDS crew had similarly spooky backgrounds.

What did Bigelow find out during his years as the benefactor of a well-funded Scooby Gang of paranormal researchers from the Pentagon? Maybe nothing — the mysteries of consciousness and reports of the bizarre have baffled even the most dedicated minds. Maybe thinking about extended-stay motels and reports of space-worthy stealth blimps just gave him a good idea for a cheap space station. In any case, if you have enough money, you can book an extended stay in one of Bigelow’s planned private orbital motels right now: “$26.25 million for a 60-day stay, including the ride to orbit atop a Falcon 9 rocket built by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX,” according to The New York Times, which will always write about travel for the rich but very rarely about rich people investigating werewolves.