31 July 2017

All the really big news that happened today did not, of course appear in this morning's paper, so tonight I bring you the news hits of the very recent past---Venezuelan election violence, refugees working at chicken processing plants, that sort of thing. Sometimes I feel like the news ghost, haunting you with all the things that got pushed aside by whatever is currently going down/blowing up. But hey, tomorrow, for the third and hopefully last time, I'll give you a sketched portion of Scaramucci's stupid head. Boo!

30 July 2017

As is the case with many huge, institutional scandals that seem to appear abruptly, the USC med school dean scandal is turning out to have quite a bit of a back story, and the LA Times has been rolling out a little piece of it every day (much to the delight of USC's communications team, I'm sure). Today's nugget is the story of how there were many, many complaints about Dean Puliafito's behavior in the years leading up to the current crisis. They were, of course, all ignored. Because, you see, he was doing so much for the school! Until, of course, he wasn't.

29 July 2017

Well, the white house has driven Reince out to the woods, opened the car door and let him run free once again. He was replaced with the guy who was, until this transfer, running the Department of Homeland Security. It's always a good idea, when you remove the head of a really important department, to take the head of another, equally important department and use them to plug the hole in that first department. Then you grab a bowl of Doritos, turn on Fox and Friends, and assume that the department you just decapitated will be totally fine. That's real leadership, people.

28 July 2017

Well, Scaramucci ("the Mooch," I guess we're all calling him) seems to have inherited not only Sean Spicer's job but his tragicomic foibles and general ineptitude. Not so inept that he couldn't dislodge Reince Priebus from his position in the white house, but just inept enough to call a New Yorker writer and have an expletive-laden meltdown on the record. I mean, if there's one thing the white house needed more of, it's mentally unstable narcissists. They simply don't have enough of those.

Man, politics is hard. Is weed legal yet?

27 July 2017

We should all strive to do better, yes? And of course the first step to getting better at something is to acknowledge when things aren't quite up to snuff. I mean, it's better to come to that realization on your own, and not be forced to it by, say, an article appearing in the local paper about your drug-addled dean. But hey, a first step is a first step. As for the Olympics coming to our little town in 2028, well, I think the Olympics are a lot like a wedding: they're the most fun when you have no organizational or financial responsibility for them.

26 July 2017

Trusted medical sources assure me that after a certain point, it's just Jolly Rogers the rest of the way through.

25 July 2017

Farmers here in California are experiencing a labor shortage so deep and so sustained that they are either switching the crops they grow (say goodbye to California-grown asparagus) or developing machines that can do all that manual labor that really keeps farms humming along. Between the drought and the rapid mechanization of farm jobs, I predict that California will essentially look like Tatooine in about twenty years. Also, I know nothing about agriculture.

In other news, Donald Trump---ah, you know what? We all know Trump is a sociopathic sleazeball, so let's not dwell on whatever the fuck it was that he did to the Boy Scouts today. Go enjoy your evening and forget about that piece of shit for a few hours.

24 July 2017

Aside from the whole USC debacle, there is another weird little scandal coming to light here in Los Angeles. This one involves the LAPD cadet program, which is a shame, because those kids deserve better. Apparently some equipment room manager did his level best to corrupt a few young minds, leading to multiple high speed chases in stolen squad cars and sexual assault charges being brought against the offending adult.

23 July 2017

Man, today's A1 was wall-to-wall criminal shenanigans, with the sole exception of a little piece on the growing excitement over the Great American Eclipse (the celestial phenomenon, not the current presidency). And, as you might expect, the rich and powerful are largely getting away with it (hell, one of them is ostensibly running the fucking country right now), and the only guy doing any jail time is the poor security guard who was wrongly convicted. He did 11 years.

22 July 2017

Well, you won't have Spicey to push around anymore in your lamestream media reportage. But fear not: Trump's new Communications Director, Anthony Scaramucci, is already dishing out steaming piles of comedy gold via twitter. Huckabee-Sanders, you need to step up your game.

21 July 2017

Oh no! Donald Trump can't understand Japan's First Lady Akie Abe! Help him out by finding her message to him in the word search above.

Hey, look at that, today you got a puzzle! Tomorrow we'll maybe get one last chance to draw that idiot Spicey.

20 July 2017

Today the paper has a piece on O.J. Simpson's parole hearing, but, as we all know, O.J. did in fact get paroled this very afternoon. It also happens to be Marshall McLuhan's birthday today, and we are ass-deep in wildfire season here in California. So basically today was like a paragraph in "Underworld."

19 July 2017

We here at mixed media daily occasionally put in, between band rehearsals and plain old work, 15-16 hour days, and thus we sometimes we sometimes take advantage of a more minimalist approach to this project so that we don't miss a day. And frankly, when you're presented with not much more than these two asshats on A1, sometimes it's nice to get in and get out with a minimum of fuss.

18 July 2017

Contrary to what you might be thinking, Weird Wave is not, in fact, a hot new microgenre of indie electrofuckery. It's a coffee shop in Boyle Heights that is the newest target of anti-gentrification protesters in that neighborhood. And, honestly, if you want to set off alarm bells in the heads of the anti-gentrification folks, naming your coffee shop "Weird Wave" is pretty much guaranteed to do so.

17 July 2017

For months it has felt like the White House had a virtual monopoly on generating the truly insane news stories. Revelation after shocking revelation pours out of that clown car, and all of our attention is pointed at the one morally degenerate, flaxen-haired goon who least deserves it. Well, I'm happy to report that today we have a story that really gives the Trump gaffe machine a run for its money. If you haven't yet read or heard the story of Dr. Carmen A. Puliafito that the LA Times broke today, just go read it. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll probably mutter "Damn!" to yourself a few times while reading it. Oh, and if you happen to be a patient of this guy, mmmmmm, you might want to change doctors.

16 July 2017

 A hearty mixed media daily welcome to our newest guest paper, the Ventura County Star! They've got a great masthead font (at least for the "Star" part of their name) and a front page that is pretty damn local. I mean, the main story above the fold is about some new bike lanes being planned along Portrero Road (that's up around Thousand Oaks. Oh, and Thousand Oaks is a town in Ventura County. You get the idea). In fact the only common thread between The Star's A1 and the Los Angeles Times' A1 is Wimbledon. LAT had a small blurb about tennis superstar Venus Williams. The Star had a blurb about hometown girl Claire Liu (from Thousand Oaks!) winning the Junior Crown at Wimbledon. Way to go, Claire! I don't know if Junior Crown winners walk off with any money, but if you do, might I suggest investing in a new bike? I hear you're gonna have some sweet bike lanes in your neck of the woods soon.

15 July 2017

If you tried to post a candle emoji on Chinese social media in the past couple of days, you probably got an error message like the one adorning Liu Xiaobo's face: "20021 content is illegal!" I love that they end that phrase with an exclamation point, to really drive home your, um, reckless use of emojis. Sina Weibo and other Chinese media routinely censor their users in a way that would make an American or European social media user howl. But that's just one of the many hazards of living in a country where one party controls the entire government. Thank god we don't live in a place like that! Oh, wait a second...

14 July 2017

Yes, that is Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore. No, I don't really think they're out there murdering sex slaves with Kalashnikovs. But, as I've said before, this is a company town, and thus the announcements about the Emmy nominations (which you bet your ass are gonna be on the front page of this particular paper) are sharing space with all the other news---the badass volunteer soldiers from America and Europe who fight with the YPG against the Islamic State, assessments of the newest, pathetically inadequate GOP healthcare plans, whatever the fuck Trump said or did that day---and so we end up here.

That's all for now. Go out there and get your weekend on.

13 July 2017

I like a paper that'll give me, on the front page, side by side, an article about how the wait times at Disneyland rides are getting longer and longer and an article about a one-trillion ton iceberg that just calved off the Antarctic ice shelf. And all the political stuff is still there, all the photos of sentient douchenozzle Donald Trump Jr. that you can stomach, just to the right of the iceberg and Disneyland stories, but at this point everyone is like, "we know the White House is a seething, garbage-choked cesspool of corruption and greed, so fuck it, let's talk about some other stuff. Let's talk about everything, the truly dire shit (iceberg) and some total nonsense as well (Disneyland)."

12 July 2017

After Donald Trump Jr.'s  display of pure incompetence and stupidity in the face of damning charges against him, it is abundantly clear that the apple does not fall far from the tree. But hey, thank god for stupidity and incompetence if it speeds up the removal of these idiots from positions of power.

11 July 2017

Every year around this time parts of California burst into flames in a ritual known as wildfire season. Normally this grim event feels like a very local tribulation, but this year it's also being reported on at the same time that insane revelations about Don Trump Jr.'s brief foray into treason are also appearing on the front page and, man, it feels a little too on the nose, and I am totally ok with that. The wildfire story's headline---"In a new fire season, just what will ignite?" could easily be the name of the book some smart cookie is eventually going to write about this nonstop clusterfuck clown show that is Trump doing the worst imitation of a sitting president.

10 July 2017

I'm sorry, but if you're the leader of a nation, and your nation is subjected to cyberattacks during an election by a hostile foreign power, and soon after those compromised elections you meet with the leader of that foreign power, and after that meeting you come back to your nation and tell everyone that you think it would be a great idea to team up with said hostile foreign power to combat cyberattacks--well, you're just a complete fucking moron, aren't you?

9 July 2017

You know what's really hard to draw? Baseball bats. I mean, it's a simple form, yes, but the subtle bends in the silhouette combined with its perfect symmetry means that any deviation from it shape make it look a little dumb. So I present you with four dumb bats, I guess. Speaking of dumb bats, Trump has finished doing stupid shit in Europe during the G-20 meeting and is now back here in the States, presumably still doing stupid shit, but at least he's doing it out of sight of the Europeans. Yes, the bar really is that low these days.

8 July 2017

Did you know that there is currently only one of these signs left standing in California (it was created by John Hood, an artist who worked for Caltrans)? Apparently they've outlived their usefulness, since immigrant crossings into California are way, way, way down from their peak in the 80s and 90s. There are still folks who want to come here, of course, and folks who make the journey, whether by this route or in some other fashion. We are a nation of immigrants, and I sincerely hope we do not choke off that legacy. We should be welcoming. Well, maybe not to a certain homicidal Russian autocrat. But normal folks, yes.

7 July 2017

National embarrassment Donald Trump is off on another jaunt to Europe, where he met with Putin for the first time, and apparently he acted like everything was ok, never mind that the Russian government interfered with the American electoral process. For somebody who has held a grudge against Rosie O'Donnell for over a decade, that's an awfully fast turnaround on an actual enemy who also  made you into a complete joke the moment you took office.

6 July 2017

Man, that pug sure has a lot on his mind. Maybe not as much as parents who depend on medicaid for health coverage for their children. Or parents with kids in LAUSD who are worried about what a school board stacked with pro-charter forces means for their school. And probably not as much as anyone who's been paying attention to the news about North Korea's rapidly expanding missile program. You know what? The pug's fine. Don't worry about the pug. Worry about all the other shit.

5 July 2017

Like it or not, the ICBM club has gained a new member. North Korea now has the capability to hit Alaska which, granted, spawned Sarah Palin, but it's still a fine state and we shouldn't hold that against it. Anyway, it makes for a lot of new and serious complications in navigating global geopolitics, and unfortunately we have a complete idiot at the helm of our little red, white, and blue ship. The New York Times is already looking at war scenarios (summary: they're all horrific). None of this is comforting, I know, but we'll all have to wait and see what happens, I guess.

4 July 2017

In these trying times it can be hard to muster any patriotic fervor. What exactly are we celebrating these days? Not the trainwreck that's currently working its way through DC, certainly. America has been through rough patches before, so maybe there's a story somewhere in that checkered past that can uplift and teach us a lesson about how our ancestors dealt with whatever shit hand they were dealt. Oh, hey, thanks Joe Mozingo for that story about Hiroshi Miyamura! And, of course, thank you Mr. Miyamura.

3 July 2017

How hilarious is it that a Los Angeles paper put an article on its front page about the problems with New York's antiquated subway system? It's kind of like the car thief being judgey about the bank robber. C'mon, Los Angeles. All New York has to do is look at you and mouth "405," and then won't you look silly.

2 July 2017

If there's one thing I can't resist on the front page, it's a good technical diagram. Particularly when it's describing something as perilous as nuclear containment. And, let's be honest, we have a lot of nuclear bullshit we need to contain in this country. Oh, and there are also a lot of spent fuel rods we need to store as well.

1 July 2017

Alright, the big independence day weekend is upon us, and we're gonna kick it off with a celebration of, um, dying, both figurative and literal. In all seriousness,  everybody in California should be grateful that we have something on the books as forward-thinking  as the End of Life Option Act. It's one of those things that you won't think about at all unless there comes a day that you or a loved one needs its protections to enact your last wishes. And if that time is not now, get on out there and do your founding fathers proud by celebrating the fuck out of your independence.