Summerbabble

At least the men around town are finally opening up. You know, they can be so quiet. They probably needed some therapy, the talking cure...

I liked Jon Regardie including Kobe Bryant along with Antonio and Rocky in a piece on this year's early summer phenomenon: Men Who Talk Too Much, and the Women Who May or May Not Love Them.

Lay right next to it this posting of blogger Angry Mom, a housewife in town and one to watch a little more, who includes Sheriff Baca and indelicately cuts to the chase, noting that the back-door dishing the is becoming a three-way, including the Sheriff.

[That post, btw, is hilariously titled "The LA Times is the new TMZ"...]

To further promote Kobe as a sensible example, for a moment forget the marital troubles Kobe's had in the past, and visualize what his loose talk has done to the other intimes of what has historically been one of the world's best men's clubs: your Los Angeles Lakers.

Say you're who has been recently fingered as trade bait by Kobe. What kind of performance, what kind of team will these people work up next year, if fate finds them all together on Team One again?

Similarly, the domestic difficulties and perplexing psychobabble being dished by Villaraigosa, Delgadillo and yes, Baca early this summer, and their various staffs' willingness to dish on each others, offer a very entertaining summer for we who are not on any team can seemingly sit back and enjoy. But the downside of all the male psychobabbling is that the staffs will begin to feel that doing the business of we the voters is a joke---I mean, even more than they already do.

Orlov almost says as much today, quoting a City Hall aide: ""Everyone is joking about it, but you know we are all checking to make sure we don't have anything that could embarrass us or our boss." In the new kind of climate, where your GM no longer can say "I'll take care of it" and a nod-and-a-wink to another GM could do that, the business of the City this summer is less CRA and more CYA.

Regardie notes that Delgadillo issued a press release a couple Fridays ago about the City Attorney securing a conviction in a cat-hoarding case. While the conviction is likely to please people like Daniel Guss as well as cat-owners and animal activists everywhere, it's typically not the kind of item that you send out to the masses of one of the world's MSM epicenters.

It reminds us, in fact, of Councilman Huizar (who?--it's been a while) pointing to organizing a big-item trash pickup in Eagle Rock as a top accomplishment in advance of his election.

What happens if the psychobabble extends through the summer and the City becomes even more do-nothingly dysfunctional than it already is?

In two short years of Antonio, we already have so many density-terrifying projects up that LA already feels like Tokyo in many now-dystopic spots. The solution to every problem in LA since July 2005 has been: oh, that's too hard, let's just permit more units and more retail. Not more market solutions to the housing crunch, mind you, and not more inviting-to-enterpreneur development: just more units and more corporate retail culture. You can probably expect that trend to go irrationally exhuberant now.