Hey, this is America. If a hot biker chick can't show some skin and provocatively handle a couple of firearms here, where can she? Well, if she's a convicted felon -- like Colorado's Katica Crippen, who sold a little speed to an undercover cop back in the day -- it's a big no-no. The reason? New federal efforts to aggressively enforce gun laws -- even if the occasional babe who just wants to be photographed stroking some cold steel gets swept up in the dragnet, David Holthouse writes.
Marched around half-naked. Raped. Kept in isolation. The life of a transgender prisoner in the Sacramento County Jail is basically hell, Sacramento News & Review's Cosmo Garvin writes.
Twelve-year-old Sheila Bronson can dunk like Kobe Bryant, board like Tim Duncan, shoot like Ray Allen, and handle the rock like Jason Kidd. She thinks Lisa Leslie is a chump, is set to get her driver's license next year, and vows to skip high school for the riches of the WNBA to avenge the criticism leveled against her oft-beleaguered uncle, ex-NBA center Alton Lister (aka "Alton Listless"). If you thought LeBron James was enough, he wasn't, Riverfront Times' Mike Seely tells us.
Johns Hopkins Magazine says Smith led a university newspaper staff "fueled by coffee, beer, and drugs." Several former fellow underclassmen express shock that the devotee of Hunter Thompson has morphed into an acerbic conservative columnist. The alumni magazine calls the The New York Press, which Smith founded in 1988, "a gadfly: loud, vulgar, self-indulgent, disrespectful, and bracing." Smith's "Mugger" column "can veer from political diatribe to vitriolic media critique to accounts of Smith's domestic life, all in one week," Dale Keiger writes. Smith recently sold the paper and has plans to move from New York City to Baltimore.
There is a "philosophical disconnect" between LA Weekly's corporate owner, Village Voice Media, and its own avowedly liberal publications, Erin Aubry Kaplan writes. "There are other things writers cannot say about the places they work that I am going to say here, too, because the Weekly is still a place where you can say them." She writes that the company has "been sharpening its nose into that of a corporate shark," with its controversial deal with New Times to close papers in competing markets and its opposition to unionization attempts in L.A. "I wish VVM had taken the ironies of its position more seriously," she concludes.
