Using a 1926 law that regulates dancing, both Mayor Rudy Guiliani and now his successor Michael Bloomberg are sending cops into the warehouse districts of Manhattan looking for people illegally shaking their booties. The city is using the law "to combat quality-of-life complaints and troublesome clubs," Tricia Romano writes in The Village Voice. Increasing the anger of booming club operators, "the nightlife industry's sole voice ... is not in favor of repealing the law," she writes.
Rhonda Reeves, editor and publisher of the Lexington, Ky. alt-weekly, faces charges of wanton endangerment after she was accused of striking a deputy constable with her sport-utility vehicle. "She didn't know what she was being arrested for," says Reeves' attorney, who calls the charges unfounded. According to the complaint, Reeves struck the officer as he tried to serve her with a civil summons issued when Bank One sued her for defaulting on a line of credit. Reeves has filed a response disputing the bank's claim.
University of Texas film student Rhys Southan and a prankster partner decided to break into Sony Studios, steal the worst script they could find, rewrite it, and then put it back. The 17-minute documentary they made of themselves doing so is one of the year's hottest documentaries, but it also put the studio on their trail. The Houston Press' Tony Ortega talks to the fugitive filmmaker.
Casco Bay Weekly's co-founders, Monte Paulsen and Gary Santaniello, mourn the closure of the alternative newsweekly they opened in 1988. "It was glorious," Paulsen says of the early days in Portland, Maine, when the staff delivered the paper by themselves and the photographer worked in the staff bathroom. The paper closed Nov. 21, unable to stem financial losses and fight off competition from the Portland Phoenix.
Dan Savage, editor of The Stranger and author of the syndicated sex advice column "Savage Love," paid $200 for advice icon Ann Landers' typewriter and $175 for her desk. "I want that desk and that typewriter," Savage told a Northwest Herald reporter at an auction of the late Eppie Lederer's belongings. "That's what I came for."
The Center for Biological Diversity cares as much about the unarmored threespine stickleback as it does a cathedral forest of trees, which is why it is reinventing the environmental movement and could be saving Southern California in the process. LA Weekly's Susan Zakin follows the center's unlikely warriors on their daily rounds as they try to stop developers from turning one of Southern California's last natural rivers into a concrete-lined dump.
John Dicker, staff writer for the Colorado Springs Independent, describes how he physically defended the First Amendment against the combined might of the Colorado Springs human resources department after a rookie staffer turned over a police detective unexpurgated file. "I did consider bowling her over, but this woman was big, more linebacker than power forward," Dicker writes for AAN News. "Call me an effete East Coast twit, but I just couldn't manage it."
