Biography

Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for The Times, for which her work has spanned topics from national politics to the O.J. Simpson ...

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Patt Morrison

Patt Morrison

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Tim Gunn: On the 'Runway'

Tim Gunn: On the 'Runway'

November 14, 2009

To employ catchphrases from two Teutonic giants -- Heidi Klum and Arnold Schwarzenegger -- Lifetime TV's "Project Runway," which wraps up its season this coming week, has bid auf Wiederauf Wiedersehen to Los Angeles for now. But it'll be back.

  • Sheila Schuller Coleman: The reverend daughter

    November 7, 2009

    Iwas 7 or 8 years old, reading my way through my kiddie encyclopedias, when I infuriated my Sunday school teacher by suggesting that the miraculous parting of the Red Sea was simply low tide. At that age, Sheila Schuller was working for her father's fledgling church. On Sunday mornings, she thumbtacked the Sunday school lessons to the wooden picnic tables at the Garden Grove drive-in theater where the Rev. Robert H. Schuller preached sermons from atop the snack stand.

  • Michael Jackson: Sir radio

    October 31, 2009

    You have only to hear the voice to recognize who owns those pipes: talk-show host Michael Jackson, the original issue, with more than half a century on the radio. During the BL era -- Before Limbaugh -- he reached millions of ears on several continents and was, for about three decades, the monarch of Los Angeles' AM talk radio. Jackson wears a coat and tie on the radio, in perfect keeping with the urbane, civil, informed discourse that earned him a place in the Radio Hall of Fame, an honor from the queen of England and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That star was smothered in flowers this summer by music fans who mistook it for the other Michael Jackson's.

  • Leonard Kleinrock: Mr. Internet

    October 25, 2009

    The Internet, like victory, has many fathers. One of the best known is Leonard Kleinrock, a computer science professor at UCLA. He was in the campus computer lab 40 years ago, on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 1969. At 10:30 p.m., he and his colleagues were working on a computer the size of an old-fashioned phone booth when they sent the first computer message. It was launched via a packet-switching mathematical theory Kleinrock had conceived for transmitting data. The message traveled from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute on a system set up through a Defense Department program. It was a Sistine-ceiling moment, a lightning spark of the Computer Age. Today, Kleinrock is still at UCLA, and so is that computer, the IMP, the Interface Message Processor. It will be the centerpiece of the forthcoming Kleinrock Internet Museum and Reading Room, not far from Kleinrock's office. As the now widely Webbed world marks its 40th anniversary, here's a bit of what it means to Kleinrock.

  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Feminism's freedom fighter

    October 17, 2009

    For five years she's lived under the threat of death from Islamic radicals, and in those five years, she has become an acclaimed and provocative author on matters about Islam and the West. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born into a Somali Muslim family and eventually made her way to the Netherlands as a refugee.

  • Jerrianne Hayslett: Trials and errors

    October 3, 2009

    Fourteen years ago today -- shock and awe. After 16 tawdry months of the Simpson case wallpapering the public square, a Los Angeles criminal court jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of the hideous murders of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman.

  • Ken Burns: The public's filmmaker

    September 26, 2009

    Ken Burns is a matchmaker with a camera. He has introduced Americans to themselves, to their history, with documentaries such as "The Civil War." He also used the "pan and scan" camera technique to make still images of the long-dead seem alive on the television screen.

  • Susan Feniger: Spice girl

    September 19, 2009

    Restaurant years are like dog years. If a restaurant survives one year, it's like seven in the real world. So when two women chefs make a go of it for nearly 30 years -- not only one restaurant but several, and TV and radio cooking shows, cookbooks, merchandise, catering and a heavy schedule of fundraisers for their favorite charities -- it's nigh on miraculous. Susan Feniger is one-half of the Too Hot Tamales; with her business partner and friend, Mary Sue Milliken, she's entered the pantheon of L.A. überüber-chefs, with Mexican-inspired restaurants Border Grill and Ciudad. Knowing when to hold 'em and also when to fold 'em is a mysterious skill even among restaurateurs, and both Feniger and Milliken possess it (though many Angelenos still mourn the end of their first hole-in-the-wall effort on Melrose, City Cafe). As of this spring, Feniger has also struck out on her own with Susan Feniger's Street, serving her versions of street food. She makes a daily loop among her restaurants, new and old, and the Brentwood house she shares with her life partner, filmmaker Liz Lachman, and alights at Street to talk shop.

  • Phil Angelides: The Columbo of Wall Street

    September 12, 2009

    One very scary year ago this week, we were tipping headfirst into an economic black hole that threatened to suck down the global economy. How did it happen? Congress has created a 10-member citizens commission to find out. At its head is Phil Angelides, Democrat and millionaire businessman who served as California's state treasurer for eight years and then lost his bid for governor in 2006. Lately he's been working with Magic Johnson to create a fund to fix up and "green up" affordable rental housing for working families. Now he'll be spending a couple of weeks a month in a rented office on Pennsylvania Avenue between the International Monetary Fund and the White House. It's called the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, but in the ways of Washington, these things can end up bearing the names of their chairmen -- the Pecora Commission, the Warren Commission. So by Dec. 15, 2010, we'll have the full report from what will surely be known as the Angelides Commission.

  • Maria Elena Durazo: Labor of love

    September 5, 2009

    With about 92% of private-sector jobs non-unionized, the old "union movement" has become the new "labor movement," one of outreach as much as contract negotiating. In Los Angeles, some of that work falls to Maria Elena Durazo. She succeeded her husband as head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, a year after he died, at 53, in 2005. On Labor Day weekend, she considers the state of the labor movement and her role in it.

  • Gloria Molina: L.A.'s 'first Latina'

    August 29, 2009

    Gloria Molina's life has been one of contradictions: the famous feminist politician from East L.A., the career policymaker/politician who still feels like an outsider. She can claim many "firsts," a lot of admirers and a lot of political foes. The first Latina elected to the Legislature, to the Los Angeles City Council, and the first woman and Latina elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, where she'll likely be until she is termed out in 2014. Her reputation is one of picking fights, but she also picks her fights -- killing a proposed prison in East L.A. in the 1980s, watchdogging cushy government pensions and perks and budget practices, and looking out for Los Angeles' poor, of which she was once one herself, the eldest of 10 kids of a poor Mexican immigrant. You may see her only in TV news clips, jabbing a finger on some point. There's more, and some slow-mo, to GloMo.

  • Vincent Bugliosi: Taking on Charles Manson

    August 8, 2009

    Vincent Bugliosi has moved on, but the world hasn't. Forty years after the impossibly grisly Tate-LaBianca murders, he is still "the Manson prosecutor." This, in spite of his many books since, arguing with magisterial fury about the JFK assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Bush vs. Gore case and now the Iraq war.

  • Theodore B. Olson: Legal eagle

    July 25, 2009

    When you've pleaded a case before the United States Supreme Court, your memento, your trophy, is a white quill. Some lawyers get one and treasure it forever. Ted Olson has enough to fletch an eagle, and he hopes to add one more -- legalizing same-sex marriage. During the Republican glory years in Washington, Olson was a GOP pillar: at the first meeting of the Federalist Society, on the board of directors of American Spectator magazine, stalwart of the Reagan administration. It was Olson who argued George W. Bush's case to the Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore in 2000, securing the presidency. He grew up and was educated in California, elementary school through law school, and lived on the Palos Verdes peninsula before going all Beltway on us. And now he's back at his old law firm and working with an old adversary, David Boies, who argued Al Gore's side of the 2000 election. They've launched a challenge to Proposition 8 that could find them together again before the high court -- but on the same side, arguing that same-sex marriage should be part of mainstream America. Who'da thunk it?

  • Jane Goodall: Chimp change

    July 18, 2009

    Chimpanzees and humans share about 95% of their DNA. If affinity and awareness count, Jane Goodall may have a smidge more. As the world's most renowned primatologist, her work has changed what we think of our primate brethren as thinking and feeling creatures, toolmakers, peacemakers and warmongers.

  • Kevin Starr: Making history

    July 11, 2009

    I made the acquaintance of Kevin Starr's books long before I made the acquaintance of Kevin Starr. "Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963," the eighth volume in his serial love letter to California, is arriving in bookstores this weekend.

  • Mavis Leno: More than just talk

    July 4, 2009

    For my money, the funny Leno is the one who's not on TV. Mavis Nicholson Leno is swift with the wisecrack, and she has this big, hearty, irresistible laugh that you suspect makes her her husband's best audience. But there's a fierce focus in her that I first saw about 10 years ago, after she'd begun working with the Feminist Majority on behalf of women in Afghanistan. That was well before most Americans could place Afghanistan on a map, much less knew what vileness the Taliban was up to. Leno may be the most ardent American champion Afghan women have, taking her crusade for literacy and healthcare to the news media and to Capitol Hill. When she spoke to me at the Feminist Majority offices in Beverly Hills, she was preaching to the choir. What she wants is a lot bigger choir.

  • Karen Bass: Madame Speaker

    June 27, 2009

    Since California added term limits to the political rule book in 1990, the piece of furniture occupied by the speaker of the California Assembly has become both a musical chair and an ejector seat. We've had nine speakers in 14 years. Karen Bass is the latest, a Los Angeles Democrat and the first black woman in the job. She was elected to the Assembly in 2004. She became speaker a year ago, and she'll have to pack up and be gone next year. When I first met her, she was a physician's assistant and a community organizer, crusading for foster care and against the myriad liquor stores in South Los Angeles. Sure, today she sits next to the governor in the "big five" meetings -- but with the ticking clock of term limits and the most hellacious budget in decades, I think of the speaker's job now as much like the Woody Allen joke about two women chatting at a resort: "The food here is so awful." "Yes, and such small portions." Bass dishes it out, and takes it.

  • Benjamin Jealous: Mr. Rights

    June 20, 2009

    Benjamin Jealous hears it so often that I'm sure he just lets it slide off by now: "You weren't even born when ... " Fill in the blank with your favorite milestone of recent racial history in this country -- when Rosa Parks sat down on the bus, when the Civil Rights Act passed, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. But at age 36, the California native and the youngest president of the NAACP was certainly present for the biggest milestone of all -- Barack Obama's election. In a few weeks, Jealous will preside over the NAACP's 100th anniversary convention. He's a Rhodes scholar who went to work for a scrappy Mississippi black newspaper that was firebombed for its exposes. He has organized voter registration drives, run a human rights program at Amnesty International -- and, when he had time, used to run marathons.

  • Jean-Lou Chameau: Cooking up ideas

    June 13, 2009

    I hope Jean-Lou Chameau gets to sleep late this morning. Friday, at his third graduation ceremony as president of Caltech, he also announced $30 million in gifts to that singular institution, where Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman worked their mighty brains. Caltech has raked in oodles of Nobel Prizes. Its operation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has sent its renown beyond Earth. And its students have pulled off both brilliant research and inspired pranks. The long-ago dismantling of a Model T and the reassembling of it in a student's room, where it was discovered with the motor running, is so well known that President George H.W. Bush kidded around in his 1991 Caltech commencement speech about students reassembling Air Force One in the lobby of his hotel. The school's eighth president is a civil engineer with an interest in earthquakes from a village in Normandy. It had fewer residents than Caltech's undergraduate population of about 900. Now he works at the roll-top desk that belonged to Caltech's first president, the Nobel-winning physicist Robert A. Millikan. It is, says Chameau, "humbling."

  • Harry Shearer: Seriously funny

    June 6, 2009

    A little deep Googling reveals that a sizable hunk of what I've laughed at in American humor over the last 30 years bears the mark of Harry Shearer: On TV, "Saturday Night Live" and a dozen or so character voices on "The Simpsons." On radio, "The Jack Benny Program" (before my time but just thinking of Benny makes me smile) and "Le Show." On the big screen, "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Teddy Bears' Picnic." My seat was next to his at the O.J. Simpson civil trial, where he mined a much more comedic seam than I did. And for a time, we took turns on the columnists' page in the L.A. Times Magazine. So I can say that I know Harry Shearer, a bit. Harry Shearer is an acquaintance of mine. And I'm no Harry Shearer. But I don't have to be. He does it for us all.

  • Laffit Pincay Jr.: Horse sense

    May 30, 2009

    I am laying one finger on the Kentucky Derby trophy. It is small, smaller and far less flashy than a lot of the other trophies on Laffit Pincay Jr.'s shelves -- much less gaudy than any of my parents' bowling trophies. It doesn't need to be flashy: Hello, it's the Kentucky Derby. Pincay won it in 1984. The little horse on top is broken, and he sets the cup aside to have it fixed. Then his cellphone starts ringing: The ringtone is an old song with the line, "No more love on the run," which strikes me as sad because Pincay, 62, has been out of the running since 2003, when he injured his neck in what turned out to be his last race. For seven years, he was the world's winningest jockey; now, he'd rather sing the praises of his son, broadcaster Laffit Pincay III, who talks about the ponies on TV instead of riding them. Next Saturday's Belmont Stakes, the last jewel in the Triple Crown, is raking in bets and headlines for the sport of kings. But in Southern California, Hollywood Park may be bulldozed, Santa Anita is on the block and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is talking about cashing in on Del Mar racetrack's seaside real estate. It's a good time to hear one of racing's most renowned jockeys on life in a sport that's having problems in the far turn.

  • Daryl F. Gates: Clear blue

    May 23, 2009

    At 82, Daryl F. Gates still looks as if he could pass the training physical for the Los Angeles Police Department, which he joined as a rookie 60 years ago and ran as chief for 14 years. When he says that his name was on the front page of The Times more than any other Californian during those years, he's probably right. Gates made headlines because he made waves. His legendary set-tos with politicians and the Police Commission were combustible theater. His tenure as chief overlapped Tom Bradley's as mayor, and there was no love lost between the two; by the 1992 riots, they weren't on speaking terms. Gates' LAPD career carried him from driver for Chief William H. Parker to Parker's right- hand man and heir. He was the last chief to earn the job through the civil service system; since Gates, chiefs have been appointed, with term limits. Now there's talk of lifting those term limits so the current chief, William J. Bratton, could stay on for five more years -- making his tenure one year longer than Gates'. When we met, he brought me a cup of Starbucks, and before I asked the first question, he referred to a 1982 Times story about his plan to ban one of two LAPD chokeholds. In seven years, 16 people had died in police chokeholds, 12 of them African American. Gates told The Times then he suspected some blacks had a medical condition that made them more susceptible than -- and this stirred an outcry for his resignation that never disappeared -- "normal people."

  • Eli Broad: A Broad view

    May 16, 2009

    I'm enough of a workaholic to recognize another one, even if I have to do it from a long way off and by the back of his head. That's Eli Broad up ahead. The man who hates the b-word -- "billionaire" -- prefers the p-word, "philanthropist." With his wife, Edythe, he plays on a bigger board than a hundred average workaholics: in education, science, the arts and L.A.'s civic life. His foundation writes checks to charter schools, Teach for America, a zealous arts program that lends the Broads' collections to museums around the world. The lifted-eyebrow crowd finds fault with his unapologetic big-checkbook activism, but nobody can doubt that the Broads help circle L.A. on the cultural map. Around town, he's Eli, maybe because, like Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, some people aren't sure how to pronounce his surname (it rhymes with "road"), and maybe because he's joined that exalted one-name pantheon. And, for a guy with so much on his plate, he's a pretty fair dancer. I know: I won a bet asking him to dance at the City Hall rededication seven years ago. (And hey, you guys still haven't paid up; you know who you are.)

  • Hugh Hefner: The Bunny man

    May 9, 2009

    I've been in this room in the Playboy Mansion before. As I recall, the painting on the wall was a topless portrait of his wife, Kimberley, mother of his two teenage sons, from whom he is now separated. Now it's just Hefner, painted in Tudor robes, in the style of Holbein. In person, he wears his singular uniform of pajamas and slippers. The girls cavorting outside have changed, but he has not. At 83, he is part of the 20th century cultural pantheon, the subject of " Hugh Hefner: Playboy Activist and Rebel," an in-the-works documentary by an Oscar-winning filmmaker. He remains "creative director" of the family business, Playboy Enterprises (his daughter, Christie, stepped down as chief executive in December). A cable TV show about life with his trio of blondined girlfriends has made him more famous now than he was as the renowned and sometimes notorious founder of Playboy, which, compared with some 21st century smut, is practically decorous. The man who put the "he" in "hedonism" says he's proud of liberating women as well as men from the sexual cage of the 1950s.

  • Laura Chick: California's eagle eye

    May 2, 2009

    If I were writing her business card, it would read, "Kicking butt in sensible shoes since 1993." Laura Chick has enemies. I am not one of them. The woman who's leaving Los Angeles City Hall after two terms on the City Council and two as city controller is stepping up to the appointed job of inspector general of California's $48-billion share of federal stimulus money. Editorial writers have praised her as an eagle eye in a green eyeshade, a grandma turned pit bull. A Toronto newspaper column said Canada needs its own Laura Chick. From her City Hall office, where her unsparing audits have left few stones unturned or uncast, she's just moving into her new quarters near the state Capitol. There, she's arranged "Morgan shelves" for pictures of her 6-year-old granddaughter and, arriving soon, her voodoo doll collection.

  • Identity theft hits close to home

    March 12, 2009

    Now it's my turn to be a statistic.

  • California needs a constitutional convention

    March 5, 2009

    Heck, yeah, California should throw a constitutional convention.

  • Wild wild Web

    February 26, 2009

    The guy who wrote that the American frontier closed more than 100 years ago -- he's a five-star moron.

  • In L.A., east is east

    February 19, 2009

    You. In the stiff new fedora and drinking a caipirinha. Stop playing fast and loose with the map of L.A.

  • Good movies in bad times

    February 12, 2009

    It must be the worst case of bad movie timing since John Dillinger decided to take in the late show at the Biograph.

  • I'd like my CEO well-done, thanks

    February 5, 2009

    Oh, I want it. I want it bad.

  • Villaraigosa's next race

    January 22, 2009

    Whoa, there. Don't let the inauguration lull you into a false sense of ease. You're not finished with voting yet.

  • Capping off the inauguration

    January 18, 2009

    It's the closest thing to a crown that America's small-r republican first ladies get -- the simultaneously regal and egalitarian Inauguration Day hat.

  • California's budget breaking point

    January 15, 2009

    If what it takes to fix California -- to fix everything about the way it raises money and spends it -- is to let it wreck itself first, then maybe we have to let that happen.

  • Is public access TV dead?

    January 8, 2009

    Your remote control isn't screwed up. As of now, there really is nothing on some cable channels.

  • L.A.'s 'Hail a Cab' experiment

    January 1, 2009

    If there's a peak mating season between those oddly matched species, the Angeleno and the taxicab, it surely came at about 2 o'clock this morning, New Year's Day, when "Auld Lang Syne" almost rhymed with "DUI."

  • California has no room for good Samaritans

    December 25, 2008

    Uh, gentlemen? You three wise men? As your lawyer, I'm advising you not to go there.

  • Should we tax pot?

    December 4, 2008

    Barack Obama is probably getting more letters than Santa Claus this year.

  • Cherie Blair gets personal in 'Speaking for Myself'

    November 5, 2008

    If you believed half the snarky descriptions the British press has slung at Cherie Blair, you'd have expected her to arrive in Southern California astride a broomstick, accompanied by flying monkeys.

  • A case of elective compulsive disorder

    October 30, 2008

    At last, the end of crazy is in sight. Come Tuesday night, maybe we can all ... just ... stop.

  • Disney's California Adventure redo

    October 23, 2008

    Fake? We've got nothing against it here. California practically took out the patent on fake. The ingenious faked fantasy world of movies, the virtual technological reality of Silicon Valley and the virtual human reality of the Silicone Valley of the Dolls -- we own fake, baby.

  • 3 no-good propositions

    October 16, 2008

    Here's how difficult it is to put something in the U.S. Constitution: You need the approval of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. This is why the Constitution only has 27 amendments, and nearly half of those came with the original Constitution.

  • Is two more hours of Dubya two too many?

    October 9, 2008

    Here's your Stetson, what's your hurry? Americans can't wait to see the back of George W. Bush. Will they feel the same about him at the box office?

  • The 'Bradley effect' in 2008

    October 2, 2008

    If I had a nickel for every time some pundit has opined about Barack Obama and the dreaded "Bradley effect," I could rescue Wall Street.

  • Kicking our addiction to O.J.

    September 25, 2008

    If O.J. Simpson whined in the Mojave Desert (Nevada side), and no one was around to hear him, would he still make a noise? Do we care?

  • Californians are far away at this convention

    September 4, 2008

    The sage of St. Paul, the radio storyteller Garrison Keillor, has a tender spot for California -- so tender that perhaps one day he'll launch "A Coastal Home Companion" as a winter replacement series for his "A Prairie Home Companion."

  • Between 'crazy' and 'committed'

    February 14, 2008

    It's Valentine's Day, and one family is showing its love by showing up in court. Britney Spears' parents plan to ask a judge to keep her under their care and supervision. Try finding a hearts-and-flowers card for that -- "To our daughter, we love you, please go back into the hospital."

  • If Hillary taps Antonio

    February 7, 2008

    Los Angeles, I've always got your back, don't I? So here's how I see this election going down for us:

  • Early birds miss the point

    January 31, 2008

    Now aren't you sorry?

  • After Johnny Grant

    January 17, 2008

    The last time I talked to Johnny Grant was just before Halloween. A couple of venerable actors had been perplexed that our friend Norman Corwin, the founding father of radio drama and subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, did not have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I called up Johnny in his Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel penthouse. Hollywood's honorary mayor for life professed astonishment that Corwin was a man without a star. Get me the paperwork, he said, and I'll take his name to the committee personally, immediately.

  • Britney's Law? Not so crazy

    January 10, 2008

    Wouldn't it be something if the giants of mental healthcare reform in California turned out to be three men named Lanterman, Petris and Short -- and a pop singer by the name of Britney Spears?

  • Ready for their close-ups?

    January 3, 2008

    This can't be a joke because there's a writers strike on and jokes are out for the duration. So in all unscripted seriousness, I ask, could Hollywood really be smarter than Washington? Is it possible that movie people are savvier than political people?

  • Rooting for trees

    December 20, 2007

    What a lousy time to be harping about how there aren't enough trees in the world.

  • In a drought, who you gonna call?

    November 22, 2007

    For starters, the name's all wrong.

  • Who needs writers?

    November 8, 2007

    It's Day Four of the Writers Guild strike, and here's how to tell that the striking writers haven't so much as picked up a Bic: Their picket-line chants are crappy.

  • Blackwater: Not in our backyards

    October 4, 2007

    If you turned on C-SPAN on Tuesday and thought for a moment that you'd punched in some all-action-movie channel by mistake, I can't blame you.

  • The GOP's fairness fakery

    September 27, 2007

    A show of hands: What words do you associate with Americans? No, not "no money down." Name one quality we like to think matters most to us.

  • Mitochondrial politics

    September 20, 2007

    Here's what to watch for at next week's GOP minority-issues presidential debate at a historically black college in Baltimore: empty chairs. All four top Republicans have "scheduling conflicts."

  • His story won't die

    August 23, 2007

    Daniel Pearl's name you know. Chauncey Bailey's, you probably don't. Both men were murdered presumably because of what they did for a living.

  • Taken for a ride on Air Arnold

    July 19, 2007

    HOW SELFISH of me not to have noticed. I had absolutely no idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger was so hard up. He's practically the Oliver Twist of governors. He's so needy that there's a charity devoted almost exclusively to helping him out.

  • A law for bad humans

    July 5, 2007

    HONESTLY, PEOPLE. Here it is, the day after Independence Day, and some "independent" citizens you all are, still expecting someone else to clean up after you.

  • Ho-ney, I'm ho-ome ...

    June 28, 2007

    AND NOW IT'S time for another episode of "I Love Chelly," about that wacky, lovable brunette who's married to a handsome, up-and-coming city attorney who wants to make it big in politics.

  • I don't care about Antonio's breakup

    June 14, 2007

    MAYBE I NEED to call a doctor. It might be a virus. Or an allergy.

  • Green guilt trip

    June 7, 2007

    DON'T YOU LOVE IT when the auto industry starts talking in corporate tongues? The most astonishing idiocies come out of its collective mouth: No, no, no, we couldn't possibly put in seat belts. Air bags? Who'd want to pay for air bags?

  • The $3-a-day diet

    May 24, 2007

    LOSE WEIGHT on $3 a day! Ask me how!

  • Drought, the sequel, is here

    May 17, 2007

    HEY, ALL YOU sequel fans! Last week, it was "Spider-Man"; tomorrow "Shrek" and next week another "Pirates of the Caribbean." And I'm sure you'll be lining up for the most spectacular sequel of all, "Drought III: The Thirst."

  • Let them eat Dodger Dogs!

    April 12, 2007

    OPENING DAY at Dodger Stadium. Out on the fresh, emerald field, it was all about the RBIs and the ERAs.

  • The $1 federal budget

    March 22, 2007

    I WAS WORKING on my taxes at the time, so I was probably already hysterical, but something on the 1040 form got me giggling: the $3 checkoff for the presidential election campaign fund.

  • Does L.A. need another downtown?

    March 1, 2007

    DON'T HATE ME, Eli Broad. I'm just asking the question here: Do we really need a new downtown?

  • Patt Morrison for president!

    February 15, 2007

    MY FELLOW Americans: Today I am announcing that I am not testing the waters. I am not forming an exploratory committee. I am not studying the possibility. I am not embarking on a listening tour.

  • No case, no justice

    January 25, 2007

    BY NOW, Charupha Wongwisetsiri has been cremated and her mom has moved out of the Craftsman condo in Angelino Heights where 9-year-old Charupha was shot as she stood in the kitchen.

  • Who wants a deep-dish Olympics?

    January 18, 2007

    THE LAST TIME L.A. landed the Olympics, it was because nobody else wanted them.

  • Insurance is enough to make you sick

    January 4, 2007

    IT'S A GOOD thing I have health insurance, because I thought my ticker was going to give out when I read this: Health insurance companies will not sell policies, at any price, to hale and healthy people who have, or had, some pretty trifling ailments. Hemorrhoids. Varicose veins.

  • Adopt a homeless Angeleno

    December 21, 2006

    NICE AND WARM? Got enough to eat? Not addled by booze or drugs, or saddled with some mental disorder? Maybe you've even got a house key on your keychain?

  • The phantom congresswoman

    December 7, 2006

    THAT FRESHMAN California congresswoman, Sherri Davis — she does get around, doesn't she?

  • Patt Morrison: Vote for Cal!

    November 23, 2006

    IT'S TAKEN ME all this time to get rid of the disgusting aftertaste of the midterm election TV ads, with their artificial colors and flavors — cloying, bitter, sour, stupid. (Is stupid a flavor? It should be.)

  • Patt Morrison: Arnold lacked the guts to oppose Prop. 83

    November 16, 2006

    I USED TO THINK something was wrong with Iowa. So many Iowans left the Hawkeye State to come here. Maybe it was all that corn. Maybe it was the early presidential caucuses.

  • Patt Morrison: PR for the Homeless

    October 12, 2006

    SUDDENLY, FINALLY, there's some real money finding its way to the homeless.

  • Patt Morrison: The Funniest Movie You Can't See

    October 5, 2006

    SO WHICH will be harder to spot this season — Mark Foley campaign signs or movie ads for "Idiocracy"?

  • Patt Morrison: Memo to Congress -- Voting Is a Right

    September 28, 2006

    EARLY ON election day last June, someone broke into a poll worker's garage in the Central Valley town of Sanger and stole 1,000 blank ballots and two voting machines. Sinister, no? Florida 2000! Ohio 2004!

  • Patt Morrison: Border Fence Is Borderline Insanity

    September 21, 2006

    WHAT, no land mines?

  • Patt Morrison: Owning O.J.

    September 7, 2006

    SWEAR TO DeMille, this is going to be the most frightening story that Hollywood has come across since the news burst upon El Mundo de Movies that a private eye named Tony Pellicano was supposedly eavesdropping on some quite glamorous and private telephones.

  • Kill Barbie

    June 22, 2006

    IT'S TIME to kill off Barbie.

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