Opinion: In today’s pages: The swimsuit edition. Plus marijuana. And beer.
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Today’s Times editorial page tells FINA to get a grip. Or, rather, loosen its grip. FINA -- that’s Fédération Internationale de Natation Amateur to you -- is the body that governs competitive swimming, and it recently said non to the high-tech, full-body polyurethane suits that have helped swimmers set new world records. Don’t fear the modern world and its innovations, the editorial says:
But short of a swimsuit fitted with motorized propellers, or high-jump shoes soled with rocket boosters, there’s little reason to reject improved design and materials based on skittishness about the records set and broken in seemingly less time than the 20 minutes it takes to don one of the new swimsuits. Fans like to compare performances of the past with those of the present. Who’s the greater golfer, Tiger Woods or Arnold Palmer? Sporting events should be a contest among athletes, not between current athletes and the ghosts of athletes past.
The editorial page also says it’s high time for Los Angeles to weed out the medical marijuana joints ... sorry ... dispensaries ... that can’t or won’t abide by reasonable restrictions. Like not being next door to a school. Or a bong supplier: ‘If the city doesn’t regulate its dispensaries, there’s a chance the Drug Enforcement Administration will, with results many Californians would rather avoid.’
The page also raises a glass to President Obama, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the guy who arrested him, Cambridge police Sgt. James Crowley. See, they’re having a beer in the White House today to talk over old times (‘Dude, remember that time you came to my house, and I yelled at you, and you arrested me, and the president took my side, and then he backed down? That was cool.’). We don’t deal with the fact that the president’s beer of choice, Bud Light, is now foreign-owned.
OK, turn the page. Op-Ed leads off with Israeli blogger Yisrael Medad and his observation of a Jewish day of lamentation -- and his assertion that the U.S. stance toward the status of Jerusalem has created ‘another lamentable situation between the two nations.’
UCLA law professor Gary Blasi, a persistent thorn in the side of cities trying to ‘clean up’ homelessness rather than help the homeless, takes on Santa Monica for its aggressive enforcement:
The city’s budget documents praise ‘the rigid enforcement of laws and ordinances to discourage’ what it calls ‘encampments.’ The budget included $250,000 for ‘homeless intervention’ but also $240,000 for a panhandling education campaign, presumably to reduce giving to people perceived to be homeless. And last winter, Santa Monica closed pickup locations from which homeless people could get to cold-weather shelters in adjacent cities.
Read previous Blasi Op-Ed articles in the Times here.
And Jersey girl Meghan Daum compares her state of birth with her new home. Is L.A. New Jersey West?
And yet it’s also the way both places are blessed with a commendable lack of smugness about themselves. Just as New Jersey lives in the shadow of New York and Philly, Southern California is forever contending with the sanctimonious posturing of Northern California. We are perpetually being told our coastline isn’t as dramatic and our populace not as literate. San Franciscans refer to their town as The City and do a lot of chest-thumping about how the taxi drivers quote Rilke and the sourdough starter dates back to the Gold Rush.
You know, Meghan, the West Coast has the sunshine.
But, I guess, down on the shore everything’s all right.