Plus: “Curse words” aimed at the Weekly
By Andy Van De Voorde
Under California law, attorneys are allowed to ask hypothetical questions of expert witnesses. But Bay Guardian attorney Ralph C. Alldredge outdid himself Friday when certified public accountant Everett P. Harry took the stand in the Guardian’s predatory pricing lawsuit against the Weekly.
Harry is the financial expert called by the Weekly to refute the outlandish damage estimates submitted by Clifford Kupperberg, the $500-per-hour Guardian witness who on Thursday discussed fourteen different “damage models” ranging from $4.4 million up to $11.8 million.
Confirming once again the depth of our modern voyeuristic impulses comes RottenNeighbor.com, the latest in gossip-enabling technology. It allows you to "locate, rate, and share good and bad neighbors," and you can be sure it's mostly bad — hence the name — as a cursory search of a random intersection in the Castro reveals. It's kind of like FelonSpy.com only (seemingly) for real. All the neighborly rottenness after the jump.
In its best year ever, the Guardian made a 5 percent profit. So how does its damages expert imagine a world in which the Guardian has a 75 percent profit margin?
By Andy Van De Voorde
As The Snitch was sipping his coffee and checking the morning line at Bay Meadows today, he took time to surf past the Bay Guardian’s Web site and check in on the competition.
Your faithful courthouse correspondent always likes to see how the Guardian is covering its predatory pricing lawsuit against the Weekly, in part because he appreciates the rhetorical dexterity necessary to cast a patina of logic onto a case that seems to spin further into the ether with each passing day.
As an aside, it would appear that Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann checks up on the competition as well. On Thursday morning, the big brute was standing next to The Snitch waiting to go through the metal detector at the courthouse on McAllister Street when the two journalists (your Superior Court bureau chief uses the word loosely, of course) happened to arrive at the gate simultaneously.
Brugmann gestured, almost as if in a curtsy, to signal The Snitch through.
Thank you, said The Snitch, who while growing up in the witness protection program was always taught by his mother to be polite, especially to six-foot-five bullies capable of holding you upside down by the ankles and shaking free all the change in your pockets.
A definite contender for most ridiculous neighborhood name ever, Curbed SF drops the dime today on "MiMa," an area of Market downtown that encompasses the 944 Market St. address where New Urban Properties has staked their latest claim, and possibly employed the fine art of linguistic mashup to concoct the abbreviation for "mid-market," which Curbed describes aptly:
"And there you have it. A new nabe — albeit one that sounds a bit too much like a child's pet name for grandma — makes its public debut."
And it's not as though other contrived neighborhood mashups haven't been aiming for the same heights of weirdness: there's the "TenderNob" (Tenderloin/Nob Hill), "NoPa" (North of the Panhandle), and "SoCha" (South of Cesar Chavez) of the cafe fame.
-- Brian Bernbaum
Last month a New York appellate court ruled that while the state may not perform gay marriages, it has to recognize them if they were performed legally somewhere else. This morning the Republican administration of Monroe County has announced they’re appealing that ruling to New York’s highest court.
According to County Executive Maggie Brooks:
“This is a clear case of misinterpretation of the law. We must appeal this decision in order to protect Monroe County taxpayers. We can not simply extend benefits to unmarried couples and we certainly can not ignore the definition of marriage that currently exists under State law.”
The case, involving a lesbian couple living in Monroe County who had a civil union in Vermont and a marriage in Ontario, Canada, came out of nowhere for one of New York’s largest counties and has received almost no response from the general public, in Monroe County or the nation – even though it puts New York near the forefront of the gay rights movement.
No trial date’s been set, but the lack of a backlash (so far) and a generally liberal judiciary in NYS means this just might hold. - Benjamin Wachs
The Chronicle gets the Dubious Headline of the Day award. Reads the home page of the newspaper's online incarnation : Conviction In Nurse Sex Slaying. The story reports the arrest of John Puckett in the 1972 murder of nurse Diana Sue Sylvester who was sexually assaulted, strangled, and stabbed to death. After clicking on the salacious link, the reader is taken to the actual article with the more appropriate headline, Sex offender, 74, conivted in 1972 murder. Repeat after me: sexual assault is not sex. –Andy Wright
