Past Stories
TAKE MY LIFE–PLEASE!
It was Tuesday, and Cher Ofstedahl was telling 100 people a joke about her penis.
“I can tell that I’m attractive,” the 44-year-old stand-up comedian told the crowd of predominantly male, varyingly intoxicat...
KITTEN DE VILLE’S BURLESQUE RECITAL
America has a long tradition of offbeat, vernacular theater—the Blackface minstrels of the 19th century, the rough-and-tumble high-jinks of vaudeville, the semi-underworld allure of the burlesque house—forms that al...
THE FABULOUS FIRST-EVER IE WEEKLY HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE!
A BOOT TO THE HEAD!
Want to give your mate a kick in the teeth for the holidays? Café Sevilla in Riverside is more than happy to oblige. The multihued tapas restaurant and nightclub hosts tango dinner shows every Friday&...
Grand Chasm
The taxman has made it official. The Internal Revenue Service, by far the largest collector of personal economic data in the nation, said last month that the gap between the richest Americans and everyone else continues to grow...
War On Hate
Brian Levin, founder and director of the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, isn’t sure how old he was the day a pack of racists kicked his ass for being Jewish.
“I was in the third or fourth…
We (Barely) Survived Coachella!
DAY 1: FRIDAY
2 P.M.: BLAST OFF!
Chicago DJ duo Flosstradamus spin some decent mash-up stuff to a sparsely-populated Polo Field, and got a good number of people dancing despite the already-harsh desert heat. We were feel...
Crazy Insane!
Some people are born into a life of privilege and wealth most of us can only dream of. Banning’s Michael Hughes was born into a life in the limelight, although his experience has been much less glamorous than that of…
Best of IE
Best Part of Waking Up? The Morning Stiffy—KCAL 96.7
No matter what age group or nationality, sex or religion, clique, crew or club, IE residents have one common bond: We love to be entertained. As we waste ...
Sweet Tooth
Aladdin Jr—Baklava
Tucked neatly away in a small, non-descript strip mall in Pomona lies a late-night oasis of delicious that houses little else than laundromats and discount stores. Granted, the “I can’t beli...
Just Saying No to China
By Kit Stolz
The trouble began with cardboard dumplings. In Beijing, a Chinese television reporter found a street vendor who was selling dumplings stuffed with fake pork made out of cardboard. His ...
BACK-BURNED
Of all the problems afflicting modern news reporting, perhaps the most insidious is our tendency toward oversimplification.
Journalists love to turn complicated information into folksy language everyone can follow. We pi...
Bonfires Burning Bright
Some of these things you already know as fact: Satanism is a minimal evil next to ignorance—the only difference being that evil possibly doesn’t exist at all. Geraldo Rivera is a ratfink, George W. Bush didn’t...
The Dealers Next Door
The neighbors to the right of us are moving, which bothers me like you wouldn’t believe. Good neighbors are hard to come by, and these folks—a couple and their three small children—were good neighbors. M...
She-Bold
A few years ago, when the robin’s egg blue of The Lovely Bones was everywhere you looked, you might have resented Alice Sebold . . . maybe just a teensy bit, anyway.
If you weren’t one of the five million…
MAN OF THE YEAR!
“Living these days is makin’ me nervous,” Ben Harper sings at the start of the title tune of his latest album, Both Sides of the Gun. And the guitarist and singer-songwriter isn’t alone.
Like many ...
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
At 2 a.m. one Sunday last year, Amanda’s cell phone started beeping. She turned the alarm off, grabbed her pillow and blanket and walked into the living room to her desktop computer, its CPU fan still humming. Perched on ...
NO LAUGHING MATTER
The mouse with a brick. The round-headed kid. The bald and bearded guru in the bed-sheet robe.
In their time, they’ve all urged us to take comics seriously. Now that comics garner book awards, big-time museum shows ...
GARAGE DAYS REVISITED
Kids didn’t want PlayStations or iPods for Christmas in 1966; they wanted electric guitars.
Forty years ago, rock & roll was more than just another niche commodity in the entertainment marketplace—it was p...
STRAIGHT OUTTA DAMASCUS
Two years ago, we were sitting on the roof of a house in the old quarter of Damascus interviewing a manager of a local hip-hop band. It was a balmy autumn night, and all around us, people in the…
VanRossum’s Ghost
Goodbadcorrupt.com is a strange and ugly little website, similar in appearance to those espousing such conspiracy theories as JFK being assassinated by the Freemasons, or 9/11 being the work of Jewish bankers and space re...
Know Your Neighbor
A bad day, Vince MacDonald knows, is learning you’re a wanted man in Mexico. A
really bad day is hearing you’ve been convicted of a crime in Mexico.
All of which makes MacDonald wonder: Is that monste...
Big Boobs
Andi Campognone isn’t the type of woman who’ll have her vision compromised. She’s a staunch advocate of free artistic expression. As the associate director of the Riverside Art Museum, she lived at peace with ...
Colossus of Rhoads
It’s been 24 years since that fateful day
You were scooped up and taken away
And there you would stay
I still hear the music you played!
As if it was just the other day
Your light shined bright…
Back to the Grindhouse
You’ll probably see Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse double-feature-within-a-feature this weekend, and if you’ve got a wicked streak, you’ll see it properly at a grimy midnight show or...
Greatest Hits
The extra buttock wrinkles, the carpal tunnel splints, the leaky roof, the freight trains constantly rolling by, the idiots a few doors down who insist on revving their deafening motorcycles whenever we’re trying to talk ...
COACHELLA ’07
Coachella time. Again.
You know the drill by now, or at least you should—this is the eighth desert extravaganza since the fest’s 1999 birth, and this year the beast has ballooned to an exhausting three-day affair&md...
The Most Hated Man in Norco!
Yee-haw!
If ‘en you think them there good folk over in Norco don’t know how to have a good time, you ain’t never seen ‘em on a field trip.
Case in point: A group of Norco High choir students and…
Bring the Noise!
Another May, another post-Coachella depression. But why suffer the fallout over that overrated desert extravaganza when one of the better music fests is going off this weekend in way-closer-than-Indio Temecula?
In just its thir...
