Past Stories
Empire Chatter
Raymond Chandler had Los Angeles. Stephen King has Maine, and William Faulkner was devoted to fictional Yoknapatawpha County. But for writers Susan Straight (Highwire Moon, A Million Nightingales), Gayle Brandeis (A Book of Dea...
No Heart for the Heartless
Within minutes of the official announcement Tuesday—Christian televangelist Jerry Falwell, dead from heart arrhythmia at 73—the cable networks broke out their mourning accoutrements: the frost-tinged graphics of the...
Tourist Trap
The Inland Empire doesn’t so much welcome people as it traps them in its grip—less ticker-tape parade, more tar pit. Spend a Friday night in any IE bar, and you’ll hear the tragic tales from world-wise wayfare...
Sticking it to Mr. Sam
Sure, Wal-Mart underpays its employees and unfairly burdens the federal and state governments by not providing most of its workers health benefits. Yes, the family behind the mega-chain inspires otherwise apathetic couch potato...
The Even-More-Inland Empire
I’ve always been intrigued by those little Podunk towns you see on the way to Laughlin and Vegas. What kinds of people live in them? How can they live without a Bed, Bath & Beyond? Where do they go when…
Bitch In Heat
The surreal is where you find it. We’d driven across London Bridge to find ours, a barren bluff with a view across Lake Havasu to California. It was doubtful the wild dog circling us had taken the same route. It…
Pop Your Cherry!
Every June, Eden arrives in Beaumont, signaling the passing of spring into summer, idyllic afternoons spent amidst rolling hills of oak and sycamore, juices dribbling down your chin as you stuff your mouth with the forbidden fr...
Ridin’ Dirty
We’re writing this from more than 8,000 feet in the air, thanks to a trip up Snow Summit’s Scenic Sky Chair, the same high-speed quad ski lift that during the wet winter months goes by the name East Mountain Express...
Vote Often!
Have you heard? There’s an election going down Tuesday, and as far as the IE goes, the most entertaining one is certainly the battle over the Riverside city council—at least that’s the one using up all the ban...
San Bernardino’s Price for Free Speech? $17,000
You’ve got to admire San Bernardino City Hall. How many other American cities do you know that can take an issue as tense, ugly, and full of political grandstanding as illegal immigration, and in one day make it a l...
THE RUNDOWN
TUESDAY, JUNE 12
The Palm Springs Desert Sun takes the weird trend in interactive newspapering—which, basically, assigns journalists to make news instead of reporting it—to an especially weird place by posing this q...
To Be Young, Gifted and Screwed in SB
As much as San Bernardino city officials would like us to believe that the young members of Inland Congregations United for Change are just a bunch of malcontents, they are, in fact, some of the most optimistic citizens of the&...
Temecula Unplugged
While Temecula musicians are still getting used to the ban on one of their favorite pastimes—smoking—they may soon have to deal with a ban on their other favorite hobby. The Temecula Planning Commission is designing...
Rialto Roadblock
There’s a potentially deadly menace lurking underneath Rialto. Although it sounds like the plot outline of a horrible B-film, this threat is really closer to the stuff of our post-industrialized nightmares: an underground...
Masters of their Eminent Domain
Across this expanse of concrete and desperation known as the city of Riverside, the signs of progress are everywhere. You see them in the glistening eyes of dark-suited investors as they gaze dreamily upon neighborhoods that we...
Hard-Pressed for Ethics
These should be exciting times for the Riverside Press-Enterprise, the so-called newspaper of record for the city and county of Riverside, and the only paper around with the name Riverside in its name.
The city is neck-de...
Train in Vain
Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 91 for the eighth time in four days, I passed the time by working out the physics of running myself over with my own car.
It was a matter of distance, time and velocity:…
Adventures In Bureaucracy!
Last week, the California Department of Finance released a projection estimating that the Inland Empire will have about 75 percent new IEers by 2050, putting the combined populations of Riverside and San Bernardino counties at ...
THE RUNDOWN
TUESDAY, JULY 10
It’s the end of an era in Yucaipa, where the city council has voted to restrict owners of single-family residential homes to no more than nine birds, total. It had to happen, of course, and someday people...
ASK A MEXICAN!
Dear Mexican: Why don’t Mexicans have enough gratitude for America to learn to speak English? Are they too stupid? Too lazy? What—they can’t learn two or three words a day? Is this asking too much?
—Took...
Hack! Cough! Wheeze!
According to the American Lung Association, this summer more than 35 million Americans are living with chronic lung diseases—including asthma, emphysema and lung cancer—and 136 million Americans now live in areas wi...
THE RUNDOWN
TUESDAY, JULY 24
There’s a traffic jam at the opening of the world’s newest freeway link, the 7.25-mile stretch of the 210 that connects San Bernardino and Rialto, a route which in Southern California’s romant...
Temecula
The band was raging. The music rattled in the chests of more than 200 listeners. The crowd in Temecula’s only live music showcase swayed and jerked to the rapid pulse of the bass drums. Meanwhile, inside an office in the&...
Claremont Sees Liight at End of the Pipe
Something truly remarkable happened in the Inland Empire recently–a city council actually took a step back from the reactionary mood of its police department and lawyers, educated itself on a controversial issue and made ...
On the Cheap
Getting your ass back in college after a lengthy summer break of doing nothing (on top of doing absolutely nothing) is probably one of the most difficult feats to accomplish outside of having your appendix removed without the a...
Where Dreams May Come
Ray Bradbury dreamed about man’s great conquest long before President Kennedy voiced his proclamation and long before Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind in 1969. Colleagues dismissed his talk as hogwash, but t...
Respect Thy Youngsters
Any musician who plays shows can talk extensively about shady promoters and shows that went horribly awry due to lack of planning, poor communication or poor ticket sales. Moreno Valley’s Women And Children Die First saw ...
Good Libations
Remember when you were young, and you’d go out to dinner with your parents, only to run into one of your teachers? Never was life more horrifying than in that moment. The only thing that would make it worse was…
