Miracle in Chula Vista: Seeing Is Disbelieving

Read my lips:

THERE IS NOTHING THERE. IT’S JUST A WHITE BILLBOARD. IT’S AS BLANK AS AN ANCHORMAN’S MIND.

There, I’ve said it. I’m now an official disbeliever in Chula Vista’s Miracle on Broadway.

I enjoy a good summer wraith as much as the next person, but enough is enough.

I think what tore it for me was when a learned professor went on KPBS Radio talking quite solemnly about how we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility of the supernatural intruding on hum-drum modernity and blah blah blah.

Oh brother. Get a life. Alternatively, get a television and watch a few reruns.

What next?

Sightings of Bigfoot in Balboa Park? The Lake Hodges Monster? Rumors of an affordable home in Mission Hills with off-street parking and a big back yard?

Remember a few years ago, when a swarm of drones at the telephone office in San Diego got sick--one, then two, then three, then more and more, and the doctors couldn’t find anything medically wrong with them?

Can you spell m-o-b p-s-y-c-h-o-l-o-g-y? How about m-a-s-s h-y-s-t-e-r-i-a?

In newsrooms and bistros there is talk of other explainable things.

In La Jolla, Roger Revelle appearing like Hamlet’s father on the Faculty Club wall to settle a few old academic scores.

On a darkened stadium scoreboard at midnight, Benito Santiago swinging and missing at a 3-0 pitch that is high and outside.

I’ve even heard--this is no joke--that investigative reporters who spent the better part of several years trying to nail Bill Kolender for alleged misdeeds claim now they’ve seen something incriminating.

Supposedly it’s a billboard on El Cajon Boulevard where the forms of the one-time San Diego police chief and the Rolodex Madam can be discerned in the moonlight.

Now that’s an apparition worth seeing.

More Language Manipulation

Your government at work.

San Diego Councilman John Hartley, whose political constituency includes the gay community, has taken the lead in lobbying the San Diego Union to stop using the word homosexual .

Hartley, two legislative aides, and a board member of the gay San Diego Democratic Club met with three senior Union editors to press for the use of the words lesbian and gay .

January Riddle, one of the Hartley aides, said the word homosexual is considered a slur by many gays and lesbians: “Many of them grew up being taunted by the word homosexual .”

Doug Hope, the Union’s deputy managing editor, said the paper’s stylebook committee will consider the Hartley request.

(Due to a misunderstanding, Hartley sent out a premature press release announcing that the Union had already agreed to his request.)

Hope noted that use of the terms lesbian and gay is already increasing in the paper. He said a computer analysis of stories over a three-year period showed usage split almost evenly between homosexual and gay / lesbian .

If the Union accedes to the Hartley request to ban or restrict the use of the word homosexual , it would be somewhat of a departure from the rest of the profession.

The Associated Press stylebook says the words homosexual and gay / lesbian are synonymous.

The Los Angeles Times stylebook was changed last year to approve, although not require, the use of gay as an adjective or noun meaning homosexual “in reference to social or cultural patterns and political issues.”

Riddle said that, once the issue is resolved with the Union, similar requests may be made to other San Diego news organizations.

The Vultures Circle

Life and death.

The World Wrestling Federation, which played to a screaming house here last week, leaves nothing to chance in creating its fictional universe.

One star most favored by the Sports Arena crowd was The Undertaker, who dresses in black and likes to put his opponents in body bags.

In the program, his hometown is listed as Death Valley.