Unless you work at the Irvine Co.'s Irvine Apartment Communities (IAC), skip this item and check out the 1-800-WASH-NED ad in the back. Hey, IAC: we stopped dead in our tracks at the Lab on July 24 when we came across a stack of your slick glossies Apartments on the Irvine Ranchalongside the Weekly, Mean Street, assorted other music rags and a tabloid for New Age crystal lickers. It brought a tear to our eye knowing that a mega-landowner like you is informing our fellow Gen-Xers about your fab apartment complexes in Irvine, Newport Beach and Tustin Ranch. However, since you're one of our prized advertisers whose continued success is linked to our own, we have one word of advice: hip that mag up! A photo on Page 2 shows a group of mostly old farts in front of a charter bus. Where are they headed? The Laughlin turnaround? When you do picture people born after Woodstock, they are invariably shopping. And not even at Hot Topics! And not a tattoo or piercing in the bunch! Look, if you give us the impression that all there is to do around your apartments is spend! spend! spend! at one of the 28 nearby shopping centers, well, me might as well keep living with our parents. And another word: humans. You need some. The architecture of the apartments pictured is impressive (in a Mediterranean-villas-if-the-Bauhaus-gang-had-succeeded kind of way), but there are no people in those shots. It reminds us of that Twilight Zone episode where the guy walks out his door and there are no other living beings anywhere. Creepy! We implore you guys to keep people like us in mind if you're going to market to people like us. And would it kill you to mix in one 1-800-WASH-NED ad?
COUNT DRACULA First there were the poll guards the Republicans hired to intimidate voters in heavily Hispanic central Orange County neighborhoods in the 1988 election. Then came the groundless voter-fraud crusade by ex-congressman Robert “B-1 Birdturd” Dornan (R-Garden Grove) after losing to a Latina in 1996. The latest example of Republicans employing Draconian tactics to fight rising Latino power in OC came on July 25. That's when Congressman Dan Miller (R-Florida) called for an investigation into the census count in Santa Ana. After the 1990 census—the nation's official head count—it was obvious that many poor, predominantly minority residents did not participate. That resulted in this crazy irony of modern American life: people most in need of government resources and representation were denied both. So the feds made a big push in the 2000 census to count everyone. Literature, radio ads and television commercials stressing the importance of being counted were targeted specifically at Latino communities. So when the rate of response was significantly quicker this census in Santa Ana, how is yet another representative of the GOP rewarding townsfolk? Like lawbreakers, naturally. Someone ought to ask George “Dubya” Bush's Latino nephew about that the next time he swings into town.
SPEAKING OF DUBYA . . . Atop the pile of voluminous mail we received on July 26 was a letter from a monthly humor magazine called Funny Times. Figuring it was yet another subscription solicitation, we got ready to toss it when we felt something bumpy inside. Imagine our surprise when we pulled out a packet of “Texas Homegrown Dope” seeds. A Matt Wuerker cartoon on the “Bushleague Seed Co.” packet shows a potted plant composed of leaves and Dubya's face. Funny Times apparently got the idea to create the packet after hearing about the millions of dollars of “seed money” the GOP raised to get Shrub elected. They wondered what kind of seed he might be. “With all the dopey things Bush has already said and done, we figured it must be a dope seed,” they explained. “And if, as now seems likely, he gets elected president, we expect a whole new crop of dopey policies, dopey appointments and dopey political bickering in Washington.” To be the first kid on your block to have “Texas Homegrown Dope” seeds, log onto www.funnytimes.com/features/dope/and be prepared to pay a buck per packet, $5 for 10 or $10 for 24.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.