Thank God for the obsessively observant South Coast Plaza security detail and the eagle-eyed officers of the Costa Mesa Police Department, who joined forces to protect the public from that ceaseless scourge to society, Dennis Rodman. As the Worm left the Plaza restaurant the Clubhouse around 5:15 p.m. on Dec. 22, the mall's rent-a-cops called Costa Mesa cops to say a possible—a possible—drunken-driving incident was going down (even though the upscale eatery's staff later said Rodman did not appear drunk when he left). Quicker than you can say “tomorrow's headline,” a Costa Mesa PD squad car had Wormy pulled over just a missed Shaq free throw away. Had Rodman's powder-blue Bentley convertible been swerving? Nope. The car was reportedly stopped because an officer saw that a passenger was not wearing a seatbelt, leaving us to assume Costa Mesa cops are outfitted with those x-ray specs advertised in the backs of comic books. The smell of alcohol was reportedly on the former NBA bad boy's breath, and a field sobriety test resulted—like his brief Lakers stint—in failure. Thank God for that unbuckled seat belt! The Newport Beach resident was popped for an alleged DUI but was said to be—unlike his brief Lakers stint—a good sport about it all.
HOT TIP TO PHOENIX PD Reports have Rodman soon joining the Phoenix Suns.
NO NEWS IS, UH, NEWS? The millennium came and went at 12 a.m. on Jan. 1. Near as we can tell, we're still here. So is San Antonio, Texas-based, global telecommunications giant SBC Communications, which felt obliged to press release us on Jan. 2 to say so. “SBC employees monitored the network and supporting systems throughout the New Year's weekend and found no Y2K-related anomalies,” the company announced in its three-paragraph non-news briefing. National treasure Harry Shearer raised an interesting Y2K question on his Jan. 2 Le Show radio program on KCRW (89.9 FM). Why hasn't anyone drawn a connection between the billions that were spent on supposedly essential Y2K readiness during '99 and the billions those otherwise profit-barren technology companies raked in during '99?
THIS JUST IN “The Fountain Valley Police Department did not experience any Y2K problems over the New Year's weekend, and no major crimes or incidents occurred.” Sergeant Jim Perry's Jan. 3 announcement prompted us to ask, smirklingly: “Do major crimes or incidents ever occur in Fountain Valley?”
FOOD FOR LESS Now that all you yahoos—and by yahoos we mean survivalist wackos, not Y2K-compliant Yahoo.com—have stockpiles of food and water left over from the end of the world that didn't, how about helping the rest of humanity for a change? The Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County is coordinating Y Go 2 Waste, a millennium food drive from Jan. 15 to Feb. 1 that allows you to donate excessive groceries to people who actually need them. For details, call (714) 771-1343.
WE'VE BEEN BOUGHT! The rag you're currently using as: a) A coaster; b) Kleenex; c) A vital journalistic resource that allows you to keep up on what's really going on in Orange County in an acidic, irreverent, immeasurably intelligent way; or, d) None of the above—and we really don't want to know what you're currently using it as. Perv—that rag's been sold. A group of investors bought OC Weekly, it was announced on Jan. 5. Oh, seller Leonard Stern—the pet-products czar who made his bazillions the hard way: one flea at a time—also threw in six other alternative weeklies with goofy names like the Village Voice and LA Weekly and Minneapolis City Pages. Even though those other papers rode on our coattails (you're welcome, guys!), the new company that owns the Great Eight—which includes our newest addition, an alternative in Nashville, Tennessee (Shit, howdy!)—will be called Village Voice Media. Why Village Voice? Because 44-year-old Village Voice is the oldest alternative around. Because we'll be CEO'd by David Schneiderman, the Village Voicepublisher. And because New York gets everything it wants or it throws a screaming fit. The leading equity partner for the ownership group is New York/San Francisco money management firm Weiss, Peck N Greer, whose name we'd know if we even bothered to pick up the business pages. The price tag for the deal? We've heard $150 million to $200 million bandied about, but no one's telling for sure because it'd make our heads explode, and we'd find it damn hard to crank out more papers to make even more fistfuls of cash for our new owners.
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.