Yahoo! has a story on the role of candidate wives in recent commercials for their would-be-President husbands. Can't help notice that they're all blonds.

San Gabriel Valley Tribune story claims surrogates of Judy Chu lobbied the redistricting commission to create a more favorable district for her.

The Pomona Freeway has been mostly open since Saturday afternoon. There are apparently still nightly closures going on as the Paramount bridge is completely demolished. However, it has no effect on rush hour commutes.

Access to the Montebello Mall is still possible from the north, via San Gabriel Blvd, and the south, via Montebello Blvd.

A tanker truck caught fire near the mall, and it stopped under the Paramount overpass. The heat of the fire caused the concrete to explode. The freeway's shut until further notice, and traffic will be diverted one offramp before the Paramount offramp.

Apparently, SCE's estimates of the number of its customers who lost power were low by about 200,000. It was actually 415,000 Edison customers who lost power. Additional persons served by LADWP or other local providers ups the total in the dark last week to roughly a half a million.

That would major-league suck.

"The area has notably fewer trees than neighboring towns. A lot were torn out in a recent mansion-building boom, said city spokesman Brian Haworth. Many of the mansion owners are Chinese immigrants with a faith in feng shui. They build their homes without trees near the front to allow more energy to enter."

If you're still in the dark but have Internet access, you can track the progress on turning the power back on at this web site, which is the
SCE Outage Center webpage.