• Evangelist Tony Alamo, who is currently on trial for taking a minor across state lines for sex, was deemed a flight risk yesterday after former followers came forward and testified that Alamo practiced polygamy (read: abuse) with girls as young as 9. • Britan's speaking clock will be done in Tinkerbell's voice for three months to promote the DVD release of a Tinkerbell movie. • Where are all the single young men at? In pretty much every major city in America. • Tears of the Desert, written by Halima Bashir is the first memoir written by a woman about the war in Darfur. • A young English man is traveling the world for three weeks while dressed in a Smurf costume to promote his costume shop in Newbury, which has a excess of Smurf costumes this year.• Oh, it was also the Smurf's 50th anniversary on Wednesday. • Arien O'Connell ran the fastest time (11 minutes) at the Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco on Sunday but did not win the race since she did not sign up as an "elite" runner, which would have given her a 20 minute head start over her own open group. • A federal grant will help replicate the Maryland Network Against Domestic Violence, which helps police officers responding to 911 call assess high-risk abuse cases, in at least five other jurisdictions across the US. • A new study has found that parents of a child with ADHD are nearly twice as likely to divorce by the time the child is 8 years old than parents without ADHD children. • Here's a new pointless gift to give at baby showers: A scale that shows a pregnant woman how big she is getting during her pregnancy. • Several male students at the University of Central Florida say they can now empathize with women who wear high heels after they took a volunteer high heel walk around campus this week as part of a Strike Back Against Dating/Domestic Violence event. • A 61-year-old woman got into a violent row with a deer on Monday after the deer attacked one of her dogs. • At least 500 Muslim protesters marched through Jakarta in Indonesia to push for the approval of an anti-pornography bill which would "shield the young from pornographic materials and lewd acts."•

Yesterday, I rang again. They'd moved locations and were now in Laguna at a shopping center, wasting time. I asked John about the house. Again, he seemed upbeat: he didn't know how close the fires were to the house, and was waiting for news from a neighbor. At the very least, the fire line seemed to be a few miles away; or so the websites were reporting. I asked him about the sky; he said it was slightly gray, and in the distance, south and east, brown and yellow. Laura babbled in the background. I pictured the two of them standing near a candy shop or children's store and Laura pulling on his pants trousers, urging him on, and in. A few hours later, he called to say everything was gone.

I am from California, the part of California where earthquakes and floods, not wildfires, are the norm — nay expected. But anyone from California — or anyone familiar with the work of those writers or artists whose careers were made through the dispassionate chronicling of California's strange, singular, ominous beauty — knows that Californians live with the knowledge that the ground could, at any moment, fall from beneath them, whether literally or figuratively. Some question why Californians live that way. The only acceptable answer is that if you haven't done it, you'd never understand.

Not understanding was part of the problem for us yesterday. At my urging, one of my writers composed a post on one aspect of the media's coverage of the fires currently blackening much of Southern California, with the critique that, as is the case in much of American society, the ivory towers of the rich and the famous were receiving a disproportionate amount of the attention. However, for reasons of haste, an attention-getting headline and yes, some heartless bitchiness about political persuasion and income distribution, some of that critique was lost and, as a result, many understandably took offense.

We're sorry.

Rich or poor, white, brown or black, at this point, over a million Americans have been displaced in San Diego County and points farther north, with an untold number of those left without homes, and in some cases, livelihoods, to return to. There are still 13 wildfires burning out-of-control, and the weather forecast, though not completely dire, remains extremely troubling. And despite the easy target served up via media coverage of fire-threatened, privileged "tabliverse regulars" like Heidi, Spencer, and Suzanne Somers, we should have been more sensitive about the entire thing. To borrow (er, mangle) a phrase from another California native and far better writer, we can safely say that the winds yesterday showed us just how close to the edge we sometimes get.

You should have seen it; he had a body language expert analyze whether Ellen Degeneres was "faking" her on-screen breakdown and assorted other treasures. Anyway so my insensitivity was sort of preemptive to the insensitivity I anticipated from him and Hannity and friends, which upon reflection was a bad call; I mean obviously, fuck what those guys think. I really hate people who think the answer to the Right's lack of human empathy is to pretend anyone on the Right is not human, so why did I just almost become one of them?

Frankly, San Diego, I do not give a shit if you voted for Bush or Kerry in the last election: I ache for your losses either way. I am also impressed by your heroism and resourcefulness. It still saddens me to say I have more confidence that, when it all blows over, most of you will rebuild your houses and lives quicker and more successfully than the victims of disaster in most other corners of the world; I think that's just how liberals are. It reminds me of the time, during Katrina, that I met a Kerry campaigner in Ohio who mused that he wished the death toll would go higher and reach that of 9/11.... well, fuck if that's not a warped way to have to think about things!

Anyway, so: I am really, really thankful for every Californian whose life was spared in this, including those of all the celebrities whose photos = my livelihood, and from now on I hope we can all just drop all the schadenfreude and learn to be inspired by our fellow humans for once.

Ha ha ha, that last part was a joke.

The fact that the fires have focused their efforts on what was a year ago the country's most overheated real estate market reminded me of a few things. Number one, San Diego is rich. Sure, it is not universally rich. But it is not fucking New Orleans, though its relative lack of black people is surely going to make for a great week of ratings for Sean Hannity, and I should add here that it is not only rich but vastly Republican, and not coincidentally unforgivably stupid, as well as a breeding ground for Al Qaeda cells. But anyway, thanks to the once-overheated real estate market begat by shady condo developers in desirable markets like San Diego, people all across America are losing their homes — and in many cases, huge stacks of personal information which will be used by identity thieves to fuck up their lives — in cases a lot less dramatic, but no less migraine-inducing, and much more common, than whatever Heidi and Spencer are putting up with right now. So yeah, my heart goes out to the one San Diegan that has lost his life in this tragedy, but otherwise they seem to have things under control.