Los Angeles, CA

And with that, we’re back from Christmas. (!) I know this isn’t really LA news, but this piece of news is all over the place nationwide, and it means an extra something to me because I used to live by the zoo and would walk there all the time on free zoo day (the first Wednesday of the month). The San Francisco Zoo is open 365 days a year, and yesterday, on Christmas Day, a tiger somehow escaped from its habitat and roamed the east side of the park, killing one man in front of the enclosure and wandering to a cafe 50 yards away before attacking two more men.

This happened shortly after closing, which is why more people weren’t hurt by the tiger, and when police arrived on the scene they found the tiger still mauling one of the three victims. The tiger looked up at the police and started to go back to her victim when they opened fire and killed the animal with their handguns. This Siberian tiger, named Tatiana, had actually mauled a keeper last year at this time. The zoo had daily feedings of the big cats at 2pm every day, and while a female keeper was throwing meat to the animals, Tatiana reached through the bars and snagged the woman’s arm, trying to pull her into the enclosure. This happened in front of a large crowd, including lots of children, and while the woman was eventually pulled away, she did lose her arm.

Today the zoo is closed while the police and zoo officials further examine what happened, but I have the feeling that at the end of it all it’ll boil down to human error of some sort. Initially reports said that all four tigers had escaped, which leads me to think someone saw an open door somewhere. All the same, you can read more here through the LA Times, and read the updates as they’ve happened on Metroblogging San Francisco.

You can always count on LA to provide you with a never-ending stream of weird news. The latest item is about crafty thieves posing as maintenance workers who steal copper wiring from public street lights. This may sound bizarre to you, but have you ever taken your recycling into an actual recycling plant? They not only take plastic, paper, and glass, but scrap metal such as steel and copper, and other construction-grade material.

Also, the price of precious metals has gone up significantly in the past year. I have a friend who is a jeweler, and while her business is still small (her jeweler’s bench is in her bedroom, and she has three other jobs to support her art), she is still hurt badly by the rising price of gold, which has more than doubled, steel, and copper. Moreover, when you buy over a few ounces of a precious metal, you have to fill out government paperwork so they can keep track of how much you buy to be sure that you’re not hoarding. And with the rate of the dollar these days, I can’t really blame anyone for wanting to hoard.

The easy way around that is to steal! You get enough copper scraps to turn in and get a pretty sum of cash, and there’s no trail leading back to you. The downside? People are left in the dark for months, making it very dangerous at night for pedestrians, cyclists, and even drivers. This wire theft has been growing in popularity, and is now affecting not only LA but San Bernadino, Redlands, San Francisco, and Pasadena. It might not be a bad idea to take down the license plate of a plain white truck or work van you see when the worker is up a pole fiddling with the lights and call it in to the nearest DWP, just to be sure nothing fishy is up. It may save a life.

To read more about these strange thefts, go here.

Still making big news nationwide is the oil spill in the San Francisco Bay. I’m up in San Francisco right now, and so far mayor Gavin Newsom, newly re-elected, has put in an appearance, along with governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to assess the damage. While they haven’t really done anything and have absolutely nothing to say, the locals and park rangers around the Crissy Field area say that the beaches may be closed for years due to oil washing up on the beaches. While San Francisco doesn’t have any beaches that I consider worthwhile (meaning you can’t swim at any of them due to freezing water, unusually strong tides, and riptides), it is really nice to climb down to Baker Beach (nude or clothed, there’s a bit of both there) and just sit on the sheltered beach and enjoy the fabulous view of the Golden Gate Bridge. Now we can’t even do that, since the sands are covered in oil and poor dead birds keep washing up. Most locals who want to volunteer can’t because they don’t have clean suits to wear, because not wearing them means severe sickness from the oil. Criticisms are running rampant here, with the ship’s crew being blamed because they should have been too experienced and too familiar with the bay to collide with the Bay Bridge, and the Coast Guard for being slow to respond and only reporting 1/10th of the oil spilled, thereby causing too much of a delay picking up the oil until it was too finely dissipated in the water to be able to collect. The entire bay is affected and will be for countless years, everything from protected wildlife to the shipping industry via Oakland to local fisherman.

The other big California disaster is of course the fires. Though long extinguished now, people are still looking for someone to point their fingers at. While President Bush and the rest of the government seemed to learn their lesson big-time after Hurricane Katrina and he made a speedy appearance on the scene in San Diego, FEMA had their butt handed to them again as it was revealed that they had staged a press conference in a desperate attempt to make themselves look more capable of handling large-scale emergencies. You know, what they were supposed to be doing, as opposed to staging press conferences. Despite their shaky past, though, Southern Californians are giving FEMA good grades, saying that they have responded quickly to claims and that over 1,000 fire victims have been given aid already. Maybe this, and not self congratulations, will be what turns FEMA’s image around.