very much like Oakland airport, even after the renovations, or maybe especially after the renovations. The noise is painful there as well, but I think that's nearly a universal problem in US airports. If you'd like to see a pleasant, well-designed airport, go check out Traverse City airport - but they have an advantage in being small.

You said "If newspapers die, so does reporting" - What I see is newspapers dying as a consequence of reporting's death - and I think this has been reflected in many, maybe most of the letters.

Second, regarding your concern about local reportage: I think you're off base there as well. Here's a couple of links to why: LA Observed (http://www.laobserved.com/), which includes a number of former LA Times staffers as regular contributors and does a creditable job covering local news, has this interesting column:

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2009/02/extimes_reporters_elegy_f.php#more

wherein the author notes, much like Gary, that,

" What stories are we missing? I can answer that question only for myself, thinking of my life with my hometown paper.

Gone is the stuff my neighbors and relatives read, the straightforward news about their local communities, particularly in the suburban counties that ring Los Angeles, a county of ten million people and 88 cities. A decade ago, the Times fielded more than a dozen reporters in the some of the county's larger cities. Dozens more toiled in the big, growing areas that border L.A.--Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, Orange. Yes, those writers were young and green. Yes, they missed things, as inexperienced reporters do. But they were there. They watched council meetings and school board meetings and county supervisors meetings. They called the cops. They looked at court filings. The most ambitious dug deeply into problems of transportation and development.

But those places were among the first to face cuts, even before the Tribune Company took over the paper in 2000. Where dozens of reporters once worked, only small skeleton crews remain. There are fewer checks. Fewer meetings are witnessed. Fewer records are reviewed."

And yet, the blog in which this is reported is covering those affairs. As another example, in response to that very lack, both from the LA Times and the Pasadena Star-News, my community of Altadena has a blog to which we all contribute first-hand knowledge and cover such things as local council meetings. Take a look:

http://www.altadenablog.com/

I'd be surprised if this wasn't happening in a lot of places.

does not copy from print news - while my morning LA Times said absolutely nothing about a resolution to Calfornia's state budget crisis, Andrew Leonard had a nice article, online early Thursday morning, about the final compromise reached in the wee hours of Thursday morning. So, again, contrary to your assertion, Gary, Andrew is using his resources, not print because it hasn't happened yet, to break a story put together through his own primary connections and through being awake and on top of this story. The LA Times "staff" posted the story to the website at 7:10 am, and do mention how Maldonado's open primary measure benefits Maldonado, while Andrew does.

We in the western world tend to view the world in compartments, just as in medicine we specialize in different portions of the anatomy. East Asians tend to take a view that is more inclusive, not dividing things up so much. Based on that supposition, I wonder if Wen's comments have any relationship to the little kerfluffle last week over the Chinese trawlers approaching the US navy group off the China coast.

As a former customer of Pacific Bell, then Southwest Bell, now AT&T - but wait, wasn't AT&T broken up decades ago as a monopoly? In my humble opinion, a prime reason we have these TBTF (too big to fail) corporations is because mergers have been encouraged by the regulators, and one looked-for effect of these mergers may indeed have been to position a given corporation such that as a TBTF company, they could feel confident of government help if needed, or maybe even if not needed.

you can make those criticisms.

When your symphonies get performed by the London Phil, like Beethoven's, you can make those criticisms.

When you write novels like Hemingway, you can make those criticisms.

When you can play the violin like Joshua Bell or sing like Jessie Norman, you can make those criticisms.

at least on a population basis. I'm an epidemiologist, and one of the annual meetings I go to includes "round tables" where you can sit and explore an unfamiliar topic with some people who really know an area. I went to one a few years ago, and I forget the exact title, but the thought was "What disease do we have to worry about wiping out large numbers of people worldwide in a short span of time?". All of us at the table already knew it's not something to be afraid of on an indiviudal basis, like Ebola, which simply doesn't have the transmissability chops to pose a population threat - even AIDS/HIV or tuberculosis take a lot of exposure to hop to a new host, so those bugs tend to be slow burners.

There were a couple of guys from the CDC's Department of Really Scary Diseases there as the round table experts, and as you've guessed, on a population basis the greatest potential for large numbers of deaths fast - say 250 million per year - is from flu. And we're not taking a scary, 1918 variant or anything - just a basic new strain to which most of the population does not have antibodies.

the hormones involved are most likely dopamine and epinephrine, not testosterone. Maybe a little norepinephrine, too.