Letters

As a homeowner who lost everything during the recent firestorms, the task of building and furnishing a home from scratch is daunting. Resources like [Home Design Quarterly] and design information are invaluable right now.

Triple Threat

I find it quite amusing that the front cover of your June magazine includes articles on: women and prostitution; businesswomen and the glass ceiling; and sexy women at the pool. This is most likely a reflection of the interests of your current readership, which says a lot about your magazine.

Lois Dern
University of California, San Diego

A reflection of our ongoing commitment to cover all the bases when covering San Diego.
Editor

Cow-Poke

I enjoyed and agreed with many of your picks for the “Best of San Diego” [June]. However, I think you may have missed the boat on the “Best Place To Wear a Cowboy Hat.” Next year, when you are considering such places, please take the time to drive east on Interstate 8 to the Flynn Springs exit and visit the Renegade. You can’t miss it; at night it has a big white horse on top and plenty of trucks parked in front. It’s the real deal: live country music and patrons who ride horses on a regular basis. Check it out—especially when Coyote Moon is playing.

Katie Schultz
City Heights

Natural Resource

I have just finished looking through the Home Design Quarterly on-line and want to thank you for the resources presented. As a homeowner who lost everything during the recent firestorms, the task of building and furnishing a home from scratch is daunting. Resources like this and design information are invaluable right now.

Have youExtreme Makeover Home Edition and others being so popular, your readers might find a local family’s experiences in rebuilding to be of interest. We are breaking ground on our new home in Scripps Ranch sometime in June and would love to see more information, resources and design ideas to help us in the process. It’s a much different perspective when this situation is thrust upon you versus going about it intentionally.

I have subscribed to San Diego Magazine for many enjoyable years. Thanks!

Jeri Demner
Scripps Ranch

Class Act

Congratulations to you and HDQ editor Tom Shess on a job well done on Home Design Quarterly. It’s refreshing to see a publication dedicated to highly differentiated design. So often we see the same cookie-cutter homes being touted as “innovative.” While Craftsman bungalows may be nice, we’re ready to see something a little more edgy.

Featuring unique advertisers in HDQ also gives the publication a fresher feel, since, as you know, seeing the same ads over and over can make some publications begin to look alike. The look and feel is very clean and stands out from the others in the market.

Also, I recently attended a California Preservation fund-raiser at a Wally Cunningham–designed home in the Blackhorse Farms area by UCSD. One word: breathtaking. The design is truly amazing and unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. You can see portions of the house on the Wallace Cunningham Web site. The home is owned by the wife of the late Dr. Paul Saltman, a celebrated UCSD professor.

Janet McCulley
Muttropolis
Solana Beach and La Jolla

Wallace Cunningham is the featured architect in this month’s issue of HDQ.—Editor

To Die For

Thank you for the wonderful article you published about our family and profession [“A Dying Business” by Thomas K. Arnold, May]. We have had excellent relationships with your staff, and everyone who mentions your article about us is very complimentary.

The usual remark is “Boy, they sure wrote about you as you really are.” Special thanks to Thomas Arnold for his courtesy and close attention to our feelings and remarks.

Wallace Featheringill
Featheringill Mortuary
San Diego

Unsafe Bet?

As a longtime subscriber to your magazine, and as one who has enjoyed and appreciated your editorial content, I was stunned by the puff piece “Slots of Fun, Lots of Growth” in your May issue.

I looked more closely and noted the “Special Advertising Section” at the bottom of the pages, which explains why we are so blessed by the growth of Indian “gaming” casinos (not “gambling,” an old-fashioned, more accurate term).

Obviously the tribes and their representatives have no interest in publishing anything about the downside of this industry. But I think it would be an adventuresome thing for your magazine to assign a quality reporter to prepare an article (or series) about who leaves their money in the casinos (little old ladies, lots of ethnics, poor people) and why the industry continues to expand and influence governmental affairs —and why this phenomenon, nationwide, makes such a negative statement about common sense and morality in our time.

R.B. Fehlman
University City

More Kudos

I want to express my gratitude to you and the entire staff for selecting me as a personality profile in your May issue. The feature was fantastic, and both the writer, Kate Lyon, and photographer, Brevin Blach, were terrific to work with.

I’ve lived in the San Diego area since the mid-1990s, and have subscribed to your magazine for some years now. Being included with the many San Diego– area newsmakers is a real honor.

Don Prudhomme
Don Prudhomme Snake Racing
Vista

Inside the Shell

Thank you for “The City Hall Shell Game” [by Larry Edwards, May]. It was of particular interest to me, since I retired from city of San Diego employment seven years ago. The author presented a lot of hard facts and figures in a very readable manner—well-organized and to the point.

There was one statement I didn’t understand: “The cumulative shortfall, combined with a shortsighted investment strategy and double-entry bookkeeping, has resulted in the projected $2.6 billion-dollar deficit.” In the context of the article, I believe the cumulative shortfall is the projected 2.6 billion-dollar deficit. Also, is using the dollar sign before the 2.6 and the following use of “dollar” redundant? How does Mr. Edwards come up with the investment strategy for the fund being shortsighted when, later in the article, it is described as averaging “a 9.11 percent annual [return] on its investments” during the past 10 years? And what does double-entry bookkeeping, a widely used, generally accepted accounting practice, have to do with the projected deficit?

William L. White
Fashion Hills

Larry Edwards replies: The dollar sign is redundant. The reference to “double-entry bookkeeping” probably should have been phrased differently. What I should have said is that the city effectively keeps two sets of books. “Shortsighted” refers to the fact that whenever the retirement investment exceeds an 8 percent return, the excess is siphoned off rather than reinvested. Then the money siphoned off is counted as still being in the pension fund to calculate the rate of return, even though it isn’t really there. This was explained later in the article.

A Bad Taste

That Zagat restaurant guide has ceased publishing a San Diego edition and now has included only 51 San Diego restaurants as part of the Los Angeles edition is either an incredibly bad decision or a cost-cutting move based on Zagat’s waning popularity. If Los Angeles is, as Zagat calls it, “a vibrant and evolving restaurant scene,” then San Diego is the next Paris.

Los Angeles is a vast wasteland of poor restaurants. In the San Fernando Valley, with a population of nearly 2 million, there may be two dining establishments that deserve praise. I worked on the Sunset Strip for nearly 20 years, and my luncheon companions and I were always hard-pressed to come up with more than a handful of good restaurants. It’s just the opposite in San Diego. There are so many good restaurants that making a choice becomes a problem.

Zagat, as well as the various food-and-beverage magazines and newspaper food critics, look to Los Angeles for its celebrity and tend to worship restaurants where the big stars dine. The irony is that most folks in the entertainment industry wouldn’t know the difference between foie gras and ground beef.

Thomas Pflimlin
Los Angeles

Hear, Here

In response to your “Best of San Diego” feature in the June issue, I would like to help your readers better understand what has taken place in the past decade regarding the San Diego Symphony’s efforts to upgrade and redefine the acoustics of Copley Symphony Hall.

In 1993, under the direction of Paul Scarbrough, principal designer of Akustiks, LLC, the symphony constructed a new concert shell consisting of birch wall and ceiling panels that enclosed the entire performance area on the stage within a wooden structure. At the same time, a digital upgrade and replacement of the electronic-enhancement system was installed.

In the summer of 2002, Mr. Scarbrough oversaw the installation of a Brazilian cherry wood floor on the stage.

These upgrades have proven to be astounding and the most significant to date. San Diego’s Symphony Hall is now perhaps one of the acoustical showcases on the West Coast.

Of course, the acoustics will vary from seat to seat in any concert hall. Even the great halls of Vienna, Amsterdam and Boston have distinctly different sound characters in various locations. The bottom line is that this variation allows concertgoers to find a sound quality that gives them the most enjoyment.

Regarding the magazine’s negative comment about the San Diego Symphony’s Summer Pops, this 10-week outdoor music festival is precisely that—outdoors. The symphony will not sound the same outdoors as it does indoors. Our intent with Summer Pops is to reproduce the rich sounds of the symphony orchestra and our variety of guest artists as authentically as possible in a unique and aesthetically beautiful setting along San Diego Bay.

We extend an invitation to your music reviewer, David Gregson, to visit our Summer Pops venue at the Embarcadero Marina Park South and experience a delightful evening of music under the stars. We also extend an invitation to Mr. Gregson to return to Copley Symphony Hall this October as we launch our exciting 2004-2005 season under the direction of Jahja Ling, our renowned new music director, and featuring our opening-night special guest artist, the acclaimed Sir James Galway.

Drew Cady
General Manager
San Diego Symphony

Hear, Here II

San Diego’s Symphony Hall is one of the best transformations of a classic movie palace into a modern symphony hall in the United States. The space has a natural reverberant quality that’s characteristic of some of the world’s great concert halls.

As part of its ongoing commitment to the acoustical quality of the hall, preliminary studies are under way for a new stage riser system that will complement the wood floor.

In addition to my work on the 1993 and 2002 Copley Symphony Hall upgrades, I have also served as principal designer and/or project manager for the renovations to the concert hall at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Severance Hall in Cleveland, Ohio, and the News Victory Theatres on Broadway.

Paul Scarbrough
Akustiks, LLC
South Norwalk, Connecticut

For the Record

The following is a response from author Lisa Petrillo to a May letter to the editor from former California Highway Patrol Chief Ben Killingsworth regarding her article on disgraced Highway Patrolman Craig Peyer [“The Killer Cop Revisited,” February]:

Convicted murderer Craig Peyer did spend lots of time discussing personal lives and romance with dozens of women he improperly forced off the freeway into the dangerously remote dead-end of Mercy Road back in the 1980s. There is ample trial testimony to that fact, despite what Peyer’s old boss, Ben Killingsworth, says in his letter. Odd was Killingsworth’s claim that “most of these women thought he was a wonderful officer...” Indeed, most testified they were angry, irritated and even terrified. As 25-year-old Sarah Lundberg told the jury, “I was petrified.” In fact, the CHP fired Peyer for such improper behavior even before the “model” officer’s first murder trial. The CHP listed 113 major violations of policy by Peyer, the most egregious being the murder of the innocent 20-year-old Cara Knott.

ErRata

In the April feature “Perfect Weekends,” it should have been noted that Bikram’s Yoga College is in La Jolla.

In our 2004 Medical Guide supplement (May), the local drug discovery and development campus for Pfizer Global Research & Development should have been referred to as Pfizer La Jolla. The story should have noted that Pfizer bought Warner Lambert, which had previously purchased Agouron Pharmaceuticals. Agouron is now part of Pfizer La Jolla and, with its new and broader capabilities, is pursuing new compounds to treat drug-resistant HIV/AIDS.

In the June “Best of San Diego” feature, the name of Shwoomp!, a company that sells soap and makes its most of its own bath products, was misspelled.

Credit due: Our June fashion spread (“Swimwear 2004,” produced by Heather Eubanks) was photographed by Ramsay Mead.

Letters Welcome San Diego Magazine invites letters from its readers. Send comments to Letters to the Editor, San Diego Magazine, P.O. Box 85409, San Diego, CA 92186-5409 or to tblair@sandiegomag.com (e-mail) or 619-230-0490 (fax). Letters must be signed to be considered for publication. Please type or print your name, as well, and include a daytime phone number. E-mail should include the writer’s full name and city. We reserve the right to edit letters for clarity and to excerpt them.

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