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Business
The Difference Between e.g. and i.e. Is Not a Memory Problem
Today, we cover: Merriam-Webster's most looked-up abbreviations. Two four-character Latin fragments that a major dictionary has to keep explaining, decade after decade. Chicago's mechanical rules. Periods, commas, parentheses, and the one pairing you should never write. Garner's transatlantic split. The same abbreviation, punctuated two different ways depending on which side of the ocean you are writing for. The Latin itself is not complicated. E.g. abbreviates exempli gratia, "for the sake of example." I.e. abbreviates id est, "that is." Both entered English writing centuries ago and never left, and both are short enough that nobody forgets how to spell them. What people forget is which one they meant. Merriam-Webster reports that these are the most commonly looked-up abbreviations in English — a statistic worth sitting with, because it says the confusion is not a failure of vocabulary. Readers already know both translations. They look them up anyway. The reason is that the two abbreviations do opposite things to a set. E.g. reaches into a group, pulls out a representative item, and leaves the group open — the reader understands that more members exist and were not named. I.e. does the reverse. It restates the whole thing in different words and closes it, promising the reader that nothing has been left outside. Write "the citrus fruits, e.g., lemons," and you have offered one instance of many. Write "the citrus fruits, i.e., lemons, limes, oranges, and grapefruit," and you have claimed to have named them all. Choosing between them requires knowing whether you are sampling or defining, and that is a question about your own argument, not about Latin. Every mechanical rule follows from that. The Chicago Manual of Style keeps the periods in both abbreviations, follows each with a comma, and precedes each with an opening parenthesis, a semicolon, or a dash. In formal prose it confines them to parentheses, notes, and tables; everywhere else, Chicago would rather you spell the thing out in English. The instruction that reveals the underlying logic, though, is the prohibition on writing e.g. and etc. together. If e.g. has already signaled that the list is a sample, then etc. adds nothing — it announces a fact the sentence has already announced. And etc. after i.e. is worse than redundant. It is a contradiction, because i.e. claimed completeness and etc. immediately withdraws the claim. The conventions surrounding the abbreviations are less settled than the meanings. Bryan Garner's LawProse lesson lays out the split plainly: American usage precedes e.g. and i.e. with a comma or dash, keeps the internal periods, and always follows with a comma. British usage drops the periods entirely and typically drops the trailing comma as well, so that eg sits bare in the sentence. Garner's argument for caring is professional rather than aesthetic — in legal documents, punctuation that obscures the relationship between listed items is a liability, and a redundancy like and etc. reads as carelessness to exactly the audience you were trying to persuade. What holds across all three sources is the ordering. The distinction between sampling and defining is fixed; the punctuation around it is a house style that changes with the publication and the country. Writers tend to invert that, treating the commas as the hard part and the meaning as obvious, which is how a sentence ends up with the correct punctuation wrapped around the wrong abbreviation. There is a way around the whole problem, and Chicago already recommends it. Outside of parentheses and footnotes, write "for example" or "that is." The English costs a few characters, carries no risk of transatlantic mispunctuation, and forces you to decide what you meant before you write it. The abbreviation was never the hard part.
September 3, 2026
Business
One Owl, Three Kinds of Ground
Today, we cover: Saskatchewan's fledgling owls, the short version. Young burrowing owls are learning to fly along the province's roadways right now, and a conservation group is asking drivers to slow down before the season ends. Utah's new burrows, the short version. A wetland sanctuary built 18 artificial nest structures this year, and owls moved in almost immediately. California's pending decision, the short version. State regulators are still weighing whether to formally protect the species, even as the healthiest population on record keeps growing. Every summer in Saskatchewan, burrowing owls do something almost no other owl does: they raise their young in a hole in open ground, usually a repurposed badger or ground-squirrel burrow, rather than a tree cavity or cliff ledge. From mid-July through the end of August, the fledglings of that arrangement are learning to fly and hunt, and Nature Saskatchewan has spent the month reminding drivers what that means for the birds: paved roads run warmer than the surrounding grassland, which draws the insects and small rodents owls hunt, which in turn draws young owls that haven't yet learned to clear an oncoming vehicle. "Motorists can help reduce the risk of owl-vehicle collisions by slowing down near known or potential nest sites and being on the lookout for low flying owls," said Grace Pidborchynski, who coordinates the group's Operation Burrowing Owl program. The stakes are unusually concentrated: Nature Saskatchewan puts the country's entire breeding population at around 270 pairs, so a bad week on the highway is a bad week for the species. Roughly 1,300 miles southwest, at Audubon's Gillmor Sanctuary on the shore of the Great Salt Lake, the same ground-nesting habit is being solved from the other direction — not protecting burrows owls already have, but replacing ones that no longer exist. Natural burrows depend on other animals, ground squirrels and prairie dogs among them, to keep digging and maintaining them, and where those populations have thinned, burrows collapse faster than owls can find new ones. This year, Audubon built 18 reinforced burrows from upcycled materials, engineered to hold up under the weight of larger animals and positioned so owls could still see predators coming. The uptake was almost immediate: one burrow was occupied within three days of installation, against a two-year timeline the team had planned for. Seven of the nine resulting nest sites drew a pair this season, and every one of those nests fledged owlets. Audubon now plans to roughly double the structure count, to 32 burrows across 16 sites. California, meanwhile, is still deciding what any of this adds up to legally. The western burrowing owl has held candidate status under the California Endangered Species Act since October 2024, which gives it the same take protections as a formally listed species while the state Department of Fish and Wildlife completes a mandated review. Imperial Irrigation District submitted its own data into that review in December: more than 30 years of monitoring showing over 7,100 breeding pairs in the Imperial Valley and another 300-plus in the Coachella Valley, a population that was near zero as recently as the early 1990s. "IID believes this information will substantiate that listing of the species is not warranted," board chairperson Gina Dockstader said at the time — the district's argument being that the valley's existing irrigation and land-use patterns are already doing the job a state listing would try to mandate. The Fish and Game Commission's decision on the petition was slated for this month; until it rules, every burrowing owl in California keeps its candidate protections regardless of what the local numbers say. The owl never builds its own hole. It just has to live in whatever's there this year.
August 29, 2026
Business
The Petition Against Jesus Gonzalez Is Missing Its Own Evidence
The Setting: A Change.org petition posted August 19, 2026, addressed to the Coachella Valley Unified School District board of trustees. The Speaker: Daily Dunes, the petition's author, writing on behalf of residents of CVUSD's Trustee Area 2. The petition asks one thing plainly: that Trustee Jesus Gonzalez step down and give Trustee Area 2 what its author calls "a new beginning." It has 525 verified signatures as of this writing, five days after it went up. What it doesn't do, plainly, is show its work. The first claim is a felony allegation from the early 2000s. No charge is named, no case number is given, no disposition — conviction, dismissal, plea — is stated. It sits in the petition as a single sentence, doing the work a paragraph of documentation would normally have to do. The second is a possible family or personal connection between Gonzalez and Desert Concepts Construction, a contractor that does business with the district. Here too the petition stops short of specifics: no contract, no dollar figure, no date, no named relationship. It's raised as a question rather than argued as a fact, which is a fair way to raise it — but it's also as far as the petition goes. The document is honest about this limitation. It says so itself: "We are not presenting unverified allegations as proven facts, but we believe questions involving an elected official, public contracts, and taxpayer resources deserve transparency." That's a reasonable standard to hold a petition to. It's a much lower bar than the one its own headline asks readers to clear — resignation — and the gap between the two is the actual story here. Both underlying claims, if true, would be uncommonly easy to document. A felony conviction is a matter of public court record, searchable by name in whatever county it was filed. A financial relationship between a sitting trustee and a district contractor would show up in the disclosure forms California already requires elected officials to file, or in the district's own bidding and contract records — both of which are public-records requests away from confirmation, not a petition away from it. Filing those requests, and publishing whatever comes back, would do more to settle the question than another thousand signatures. A petition can start a conversation; it can't finish an investigation.
August 26, 2026
Business
Palm Desert Lowers the Barriers to Entry
Today, we cover: A free skate park, now open longer. Palm Desert's Civic Center Skate Park dropped its admission fee and expanded to a 6 a.m.–10 p.m. daily schedule. A five-week course in how the city actually runs. Applications are open for the next Civic Academy cohort. Committee seats, standing open. The city's resident advisory boards take applications year-round, and several have vacancies right now. The Palm Desert Civic Center Skate Park no longer charges anything to use it. Admission was already modest, but the city has waived it entirely and extended hours to run 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week. The 10,000-square-foot concrete park splits into beginner and advanced sections, with a street spine, quarter pipes, rails, a fun box, and a bowl — enough terrain that a new rider and a serious one can use it without getting in each other's way. Lighting runs the length of the facility, so the free hours now stretch well past sunset. The park stays unsupervised, and the city is explicit about the one requirement it hasn't dropped: helmets, knee pads, and elbow pads, no exceptions. A few miles away, the city is opening a different kind of access. The Civic Academy takes a small cohort of residents through five consecutive Monday evenings — dinner first, then two hours with the people who actually run Palm Desert: the City Manager's office, Finance, Planning, Public Works, Public Safety. Applications for the Spring 2027 class are open now, with a deadline of March 19. The requirements are light — live in or do business with the city, stay off the ballot yourself, show up for at least four of the five sessions — and the payoff is unusually direct: graduates walk away understanding how a zoning variance or a capital project actually gets decided, instead of guessing from the outside. The Academy also functions as an unadvertised on-ramp to the third piece: the city's resident advisory boards. Planning Commission, Historic Preservation, Housing Commission, Parks and Recreation, and a dozen others all take applications year-round, with interviews clustered each May and June. Several have open seats right now — Historic Preservation, Housing Commission, and the El Paseo Business Improvement District Board among them — and the qualifying bar is mostly residency, not credentials. A seat on the Planning Commission is a real vote on what gets built and where; a seat on the Public Safety Committee is direct input on policing and emergency response. None of it requires already knowing someone. In every version of this — the skate park, the classroom, the committee room — the price of entry this year is the same: show up.
August 22, 2026
Local
The Podcast Hosts Who Filed Against the People They Recalled
The Setting: Coachella's candidate filing period for one open city council seat closes today, Aug. 12, with the Nov. 3 general election already remade by a recall campaign that began outside city hall. The Speaker: Jesus Gonzalez and Vicente Zamora, co-hosts of the Instagram and podcast account More Than Politics Coachella Valley Gonzalez and Zamora spent the spring building an audience out of council-meeting attendance and criticism of city leadership, then turned that audience into a recall effort against Councilmembers Denise Delgado and Yadira Perez, collecting more than 30 signatures before formally filing notices of intent in June. The recall cited unaddressed transportation needs for the city's senior population, but scrutiny fell just as quickly on the organizers themselves — Gonzalez is the son of a former Coachella mayor indicted on bribery charges in the 1990s, and neither man would rule out a council run of his own. By July, that run had a name. Gonzalez filed to challenge Delgado directly for mayor, joining a field that already included interim Mayor Frank Figueroa and newcomer Frankie Molina, whose campaign has centered on the same data-center controversy Gonzalez and Zamora built their show around — the council's approval of a Stronghold-linked data center project tied to a developer the SEC ordered to repay $1.5 million in misappropriated investor funds. Zamora, meanwhile, filed for the city council seat his own recall petition was aimed at emptying. The city extended that seat's filing window to today, giving any other resident until 5 p.m. to join him on the ballot. Whatever else happens between now and November, the race for Coachella's next mayor is being run, in part, by two men who spent the year arguing the current one shouldn't hold the job.
August 13, 2026
Business
Fifty Years On, Black Flag Is Still Rebuilding Itself
Today, we cover: Black Flag's fall 2026 tour, the short version. Forty-five dates, September to November, almost all of them clubs. The new lineup, the short version. Greg Ginn, 72, fronting three musicians in their twenties — one of whom he found singing in a crowd. The band's history, the short version. From Keith Morris to Henry Rollins to Bill Stevenson and Kira Roessler, no one has ever stayed long except Ginn. Black Flag turns fifty this year, and the band marking the anniversary bears almost no resemblance to the one that started it. The tour opens September 3 at Belly Up Aspen in Colorado and closes November 1 at House of Blues in Houston — 45 stops in between, threading through Fox Theater in Boulder, Aces High Saloon in Salt Lake City, recordBar in Kansas City, Crafthouse in Pittsburgh, Electric City in Buffalo, and 40 Watt in Athens, Georgia. Additional January and April 2027 dates are still to come. It's a club tour, not an arena run, which is itself a small statement: a band that could probably fill bigger rooms is choosing the kind of venues it built its reputation in. That choice tracks with who's actually on stage. The current lineup pairs Ginn — the band's founding guitarist and, notably, its only member who has never left — with three musicians in their early twenties: bassist David Rodriguez, drummer Bryce Weston, and lead vocalist Max Zanelly, who is, by most accounts, the first woman to front Black Flag. Zanelly's path to the role is unusual even by the band's standards: she had never been in a band before Ginn found her singing in a crowd. The lineup debuted overseas and on the West Coast in 2025, played Coachella this past April, and this fall tour is its first extended run through the rest of the country. Ginn has also said the band is working on its first new music in twelve years, which would make this tour something closer to a reintroduction than a victory lap. None of this is new for Black Flag, exactly — it's the pattern. The band's roster has turned over more or less continuously since Ginn and Keith Morris started it in 1976, with Ginn's brother Raymond Pettibon briefly on bass before the group had even settled on a name. Morris left in 1979 to form Circle Jerks. The lineup most people picture when they think of Black Flag — Ginn, Henry Rollins on vocals, Chuck Dukowski on bass, Robo on drums, Dez Cadena on rhythm guitar — cut Damaged in 1981 and didn't even last through the album's own touring cycle intact. The band's most productive run, four albums and three EPs in sixteen months between 1983 and 1985, came from yet another configuration: Ginn and Rollins joined by Bill Stevenson on drums and Kira Roessler on bass. Seen against that history, a twenty-something lineup fronted by a singer Ginn discovered by chance isn't a departure from what Black Flag is. It's closer to the only thing that's ever been consistent about it.
August 13, 2026
Local
A Chain, a Storefront, and a Hospital Rank All Land the Same Week
Today, we cover: Shake Shack's ribbon cutting for its new La Quinta location on Highway 111. Art for All's grand opening at Old Town Artisan Studios in La Quinta. Eisenhower Health's new No. 1 ranking among Inland Empire hospitals. The Greater Coachella Valley Chamber of Commerce will cut the ribbon on Shake Shack's new La Quinta location at 9 a.m. next Wednesday, August 12, at 78772 Highway 111. It's the kind of opening that barely registers as news on its own — a national chain landing in a stretch of highway that's absorbed a dozen similar arrivals over the years. But the Chamber treats it with the same ceremony it gives a single storefront, and that's not nothing: in a corridor built on national brands, the ritual is still local. A few miles away, that same Chamber is marking a different kind of opening. Art for All is holding its grand opening at Old Town Artisan Studios, also in La Quinta — a working studio space rather than a drive-through, built around access rather than throughput. The two ribbon cuttings land in the same week, in the same city, for opposite ends of what a business can be: one measured by lines out the door, the other by who gets a chance to make something. Then there's the number that actually moves the needle for people who never set foot in either building. Eisenhower Health was named the No. 1 hospital in the Inland Empire by U.S. News & World Report on August 4, ranking No. 22 statewide — the top 5.5% of hospitals in California, out of nearly 4,500 evaluated nationwide. A hospital spokesperson put the stakes plainly: not having to leave the Valley for serious care is, in their words, "obviously critical." That's a claim a ribbon cutting can't make. It's the difference between a place that's growing and a place that's holding up its end for the people who already live here. Three different kinds of validation, three different weeks' worth of consequence — but all of it lands the same way: the Valley keeps getting proof of what it can support, one storefront and one ranking at a time.
August 8, 2026
Local
Three Signs the Valley Is Already Running Toward Fall
Today, we cover: Indio's fourth annual free backpack giveaway, handing out 1,800 backpacks and school supplies downtown tonight. Visit Greater Palm Springs closing out its fifth annual Event Services Celebration Week, honoring the people who staff the Valley's event economy. August's venue lineup across the Valley's arenas, casinos, and theaters, still running at full tilt through the hottest stretch of the year. Indio spent Friday evening handing out 1,800 free backpacks and school supply kits at Town Street and Bliss Avenue, folded into the city's regular Food Truck Fridays. Costco donated a full pallet of backpacks; Handel's Homemade Ice Cream added 1,000 free scoops. It's the fourth year the city has run the giveaway, and it works because it doesn't ask anyone to be anywhere they weren't already going to be — the event just sits inside an existing Friday-night habit, first-come-first-served until the supply runs out. That same instinct — build the support into the infrastructure that already exists — showed up this week from the other end of the Valley's economy. Visit Greater Palm Springs closed out its fifth annual Event Services Celebration Week on August 7, a run of recognition for the caterers, AV techs, and venue staff who keep the Valley's convention and event business functioning without ever appearing on a marquee. It's a smaller story than the backpacks, but it's the same underlying fact: a place that runs on tourism and hospitality still has to take care of the people doing the actual work. And the work keeps coming. August's venue calendar has Lionel Richie and Earth, Wind & Fire opening the month at Acrisure Arena, Dwight Yoakam at Agua Caliente Rancho Mirage, Ramón Ayala closing it out on the 29th, and Pappy and Harriet's running Osees and La Luz through Pioneertown's smaller, dustier circuit. None of it pauses for the heat. The Valley's calendar doesn't know it's August — it just keeps booking. School supplies, event staff, and a full slate of touring acts aren't three separate stories so much as one: this is a place that still has to function, in triple-digit heat, for the people who live here and the ones who work the shows.
August 8, 2026
Business
Punk Rock Starts Keeping Its Own Records
Today, we cover: NOFX's warts-and-all documentary, the short version. Forty years of a band that built a career on refusing to be taken seriously gets a feature film that doesn't take it easy on them either. Joan Jett's debut, remastered, the short version. The solo record every major label rejected in 1981 returns for its 45th anniversary, original collaborators and all. A regional Irish scene's reunion documentary, the short version. Four Cavan teenagers who tried to be The Damned in the 1980s, and got nowhere, get a film about it anyway. Punk's founding claim was that none of this was supposed to matter later. No major labels, no critics' approval, no institutional memory — just a scene built to burn fast and not ask permission. Three separate 2026 releases suggest that claim didn't hold. What's notable isn't that the 1980s and '90s punk scene is being revisited; nostalgia cycles do that to every genre eventually. It's who's doing the revisiting: not historians or studios working from the outside, but the people who were actually there, now acting as their own archivists. The band that never apologized NOFX formed in Los Angeles in 1983 and spent forty years refusing to fit anywhere — too sarcastic for punk's purists, too strange for mainstream rock radio, never signed to a major label because no one who mattered particularly wanted them. "40 Years of Fuckin' Up," directed by James Buddy Day, premiered at SXSW in March and gets a wider theatrical release on August 23 and 26. Fat Mike, Eric Melvin, El Hefe, and Erik Sandin all sat for it, which is its own small admission: a band whose entire identity ran on not being earnest agreed to be filmed being earnest, at least for ninety minutes, about how they built a fanbase without ever needing anyone's approval to do it. A record no one asked for, in 1981 Joan Jett's case runs the same logic in reverse. Her solo debut, "Bad Reputation," exists because every major label she approached in 1981 turned it down — so she and producer Kenny Laguna pressed it themselves on Blackheart Records, an indie label built for exactly this problem. The album that became the reason no one questions her judgment again just got a 45th-anniversary reissue, dated July 31, with new artwork and guest musicians pulled from the Sex Pistols and Blondie — the same scene, checking back in on the record the industry didn't want. The place documentaries don't usually go "Once We Were Punks" is the smallest and least commercial of the three, which is what makes it the clearest version of the pattern. Director Frank Shouldice's film follows four teenagers from Bailieboro, a small town in County Cavan, who formed a postpunk band called Panic Merchants in the 1980s and got nowhere — no deal, no scene beyond their own, nothing to show for it except, twenty-five years later, a reunion as Sons of Southern Ulster and a reunion gig at a Dublin venue. It won the Audience Award at the IFI Documentary Festival anyway. Punk's most local, least mythologized corners are getting the same treatment as its most famous ones. Nobody involved in these three projects needed to make them. That's the point.
August 8, 2026
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Culture
The Boardr Series Hits Birmingham and Minneapolis This Week
The Boardr is running its national contest series in Minneapolis (with 3rd Lair) August 7-8 and helping stage the Crew Battle at FISE Birmingham August 6-8, alongside a Red Bull LEDGEnds ledge jam in Houston August 8. Source: Upcoming Skateboarding Events and Competitions
August 8, 2026