Good morning. It’s Thursday, Aug. 14.
- Underground robot fight club debuts in San Francisco.
- Los Angeles’ fruit vendors vanish after ICE raids.
- And life in the desert oasis of the Imperial Valley.
Statewide
1.
The sinking of the San Joaquin Valley, caused by more than a century of groundwater pumping, has caused canals, roads, and bridges to buckle. New research revealed that it’s also driving down home values. Sales data from 2015 to 2021 showed that home prices were as much as 5.4% below what they would have been on stable ground, translating into losses of between $6,689 to $16,165 per home. In all, the depressed land was estimated to have wiped out $1.87 billion in the value of homes across the valley. The study cited cracked foundations, depleted wells, and higher insurance premiums. L.A. Times | CBS News
Northern California
2.
Humanoid robots are beating each other to smithereens in an underground fight club in San Francisco. REK, hailed as the world’s “first robot combat league,” has been drawing sellout crowds for events held in the basement of downtown building. It’s run by a virtual-reality entrepreneur named Cix Liv (his real name), who envisions a place where humans wearing headsets control the movements of robot gladiators inside a cage. “Once people can really feel this and see this,” he said, “it’ll be fully mainstream.” Core Memory | Futurism
- “What the fuck was that?” A viral video showed a malfunctioning “fighter” robot thrashing about uncontrollably.
3.
“His promise is essentially a world in which you can blithely marry someone forty years younger than you, continue to have children even as your grandchildren are having children of their own, and keep your gaze trained on the farthest horizons — in which you can stick around to witness, and even determine, where humanity goes next.”
The New Yorker profiled the wealthy investors and biohackers working to make death optional — and get rich doing it.
- Another Silicon Valley obsession: high-IQ embryos. Wall Street Journal
4.
In April 2024, a Harris Hawk named Ripley flew off from the Fresno Chaffee Zoo. For more than a year, zoo officials chased dozens of reported sightings of the hawk, an agile hunter with striking dark brown and chestnut red coloring — to no avail. Then on July 29, a woman in the Sierra foothills reported an odd-looking bird in her yard. When zoo caretakers arrived, Ripley flew directly out of the trees to them. “Remarkably, he recognized his caretakers,” the zoo said. He was in superb health. Fresno Bee
5.
Dale Webster died. In 2015, the Bodega Bay school custodian ended an extraordinary run of 14,641 consecutive days of surfing when minor surgery finally kept him out of the water. Webster’s quest began in 1975, when an epic swell led him to surf seven straight days. “I thought, ‘Let me see if I can keep this going,'” he told the New York Times in 2000. Across more than 40 years, he surfed in hurricane-force winds, through the pain of kidney stones, and on the day his wife died of cancer. “He was a surfer, that was his main thing, that was his life ambition,” William Beal, a friend, said on Wednesday. “I don’t think he ever second guessed it.” Webster was 77. SFGATE | The Inertia
Southern California
6.
A San Fernando Valley resident named Gary Boyadzhyan has been blaring a train horn from his yard almost every day for months, driving the neighborhood insane. “It has a range of three and a half miles,” said neighbor Bob Donovan. “It is an actual train horn.” Police officers have been summoned repeatedly, but Boyadzhyan simply resumes the blaring after they leave. He told a reporter the ruckus is a way of “crying out for help,” but declined to explain what he needs. “I know it’s not fair to my neighbors,” Boyadzhyan said. “If I were in their shoes, I would complain too. It is loud.” KABC | KTLA
7.
Watching a Los Angeles fruit vendor work can feel like taking in a great performance. El Ninja, a master frutero in La Puente, livestreams his lunch rush for 5 million followers on TikTok and regularly gets visitors from overseas. But the once-omnipresent vendors, with their signature multicolored umbrellas, are vanishing from L.A. in the wake of immigration raids. Bill Esparza, a food writer, estimated that sales are down 90%. “That number is not an exaggeration,” he said. Grub Street wrote about “what Los Angeles loses without its fruteros.”
8.
“What happened in Boyle Heights might end up going into the annals of chase lore.”
The televised car chase, a staple of Los Angeles news coverage since the 1990s, typically ends the same way every time: with the suspect being captured. But on Sunday, two suspects got away. After a wild police pursuit, they ended up beneath a freeway overpass in Boyle Heights, shielded from the police and TV helicopters overhead. Then they were gone. Three days later, the suspects remain at large. L.A. Times
9.
Online reviewers have given the Hollywood Premiere Motel an average Tripadvisor rating of 1.7 stars, calling it “garbage,” disgusting,” and “sketchy.” “Never again,” wrote one former guest. Yet the 1960s structure was just added to the city’s Historic Cultural Monuments list, making it the first motel to receive the honor. Preservationists highlighted its mid-century modern design and Googie-style sign. “We don’t judge our landmarks by thread count,” said City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martínez. Smithsonian Magazine
10.
Five years after protesters toppled dozens of historical statues in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, a Los Angeles museum is planning to return some of them to public view. The upcoming show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, called “Monuments,” will include a statue of Stonewall Jackson removed from its perch in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2021 and another of Jefferson Davis that protesters dragged off its pedestal in Richmond, Virginia, in 2020. The idea, the museum said, is to illustrate the figures’ evolution from symbols rooted in a “funerary impulse” to ones of resurgent white supremacy. Washington Post
11.
Escondido, nestled in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains about 15 miles from the ocean, is one of the most affordable towns in San Diego County. It has wineries, golf courses, parks, weekly classic car gatherings, and the renowned cultural hub California Center for the Arts. A new development of 64 homes is being touted as the first fire-resistant neighborhood in the U.S. The New York Times published a feature on what it’s like living in Escondido.
12.
In Southern California’s Imperial Valley, a major produce region that relies wholly on the Colorado River, “water is like gold,” said the photographer Scott Rossi. In the tradition of Dorothea Lange, Rossi documented the people scratching out lives in a corner of the earth that seems doomed to collapse. “It was quite profound the first time I saw it,” he said. “As you’re driving through the desert, it appears out of nowhere like a mirage. All of a sudden, it’s just green.” See photos from Rossi’s project, “Dreams on the Dying Stone.” British Journal of Photography
- See more at ScottRossiphoto.com.
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