In regards to yesterday's web sensation and dueling local media headlines on whether or not Frisbee throwing was banned on Los Angeles County beaches, county officials have tried to clarify things. Yes, there is a rule against throwing Frisbees and footballs in summer. Yes, the rule did get changed this week. No, they don't expect to write many citations, if any. And no, the fine is not $1,000.

After years of outright prohibition, a new ordinance which received final approval this week spells out for the first time the conditions under which Frisbees and footballs are allowed on county beaches—basically, in the off-season, or with a permit or permission from the lifeguard....

The new ordinance does give the county the right to ticket Frisbee scofflaws, like people who persist in throwing into large summer crowds, or when asked not to by a lifeguard. The first offense is $100—an amount set by the California Government Code.

[skip]

As for those new $1,000 fines you may have heard about: yes, they’re in the ordinance but they apply to only a few kinds of misbehavior. Those include nudity, shooting weapons and swimming or surfing during hazardous conditions or in prohibited areas.

Previously on LA Observed:
LA bans beach Frisbees? Tale of two headlines

Video: Channel 4 story

United Teachers Los Angeles president Warren Fletcher held a media op outside Miramonte Elementary School this morning, where some students returned to school after two days of cancelled classes. Fletcher hit hard on the district's summary transfer of all teachers and staff, calling it a media stunt that shows officials are "making it up as they go along" in responding to the arrest of two teachers accused of lewd conduct with children. I said from the start that it seemed like an obvious bad shortcut to impose more trauma on the students, and it looks now as if there's a lot more going on around the move, including union politics. I caught part of a good examination from many angles this morning on Airtalk with Larry Mantle on KPCC. Now both Fletcher and Superintendent John Deasy, who made the decision, are booked on Patt Morrison's show at 1:20 p.m.

City Attorney Carmen Trutanich made it official and announced this morning that he is running for District Attorney of Los Angeles this year. Sheriff Lee Baca's support figures large in the flackage. Campaign website | Video

Rival candidate Alan Jackson is distributing a pledge Trutanich made while running for City Attorney in 2009, promising that if he ran for a higher office during his term Trutanich would pay $100,000 in personal funds to the LA's Best after school program — and buy full-page newspaper ads saying "I Am a Liar."

File photo of Trutanich

Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore told KPCC that a student's account of Miramonte Elementary School suspect Mark Berndt being helped by another teacher was fabricated and not true. The account had made it onto Channel 5. "Our investigators are saying that that individual was never suspected," Whitmore told KPCC. "They talked to the woman and they looked at all the evidence and decided there was nothing criminal. ... It's all fabricated."

Some background on KTLA's story, from KPCC.

Justice Kennedy and Prop. 8, Speaker Perez and tuition, Grammy party gets into Getty House, no city for East Los Angeles, Lana Del Rey draws a big crowd in Hollywood and more.

The city of Los Angeles used to plant ficus trees, or laurel figs, in the parkway between the sidewalk and the curb. Now everybody realizes that was a mistake, though City Hall keeps talking about making the current property owner liable for injuries and the cost of sidewalk repairs.

Judy Graeme noticed an especially bad sidewalk rupture on Prosser Avenue, just below Pico in Rancho Park.

* Updated previous quake from Santa Barbara to Long Beach

Vanessa Whang, the director of programs at the California Council for the Humanities in the Bay Area, contributes a reminiscence of the 1971 Sylmar earthquake on the Zocalo Public Square website. Her family lived in Sylmar, slept in the car for a few days after the quake that killed 65, and remembers some dogs and families fleeing the neighborhood never to be seen again. At magnitude 6.6, it was the biggest quake along the Southern California coast since the 1933 Long Beach quake (6.4 magnitude.) The '25 quake that destroyed downtown Santa Barbara was 6.3. The 41st anniversary of Sylmar is Thursday.

I don’t know when it started or who made up the story, but as kids growing up in the San Fernando Valley, we all lived in fear of the Big One—the massive earthquake on the San Andreas Fault that was going to separate L.A. from the continental U.S. and make Palm Springs beachfront property. In science class, we were shown black-and-white films of earthquakes toppling tall buildings and wreaking havoc on hapless populations. This would be our fate. This is what we should be prepared for (though it didn’t seem like there was really any way to prepare). Mostly, we just accepted the notion that one day it would all be over; that was the way things were. Besides, other places had hurricanes or tornados or ice storms, so it wasn’t like you could escape disaster. It was a matter of picking your poison.

So it wasn’t a mystery to me what was happening that early morning on February 9, 1971. I knew immediately it was an earthquake. I was on the top bunk of a bunk bed in the room I shared with my older sister, and I woke to the sound of screaming. At some point, I realized I was the one who was screaming.

I posted some then and now photos last year on the 40th anniversary. The quake struck at dawn, 6:01 a.m. These clocks came out of one of the downed hospitals.

On a world scale, the underwater earthquake that triggered the deadly tsunami in Japan last March 11 was magnitude 9.0 — many times stronger than Sylmar.

First, Channel 9 on the CBS LA website:

LA County OKs $1,000 Fine For Throwing Football, Frisbee On Beaches

Now the Los Angeles Times headline and story:

Ball playing, Frisbee tossing now allowed on L.A. County beaches

Take your pick. The gist of both stories seems to be that the Board of Supervisors clarified 37 pages of rules covering the beaches, and raised the fine to $1,000 for throwing a Frisbee or a football when the beach is crowded in summer. But a beach ball is OK — and none of the throwing restrictions apply between Labor Day and Memorial Day.

Former L.A. Times reporter Anne-Marie O'Connor's book, The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, is out this month and she will be making appearances here over the next few weeks. It's the story of the ”Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer,” the Klimt painting looted by the Nazis in Austria, recovered in 2006 for a Cheviot Hills woman named Maria Altmann whose family had owned the painting, brought to Los Angeles and sold later that year for a record $135 million.

Louise Roug, another former L.A. Times reporter, is returning from Denmark to be foreign editor at Newsweek and the Daily Beast. We noted when she left the U.S. to host a television news show in Copenhagen.

And ex-LAT critic Paul Brownfield had a piece in last weekend's New York Times Magazine on the explosion of podcasts by comedians and the paradox that it’s "at once a minirenaissance for comedy and a retreat by comics further into themselves — a sort of talking cure for a group of people who suffer from something not yet covered, I don’t believe, in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: a need, when not formally doing comedy, to talk about how and why one does comedy."

Also on the media beat today:

• Editors at Patch denied they plan layoffs and disputed most of the rest of a morning letter to Jim Romenesko from a disgruntled staffer.
• The tech blog-turned-website GigaOm acquired paidContent, the formerly L.A.-based site started by Rafat Ali. Editors Ernie Sander and Staci D. Kramer post that they are thrilled.
• ReelzChannel has ordered 26 more episodes of "Hollywood Uncensored with Sam Rubin."
• Ken Doctor looks at the newsonomics of news in California, concluding "the massive changes we’re seeing in California journalism portend even faster journalistic change across the country." California Watch, MediaNews and KPCC are featured.
• Aaron Sorkin‘s upcoming HBO drama “The Newsroom,” starring Jane Fonda, will be set in the fictional Atlantis Cable News and will likely launch in June.
• Black Clock 15 from CalArts is promised to be "a movie issue like no other," with pieces such as Geoff Nicholson’s meeting of two film pioneers in “Buster Keaton: The Warhol Years.”
• How to be a dream PR intern.

Police have been trying to talk down a man who took his clothes off as he climbed a 220-foot communications tower near the city's emergency complex on East Temple Street. He has been up there for at least a few hours. Photo by Ed Fuentes.

Update: He is reportedly being brought down in a basket by firefighters.