The latest LA Weekly writer to post a piece in Sunday Opinion at the L.A. Times is Howard Blume, who deftly picks apart the L.A. school district's dropout stats. Weekly writers seldom broke in until Sue Horton took over as Sunday Opinion editor. Marc Cooper and Harold Meyerson have become semi-regulars since Horton arrived, and Greg Goldin had a piece in earlier in June. The connection? Horton used to be the top editor of the Weekly.

Blume, by the way, covers the LAUSD for the Weekly, where this week he sided with sentiment to preserve the Ambassador Hotel in the schools planned for the Wilshire landmark's site. No argument here, but on historic heritage value, not architecture. The Ambassador is not among Myron Hunt's lauded accomplishments -- unlike the Rose Bowl, the Huntington Library and Occidental College. One factual quibble though: Blume, like many others, reports that Barbra Streisand made her West Coast debut in the hotel's Cocoanut Grove. She actually had appeard on stage first at the hungry i nightclub in San Francisco and in Las Vegas. Um, there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why I'd know such nonsense.

Recent Ambassador photos via the Los Angeles Conservancy Modern Committee site.