Orange County News Blog

Courtesy of Macy's

"Is that a pout, the gout or the mumps?"

​NEWS ITEM: 'Tis the season of H1N1, so Santas are being told to remove the gloves and wash their hands as much as possible ("Every time you hear a bell, Santa should pump a shot of Purell"), while warnings are being issued about flu buggies and other germs that can live for hours in the jolly fat men's suits, laps and flowing white beards.

INSTA-PUNDITRY: Can you imagine what kind of crap the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade Santa will trudge from New York City when his 25-city tour stops at the Mission Viejo Macy's on Dec. 5? All kids are encouraged to come meet Herr Kringle, and it is for a good cause--a month's worth of Macy's events benefitting the Make a Wish Foundation. Still, better dress the little ones in Hazmat gear, moms.

​Did you really think an email with the headline "Newest Trend in Fashion This Season . . . Ready-To-Wear Breasts" was going to escape the Devil's spawnin', snark-inducin', back-page escortin' Weekly?

Surely, you jest. And stop calling yourself Shirley.

Nope, you could have knocked us over with a feather tickler when we scanned local plastic surgeon Dr. Sid Mirrafati's missive promising, "Women can have READY-TO-WEAR BREASTS in just a few hours."

Oh, do tell more, dear doctor . . .

​

Eight Orange County adults died of swine flu last week, reports the Orange County Register via the county Health Care Agency. That 33 percent increase in local deaths brings the total H1N1-related fatalities in this blessed region of ours to 32. Most of those suffered pre-existing conditions ranging from obesity to cancer to diabetes. Three, including one of those who died last week, were pregnant and four were children.

None, as near as we can tell, were cats.

​Another health practitioner with Orange County ties has been arrested on suspicion of prescribing phony cancer cures.

WSJ.com

​Licensed physician and ordained Pentecostal minister Christine Daniel of Mission Hills was arrested Thursday night in Los Angeles for allegedly taking $1.1 million from 55 families over three years for an herbal cancer "treatment" that resulted in at least six patient deaths in a six-month period.

(The only image Clockwork could find of the 55-year-old was this line drawing from the Wall Street Journal, although there exists online multiple photographs of Christine Daniels, formerly known as Los Angeles Times sportswriter Mike Penner.)

Dr. Daniel reportedly appeared on the Costa Mesa-based Christian television network TBN's Praise the Lord program and convinced some viewers to become her patients, stop their medically prescribed cancer treatments and send her $5,000 apiece. At least one rube is claimed to have paid her $13,000 only to die a few months later.

Among the three Southern California hospitals where Daniel has privileges, according to her official website, is Los Alamitos Medical Center.

Comedienne Happy Slip performs tonight--and you can see her free.

​The B HERE campaign that raises awareness of the life-threatening disease hepatitis B launched Thursday, but it really swings into high gear on the UC Irvine campus today.

First, a free art exhibit featuring works by up-and-coming artists working in a variety of mediums to explore the many facets of the "silent killer" that impacts up to 2 million Americans opens at 10 a.m. in the Pacific Ballroom inside the Student Center at Pereira and West Peltason drives.

Those who check out the exhibit before 5 p.m. get a free ticket to live performances from 6 to 9 p.m. in the Barclay Theatre at 4242 Campus Dr. (Parking for the art exhibit at the live show is available in the Student Center Parking Structure.)

Entertainment will be provided by young, Asian-American singers, musicians, dancers and comedians, including stand-up comic Happy Slip and KABA Modern, an award-winning Hip Hop dance act that originated at UCI and rose to national fame on MTV's America's Best Dance Crew. The emcee is "YouTube sensation" KevJumba.

The events are sponsored by Gilead Sciences, a leading maker of medicines for chronic hepatitis B, with support from campus partners Alpha Phi Omega and the Chinese Association of UCI. There's an Asian flavor to the events because though the liver disease can strike anyone, it disproportionately effects Asians. It is believed as many as two-thirds of Asian Americans with chronic hepatitis B do not know they are infected, putting their health and that of their loved ones at risk.

The B HERE poster follows after the jump . . .

Coming to Anaheim Thursday.

​Kaiser Permanente employees will picket outside the Kaiser Orange County facility Thursday to protest the health behemoth's plans to slash 1,350 jobs in coming months.

Kaiser workers in purple shirts are scheduled to chant, carry signs and speak with patients about the effects of job cuts on patient care from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. at 411 North Lakeview Ave., Anaheim. The picketing is part of five weeks of events held by SEIU-UHW members, who have scheduled simultaneous protests at Kaiser facilities in Fresno and Santa Rosa on Thursday.

"This is a hard situation for our members," says Ronda McClelland, a laboratory assistant at Kaiser Walnut Creek, in a SEIU-UHW announcement. "Kaiser made $620 million and is building new hospitals--and then they want to get rid of our people. But we are going to support our members and fight this to the end."

From Daryn Peterson's online infomercial.

​People who are apparently patients of Daryn Peterson have set up an online legal defense fund -- www.DrDarynPetersonDefenseFund.com -- for the "natural doctor" the Orange County District Attorney's office has branded a fake.

 

The 37-year-old Las Vegas resident was arrested and charged late last week with unauthorized practice of medicine, operating a health care service plan without a license, treating cancer without a license, offering an unapproved drug for cancer treatment, and misrepresenting himself as a licensed medical practitioner.

Prosecutors allege Peterson has been practicing medicine without a license and making outlandish claims about curing cancer and AIDS, but his defense-fund page claims he "has a verifiable Ph.D. in Bio-Science and is board certified by the AAMA (American Alternative Medicial Association) as an alternative medical practitioner."

There are tabs on the page indicating $75, $100 and $250. "Please click on the donation you can do," visitors are instructed. "You can do this as many times as you like. When this ordeal is over, Dr. Peterson will speak to you personally to thank you!"

Daryn Peterson

Daryn Peterson must have been flying pretty high on June 10, when he opened the Orange County Register and read Courtney Perkes' feature story on him, "A Rejection of Western Medicine."

Today, the 37-year-old Las Vegas resident was arrested and charged with unauthorized practice of medicine, operating a health care service plan without a license, treating cancer without a license, offering an unapproved drug for cancer treatment, and misrepresenting himself as a licensed medical practitioner. 

Among the allegedly fake doctor's victims was the Orange County Register.

So much for all publicity is good publicity.

Dr. Gary Rheinschild

​For "Long and Short of It," Salon.com's Aug. 2, 1999, story on botched penile enlargement surgeries and the, ahem, lengths patients must go to if they safely want to increase the size of their members, reporter Michael Easterbrook turned to an Anaheim Hills urologist for expertise.

Now, Dr. Gary Rheinschild, 75, faces possible state discipline that could range from a public reprimand to loss of his license over allegations he botched several penis enlargement surgeries.

A decision from the California Medical Board is expected by January, reports the Orange County Register. In the meantime, we can check out Rheinschild's website, which includes "case study" photographs. (If you are as squeamish as the person banging this out, do not click on "Continue reading . . ." or scroll any farther.)

The AFL-CIO convention in Pittrburgh voted last night to endorse single-payer, universal healthcare for all Americans, and rU.S. Senator Max Baucus (D-Montana) just trotted out to reporters his bill to provide non-single-payer, non-universal healthcare for not-quite-all Americans.

Coincidence? 

With healthcare premiums expected to rise 94 percent by 2020, everyone agrees something must be done. Well, everyone except town-hall criers.

And Fox News.

And Republicans.

The main stickling point seems to concern government-run healthcare--or Red Communist Marxist Leninist Nancy Pelosi Mandatory Death Systems in Sean Hannity-speak. A lot has been said both for and against the public healthcare provided in Britain, Canada and Germany.

Now UC Irvine plans to cut through the bullshit and take a hard look at foreign plans and how they compare with what Glenn Beck calls the greatest healthcare system on Earth. When he isn't crying like a baby, that is.

By the way, don't be scared off by managed-care behemoth Kaiser Permanente being a sponsor of the conference (details of which follow the jump). The co-sponsor is the independent California Healthcare Foundation, which seeks affordable healthcare for all and has provided grants to treat poor Californians. 

All for one and one for OC Healthcare for All.

​OC Healthcare for All and other groups peeved about the current health-care debate march to the Ronald Reagan Federal Building in downtown Santa Ana tonight and rally in support of the following message:

Both sides--the ones personified by President Barack Obama and town-hall protesters--are dead wrong about how to cure our ailing health-care system.

​The baby mama breastfeeding boutique in South County known as Milkalicious has sent word to the Weekly that Hoag Hospital in Newport Beach has pulled out of hosting the "The Great Vaccine Debate," an event the milkers had scheduled for Sept. 16th. According to the release, the hospital changed its mind over hosting the event because it "...did not back up Hoag's current pediatric practices with regards to vaccinations."

Hm. The panel of experts scheduled to talk candidly about the controversy surrounding the fatter batch of vaccines now given to kids and babies at younger ages, was going to be all doctors. But they were scheduled to talk about alternatives and perhaps even possibly (gasp) the idea that parents can and maybe should hold off on heavy rounds of vaccinations for their very young. This may have not only upset Hoag's position, which is presumably pro-vaccine, but probably also flustered the feathers of big brother, er, big pharma -- the supply side of the debate. The last thing pharmaceutical companies want is a bunch of touchy feely breast feeders getting a much needed debate going in the county.

The move is unfortunate for Hoag, which missed out on the opportunity to show its patients that engaging in an informed debate is a healthy thing, and more importantly, that it's not swayed by the push of big pharma. Lucky for Milkalicious, they were able to keep the same date for the debate, and moved it instead to Dave and Buster's at the Block in Orange.

The other side of the health-care debate (think opposite of Fox News' town hall criers) has come out swinging of late.

California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee just issued a statement with the provocative title, "California's Real Death Panels: Insurers Deny 21% of Claims." The CNA/NNOC has compiled data that shows one in five requests for medical claims for insured patients, even when recommended by a patient's physician, are rejected by California's largest private insurers, "amounting to very real death panels in practice daily in the nation's biggest state."

Cypress-based PacifiCare denied 40 percent of the claims it received the first half of this year, and Irvine-based Cigna shot down 33 percent during those six months, the CNA/NNOC claims.

CNN carried a report this morning on physicians at the University of Kansas telling students to avoid coming in to the campus health clinic if they contract the H1N1 swine flu virus and that they instead ride it out in their dorm rooms.

That's keeping with federal guidelines California public schools plan to follow this flu season, when more swine flu cases are anticipated, to keep campuses open as long as possible, closing schools only as a last resort.

It's like Uncle Sam and Aunt Cali want us all to catch it!

Courtesy of HelpTami.Org

​

Before I wrote this week's news article, "A Bone Marrow to Pick," about Matthew Nguyen and bone marrow donation, my assumption of the whole process came from watching Grey's Anatomy. It was the third season and Izzy Stevens (Katherine Heigl) had to donate bone marrow for her daughter. In a scene rife with melodrama, there was an abnormally large needle, and enough pain to ensure that she could not even stand afterward.

Then after I found out more about the process via a family member, I realized that such medical drama scenes don't do any favors to patients such as Nguyen, who needs a bone marrow transplant in order to effectively treat, and perhaps even cure, his blood cancer. I've since stopped watching Grey's Anatomy.

Here's the truth to bone marrow and stem cell donation, something that is not detailed in the article and which is not commonly known:

• A majority of bone marrow donations are done using a non-invasive procedure where blood is taken out of a donor, the stem cells are removed, and the remaining platelets are reinjected into the donor's body. This is called a peripheral blood stem cell donation. To increase the number of blood-forming cells in the bloodstream, Filistrim injections are given for five days.
  
• The other, less common method, comprises of liquid marrow being collected straight from the bone via a hollow needle. It is done under anesthesia and the donor may feel sore afterward.

But, overall, there are no lasting side effects and the bone marrow replenishes itself in a few days. And unlike some organ donations, the donor can give while still alive with no risks. In this case, to coin a cliche phrase, a little bit does go a long way.

More statistics and ways to register for the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) after the jump:

​

Thanks to the swine flu, it is common to see nurses and other hospital workers wearing special respirator masks. This has put hospitals and nurses at loggerheads--not over whether the masks should be worn but how often they should be changed out.

Even though Sacramento-area hospitals say their nurses have been wearing the special masks, a nurse there became the first health worker in the state to die from swine flu. This has given weight to the argument to frequently change the protective masks.

"If health care workers are not protected, we can potentially get infected and actually infect patients," warns Jan Rodolfo of the California Nurses Association. "So either we're protected--and everybody's protected as a result--or we're putting people at risk."

​After thirty years of working closely with the county and swooping in to absorb patients the county's shoddy public health care system could no longer treat, Planned Parenthood was forced to give up the county grant it has received for the past nine years. In a scathing letter written to the county Health Care Agency, CEO Jon Dunn ripped into the agency, and the board of supervisors, for blatantly erecting a series of barriers that have made it virtually impossible for the organization to receive the $290,000 allocation it was seeking for a new breast cancer treatment clinic.

Despite Planned Parenthood's long track record of working harmoniously with the county for decades, the Board of Supervisors "discovery" a few months ago that the non-profit received funds for sexual health training sessions and education (which many county employees benefited from) prompted a series of board meetings that eventually led to the yanking of Planned Parenthood's funds. After the funds were reinstated (because of the potential illegal move on the Board's part), the Health Care Agency enacted a new set of rules for all the community clinics receiving funding from the county. The new rules seemed specifically targeted at Planned Parenthood, with new caveats specifically targeted at clinics that performed abortions (county funds have never been used for abortion services at Planned Parenthood). Read the full back story here.

After several months of trying to comply with the Health Care Agency's new rules, Planned Parenthood gave up late last week after the agency asked that Planned Parenthood review and sign a proposed contract -- which would only pay half of the $290,000 allocation the clinic has traditionally received -- in less than 24 hours. "We told them we had to review it with our board and pleaded with them for more time, but they wouldn't give it to us," says Stephanie Kight, senior vice presidnet of Planned Parenthood OC. Without time to review the contract, the organization was forced to forfeit the grant, says Kight. 

"The barriers that the County erected for Planned Parenthood alone -- conditions it did not impose on other clinics -- have made it impossible for us to provide critical health care services to women in Orange County," wrote CEO Jon Dunn in a frustrated and biting letter sent to the board, the Health Care Agency, and cc'd to the ACLU on July 29. The letter lays out, in detail, the myriad barriers Planned Parenthood, unlike other clinics, faced in securing their funding.

Read the full contents of the letter after the jump....

Marcin Tusinski

​Remember the series of stories we shared about the Hungtington Beach plastic surgeon who had a penchant for red wine and accumulating DUIs? And remember how California's Medical Board egregiously allowed that doctor (and many like him) to keep practicing medicine despite his having failed out of its secretive drug diversion program (which was shut down last year after repeated failed audits)?

Turns out doctors like Brian West, who the state Medical Board allowed to keep practicing medicine for years while he struggled with alcoholism, and then lagged on disciplining him once medical accusations were filed, aren't the only ones who the state was turning a blind eye to. The state's Board of Registered Nursing has also lagged when it comes to disciplining nurses addicted to drugs who have failed that board's drug diversion program, according to an exhaustive investigative report released this week by ProPublica. The most flagrant cases involved instances of nurses stealing drugs from hospitals, and shooting up in their cars or during surgery with painkiller medications intended for patients.

In the most severe cases, nurses were deemed a "public risk" or "public safety threat" after flunking out of the drug diversion program that had allowed them to keep working, and keep their drug problem under wraps, as long as they promised to stay sober. The ProPublica investigation found that the time between when those nurses were identified as a risk to the public and when a formal medical accusation was filed by the board was often several years. In the meantime, those nurses continued to see patients, relapse and in some instances, were arrested. Of the 81 nurses the investigation identified as having been deemed a safety risk to patients between 2002 and 2008, five were from Orange County. Their names and the number of days they worked after having been deemed unsafe without the board filing an accusation are listed after the jump...

The National Minority Quality Forum created an online map to coincide with last month's National HIV Testing Day that shows what areas of the country have the most cases of HIV/AIDS. It's available here. You first have to register, free of charge, to use the map. You can then punch in a state, county and congressional district and find out how it fares.

The methodology is based on the number of people reported with HIV/AIDS by county health officials versus the county's population in 2000. Punch in Orange County and you'll see it's at threat level orange when it comes to its AIDS prevalence rate. The color is merely coincidental; it rises in hue to darkest red for the worst of the worst areas when it comes to frequency of AIDS cases.

Orange puts Orange County at 0.104 percent to 0.247 percent of people living with AIDS, which is about the same as Los Angeles County. By comparison, San Francisco County is pinkish red, one shade less than dark red, with a 0.248-0.592 percent rate. Orange County fares slightly better when it comes to the prevalence of HIV (non-AIDS). The threat level color is yellowish, with a 0.106-0.194 percent rate.

It is always heart-warming to see one's county first in something. Though when it's something as terrifying--though not really--as swine flu, you can't help feeling even more proud. According to the Associated Press, Orange County, with our gargantuan total of 5 deaths, ranks as the number one county for swine flu deaths in California. Take that LA County!  

Dr. Ana Nogales

A new, nonprofit mental health center for families who have been victimized by crime is scheduled to open Friday in downtown Santa Ana. Casa de la Familia arrives at a time of great need. The Mary Kay Ash Charitable Foundation, a nonprofit agency dedicated to ending domestic violence, reveals that 75 percent of domestic violence shelters in the U.S. have reported an increase in women seeking help since September, something 73 percent of these shelters attribute a rise in financial hardship.

Most counseling at Casa de la Familia will be provided at no cost by more than 40 qualified, bilingual professionals. The center opens with a ribbon cutting at 2:30 p.m. Friday in Nogales Plaza, 1650 E. 4th Street, Santa Ana. Among the invited guests are state Sen. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana), Santa Ana City Councilwoman Michelle Martinez and former California transportation secretary Maria Contreras-Sweet. Congresswoman Loretta Sancez (D-Garden Grove) is scheduled to appear via video.

Casa de la Familia's clinical director is psychologist Dr. Ana Nogales, whose new book, Parents Who Cheat, has just been published. Though the book is not directly related to the facility's opening, it does cite interesting statistics about the destruction of families: 87 percent of the children of cheating parents believe in monogamy; 96 percent say cheating is wrong; and 44 percent have themselves cheated on their mates. Within the pages, the author explains how adultery damages a child's understanding of love, marriage, and trust, threatening their relationships up through adulthood. More information about the book is available here.

Paul Schultz

This is not Ethel Mark, but isn't she so cute?

A cardiac care nurse at UC Irvine who raised questions about faulty narcotics pumps, proper nurse rotations and mandatory breaks was notified by management that she could expect to fired in early July, according to the California Nurses Association.

Ethel Mark, who's worked at UCI Medical Center for seven years, and a nurse's committee at the hospital have been pushing their managers to curb unsafe "floating" conditions, (nurses who aren't properly trained to operate patients' heart monitors are required to work shifts in the unit), to give nurses -- who work 12-hour shifts -- their proper breaks, and to replace faulty narcotic pumps (six months ago UCI pulled one third of all of these pumps because they failed mechanical tests). As of now, according to the Nurses Association, the remaining malfunctioning pumps still haven't been replaced or fixed.

Nurses are holding a vigil tonight outside of UC Irvine Medical Center to protest the impending firing of Mark, who the association says is being targeted for being a patient advocate and whistleblower. Jill Furillo an RN and Southern California Director of the California Nurses Association (CNA), which represents UC nurses says nurses are obligated to be patient advocates, and to act accordingly if they believe that their managers are making decisions that may hurt their patients. "Ethel Mark, RN had a legal and ethical obligation under the state's Nursing Practice Act to challenge unsafe practices and she acted accordingly," she said in a press release sent to the Weekly today.

Vigil details after the jump...

All seemed to be said and done yesterday in the fight over whether Planned Parenthood should receive county funds for its non-abortion related health care programs. The board of supervisors voted to approve its contract with the Coalition of Community clinics, the organization responsible for doling out $5.5 million in tobacco settlement funds among 19 subcontracted community clinics.
Planned Parenthood, which has received its share of the funds for nine years, was conspicuously absent from the list of clinics approved by the county Health Care Agency to receive funds this next year.

The effort to get the county to pull its funding from the clinics began this past February, when a constituent alerted supervisor John Moorlach that Planned Parenthood was receiving county money. Moorlach and the other four board members apparently had no idea, and they voted to cut off the clinic's funding, citing their moral opposition to abortion. The funding was subsequently reinstated (because of potential illegalities), and a new set of funding rules, with specific new caveats for clinics that perform abortions, was drafted by the Health Care Agency at the direction of the board.

Exercising and eating right can help prevent any number of diseases. You're on your own when it comes to consumption but for exercise you can walk all this next weekend in different parts of Irvine to help keep not only yourself healthy but millions of others as well. That's because the city just happens to find itself the site of separate walkathons for sufferers of two of man's nastiest diseases: lupus and cancer.

First, the Orange County Great Park--formerly known as the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station--hosts Saturday's Walk for Lupus Now, the Lupus Foundation of America's signature event aimed at raising funds to save lives from the autoimmune disease that afflicts more than 1.5 million Americans. Among them are more than 170,000 Californians, including two women I know. The last time I ran into both, you would not know they were suffering from anything.

Lupus is an acute and chronic autoimmune disease in which the immune system is unbalanced, causing inflammation and tissue damage to virtually every organ system in the body. One of the friends I mentioned above just told me this past weekend how she has suffered from an array of injuries, disorders and diseases that her doctors now suspect was caused all along by lupus, which had been undetected in blood test until just recently.

Despite having to take extra precautions because of the sun's harmful rays, she will be among the many Lupus sufferers walking in Irvine to try and help Orange County's Walk for Lupus Now reach its $75,000 fund-raising goal. More than 50 chapters around the country are holding events this weekend. Many walkers participate in the memory of friends and loved ones who have fallen to the disease.

Check in begins at 9 a.m., with the walk proceeding an hour later. Visit Lupus.org for more details. The Great Park intends to start balloon flights at 9 a.m. also--weather permitting.

No scalpels allowed.

When we last left off in the strange case of alcoholic Huntington Beach plastic surgeon Brian West, we'd just learned that he'd been found guilty for lying to investigators about a DUI and disfiguring a former patient without her consent. The administrative law judge recommended that his license be revoked but the Medical Board of California, which had final say, decided, strangely, to reject the recommendation and have their own panel determine West's fate.

Today that panel ruled that they've decided to revoke the doctor's license beginning June 25 for lying, basically, over and over again. (Click here and type in his name to read the Med Board's decision). West also failed to show up for his random drug tests these past few months, behavior that didn't exactly scream sobriety to the board.

Friends of Dr. Brian West (or West himself) made a laughable attempt at tarnishing my and Sacramento reporter Kurtis Ming's reputations a couple of month's ago by launching a website that aired our dirty laundry (a 15 year-old underage drinking ticket for me; nothing on Kurtis). It was an effort to get back at us for reporting on the women he maimed, his drinking problem, and the faulty California Medical Board program that allowed doctors with addictions to continue to practice on patients without disclosing their problem if they joined a secret, loosely monitored state rehab program.

marosh / Flickr / Creative Commons

This might sting a little.

St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton and UCI Medical Center in Irvine will both face administrative fines from the California Department of Public Health, the department announced today. Each fine is $25,000, and comes as a result of "a determination that the facilities' noncompliance with licensing requirements has caused, or was likely to cause, serious injury or death to patients."

A total of 13 hospitals in California will be penalized, and UCI is the only hospital on the list to pay for two violations. The press release gives the reasons for each fine:

9.    St. Jude Medical Center, Fullerton, Orange County. The hospital failed to ensure the health and safety of a patient when the hospital did not follow its surgical policy and procedure. This resulted in a patient having to undergo a second surgery to remove a retained foreign object.  This is the facility's first administrative penalty.

10. University of California Irvine Medical Center, Irvine, Orange County. The health and safety of a patient was jeopardized when the hospital failed to follow its policies and procedures for fall prevention. This is the facility's first administrative penalty.
 
11. University of California Irvine Medical Center, Irvine, Orange County. The hospital compromised the safety of a patient when an allegation of physical assault was not investigated timely. The right to considerate and respectful care was not ensured. This is the facility's second administrative penalty.

It should be noted that neither of the two above hospitals were among the OC medical facilities that have made headlines for dumping patients or allegedly framing a doctor by planting a gun in his car.

Boras

Jeffrey Anderson's 2007 Weekly story "The Boras Factor" made great hay out of ways Newport Beach-based baseball super-agent Scott Boras gives his clients "the competitive edge" through high technology, physical trainers, psychologists, player profiles and even a "war room" he has at his--and their--disposal. "The company also tends to players' goals off the field, such as charitable work, and the interests of their families," Anderson wrote.

But one area Boras and his minions steered clear of mentioning was "juicing" or the use of performance-enhancing drugs (PED).

That's curious, given the roster of players that have been tied to the banned practice, the latest being, of course, Manny Ramirez of the Dodgers. Major League Baseball just suspended Ramirez for 50 games after the outfielder tested postive for PED.

Manny: drop and do 50.

Just before the season started, the MLB was rocked by the admission of perhaps the greatest player in the game, Alex Rodriguez, that he had failed a drug test for Primobolan in 2003. Boras had helped make the Yankee baseball's first $200 million man.

Baseball's first $100 million man, pitcher Kevin Brown, another Yankee and Boras client, was mentioned in MLB's juice investigating Mitchell Report for using his super-agent's Newport Beach headquarters as the return address when he sent cash to a steroid/HGH supplier.

Juicer-turned-squealer Jose Canseco accused catcher Ivan Rodriguez of using, but Boras later claimed Rodriguez was not his client at the time of the alleged doping. But several other Boras players have turned up in PED investigations over the years.

HBO's unprecedented, multi-platform series The Alzheimer's Project--which includes four documentaries, 15 short films, a book, a community outreach program and a website covering every aspect of the disease--debuts on the pay-cable network Friday but locals get a sneak-peak at one of the films this evening.

The Boys & Girls Clubs of Garden Grove, in collaboration with Acacia Adult Day Services, hosts a free screening of the project documentary Grandpa, Do You Know Who I Am?, which is geared toward children and young teens coping with a grandparent's illness through vignettes aimed at explaining a relative's sad, gradual decline into Alzheimer's. It begins at 6 p.m. in the H. Louis Lake Senior Center, 11300 Stanford Ave, Garden Grove. Email here to reserve a spot.

The doc features, is executive produced by and is based on the book by Maria Shriver, whose father was dianosed with the disease.

While the Coker you read with great joy makes up the news, the newest Coker makes news. My nephew Ian Coker and niece-in-law Carrie just welcomed their third daughter Josephine into the world--at the side of a rainy highway somewhere or another in Utah.

The Fox affiliate up that way got the story. Enjoy!

Orange-based Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino Counties, which had its $300,000 health-services contract voided in March due to activist county supervisors, only to have the grant reinstated Tuesday along with regulations that will make it more difficult to attain future county funds, defiantly vowed to apply this week for the new money anyway.

"We will not be deterred by their persistent bias against us," said Jon Dunn, the nonprofit's president and CEO, in a statement sent to the Weekly. "This week, we will submit a grant proposal for next year's TSR [tobacco settlement] funds that will be fully compliant with the policies set forth in [Tuesday's] meeting--second-level breast health care for underserved and uninsured young women in Orange County."