The Insider hears that Speaker John Boehner is expected to start the federal government’s first full week back to work in OC, where he’s set for an Oct. 21 makeup date with Californians for a House Majority. The group’s reception for Boehner, Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy, NRCC Chairman Greg Walden and North OC Congressman Ed Royce was originally planned for Oct. 16 at the Lyon Air Museum, with a dinner following at the Pacific Club. …
The Department of Energy’s every-other-year Solar Decathlon dodged a potential disaster with its early October run at the Great Park, where home designs by 19 academic teams from around the U.S. and the world drew hundreds of thousands of visitors. The event was previously held at the National Mall in Washington, which was among the national parks hit by the shutdown …
Plenty of ties between the L.A. and Long Beach ports and OC. Here’s another: the TOTEM show that Cirque du Soleil plans to feature at the Great Park starting on Nov. 21 is warming up at the Port of L.A. It will run there until Nov. 10, giving the troupe about a month to get the “fascinating journey into the evolution of mankind” down pat and then take a break before setting up here …
How’s the OC Register really doing these days, now that new owner Aaron Kushner’s more-is-more approach has added new hires, new sections, new looks for its string of community newspapers and a new acquisition with the recent $27.5 million buy of the Press-Enterprise in Riverside? Kushner does a good job of keeping details on his privately held operations private, but clues from the Register newsroom and circulation sales centers have begun to emerge. Word from the newsroom suggests a “sense of urgency” on Kushner’s experiment, which has bet heavily on charging more for subscriptions to help offset a long-term trend of declines in print advertising. The strategy saw the Register set a high bar, asking readers to pony up a dollar a day—$365 a year for the daily paper and full access to the newspaper’s website. Circulation sales pitches, meanwhile, offer discounts of up to 42% for a come-on period of four weeks to readers who have cancelled seven-day subscriptions. Those have been supplemented by phone calls that pitch a similar discount on a week-to-week basis. …
A recent Wall Street Journal story on orchid growers in Taiwan should be cause for concern in the Little Saigon district, home to an OC-based cottage industry that specializes in breeding all sorts of varieties of the genus. Orchids have a lead role in the annual Lunar New Year festivities in Little Saigon, which is preceded by a two-week Flower Festival, where local growers offer their best. The Journal story indicated that they can expect stiffer competition from Taiwan, where entrepreneurs “have brought to orchid-breeding the energy and methods applied to making consumer electronics,” and “the once-rare orchid has become a mass-market commodity.”
