I recently got a call from a local publicist — I won’t say her name to spare her the embarrassment because she doesn’t deserve it; she’s excellent at her job — promoting a new store at one of the local malls. She was hired apparently to get the word out about the store. So, I thought, maybe it would work well with the “Checking In” feature I do for Friday’s paper. It’s a simple-enough feature. Usually I e-mail questions to the owner or manager of a business and they reply back — a standard e-mail interview.

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So, the great Orange County Restaurant Assn.’s Happy Hour Week bar-joke contest is over and we have some winnahs:

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A group of Italian journalists dropped in on me recently. They had picked up a copy of the Los Angeles Times in Costa Mesa, saw the Daily Pilot in it and decided to call me for help with a story they were working on about how the economic crisis is affecting America. They work for a TV news magazine show in Italy that’s not affiliated with the government channels (it’s on the Anno Zero channel).

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