Times website that looks like the real thing. It's

Love Spillman, this is the best blog at KTLA. Can I have an autographed pic of Eric?
Thank you,
Your admirererererer

NottheLATimes has some funny stuff -- I particularly like the "customer service" link that goes to a maze.

Mr. Rivenburg also wrote some funny stuff during his career at the LA Times, but unfortunately he had the very unfunny episode of making bizarrely strenuous efforts to discredit a Holocaust survivor and decorated WWII veteran named Michel Thomas, whose family of Polish Jews was murdered at Auschwitz, but who managed to survive and fight the Nazis with extraordinary courage and tenacity during the war.

He continues those efforts to this day.

Rivenburg's 2001 profile of the late Mr. Thomas, who was then 87 years old, led to a defamation suit against him and the Times. The profile portrayed Thomas as a phony Dachau liberator who lied about or greatly exaggerated other important events during his service in the French resistance and fighting with US troops during WWII, including his work as an Agent with the US Army's Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), where his fluency in many European languages made him invaluable.

In 2004, Thomas was awarded the Silver Star for his bravery fighting with American troops in 1944 in France. Senators Bob Dole and John Warner pinned the medal on Thomas at the WWII Memorial in Washington during the week of its dedication, as several of Thomas's WWII comrades stood by -- or in one case sat in his wheelchair, which I was pushing -- with tears in their eyes. The Ambassador of France also attended, as did Eli Rosenbaum, who heads the US Justice Department's office of Special Investigations -- the department that deports Nazis from the US.

Neither the Times or Rivenburg saw fit to cover this event, nor did they report on any of the other significant facts that countered RIvenburg's profile -- such as the public recognition given to Thomas as a Dachau liberator before a large crowd by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, two days after he was awarded the Silver Star, or the monograph crediting Thomas with the rescue of the Nazi Party's worldwide membership card files, sent by the Nazi leadership to be pulped at a paper mill near Munich in the final days of the war. Rivenburg's article relied on press reports from 1945 to discredit Thomas as the rescuer of those files, but he has never acknowledged the facts set forth in the detailed, scholarly paper by Robert Wolfe in 2002, which credits Thomas with the rescue. Wolfe, who served at the National Archives for more than 30 years, is widely considered the top expert in the world on captured German war documents.

A detailed rebuttal to the article, including downloadable historic documents that were shown to Mr. Rivenburg, but which he apparently ignored, can be found at http://www.michelthomas.org.

Despite all this evidence, and the very public recognition of Mr. Thomas's wartime service during the final year of his long life, Mr. Rivenburg continues his Javert-like crusade to discredit Thomas, who died in 2005 at age 90. Soon after Thomas died, and was the subject of laudatory obituaries by the AP and other mainstream news publications, Rivenburg posted "The Myth of Michel Thomas" on his personal web site, including links to friendly bloggers with headings like "That Lying Old Fraud Michel Thomas Is Dead."

He now promises, on his personal web site, an update to this article, three and a half years after Mr. Thomas went to his grave.

This is hardly the way to keep 'em laughing Mr. RIvenburg. Stick to the humor stuff.

LOVE IT!

Eric, two things!
One is something they showed on GDLA this morning is a clip from Jay Leno the Tonight Show last night that was a music parody titled; "Obamamia" done to the tune of "Mama Mia". Is there anyway you can obtain the entire clip and post it! What little they showed was hysterical!

Second thing is as soon as the earthquake hit, cell phones were NOT usable. No one was able to call - is this a system that is set up to free the airwaves for Emergency People or is this something that happened unexpectedly? With no payphones around any longer, it's really panic time when you're trying to call your elderly parents to see if they're all right and can't get through.
Could you maybe blog a bit on this subject.....please???

i live in chino i've lived in californa all my life and i still get scared every time we have an earth quake today earthquake was two hard jolt i was on my computer at the time i jump and ran to check on my kids and grandbaby a couple of pitures fail off the wall but that was it

I'd love to see them do one for ktla's website! Oh think of what we could write on that!!!!!!

Alright, I went back for that and I just couldn't stop laughing! This is too funny! I'd like to see someone do the same thing with the OC Register.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

I've sent the link to family and friends. What a wonderful way to start the day . . . weather forecast - fire, earthquake, followed by locusts. HAHAHA.

that is great!!

Too funny! Someone had a very good time doing this. I thought the blog about Sam Zell was especially good and probably not too far off the mark.

That's like the weirdest thing I have seen this morning. Interesting. "The Simpsons Ride" lol

Very funny. If it was a newspaper, it would probably sell more than the real L.A.Times. That newspaper is really losing its appeal.