Daily Bruin

Stopped by to chat with the Heisman maker, Norm Chow , after listening to UCLA Coach Rick Neuheisel give yet another hilarious but hot-air news conference. The Bruins have lost four in a row, their quarterbacks haven't thrown a touchdown pass in a month and for the first time in nearly 20 years, UCLA is in danger of not getting a bowl bid in two consecutive years. And on the back page of the Daily Bruin on Monday, the headline read: "Neuheisel's team falling apart." I know how much closer the kids on campus are to the UCLA football players, so I asked Neuheisel whether the Daily Bruin was on to something.

Tommy Trojan and Bruin Bear are wrapped in protective garb with sentries standing nearby. It's the week before the USC-UCLA football game, and the schools are guarding against sorties by each other's students. USC seems to have started the custom in 1941 when some Trojans stole the Bruins' Victory Bell. Since then, USC students have pulled such stunts as publishing several phony Daily Bruins and ruining one planned pregame UCLA rally with cancellation announcements on administration stationery.

Fight on, poor old SC! The Trojans have proved it's possible to lose respect while gaining victory. This "elite" football institution's celebration following the UCLA game shows just how far this program has slipped. Two bad teams, one bad game and USC celebrates as if it had just liberated Paris. If I were a player on either of those teams I would have run off the field as quickly as possible before somebody accused me of trying to impersonate a football player. Congratulations, USC. The streak is over.

In exactly one week, Los Angeles will wake up with a newly elected mayor. The lucky leader of 4 million restless campers with cracked sidewalks could be Wendy Greuel, the business-suited Valley kid who worked for Mayor Tom Bradley and President Clinton and would be the first female mayor in city history. Or it could be Eric Garcetti, who seems to have done everything in his 42 years except pitch for the Dodgers and kayak to Borneo, and whose adopted daughter may one day celebrate both a bat mitzvah and a quinceañera . Last week, I wrote about a Greuel visit to Tolliver's barbershop in South Los Angeles, where she was relaxed and sharp in front of a crowd that thinks she's the one. Today I'll report on my outing with her opponent, who, like Greuel, helped create some of the city's problems but now promises to deliver peace and prosperity to one and all. L.A. ELECTIONS 2013: Sign up for our email newsletter When Garcetti walked into a Westwood Village pizza parlor late Monday night, he was not recognized until after he'd selected artichokes, olives, onions and peppers as toppings.

A UCLA graduate is being honored with a Sunshine Award by the Society of Professional Journalists for a series of investigative stories that uncovered a scandal at the campus School of Dentistry. In the Daily Bruin, Robert Faturechi wrote that the orthodontics residency program's high admission standards were relaxed for children or relatives of donors who pledged hefty financial gifts, one as high as $1 million. The article said it was based on hundreds of pages of e-mails and internal documents.

When Justin Combs turned 16, his father, hip-hop mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs, gave him a $360,000 silver Maybach. When Justin Combs decided to play football in college, UCLA gave him a $54,000 scholarship. As UCLA confirmed this week that the recent graduate of New York's New Rochelle Iona Prep would enroll on a full athletic scholarship, some questioned if the cash-strapped school should pay for the education of the son of a man worth an estimated $475 million - and whether the 18-year-old should have accepted the offer.

Black students at UCLA are accusing the student-run campus newspaper of racism after the publication printed a photo caption describing a predominantly black concert crowd as a "mob." Leaders of the Black Students Alliance are also angry about another caption in the same Feb. 19 issue of the UCLA Daily Bruin titled "Music soothes the savage beast," which described the crowd as "enthusiastic but docile."

Black students at UCLA are accusing the student-run campus newspaper of racism after the publication printed a photo caption describing a predominantly black concert crowd as a "mob." Leaders of the Black Students Alliance also are angry about another caption in the same Feb. 19 issue of the UCLA Daily Bruin titled "Music soothes the savage beast," which described the crowd as "enthusiastic but docile."