Things I'll read this weekend

Willie Brown, Scott Sassa, Tim Leiweke.

I use the weekend to catch up on reading that got away from me during the week as well as to read the weekend's papers. Three things that caught my eye.

* Willie Brown. The former mayor and ongoing political kingpin of San Francisco writes a bizarre column in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. It's bizarre that the Chronicle gives a mouthpiece to Brown to pursue his agendas and settle his scores as well as to spout off on whatever he feels like. His weird lead item on Sunday was about his breakfast with the disgraced head of the public housing agency in San Francisco, Henry Alvarez. Brown had breakfast recently with Alvarez, who told Brown his tale of woe. Brown urged Alvarez to tell his story on the record. What made this weirder is that the lead front-page story in the Chronicle on Sunday, written by Heather Knight, a real journalist, was all about Alvarez and how he may yet get a full pension because Mayor Ed Lee is stalling taking any action on him. Alvarez did not return Knight's calls. Does the Chronicle have any idea how foolish it looks to have a public figure whining off the record to Willie Brown while not commenting to its own reporter?

I hate to pick on Willie Brown twice in one day, but I also wondered, as Brown did, how the Vatican was able to outfit Pope Francis so quickly after his election. Unlike Brown, and apparently his editors, such as they are, I read an AP item over the weekend that explained how: They prepared an outfit in small, medium and large. (Note to Brown: Google pope and tailor next time.)

* Sext scandal. I caught a tiny item in the Wall Street Journal that Scott Sassa, the former NBC and Friendster exec, and current entertainment head at Hearst, had quit. It said nothing more. Twitter quickly got me to this racy stuff. You couldn't make this up if you tried.

* Burying the lede. I sort of followed the news last week that sports-venue giant AEG no longer is for sale. (Guggenheim Partners, subject of the current Fortune cover story, had once been rumored as a bidder.) What I didn't catch until the weekend was that Tim Leiweke, AEG's chief executive, is leaving AEG and that Phil Anschutz is stepping up to run his company. I'd never heard of Leiweke before an awesome New Yorker article last year. TheLA Times explained over the weekend why Leiweke is such a big deal.

Have a good week.

Photo: Mazur/catholicnews.org.uk/Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.