Editorial Notes

Having just returned from the less-than-overwhelming Las Vegas AAG, I can once again revel in the fact that our Pacific Coast region produces some of the most outstanding and interesting research in the discipline of geography while also demonstrating its ability to hold conferences superior to those of our parent organization. Thankfully, the Liberace Museum and off-strip Vietnamese food provided a much-needed respite from the daily trek across the windy, dusty expanses of parking lots between the Riviera Hotel and the cavernous Convention Center. I was sorely tempted to drive my Subaru STi through the Center doors and take advantage of its made-forracing hallways in an attempt to get to my sessions on time. While Fairbanks was certainly colder than Vegas, our hosts once again easily surpassed the AAG’s increasingly typical lack of organizational insight, so a tip of the faux fur-lined cap to the Alaska meeting organizers. And a very special thanks to Katie Kennedy at Alaska Fairbanks for her help with the abstracts appearing in this volume of the Yearbook.

I am quite pleased to present my third volume as editor and am very satisfied with the variety of articles we have to offer this year. We continue to offer the best in visual materials that a black-and-white academic journal can offer, as evidenced by the high quality of maps, photos, tables, and charts that appear in this issue’s articles. So, a very special thanks to Dave Deis, our cartographer and graphics tour de force. As always, the Yearbook is a record of our annual meeting: all of the abstracts from the Fairbanks gathering are included, as are the Student Paper Awards and APCG Resolutions. There were no Distinguished Service Awards this year, and unfortunately the meeting organizers chose not to provide us with a meeting report. Darrick Danta’s unique Presidential Address, an in-depth view of the hide-in-plain-sight pornography industry located in the San Fernando Valley, is the first of this year’s articles, and, in keeping with my editorial tradition, we conclude our selections with Larry Ford’s photographic paean to San Francisco, our 2010 meeting site. Those of you who have accompanied Larry on one of his many walking tours will, I hope, be able to affectively transport yourselves to San Francisco and follow Larry on his insightful tour of the city.

In between those two bookends, we have a wide assortment of articles pertaining to our regional geography. Casey Allen and Jeremy and Ron Dorn discuss the 2005 Cave Creek Complex Fire in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert and the resultant post-fire gullying, while Greg Bohr looks closely at the trends of California’s daily surface-temperature extremes. Doug Fetters takes us on a photographic journey through railway abandonment sites in the San Fernando Valley and discusses how those locations have contributed to urban renewal projects. In a more critical vein, Michal Kohout provides a glimpse into the complex topographies of the immigration policies of Inland Empire municipalities, while Mary Ngo and Deborah Thien examine the various positionalities of those involved in the trucking industry centered around the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. From the quantitative realm, XiaoHang Liu and Julia Griswold have created a model for estimating pedestrian volumes for some of San Francisco’s busiest intersections. Claudia Radel and Birgit Schmook take us to Calakmul, Mexico, to look more closely at the effects of male transnational migration on the status of the women who remain behind, and Michael Steinberg explores the changing habitats of the Hawai‘ian Honeycreeper.

We also have another wonderful and thoughtful piece from Jim Nemeth, our APCG representative in Ohio. Jim e-mailed his submission to me right when the first effects of California’s financial woes began to impact our state’s universities and colleges, and here I include the introduction to his article from that initial e-mail:

I am sorry to hear of and read about demoralizing budget cuts in California geography departments impacting in the first instance on the job-securities of part-timers and adjuncts—many of them our good...