For City Paper, 1999 was about Kimberly, the Inky, ESP and the mayor. Howard Altman, in "The Kimberly Conundrum," another of his too-big-for-one-issue cover stories, dug into the three-year-old murder of Center City jogger Kimberly Ernest. Newly appointed "Señor" writer Frank Lewis' "Sinking Ship," a look into the Inquirer's hemorrhaging circulation, prompted rebuttals from Tom Ferrick, Murray Dubin and Hank Klibanoff, and a pat on the back from Sal Paolantonio. Sam Adams had the nerve to dis homeboy M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense , opining, "As bad a writer as Shyamalan is, though, he's far worse as a director." His assessment prompted a deluge of angry letters and Adams to revisit the smash as a civilian, "Not with an eye toward changing my mind ... but with a hope of understanding the film's popularity." Adams not only agreed with his initial opinion and found new elements of the film to critique, but reprimanded viewers brought to tears by the gimmick ending. We ran a package on the candidates for the first post-Rendell mayor, called it "Mayor Wars" and then, seriously, mocked up the candidates as characters from a galaxy far, far away. (The next week, Adams ripped The Phantom Menace.)

CP said happy trails to stalwarts Margit Detweiler and Neil Gladstone, but welcomed Brett Burton, M.J. Fine, Jennifer Carey, Maxine Keyser, Debra Auspitz, Sean O'Neal, Sara Marcus, Brians Hogan and Glaser, Joy Malinowski, Hillary Rea, Trevor Dixon, K-C Bajai's "Ill Street Grooves" and "Beat Box"er Ainé Ardron-Doley to the fold. Longtime CP phone voice Amy Schuler debuted in classifieds. Prodigal son Noel Weyrich wandered home. We said hello to newly minted HR man Daniel Skowron.

We introduced the Naked City ("Life | Style") section, Brian Howard and Patrick Rapa's video game feature "Arcadia" and a pre-election series called "Ward's Eye View." We also said hello to Rapa's fly-on-the-wall column "Hot Seats," wherein he parked himself here and there and then wrote about what he saw. In one installment he went to a nudie booth. He hid the paper from his parents at the time and as far as we know this is the first they're hearing of it.

(In back-page news, Rapa twice posted anonymous ads for his Parker Posey dial-a-song: "Hear half a song about how great she is! Call during business hours only.")

Bell Curve made the first of its DiCicco-and-Mariano-are-short jokes. In pun news, Frank Lewis wrote a cover story on a local news anchor which we titled "Mendte Telepathy" and Howard Altman chatted with Eric Gregg in "Interview With the Umpire." We put a photo of bare-assed, toes-curled Junk choreographer Brian Sanders balancing on the arm of a sofa on the cover of our Second Season Arts Preview.

Neil Gladstone wrote the second in his series of Roots cover stories, "Stakes Is High" (see page 20 for his most recent), Shepard Fairey designed the cover of our music issue, and Brian Howard reviewed the first MP3 player, failing miserably to predict the rise of the iPod. Robin Rice wrote about Shelley Spector's bid to do the improbable: succeed as an artist and a gallery owner.

After taking fishing trips with both Sam Katz and John Street, we endorsed Katz in his bid for mayor. On the eve of the election we commissioned two cover illustrations: "How Street Won" and "How Katz Won." We ran the Street cover that week, and the Katz version in the debut of our end-of-year round-up franchise "What Happened Next?" Aw.