California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed legislation that prohibits the use of handheld mobile phones while driving in the state.

Effective July 1, 2008, the legislation prohibits drivers from using a wireless telephone while operating a motor vehicle unless the driver uses a hands-free device. Drivers who violate the law will face a base fine of $20 for a first offense and $50 for each subsequent offense.

I can’t talk on my cell phone while I’m driving?

What a dopey law!

Can I still eat a chili dog while I’m driving? Can I drink a beverage? Can I try to find my favorite song on the CD player? Can I perform any number of activities that require the use of at least one hand and are at least as distracting as a phone call?

Has anyone else noticed that we have too many laws? And that every new one takes away one more precious freedom or one more hard-earned dollar, usually for no good reason?

I’m thankful that I have a job! A lot of people don’t!

I lost my last job a few months ago, along with 9,499 other people in the Orange County real estate/finance industry over the past year. We all got to compete against each other to find another one.

The Orange County Register ran a story yesterday on how some of these folks are doing . . .

Delia DeYulia, a grandmother, was recently forced to take her first retail job.

For the holiday shopping season, DeYulia, 53, is working part-time at Kohl’s, placing clothes on racks and cleaning dressing rooms. She resorted to taking the temporary work after not finding other employment. After 15 years with Fremont Investment and Loan, she lost her mortgage job in Anaheim Hills in March.

“I’m used to sitting in an office,” said DeYulia, who audited loans at Fremont, a firm from which she expected to retire. “Now, I’m on my feet all day. I’m carrying a lot of stuff and my body has to get used to it. It’s hard work for a minimum-wage job.”

The extra money will help pay the mortgage and car payment. Her husband can’t work because he’s disabled.

“I had always felt comfortable financially,” said the grandmother of two. “Now, I’m worried about the future.”

[Robert] Harrington, 31, of Tustin, was let go in September from Bankers Mortgage in Santa Ana. As its loan originator, he made about $75,000 last year. More than half of that was from commissions.

That’s why he thinks his best bet is to find a commission-based job at a luxury retailer or a store that sells big-ticket items.

So he has zeroed in on several shops at South Coast Plaza. He recently applied to Movado, Bloomingdale’s, Sony Style, Porsche Design and Allen Edmonds.

“I hope one of them calls me back this week,” he said.

He needs to help supplement the income from his wife, who is a waitress. They have a three-year-old son.

Corinna Vickers, 35, was let go a year ago from Secured Funding in Costa Mesa. Then two months ago, her husband Shad Vickers, 35, lost his job at Lending Tree in Irvine.

Combined, they had been making $200,000 a year.

Now they’re both unemployed and have been hunting for work to pay their bills and help them save for retirement and college tuitions for their four daughters. They have not had any luck and now the Vickers are both willing to take on holiday retail work.

Rhonda Struman of Laguna Niguel is not waiting around to get hired full time. Last month, she began working as a part-time salesperson at Nordstrom at The Shops at Mission Viejo. It pays $8 an hour. Before she was laid off in August from her underwriting position at Paul Financial in Irvine, she was making more than four times that hourly rate, or about $70,000 a year.

Her husband also got laid off from the mortgage industry. He was pulling in about $130,000 a year. Now, he’s working for $11 an hour at a Costco in San Juan Capistrano.

Because of their huge pay cuts, they’re having a hard time paying their $3,400 monthly mortgage. They sold off their boat to get rid of the monthly payments. They will soon sell their furniture.

“I cry all the time and I’m stressed all the time,” Rhonda Struman said.

By February, she and her husband will leave Orange County for Colorado to look for mortgage jobs or work that pays better than their current employers. They’ll rent out their Laguna Niguel house to help pay the mortgage and then rent in Colorado.

“We have no choice,” said Struman, who’s in her 40s. “There’s too much competition in Orange County. “There are too many people out of jobs” who are looking for new work.

Whew, tell me about it! I was this close to taking a job parking cars for $12 an hour . . .

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Nor does the immediate future look bright for the local real estate market. Here are some of this week’s headlines from the OC Register real estate blog:

• Calif. had biggest U.S. home-price drops in Sept.
• Fed sees ‘deepened’ housing downturn
• Equity’s gone for 35% of recent SoCal homebuyers
• Early Nov. O.C. home sales off 43.5%

As you can see on this perimeter map of the Santiago Fire, the active fire line is now far enough east that my wife and I can clean the ashes and soot off our patio this morning without worrying about having a new load of ashes and soot dumped on it the next day. (We live in the small notch northeast of the now-decommissioned El Toro MCAS.)

I say to her, “They should find the guys who set the fire and make them clean up this mess.”

“Kill them!” she suggests.

“Couldn’t we make them clean up the mess and then kill them?”

Air quality and visibility were much worse today than yesterday. I don’t know if the winds shifted or if it just takes a day or so for all the ashes and soot to fall back to earth.

Proving that there’s a positive side to everything, the Santa Ana winds that have fanned these fires around Southern California also knocked down half the trees in our community, which will now have to be removed and replaced, so if you’re in the landscaping service business, this is a good time for you.

“Honey! Call Farmers and get a quote on
homeowners insurance - stat!”

My wife is in the insurance business. She’s received several calls over the past few days from people wanting to buy a homeowners policy. Ordinarily, she’d be happy to sell them one . . . the problem is that the houses are in zip codes that are currently on fire, and her company has suspended sales of homeowners insurance in those areas.

Here’s a tip, folks: The time to buy insurance is before your house is on fire.

As a result of the fires, particularly the one that burned across the northern border of Irvine, everything in the neighborhood is coated with either a thick layer of soot or a thin film of soot, depending on whether the object in question is outdoors or indoors.

Wildfires are burning all over Southern California, including one here in Irvine:

What they’re saying on the TV news is that firefighters are planning to make a stand at Portola Parkway and stop the fire there, which is good news because we live south of Portola. About 100 feet south, but it’s better than nothing.

Here are some blurry photos from our patio:

One thing I learned on my recent vacation is that Florida, unlike California, doesn’t have a helmet law for motorcycles.

If you’re wondering what percentage of riders will wear a helmet for safety reasons if they’re not required to by law, the answer appears to be zero, although more than half the riders I observed did take the precautionary measure of wearing a shirt.

We drove out to LACMA last weekend to see The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950, and Re-SITE-ing the West: Contemporary Photographs from the Permanent Collection.

I love exhibits like this . . . I’ve lived in California my whole life and I feel like these Western landscapes are part of my DNA.

While we were there, we also took in the Dan Flavin retrospective. Flavin’s work consists of standard fluorescent tubes arranged in patterns not beyond the imagination of the average six-year-old.

I tried viewing them up close, far away, from the side . . . I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.

LACMA helpfully provided a detailed theory of Flavin’s work in the form of a fold-out brochure with a lot of small print, but I didn’t read it. Isn’t art supposed to provide some sort of pleasure and/or illumination — pardon the pun — on its own merits?

I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s epiphany in The Painted Word, that the distinction between, say, a Jackson Pollock painting and the splatterings of a kindergartener is that the kindergartener’s work lacks a persuasive critical theory:

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well–how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works only exist to illustrate the text.

We have a company directory, including photos, on the intranet, so when I do a project with people in a different office, I like to go to the directory and look at the photos to see who I’m dealing with.

Today I started working with some folks in the Roseville office.

“Where’s Roseville?” I asked anyone within earshot of my desk.

“You know where Sacramento is?” someone responds.

Do I know where Sacramento is? What a question! It’s the capital of the state I’ve lived in my entire life.

“Duh, no. Hang on, let me get a map.” Geez, if I want to be insulted, I can get that at home.

The reason I asked: After clicking on a few of the photos, the kindest thing I could think of to say was “Maybe people in Roseville don’t photograph particularly well.”

We stayed on Route 66 as much as we could on a recent family drive to Arizona. The Mother Road has long since been bypassed by the interstate highway system, but long stretches of it are still driveable, including hundreds of miles in California and Arizona.

We just got back from a family drive to the Grand Canyon . . .

Have you ever tried to introduce family members to things that have made a deep impression on you personally? It’s often disheartening, isn’t it?

For example, here’s what my son got out of the sea of sage and grasslands that make up the Kaibab Plateau:

“I’d put an amusement park over here,” he said, pointing to the right. “And over here,” — pointing to the left now — “a shopping center and a sports arena.”

“Look at the mountains,” I said to my wife, indicating with a sweep of my hand the silent, austere beauty of the East Mojave, where desert mountains rise dramatically from the sloping terrain.

“I’ve been looking at them for five hours,” she said.

“You know,” I said, “you guys just don’t appreciate the grandeur –”

“HEY, LOOK!” my son yells. “IT’S A BUSH!“

“– of the American Southwest.”

These are from the same photo set on Flickr, taken at a local beach here in Orange County:

Any questions?

See Also: Why Asian Girls Like White Guys II

My boy is doing a school report on Patrick Henry. Something I didn’t know about Patrick Henry is that his wife went insane in 1771 and was subsequently kept in a straitjacket in the basement of the family home.

Continue reading Patrick Henry’s Crazy Wife in the Basement

From Reuters:

PHUKET, Thailand — William Robins vowed Monday to change his life forever after the professional golfer from California and his new bride, Amanda, narrowly escaped death in the grip of a tsunami.

The newlyweds were honeymooning on Phi Phi island — made famous by the film “The Beach” starring Leonardo DiCaprio — when a giant tsunami wave slammed into it Sunday.

Continue reading Tsunamis: Another Reason I Just Stay Home

It might have been fun watching a talking tree lead the country for a few years, were it not for the small matter of the war for civilization, and the fact that you don’t want a president who’s determined to lose it.

It’s interesting, in looking at a map of the results, to see that there’s a huge block of red (Republican) states starting from Florida, going most of the way up the eastern seaboard, and then sweeping west all the way to Nevada, leaving a few pockets of confused people on the fringes — geographically and otherwise — who are completely out of touch with the rest of the country.

Unfortunately, this includes my home state of California . . .

We have a new governor in California:

Does the punishment of a humiliating recall fit Davis’ crimes? Maybe not. But the issue isn’t fairness to Davis. It’s the future of the state. If the voters brutally and unfairly punish a state-of-the-art pol who overspends in boom times and puts off tough decisions until after he’s reelected, that doesn’t seem to me a terrible precedent to set. It seems a useful precedent.

— Mickey Kaus

Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die . . .

— Bob Dylan, “Gates of Eden”

According to Slate, if NRA president Charlton Heston does in fact develop full-blown Alzheimer’s disease, California state law would compel him to surrender his firearms.

Continue reading Ironic Twist of the Year Award

Notes from the Rainbow Hotel Casino, Wendover, NV:

Belongings in a U-Haul in the parking lot.

I liked the Bay Area, but it was indifferent to me.

I sold online ads for an Internet company. I wore shorts to work and still made a lot of money.

Then in October, the executives called a meeting and told us the company was closing. We had an hour to leave the building.

I was really sad.

I got another job selling ads for LookSmart. But LookSmart wasn’t as smart as it looked. In January, they laid off 30 percent of the staff, including me.

There was good news too. I could always find 12 friends to go bowling on a Friday afternoon because they didn’t have jobs either.

Now I’m going B-to-C.

Back to Cleveland.

Ansel Adams was born on this date, Feb. 20, in 1902. Adams was a great American photographer, best known for his black-and-white photos of Yosemite and other natural monuments of the American West.

Continue reading Ansel Adams (and Other Great Americans)