It was like a ghost town yesterday. The Lakers were playing a close-out game. It’s Finals Week at the local high schools. Everyone young and old had something to do. My own 10th-grade boy spent 12 hours Saturday studying at the Barnes and Noble cafe at the Marketplace, followed by an Extreme English Breakdown session yesterday at Starbucks on Culver . . . Good luck, students! Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Irvine
I Can’t Read The Sign
I’m driving my son to hockey practice . . . at Barranca and Culver, an Asian kid is holding a sign with an arrow and something written in Chinese. Or Korean maybe. “Wow,” I say, “that is racist. I’m being totally excluded from the activity, whatever it is. If he had a sign saying ‘No Whites Allowed,’ it couldn’t be any more racist.” “Maybe that’s what it says,” my son suggests. “Good point.” Read more →
NARCh Qualifier
My son’s roller hockey team is playing in the NARCh qualifier in Irvine this weekend: one round-robin game tonight @ 10:10, one round-robin game tomorrow night @ 11:40, then the teams get seeded for single-elimination play on Sunday . . . Read more →
Taxes Make People Nuts
One of the post offices here in Irvine is a best-kept secret . . . it’s off Culver Drive, down a side street and around a corner, basically in a residential area. It’s never busy because, unlike the post office on Sand Canyon, it’s not visible from a major street and most people don’t know it’s there. My wife emailed me at work yesterday morning to say that she went to that post office and tons of cars were lined up to get in, which reminded her that it was April 15. Not to worry though. We mailed our taxes on the 14th — to beat that last-minute rush. Twenty years or so ago, I was living in Hollywood and — on the evening of April 15 — filling up at a gas station just south of the freeway from Union Station. Beyond Union Station on Alameda St. is the… Read more →
A Father-Son Day
Everyone’s got armbands and 3-D glasses . . . — Elvis Costello Irvine schools are on spring break this week. I took a day off for father-son activities with my boy, age 15. As we were driving back from lunch at Wingstop, I said, “You want to see Monsters vs. Aliens in 3-D IMAX?” “Not particularly,” he said. I’d already decided that I did want to see it so I got off at the Irvine Spectrum exit. “I guess this means we’re going to see it,” he said. “You know what they say: Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time, but regret for the things we didn’t do is inconsolable.” “Oh shut up, Sophocles. It’s a movie for two-year-olds.” “No it isn’t. There’s a giant girl in it. It looks cool.” “I’ll be the combined age of everyone else in the theater.” We got there a… Read more →
Microblog: 2009-04-06
Everyone in Irvine drives the same car: http://tinyurl.com/cad86w # Most valuable and underused social media strategy: http://blog.foghound.com/474/ # 5 Ways ‘Common Sense’ Lies to You Everyday: http://tinyurl.com/cdmhxa # Read more →
Everyone in Irvine Drives the Same Car
It’s a white Lexus SUV. This leads to hilarious mixups like my son approaching a line of cars after school and getting into the wrong one by mistake, and my wife and I standing in the Trader Joe’s parking lot trying to figure out why we can’t unlock “our” vehicle . . . Read more →
Rollo Takes a Walk
The Northwood Wind Ensemble went deep into the repertoire at last week’s Irvine Band Festival for some avant-garde pieces, including one called “Rollo Takes a Walk.” “It’s the quirkiest, gayest piece I’ve ever played,” my son said. “Rollo” didn’t have any good percussion parts, just oddball instrumentation with rimshots, slide whistles, etc. “And in measure 126,” he said, “everybody stops playing and says, ‘Rollo…takes…a walk.’” “Hmmmm.” “Except it’s not written into my part so I don’t say it . . . and I play one note on the chimes.” “What note is it?” “An F.” “I’m thinking the Rollo composer could follow up with an entire Rollo suite,” I said. “‘Rollo Takes a Shower,’ ‘Rollo Takes a Test,’ ‘Rollo Takes a Vacation,’ you see where I’m going with this?” “Stop being stupid,” he said. “Why is it stupid? Because you didn’t think of it?” Read more →
Signs of the Times
The house two doors down from us is for sale. The house across the street is empty and for sale. The woman behind us and the woman next door, who was recently laid off, have asked my wife if she knows anything about loan modification . . . Read more →
Ducks Visit WIHA
The Devil Dogs played in the WIHA tournament in Irvine last weekend, losing in the Bantam AA finals to the Reebok Blades. Wild Wing, the Ducks mascot, was there. Two of the Power Players were there too. You can’t see the girl on the right because I’m a bad photographer, but there are better pictures of her here. My son is the taller boy with the crooked sneer he likes to be photographed with. I hope he outgrows that. Someone said to me, “I bet you wish that was you in the photo.” I must be getting old because I hadn’t thought of that. I did get to fist bump the Duck mascot though . . . Read more →
Tweets on 2009-03-26
It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult. –Seneca # The definition for “value” that I recently started using is “what guides us when we have to make a hard decision.” http://tinyurl.com/chzkqp # @tweetmeme @smashingmag Reading ‘Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices’ http://tinyurl.com/dnzeyh # Love the Weinerschnitzel vs Carls Jr 2 for $3 chili dog battle. The customer is the true winner! # RT @BonnieLowe: Reading “Thirsty plants cn twttr 4 water w/ new device.” nxt it’ll be yr cat tweeting 4 snacks. http://tinyurl.com/dfh8dk # RT @KathySierra: Choosing a dog based on breed name is ridiculous, but the coder in me is geekily drawn to: http://tinyurl.com/d3gmkc # At Uni High 4 Irvine Band Festival # Read more →
Diversity
“Forty percent of the people at my school speak Korean,” my son says. “Or Chinese. I can’t tell the difference.” Read more →
It’s Not Safe to Live Here Anymore
IRVINE A man is dead — and his wife and son injured — after his daughter’s ex-boyfriend allegedly took the family hostage for five hours beginning late Friday, police said. — OCRegister.com That’s the second murder in town in the last two weeks! PACK YOUR BAGS HONEY! WE’RE MOVING TO SANTA ANA! Read more →
To Live and Die in Irvine
IRVINE – A group of solemn people sat around tables at a fast-food Chinese restaurant off Jeffrey Road on Wednesday night after a man was shot and killed while sitting in a white Lexus parked behind the eatery. — OCRegister.com At least he died in a nice car. It’s Irvine, Jake! This happened a stone’s throw from my house. Well, more than a stone’s throw but let’s say a hard 5-iron with a good bounce off Trabuco Road. I’ve been to that Chinese restaurant many times. (It’s a dine-in restaurant, not a fast-food place, despite what the Register says.) Don’t worry about me though. Irvine is still the safest city in the country. That guy must have gotten himself mixed up in some kind of trouble . . . Read more →
The Man Who Wasn’t There
I thought I saw one of the dads from my kid’s high school roller hockey team at L.A. Fitness this morning. He was riding a stationary bike and there was no way I could get where I wanted to go without walking past him. Great . . . now I’m going to have to take time out of my workout to acknowledge this guy and talk to him. I hate talking to people when I’m working out. That’s why I come in here at 5 in the morning — because it’s not crowded and I don’t have to talk to anybody. If this guy’s going to start coming in at 5 and I have to talk to him every morning — even if it’s just to say hello — I swear to Jesus I’m going to start coming in at 4. Thank god it wasn’t him after all . .… Read more →
What Do They Do to the Unpopular Professors?
Mowing the Lawn
A co-worker tells me that when she was growing up in Seattle, people did their own yardwork . . . not like here in Southern California where that work is done by Mexicans for hire. I told her we used to mow our own lawns in SoCal too. In fact, if you like A Christmas Story, you would have loved our neighbor next door. He was like Darren McGavin, but instead of the furnace, he’d curse at his beaten-down jalopy of a lawn mower. And not in the basement — right out on his front lawn. I mowed my own lawn at the first house I ever owned. Pride of ownership! And this was not in Irvine, where I live now and the lawns are the size of postage stamps, it was on a large lot in La Verne. Of course, I soon tired of it and paid a Mexican… Read more →
Is the Front Door Locked?
Every night at bedtime, my wife asks me to check and make sure the front door is locked, even though we live in the Safest Big City in America. It’s annoying — and not just because it’s always locked, but because sometimes she waits until I’m already in bed. Then: “Did you check if the front door is locked?” And I have to get out of bed to check it. She’s out of town this week. I got up this morning and noticed that I’d left the door unlocked all night . . . Read more →
Our Kids Are Smarter Than Your Kids
A new set of California Academic Performance Index (API) scores are out . . . In Irvine, where I live, education is king, and the school district posted a very nice score: 888 out of 1000. Breaking it down demographically, the Asian kids led the way with a 933. African-American and Hispanic kids were both more than 100 points below the average, but there are so few of them in the district that they don’t affect the overall score very much. Even the special ed kids scored a respectable 705, higher than the 668 scored by the neighboring Santa Ana district, where education takes a back seat to gang-related slayings. Irvine: Our special ed kids are smarter than your honor students. Read more →
Asian Gang Activities
A co-worker informs me that a Santa Ana elementary school teacher has been charged with child endangerment for keeping a gun in her classroom. “Well, that’s Santa Ana,” I say. “What do you expect from people? Not a day goes by that you can’t pick up the Orange County Register and read about a gang-related slaying in Santa Ana. If I were a teacher in Santa Ana, you best believe I’d be packing heat too. Thank god this kind of thing doesn’t happen in Irvine where I live.” “There are Asian gangs in Irvine.” “Asian gangs in Irvine?! What a racist you are. I’ve lived in Irvine for seven years and I’ve never seen or heard of any Asian gang activity. Unless studying for AP exams counts as a gang activity. Blowing their brains out with mathematical formulas . . .” Read more →