According to the Los Angeles Times:

• Red Sanders decided to stay on as football coach at UCLA instead of pursuing the football coach/athletic director job at Texas A&M, a job recently vacated by Paul (Bear) Bryant. (Sanders would have a heart attack and die before the start of the 1958 football season anyway.)
• A father of three killed himself in front of his wife after losing his job on Christmas Eve.
• Silent-screen star Norma Talmadge died in Las Vegas. The Times gave her age as 60; according to IMDB, she was actually 62.

. . . but something I just learned is that area codes were originally assigned according to the population density of the city or region, with the lowest numbers going to the most populous areas. Keeping in mind that phones in those days had rotary dials, and higher numbers therefore took longer to dial, the thinking was that areas with the most people should be the easiest to call.

That’s why New York City got area code 212, Chicago got 312, Los Angeles got 213, etc. (Zero actually counts as a high number — a 10, essentially — because it takes the longest to dial.)

Conversely, the area code for the entire state of Alaska was (and still is) 907.

One thing you can’t help noticing in spending a day at LACMA, what with the proximity to West Hollywood and all, is that gay guys really like art.

I mentioned that to my son and his response was “Case in point: you,” which wasn’t very nice.

He’s not much of an art lover . . . I admit that I occasionally drag him along to an art museum, because I feel like he should know at least a little bit about it whether he likes it or not.

On our way back to Orange County — in keeping with my mission of introducing the boy to the finer things in life — we stopped off at the original Tommy’s stand at Beverly and Rampart, not only an L.A. landmark, but a favorite of USC students for decades, where you can still get — as the boy did — a double chili cheeseburger, fries and a drink for $5.40.

Apologies to Pete Townshend, but I’d call that a bargain!

The Epps family was in Thai Town in Hollywood late Friday night. Most establishments were already closed . . . one exception was a Thai sweet shop called Bhan Kanom Thai, across the street from the famous Sanamluang Cafe.

There were three generations of Thai women in the shop: 1) A very cute, very poised 9-year-old girl, who probably could have run the place herself; her mom; and Grandma, who was cooking up some coconut pastries about the size, shape and consistency of silver dollar pancakes.

My wife walked out with about 25 dollars worth of the coconut pastries and other goodies.

When we got back on the 101 South, our son announced he was hungry.

“Try those coconut pancakes,” I said. “Best thing I ever tasted. I’m in heaven.”

“I don’t like coconut,” he said.

“How can you not like coconut?” my wife asked in alarm. “It’s a main ingredient in Asian food.”

“There’s no coconut in chow mein,” the boy said, by way of counterexample.

We couldn’t get him to try any, but that’s okay . . . more pancakes for me.

I thought sports columnists were appointed for life, like Supreme Court justices, no matter how irrelevant they become, and yet I see that the Los Angeles Times has just dumped J.A. Adande.

Well, by golly, that’s a good start!

I can’t think of a single print columnist, at the Times or elsewhere, who’s remotely relevant anymore. There are dozens of sports websites (not that one — start at Deadspin and follow the links) with at least an order of magnitude more energy, insight and wit than you’ll find in your local print rag, which is why newspapers are going the way of the 8-track tape, the buggy whip and whale oil.

The next in line to go at the Times should be fatuous blowhard T.J. Simers.

Simers positions himself as a pot-stirring wiseass, and the line on him seems to be that if people don’t like him, he must be doing something right.

Actually, nobody likes him because he’s a dull, uninformed, solipsistic clod, whose “style” consists of run-on sentences, juvenile name-calling, and endlessly repeated in-jokes and shout-outs that were never funny in the first place.

(That’s a better sentence than Simers ever wrote, if I say so myself.)

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.

NEWPORT BEACH — Two Los Angeles residents believed to be a father and a daughter were arrested early today near John Wayne Airport on suspicion of burglarizing four local businesses, authorities said.

Donald Perkins, 48, and Kenesha Perkins, 28, were pulled over for speeding at about 3:15 a.m. near Dove Street and Newport Place Drive, said Sgt. Evan Sailor of the Newport Beach Police Department.

— Orange County Register

Kenesha Perkins is a lucky girl . . . most black fathers are not actively involved in their children’s activities like this . . .

We’re at a stop sign on 6th St. in San Pedro, waiting to cross Pacific Ave., a busy street with multiple lanes of traffic in both directions.

We’ve been waiting for an opening for quite a while when my son says, “You gotta go Tokyo Drift on these pansies.”

Antonio Villaraigosa, UCLA graduate and mayor of Los Angeles, gave a commencement speech at USC last month, at which time USC generously awarded him an honorary doctorate.

This week, Villaraigosa delivered a commencement speech at UCLA, in which he made the point that UCLA, unlike USC, does not confer honorary degrees.

“You’ve got to earn your diploma from UCLA!” he said.

HA HA HA! Good one, Mr. Mayor!

Why don’t you go flunk the bar exam a few more times, genius? They don’t give that away either.

Smush Parker of the L.A. Lakers has a custom Cadillac Escalade that says SMUSHCALADE on the tailgate where it usually says ESCALADE.

I say to my son, “I wonder if I could get an Escalade with EPPSCALADE on the back.”

“You can’t even afford an Escalade and still have a good financial condition,” he says.

“I can’t?”

“No, ’cause you ain’t representin’.”

“I’m not representin’?“

“No, you ain’t wheelin’ and dealin’. You sittin’ on the block while others are out gettin’ their bling.”

My son’s on spring break and my wife — a moderately functional paranoid schizophrenic — is taking a day off to spend some time with him.

Continue reading Notes from the Asylum

Sure, they just absorbed their worst defeat in 75 years, but at least they’re not suffering through the kind of mortifying off-the-field incidents that characterized the Bob Toledo era!

Well, except for placekicker Justin Medlock driving around drunk at 3 A.M., rolling his car over on the 405 freeway, and walking away from the wreckage with a seriously injured girl still inside.

Continue reading The Bright Side of Bruin Football

I’m glad it was a blowout. Most of the season, I had to listen to “what a great job Karl Dorrell, Drew Olson and the Bruins are doing.” I didn’t think they were doing a great job at all. They were 9-1, but given all the last-minute, come-from-behind wins over bad teams, they were pretty close to being 5-5. Hence the lack of respect in the polls and the 21-point spread on this game, which turned out to be way too low.

Continue reading USC 66, UCLA 19

The guy in the next cubicle is spending the afternoon looking at animal cams on the web.

“Look at this whale cam,” he says. “It’s underwater!”

Continue reading Whale Cams

A crazy thing happened after this year’s USC-UCLA football game . . . because the Bruins were able to keep the score close for the first time in years, UCLA coach Karl Dorrell was rewarded with a two-year contract extension.

Continue reading A USC Man Looks at UCLA Football

Ignore the rumors. L.A. does have four seasons: earthquake season, fire season, riot season, and the most ravaging — pilot season. Network TV keeps groping to win over an America it despises — a viewing public it sees as a blurry, fat, brainless blob of uninsured, Hemi-powered, God-fearing Wal-Mart clerks.

— Peter Mehlman

My son and I went to the USC-Washington game last weekend. We don’t get to go to a lot of games because 11-year-old boys have their own activities and stuff on the weekends, but this time we were able to get there a few hours early and stroll around the campus, site of many of my greatest academic accomplishments . . .

Continue reading Fight On!

Here’s one of the weirdest ideas I’ve heard today . . .

Cinespia is screening the film Detour at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery:

Bring blankets, picnic dinner and cocktails for this special screening below and above the stars.

Continue reading Below and Above the Stars

An affordable housing advocate has given up on finding an affordable house in Los Angeles and is moving to Connecticut.

“This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived in and the weather is fantastic,” he said. “It’s paradise. I just can’t afford to live here.”

His annual salary is $80,000.