Thanks to the annual Super Bowl Sunday Buy One Get One Free sale at Books Etc. in Laguna Hills, the works of Bellow, Borges, Bukowski, Brautigan, Cheever, Eco, Grace Paley, Dennis Potter, Pynchon, Robbe-Grillet, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe have found their way onto my bookshelf for a capital outlay of only 32 dollars American.
“Fly ball, center field! Erstad says he’s got it! Erstad makes the catch! The Anaheim Angels are the champions of baseball!”
As my son and I were driving past South Coast Plaza, we saw a woman holding a cardboard sign that read “UNEMPLOYED AND DESTITUTE. Any Help is Appreciated.”
“She’s got a good vocabulary,” I said to the boy. “Someone should hire her.”
A young lady named Hope Xu — from University High right here in Irvine — scored a perfect 2400 on this year’s SAT exam.
I’ve advised my 16-year-old son that henceforth, when he’s faced with a tough decision in life, he should ask himself the question “What would Hope Xu do?”
I know one thing she wouldn’t do and that is to run into her dad’s bedroom at 11 p.m. and start doing flying front kicks when he’s trying to sleep.
“Why are you doing that?” I ask him.
“I just drank a Red Bull,” he says, then dances back out the door singing a song I don’t recognize . . .
High school roller hockey starts tonight. To prevent the use of ringers, each kid has to turn in an enlarged color copy of their school ID card.
I reminded my son about that requirement last night as he was doing homework in his room.
“Why don’t you go ahead and make the copy now while you’re thinking about it?” I said.
“I’m not thinking about it,” he said.
“You are thinking about it.”
“What am I thinking about?”
“Okay, do it your way,” I said, and left.
“What did you come in here for?” he called after me.
Hilarity is really going to ensue when he shows up for the game tonight and can’t play because he doesn’t have a copy of his ID card . . .
Man accused of almost beheading best friend, setting him on fire
I love Saturday mornings! My owner takes me to the dog park, then we drive through Starbucks and I get a Pup Cup, which is a paper cup filled with whipped cream.
— Lightning 
Special prix fixe menus from participating restaurants:
You can’t go wrong with Orange Hill or Anaheim White House, in this reviewer’s opinion . . .
The Moreno Valley is now the poster child for American housing gone wrong, and the New York Times weighed in with one of their stock magisterial pieces, the kinds that read purty but don’t say jack shit about reality. The Orange County connection is that two of the homeowners profiled in the piece moved to the MV because they couldn’t afford apartments in OC, which should clue the rest of the nation into how stupid they were to buy into Moreno Valley. Reporter Jennifer Steinhauer doesn’t note that even people in Colton ridicule Moreno Valley residents for living there. It’s not an area “filled with people priced out of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, or looking to escape louder, less-safe cities,” as the Times notes; it’s a place for fools who weren’t smart enough to buy a house in Calimesa. Shit, even Beaumont is better than Moreno Valley, and Beamount is sketchy.
[The New York Times piece is here.]
I paid a visit to The Bookman — a local used book store — today, spent $36 and came home with the following haul:
Flying back to California from the east coast, I sat next to one of about 60 kids coming back from a three-week tour of Europe to celebrate their graduation from an Orange County high school.
“You guys must be rich,” I said to her, “traveling around Europe for three weeks.”
“We’re on the low end of wealthy,” she said. She put her hand out in front of her, palm down — not too high — to indicate her standing on the wealth ladder.
It’s a warm early summer day here in Southern California. As I come back to the office from lunch, a colleague is setting up one of those windshield screens to keep the sun from shining into her car all afternoon.
Toughen up, sweetie. I like my steering wheel to be blazing hot when I return to my vehicle. The pain reminds me I’m alive.
AAAAHHHHHHHH!!!
Jonny Copp, a well-known mountain climber and adventurer who grew up in Fullerton, has been found dead on the side of Mount Edgar, China, the apparent victim of an avalanche, according to a variety of websites, including his own.
Three words that come to mind when I hear someone introduced as an “adventurer”: Die, die, die . . .
