Obama dogged by protesters on bay visit — SFGate
Dogged by protesters?! If he ever comes to Orange County, he’ll be PROTESTED BY DOGS!
My owner pays so many taxes that there’s hardly any money left for pug treats! 
— Lightning 
We took a boat tour of Newport Harbor last week to see Christmas lights on the bayfront homes and yachts . . .
Current and former owners of these fabulous abodes include Nicolas Cage, Michelle Pfeiffer, Richie Sambora, Peter Falk, Mark McGwire, the William Wrigley family, the Snyder family (founders of In-N-Out Burger), the FaBrizio family (founders of Simple Green), Shirley Temple, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, John Wayne, Charles Bronson, Charles Schulz, George Argyros, and local luminaries like Fletcher Jones Jr (owner of Fletcher Jones Motorcars) and the Segerstrom family (owners of South Coast Plaza).
In the early 20th century, lots in Newport Harbor were selling for $75. Amenities such as electricity, paved streets, sewers, streetlights and water were lacking and roads to the area were largely undeveloped. Basically, you were buying the right to live on a mud flat at a three-hour drive from civilization, so even at $75, sales were slow.
The sellers then placed a coupon offer in Sunset magazine: buy a two-year subscription to Sunset and get $25 off the price of a lot. So — $50 instead of $75.
I wish someone in my family tree had had the foresight to buy one because you couldn’t get a bayfront lot today for less than about $10 million. Not a house — that’s just for the lot.
The smoked salmon appetizer was superb, as was the prime rib entree.
Attentive service is provided by busty waitresses in the Brobdingnagian tradition.
“Did you notice all the waitresses had big tits?” my wife asked.
Highly recommended!
I recently concluded a 3-month job search. As part of my networking, I met a number of unemployed people in other fields who were having trouble not only getting jobs, but even getting interviews.
I talked to a lot of people and averaged about an interview a day, including phone interviews, mostly for development manager jobs. For every development manager job, there are multiple development jobs, so if you’re a developer, your situation is even better than mine was.
I live in Southern California, but the demand is not just local. I had multiple contacts from companies outside the SoCal area that can’t find qualified candidates.
I’ve been working again for over two months, I no longer have an active résumé on job boards, and I still get emails and calls every day from recruiters all over the country.
The situation with Agile and Scrum right now seems to be that a lot of people are putting it on their résumé but most of them are bluffing.
One hiring manager told me that he’d talked to three dozen candidates who claimed to know Scrum and only one (me) who actually knew it.
Another hiring manager asked me to describe the Scrum process, beginning with a product owner with an idea through the end of the first sprint. It’s a basic question, and when I finished, he thanked me for my answer. “You’d be surprised how many people I ask that question and the answer is a yard sale.”
Actually, you’d be surprised how little I’d be surprised by that.
One recruiter contacted me about a 3-month Scrum Master contract in Toledo, Ohio. A glance at my résumé will tell you that I’ve never worked outside Southern California, so on a list of people likely to take a 3-month contract in Toledo, Ohio, my name would be far, far from the top, but the difficulty of finding a qualified candidate to fill that job is such that the recruiter contacted me anyway.
If you really know Agile and/or Scrum right now, it’s a seller’s market.
Gary Carter (Photo credit: AxsDeny)
Gary Carter obituary: Baseball Hall of Fame catcher dies at 57
Gary Carter and I went to the same high school — Sunny Hills High School in Fullerton, CA.
My freshman yearbook has a picture of a Carter as a senior. Or another way to look at it is that Gary Carter’s senior yearbook has a picture of me as a freshman.
That’s all I have on this.
RIP Gary Carter.
Chili's
We got to Chili’s around 8 o’clock last night but it was still very crowded. People were waiting outside.
“How long is the wait?” I asked the hostess.
“About 25 minutes.”
I said to my posse, “I’d rather not wait 25 minutes but I could do it if I had to. What do you guys think?”
My wife said, “Put our name on the list and we’ll talk about it outside.”
“Paul — party of three.” The hostess gave me one of those devices that beep and light up when your table is ready.
At the same time, a gentleman came up to the desk to turn in his device. “We can’t wait anymore,” he said.
“Maybe you could give us his device,” I suggested after he left. “Where was he on the list?”
She went down the list of names. “Second,” she said. “Yeah, I could do that.”
“Thanks.”
My son said later, “You were just joking, right?”
“Well,” I said, “I didn’t think she would do it, but let that be a good lesson for you. If you ask for something, you might get it, but you’re not going to get it if you don’t ask.”
NEWPORT BEACH A man accused of becoming angered at his 7-year-old son and tossing him off a boat during a harbor cruise pleaded not guilty Monday to felony child endangerment.
Sloane Steven Briles, 35, of Irvine, is accused of being under the influence of alcohol and poking his son in the chest and repeatedly slapping him in the face before tossing him about 10 feet off the boat and into the path of oncoming boat traffic.
Prosecutors say he made no attempt to save his son and jumped off the boat only to avoid angry passengers on the Queen.
A boat had to maneuver to avoid striking the boy, who treaded water before a captain on another boat tossed him a life ring, according to prosecutors.
In interviews with television reporters following his arrest, Briles said he and his son were just playing around and that they both decided to jump into the harbor for fun.
The boys arrived back from their graduation trip, but missed their connecting flight in Philly, which seems to be the rule rather than the exception for U.S. Airways.
They were able to get on a later flight — to Los Angeles though, not Orange County — so the parents drove out to pick them up at LAX at 11:45 p.m.
“We should sue the airline,” one of the moms said.
“That’s a good idea,” I replied, not because I thought it was a good idea, but because I wanted to hear the plan.
“Five sets of parents have to drive all the way to Los Angeles,” she said. “Gas is expensive! Then there’s punitive damages. Frustration. Loss of income.”
“How is there a loss of income?”
“Some parents might have to work at night. You don’t know.”
“How much do you think we should get — a million dollars?”
“No,” she scoffed, like I was being ridiculous. “Two hundred thousand.”
Is today National Make a Left Turn Into Oncoming Traffic Day? Because I saw a lot of that on the way in this morning . . .
My kid and a few of his high school friends are on their way to see Ron Artest at Living Spaces in Irvine. He’s doing a meet and greet from 3:00 to 5:00.
What kind of advertising is that? Those kids don’t have money to buy furniture.
Picking up my family at John Wayne Airport . . .
There’s a guy walking around the baggage claim area with a toy poodle on a leash.
I point this out to my son and say, “I didn’t know you could walk your dog around here. I would have brought Lightning.”
“Maybe it’s a bomb-sniffing dog,” he says.
“A bomb-sniffing poodle?”
“Yeah.”
One of my son’s friends, his parents split up some time back because his dad, as it turned out, was not really attracted to women.
I met the gentleman for the first time last night at a school concert. How he was able to convince anyone, including himself, that he’s not gay is a mystery.
“Did you notice they’re opening a new restaurant at South Coast Plaza?” he said in a voice as gay as Christmas. “They’ll be serving only locally grown food. I was on my way to the Apple Store . . .”
Now I’m not saying that every man who cares about where his food is grown or owns an Apple product is gay but . . .
“I own an Apple product,” my son says.
“Yeah, an iPod,” I reply. “That’s okay. That’s mainstream.”
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 . . .
