I’ve walked by this store dozens of times at the Irvine Spectrum and it never occurred to me that an extreme closeup of the sign would make an interesting photo.
I guess that’s why some of us are photographers and some of us are sitting around saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
More like this: The photo is from a Flickr set called .:life in “the oc”:.
In other sports news — “other” meaning something besides steroids, blood doping, dog fighting and point shaving — Dara Torres has won her 14th and 15th national swimming titles at the U.S. Nationals currently going on in Indianapolis.
Why is that worth mentioning?
Well, swimming is a young person’s sport and Torres is 40 years old. She won her first national title 25 years ago in 1982. She won Olympic medals in 1984 in Los Angeles, 1988 in Seoul and 1992 in Barcelona, then retired from competitive swimming at age 25.
After a 7-year layoff, she started training again and qualified for the 2000 Olympic team. She was 33 years old, the oldest swimmer on the team. She won 5 more medals at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, then retired again.
Four days ago, at age 40, and just 15 months after giving birth to her first child, she won gold in the 100m freestyle at the U.S. Nationals in Indianapolis, her 14th national title.
“I just got in shape swimming with my daughter and I started swimming a couple of meets and I swam real fast,” she said. “A lot of master swimmers were encouraging me to swim, so I just decided to get back into it.”
Last night, she won her 15th title, swimming the 50m freestyle in 24.53 seconds, breaking her own American record of 24.63 set in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Lara Jackson placed second at 25.27, close to a full second behind, which is an absolute blowout in a 50m race.
Her goal is to qualify for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, where she would be the oldest female Olympic swimmer ever at age 41.
I love this story, although it’s getting little to no play in any of the sports media I follow.
Originally uploaded by debaird.
Yes I do. The first movie I saw in a theater was Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
The first movie I took my son to was Space Jam.
Keep before you the swift onset of oblivion, and the abysses of eternity before us and behind; mark how hollow are the echoes of applause, how fickle and undiscerning the judgements of professed admirers, and how puny the arena of human fame. For the entire earth is but a point, and the place of our own habitation but a minute corner in it; and how many are therein who will praise you, and what sort of men are they?
I’m reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations when my son, referring to the cover photo above the author’s name, says, “Who’s that? Zeus?”
“No,” I say.
“Caesar?”
“No. It’s Marcus Aurelius.”
“Hmmm. That seemed too obvious.”
POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT!
I just finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. For some reason, the publisher chose to give away the climax of the story in the dust cover illustration, although it does leave a few questions unanswered so as not to make it too obvious:
I recently spent a week in Florida with my son for a roller hockey tournament. We stayed at the Santa Maria Resort on Fort Myers Beach.
The place was great, like a furnished 2-bedroom apartment with a fully appointed kitchen: oven, stove, microwave, fridge, freezer, plates, bowls, pots, pans, silverware, etc. We went to the local Publix grocery the first day and stocked the place up with food and beverages.
We got all this for about $50 a night less than we would have paid for a room at, say, the Embassy Suites. And when I say “room,” I mean that usually when I travel with the boy, the hotel room is in fact a room and we’re both in it together. That’s a problem because he likes to watch TV in hotel rooms and I’d rather read a book.
But with the 2-bedroom setup — each bedroom on opposite sides of the suite, separated by the main room — I didn’t even know he was there most of the time.
Rating: Four stars (out of four).
The Orange County Register has an update on last week’s arrest of UCLA assistant football coach Eric Scott on suspicion of felony burglary:
UCLA officials said Monday that the background check on receivers coach Eric Scott was conducted by the university and not an outside agency, as previously stated.
But, again, Athletic Director Dan Guerrero and Coach Karl Dorrell were unaware that Scott had been arrested four times between 1996 and 2005.
The Bruins coach, who was arrested for a fifth time last week on a charge of residential burglary, previously had pleaded guilty or was convicted of misdemeanor carrying a concealed weapon in 2005 and misdemeanor disturbing the peace in 2002.
OOPSIE!
UCLA: University of Coaches Looting Apartments.
Coach Scott is on administrative leave at this time. I don’t want to jump to any conclusions regarding his guilt or innocence based strictly on his extensive list of priors.
From wnbc.com: Even More Famous Women: How They’ve Aged
It’s a photo slideshow. My comment after viewing it:
Another study quizzed graduating master’s degree students who had received job offers about whether they had simply accepted the offered starting salary or had tried to negotiate for more. Four times as many men — 51 percent of the men vs. 12.5 percent of the women — said they had pushed for a better deal. Not surprisingly, those who negotiated tended to be rewarded — they got 7.4 percent more, on average — compared with those who did not negotiate.
A Carnegie Mellon professor has figured out why men make more than women for the same job.
I actually figured that out myself the first time I heard about it. Salaries are negotiable. You can’t pay someone less than they’re willing to work for. Hence, women must be willing to work for less money. It’s the only possible explanation.
UPDATE: I should have emphasized that 7.4 percent is just the difference in starting salaries. If we make the reasonable assumption that men continue to be more aggressive in seeking raises and promotions throughout their careers, the monetary difference potentially becomes very large indeed.
Ingmar Bergman died today, age 89. I swear to God I though he was already dead.
Cypress man rescued by pet pug
I’m not surprised by this. Pugs are smart, brave, loving and loyal. Do not underestimate the pug.
Your canine correspondent,
Lightning Epps 
Stoney’s Sports Cafe in Estero, Florida, has an interesting variation on the crane game. Instead of the usual collection of stuffed toys, the machine is filled with water and live lobsters. If you manage to catch one (at $2 a chance), they’ll cook it up and serve it to you.
Live by the claw, die by the claw.
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.
My son’s hockey team didn’t do so well at NARCh this time around. They got knocked out in the round-robin portion of the tournament.
That left us with some extra time on our hands, some of which we used to drive up to Tampa to watch the Angels get worked by the ordinarily hapless Devil Rays, 7-2.
We got good seats though! — right behind home plate about 10 rows up.
Completing the hat trick of futility, I arrived back in California to find that the mortgage bank I worked for had laid off 400 people, including me.
The good news is that I did get a severance package, unlike the last time I got laid off (from a dot-com company), when all I got was a handshake and an escort to the parking lot.
Oh, and I’ve got more time to read the last Harry Potter book. I’m really sick of Harry Potter but I do want to find out how the whole thing wraps up . . .
We’re off to NARCh for a week. I hope there won’t be thunderstorms every day like the last time we were there.
Let’s have a look at the 5-day . . .
My first 10 years in the software business, I had great managers. They did the management thing and I did the programming thing and we got great results together.
Then, after the dot-com boom torpedoed industry hiring standards, I got tired of working for managers who should not have been allowed anywhere near a software project, people who were not fit to direct a professional software developer to a table at the Olive Garden, much less direct their activities on a complex project.
I couldn’t possibly have continued to work for people like that — it just made a mockery of all the work I’d done over the years to actually learn something — but I still miss being a developer . . .
Thus spoke The Programmer.
And often you asked me,
“What is the use of knowing the evil in the world?”
I am out of your way now, Spoon River,
Choose your own good and call it good.
For I could never make you see
That no one knows what is good
Who knows not what is evil;
And no one knows what is true
Who knows not what is false.
