Behind me two women talk about their “awesome” pastor. In front of me another woman reads with the Life Application Bible and a Josh McDowell apologetics text called “A Ready Defense” stacked next to her. The parking lot is full of ichthyomobiles.
The groupthink is dreary. I feel like the last one in Orange County who’s not an evangelical Protestant Konservative Kristian Klone.
Kir Royale
Tapenade with bread crusts
Wild morel mushroom cream soup
Duck a l’orange with mashed potatoes and sautéed julienned zucchini
Seghesio Zinfandel
Bread pudding
Coffee
They closed my childhood library and opened a newer, bigger one next door.
I haven’t been to the new one yet. Apparently they didn’t buy any new books but there are laptops and iPods and expansive expanses of formica. The library is now to be run like a business by business-like people, and multimedia is the future.
I was well-educated in our local public schools and by my parents, but the real autodidactic core of my learning happened at this local branch library. I first read through the children’s section, checking out as many books as I could carry each time. Classic children’s fiction, books about cars and guns and planes, biographies, history books, science, the whole damn thing probably except for the girly books and the sports stuff. I have a vivid mental image of the children’s librarian, a very large redheaded woman with impossibly big arrms covered in freckles.
I then moved to the adult section and chewed on it for a decade. When I got interested in a subject (history of architecture! the invention of the atomic bomb! Wales!) I went through the Dewey Decimal number for that and related interests and read every book that was not obviously stupid. I haunted the new books shelf for anything I knew was coming. I read all of the science fiction, all of the nonfiction on any subject that interested me, and a good two-thirds of the fiction. I went through the records and found peculiar worlds and visited them: who is this Warren Zevon? What does Blue Öyster Cult sound like? Why would someone switch on Bach?
The library employees all knew me, and they were my friends. I’d go back and forth in that checkout, sometimes more than once in a day. The paper library card with the little metal number stamp in it went CLUNK! as each book was checked out, and they said “Now remember to read them all!”
The park outside the library contained my first ever school, a play group for pre preschool kids. It was the site of countless family picnic lunches, a thousand ball games, the annual 4th of July Bike Parade, and later on for long reading stretches after school and before I went home to deal with being a teenager.
I left and moved to Los Angeles for a decade. When I came back I had got out of the library habit, which still bothers. Mariners Branch was part of my past by then anyway. It was a small place with a small collection, and I’d read most of it. I’m sad to see it gone, though. When I left that place and went out into the world, I was as prepared as books can make a boy.
Other pictures in the set are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ch/sets/72057594129847160/
What kind of insane death-cult ritual were you doing over there? Did something go terribly awry at the Beltane party?
Deer on Lido Isle sedated, relocated
Authorities aren’t sure how buck got across the channel. Animal is released in Crystal Cove.
By Lauren Vane
(Published: May 5, 2006)
A young male deer that found its way onto Lido Isle in Newport Beach was corralled by animal control officers Friday and taken to Crystal Cove State Park, where it was released.
This appears to be a housing development somewhere in China that attempts to be Orange County, California.
Edit: Yup, it’s just that: http://www.quartzcity.net/blog/archives/2003/02/06/orange_county_china.html
http://www.orangecounty.com.cn/load.html
http://www.orangecounty.com.cn/news/detail.htm
A letter to the editor in this week’s Orange County Weekly, with a response not from the reporter but from the editorial staff, makes me all warm and happy inside.
IN WHICH WE’RE WISHED A NICE DAY, BUT IRONICALLY
Your rag and alleged journalists are certainly entitled to what I consider immoral, ultra-leftist opinions. Freedom of the press is, in fact, essential to a democracy. However, when a writer (Jim Washburn) has a column entitled, “Immigration? We’ve Got Bigger Problems” with a subtitle, “Why Our Noncitizens Are Our Best Citizens”, I would hope that the article would contain concrete examples of these declarations. Unfortunately, the writer chose to ramble on various issues, never addressing his topic points, before offering an example of a missed opportunity to the solution of illegal immigration by stating, “Back in the 1980s, Jesse Jackson proposed helping Mexico and other neighbors to (sic) overcome corruption and cronyism to (sic) raise (sic) job prospects and standards of living so people wouldn’t feel compelled to come here”. Mr. Washburns reasoning, like his writing, is muddled. Hey Jim, why don’t you and Jesse co-author a letter to President Fox? What a joke!!
Washburn’s final paragraph starts, “Immigrant-rights organizers are next planning a May 1 “Day Without an Immigrant,” (sic – comma should have been after the parenthetical close) in which they’re asking that people not work or shop on that day”. Great writing, Jim. I particularly enjoyed you’re convoluted word structuring in this sentence. Finally, Washburn, assumingly toungue in cheek, illogically states that blackened calamari tostada is as American as apple pie. Not that clever, Jimbo.
I applaud celebrating a “Day Without an Immigrant”. If illegal immigrants don’t work, don’t shop, don’t drive without a license or insurance, don’t commit any crimes, don’t send their children to school, don’t use any free governmental or health service benefits, etc. on that day, I would propose “A Year Without an Immigrant” so we can actually ascertain the true cost of illegal immigration.
Have a nice day,
David S. Gray
Via e-mail
The copy editor responds: Your letter, while dull, illustrates two important points: that you are frighteningly stupid, and that you really shouldn’t mess with a copy editor. In American English, we keep our punctuation inside our quotation marks unless the punctuation in question would change the meaning of that which is being quoted—for instance, if I were to say, “It sure is amazing how far David S. Gray’s ‘toungue’ is up his own ass,” and then someone else asked another person if he had heard me say that thing about you and your “toungue,” he would say it thusly: “Did you hear the copy editor say of David S. Gray, ‘It sure is amazing how far David S. Gray’s “toungue” is up his own ass’?” Am I confusing you now with all the switching back and forth between the apostrophes and the quotation marks—incidentally, what you do when there’s a quote within a quote? I’m sorry. Sorry you’re so pathetically dumb! By the way, you seem to have a bit of a problem with your possessives and you don’t know your yours from your you’res. By the way also? You’re a dick.
Don’t mess with Texas, you pussy little bitch.
…that 350 men and women of the Los Angeles Fire Department saved that city’s Central Library at great risk to themselves.
Via Brian Humphrey’s summary at the LAFD Blog.
It should have been a total loss. Thanks again for saving it.
In my part of Orange County, affordable housing is rare. One of the disappearing features of the landscape is the trailer park. We used to have quite a few around here but one by one they’re disappearing to be replaced with more familiar suburban things like parking lots and office buildings. The one down the street from me exists solely because the land is owned by a family that is resistant to change and has lots of money already, for example.
Until recently there was a trailer park on the campus of UC Irvine, where my father was charter faculty in 1965. The University, being college administrators, needed a new parking lot, so off it went. But not after some spirited student resistance from ornery and inventive graduate students!
A film has been made of the last days of Irvine Meadows West: http://trailerparkfilm.com/
I recommend seeing the trailer. It’s a bit hippiebongoburningman but gives a good idea of the scene. One of my college friends from the 80s, Maggie Sullivan, was involved in this scene but I don’t see her in the trailer. I mean the movie trailer, not the actual trailers in the movie about trailers.
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