Tag: orangecounty

Attention area pervo predators

Holding the puppy in your arms does not cancel out the ski mask and endear you to potential victims. This guy is probably not going to be hard to catch.

Police seek help finding man Irvine girl said accosted her
The incident in which the man reportedly wore a ski mask and held a puppy happened at about 2:45 p.m. Wednesday.

By JOHN McDONALD
The Orange County Register

IRVINE – Police are asking for the public’s help in finding a man a 12-year-old said accosted her while wearing a ski mask and holding a puppy on a leash.

The incident occurred at about 2:45 p.m. Wednesday in the area of Deer Spring. He made no attempt to pull her into his car, police said. Two similar incidents took place May 18.

The man was described as 5 feet 7 inches tall, 160 to 180 pounds, wearing a black long-sleeve shirt with the word “Hurley” across the front, dress black pants and brown work boots. He was driving a tan four-door Honda.

Anyone with information is asked to call 949-724-7172.

Local characters: The landscaper

The gardener

Here is the gardener for my neighbors. She is in her late fifties or early sixties. She does their whole yard, lawn and plants, with one helper, once a week. Her pickup truck is stickered with patriotism. She clearly has arthritis or knee injuries and walks with a kind of swiveling cowboy swagger that says: I am in pain and I don’t give a damn. She chain smokes. While she is working she does not stop except to take stock of progress or give instruction to her assistant. She’s so focused that it takes two or three attempts to contact her before she’ll break away from work.

She is a force of nature.

The gardener

The unspeakable lured by the unreadable

I try not to to be too hard on hack writers most of the time. It’s hard to make a living in journalism, and a lot of jobs are at boring and stultifying industry house organs or shilltalk ad rags. These are people who wanted to be ink-stained front page reporters or film critics and they get to write about aluminum foil or fabulous getaway weekends. Sometimes, though, they cross a line. This piece, from a credit card company’s luxury travel magazine, is… well, I’ll pay you a quarter if you read the whole thing straight through. It’s for our local South County seaside resort, and the writers decided that instead of the usual luxury porn template that bored them so, they’d use an alternative literary form for thier puff piece: A film script! Because that’s what they really wanted to do anyway.

THE SCRIPT

rhinoceros

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.

The end of the old library

Mariners Library Sign

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.

Mariners Library Closed

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?

Mariners Library Checkout

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.

Mariners Park

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.

Mariners Library - Looking Out

Other pictures in the set are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ch/sets/72057594129847160/