Tag: orangecounty

Your tax dollars at work! Or mostly at play!

There were a few news items about the mortgage catastrophe today. Instead of saying “hey everyone the so-called subprime market was usury and fraud and soon it will all collapse and we will pay and pay and pay,” they said that there was “increasing concern” about the “dip” in the “subprime market” and that foreclosures were occurring. Also, big time Democratic Senator Dodd was intoning that we must save the American homeowner and punish “predatory lending” since he had just discovered the other day that the mortgage business was being run by actual burglar-type criminals.

I assume that this will result in a huge S&L style bailout eventually. The homeowners will be “saved” by a “public/private partnership solution” in which taxpayers foot the bill for yet more mortgage bros to refi everything. Five or six egregious offenders will be convicted of fraud because of “predatory lending,” and everyone else will refi their rap sheet and continue.

Get out your checkbooks everyone. You’re about to pay out for the last fifteen years of appletinis, Humvees, shiny shirts, big watches, square-toed Italian shoes, blowjobs, cocaine, Harleys, Las Vegas, more cocaine, Mexican resorts, Dave Matthews Band tickets, still more cocaine, and one more appletini for the road.

A final goodbye to Apollo Books

http://www.dailypilot.com/articles/2007/01/15/features/dpt-closed15.txt

They held on a few months after they announced their retirement, but now it’s gone for good. The Apollo, in its original location at 18th & Newport, was a big part of my education. Others had the same experience; we found entirely new worlds in stacks of dusty paperbacks.

If I win the lottery I’m going to run a bookstore until I’m poor again.

Orange County Badass of the Month Award

Yesterday I visited South Coast Plaza, one of the two huge shiny shopping malls here. I visited Johan at Book Soup, where they keep the porno mags on the bottom shelf for the kids. I browsed a bit and bought a snobby intellectual magazine.

On the way out I saw a young Middle Eastern guy, skinny scraggly kid, who was wearing a black logo t-shirt. The type said something like ONE STRUGGLE, ONE CAUSE and on one side said PLO. I couldn’t quite see the other side; it might have said something in Arabic, or said “Hamas,” or something. It might have been some Israeli left-wing group for all I know.

And there he was with the PLO Struggle shirt just kickin’ it in the big Orange County shopping mall. Now that’s some free speech. Hope he made it home okay. Bad-ASS.

vive Pescadou

I had one of the great meals of my life last night at Pescadou Bistro. They put on a holiday prix fixe, and mom and I went to the early seating, which was cheaper and also got us home before the… stuff started down on the peninsula.

Three courses, choice in each. I had the quail and foie gras over baby lettuce, with pears. Entree choice was filet mignon with peppercorn sauce, mashed potatoes, and endive. Dessert was a warm chocolate cake with creme fraiche. The other options were a first course of lobster bisque, a second of seabass or venison, and a third of an apple/camembert tart.

Pescadou is serious French food, which doesn’t mean stuffy or expensive or pretentious, but it does mean attention to detail and tradition. It also means reasonable portion sizes, unlike the U.S. tradition in celebratory meals of forcing an entire farm down your throat.

Everything was made… just… perfectly. The owner and staff are friends after years of going there. It’s more like showing up to someone’s house in a medium sized southern French town for dinner than it is like a restaurant. It’s nothing like any other restaurant around here, that’s for sure.

The three course prix fixe was $52. With tax and tip and two glasses of wine for mom and some fizzy water for me, $80/person. That’s about as expensive as a meal can get there. The usual dinner prix fixe is $25.

Please don’t change, Pescadou.

Letter to the OC Weekly that will not be published

Dear The OC Weekly:

Please reboot your paper. You have maybe 3 or 4 good writers left: Arellano, Moxley, Schou. Ziegler’s Meltzer riff on Matt McCluer was good last week. The rest is painful: a depressing and irresponsible guide to holiday drinking, a Social Distortion tribute band, a review of a Paul Frank party, a botched mess of a feature that should have been excellent about the Asian sex mystique, and the worst circle-jerk of solipsistic first-person journalism ever seen. Reading the Weekly now is watching a party clique amuse themselves and each other. One friend of mine suggests that each feature should be indexed to its corresponding episode of “Arrested Development.”

There is a spanish phrase “verguenza ajena” which means “pain on seeing the embarrassment of others.” It’s the cringe sensation, and we’re feeling it for you. Improve!

best,

Orange County Catastrophe Day

  1. Pedestrian struck, killed on I-405 in Westminster
    Northbound lanes shut down more than 4 hours while crews cleaned up.
    By KIMBERLY EDDS
    The Orange County Register

    WESTMINSTER – A man dressed in black was killed early this morning after being run over by a car and a big-rig as he walked across the San Diego (I-405) Freeway. The man, who has not been identified, was in the fast lane of the northbound I-405 near Beach Boulevard when he was hit by a Honda Civic and then a big-rig at about 1:17 a.m., CHP dispatcher Dave Clark said.

    The freeway was shut down at 1:27 and remained largely closed down for more than four hours as biohazard crews cleaned up lanes, Clark said.

    The drivers of the Honda and the big-rig pulled to the side of the freeway and called police, Clark said. No one has been cited in the crash. The investigation is ongoing.

    The pedestrian is described as a black man wearing a black hooded sweat shirt, dark jeans, black tennis shoes and a black baseball cap.

  2. Santa Ana man arrested in Upland deaths

    UPLAND – A 75-foot power pole being moved into place smashed through a car, killing the driver and a construction worker and critically injuring a woman passenger, police said.

    The crane operator, Joseph Dimaano, 31, of Santa Ana was arrested for investigation of involuntary manslaughter after the accident because the pole was moved onto the street without warning, police said.

    The pole was being installed at a corner shortly before 10 p.m. Wednesday and was dangling from a crane when it was moved out into traffic, where it went through the windshield of a car, police said.

    The driver, an 81-year-old Montclair man, was killed on impact. His identity was withheld pending notification of relatives, the San Bernardino County coroner’s office said Thursday.

    The passenger, an 80-year-old Montclair woman, was taken to a hospital in critical condition. There was no word on her condition Thursday.

    After the pole’s bottom end hit the car, the top end struck a worker on the ground who was guiding the pole. David Jenkins, 29, of Lake Elsinore died about an hour later at a hospital, Sgt. Greg Doyle said.