The SoCal Byte

Most intellectuals in the chattering class (as if there’s any other kind) revile Hollywood’s incessant worship of the mundane. But the American tradition of unjust boundless praise isn’t limited to entertainment nitwits. In that regard the learned class can be just as vacant.

In the never-ending attempt to lay maps on the territory, scientists from the U.S. Geologic Survey are currently looking for volunteers in Orange County interested in installing home-based earthquake sensors.

Even though I’m a big baseball fan, I’m also anti-memorabilia-ist. Storing material prompts for memories is neither my ambition, nor my religion. However, the recent news that baseball legend Kirk Gibson was auctioning off his treasured Dodger World Series keepsakes grabbed me in the way Ruth Gordon’s character in Harold and Maude grabbed me.

Last weekend, during that familiar yet awkward point at a wedding reception — before the toasts, cake cutting and garter toss — when the improvised B-list seating arrangements conspire in unpredictably embarrassing ways, I found myself sitting with a group of biologists.

Up the outside flight of steep concrete stairs 81-year-old Frank — hot meal in hand — slowly climbs to a small landing and rings a doorbell. A long minute passes. The front door opens. A head in shadows peers out from inside. Then a wavering aphasiated octogenarian women’s voice dampened by a stroke asks Frank to open the security door that serves as protection against the world outside. The tiny landing is jammed with stacks of old wet newspapers, empty flower pots and two seatless chairs, so, in order to open the security door that swings outward, Frank has to step backward off the landing, balancing the hot meal.

This Summer in Orange County, California, Knott's Berry Farm began the tear-down of Goldie's Place — one of the themepark’s last original buildings from the 1940s. The demolition began with little fanfare. That’s surprising because Goldie’s is the berry farm’s imaginary Whorehouse.

It’s 2 am. The radio is on. But it feels like a dream. Somehow a voice on the air is tempting me to enroll at the Graziadio School of Business and Management. Graziadio? A school of business that thanks God in Italian? How could this be?

I can’t solve everything. But may I propose a way to settle one of our diet dilemmas? It’s called The Carnivore’s License. In simple English, you have to be able to kill it to eat it.

Earlier this year, Orange County, California’s Pacific Symphony dedicated a performance to “the greatest generation any society has produced”. Even though this so-called Greatest Generation is still with us, thanks to the blessing of old age they’re dwindling in numbers. And by Greatest Generation I don’t mean the generation who grew up in the United States during the Great Depression, and then went on to fight in World War II. What I mean is the people who grew up during that time and actually believe that they are The Greatest Generation who ever lived. What a load of crap.

Dylan Thomas once said that “A born writer is born scrofulous (scruffulous); his career is an accident dictated by physical or circumstantial disabilities.” I’m not sure whether or not I’m a born writer, but I do know that I’m scruffulous — or as my parents used to say, morally degenerate and corrupt. Maybe Dylan Thomas was right. Maybe my degeneracy is related to a disability. It hasn’t gotten me a job. But I’ve always believed in hiring the disabled. Let them suffer like the rest of the world.