Sarah & Adam on Father's Day

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Sarah is 4 and a half. Adam's nearly 3:

Ill-advised bottle removal in Mission Viejo*

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In this morning’s OC Register: Suspicious object destroyed in Mission Viejo:

A Best Buy store was evacuated and shut down for more than four hours Saturday after a clerk found a suspicious device that a bomb squad later determined to be harmless, authorities said.

A clerk found the object—described as a water bottle with duct tape and wires—about 4 p.m., and removed it by hand from the store, an act officials called ill-advised. The Best Buy and several adjoining stores in the 25000 block of El Paseo were evacuated.

The Sheriff's Department bomb squad inspected the device with a robot and, about 8 p.m., destroyed it with a water cannon, said Sheriff's Lt. Lee Trujillo. Investigators determined the object was not an explosive and are treating the incident as a hoax.

No threats have been received, and there are no suspects,Trujillo said.

*All photos are artists' deconstructions

Pocket Puma on the mend

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AS YOU KNOW, the semi-official beast of Dissent is Sunny the Cat, aka Sunny Girl, Sunny Bear, Weasel, and the Pocket Puma.

Sunny is marvelously stunted; she’s less than six pounds of semi-feral cat. Nevertheless, for seventeen years—that’s right—she’s been absurdly healthy.

Now, she’s ill. I had to take her to the vet, which I hate to do, cuz these visits always take something out of her. To a creature like Sunny, a visit to the vet is much like Bushian rendition.

She had to stay at the Hanoi Hilton for two days. They stuck her with an I.V. and who knows what else.

When I sprung her, I learned that, probably, she’s got a kidney infection, not kidney failure.

Probably.

Predictably, the visit weirded her out bigtime. She was pretty confused and upset. But, by this morning, she was almost back to her usual weaselly self, and I let her out to dart around like she does. She loves to be out in the wild.

Here are some pics of her morning adventure.

And, oh, Sunny says "hey."

Something way cool this way comes + Let's maximize gayness

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SOMETHING way cool seems to be happening with Irvine’s “Great Park.”

According to an article in Thursday’s OC Register, two subprojects have been provisionally approved, and they're humdingers:

…The Great Park Board unanimously decided Thursday to make a nearly 3-mile-long wildlife corridor and Agua Chinon, a stream currently covered by runways at the former El Toro Marine base, the next major elements of the Great Park....

"We're creating something here that in future years will be looked at with awe," said Michael Pinto, vice chairman of the Great Park Board and founder and president of the Laguna Canyon Foundation.

The wildlife corridor will provide a vital link for animals between the Cleveland National Forest and the Coastal Hills Preserve, Pinto said....

...Ken Smith's design team will now get to work on construction-level drawings for the Agua Chinon project, which involves uncovering one of the natural streams that is now diverted under the El Toro base in clay pipes, concrete culverts and tunnels….

…Even though Agua Chinon must become a flood control channel, designers want it to look like a natural stream. Plans call for trails and bridges along the stream and possibly kiosks educating park visitors about the stream's restoration.

…The initial project will connect the corridor to the Cleveland National Forest, but not the southern coastal open space…Great Park Engineer Pat Fuscoe said the corridor will still function without the southern portion. He said animals will be able to travel under train tracks to find a small wetlands area.

…Corridor construction will begin this summer and is expected to take two years…Nine people came to Thursday's meeting to praise the corridor plans–some calling it an "act of courage."…But some environmentalists prodded the board to continue supporting the corridor by both completing its southern end and by adding a more diverse and rich array of plants and trees.

—I know, I know. It would be much better if they stopped building homes—home construction is an important part of the Great Park's grand plan—and encouraging people to move out here. Yep.

There are too many people, I say. People are fucking everything up.

Let's get small. Let's punctuate the Earth, not overwhelm it.

I'm doing my part. These days, I'm advocating homosexuality. I don't happen to play for that team, but I do see the advantages, growthwise. If we maximize gayness, we will help address the "humanity as a cancer" problem, and we'll do it in a very, well, humane way.

You know, maximizing gayness is just letting left-handed kids be left-handed. It's nice. Plus it's good to the future.

It's a win-win.

Extolling danger in Orange County

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MY LIFE is way busy these days. But Sunny the cat is at the vet, and I’ve got to wait around for a phone call. Time to read the news.

EXTOLLING DANGER

This morning, the clever scribblers at the OC Register report on a program at Los Alamitos High School that warns students about the dangers of drunk driving.

The name of the article?

"High school program extols dangers of drunk driving"

—Extols? That can’t be right. I checked my dictionary. It means to “praise enthusiastically.”

Thought so.

POP TO IT

According to the LA Times, Garden Grove (which has neither) is contemplating partnering with an Indian tribe and opening a casino. Turns out GG is in the habit of contemplating goofy revenue-enhancing schemes:

[T]he city…has pursued ambitious plans before, only be to disappointed. One developer proposed a replica of the London Bridge across a man-made river...and another suggested a cultural center dedicated to the late King Hussein of Jordan.

I know. Why don’t they build a garden? Or a grove?

I guess I’m no libertarian, ‘cause I can’t help but view casinos as addiction generators/enablers. I mean, except for décor, what’s the real difference between a casino and an opium den?

The casino plan concerns the Gabrielino “Indian” tribe. But there’ s a problem:

There are an estimated 2,000 Gabrielinos in Southern California, but the splintered tribe is mired in a leadership battle and has yet to achieve federal recognition, which could complicate or even sink its efforts to build a casino.

Sounds dicey.

But GG wants its magic revenue source, and they’re determined to find it, even if they have to open an opium den.

"We're never going to see a significant boost in revenues unless we get something with a lot of pop to it," said the City Manager.

EVEN BANDITS ARE GETTING GREEN

Evidently, according to the Times, Orange County banks are being menaced these days by the “Landscape Bandit”, who is described as “heavyset, favoring sun hats and glasses and smelling of dirt….”

SORT OF

The OC Register reports that, a week before his big retirement party, popular and inspirational Tustin High teacher, John Sorenson, died unexpectedly.

Said one former student, “"He was sort of like a mentor….”

EXCELLENT

Meanwhile, Pioneer Middle School, in Tustin, was evacuated, owing to a bomb threat.

How did the evacuation go?

"I would consider it an excellent evacuation," said Tustin police Sgt. Pat Welch.

DEAD POSSUM MAYOR

On Wednesday, we learned that the Mayor of Newport Beach owns a house in the city that’s pissing off the neighbors:

The yard is overrun with weeds, and the lanterns on the front porch are caked in rust. The paint is peeling, the plaster is exposed, and a dead opossum reportedly lingered for several weeks.

One neighbor calls the Mayor’s place "the little junk house."

HONORED AND MOTIVATED

A new president has been named for Cypress College:

Michael Kasler, the campus's executive vice president, was named Cypress's 10th president Tuesday night by the North Orange County Community College District board of trustees.

Kasler issued a statement:

"I feel both honored and motivated…,” he stated.

CHIQUITA?

The Reg offers a story about a property rights battle over a big plot of open space called Chiquita Ridge. Lots of slippage up there, evidently.

The devil causes Inside Higher Ed to publish false reports

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ONE THING about right-wing critics of academia: the facts just don’t matter to them.

According to this morning’s Inside Higher Ed, a new study has compared young people who do and young people who do not attend college with regard to loss of faith.

Here are the facts (evidently): decline in faith among young people is more common among those who don’t attend college than among those who do.

Jeez, what’s it all mean?

…The more you pursue a higher education, the more likely you are to abandon your faith — at least that’s what conventional wisdom holds.

“Actually we’ve just been wrong about this for quite a while,” said Mark D. Regnerus, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the authors of a new study that suggests students who attend and graduate from college are more likely than others to hold on to their faith.

It’s not that colleges necessarily encourage faith, he said, but for all the talk about how intellectuals are out to destroy students’ relationships to their religions and God, the main obstacles to such relationships have to do with maturing and how young people spend their time. “Some kids were bound to lose [their faith] anyway and they do,” Regnerus said. But the evidence suggests that college isn’t responsible.

…The data were mined for trends on three factors of religious activity: attendance at religious services, relative importance of religion, and disaffiliation from religion. A substantial majority of young adults report a decline in attendance at religious services, while a minority report that religion has become less important and that they have completely dropped their religion. But the greatest drops come from those who are not in college. [My emphasis.]

So with all the talk about supposedly liberal, anti-religious professors, why do the young adults who don’t go to college suffer more of a religious loss?

Regnerus said that what the study suggests — and his personal experience confirms — is that while there are plenty of non-religious professors around, they aren’t trying to discourage any students from practicing their faith. “Of course there are some who are hostile to religion. But they don’t teach that. They teach their discipline,” Regnerus said. The attitude, he added, is: “Whatever I think about evangelicals, when I go to teach quantum physics, I teach quantum physics.”

…Behavioral factors, he said, are a better way than college status to predict whether young adults will become less religious. Those who don’t have sex before marriage are also those who don’t experience as much of a drop in religious connection. Those who have smoked pot experience more of a drop. Those who increase alcohol consumption during their young adulthood experience more of a drop in religious connection.

Those who blame college for declining religious activity by students don’t understand that it is these factors, among others, that are the influence, Regnerus said. “This is about this period of the life course where freedom and choice become paramount,” he said. “What diminishes religiosity is freedom and choice, not intellectual engagement.”

Signs, Signs, Everywhere There's Signs

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THE OTHER DAY Mona Lisa Quesadilla was struck by a sign she saw as she made her way through the world. There, in the fair city of Orange (some say the fairest city of all in the O.C.), the venerable Chapman Avenue meets a not-so-venerable street named: Trails End.

That's right, no apostrophe.

Trails End.

She believes that the lack of an apostrophe renders the sign a declaration rather than the typical locale observation often found in other signs, say, for example, Hill Top Drive or Santiago Canyon Road.

So, it is not Trail's End as in the end of the trail or even Trails' End as in the end of trails.

It is Trails End as in, the trails, all of them, are over, kaput, finis.

It's an announcement.

Mona Lisa finds herself agreeing with the sign, even as she shakes her head.

What can she say? Mona Lisa loves the O.C., the sense of doom she finds in even an innocent street sign, unsure of whether it marks the end of nature, the end of punctuation, the dearth of thoughtful, detail-oriented urban planners, or all of the above. Who's in charge of street names anyway? Where does she sign up for that job?

To close, a poem by Billy Collins who once remarked that the massive signs announcing new housing developments seemed to him to serve as epitaphs for the creatures and fauna who previously resided there.

The Golden Years

All I do these drawn-out days
is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
where there are no pheasant to be seen
and last time I looked, no ridge.

I could drive over to Quail Falls
and spend the day there playing bridge,
but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
would just remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

I know a widow at Fox Run
and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
One of them smokes, and neither can run,
so I'll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.