The Orange

Logic would have it that Portola Road in Irvine would connect to Portola Road in Lake Forest.

West Nile Virus killed its first California victim here in Orange County. Am I afraid?

Police have never seen anything like it.

We went for a hike near Ortega Highway. I got too enthusiastic and decided to avoid the long drive over paved roads and take a short cut by way of Silverado Canyon.

The weird wildlife encounter of the day was a swarm of bees which covered an area the width of a basketball in the middle of the road.

Yes, she persuaded them to rape her with a pool cue and a lighted cigarette as shown in the video.

The noise of the OHVs sandpapered our ears as we climbed the 400 foot scarp to the first mesa.

I gained too much weight and didn't upload any new hikes until this past week.

Reverend Lou Sheldon claims never to have said those words. Which is funny because he's said an awful lot of words like them!

As soon as we got out of the truck, a fellow riding a taxi bike asked if we needed a ride to the entrance. I declined, thinking it odd that on this night we'd been transported into a Saigon without the mortar rounds and the shrapnel.

The Story is what we take when we don't have the courage to ask our medical insurance to allow us to see a psychiatrist or get assertiveness training.

It's not much, just an undercut of a brief run that comes down from the neighborhood called "Top of the World".

They're strict here.

I pulled up behind the creme-colored, old style, I'm-so-big-you-have-to-park-me-in-the-Great-Plains Cadillac at the corner of Aliso Creek and El Toro.

They sneaked in electronic voting in Orange County. When we went to the polls, the luminescent screens in their blue boxes were there.

I am a street: fronted by strip malls.

I am a flood: gushing from a canyon.

I am a wind: that dries the brush.

I am an SUV: hungry for rough roads.

Costa Mesa attorney Joe Weber wonders if the acquittal of O.J. Simpson and the falsehoods implanted concerning WMDs by George W. Bush have "somehow plant[ed] the suggestion in the public consciousness that a complete denial is the only way to go?"

Yellow police tape and red signs remain looped around the area following this month's earlier mountain lion attack. I suspect that bikers are ignoring the signs.

This being Orange County politics, the Weekly treats the race as pretty much finished by the time the March California Primary decides who will be the Republican candidate.

I looked at the loudmouth's hands. Smooth white fingers. No ring. Not surprising.

Was this my lion, the lion that I frightened off last October?

We can and will learn from this. My sincere condolences to the family of the victim, to the woman who was mauled, and the two survivors of the incidents.

Think of it: a biker never stops to look. He is always on the move, always -- in the eyes of the lion -- fleeing. It's like dragging a piece of red yarn in front of your cat. It's going to induce it to pounce.

The Weekly's selling baby flesh.

This is my Orange County. A place where the needs of business outrank those of the people who live and work there, the ones who make it prosper.

The light doesn't end with a thunderfall or begin with a bang. I just notice that it is gone when the world turns a little too blue for seeing clearly.

"This job," said the Latino, "is a job. It's hard, very hard."

I could not check into the motels, ride in the motorboats, or afford to hire a biplane to drag the message I wanted the beach people to see which was "You're being screwed!"

Stillness, lassitude within the confines of one's house is the great enemy of sanity.

El Toro Road stretches from a point just beneath me to its intersection with Laguna Canyon Road, some 16 to 20 miles away. I do not see many pedestrians along the route.

The aerial photo fairly represents my neighborhood as screaming suburbia, a place of stucco pressed right to the edge of asphalt, where individuality is denied on the exteriors, but fervently expressed inside.

Neither writer nor reader should rush their exercise

While making a crossing on the trail back from Holy Jim Falls, I chose to travel by means of the cemented stones on the right rather than the unsteady line of stones on the left.

"Fifty dollars!" cried I. "Why Bin Laden is heavily in your debt!"

The instructor gave me a blank, "thank you for sharing" look. As I sat back, I muttered to my seat mates "Well, there I've gone and upset all the Fundamentalists."

I wanted to stand up, point to the guy, and cry to the instructor: "Flunk that man! He's not getting it!"

I can just see some office gleep seeing the flashing button on the phone and punching it off, repeatedly.

Royalty for a fraction of the cost!

Dove Canyon is one of Orange County's larger "gated communities", full of insecure elites who tell the rest of us that we have nothing to fear when they are in charge here in America.

Summer is the season of death in Southern California....