DOCTOR THE NUMBERS: If you want to...

DOCTOR THE NUMBERS: If you want to enter medical school at UC Irvine, be prepared for a wait. The cutoff date to apply for its 92 class openings for September’s enrollment was Nov. 1, 1994--with 5,189 applicants. Following a national trend, that’s up slightly from last year. Hottest California medical school, from figures released Monday: Stanford University, which had 7,006 applications for just 86 spots.

NO HORSING AROUND: There’s more to touring Orange County when you add a little hindsight (E1). In the late 1940s, for example, Cypress was home to one of the county’s biggest attractions: the back yard pasture of rancher Frank Vessels Sr. There, visitors paid $1 to watch six horses race for purses of up to $100. . . . Vessels’ wife, Grace, made and sold hamburgers for the inaugural event, which drew 2,000. . . . It became Cypress’ Los Alamitos Race Course, relocated to its present site in 1954.

SHORT HERO: Shortstop, the county Bar Foundation’s tough-love juvenile-crime-prevention program, celebrates its 15th anniversary Wednesday, reuniting past board members, volunteer instructors and advisers. But special guests will be a lot of young people who managed to stay out of trouble once their first brush with the law took them to Shortstop. . . . Among them, successful rap music producer Manuel Moreno. His success, says Moreno, proves that “advice when listened to can definitely work.”

RUSSIAN STRATEGY: It wasn’t too many years ago that dignitaries in Russia were scoffing at the likes of major American capitalists like Fluor Corp. of Irvine. Monday, Fluor announced it is opening a Moscow office--to serve both Russian and international clients. . . . The global engineering and construction firm already has offices throughout much of Europe. . . . Why Moscow? One Fluor official says there’s “an emerging Russian market economy,” and Fluor wants in on it.