Summer’s Full of Hard Choices Over Where to Park Your Car and Your Towel
Welcome to Only in L.A.’s gala Summer Non-Swimsuit Issue!
Let’s start with one of the most agonizing morning choices facing Southern Californians (spotted by Irving Schreiber on the back gate of a Manhattan Beach house).
Summer wouldn’t be summer without the crazy beach traffic. Why, Coronado even had to remind motorists not to park on top of psychics, as Kathi Hansen noticed.
And, finally, summer is all about fun, and if you’re in short supply you have only yourself to blame for missing a recent Pierce College event (see photo).
*
Summer speed reading: Writer David Allen tells me he was at a used bookstore in Hollywood one recent afternoon when someone brought in the latest Harry Potter book to trade. It was barely 12 hours after the 700-plus-page book had gone on sale the previous midnight.
“The [store] owner said he debated whether to sell it for full price,” Allen said, “but put it out for the usual half-price as a used book. It sold within minutes.”
*
The summer game: So there I was, reading “Moneyball,” a bestseller about statistical approaches to baseball (really, it’s a bestseller) when what do I come upon but a slam at USC’s approach to academics. Of course, slams at my alma mater’s academics are practically a local sport in themselves.
Anyway, author Michael Lewis writes that Billy Beane, now the general manager of the Oakland A’s, considered attending Stanford and USC when he graduated from high school.
But, Lewis writes, USC’s baseball recruiter “tried to talk Billy out of Stanford. ‘They’ll make you take a whole week off for final exams,’ he (the USC recruiter) had said. To which Billy had replied, ‘That’s the idea, isn’t it?’ ” In the end Beane rejected both Stanford and USC.
*
Now it’s UCLA’s turn: Daniel Mitchell of Santa Monica found some not-so-helpful advice for users of a parking lot on the Westwood campus (see photo).
*
Advice that should have been taken: Tova Friedman of L.A. wonders about the driver “in front of me who was conspicuously chatting on his cell phone block after block. Not strange? Well, he had a bumper sticker that said, ‘Get off the phone and drive!’ ”
Perhaps someone affixed the sticker on the guy’s car at a previous stoplight. The driver would have been so busy talking on the phone that he wouldn’t have noticed.
*
miscelLAny: Writer Hank Rosenfeld says, “I love the little St. Clement’s Church here on Marine and 3rd Street on the Santa Monica-Venice border. But adjacent to the church is a big parking lot. A sign on the lot says ‘NO GRACE PERIOD.’ ”
*
Steve Harvey can be reached at (800) LA-TIMES, Ext. 77083, by fax at (213) 237-4712, by mail at Metro, L.A. Times, 202 W. 1st St., L.A. 90012 and by e-mail at steve.harvey@latimes.com.