Orange County

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clean-dirt-wanted

The mindset represented by this sign is what I mean when I refer to the Orange County city of Irvine as a soulless, planned-community hellscape. If I hadn’t spent 90% of my waking hours at the area’s one oasis of culture, the UCI Fine Arts village, I’d never have stayed there for four years.

Full disclosure: I took this picture in 1993, a little bit before the advent of the cameraphone. Still, I think any reasonable person will agree that it qualifies as a folly. This little roadside want ad stayed up for at least a week or two, which gave me plenty of time to remember to throw my camera in my bag before the next time I drove by.


Again, an item in Ye Olde Facebook Newsfeed set me to thinking. The blurb below was posted by an old schoolmate of mine. I have anonymized her profile picture, and (obviously) blurred out her name. She still lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we grew up; I (in case you didn’t know) now live in Los Angeles.which-ca-city-LA-screencap

I haven’t taken the quiz, so I don’t know what questions my friend answered. She was puzzled by the result, so I’ve endeavored to develop more in-depth questionnaire to determine how temperamentally well-suited one is for L.A. residency. So here it is: Derek’s L.A.dar, v 0.5.
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