Tag: history

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Panda Express as it stands today. (Literally, today, 20 minutes before posting this.)

When I lived in Lake Forest during the year 2000, I used to frequent a place called Panda Panda. It was your basic steam table Chinese restaurant, but it was good. I remember the occasional evening on which I’d think, “Do I go to the store, buy ingredients, come home, then spend time cooking just for one person, or do I go out and grab some fast-ish food?” Panda Panda was a frequent winner of these decisions.

It was located at the corner of El Toro and Raymond, near the library. Panda Panda shared a building with a Quizno’s sandwich place and was one driveway away from a Wendy’s.

I don’t know if they were a small chain or a solo restaurant, but they were eventually bought out or otherwise assimilated by Panda Express, which I’ve never particularly liked. (Though Panda Inn, a table-service restaurant owned by the same company, has been consistently good.) Naturally they homogenized the menu as well.

That was the end of that.

A few years later, as part of the big project to renovate the area, both buildings were bulldozed to make way for a new strip mall segment. Panda Express got the prime spot in the new building, but all traces of Panda Panda are lost.

For the record: I’m currently sitting in a Wahoo’s taco place roughly where the driveway used to be.

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  • Last night I learned that the Satellite Market near Disneyland is still there, but the Sputnik-style sign has been replaced. Old & new photos.
  • Side salad vs. fries study: Adding a healthier option caused people to choose the unhealthy option more often. It’s made me a lot more aware of what I order for lunch.
  • Spam apparently advertising speed bumps: “Women won’t hide their excitement when they see your bulge in the street”
  • Funny webcomic: Ada Lovelace: The Origin! (via @johannadc)

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When I was around 15, I had a close encounter with a rattlesnake. In my tent. No one was bitten, but getting that snake out was an interesting experience. It happened during a week-long summer camp at Lost Valley Scout Reservation in the mountains northeast of San Diego. It was at least my fourth summer camp with my Boy Scout troop, placing it around 1991 or 1992, and at least my second at Lost Valley.

Lost Valley

There are two kinds of campsites at Lost Valley (or at least there were in the early 1990s): One type had simple wooden cabins, which held two bunk beds apiece*. This was the other type, with canvas tents. The canvas made up the roof and walls, and was tied to a metal frame with a plywood floor. (Note: this arrangement is not sealed.) Two cots lay on the floor. Scouts would typically lay out their sleeping bags on top of the cots, and stow their gear underneath.

The site was in a wooded area of the camp — mostly evergreen trees — below a hill, in the Camp Irvine section. Looking in from the road, there was a large rock formation to the right, which I remember a lot of us scouts would climb onto. (It’s the 13th point of the Scout Law: A Scout Climbs Rocks) To the left, the land stayed flat at least as far as the next section of road. Straight back was a fairly steep hill which led up to more campsites and eventually the dining hall, if you were willing to go off-trail and cut through another site. Judging by the map, it looks like it was probably Indian Wells campsite. Edit: My dad points out that the stones had been grinding sites for the local Native American tribes, which may have been the source of the name.

Finding the Snake

My tent was toward the back. One night** as I was getting ready for bed, I set my canteen down before closing it and accidentally knocked it over. I quickly set it upright, then got down with a flashlight to look at the puddle of water spreading back under my cot, and see if I needed to move anything out of the way.

Looking back at me was a rattlesnake. It had apparently set up its own camp under my bed. I said, surprisingly calmly, “Oh, there’s a snake under my cot.”

“That’s nice,” my roommate, Geoff, who was already half-asleep, mumbled. Followed a few seconds later by, “WHAT!?!?”

I think he went to get an adult while I kept my distance and watched the snake. Or possibly the other way around. Or maybe we both went for help. I definitely recall one of those audio relays of boys saying, “There’s a snake in Kelson’s tent!” Someone went to contact camp staff, and the snake crew showed up. (Chances are pretty good that Phil Brigandi*** was among them.)

Keep in mind that it was dark. It was several hours into night, and the only light came from flashlights and propane lanterns.

Removing the Snake

My dad, who was there as a troop leader, adds a little more info:

They used the opportunity to make a point that little rattlesnakes are more dangerous than adults, because they’re less skilled at releasing their venom in small doses. (Otherwise, the snake has no venom for a second strike, in case it needs to fight another enemy.) So little rattlesnakes inject you with everything they’ve got.

Our biggest concern of course was that we didn’t want the rattlesnake to get away while we went and got the snake control guys. (Otherwise, you’ve got the trouble of wondering where it’s GONE!) Of course, nobody was going to try to catch it or anything, so the basic idea was to leave it alone but keep the lights on so we could keep an eye on it. We all counted ourselves lucky when we got back and found that the snake was still where we’d found it!

They don’t kill rattlesnakes when they find them, just relocate them. (Rattlesnakes play a part in the local ecosystem, after all.) Their equipment consisted mainly of a stick with, IIRC, a loop of rope on one end, and a large wooden box. Normal practice involved trying to pick up the snake with the stick, depositing it in the box, closing it in the box, then taking it out somewhere farther away from any people.

There was a problem, though: The snake was too small to pick up. It just kept sliding through the loop. Finally someone (possibly my dad, now that I think about it) picked it up with a shovel and put it in the box. They closed it up, may have loaded it on a truck, and that was the last I ever saw of the snake.

Notes

*It was in one of those cabins that I once rolled off the top bunk in my sleep and woke up on the way down, before I hit the floor. I don’t remember it hurting at all. I just climbed out of my sleeping bag, climbed back up, and went back to sleep.

**I think it was the same night that I took my camera and a tripod out to one of the large meadows and experimented with taking pictures of the night sky. I got some fairly decent (for a first-timer) shots of Sagittarius, Scorpio, and the Milky Way, which I’ll have to see if I can find sometime.

***I was prompted to write this when I read Orange County Historian Phil Brigandi‘s account of the first time he ever saw a rattlesnake bite in his many years at Lost Valley Scout Reservation.

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An NPR story about an archaeological site in Peru mentioned that the ancient Andean calendars used a 10-day week, and I started wondering what other measurements various societies have used. The seven-day week is (almost?) universal these days, developed independently in both the Middle East (spreading to the West) and in the Far East, but past societies have used anywhere from three days to ten.

Unlike the day, year, or lunar month, there’s no natural unit of time corresponding to the week. So it’s hardly surprising that different societies have chosen different lengths. Ten is one obvious choice (there’s a reason we refer to number places as digits, after all). But aside from the obvious Biblical origins, why seven?

Well, seven days roughly corresponds to a phase of the moon. But humans have long had a fascination with the number seven, no doubt influenced by the seven heavenly bodies: the sun, the moon, and the five visible planets. Sunday, Monday (moon day) and Saturday (Saturn day) are obvious in English, but Tuesday through Friday are a little less clear: you have to work out which Norse god the name comes from—Tyr, Wotan, Thor, Frigg—and convert to the corresponding Roman god—Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus. It’s much clearer in Romance languages, as I discovered when I studied Spanish a few years ago. Wikipedia also has a nice table of weekday names in various languages.

On a related note, if February were a full month, today would be February 30. It turns out there’ve been a few of those in relatively modern times, including an extra-long leap year in Sweden in 1712, and two in 1930-1931, when the Soviet Union tried to use a “revolutionary calendar.” (Funny how those never seem to catch on.)

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From the Astronomy Picture of the Day, it’s the remnants of a two-billion-year-old nuclear reactor discovered in 1972 in a mine in Oklo, Gabon.

Apparently in the old days there was enough uranium-235 in the Earth’s crust that, under the right conditions, nuclear fission could occur naturally. Over time the fuel was used up, and now uranium deposits are mostly 238U, so we don’t need to worry about any new nuclear reactors popping up without our help.

What’s really odd is that this reactor produced plutonium naturally. There’s still some there. Most periodic tables I’ve seen label plutonium as a synthetic element, so the idea of natural plutonium takes some getting used to.

Kind of like the idea of a natural nuclear reactor.