Smoke from various fires up near Los Angeles and Corona, creeping across the sky into Orange County.
Tag: Orange County
OC D&D
Something like 10 years ago, Katie saw a self-storage place in which the opening S was unlit, making it read, “Elf Storage.” She’s been looking for another one ever since, and we finally caught one in Newport Beach a few months ago. This one was even better, because the S had actually fallen off.
Of course, there are other things in the area that could easily come out of a Dungeons & Dragons manual. Such as this Kobold Construction truck.
And then there’s the fact that all fire engines in Orange County are labeled ORC.
Let’s not forget the previously-blogged Hobbit Center in Laguna Beach.
And that’s not even getting into all the Tolkien-inspired street names in Lake Forest…
Knowing too much
Finally watched A Scanner Darkly this weekend. Better than I expected. One sequence pulled me out of the film, though, and only because I live in Orange County.
In the middle of the film, several characters start a road trip to San Diego. They start on the 5 freeway in Anaheim and drive south until the car breaks down in Irvine. Then they ride in a tow truck back up to Anaheim.
The problem: They used real backgrounds of that stretch of the freeway, but showed them out of sequence. Shots alternate between characters as they hold a conversation.
First you see the squarish beige office buildings lining the freeway near Jeffrey in Irvine. Then you jump 3-4 miles north to the edge of Santa Ana, where you can see a blue glass-lined building in the background near Fourth St. Then you jump back down to the beige buildings. Then up to Santa Ana again. Then down to the office buildings. Back up to Santa Ana. Down to the office buildings again, which finally give way to The Market Place (you can see the giant purple sign as it goes past).
Now I understand how all those Chicago residents felt watching The Dark Knight.
Although thinking about it, it probably wouldn’t have bothered me if it had been set somewhere generic, and just happened to use local backgrounds.
Starbucks Overreaching
A couple of years ago, Starbucks bought all 30 or so company-owned Diedrich Coffee stores. There were a couple of franchise locations left (well, kiosks, really) in Orange County, and one of the Texas stores, but that was it. Most of them were converted or shut down, with only two keeping the Diedrich name and menu (both in Irvine, oddly enough). The one across from UCI eventually got converted.
The Diedrich nearest where we live was always busy. After it had been assimilated, though, we never saw it full. People didn’t go there just because of the location, they went there because it was a Diedrich.
Now it’s on the list of stores that Starbucks is closing, along with a newer one that opened about a quarter-mile away. (They haven’t updated the web page yet, but it’s on the PDF.)
In essence, Starbucks bought an (apparently) successful business and ran it into the ground. I really hate when that happens.
Obviously the place, when it was a Diedrich, wasn’t taking money that would have gone to Starbucks, since their customers didn’t stick around when it was converted. And the one store that does still have the Diedrich name and menu always has customers whenever I end up in the area — so it’s not just people avoiding the parent company. It’s people who don’t like the Starbucks coffee and atmosphere. (And possibly the name.)
I have to wonder how that other store would have done if they’d kept it intact instead of homogenizing it.
Update: Martin Diedrich picked up the empty storefront after Starbucks left, and opened his second Kéan Coffee in March 2009. Once again, it’s always busy. Funny, that!
Under Construction Indefinitely
We went to Wayzgoose* at UCI on Saturday, which meant getting our annual taste of what’s changed about the college campus. I’d caught the new Student Center last fall, but Katie hadn’t been back since last year, before it was finished.
Some of the meeting rooms buried in the hill still remain from the previous building. In a food court next to the bookstore, I found a window looking down on this familiar-looking atrium.
Through the glass paneling is a stairway that leads up to the ring road entrance. Clone Copy and Clone Notes used to be on the lower floor to the right (off-camera). In the mid-1990s, the area below the overhang to the left was a pool hall whose name escapes me. I think they converted it to a study area when they remodeled the upper floor to create Zot Zone (which has since been demolished and relocated). The area where I was standing used to be an outdoor walkway connecting the main courtyard to the bookstore.
What was really odd was the west food court, where my brain kept trying to overlay the old layout even though I’m sure they ripped out and replaced that section of the building entirely.
The sad thing, though, was that they’re tearing up the large grass area in the middle of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts and putting in another building. Everything in the quad bordered by the Claire Trevor Theater (formerly the Village Theater), the Studio Theater, the scene shop, Studio Four, and the drama offices is a big fenced-off area of dirt.
Aside from the usual uses for a lawn, it was a great place for people to rehearse. It’s not clear how much of the fenced-off area will actually be turned into a building, but they may have finally finished paving the entire school.
I found it a rather ironic discovery to make at this time, considering that Wayzgoose/Celebrate UCI is also combined with Earth Day.
*Update 2019: Since the link seems to be dead, some context: Wayzgoose was part of Celebrate UCI, a combination festival, open house (for prospective sutdents and parents), and club fair. It started with a medieval theme in the 1970s, though by the 1990s that was already fading. Once that was gone, there was a slow shift of emphasis away from Wayzgoose and toward Celebrate UCI as far as branding went, presumably because nobody knows what a Wayzgoose is, but everyone knows what a celebration is.