Spotted this store in Costa Mesa.
I didn’t have time to take a closer look, but from what I can see online, they appear to be focused on making and selling environmentally-friendly clothing made from recycled materials, overstocked fabrics, etc.
Their website doesn’t say, but I imagine the name is a response to the overly brand-conscious nature of today’s fashions. (Ironically, it’s turning “generic” into a brand itself.)
[Tonight] we went up to Anaheim to see a showing of The Nightmare Before Christmas. It was the new 3-D version, and it was at a theater (Cinema City) that looked astonishingly like the Irvine Spectrum theater on the inside (in decor, not layout), but wasn’t an Edwards or Regal theater. We wondered if it had been built or renovated right before the whole industry went through its consolidation phase a few years back.
There were maybe 12-15 people in the theater by the time it started, all adults. Perhaps some high-schoolers at the youngest. Naturally the pre-movie programming was aimed at children. It’s animated, right?
The movie was good, as always. It was the second time we’d seen the 3D version, which works quite well, though there was one problem with the presentation: This theater uses all digital projection, and the resolution isn’t quite as high as it should be. In scenes with high contrast or fast movement, we could see the pixels at the borders.
Editor’s note: I’ve replaced a rather sparse imported tweet with a more thorough bit from my LiveJournal that I wrote a few days later.
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…
Just to show that English-language sign writers don’t have a monopoly on misspellings, here’s a sign we spotted at a construction site in Irvine:
Literally it means “Think Safety” — or it would if it said “Piense seguridad.” The typo makes this the Spanish equivalent of “Saftey First.”
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.
