Category: Highlights

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I have a bunch of old coffee mugs from TV shows, art museums, even an apartment complex where I used to live. In once sense these aren’t replaceable. If I ever break my Mozilla Coffee mug or the “I’m in the middle of fifteen things, all of them annoying” quote from Cmdr. Ivanova, or if I lose the “Venti Schmenti” travel mug from Diedrich’s (a coffee chain that has since been absorbed by Starbucks), that’s it — I can’t get another one.

But I have plenty of other coffee mugs, and there’s no shortage of mugs I could buy to replace them if I had to.

As memorabilia, they’re irreplaceable. Functionally, they’re almost expendable.

It’s interesting to think that they’re both, depending on how you’re looking at them.

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I don’t remember much about Marineland of the Pacific. It was an ocean park/aquarium like Sea World that operated near Los Angeles for several decades, closing in 1987. I know I visited at least once, with my grandparents, but all I remember is:

  1. The view from what I assume was Palos Verdes Drive, as the car crested a low summit, brown hills rising to the right and falling gently toward the ocean on the left. The park stood on a promontory jutting out into the ocean. I haven’t been able to locate the spot, but that could just mean the road’s been moved.*
  2. A sign saying “CAFE” visible from the parking lot, which I misread as rhyming with “safe.” (Evidently I was very young at the time.)
  3. That’s about it.

You’d think I’d remember the sea life at least a little, though I suppose it’s possible I’ve misattributed some memories to Sea World (which, come to think of it, I don’t remember super-well either).

Not much of Marineland remains aside from a few names at Terranea Resort, which now occupies the site. But a piece of that history is coming back. In 2014, a 35-foot whale statue from the park entrance was found in a maintenance yard. The city has approved plans to place the statue at Point Vicente Park just up the road. Update April 2026: The statue still hasn’t been installed. I was out walking around Point Vicente over the weekend (the day after this year’s Whale of a Day and lighthouse tours, annoyingly enough) and got to wondering about it. The latest article I’ve found is from 2023, when they were still trying to arrange funding to restore the fiberglass statue, after a half-million estimate derailed the original plans.

Apparently the decline and closure of the park was rather sordid: HBJ, the textbook company that owned Sea World at the time, had tried to buy Marineland’s star orcas. They weren’t selling. So HBJ bought the park in December 1986. Late in January, they secretly loaded Orky and Corky onto trucks in the middle of the night and drove them down to San Diego. (Update: the moving process was traumatic for the whales as well.) A week later, they announced the park would close in March. They shut it down halfway through February, and by May they’d sold off the property to a real estate developer. Plans for a conference center were never realized, and the site was abandoned for 20 years until construction began on Terranea.

*Update: My dad pointed me to the Wikipedia article, which led me to a post at Modern Day Ruins, which led me to the California Coastal Records collection of aerial photographs. I found one from 1986 that indicates that Rancho Palos Verdes Drive is in the same spot as it was back then, but the housing developments on either side to the east of the turnoff weren’t there at the time. That’s probably why I didn’t recognize it. Or the road I remember could be the one down to the parking lot.

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Anza-Borrego Wildflowers

The kiddo had a day off from school in mid-March, so I took a vacation day and we all drove out to the desert to see the spring wildflowers. After the endless suburbia of Los Angeles, northern Orange County, and Corona, we drove past hills green from the winter rains, then into the similarly-endless suburbs of Temecula. It’s been years since I took Highway 79 south, and the city has grown a lot, but after a few miles the strip malls and housing developments disappeared, the road shrank to two lanes, and we drove through green hills with oaks, bushes, and the occasional patches of poppies, mustard and lupins. Fences, dirt roads and gates indicated ranches and wineries. Continue reading →

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An odd contradiction: People are turning away from science as a way to understand the world, even though we keep using more and more advanced technology which is invented using that scientific knowledge.

What if it’s that, in terms of Clarke’s Third Law, the technology we use is sufficiently advanced that it might as well be magic?

It’s easy to understand how a toaster works. Electricity goes in and heats up the wires. Or an incandescent light bulb, or an internal combustion engine. Anything that’s primarily mechanical, you can understand intuitively: “Oh, this part moves that part, which moves that part, and then I kind of get lost, but eventually it gets to the wheels.”

But a computer chip? GPS navigation? Downloading and playing a game on a mobile phone? These things might as well be magic to most people who use it. At the consumer level, GPS is a black box that tells you where you are and how to get where you’re going. But underneath that, it’s satellites, relativity, radio transmitters, radio receivers, computer software, circuitry, mathematics, rockets, data transmission, traffic detection, mapping software…so many pieces that take some degree of studying to really understand.

If our technology is “magic,” it ceases to be a reminder that science works, and may even encourage belief in things that don’t have clear mechanisms and supporting evidence. The very success of science at making possible the technology we use everywhere could, ironically, be discouraging people from believing in it.

*I wrote this three years ago. I’m not sure why I didn’t post it at the time. All I had to do was tighten up the wording a little bit. And sadly, the situation hasn’t improved.

Update 2026: It’s been another ten years since I posted this, and things have gotten so much worse. We’ve got people in charge of public health who won’t even acknowledge that germs cause disease. And now we’ve got companies using “AI” to make technology look even more magical and harder to understand.

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Bleeding tree stump

I’ve described sap as “tree blood” before, but this seems a little too apt.

There are a bunch of tipuana trees mixed in with the jacarandas and palms around the area where I work. (One fewer now.) They look a lot like jacarandas with yellow flowers instead of purple, though the leaves are a little bit wider and the bark is just a bit different. (They make just as big a mess, too.) Tipuanas look close enough that I actually mistook them for jacarandas until I saw them flowering — which, oddly enough, I haven’t seen any of them do yet this year.

And now I know that they have blood-red sap.

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This sign used to say FRESH AVOCADO. But for several years, it's said something more like FRE SH AVOCA DO. Now it's been "fixed."

The Del Taco sign actually says Free Shavocado (ask inside)

This sign used to say FRESH AVOCADO. But for several years, it’s said something more like FRE SH AVOCA DO. I’m not 100% certain, but I think they may have actually moved the SH further from FRE and toward AVOCADO a few times…and now they’ve finally just added another E.

After I posted it to Instagram, a friend on Tumblr pointed out that the “Free Shavocado” tag already exists. I found a short video of the sign in its “FRE SH AVOCA DO” state, narrated by someone giggling and saying, “Come to Del Taco! They have free sha-VA-ca-doo!” Even funnier: The restaurant updated the corporate sign between then and now without correcting the spacing.

Or maybe that’s when they decided to “fix” the spelling instead!

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