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Saturday, July 31, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Are property tax values cut in your city? Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach?
July 29th, 2010, 9:30 am by Jeff Collins
Did home values fall this year in your city?
Chances are they did.
Nineteen of Orange County’s 34 cities had decreases in taxable property values this year, meaning that tax revenues owed to those towns also will be less in the 2010-11 tax year, the Orange County Assessor’s Office has reported.
The declines are based in the main on falling real estate values, with most of that being homes.
Santa Ana saw property values go down the most. The total value of real estate (plus a much smaller amount of “personal property” like boats, planes and business property) fell 3.03% in that city, from $20.5 billion last year to $19.8 billion this year.
The county’s assessment of taxable property values are used to determine how much taxes are owed by individual property owners.
In addition, the Assessor’s Office reported:
- Ten cities had value drops of 1% or more, including: Laguna Woods (-2.64%), Laguna Hills (-2.3%), Costa Mesa (-2.17%), Orange (-1.92%), Lake Forest (-1.56%), San Clemente (-1.53%), Garden Grove (-1.45%), Irvine (-1.45%) and Stanton (-1.43%).
- Meanwhile, 15 other cities saw the value of their property go up.
- Fountain Valley had the biggest property value increase, up 3.13% from the 2009-10 tax year, up from $6.8 billion to nearly $7 billion this year.
- Just four cities had value gains of 1% or more. In addition to Fountain Valley, they include Laguna Beach (1.89%), Los Alamitos (1.65%) and Westminster (1.22%).
- Irvine has the highest property value total in the county. That city has 63,397 parcels of land with a total assessed value of $46.5 billion this year.
- Newport Beach is second. Even though it has more parcels — 69,498 — its value was $38.8 billion.
- Anaheim has the county’s third highest value, with 76,529 parcels assessed at $34.4 billion.
- Number four was Huntington Beach, with 62,561 parcels assessed at $28.4 billion.
- Santa Ana, O.C.’s most populous city, has fewer parcels: 56,081. The city had the county’s fifth-highest property value total at $19.9 billion.
Countywide, property values fell 0.48%, from $419 billion to $417 billion this year.
Read the rest of this post to see a city-by-city breakdown. Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Trash day in Sydney: Recycled Plastiki completes 8,300-mile eco-voyage
Trash day in Sydney: Recycled Plastiki completes 8,300-mile eco-voyage
It’s easy to root for Plastiki, the plucky plastic catamaran made from thousands of recycled bottles, which arrived Monday in Australia, sailing past the Sydney Opera House, after finishing its mission to draw attention to all the swirling plastic polluting our oceans. The vessel had set out in March from San Francisco to tour the enormous marine trash circle known as the “great Pacific garbage patch,” according to media reports. (My favorite headline was from the Toronto Globe and Mail: “Plastiki a Message in 12,500 Bottles.”)
The eco-boat made it to Australia with a mostly British six-member crew led by banking heir David de Rothschild, who will display the vessel and speak Wednesday night at the Sydney Institute of Marine Science. The 8,300-mile journey was inspired in part by the Kon-Tiki, the raft that Thor Heyerdahl sailed across the Pacific in 1947 as part of his research on Polynesian migration routes.
The Plastiki crew, which varied during the journey, included documentary filmmaker Vern Moen of Long Beach; a group from National Geographic that also filmed the sailing; and expedition diver Olav Heyerdahl, a civil engineer and grandson of Thor Heyerdahl.
You can visit Plastiki’s website to track every aspect of this journey, from the design feat that kept the Plastiki afloat to videos of Pacific storms that the crew encountered.
—Mary Forgione, Los Angeles Times Daily Travel & Deal blogger
Photo (top):
The Plastiki catamaran sails into Sydney Harbor. Credit: www.plastiki.com
Photo (bottom): Skipper Jo Royle, left, and David de Rothschild arrive in Australia on Monday. Credit: www.plastiki.com
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Monday, July 26, 2010
Tiny Eye Telescope Brings Back A World Of Sight
| View and comment on NPR.org | |
| The Food and Drug Administration has approved a new treatment that could help millions of older adults who are nearly blinded by macular degeneration. It’s a miniature telescope implanted directly into the eye that magnifies images to more than twice their size. Findings from the clinical trials show that the telescope does improve vision for the majority of patients. Still, there are some concerns about corneal damage, since the telescope is relatively large inside the eye. And the population who might benefit from the new device is somewhat limited. The treatment doesn't work for those who have had cataract surgery. And for those who catch the disease early on, there may be better options. But for 80-year-old Marian Orr, the implanted telescope was just what she needed. Orr has a big family: five children, eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. That means lots of graduations, weddings and school events. In other words, lots to see. So when Orr's vision began to decline in her mid 70s, she got worried. Both her father and uncle went blind in their 60s, and she knew macular degeneration was often inherited. Orr says her sight gradually diminished. It got to the point "where I couldn't see. If I looked at you straight on, I couldn't see your face, could only see your head," she says. "I couldn't see the eyes and the nose. I could just see the round head that was all, sort of like a halo was all over it." This blurred vision is pretty typical of macular degeneration. Orr couldn't see things in a store. Her daughter took her grocery shopping. Orr couldn't identify pots, pans and dishes in her kitchen. And the outdoors became an unfamiliar, startling place. Testing The Tiny Telescope So when Orr's cousin read about an experimental treatment for macular degeneration, Orr quickly got in touch with one of the researchers, had some basic tests, and before she knew it, she was one of more than 200 patients to have an experimental miniature telescope implanted in her eye. Dr. Kathryn A. Colby, ophthalmic surgeon at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston and assistant professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, calls the pea-sized technology a true "breakthrough" that could help millions of patients who, until now, have had no treatment options. Colby was one of the principal investigators in the clinical trials of the miniature telescopes. They were conducted at 28 leading ophthalmic centers and included 219 patients with end-stage, age-related macular degeneration. She was not Orr's doctor. .......http://www.google.com/ig?refresh=1#max124 |
Sunday, July 25, 2010
INTERVIEW: KELLY SLATER
| Nine-time world champ speaks out on the post-Tahiti tour restructuring By: Craig Ritchie Photos: Alan van Gysen |
| During the Billbong Pro J-Bay, much of the murmurings from the competitors' area related to concerns about the restructuring of the ASP World Tour after Tahiti. Everyone and their dog has an opinion about cutting down the number of surfers from 45 to 32. As well they should -- it's been the Top 45 since 1992. Careers will be affected. Livelihoods threatened. Contests shortened. A big deal. Shortly after his early-round bow out at Jeffreys Bay, we caught up with Mr. Robert Kelly Slater, the nine-time world champ who started competing on tour and winning world titles in 1992, to get his thoughts on the matter. |
| Surfline: I'm sure for you, right at the top of the ratings, it doesn't make a big difference in terms of staying on tour, but we'd like to ask you about what you think about the implications this has for the overall talent pool. There are already so many great surfers who aren't making it on tour at this stage, and now we're cutting out another 16 of them. Guys have got some pretty mixed opinions about this, but where do you stand? Kelly Slater: My opinion hasn't changed in years: I think we have too many guys on tour. The best surfing inevitably comes from the quarterfinals on. That's when the best guys do their thing. I almost feel like with the second round, people actually just want the contest to get going -- the surfers included. But, you know, I think what we have is... it's hard to say because there's obviously a lot of depth, and there's a lot of guys who aren't on tour that I'd like to see on tour, and trimming the number down is going to make that even harder for a guy who is generally a great freesurfer. We're probably going to lose a couple of really great surfers this year -- guys who are rookies or guys who are trying to get their feet wet and loosen up. So instead of them feeling like they can perform, they're just trying to get to that point to save themselves for the halfway mark and then save themselves again at the end of the year. So it's a lot of stress for them.Well, you already had to be in the top 16 or maybe the top 20 to feel remotely safe, and now it's just become even harder. Yeah, but, you know, that being said, if you win four heats you're going to make it.What do you mean, like in one event? No, over the course of a year! Even if you just win one heat per contest, more likely than not you're going to make the cut. And if you can't win one heat per contest...then what are you doing? "If you can't win one heat per contest...then what are you doing?" --KS Well, I don't know if you shouldn't be there, but there's something blocking you from performing at your best. Every guy at this tour should be able to, at one point or another, win a couple heats in a contest because that's the level and that's the depth that we have. I've watched a lot of good surfers, like obviously Dusty, guys like Nate Yeomans and the Gudauskas brothers, those guys have tended to have really tough draws this year, so that's prohibitive for rookies, obviously. That makes it harder and I'm not sure if that's the fairest thing, but I don't know how else we would do it. There are some proposals for other ways to seed based on past results and you might have a top seed who hasn't done well at a past event and if that's the case, then maybe they should be seeded lower and the lowest guy wouldn't have to necessarily get that guy -- he'd draw a middle guy. It's tough, but at the end of the day we're trying to logistically trim down our events so that we can use three days in an event. I don't know if there's another way to do that and also allow everyone to have enough time to surf. So it's a tricky thing. All of us are going to lose friends on tour and guys that we feel are more than worthy to be on this tour, but I have felt for years that we have too many guys just based on the conditions we are forced to surf in when a swell dies.It leaves very little room for error, though. You get a tough draw, you have a bad heat, you maybe get an injury and miss one or two events. It's as though now, so much has to go right -- and by reducing the numbers it's almost like you can't afford for anything to go wrong. Now, it's so top heavy. The guys that come in early, the top seeds, they go up against the wildcards and the lower ranks, and it almost seems like the guys who are up there are secure and they can stay -- and you're going to see a lot of switching around the bottom the whole time. So these lower-ranked guys end up working twice as hard because they're also trying to fill up their points with 'QS results. It's a tough answer. There's no easy answer. But at the end of the day it's one out of four guys that goes, and if the cream rises to the top - and that is an 'if,' because as you said, there are hard draws and guys are going to have bad breaks or injuries or confidence issues, or maybe they're not great at those breaks, Like, for instance, we have a lot of rights and there's a bunch of goofies on tour and maybe it doesn't favour those guys. Yeomans surfed great here at J-Bay, and Bobby from what I saw, but Snapper doesn't really favor backsiders and Bells doesn't really favor goofyfoots. I'm not so sure about Brazil. I don't think the waves in Brazil favoured anyone -- they were just really hard to surf. It's hard man, I don't wish to see anyone go, but I also feel there are too many guys on tour. Look, surfing is the product of the ASP and in order to have the best product you have to have a way to display that in the most fair way. Who knows what the perfect answer is? Is this just a very experimental stage? The ASP has been jumping stuff around since the late '80s or early '90s. Well, really since about '91, '92, when I got on tour. The first year I got on tour we had a best-of-three situation, where you'd go out and surf three three-man heats and the top sixteen out of those results ended up going through to the round before the quarters. It was a really bizarre thing. We only had that for two events and basically if you lose either of your first two heats there was basically no way you were going to make it into that 16 bracket, which definitely is unfair to the lower draw guys. Now we're bouncing ideas around and we're trying to come up with the best of the ones that get thrown around. But you're pretty set that less surfers, more days, premium surfing -- that's the way to go. I think it's proven to be, historically. Even at Teauhupoo, we've had two or three years that have been miserable and had we had one less day of surfing, we would have had good waves for everybody and it's just that half a day extra that we needed to trim off, so it really comes down to a timing issue. It's not so much trying to get rid of people, it's just timing to run the event. You know, if we were able to maybe use the overlap heats at every event, then we could trim a half day off every contest no problem. We could probably even trim a day and a bit of each contest. But, the surfers are reluctant to do that because guys in different heats could mess with each other if they wanted to. There could be problems. And if a guys doing terrible and going to lose a heat and he messes with a guy in another heat, how do we rectify that? How do you make that fair? So, I dunno, we're just trying to do the best we can with the options we brainstorm out of ourselves.How would this affect wildcards? We'd still have the same number of wildcards -- three or four. I think it's four now. I think it would be 32 plus four guys -- one ASP and three wildcards. In fact, the numbers get better for the wildcards because there's more wildcards compared to the number of guys on tour. |
Saturday, July 24, 2010
After 40 years, Newport Coast nears completion
NEWPORT BEACH – After more than 40 years, work on the community of Newport Coast is nearly finished, leaving perhaps the best example of Irvine Co. efforts to mold much of Orange County into a master-planned paradise.
With more than 95 percent of the lots sold, the final product is a miniature city on a hill, boasting more than 2,500 homes, 36 holes of ocean-view golf, many miles of hiking trails, a long strand of beach, luxury timeshares, fine-dining restaurants and a resort where nightly rates start at $695.
A structure announcing entry into the community of Newport Coast is located at Newport Coast Dr. and East Coast Highway.
H. LORREN AU JR., THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
"Newport Coast has exceeded our expectations," said Rob Elliott, a senior vice president at the Irvine Co. "When we started the planning for this community, we knew that we would be working with some of the best remaining coastal land in California, and had an obligation to create not only a magnificent coastal community, but also one that respected the value of open-space preservation for habitat and recreation."
More so than any of the firm's developments, Newport Coast was conceived with the belief that perfection is possible, if not easily affordable. Pleasantville meets Bel Air.
"I worry a little bit that my kids are getting a jaded look at how people really live in America," said resident Rick Russell, a father of two who works in real estate. "I took them up to properties in Long Beach, and they asked me, 'Do people really live here?'"
Newport Coast's image as a bubble is enhanced by more than the wealth of its inhabitants. Towering arches at the main entrance off Pacific Coast Highway, for example, are favorite targets of populist sneering. "Icons of superficiality," a Register columnist declared in 2000.
There's also the fact that every community in Newport Coast is gated, and there are even gated communities within gated communities.
"Most of these individuals are very, very, very private individuals," says Thomas G. Veal, an Irvine Co. vice president. "These are high net-worth individuals, so they are very concerned about security."
The irony is, the creation of the ultra-exclusive enclave gave all of Orange County access to near-pristine real estate, with the Irvine Co. selling the land that would become Crystal Cove State Park as part of its effort to get approval for Newport Coast.
"I think it's fantastic that they made this reserve – that's huge," said resident Mike Kollen. "The rest of Orange County is wall-to-wall homes."
(Click the Graphics tab above to see the changes since 1994).
It should be noted that the Irvine Co.'s benevolence materialized after it was hit with lawsuits that threatened to stall the development.
In the mid-1960s, when company planners hopped around the Mediterranean for architectural inspiration, the concept called for 50,000 dwellings in what was then known as the Irvine Coast.
Later iterations of the plan included 10-story office towers and a quartet of hotels, but in the end, about 80 percent of Newport Coast's nearly 10,000 acres was preserved as open space.
"It would have been much worse" without pushback from environmental groups, said Fern Pirkle of Friends of the Newport Coast, which led a pair of court challenges.
Newport Coast broke ground in 1990, and as it developed, the area was populated by significant numbers of well-to-do minorities, a contrast to the populace of Newport Beach, which eventually annexed the development.
Newport Coast is about 68 percent white, while the rest of Newport Beach is more than 90 percent white, according to estimates by demographics analysis firm Claritas.
"The ethnicity in the schools is much more diverse," said Russell, whose wife is Persian and who moved to the community from Corona del Mar.
"It's an eclectic mix up here," added John McMonigle, one of Orange County's more prominent real estate agents. "I wouldn't call it a melting pot, but there's an eclectic mix of people from around the world."
Celebrities also call Newport Coast home, including author Dean Koontz, tech-billionaire Henry T. Nicholas and future NBA hall-of-famer Kobe Bryant.
The type of buyer is unique, too. Whereas some spend millions to be neighbors with shirtless frat boys and other party animals in West Newport, the homeowner in Newport Coast will find a carefully staged environment where flower gardens are symmetrical, and even the gardeners are nicely dressed.
"I refer to this as being very civilized," McMonigle said.
And very expensive. An empty lot in Crystal Cove can sell for $15 million, and a recent glance at listings found three dozen Newport Coast homes with asking prices above $5 million, including the $57 million Villa del Lago, which features a lake, equestrian stables and a wine cave.
That's not to say your average upper-middle-class professional can't get behind the gates, as there are a good number of townhomes in the $500,000-$750,000 range.
Some condos, such as the one owned by resident Joni Parenti, have city lights views that, in her words, "look better at night than the ocean."
The appeal of the Irvine Co.'s master-planning masterpiece is simple, Parenti suggested, and before setting out on the Pacific Ridge Trail, she gestured to the sweeping canyons, the immaculate mansions, the impossibly green grass at Coastal Peak Park.
"We love it up here," she said. "I mean, look around."
http://www.ocregister.com/news/newport-259130-coast-irvine.html
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Monday, July 19, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Beach town home sales swoon
While the affordable slice of the housing market enjoyed a sales boost from an expiring federal tax credit, Orange County’s beach communities had falling sales activity as the June 30 tax-break deadline arrived. (Then it was extended to Sept. 30.)
In June, DataQuick shows 553 homes sold in 17 Orange County beach cities ZIP codes — off 3% from May and just up 5% from a year ago. In May, beach homebuying was running 40% above a year ago.
Now in beach towns where the median selling price if $685,000 — up only 1.4% vs. a year ago — a tax break of up to $8,000 is no market mover. Still, in today’s climate, anything should help. But as beach sales fell 3% from May to June as the rest of the market saw sales rise by 7%.
Our region-by-region analysis of homebuying also shows …
- 776 homes selling in Orange County’s north-inland ZIP codes in this most recent period, +16% from a year ago. Median selling price? $462,500 in these 22 ZIPs. This most recent median price change was +2.0% vs. a year ago.
- Mid-county ZIPs — median selling price $350,000 – had 924 sales, -7% from a year ago. In these 25 ZIPs, the freshets median price change was +10.4% vs. a year ago.
- Combined, total homes sales in ZIPs in the north and mid-section of Orange County were +2.2% vs. a year ago as homebuying the rest of the county ran +29.1% vs. 12 months earlier.
- North/mid-county homes accounted for 51% of residences sold in the most recent period vs. 57% a year ago.
- South inland ZIPs — median selling price $480,000 – had 1,097 sales, +46% from a year ago. In these 19 ZIPs, the latest median price change was +1.0% vs. a year ago.
- All told, countywide sales were +16% vs. a year ago. The median selling price was +6% in the past year.
How did your neighborhood fare? Check our ZIP-by-ZIP data HERE!
Vote in our latest real estate poll HERE!
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Saturday, July 17, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Ben Franklin, Sustainable Thinker as Founding Father
I think everyone should pick a Founding Father to admire, and mine is Benjamin Franklin.
All others are great choices, but I select Franklin because he inspires me. Like Franklin, I think a key to sustainability is that successful business people have an obligation to be civic and community leaders. So, over this Fourth of July weekend, I thought I would share some impressive background on my favorite Founding Father, who is also a sustainable thinker, and see if I can inspire those in Newport Beach.
I thought we could start with an overview of Franklin’s achievements, as outlined by Jack Uldrich in “Leader to Leader.” Franklin did “walk the walk and leave a good trail”:
- As a businessman, Franklin built America’s first media conglomerate by setting up printing and newspaper franchises throughout the American Colonies.
- As a citizen, he formed America’s first public library, its first fire department, and its first nonsectarian university, the University of Pennsylvania.
- As a scientist, he discovered electricity–an achievement that made him world famous and helped drive the Industrial Revolution. He also produced the Franklin stove, invented bifocals, conceived of daylight savings time, and was the first person to chart the Gulf Stream.
- As an author, he wrote America’s first best-seller, “Poor Richard’s Almanac,” and his autobiography has been credited with influencing everything from the philanthropy of Andrew Carnegie to Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
- As a civil servant (postmaster general), he revolutionized the delivery of mail in America by establishing one-day service and home delivery.
- As a politician, Franklin had an active hand in creating the major documents of the Revolution–the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the alliance with France, and the peace treaty with England–and was the only Founding Father to sign all four.
- As a diplomat, he negotiated and secured America’s strategic alliance with France during the Revolutionary War–an act that arguably helped secure the eventual victory.
Franklin authored many quotes, and here’s a relevant one: “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought to equally have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when Truth and Error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.”
So, one of Franklin’s principle methods of learning was to engage others in spirited debate.
Another quote: “More is to be learned with the ear than the tongue.”
Others are: “Early to be, early to rise makes men healthy, wealthy and wise,” and “Sleep with dogs, wake up with fleas.”
Franklin was also interested in the practical application of scientific knowledge. The accent is on the practical, not the crazy, way-out-there stuff we sometimes hear about . And that he based much of his work on scientific knowledge is akin to my desire to make decisions based on facts and data and not the emotion-driven “logic” we often see on important issues in our community
I admire Franklin’s entrepreneurial risk taking, even if it gives my wife some pause. At age 17, after leaving home, he established his own print shop. Three years later, he was one of Pennsylvania’s most prominent printers and by 26 had established America’s first franchise system of printing shops. He formed an organization called the Junto, a group of tradesman and artisans who were intent on self-improvement. Tell me we can’t use more of that type of thinking and success.
So, as you can see, I have a broad definition of words like green and sustainability. Thank you for taking the time to learn a little about my favorite Founding Father in hopes that it will, in some shape or form, inspire you to get out there in our community and utilize your talents to make this a better place to live. Never have we needed more volunteers and public-private partnerships, at least not in my lifetime.
You can email Jim Fitzpatrick at JimFitzEco@gmail.com.
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
If your a big enough lunatic, you can put this on your bucket list: Pamplona's Running of the Bulls
To a man of spirit, cowardice and disaster coming together are far more bitter than death striking him unperceived at a time when he is full of courage and animated by the general hope.
--Pericles, Funeral Oration to the Athenian People during the Peloponnesian War
It’s six a.m. in Pamplona, the sky is turning from navy to pale blue with the approaching dawn, and the streets are already packed. In reality, many of the people who line the cobbled lanes of the old town have not been to bed yet. They’ve spent all night in the bars, clubs, and culinary societies of this ancient Roman city celebrating one of the patron saints of the region of Navarra, San Fermín.
Every year, roughly a million people flock to Iruña, as Pamplona is called in the native Basque language, for the festival of San Fermín, or Sanfermines. They join the native Navarros in an epic bacchanal that has taken place annually since 1591. The party kicked off yesterday at noon with the echoing explosion of a rocket and will continue, almost uninterrupted, for eight days and nights.
Almost.
Around seven o’clock every morning, a pregnant calm sweeps through the city as municipal workers set up thick wooden fences along a well trodden path that runs a half mile (850 meters) from holding pends in the northern part of the old town to the bull ring. Over the next hour, young men dressed like 99 percent of the people in the city this week--white pants, white shirt, red neckerchief, and red sash around the waist--gather in the street where, at eight o’clock sharp, they will run for their lives in front of six angry bulls. This is the encierro, the running of the bulls, which has been taking place since the 17th century, and remains one of the most thrilling spectacles in modern sport.
As the crowd gathers, I find myself standing beside Juan Jose Iturmende, a 65-year-old Navarro, born and bred in Pamplona but currently living in France. He returns every year to enjoy the festival. The men gathering at the start of the run, on the hill of Santo Domingo, are mostly younger than him, the majority between 20 to 40 years old. They each carry a copy of the local paper, the Diaro de Navarra, as a matter of tradition and as a last resort, explains Iturmende. “They fold it like an accordion and toss it behind them to distract the bull if they think they might get gored. It probably doesn’t do much good, but it’s a mental thing.”
Iturmende used to run, he says, but now he is too old, has one bad Achilles tendon, and no longer has the mindset to be able to do it. “Once you stop,” he says, with a certain wistfulness “it’s difficult to go back.”
He points out the older runners as they go by and greets them with hearty waves. They are men in their 50s and 60s, fitter and trimmer than most of the young Americans, Australians, and Englishmen that pack the streets. They stand tall and saunter toward the starting line, noticably relaxed beside the skittish youngsters. Many of them run every morning of the festival and have done so every year since they were teenagers.
“Why do they keep running?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Either you have it in here,” he says, pointing to his heart, “Or you don’t. Eighty percent of the guys on the street are irrelevant. They don’t feel it, they don’t live it. Most of them don’t even run in front of the bulls, they just stand to the side and watch the bulls pass.”
The men gather below the small statue of San Fermín set into a recess of the stone wall that borders one side of the street. At five till eight, they raise their papers in the air and sing:
A San Fermín pedimos por ser nuestro Patrón nos guíe en en encierro dándonos su bendición.
Which means, we ask San Fermín, because he’s our patron saint to guide us in the encierro giving us his blessing.Iturmende sings with them and as parts of the group break off to take up positions further down the street, he shouts encouragement. “Come on boys! Don’t get nervous now!”
The men sing their song two more times, then the clock strikes eight, another rocket explodes in the sky and Pamplona is quiet, except for the sound of approaching hooves. The bulls appear at the bottom of the 20 percent sprints down the street until a bull’s horn tickles the back of their red neckererchief and they are forced to dive to the side in order to avoid certain goring.
The bulls pass us in a matter of seconds, rush through the Plaza Consistorial, and hang a hard right at the Curve of Estafeta where the street is covered with an anti-slip chemical to keep bulls and runners from sliding out, as they often did before 2005. From there, it’s an all out sprint up Estafeta Street, an easy left on the Telephone Curve and down into the bull ring. Among the hundreds of people in the street, maybe 30 actually put themselves in front of the bulls.
And when they do, everyone from children peering through the bottoms of the wooden fences to the people drinking mimosas in balconies high over head seem to catch their breaths. Split seconds freeze in time as the impossibly sharp horns, unrestrained by such things as referees and penalties look sure to snag their quarry. In these moments, when death and happiness go hand in hand,* each runner realizes a certain larger than life glory that, in our age of professional athleticism, is otherwise unobtainable to the common man or woman. Then they dive to the cobble stones, or recede back into the crowd and become indistinguishable from their fellow runners. It is all over in 2 minutes and 23 seconds, pretty fast as these things go.
When I turn to Iturmende there are tears rolling down his cheeks. “I want to be out there,” he says his voice cracking. “I want to be out there running, but I can’t, I can’t...”
Either you have it in you or you don’t. And if you did at one time, if you really had it, but now have lost it, well, that’s a hard thing to let go.
*ibid, Thucydides, Pericles’ Funeral Oration
Friday, July 9, 2010
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Homes facing foreclosure in 16 cities
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Distressed homes market at May 2009 level
What’s your O.C. city’s share of distressed housing?
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Every week, homes throughout Orange County go to foreclosure auctions. The owners can be millions of dollars in debt, or owe just a few thousand.
Often these homes revert to the lenders, who eventually put them back on the market. Sometimes the homes are bought by investors and resold.
Foreclosures affect more than the homeowners involved. They can impact entire neighborhoods. At the very least, they can affect nearby home sales.
All of these homes and addresses have been listed in the public notices, as required by law.
Auction dates are frequently postponed and can be checked through trustee sale and phone numbers. Some auctions could be cancelled. Also, some homes may be on the market.
For homes, click on city:
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- Aliso Viejo
- Anaheim
- Coto de Caza
- Dana Point
- Irvine
- Huntington Beach
- Laguna Beach
- Laguna Hills
- Laguna Niguel
- Laguna Woods
- Lake Forest
- Mission Viejo
- Orange
- Rancho Santa Margarita
- Tustin
- Yorba Linda
Read more:
Trustee, trustor … what’s the difference? Click here for foreclosure terms and definitions
Top tips for buying investment properties
Note: There are foreclosures in other Orange County cities but so far we haven’t had enough available writers to regularly compile foreclosure information from them. We hope to add more in the future.
For a map with a partial list of other real estate listings around Orange County, click here
http://mortgage.ocregister.com/
.http://mortgage.ocregister.com/
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
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