Feelings

NEWPORT BEACH - This week is becoming quite memorable for Stewart Hagestad. The 21-year-old Big Canyon Country Club member qualified for his fourth United States Amateur championship at the Old Works Golf Course in Anaconda, Mont., on Monday. Then Saturday at his home course he shot a three-under-par 69 to move into second place after 54 holes of the Southern California Golf Assn. Amateur championship. Hagestad, playing the SCGA Amateur for the first time, is four-under (70-73-69 - 212)

Spoiled is how Chandler Harnish said he's felt during his first visit to California. Newport Beach tends to treat the last player selected in the NFL Draft every year like a No. 1 pick. This year, it's Harnish's turn to enjoy being Mr. Irrelevant. The quarterback didn't go No. 1 overall like Andrew Luck. Harnish went dead last, pick No. 253. The same team, the Indianapolis Colts, chose the first and last players in the draft. Harnish knows he isn't going to earn Luck-like money, but Newport Beach has showered the boy from Indiana like the top draft pick.

IRVINE - UC Irvine men's volleyball coach John Speraw spoke of the future during a celebration of the 2012 NCAA champion Anteaters in front of about 300 on campus on Tuesday. But whether that future will be at UCI, UCLA, or exclusively with the U.S. men's national team will not be known for at least a few weeks, said Speraw, whose 10-year tenure at the school has produced a legacy of three national titles in the last six seasons. UCI Chancellor Michael Drake addressed the crowd and saluted both the team and Speraw, whom he said he admires as much as any leader on campus.

If you feel like the ping of an email pulls you away from that deadline you're trying to reach, you're not alone. According to a recent UC Irvine study, employees who were constantly plugged in to email were less focused, multitasked more often and had a higher stress levels than their unplugged counterparts. Researchers cut off 13 employees — including a chemical engineer, materials scientist, psychologist, biologist and food technologist — from email for five days after monitoring their normal activity for three.

With the veil lifted, theater buffs were some of the first to see inside the renovated Port Theater during the building's sneak preview Saturday.  The historic Corona del Mar film house hosted filmmaking seminars during the annual Newport Beach Film Festival.  Audience members oohed and aahed as wood-paneled doors opened to the public for the first time since the theater closed in 1998. One of the few remaining single-screen cinemas, the Port was originally built in the 1950s.

The greatest deficiency of any bureaucracy is its inability to adapt to change or to anticipate problems. But that's what makes them bureaucracies. If they were able to adapt to change, or get ahead of a curve, we wouldn't call them bureaucracies; we'd call them Apple, Google or Disney. So it should come as no surprise that a significant portion of the search process for a new Newport-Mesa Unified schools superintendent includes a series of "community input" meetings that are supposed give us common folk a stake in the decision.

Sometimes we don't really know whom we've married until there is some challenge that reveals what we wish we'd known during courtship or we experience something that supports our good decision to have married that person. I learned all I needed to know about my wife, Cay, the day after we were married Feb. 22, 1987. It rained most of the day. Our outdoor wedding at El Adobe restaurant in San Juan Capistrano was moved inside to the ballroom. We didn't mind the rain because we'd planned a skiing honeymoon in Lake Tahoe and figured that showers here meant snow there.

NEWPORT BEACH — If the walls of this beachside jazz joint could talk, oh, the story they would tell. Those walls of The Blue Beet date back 100 years, but the music venue and restaurant near the Newport Pier over the years has been shaped by much more than just jazz and steaks, said Scott Lewis, the general manager. "It's been around for a long time, serving as a hangout in one way or another," said Lewis, 32, whose father bought the Blue Beet in the early 1980s, sold it, then re-purchased it in the late '90s.

I've been going to see Bill Medley since he and Bobby Hatfield did the club circuit back in the '60s. He was always my favorite Righteous Brother, though Bobby was a soulful inspiration too. But it was Bill's deep, velvety smooth and emotionally stirring bass-baritone, displayed most hauntingly in songs like "You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin,'" that sent me directly to heaven when, as a high school virgin, I stopped breathing and melted into the...

SANTA ANA - The chant at the end of the quarter break is not unfamiliar for the CdM Aquatics 18-and-under girls' team. It's the same as the one the Sea Kings use during the high school season. Senior-to-be Pippa Saunders instructs her teammates to yell "Corona win!" on the count of three. Fellow senior-to-be Alex Musselman counts to three before the whole team yells it, "Corona win!" But in terms of saves, the goalie Musselman definitely didn't stop at three Saturday afternoon at Foothill High.