Glass

Young Chang There was something about sand melting into clear goo and the goo being shaped like it was caramel and the caramel getting blown, literally, into beauty that intrigued Kent Kahlen more than 10 years ago. Until then, he was a self-proclaimed "typical youngster" who started and quit jobs in a pattern that showed he was still looking for his place in the world. Kahlen fell into glassblowing during a stint with chiropractics in 1988 (his back hurt, he went to see a chiropractor, he decided to be a chiropractor)

Glass blower Charlie Keeling doesn’t always know why he stays in the business. He compares glass blowing to the old story about a frog in a pot of boiling water. If the water is already hot, there is no way you are getting that frog in there. But if the water is cool when the frog goes in, when it heats up he won’t get out. It may be an appropriate comparison for a man who works at a fair famous for its fried frog legs. “Sometimes I see bubbles around my feet,” Keeling said of the difficulties in his business.

A Newport Beach parent found a sharp piece of glass in the sand at Muir Beach Circle Park Tuesday. This marks the fourth such incident in the city's parks. Similar glass shards were found twice in Buffalo Hills Park at the corner of Port Margate Place and Port Charles Place on May 2 and at Cliff Drive Park on April 27, when a police volunteer found the glass wedged between slats of a park bench. Barbara Foster had taken her children to the park on Muir Beach Circle on Tuesday when she found the one-inch shard in the sand next to the monkey bars, according to the police report.

Three people were arrested Wednesday night after one stole a bottle of high-end vodka from a Ralphs on Harbor Boulevard, Costa Mesa police said. Michael Hachquet, 22, of Coto de Caza; Dillon Kuenzli, 20, of Costa Mesa; and Angelene Calvert, 19, of Costa Mesa, were arrested just after 10 p.m. as they arrived at Calvert’s apartment in the 2700 block of Peterson Place. At about 9 p.m., the three drove to the grocery store, 380 E. 17th St., Glass said. One walked in, grabbed a $30 bottle of Swedish Level Vodka, hid it, then ran out, he said.

It was a loud bang followed by the sound of crumbling glass. And then it happened. Gusts of wind bellowed into my car and little pieces of glass flew in the air drifting dangerously in my direction. Driving to work on the Costa Mesa Freeway, I tried to slow down and figure out what had just happened. I saw the right side rear window of my Honda Civic quickly disintegrating -- like somebody had hit it with a sledgehammer. My husband had lovingly polished that glass with Windex over the weekend.

Laguna Beach prides itself on being an artist colony, where a spectrum of art genres thrive -- but who knew the performance art of beer pouring could fit into that category? This art form will be featured at 5 p.m. Tuesday when Brussels Bistro owner Alain Pauwels and manager John John McEvilly, both Belgium natives, compete to see who has perfected the art of beer pouring. They will represent Laguna Beach in the Orange County qualifier for the Stella Artois World Draught Master Competition.

Lolita Harper The arraignment of a Costa Mesa man arrested on suspicion of vehicular manslaughter and drunk driving after a fatal accident outside the Pierce Street Annex bar last week was postponed until March 19. Language barriers snagged the usually swift arraignment process Tuesday, officials said. Pawel Stanislaw Wiater, who was allegedly driving the Mitsubishi Eclipse that struck two men on Friday, killing one of them, primarily spoke Polish, officials said.

Answer: Dining. Question: What’s something you wouldn’t find on my top 10 list of things I would enjoy doing in the dark? Surprisingly, though, I had a very enjoyable — and enlightening — experience Friday evening as a guest at the “Dining in the Dark” event hosted by the Orange County chapter of the Foundation Fighting Blindness at the Fairmont Hotel in Newport Beach. More than 300 people were assembled in the ballroom. The tables, spaced far enough apart for our vision-impaired servers to navigate the room, were set for eight people, with silverware, glasses, wine bottles and bread baskets.

Corona del Mar High School has six stylish jewels in its crown for this year's Home Tour. The assortment is tremendous, everything from a European farmhouse with a carriage house to a secluded Asian retreat with an infinity-edged pool. I was lucky enough to get a sneak peak at three of this year's selections. My guides were the chairwomen themselves, Lynn McAlister and Laura Lee Smith. Talk about the royal treatment, I definitely felt like a queen for the morning.

COSTA MESA — Renowned pianist Ellis Hall will play at a charitable event benefiting the Mercy House this weekend at the OC Mart Mix. "He's really great," Allison Harvey, organization development director, said of the blind musician. "He gets a really good feel with the crowd and is just an incredibly soulful, talented musician. " The event aims to raise awareness of the Santa Ana-based nonprofit that helps the homeless as well as raising awareness of homelessness countywide.

COSTA MESA — Renowned American composer Philip Glass is the subject of the Pacific Symphony's annual American Composers Festival (ACF), which begins Thursday night in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa. The festival ends Monday at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts' Samueli Theater, with Glass playing his own works on piano. ACF, a symphony event since 2000, focuses on how Glass was influenced by India's music and philosophy. It is part of the first-ever Southern California Philip Glass Festival, which began Feb. 27 and runs through March 27 and is in partnership with the Long Beach Opera and the Costa Mesa-based Pacific Symphony.

COSTA MESA — An artist like Karlin Meehan knows that good art should pop out and transform the way people see the world around them. Which is why she hangs a pair of 3-D glasses alongside her vibrant, multi-dimensional paintings. "It's a great trick to get people to really engage with the art who aren't necessarily art-oriented," said the Newport Beach resident, who is a patent paralegal by day and an aspiring artist by night. Meehan, 25, began experimenting about a year ago with different paint types and layering techniques to achieve a three-dimensional effect.

OneHope, a nonprofit wine company based in Newport Beach, recently announced a new partnership with Robert Mondavi Jr. of the renowned wine-making family. Until the partnership with Mondavi, OneHope was working with David Elliott, formerly of the Healdsburg, Calif.-based winery Lancaster Estate. OneHope Chief Executive Jake Kloberdanz is looking forward to the new relationship with Mondavi. "The (Mondavi) name has a rich tradition in the wine industry," he said. "All the wines are taking a step up. That has always been our goal … to deliver in terms of quality.

Christina Levasheff knew there was something terribly wrong when her 2-year-old son Judson fell down for no reason at the park in front of her Costa Mesa home on day in the spring of 2007. “There was nothing to trip him. I remember thinking ‘there’s something off; something is not quite right here,” she said. That spring day in the park was the beginning of Judson’s five-month battle with a debilitating genetic disease that would eventually rob him of his ability to see, walk, talk, and even breathe.

A Costa Mesa homeless man who has filed a claim against the city of Newport Beach doesn’t want any monetary compensation after aluminum cans and other recyclables he had collected were snatched from a local beach. He just wants a note from a police officer stating he can comb through trash cans for plastic and glass. Eugene Edward Howard III filed a claim last week that three Newport Beach Police officers were called to the front steps of City Hall, 3300 Newport Blvd.

Friends of late Newport Beach pro-surfer Gary Edgar will release 45 doves on the beach today to strains of the Bob Marley song “Three Little Birds.” A fixture in Newport’s surfing community since the late ’70s, Gary Edgar, 45, was listening to the song when he died last week after battling lung cancer. “ Don’t worry about a thing / ‘Cause every little thing gonna be all right ,” the song goes. Together with his brother, Ron Edgar, the identical twins were known in local surfing circles as “the Shredgars.

Costa Mesa housing developer Steve Jones is all about recycling. He fashioned his business cards from a deck of playing cards with a sticker on one side advertising his housing business, Bettershelter. The eco-friendly landscaping for Bettershelter’s latest venture, a quasi-village of 12 bungalows in Eastside Costa Mesa, was just going into the ground Wednesday. Bettershelter is hosting a launch party at 6 tonight for 12@Elden, 2381 Elden Ave., a remodeled condominium complex targeted at the young, cool and environmentally conscious home buyer.

In his recent column (“Let’s take back our country,” July 3 ) Joseph Bell yearns for the country he came home to after World War II. The country he remembers does not exactly conform to reality. At that time, immorality was not running rampant as it is now. Cohabitation before marriage was not the order of the day. The culture was not coarsened as it is today. Respect for human life still existed. The courts were not legislating from the bench. People still had manners.

Glass blower Charlie Keeling doesn’t always know why he stays in the business. He compares glass blowing to the old story about a frog in a pot of boiling water. If the water is already hot, there is no way you are getting that frog in there. But if the water is cool when the frog goes in, when it heats up he won’t get out. It may be an appropriate comparison for a man who works at a fair famous for its fried frog legs. “Sometimes I see bubbles around my feet,” Keeling said of the difficulties in his business.