Interests

It's been more than two years since that memorable morning in July 2008, when I awoke from a late night, rubbing the sleep from my eyes to walk outside and retrieve my Daily Pilot from the driveway. With coffee in hand, my first glance caused blood to rise in my face and my eyes to pop wide open in their sockets. There I was staring at "myself" in black and white – a caricature of me as a child standing on a soap box, pathetically crying while two men, lurking behind, shake hands over a document titled "Fair Rehab Deal.

COSTA MESA — Community activists who worked to preserve the Orange County Fairgrounds and supported the city's efforts to purchase the land now say they don't believe that Costa Mesa's deal with a real estate company to finance and operate the land is in the public's interest. "We got started in the first place not only to have the public hold title, a piece of paper, we wanted openness and transparency and the community to be involved," said former Mayor Sandy Genis, president of the Orange County Fairgrounds Preservation Society.

Morgan Boukather, a 6-foot-2 opposite who will be a senior in the fall at Corona del Mar High, has verbally committed to play volleyball at Stanford, her mother, Rebecca, said in an e-mail Saturday. Boukather, a Daily Pilot Dream Team selection, received several offers. She narrowed her choices to Duke, UCLA and the Cardinal. But a full-ride scholarship to play at Stanford was too hard to pass up for Boukather, who has wanted to attend the university since she was a child. Boukather, who can also play outside hitter, helped lead the Sea Kings to their fourth straight Pacific Coast League championship last season.

It was 3-year-old Heidi Haas who would help catch the man who shot and killed her mother, putting five bullets in her back in the middle of their Costa Mesa living room on March 2, 1960, as the preschooler looked on. ?A bad man hurt mommie and drove away in a white car,? Heidi told Costa Mesa police after the witnessing shooting, the Los Angeles Times reported in an article dated March 6, 1960. An intruder talked himself into 29-year-old homemaker Nancy Haas? house on Princeton Drive the day of the shooting.

Recent caps on incoming freshmen and a spike in tuition costs across the University of California and California State University systems have left the state’s 112 community colleges to absorb greater numbers of students. That includes Orange Coast College. At OCC last week, Senior Day drew more than 4,000 high school seniors — nearly double last year’s number, college officials said Friday. The Costa Mesa campus was so packed that the nearby parking lot at the Orange County Fairgrounds was full, said OCC spokeswoman Mary Rhoda.

State Sen. Mimi Walters (R-Laguna Hills) is recusing herself from voting on Assembly Bill 1590, which aims to rescind an earlier assembly bill that authorized the sale of the Orange County Fairgrounds. Walters said she wouldn’t take part in the assembly vote because her husband, David Walters, had been approached by a potential fairgrounds buyer. The potential buyer asked David Walters, who works in the financial industry, to help him find investors and funds to buy the fairgrounds from the state.

Orange County Treasurer Chriss Street is recommending that the county enter into a Joint Powers Agreement with the city of Costa Mesa to buy the Orange County Fairgrounds. In an interview Friday, Street said that a joint agreement between the county and city would work to benefit the people of Orange County, while also ensuring transparency. “If it was bought under this scenario, the board would be subject to transparency requirements [under] the Brown Act,” Street said, adding that it’s what people have been asking for. Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors is scheduled to hold a special closed-session meeting Tuesday with its real estate property negotiator to discuss the terms of the request for proposal issued by the state for the sale of the fairgrounds.

The leaders of the union representing Costa Mesa’s firefighters fired back at critics of its new contract, saying that increasing pension benefits is in the city’s best interest, not the firefighters’. As part of the city’s recent deal with the union, firefighters will be able to retire with 3% of their annual pay for every year they worked starting at age 50, instead of age 55, which it used to be. For instance, a firefighter who starts at age 20 can now retire at age 50, after 30 years of service, and get 90% of his or her pay (the maximum allowed)

Just a few hours before the first performance of the musical “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, Tristen Egdorf — a Newport Beach 8-year-old with a part in the show — had not been to a single rehearsal. He didn’t know the choreography, hadn’t met the other cast members and had never even been in a professional musical production before, yet he wasn’t nervous at all. The musical about a magical flying car and the villains who try to thwart it is touring the country from its launch point in New York City.

Christian Bale leaves the bat cave for the year 2018 in “Terminator Salvation,” a noisy and unnecessary addition to the movie franchise that began way back in 1984 when our governor was still an actor and our state was solvent. Director McG keeps the action fast, furious and loud — no chance of falling asleep here in spite of plodding dialogue (“hold on!”) and Bale as a lackluster John Connor. It takes more than a raspy voice or a cape to make an interesting performance.