An 11-year-old Detroit boy filed a $1 million lawsuit against McDonald's on July 2 after he allegedly ate part of a cheeseburger infested with maggots. The kid obviously missed the commercials for the all-new Chicken McMaggots.
LOVE AND ROCKETS Fireworks of assorted size and legality were being fired in all directions of west Costa Mesa just after nightfall on July 4, so we sought cover in a ritzier Mesa Verde neighborhood. Suddenly, Osama Bin Laden's leftover rockets were exploding overhead. We headed to Santa Ana, one of the few other OC cities to allow fireworks sales. An endless barrage of what sounded like automatic-weapon fire startled us. Wait a minute—that's any night in Santa Ana! By about 11 p.m., the mortar rounds stopped and spent arsenals littered streets all over OC. Not to worry: rain fell the next morning and washed all those harmful chemical residues from sparklers, fountains and firecrackers into the storm drains. That means our coastal sea life is now feasting on them. Mmmm, tainted mussels! Don't even get us started on the harmful greenhouse gases emitted from each blast. As defenders of the right to blow stuff up will tell you, fireworks sales fund local charities, so SHUT YER YAPPER!
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE? The Orange County Register reported on July 6 that John Greiner, who was elected to the San Juan Capistrano City Council in November, has moved to San Diego County but is considering keeping his council seat. The OC Weekly has previously reported that Newport Beach City Councilman Gary Proctor lives in an $800,000 home in San Jose and Anaheim school trustee Don Garcia resides in a $920,000 Corona del Mar pad. Yet, as the Reggie noted, only an unsuccessful Yorba Linda City Council candidate has been indicted by the county grand jury for residing outside city limits.
CHANNEL-SURFIN' CONGRESSMAN When facing Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes, Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach), co-chairman of the Congressional Scouting Caucus and himself an Eagle Scout, obviously should have applied the first rule of scouting: be prepared. Appearing in a July 8 rebroadcast of a story that was first shown on April 1, Rohrabacher defended the Boy Scouts' exclusion of “avowed homosexuals.” “An adult male who is attracted to other males should not be out camping, as they—as their adult supervisor, going into the pup tents, sleeping overnight with them, washing off with them to—to teenage boys,” Rohrabacher, uh, explained. Stahl countered that the Scouts do not allow any adult to camp with children unless there is another adult present, forbid adults from sleeping in the same tents with kids, and certainly don't permit communal showering. She also pointed to FBI studies that show homosexuals are no more likely to molest boys than heterosexuals and that the largest database of child molesters in the U.S. shows that those who prey on boys are more than three times more likely to be heterosexual in their adult relationships than homosexual. Rohrabacher's witty comeback: “I've been in the Scouts.” That apparently wasn't an admission.
GOOD RIDDANCE Excuse us for failing to get all teary over the July 8 eviction of residents from those weathered old cottages at Crystal Cove, but would someone explain to us why it was okay for taxpayers to subsidize their exclusive beach lifestyles for so long? Those people should have been cleared out like cockroaches years ago.
CONFIDENTIAL TO T.V. IN C.M. You are absolutely right: when Clockwork commented last week on Junipero Serra High School dropping the team name “the Crusaders” because it offended Muslims, it was totally inappropriate for us to suggest “the Inquisitors.” Your choices for the new Catholic school opening in San Juan Capistrano are much better: the Missionaries, the Fightin' Franciscans or the Junipero Serra Viral Infectors—or, to be cool, “the Pox.”
Illustration by Bob Aul
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.