“Grunion runs have ended for this season.”

So declares the Los Angeles Times’ latest “Fish report.” The California Department of Fish and Game provides grunion porn:

Grunion leave the water at night to spawn on the beach in the spring and summer months two to six nights after the full and new moons. Spawning begins after high tide and continues for several hours. As a wave breaks on the beach, grunion swim as far up the slope as possible. The female

Those spawnin’ grunions.

arches her body and excavates the semifluid sand with her tail to create a nest. She twists her body and digs until she is half buried in the sand with her head sticking up. She then deposits her eggs in the nest. Males curve around the female and release milt. The milt flows down the female’s body until it reaches and fertilizes the eggs. As many as eight males may fertilize the eggs in a nest. After spawning, the males immediately retreat toward the water while the female twists free and returns with the next wave. While spawning may take only 30 seconds, some fish remain stranded on the beach for several minutes.

(For more grunion lore, see this article from LAist.)

There's text in them thar hills

There’s no real iconic building in Los Angeles. The city’s symbol, if one exists, is the “Hollywood” sign, built atop Mount Cahuenga in the 1920s to flog a real estate development. I first visited LA in the late 1970s, touring by city bus, always amazed when the sign would reveal itself to me. It still holds a sense of wonder, many years later: a graphical sign looming above the city.

During interleague play (over the weekend of the 20-22 May), Goff and I saw the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim take on the Dodgers in Dodger Stadium,

my first visit to the storied ballpark. The cheap seats were a lot more entertaining than attending an Orioles game at Camden Yards, especially for the surprisingly contentious rivalry: the largely Latino crowd (with entire families dressed in Dodger Blue or Angel Red—did the Angels’ brain trust know what they were doing when they tacked Bloods to the Dodgers’ Crips?) was vocal and good-natured, jeering the opposition throughout the tautly-played game.

When Eric Gagné—recently returned from the DL—entered the game in the ninth, the entire stadium blasted off. In the shadow of the left-field “THINK BLUE” sign, though, the Dodger offense would not prevail.

If you spend any time driving about the American west, one will come across monograms,

spelled-out in white stone, on mountains and hillsides above town. These signs largely date from 1905-1915, and were constructed by students from high schools and colleges to trumpet school and/or class spirit (the original is apparently Cal’s “Big ‘C’” on the Berkeley hills, as documented in 1988 by James Parsons in Landscape, v. 30, no. 1, and reprinted here).

For those who yearn for the east coast to get into the act, check out the Murrysville tree sign, a Pennsylvania herald fashioned by planting fir trees spelling out the town name in a clearing, a sign that's still visible.