Free Ride at the Getty
It seems people will do almost anything to get into the Getty Museum.
Since it opened a year ago, classes from all over Southern California have visited the complex during the two-hour window allotted for schoolchildren every morning Tuesdays through Thursdays. Demand was so high that more than 80,000 signups for class visits were received on the first day reservations were taken in September.
As a result of the special program, parents are taking a sudden interest in their children’s field trips, according to Getty Trust President and CEO Barry Munitz.
“We have broken all records for the ratio of volunteer parents on school field trips,” Munitz told members of Town Hall Los Angeles last week. “A 30-student class may have one or two parents accompanying them to the zoo, but they have 60 parents accompanying them to the Getty. This is the way that grownups have discovered they can get here when the museum is closed to everybody else.”
Merry Christmas, Get Well Soon
Who knew that wrapping gifts could be hazardous to your health?
The number of patients experiencing symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome pain and numbness in the hands and wrists spikes during this time of year, according to the chief of staff at the Los Angeles Orthopedic Hospital, Dr. Charles Resnick. The reason? Gift wrappers who go wild during the holidays get repetitive motion injuries as they tie bow after bow. Most of the holiday-induced cases are temporary, but some are more serious.
Resnick warns that postal workers have yet another reason to be disgruntled: Handling the increased level of holiday mail makes them more prone to carpal tunnel problems.
Signs of Change
The more things change, the more they don’t always stay the same. Witness a sign atop the driveway at the Playboy Mansion West in Holmby Hills.
During Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner’s swinging bachelor days, it read, “Playmates at Play.” But when Hef married his second wife, Kimberley Conrad, and became the father of two sons, the sign warned there were “Children at Play.” Now that Hef is getting a divorce, the warning reads once again, “Playmates at Play.”
“One keeps one’s sense of humor during trials and tribulatons,” Hefner quipped.
ZZZZBest.com?
The trend of Internet-related companies filing for initial public offerings before posting any earnings has rankled many a Wall Street veteran. But it also annoys a more unlikely market observer: Barry Minkow.
Minkow was the whiz kid behind the ZZZZ Best carpet-cleaning company, a business he started in his parents’ Reseda garage at 16 and later took public. The company became a pyramid scheme that used faked financial documents, phony credit-card charges and other financial tomfoolery to lure investors crimes for which Minkow spent more than four years in prison.
Minkow, now a church pastor and radio talk show host in San Diego, said that if ZZZZ Best had been able to do in the ’80s what Internet companies are doing now, he wouldn’t have committed such crimes.
“If I thought I could take a company public without earnings, I wouldn’t have needed to lie,” said Minkow, 32. “They’ve taken the reason to lie away from the CEO who wants to take his company public. Now you don’t need earnings, you just need a good story.”
