Topline:
Fernando Valenzuela has died at the age of 63.
Why it matters: Valenzuela made a mark as one of the most popular Dodgers of all-time, drawing in Mexican and Mexican American fans who celebrated the pitching star as a transformative figure in Major League Baseball.
What the Dodgers said: "We profoundly mourn the passing of Fernando,” said Stan Kasten, the L.A. Dodgers president and chief executive. Kasten called Valenzuela "one of the most influential Dodgers ever."
Fernando Valenzuela has died at the age of 63. Valenzuela made a mark as one of the most popular Dodgers of all-time, drawing in Mexican and Mexican American fans who celebrated the pitching star as a transformative figure in Major League Baseball.
"We profoundly mourn the passing of Fernando,” said Stan Kasten, the L.A. Dodgers president and chief executive in a statement announcing Valenzuela's death. Kasten called Valenzuela: "One of the most influential Dodgers ever."
Read more: Thank you Fernando: How a Dodgers legend captured my childhood heart
Valenzuela, who'd worked as a Spanish-language Dodgers broadcaster for more than two decades, had announced earlier this month that he would step away from the booth for the remainder of the season to focus on his health.
When they announced Valenzuela was stepping back, the Dodgers did not make clear the nature of his health issues. The team said at the time: "He and his family truly appreciate the love and support of fans as he aims to return for the 2025 season, and they have asked for privacy during this time.''
Valenzuela made his mark as a pitcher, and debuted at 19 on the mound for the Dodgers. He was a storied member of the 1981 Fernandomania season. That year, Valenzuela won the National League Rookie of the Year honors and the Cy Young award.
Last August, Valenzuela's number 34 jersey was retired by the Dodgers in front of a packed stadium.
As part of the celebration, the pitcher with a vicious screwball who was dubbed "El Toro," threw out the first to pitch to Mike Scioscia, his longtime catcher.
Jaime Jarrin, another legendary broadcaster for the Dodgers, explained Valenzuela's significance when his number was retired.
“He became right away a hero for Latinos following baseball,” Jarrín told LAist. “The most important thing is that he created so many new baseball followers.…people from Mexico, from Central America, from South America that didn’t care at all about baseball.”
Go deeper: ‘Fernandomania’ Returns: The Dodgers are (finally) retiring Fernando Valenzuela’s number
Since 2003, Valenzuela had been a beloved broadcaster with the team. Valenzuela called games for the last 21 years.
That part of his career began after Valenzuela played 11 years, including as a pitcher for the 1981 team that beat the New York Yankees. The two teams, among the most iconic in the MLB, face off this Friday for the first time since then.
Valenzuela was the youngest of 12 children, born in Etchohuaquila, Sonora, Mexico.
Within a year of his 1980 Major League debut, Fernandomania set in after he went on to an unprecedented career-opening run, with complete games in his first eight career starts. Five of those games were shutouts and his ERA was a stunningly-low 0.50.
Valenzuela is survived by his wife, Linda, and four children, Fernando Jr., Ricardo, Linda and Maria Fernanda, and seven grandchildren.
His death prompted an outpouring of memories and support for his loved ones.
L.A. Mayor Karen Bass issued a statement calling Valenzuela a legend.
"To millions, Fernando Valenzuela was more than a baseball player," she said. "He was an icon that transcended the limits of hope and dreams. He was the voice of a game that we hold close in our hearts. His charisma was palpable, and his excellence was undeniable."
Gov. Gavin Newsom said Valenzuela's "profound impact on the game," will always be remembered, as well as "his spirit that embodied the California Dream."
Major League Baseball sent out a video documenting his rookie year.
Fernando Valenzuela captivated the baseball world in 1981. His unforgettable year included winning the NL Rookie of the Year, Cy Young Award & a World Series title.
— MLB Network (@MLBNetwork) October 23, 2024
We honor the memory of the Dodgers icon, who passed away Tuesday at age 63, with a look back at “Fernandomania.” pic.twitter.com/oAGgmddlFB
The Dodgers Spanish-language account on X (formerly Twitter) shared out a video of his final pitch in his first MLB start.
Fernandomanía por siempre. pic.twitter.com/uBeTXr5Zwm
— Los Dodgers (@LosDodgers) October 23, 2024
And tributes at an empty Dodger stadium after new of Valenzuela's death was shared by the team.
34 por siempre. 💙 pic.twitter.com/1Nziz1Aax6
— Los Dodgers (@LosDodgers) October 23, 2024
Topline:
Up to an inch of rain is expected today across Los Angeles County from the effects of Hurricane Marie hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, according to the National Weather Service.
Street flooding: Roadway flooding was reported this morning on the westbound 134 at the 5 Freeway, near Glendale and Griffith Park.
Coastal Flooding: All weekend, forecasters have warned of dangerous rip currents and an elevated risk of coastal flooding.
Flooding was reported yesterday in Seal Beach and Long Beach.
"We have quite a few reports already of waves up to 10 feet on some beaches — Zuma Beach especially, where we've gotten reports [of] strong rip currents," said Todd Hall, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
What's next: Hall said to expect more showers across L.A. County today. Tomorrow, he said isolated rain is expected, mostly in the mountains.
Topline:
Up to an inch of rain is expected today (Sunday, Sept. 6) across Los Angeles County from the effects of Hurricane Marie hundreds of miles away in the Pacific Ocean, according to the National Weather Service.
Street flooding: Roadway flooding was reported this morning on the westbound 134 Freeway at the 5, near Glendale and Griffith Park.
Coastal Flooding: All weekend, forecasters have warned of dangerous rip currents and an elevated risk of coastal flooding.
Flooding was reported yesterday in Seal Beach and Long Beach.
"We have quite a few reports already of waves up to 10 feet on some beaches — Zuma Beach especially, where we've gotten reports [of] strong rip currents," said Todd Hall, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
Advisories and closures:
What's next: Hall said to expect more showers across L.A. County throughout Sunday. On Monday, he said isolated rain is expected, mostly in the mountains.
Topline:
Final cleanup of the burned Boyle Heights warehouse was completed Saturday, according to Lineage Logistics and air quality officials.
Why it matters: On Aug. 29, Lineage removed an estimated 88 million pounds of rotting food waste from the site. It then faced a seven-day deadline to complete the final phase of cleanup, including debris removal, power washing and disinfecting of required areas.
What the company says: Lineage said workers have spent 210,000 hours on cleaning up the 491,000 square-foot site, which burned for about a week after igniting on July 7. The cost of cleanup, the company said, is more than $100 million.
Odor issues: Air quality officials from South Coast AQMD said odor complaints have fallen to fewer than 5 per day since food waste removal — instead of several hundred per day in July.
What's next: Lineage must continue to comply with an odor abatement order from South Coast AQMD, including sealing wastewater from the cleanup in a tank.
Lineage is also required to continue air monitoring around the warehouse.
Topline:
Hive & Hanger in Burbank sells vintage clothes and antique jewelry. Inside, you'll also find a pop-up Bee Museum.
What? The owner is Carrie Diazzz, a vintage maven turned urban apiarist. She admits with a smile two extra Zs at the end of her real last name are a homage to her beloved bees.
The backstory: When the store opened in 2020, it was originally all-vintage. The museum was opened almost a year ago after Diazzz became fascinated with the honeybee.
A sign on the front door says “Beekeeper owned,” and inside the Hive & Hanger store in Burbank, the layout is a mix of vintage clothes, antique jewelry and something rather unexpected: a pop-up Bee Museum.
The owner is Carrie Diazzz, a vintage maven turned urban apiarist. She admits with a smile two extra Zs at the end of her real last name are a homage to her beloved bees.
When the store opened in 2020, it was originally all-vintage. “I was not looking to change careers,” she said, but after taking a two-hour beekeeping experience course, she was hooked.
“I don’t like dirt, and I don't like bugs. I'm a heels and lipstick, nails, kind of person,” she said. “There's just something magical about the honeybee. The more you know, the more you want to know.”
That prompted her to pursue a bee master certification at UC Davis. She collaborated with Elina Niño at the university’s Bee Lab to curate information and research to bring her pop-up Bee Museum to life almost a year ago.
There’s a Bee 101 explainer by the front door, which shows the differences between bees and wasps, and fun touches like pop songs containing the word “Honey,” and a list of Noteworthy Beekeepers including Aristotle, Benjamin Franklin, Leo Tolstoy, Emily Dickinson, Angelina Jolie and Sherlock Holmes.
One long-standing myth is that honeybees are stingers. “People always ask me how often I get stung, but I don’t wear gloves, and I don’t use smoke, and it very rarely happens. And honeybees die after they sting, as opposed to wasps, who can sting repeatedly,” she said.
Most arresting is a floor-to-ceiling collage series of framed model fruits, vegetables, nuts and berries, all of which the honeybee has a role in pollinating. Beside that is an exhibit on pesticides, one of the insect's biggest threats. Pieces of dried honeycomb are everywhere.
Diazzz has also been hosting school trips for the Boys & Girls Clubs. “I might be the only beekeeper they will ever meet,” she noted. The point is to give bees the respect they deserve. “Did you know that it takes 12 honeybees their entire lives to make one teaspoon of honey?”
There are no live bees in the store, but Diazzz has her own hives in Burbank.
“They are from rescues: I cut the hive out from a wall,” she explained. She takes care of hives from San Diego to Bel Air, with many in the San Fernando Valley, and a couple with a view of the Hollywood Sign. Her caretaking quests have taken her on skyscraper roofs, at apartment buildings and in parking lots.
Almost a year ago, she began her studies as a honey sommelier at the American Honey Tasting Society in Connecticut, where she learned about the science and experience of honey. Her future includes going off to Bologna, Italy, the world honey hub, for the final round of studies and tests at the Albo Nazionale degli Esperti in Analisi Sensoriale del Miele or the National Register of Experts in Sensory Analysis of Honey.
“Nectar and honey are not the same thing,” she explained. “Nectar is the liquid sticky substance that bees collect from flowering plants and take back to the hive. They transform it into honey by dehydrating the moisture out of the nectar, and capping it over with wax.”
Diazzz recently held her first informal tasting experience at The Bee Museum, and has small batches of various local honeys for sale: cactus, sage, and honey from her own hives. “I usually leave the honey alone, and only take any extra they have made to sell,” she said, because bees use the honey as sustenance. Her favorite? “A toss-up between dandelion and sunflower. Orange blossom is delicious too, but very sweet.”
Topline:
NPR's Linda Holmes is a daily puzzle devotee. She recommends games that will test your knowledge of geography, history, and even the most obscure corners of Wikipedia.
Keep reading and dive right into her list of recommendations.
Maybe you, like me, are a daily puzzle player. Maybe you like a Wordle, or a crossword, or one of the other entries from the New York Times puzzle empire.
But maybe you're looking for something else.
So, with a tip of the hat to the people on Bluesky who helped me discover a bunch of games I love in the last month or two, I'm sharing a few games that I'm particularly enjoying these days — ones that are not NYT word games. (No disrespect to my original love, Spelling Bee.)
There are more, of course: the spelling bee game Beeswax, the word game Smush, the vexing Anthropeum, the movie games Framed and Cinematrix. Truthfully, I have more games in the "daily games" folder on my phone than I could ever actually play daily. But given a choice between puzzling and doomscrolling, I'll take the puzzles every time.
MapTap is a very simple game. You are shown a 3D globe that you can rotate with your finger, but there are no lines dividing countries or territories. So you are just looking at the unmarked terrain of the world, and you are challenged to tap as close as you can to a particular named location. Maybe "London, England, U.K." You tap. It shows you the distance between where you tapped and where the place really is. You get more points the closer you are. There are five questions in each daily round.
This game can be genuinely humbling, because without those familiar borders showing, it can be difficult to even locate places you are very familiar with. (Without state and national boundaries, it always takes me a minute to precisely find even a place I myself have lived.) But what I love about MapTap is that as I do it, over and over, I actually get better at world geography, which is worthwhile and enriching.
In the same family as MapTap is TimeGuessr, where each day's challenge is made up of five puzzles that each start with a photo. Your task is to choose, on a timeline, what year the photo was taken, and to choose, on a map of the world, where it was taken. Sometimes, the photos are of historically meaningful events, like the aftermath of a battle or a natural disaster. Sometimes, they are photographs of ordinary people going about their lives.
The trick with TimeGuessr is detective work. Some hints are straightforward: a sign in the window of a store that might tip off the location (if you can figure out what language it's written in), a license plate, something along those lines. But sometimes, the clues are more subtle. What are the people in the photo wearing? What do the cars look like? How is everybody wearing their hair? It's a fascinating exercise in putting together clues, and again, you can actually increase your knowledge of the world while you play.
The Loop is my favorite early-morning game, perfect for when I'm only partially awake. It offers you 12 simple illustrations that you have to arrange in a circle so that each illustration connects in some way to the ones on either side of it.
So, for instance, in one round I played, a square-root symbol connected on one side to a carpenter's square (because square/square), which then connected to a picture of a toolbox (because a carpenter's square is a tool). On the other side, the square-root symbol connected to a carrot (because it's a root vegetable), and then the carrot to an icicle (because they're the same shape). It can be fun to crack all the different ways that the images connect to each other, but the game design also offers so many chances to get it right that there's a huge amount of grace for making mistakes. That, of course, is why it's perfect for being half-awake.
Clues by Sam is a logic puzzle. It presents you with a grid — four across and five down — of people, each represented by a name, an emoji and an occupation. Your job is to figure out which of those people are innocent and which are criminals. (There is no set number; there could be lots of criminals or only a couple.) Your opening clue might say, "Michael is one of three criminals in row 2." Then you click on Michael and mark him as a criminal, and when you're right, that gets you another clue, and so on.
Like most of these games, this one is enjoyable largely because it's simple, but its diabolical twist is that you can't guess. If you try to label Jane innocent, for instance, and she eventually will be, but the game hasn't given you enough information yet to actually know that, then that answer is wrong and is rejected. You are only allowed to deduce from the clues you have, because it is genuinely the journey and not the destination. Note that Clues by Sam gets harder each day from Monday through Sunday, so if you're a beginner, give it a whirl early in the week to get the hang of it.
Without a doubt, the hardest game I play regularly. In this game, you get a list of at least some of the categories that a particular Wikipedia page belongs to, and you have to try to figure out what page it is. There are ten questions; my average score is about four, and the highest I've ever gotten is eight.
For example, if you know a page is filed under "20th century musicians," and "21st century musicians," and "American folk musicians," and "people born in Minnesota," you might start to zero in on Bob Dylan. But be warned: Many of the answers are far more obscure than that, and it's very common for me to give up and reveal the answer, only to learn that I never stood a chance, because I've never heard of the person (or event, or phenomenon) at all. It doesn't matter how many ways you classify certain medieval rulers or political conflicts of 19th century Iowa; I may never get there.
This piece also appeared in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don't miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what's making us happy.
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