How the boys in blue performed against the Houston Astros in Game 1, the college republicans have a new leader, LA public library mobile unit hosts a lit crawl.
After last night's victory LA is bathing in Dodger blue, now it's on to Game 2
Many Angelenos are basking in the glow of last night's win against the Houston Astros - and the fact that the Dodgers are playing in the World Series at all.
It's been awhile since fans got to enjoy their boys in blue playing this late into the season.
Arlene Karno, a longtime Dodger supporter, summed it up best:
"It was the most interesting year I feel like I've ever experienced as a Dodger fan and I've gone through...something like 55 of them? There was a lot of suffering that came before this incredibly satisfying moment."
Fan Jazmin Ortega was at the stadium to enjoy the moment on Tuesday. She cheered her team to victory, as they took Game 1.
"In some ways, it was an ordinary but it was also an extraordinary game in that, we're in the World Series and this is really what it all comes up to. Seeing [Chris Taylor get] a home run and getting everybody excited and having that energy throughout the same energy throughout the stadium. It was the loudest I've ever heard a Dodger crowd at Dodger Stadium."
And Ortega would know how Dodger crowds react at games. She's been part of them for a LONG time.
"One of my earliest memories is the 1988 World Series. It really began with my mom, she became a fan in the 80's just by listening to Jaime Jarrin on the radio, just turning the dial on a weekend and coming upon his voice. She learned about baseball through him and I learned about baseball through my mom."
Even if you are not a diehard fan, last night's performance may have turned you into one. Clayton Kershaw threw the first pitch. Then— in the bottom of the first inning—Dodgers leadoff man Chris Taylor immediately went for it.
CRUSHED! Chris Taylor gets the #WorldSeries going for the @Dodgers https://t.co/n2N87qQ3XQ
— FOX Sports: MLB (@MLBONFOX) October 25, 2017
Yeah, first pitch the Dodgers saw and they took a 1-0 lead. The Astros tied it with a home run of their own in the 4th and the game stayed locked at one until postseason season hero Justin Turner came to the plate in the 6th with Taylor on first base.
Game 1 would end with the score at 3-1. In between, Clayton Kershaw struck out 11 and Game 2 is tonight. Andy and Brian Kamenetzky joined A Martinez to analyze last night's two-hour game and look ahead to Wednesday night's. The big thing to look forward to? The Astro's breaking out their ace pitcher Justin Verlander.
"He is 9 and 0 since being acquired by the Houston Astros from the Detroit Tigers," Brian explained, " So if the Dodgers can get by this one with a win, things look very good for the rest of the series."
To hear more analysis on how the Dodgers did Tuesday night, click the blue play button above.
California College Republicans have a new leader — and she's ready for a fight
Young Republicans gathered in Anaheim last weekend to elect the next leader of the California College Republicans.
Winning the vote was Ariana Rowlands, a college senior, Breitbart contributor, and ally of right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.
The vote marks a change in direction for the group and a win for far-right conservatism.
But some fear that a more polarized approach could alienate moderate Republicans. So what's next for the organization?
Take Two put that question to Ariana Rowlands, the new chairwoman of the California College Republicans.
Highlights
It was a contentious race all the way up to the final votes being cast. What reactions have you heard in the days since this election?
Most people have been pretty gracious about it. A lot of people are really excited about the new turn in the organization that my election and my team's election mean.
What are they excited about?
We're finally going to change the entire strategy of the organization away from networking and electioneering and more into fighting [for] conservatism on campus, recruiting people who are excited to do conservative activism and then taking that energy and channeling it into campaigning for Republican candidates across the state.
On campus, what does that entail?
Often conservatives are suppressed by liberal campus administrations. This happens all over the country, but specifically in California, it's the worst.
If we try to host a speaker — for example, UCLA right now is trying to host Ben Shapiro, but the administration has tacked on a large security fee to prevent them from doing that. So we're going to be fighting back against that and also unabashedly pronouncing our beliefs to our fellow students who maybe haven't heard the conservative side of the coin before.
In the UCLA Ben Shapiro case, how would you go about doing that?
Firstly, we're going to establish a California College Republicans legal defense team where we're going to provide lawyers for college Republicans in situations like that.
Secondly, my team is very well versed in fighting back against that administration with the media, so we are going to be contacting a lot of reporters, having the club send out press releases, maybe holding demonstrations so that school feels that negative pressure from outside forces as well.
Note: Take Two contacted UCLA for comment. A university spokesman tells Take Two that, as a rule, the university will only pay security costs for events put on by campus organizations if at least 70 percent of those in attendance are from the UCLA community. See page 3, #4. A conservative group contends that this rule has not been applied fairly.
When we spoke to your challenger, Leesa Danzek, she spoke about a need to reach out to people with different political beliefs, such as Democrats, and come together over similarities. Do you agree with that? Do you have plans to work with Democrats?
No. I do not. Because no matter what we do, no matter how much we concede to the Democrats, we compromise our principles so that hopefully the Democrats will like us. The Democrats will never like us. The American political landscape has become incredibly polarized over the last few decades and [it's] no longer worth our resources to try to recruit Democrats. I'm trying to recruit people in the middle; I'm trying to recruit people who are already Republican.
Audio coming: Press the blue play button to hear more about what Ariana Rowlands has planned for the California College Republicans.
Answers have been edited for clarity.
Land, but no homes: How to fix the housing problem on tribal lands
Books: Preview Tom Hanks' 'Uncommon Type,' Anna Faris' 'Unqualified' and more
Fall is a time when book publishers release some of their most prestigious and noteworthy titles. And Take Two is previewing some of this week's books with a So Cal twist. Entertainment Weekly book critic Leah Greenblatt is our guide.
"Uncommon Type" by Tom Hanks
The title is a little bit of a clue. It's 17 stories, but there's a theme running through all of them, which is there's a vintage typewriter in every story. He's sort of a famous collector of typewriters, that's one of his things. Movie stars have had worse habits.
There's some show business stories in it, but they're very humanistic small portraits of people in different lives. There's one about this kid. It's his 19th birthday. His dad takes him surfing. He realizes his dad's having an affair.
It's very Hanks-y. The guy we picture, that humongous movie star meets America's dad figure that he is. He's golly gee whiz, that sort of language, that sort of charming old fashioned way that he tends to talk is very much his writing. We're not talking MacArthur Genius Grant stuff here, but with the built-in affection you already have for him, it makes you predisposed just to enjoy them.
"Unqualified" by Anna Faris
It's sort of a quasi memoir slash advice book, and it's all based and named after her podcast, Anna Faris' Unqualified. It reads very conversational and she's very self deprecating. She talks about finding herself in acting and community theater and then coming to Hollywood and getting this big break in Scary Movie and then meeting and falling in love with Chris Pratt, who writes the foreword. Unfortunately, this book came right on top of the announcement that their marriage was ending, but he did revise it.
It's kind of true to her persona as an actress. It's kind of goofy and sweet and there will be chapters that are just lists where she talks about the guys you should never date, so it's listicles mixed with these memoir bits and advice on relationships and actressing and all that stuff.
There's a lot of goodwill toward her as a person and an actress, and I think there's sympathy for her right now and she is charming and she comes across as a very relatable person. She talks about her insecurities and plastic surgeries and just what it's like to turn 40 in the industry. I liked it. I thought it was a nice, very marshmallow sweet little book.
"The Power" by Naomi Alderman
Naomi Alderman is a British writer. She has written a sort of speculative, dystopian fiction that's a bizarro world Handmaid's Tale almost where young girls start to discover they have this power in their bodies. There's a skein that runs along their collar bones that's basically like an electric eel but a lot more powerful. Suddenly, they can basically kill men with their fingertips. It's a little bit of a satire, but it's got some deep freaky moments in it and it's really engaging.
I think it's a very fortuitous moment for this book to come along. This does feel like it could connect with Millennials, but it also feels timeless in the way that good books do if they want to survive the moment. So many people are going back now and reading Handmaid's Tale the same way they're reading 1984 and all these other fitting dystopian books in 2017.
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Leah Greenblatt is Critic at Large for Entertainment Weekly.
Riding along with Ednita Kelly and her book bike
Ednita Kelly was already an avid cyclist when she decided to fuse her enthusiasm for two wheels with another of her passions -- books. A children's librarian at the San Pedro branch of the Los Angeles Public Library, she's now known as the book biking librarian.
"At the time, we were getting bike lanes here in town and a lot of poeple were saying negative things about people on bikes, so I thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice if they could see someone doing something good in the community on their bike,'" Kelly said. "On my regular bike, they would never know I was a librarian, so wouldn't it be cool to have a library bike."
We tagged along with Kelly recently as she packed up her book bike and pedaled off to Barton Hill Elementary School to show us how it works.
On a recent Wednesday, she filled the bike with about 100 pounds of books she would later donate to school children attending a family fun night -- books with titles like Cookie Dough Fun, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, Dracula's Last Birthday and "Diary of a Wimpy Kid. When I get that, the kids go crazy for that. That and dinosaurs," Kelly said, before latching the cargo compartment together, pumping up the bike's three tires and hitting the road.
2017 is the third year for the LA Public Library's book bike program. It started with Kelly's bike, but two more have since been added.
"People will honk and wave and say 'hi,'" Kelly says, describing public reaction. "Oh my gosh, they go crazy. Sometimes they cry. Sometimes they'll stop in the middle of the street. They laugh, they yell, 'Oh my gosh, I love the library.' People will ask me if I have beer in here. They want to know if I'm selling ice cream."