VIDEO THUMBS UP: Maybe a good omen...

VIDEO THUMBS UP: Maybe a good omen for this season’s California Angels? The club walked away with two top 1994 Golden Matrix awards for use of video displays during home games--using that same Sony Jumbotron, now being repaired, that got rumbled to death in the recent earthquake. . . . Rod Murray, the Angels’ entertainment production manager, attributes the winning, dazzling displays on the center-field board to improved computer graphics, plus “we like to put a lot of high energy into our productions.”

FLUSH WITH SUCCESS: Here is a different kind of award they’re boasting about in Anaheim: The city has won the top state water conservation award for its “Flush for Bucks” plan, persuading residents to buy ultra-low-flush toilets. Students at Katella High School made $15 for their school for each toilet traded in to be recycled for roadbed materials. That amounted to $9,570. Also, the city says this could save 75 million gallons of water over the next 10 years.

HAUNTING ART: When political humorist Art Buchwald was stationed at the El Toro Marine base as a young man, many evenings were spent in Newport Beach, he writes in his new autobiography. But he has a more tragic remembrance of his Marine duty here. . . . A fellow Marine crashed his plane, and Buchwald recalls standing stunned--alongside others--rather than trying to rescue the pilot, who later died, from the flaming cockpit. Writes Buchwald: “To this day, I ask myself if I committed a cowardly act by standing by.”

BOSNIA-BOUND: Golden West College is promoting the campus’s cultural diversity with a four-day Festival of Friendship this week. Today, for example, students from cultures not usually associated with basketball will play a three-on-three tournament in the college gym. And there’s a “Different but the Same” panel discussion in the Business Building. One major project for the week: Students are sending letters giving hope to people in war-torn Bosnia.