1999

What's wrong with California? We used to be a national leader in education. Now the public school system ranks among the country's worst. The state once created more jobs than it could fill. Now California's unemployment rate is 12.1%, second to only Nevada. And it wasn't all that long ago that California was seen as paradise; the place everybody wanted to live. Now more people are moving out of the state than are moving in. But here's the final indignity: Unless the Angels stage a miracle rally over the next three days, this fall's postseason baseball tournament will not include a California team for the first time this century.

Four of the top five most-viewed women's sporting events happened at the Olympics, and the other one is the 1999 Women's World Cup final at the Rose Bowl. What this tells us, said Daniel Szew, who is president of LA Sports Management and before that worked for the Wasserman Group and AEG, is that many viewers of women's sports get invested in a big event in which they get a chance to be patriotic. "I was born in Argentina and moved to the U.S. when I was 5," he said. "My feelings about this are born of my background.

Somewhere, Mia Hamm is shedding a happy tear or two. Emotions always ran close to the surface for America's soccer darling. Somewhere, Julie Foudy is letting loose with a whoop and a holler. "Loudy" Foudy always was one to express her feelings vocally. Somewhere, Michelle Akers is leaping high and stretching her neck, heading in that last-second desperation goal to salvage an American World Cup dream. Only, it was Abby Wambach who scored it Sunday. Akers was simply the inspiration, the template from the past that said no U.S. women's soccer team is ever beaten until the final whistle sounds.

Jonas Bevacqua, who co-founded the Orange County-based hip-hop and skateboarding clothing line known as LRG that became an influential fashion leader, has died. He was 33. Bevacqua died Monday inside his Laguna Beach home, the Orange County coroner's office said Tuesday. The cause of death has not been determined. An autopsy was expected to be completed Wednesday. Bevacqua, who co-founded the Irvine company with business partner Robert Wright in 1999, achieved success with products that appealed to artists, athletes and musicians such as Kobe Bryant and Kanye West.

— "Maybe I should be a literary agent," Scottish director Lynne Ramsay says puckishly. "I'm good at picking up on books that become successful before it happens. I could pick up a lot more money than making films. " Ramsay is not just referring to Lionel Shriver's novel "We Need to Talk About Kevin," the source of her latest movie and a book she wanted to film well before it became an international success and won Britain's Orange Prize for fiction. She is also talking about "The Lovely Bones," a novel she caught on to early and spent five years writing a screenplay for, only to have Peter Jackson make a very different film.

Despite complaints about drunken hooliganism at Dodger Stadium, state regulators rarely visit the ballpark and have issued no citations for liquor-law violations there since 1999. Fans and some police officials say that over-imbibing at Chavez Ravine has become a stubborn problem. But not to the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, the licensing authority that enforces responsible booze retailing, according to records and interviews. Davey Johnson was still managing the team when ABC last alleged a single instance of a Dodgers vendor running afoul of the rules, such as by selling to minors or inebriated adults or failing to do enough to prevent disruptive behavior due to drinking.

One hundred years after the 1885 premiere of "The Mikado" in London, the most popular Gilbert and Sullivan operetta still readily resonated with modern audiences. Peter Sellars set it in modern-day Japan for Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1983. Jonathan Miller made a flapper "Mikado" three years later that was seen at Los Angeles Opera and elsewhere. The G&S operettas are now less frequently produced, but such stalwarts as Opera a la Carte in L.A. or the Lamplighters in the Bay Area carry on still.

The federal government is seeking more than $1 billion from Deutsche Bank in a fraud lawsuit that could open a new front in a campaign to punish companies that churned out the low-quality mortgages blamed for sparking the financial crisis. The lawsuit filed Tuesday in Manhattan federal court says the German financial giant's New York-based home lender, MortgageIT, recklessly approved 39,000 mortgages for government insurance from 1999 to 2009 "in blatant disregard" of whether borrowers could make the required monthly payments.

Martin Marootian, a retired pharmacist who stood up for Armenian genocide victims as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit that resulted in a $20-million settlement from New York Life Insurance Co. for failing to honor claims on policies sold to thousands of Armenians slain during the last years of the Ottoman Empire, has died. He was 95. Marootian died Feb. 25 of natural causes at his home in San Diego, said his daughter, Andrea. In 1999 Marootian joined a legal battle to force New York Life to honor policies purchased by more than 2,000 Armenians, most of whom perished in what some historians have described as the first genocide of the 20th century.

The Gospel of Anarchy A Novel Justin Taylor HarperPerennial: 256 pp., $13.99 paper The house at the center of Justin Taylor's "The Gospel of Anarchy" has the universals of bohemian communities: shared food, leftist politics, dropouts, some guy peeing in the yard. Yet it is also very specific ? to a place, Gainesville, Fla., and a time, 1999 ? to the degree that it has its own peculiar name: Fishgut. We come to Fishgut through David, a college student distinguished by his slow slide into isolation: He's marginally enrolled, he's just lost his anonymous call center job and he's become joylessly addicted to Internet porn.