Annoyance

Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) owner Arte Moreno began testifying Friday and will resume Monday morning. He's trying to convince an Orange County jury that he didn't violate the team's lease with Anaheim when he changed its name last year from Anaheim Angels to the LAA of A. In the 75 minutes or so he spent on the stand Friday, Moreno and Anaheim attorney Andy Guilford were just getting warmed up.

Good sportsmanship is a value that seems to be in short supply these days at football games, where, on occasion, a calculated crescendo of crowd noise can interfere with the visiting team's snap count. It happened again the other day in Seattle -- where some sports fans, albeit not many, wondered if it happened deliberately. The roar of the crowd in Seattle brought on more than one false-start penalty as the visiting San Diego Chargers kept jumping offside.

Despite the high cost of gas, we drove our RV to the San Bernardino Mountains for some peace, quiet and stargazing. About 8:30 p.m., in drove an RV and a trailer (for their "toys"), and the owners immediately set up a bright light that illuminated the campground. So much for seeing stars. Then the RV started its generator, which we figured its owners were using to cook dinner so it probably wouldn't last long. But then they started another generator outside that was very loud.

Both of your recent articles "Art or Vandalism?" (Aug. 23) and "Barking Meters" seem seriously schizophrenic to me. How can it be art and glorified by pictures when you admit that it's completely against the law? Likewise, how can it be humorous ("HoooooOOOOF!") when barking keeps whole neighborhoods awake and send citizens out to work too tired to do their work safely? The sad truth is that both these problems are extremely serious because they ruin the quality of life in certain neighborhoods, and open them up to decay.

It was going to be opening night for "Saturday Night Alive," a new weekly series of sobriety checkpoints by the Laguna Beach Police Department. But the ruling Friday by the 4th District Court of Appeal against such operations "kind of caught us off guard," said Deputy Police Chief Jim Spreine. "I guess we're going to have to reevaluate our program." The California Highway Patrol, however, did not share that uncertainty.

The Sierra Madre News' "Police Calls" column mentions that at 2 a.m. "a woman dialed 911 . . . and told the officer who answered that she had misdialed; she wanted 411 for the number of the Buccaneer [a local tavern]." Twenty-six minutes later, the police log says, "a bartender at the Buccaneer called to report that he was getting annoying phone calls." LATEST CAR CULTURE FAD?

Having lived in (marvelous) Marin, I can visualize the places and scenery that Anne Lamott described in her essay ("Blessed Are the Annoying," May 7). And being the mother of a teenage boy, I could smell Sam's bedroom and experience the frustration of chores not done and promises going by the wayside because of sleeping or other teen-important activities. I appreciated Lamott's words of wisdom in "the four things I know for sure about raising kids," which told me that I have been affecting my son's character by overlooking all the things that are important to me, letting him go play beach volleyball instead of staying home to help me when I was sick.

Billy Packer once called "60 Minutes" a cancer within CBS. Now CBS' lead college basketball commentator is upset again at his network's award-winning news magazine show. "It's beyond comprehension," Packer said Thursday. "Any time they do a piece on college athletics, it's preposterous." It was a negative story on Jerry Tarkanian and the felons on his Fresno State basketball team that got Packer's ire in 1998. This time it was a story Lesley Stahl did that aired Sunday night.