“When we were in the elevator on the way to the room, my dad (who built himself into one of Northern California’s top real estate developers) sniffed a couple times and said, ‘You can smell the kitchen from here. That’s a sign this place wasn’t well built.’ At that moment, I didn’t need any more evidence that the Taj Mahal would fail. But I got some.” My latest post: The Untold Story of the Night the House Lost.

+ Remember Erik Estrada from Chips? Well, he’s a real police officer now. This is another example of life imitating schlock.

+ “It sounded like one lady walked up and asked the other lady if she was in line for the waffle maker. She didn’t answer, so this lady started to make her waffle. The other confronted her and said, ‘That was my waffle’ and the other lady said, ‘No, it’s mine’ and then it went down hill from there.”

+ Quartz: The US navy expects to have bomb-sniffing locusts within a year.

+ The LA Times on a sad version of where the sidewalk ends: The Holy Grail for earthquake scientists has been accidentally destroyed.