Lenny Dykstra and 400,000 Plastic Balls

Note (6/9/08): An alert reader corrected us on the body of water we were pointing to. Thanks, phaser21!

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Original post:

I’m not sure which recent real estate headline has me more transfixed: the real estate listing of Lenny Dykstra’s home for nearly $25 million or the dumping of 400,000 plastic balls into the Ivanhoe Reservoir.

Dykstra, the hard-sliding, former Major League Baseball player for the NY Mets and Philadelphia Phillies (“Nails” to longtime fans), is selling his Thousand Oaks, CA mansion for $24.95 million. A couple of reasons for my shock and awe: I had no idea Lenny parlayed his up-and-down sports career into a mostly “up” post-sports career. He is regarded as a stock-market savant even though he disdains reading, he has his own private jet, and now he’s flipping his Thousand Oaks home he previously purchased from Wayne Gretzky for $18.5 million. For the ultimate in voyeurism, check out this 164-slide show of Lenny’s home.

This next news item can be listed as “awe:” About 400,000 plastic balls, like the kind that fill kids’ ball pits at amusement parks, were dumped into the Ivanhoe Reservoir in Silver Lake, CA on Monday to block the sun from hitting the water’s surface. This was done to prevent growth of a deadly bacteria that could infect the drinking water for 600,000 residents in Los Angeles. Watch this video of workers dumping 400,000 plastic balls into the water. By the end of the year, 3 million balls will be floating in this reservoir. I wonder what kind of effect this will have on real estate prices for homes along the reservoir. Their sparkling water view has suddenly gone dark.