The Bell Curve:

I got a double helping of the California Angels last Tuesday — as the centerpiece of a lunch sponsored by the Orange County Forum at noon and a terrific win over the Cleveland Indians in the evening.

The Angels could have made it a sweep by announcing the acquisition of Roy Halladay or Cliff Lee as dessert at lunch, but you can’t win ‘em all. Anyway, the chicken was good and so were the four Angel players — pitchers Shane Loux, Matt Palmer and Kevin Jepsen and outfielder Reggie Willits — who entertained us under questioning by Angel play-by-play announcer Steve Physioc.

No city boys here. All of them came out of what we like to call America’s heartland. If any of these guys get sent back to the minors when the Angel’s wounded stars return to active duty they might want to consider a career in stand-up comedy instead. Ring Lardner would have loved them.

The venue for all this jollity was the dining area behind home plate in an empty ball park that always hits me as high-level art.

But the people who put the program together are members of a local organization called the Orange County Forum, which has been doing this same sort of thing for two decades, modeled on the Town Hall concept by which early Americans governed.

And which has been embraced by such organizations as the Commonwealth Club of California and the Town Hall of Los Angeles. Local members of those organizations peeled off to create the Orange County Forum when, as the Forum’s current president, Jim Leach, put it “we had a large enough community to speak for ourselves.� Which, 20 years later, led us to Tuesday with Angel baseball.

Although Forum activities include a number of byproducts, the major event is a monthly lunch that explores insights into current issues by highly qualified speakers, followed by lively questions and challenges.

For example, Leach pointed out that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has faced this audience three times — once as a candidate, twice as governor. And at the other end of the spectrum, the next luncheon speaker — on Sept. 18 — will be U.S. Rep. Loretta Sanchez.

All of the Forum’s meetings are open to the public. Attending will cost you $45 for lunch, which was pretty good last Tuesday. If you have further questions, check out the Forum’s website at www.ocforum.org.

I ran into Tim Mead, the Angel’s vice president for communications, at the baseball lunch, which gave me a chance to ask him why the Angels are playing more day games, and especially more games marked on my tickets as “TBA.�

Because my one-sixteenth of a season ticket is on the top deck of Angel Stadium it is fully exposed to sun during day games. So more and more, I’m looking for friends to use my tickets who aren’t defeated by three hours of direct sun.

So how does this problem look for next season? If I understand Mead, weekday games are subject to time change by contract with Channel 11, even after tickets have been printed.

And if the times on the tickets have to be changed, then the Angels are subject to penalties.

The only way to prevent that, said Mead, is to put “TBA� on the tickets. To which he added that my complaint is the only knock at the sun he has received.

Which says to me that either the complaints don’t reach him or that Angel customers are a whole lot tougher than I am. And that it is going to be an even hotter summer of baseball next year.

I’d like to add a thought or two to editor Brady Rhoades’ column and blog last week about the ongoing — maybe endless — debate as to whether homosexuality is genetic or acquired.

In balancing the debate, Brady said that there are two firm positions on homosexuality, beyond argument: first that by “any objective measure the Bible comes down strong against homosexuality� and, second, that intolerance of gay and lesbians is decidedly un-Christian.

Then Brady got off the hard line in the end by suggesting that a more thoughtful and critical reading of the Bible might soften the Biblical position.

I’d like to offer some support for that last conclusion. It’s a video called “For the Bible Tells Me So,� which was born in the heart and creative imagination of a resident of Newport Beach named Robin Voss.

Armed only with an idea and a powerful conviction born at a St. Mark Presbyterian Church seminar in Newport Beach, she turned her vision into one of 16 feature-length documentary films (out of 856 submissions) to be seen in competition at the Sundance Festival two years ago. The film has been seen widely since then, in theaters, on television and in dozens of churches.

Says Voss: “We want to encourage understanding by creating a national conversation on issues that start with a literal interpretation of the Bible. We‘re not telling people what they are thinking is either right or wrong. Only that there is a need to know or understand if their own religion starts marginalizing whole groups of people.�

I think that‘s what Brady is up to also. And, come to think of it, isn’t “encouraging understanding� what the Orange County Forum is about, too?

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.