Happy Birthday Norm!

The proud father of a five-day-old, my friend Norm turns 32 today. "Friend" is a funny word for us, since we passed a while back the time where we've known each other longer that not, and since my mom calls us her "non-biological twins".

In any case, with all the pictures of the new baby floating around the interweb, I decided to go with this blast from the past.



Taken seven years ago at the Madonna Inn for my and Marc's graduation party, before Guinness and "Uncle Pete" entered the scene...

Love you brother, happy birthday!

Our First Visitor

We had our first visitor to our Long Beach apartment just recently. Back in elementary school, Corrie's best friend was a little Chicana named Adrianna. They were good friends until Corrie moved across town and switched schools, or maybe they went to different junior highs and high schools.

In any case, they lost touch for almost twenty years, and through the world-shrinking powers of FaceBook, they reconnected during the wane of our time in Austin. The first time they got to really hang out was at our going-away party, and Audrey (the pronunciation of her 'Adri' contraction) had to leave early.

The two young ladies got along as if they'd never lost touch, and had such a good time during the brief visit that Audrey decided to come visit once we got settled. I'd be lying if I said that she was the only person to say this, but she's been the only Austinite so far to make it.

During her visit we rented bikes and rode around Long Beach, quite a nice way to spend a beautiful afternoon. Later she and Corrie took the train to Hollywood and saw some sights before coming back and hitting up a launch party for a local Long Beach retail boutique. It was the annual Long Beach Pride weekend, so the themes were colorful and fabulous.

The three of us even went to see Bridesmaids. I recommend it. It has a laughs-per-minute score that rivals some of Mel Brooks' best material, but in a thoughtful and intelligent setting, coming organically out of the scenarios, a feat not usually accomplished in cinema these days.

Here are some pictures from the bike ride and a quick jaunt up to Signal Hill, a subject for a separate post rather soon.







Thanks Audrey for coming out! I hope you enjoyed the trip as much as we did.

Another Norm?

An eternal question: Is the world ready for another Norm?

My brother from another mother and his beautiful wife have welcomed the fourth Norman Randolph to the world of us air breathers, at almost half-past midnight on 5/25/2011.



Welcome Little Norm! Happy Birthing-day! We're all excited you could join us, and make sure to thank your mom for all that labor.

Sad End for the Kingman

Born in 1941 in the Trench Town ghetto of Jamaica's capital, Kingston, Claudius Linton was among that particular slum's group of artistic musical pioneers. Trench Town was home to Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, two younger contemporaries of Claudius who became much more famous.

Their style of Roots Reggae has become the signature brand with which mainstream listeners are familiar, the reggae that follows the everyday occurrences of the singer.

Like the early days of rock music, when the lines between rock, doo-wop, bluegrass, and country were fluid and/or undefined, the early days of reggae were a petri dish of acoustic guitar, flowing bass lines, steel drums and horns. Today some of it is called ska, some is called rocksteady, and, of course, traditional reggae. Reggae is traditionally played slower than ska and rocksteady, and is characterized by the accenting of the off-beats (being a math guy I should understand that, but I don't know enough about music).

In any case, Claudius' first band that gained popularity in the early sixties was called the Angelic Brothers. A ska band, they had a few hits that can be heard on YouTube, namely "Ten Virgins" and "My Sunshine". In the later sixties he played with the Hofner Brothers, before striking out on his own.

Dubbed the Kingman, he was a lesser known hitmaker in the reggae field, and struck a large hit with his 1976 single "Crying Time". After a 1984 collaboration with producer Jack Ruby, he disappeared.

In 2007, on a beach in Jamaica, producer and indie rock musician Ian Jones (he uses the stage name Jonas) met a still-full-of-music Claudius. Out of their chance meeting came Jonas' Sun King Records remastered collection of the Kingman's greatest songs from the sixties and seventies, "Roots Master", in late 2007.

The Kingman's artistic renaissance was complete with his first new album in more than two decades, "Sign Time" by the duo Kingman and Jonah. The album was well received and well reviewed. The strengths of Claudius' roots reggae is as true as forty years prior, and the acoustic guitar flair brought by Jonas reminds people of the reggae protest songs from the era of protest songs. (It's about Iraq, but the message is the same.) Here is an article about the Kingman's renaissance.

After a falling out with Jonas, and some poor decision making, Claudius resurfaced in 2010 in Long Beach, living on the streets. He was in a long battle with diabetes, filmed a segment with the local paper, the Press-Telegram, and succumbed to his medical problems a few months later. Here is an article about Linton's passing, with the newspaper's video segment.

If being a popular guitar and singing attraction while living on the streets isn't too sad, and then dying on the streets of Long Beach isn't quite sad enough, then what happened after is the saddest part.

Unable to find next of kin, a friend from Long Beach applied for, and received, the legal rights to Claudius' remains. After working out a deal with a local mortuary for a discounted cremation (the mortician was also a fan and sympathetic to the cause), the Kingman was cremated.

His ashes? They remain in a box on the desk of the mortician. The friend has disappeared, hasn't paid the bill, and can't be located. The mortician wants to do right by Claudius, but has no legal ability to scatter the ashes, and doesn't know exactly where the best possible place could be. A friend from the street has claimed he knows where some of Claudius' family are in Jamaica, and that he can contact them, but this friend is also hard to find regularly.

The sad end for a proud artist, a rare link to the original Trench Town musicians, ashes in a box on a desk...

Congratulations Women (in Canada!)

Today, May 24th, marks the 82nd anniversary of Women as Persons in Canada. While there are lent of inequalities in this country, and definitely beyond, there has been great strides in the last 80+ years made: women can vote, own property, have a career, have a choice in whether they get married or have kids. 6000 years of tradition changed in less than a century.

But do today's ladies know what those gals went through 80+ years ago? First, obviously there was picketing:



Then you had to decide where to picket, and for what cause. In this case, let's say in 1917 in America, the cause was Suffrage and the place was Woodrow Wilson's White House. Any guess on the prize these young women won with such an action?

Incarceration, of course.

November 15th, 1917 has gone down as "The Night of Terror" in some annals. This is the first night that the women who picketed in front of the White House were jailed in a Virginia lockup. The warden unleashed the guards upon them. The women were beaten and terrorized. Lucy Burns, the following lady, was handcuffed above her head and hung from the bars of her cell overnight.



The next lady, Alice Paul, was a leader of the group. To protest their treatment that had gone on for days, Alice went on a hunger strike. She was chained to a chair while a tube was forced down her throat to force feed her.



Eventually the press found out about this ill treatment, and it subsided.

We all give our thanks to these courageous ladies.

Happy Birthday Dan!

I finally got the chance to call my brother Dan and use his, "So you're thirty years closer to death now" line. He laughed and explained he was at work trying to get things in order for the end of the fiscal year. That's my brother; hard at work on his big 3-0 at 2 in the morning.



Love you brother, happy birthday!

"I'm from 110th Street."

A cliffhanger episode of The Simpsons, one ending the sixth season and the answer-episode beginning the seventh season, the memorable "Who Shot Mr. Burns?" event, had Lisa trying to use the financial windfall from Springfield Elementary's discovery of oil to bring in one Tito Puente as a new music class teacher.

That was the first time I'd ever heard of Tito Puente. In the intervening years, after purchasing the DVDs of the Simpsons and, like a nerd, listening to the commentaries, I learned that it was Matt Groening's personal push to bring one of his own favorite musical artists into the fold of the show, hence, Tito gets on the show.

I did enjoy the mambo version of the theme song, and thought, well, that Tito is a pretty cool musician, and not much else.

Recently I saw a short film about the commemoration of the street that he grew up on in what became Spanish Harlem, and about his influence, legacy, and his tireless drive to make people feel the rhythm.

Born on 420 in 1923 on 110th Street in New York to Puerto Rican immigrant parents, Tito showed early that he was a musical prodigy child. By sixteen he was playing percussion with the biggest band leader in Uptown at the time, Manchito. It was said that he most likely would have been playing earlier in his life had there not been Spanish traditions and curfews in effect limiting the amount of time he could spend outside the house.

It didn't take Manchito very long to highlight his young percussionist and bring him to the front of the band, where Tito could show off, and the music that we now call "salsa" (the old-timers hate that name) and they called "mambo" was crystallized in its current state. Desi Arnez, and his character Ricky Ricardo from from "I Love Lucy" was a mambo star and band leader, like his idol, El Rey, Tito.

Tito was drafted into World War II, worked on a ship and learned saxophone and a little arranging. After he returned he used the GI Bill to attend Julliard and learned arranging in its entirety, basically learning the elements to elevate mambo from a groovy dance rhythm to a Latino-jazz art-form.

After Manchito passed, Tito Puente and the other Tito, Tito Rodriguez, friends from their days learning from Manchito, struck up a friendly rivalry and played the same club every night for seventeen years.

When Tito would go on tour, later in life, his band would speak about how shocked they were about the incredible crowds that would turn out. Tito was always more modest and self deprecating.

It was said that his music was ahead of its time, and this is probably true. In more than sixty years, he never played anything else besides mambo.

One of Tito's most well known songs was made well known seven years after he composed and recorded it. "Oyo como va" was on his 1963 album "El Rey Bravo", but most people know the song from Santana's 1970 recording, a recording that propelled Santana, and his brand of Latin-rock, to a new mainstream popularity.

After dying in 2000, 110th St, for a five block stretch, was renamed Tito Puente Way. When people asked him where he was from, and while he would always identify with his Puerto Rican heritage, he would answer, "I'm from 110th Street."

Pandora has allowed me to enjoy his gift while I clean up and get dinner ready, which is very nice.

Battle of Former Pacific North-Westerners

Today, May 15th, a basketball game is being contested. It is an NBA playoff game 7 between two teams, the winner will move on to face the Dallas Mavericks in the Western Conference Finals for a shot at the NBA finals.

I just thought two things were weird. The first being that the Western Conference will be represented by teams in the Central Time Zone, two hours ahead of the Pacific Zone usually associated with the "West" (not to forget Denver and Mountain Time). The possible teams are from Oklahoma City, Memphis, and Dallas.

The other thing I thought was weird from today's game is in the title of this post: these two teams used to be in close proximity, closer than even the relative proximity of Memphis and Oklahoma City. The Memphis Grizzlies used to be the Vancouver Grizzlies, and the Oklahoma City Thunder used to be the Seattle Supersonics.

The Sonics departure is fodder for another post altogether, but since both Corrie and my friend Sam are rooting for them today, I'll join them.

A Tale of Two Long Beaches

This is a photo/word essay (mostly photos with commentary) about the two Long Beaches that Corrie and I inhabit. I suppose on one hand there could be two Long Beaches, the Real and the Fake, with the Fake being the touristy zone sandwiched between the Port, which is definitely Real, and the city-at-large, but that's not the direction I went with this.

I'm talking about the dueling identities of the Long Beach we see everyday. Instead of "Real" and "Fake", I'm going with Shiny and Gritty.

For Shiny, there are plenty of new condos like this one, one we've already seen on this blog:



And while there are many expensive new condos like that, there are still plenty of these (just right of center), decrepit looking Motels that actually serve as SROs. I don't mean standing Room Only, I mean Single Room Occupancy. This, the City Center Motel, and many others nearby act as apartments for folks who can't afford a monthly lease. These serve as the living quarters for a class of folks that use the various churches as resource centers. They are either the hard-working poor, or, from my own observations, hollowed out husks of humans, destroyed by decades of heroin or cocaine abuse.



Down this same street we begin to see decrepit and crumbling places of business, closed for good...



Abandoned at some point recently, Acres of Books was almost broken into by me (I could see boxes of books that I wanted to sift through, and the door was breachable)...



Just a stones throw away is Ocean Blvd, and the parade of beach front condos...



And at the end of the Shiny and the beginning of the Fake (the touristy area), the anchor buildings before you get to the Pike pier set of themed establishments are the Westin and Comerica Bank, highlighted with this weird bronze glass:



That's all very attention-getting, and it seems like they're trying to draw your attention away from these abandoned storefronts, seen in a row from behind, highlighting their nineteenth-century brick construction. Is their a place in Shiny Long Beach for these Gritty storefronts? Some do hope, anyway...



Here we see from above, if we use our eagle-eye, a set of brick constructed storefronts in the close foreground, where the one on the left is old and abandoned, and the one on the right has new Shiny things for sale; looks like chic clothing. I like this scene of the two right next to each other:



While there's still plenty of old money...



...and new money...



...the Shiny idealists still have work to do to scrub the Gritty-ness from Long Beach.




I hope that some of the character of the city is kept, and it helps me to know that the sanitizing will take plenty of time to fully accomplish.

This is our little West Coast Brooklyn on the Beach, and that's how we like it.

Happy Friday the 13th

For real this time...

Brought to you from Churchy LeFemme and Pogo and the rest from Walt Kelly's imagination.

Montana de Oro: The Beach

This post will appear before the un-subtitled "Montana de Oro" post, and I would like to say that that other post is the real deal. Not that this is something bad, it's just not the place that is embedded in my heart like the place from the that last post.

On this trip to Montana de Oro State Park, we went here, to the Beach, after we went to the tidal-pool areas.

My friends and I spent more time at the tidal-pool zone, and less time at the Beach in the Park, even though it is also beautiful.



I was planning on going to the end of this rocky formation when the washover tuned me back. I was already many feet away from shore, and if I'd fallen in, I would have been crushed on the rocks and likely killed.



I like this picture, since it shows the meeting of a freshwater creek as it flows into the ocean. The white crest is that threshold, with marine water on the left and fresh water on the right.



This beach had no sand per se, rather it was made of these tiny pebbles that look just like the rock bed that I had in my backyard as a kid, only in miniature form, strengthening the greater idea of patterns governing the universe.



There was an even larger rock formation right next to the one I hiked out onto, a building sized deal, and I was going to scale it. But there were little kids around, and I didn't want to set a bad example, and then I felt old.

It was then that we decided to go back to San Luis Obispo, a mere fifteen minutes away, with another unforgettable experience at Montanya de Oro in our life story.

Montana de Oro

One of my most favorite places on Earth, and one of The Beautiful Places, is a California State Park called Montana de Oro. I'm cursing my blog-host currently since I can't type an enya without copy and pasting, and who's got time for that? Maybe I'll just type Montanya de Oro over and over, since that's how the Spanish would have pronounced their--and our--Gold Mountain.

I've been to a few places on this Earth, around this country, around Europe and Asia and Mexico, and nowhere is quite like Montanya de Oro. It might not quite reach the lofty heights of stupefying beauty that the Grand Canyon inspires, but really, what does? It has its own specialty. Is it th equal of Yosemite? Of Yellowstone? Maybe not, but the fact that it touches people in the same spot as those places means something.

It had been years since we'd made a trip to Mantanya de Oro, and when I say we, I mean Corrie and I and our close friends. Corrie had hurt her ankle the night before, and unfortunately had to abstain from the hike.

I, having not hurt my ankle, did lose my sunglasses (they were found later), and had to pop the brim of my hat down to shield my blue eyes the entire time.



My good friend Ryan, the Super Trooper that he was, made it all the way down to the water and back up with me, during a time when both of us were feeling our age. I love this picture of him with the crashing waves behind.



Now, what follows will be a trip down memory lane for those of us who've been before, and a good play-by-play for those who've never been. The first picture is what you see when you pull over while driving into the park. Looking north up the Sand Spit, viewers can see Morro Rock and the hamlet of Morro Bay.



After parking at "the spot", you start hiking through sand and brush dunes towards the ocean, and the first landmark is visible: the Great Dune. We used to perform experiments with gravity and momentum on this Great Dune, throwing ourselves down it. Those experiments, while highly scientific, were also, eh, fun.



Once you get to the top of the Great Dune and face the ocean (your back must face the Dune), this is your view: another dune, sloping down to what turns out to be a sandy cliff face, and the ocean crashing over the up-ended Earth-crust that makes up the rock formations out here at Montanya de Oro.



Before you take the less-than-treacherous walk down the sandy cliff face, views of the entire tide-pool area open up in both directions, and since we were there at low-tide, lagoons like this become apparent that would otherwise be under more water. It might look inviting to swim in, but the water is frigid.



This is a look back at the walk-down area, the "sandy cliff" you slide-step down. Getting up is oh-so fun. It's probably four stories high.



Now I've got some artsy pictures...

The close-up of a wave crashing over a tiny tidal ecosystem...



The wearing pattern of some of the rocky slabs...



What I like to Mussel Canyon, where I got the camera low to take a strange perspective shot...



If you see anything that looks like black sludge, don't be alarmed...well, maybe you can be a little alarmed. It's not petroleum, but instead the spermatozoa of algal life forms.

"On with the New"

On a trip to Target before we left Texas, Corrie picked up a two-buck dvd, "100 Classic Cartoons", mainly for the historical benefit of having many Betty Boop, Popeye, and other various cartoons in our film library

There's an interesting cartoon about from the Fleischer Studio about a futuristic World's Fair, rather, a World's Fair set in the future. To see how important people in the 30s thought World's Fairs were going to be in the future is interesting. That was the primary spot for cultures coming together and technological advances being unveiled. Now all anyone needs is the internet.

The majority of the cartoons are from after the Code. In 1936, at the urging of Congress, a Code was developed to tone down the sexuality, raunchiness, as well as the mix of anarchist/socialist allegory. I think there was a single pre-Code Betty Boop cartoon in our collection, and her vamping walk, coy looks, and visible garter were all a bit more exaggerated.

Most of the cartoons, also, were during the time when there was Disney and everybody else. Fleischer was well known, as well as a slew of other animators and animation studios, but the big bad papa at the time was Disney. This is seen in a short set at a circus. The main characters are a mean dog-ring master, and a mouse couple that are blatantly patterned after the creation of Ub Iwerks and his boss Walt. I know who came first because I looked it up.

This particular animated short is very interesting...the ring-master villain does something to knock the hero-mouse up into space. Then the ring-master puts the moves on the hero's mouse girlfriend. She's sitting in his lap and enjoying it, kissing the ring-master all over. The hero-mouse, using his telescope from space sees all this, and gets sad. When he returns to earth, his girlfriend acts like nothing's happened, and tries to give him love. It looks like he might relent, but eventually tosses her aside, sticking his tongue out at her as he walks away. This is so shocking to her that her panties fly off from underneath her dress! I couldn't make this up if I tried.

The titular episode of this post, "On with the New", is a post-Code Betty Boop installment, of which there are so many in this collection that they run together as a rather vacuous blur of black and white. In this episode is something that I hadn't seen before or since in a lifetime of watching cartoons: it begins with Betty working alone in a busy kitchen, working the line, breaking to wash and dry dishes, and getting right back to the line.

I've never seen an animated short where anybody was working a busy line in a restaurant. She had a range-top and a griddle, had orders barked out at her in quick repetition, and was having trouble keeping up, especially since she was washing dishes as well.

An animated sex-symbol running a line by herself...never would have guessed it.

Anyone Notice?

This is a quick post to call attention to an earlier post, the For Rent post.

Did anyone notice the end of that silly fake craigslist-style ad the phone number and names attached to it?

That was my number in the dorms at Cal Poly, and Nate was the name of my roommate.

I was just trying to be cheeky.

PBS Forever

At last count, on free Los Angeles television, there are fourteen (14!) Public Broadcasting channels.

We have KCET, KLCS, and the Living Well Network (LWN), all of which show some of the same shows that were being broadcast in Austin.

I guess I'm an old fogey...I like my PBS and NPR.

Again, those Crazy Magyars

The Hungarians, or, as they refer to themselves, the Magyars, have quite the colorful history. They were the last ethnic group to descend from the mountains and into Europe proper during the Great Migratory Age, after the fall of the Romans. They were vicious nomadic marauders, swooping in on villages and destroying them. They were forcibly Christianized in the hope that they, as a people, might settle down a bit, claim a homeland, and just be civilized. The powerful Germanic family of the day, the Hapsburgs, knew that an alliance with the Magyars was better than being an enemy; hence the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

It was that alliance with the Magyars that ultimately resulted in the German-speaking Austria being a separate country from the country of Germany today (the united German empire, a loose confederation of the Prussians, Westphalians, Bavarians, et al, didn't want any non-Germans in their empire, and the Hapsburgs wouldn't dissolve their ties with the Hungarians, leading to a battle won by the Prussians)(this is the meat of a different post).

The Magyar language is not part of the Indo-European family, which is kinda weird when you get down to it. Celtic, Romantic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, and all the various languages of India are all included under the umbrella of Indo-European. The only languages in Europe not associated with Indo-European, which implicates the diverging of their humans much earlier, are Finnish, Magyar, Estonian, and Basque. Nobody knows where Basque comes from. It is a linguistic orphan, most likely hundreds of thousands of years older, and alone in the world, with no known surviving relatives. That alone is kinda cool.

Finnish, Estonian, and Magyar are loosely related to each other under the Finno-Urgic family. Neat, anyway...

A story about the wild Magyars I remember from some time spent in Budapest, the Magyar capital, reinforced the "Don't mess with the Magyars" idea. The story goes: the king was a brutal and generally despised man. His subjects tried to revolt, and he sent his war generals into the country side to squash the rebellion. The generals reluctantly obeyed, slaughtering their countrymen. The generals didn't like the king anymore than the common folk, and after making the proper preparations, they returned with news of the victory, and other news. They chained their king to a red-hot throne made of cast iron and set on a fire for a few days. After placing a red-hot crown on his head, they watched as he burned alive.

On a lighter note, another thing those wild and crazy Magyars gave the world was the wet t-shirt contest. The original, if you follow the thread, wasn't exactly what you might think, the annual "watering of the girls" festival that occurred around vernal equinox. The event dates back to the second century, which was before they were pacified.

It's all very fascinating.

Something Familiar, Part Two

Last November I wrote a post called Something Familiar about the Texan media presence and the under-performance of the Dallas Cowboys and how it reminded me of New York.

Well again, a few months later, using my one speaker to listen to the radio on my commute to work, I switch between NPR and some sports talk radio. Here the media presence is again about the apocalypse.

If Texas loves its football, and New York loves its Yankees and Knicks, out here, in LA, they live and breathe Kobe and the Lakers.

They got swept! They could have won both game 1 and 3! Phil Jackson is leaving! Kobe's too old! Bynum is a young jerk! What happened with Pau? Who do we add after blowing up the team?

On and on it goes. Since I don't have any emotional interest in the Lakers, I find all the fretting and soul searching rather amusing.

Again, though, I'm reminded of that New York scrutiny.

RIP Lionel Rose

Born June 21, 1948 near Warragul, in Victoria, Australia, Lionel Rose died yesterday, May 8th in the same town.

Lionel was the first Aborigine to be crowned Australian of the Year, in 1968, the same year he became the first Aboriginal Aussie to become a boxing champion, beating the Fighting Harada in Tokyo for the bantamweight title.

After a successful boxing career, Lionel had a modestly successful singing career, with two hits that placed on the Australian charts, "I Thank You" and "Please Remember Me". "I Thank You" was a national hit, and occasionally played instead of the national anthem on radio broadcasts of rugby matches by a pair of comedic sportscasters.

As a boxer, Lionel Rose compiled a career record of 42 wins, 12 by knockout, versus 11 losses, mostly at the tail end of his career.

A hero to his community, not forgotten but barely mentioned in this country, he was a pioneer, and will be missed.

Passed on to the Consumers

Guess who wants better wages...

Besides every person on the planet who works for wages, the specific answer I'm looking for is the Chinese manufacturing class.

Remember all those cheap Chinese wares that are available almost everywhere in America, and exclusively at places like Walmart and Target? Well, one of the things that made them so cheap was that their manufacturers were being paid very, very little.

Now, the Chinese middle class is becoming educated about the rest of the world, and about the perceived standard of living for some (imaginary) middle class, and are demanding better wages.

And getting them.

Many cities are raising their minimum wage, some have done so more than twice in as many months, and the working class are happily growing into a consumer class (d'oh?).

But, don't feel bad for the Chinese tycoons who are forced to pay their workers in excess of $500 American a month, they won't lose a whole lot of money. They have their own solution: Make the Americans pay. They're passing it along to the foreign consumer market.

So, all those cheap Chinese wares might still be cheap, they'll just be less affordable.

For Rent

Studio Apartment (no appliances provided)



Spacious front yard and extensive bathroom, (bath only, no shower)



Ample parking, only quarter-mile away

Amazing ocean and beach views



Close proximity to both Cal Poly and Cuesta

(Prone to wash-away and flood)

$1085/month
Contact Pat or Nate
805-756-8927

An Afternoon at Newport Beach

Corrie and I spent a few hours with the volleyball a couple of weeks back at Newport Beach, a beach community in Orange County. On the drive in Texas in the truck, the route that Carol and I took came through the mountains, and we had to follow signs for "Beach Cities". My guess, since from that distance they would all be in the same direction, is that "Beach Cities" refers specifically to the Long Beach-Huntington Beach-Newport Beach threesome that line the shore south of the peninsular nub that houses Torrance. Long Beach is in Los Angeles County, and once you cross a canal leaving the city you enter Seal Beach and Orange County. Huntington Beach is the larger of it and Newport Beach, but they're both larger than Seal Beach and Sunset Beach (a community separated by canals and a destination for this blogger and his camera).

In any case, after some errands in republican Orange County, we wanted to play a bit on their beaches. We pulled into an area that said it had parking and beach access, and what we saw was this weird town-like thing, with the beach at the end of a short walk:



Two rows of houses separated by a tiny alley, the beach o one side, parking lots and the Pacific Coast Highway on the other, make up this Newport Beach "neighborhood":



The homes were nice:



The views from the beaches, though, might have left something to be desired:



In the distance, though, is Catalina Island. In doing personal research in finding out how to get to Catalina Island, it turns out it is a twenty minute helicopter ride, or an hour and a half long boat ride. The helicopter ride sounds crazy fun, but is most likely out of our budget.



Like many things in Orange County, this beach seemed overrated. It wasn't bad in any single aspect, it was just mediocre. The surf was okay, the sand was only just kinda polluted, many trash cans, which was a plus, but no bathrooms, cancelling out the waste-bins...oh yeah, one refinery. You just get a sense that the people who live in those nice houses right on the beach would rather not share the beach with the general public.

Angels Flight

Los Angeles as a city is nestled at the foot of the Santa Ana and Santa Monica mountain ranges, and if you look up the city on Wikipedia, the photograph available shows the downtown skyline with a spectacular view of mountains in the background. This is a view that is almost never enjoyed by anyone here ever, due to either smog, or haze, or the fact that the mountains are actually not as close as they look. That particular picture makes LA look like some mountain town.

While it's obviously not as crazy as San Francisco, there are parts of LA that are hilly. In the first decade of the twentieth century, around the city of Los Angeles, playing on the popularity of the railroad, a series of "shortest rail-lines ever" were introduced. They were trains that ran on rails that acted primarily as elevators.

They ferried people from the top of a hill to the bottom of a hill, and vice versa, so those people wouldn't have to walk along any stairs. They were known as the "One Penny Rail" for a while, as their price was seen as low enough. "Angels Flight" was also a common moniker.

Eventually they were all closed, mostly one by one, and then the last few remaining during a particularly rough financial patch in the city's history. As financial prospects for the city brightened, they agreed to re-install some of the tiny trains.

I believe this is the only one as of now. We got to ride it, and a ride is still a very affordable twenty-five cents.

New Photo Contest Results

My new photo contest does not have a winner, and that's my fault. The last contest I had two winners in the first three hours of posting anything, and I thought that despite calling the contest an easy one this time, that I'd make it a rather complicated question to get the prize. This was the prize:



Now, my mother knew what building was represented by the photograph, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown LA, but the question was "Using the prize as a clue, tell me the name of the real Chester Lampwick."

My goal with this particular contest was to educate anyone paying attention to some little known facts about Walt Disney. Maybe "little known" isn't accurate, because there is a rather wide consensus about the whole thing.

Really though, the key to this little quest was that a contestant would have to know who Chester Lampwick was. A fictional character from an episode of the Simpsons, Chester was a bum who had created Itchy, the mouse from the Itchy and Scratchy show in the Simpson canon. Roger Meyer Sr had stolen the likeness from him, and thrown him out, consigned to a life as a hobo (apparently no one else was hiring talented artists).

The prize was meant to represent Walt Disney, and Chester was to represent a real life person, the Chester to Walt's Roger Meyer.

The real life Chester Lampwick was a guy named Ub Iwerks. Ub's name is explained by is Frisian/German roots, as he was born in Kansas City, and befriended Walt early in their lives. While Walt was an idea and pitch man, selling stories and animated shorts to studios, his animator and workhorse was Ub. Their first great and popular creation, which has begun to make a comeback with a starring role in the Epic Mickey video game, was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

The lesson that Universal taught to an angry Walt Disney, about ownership rights and forfeiting what was felt like proprietary material, (the loss of rights to Oswald being the main action) wasn't dispersed as well to Ub Iwerks. Mickey Mouse was Ub's baby, "their" creation after they left Universal and struck out on their own. This fact is well established today. The honeymoon didn't last long, of course.

Chafing under the demanding Disney and angry he wasn't getting the credit he felt he deserved, Ub left. He bounced around different animation studios as Walt Disney created an empire and became a household name. Ub even came back to work for Walt after a decade or more.

Was Mickey stolen from Ub like Itchy was stolen from Chester? Maybe not, but the credit not being assigned properly (see Sam Simon) is similar and accurate.

An addendum to this story and some perspective:

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit was the most popular thing in animation in the infancy of the medium. Ub animated it almost entirely, but the stories, plotting, and pacing were from Walt. What happened when Walt and Ub left Oswald? Had you ever heard of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit before the Epic Mickey game? If so, are you an animation buff? Next, what happened to Mickey Mouse when Ub left?

Let's say he didn't suffer the same fate as Oswald.

Does this assign the credit of Oswald's, and then later of Mickey's, success to Walt Disney? I think that argument can be made.

As an epilogue, I can say I learned a lesson about complicated contest quests.

Something Weird, Part Two

The name of this post is call back to this post, about a dream I had after turning off a game on our lappy. I made a point in the beginning of that post to state that I'd refused to relay dream sequences in this forum, and I also said why, but that that time, things were just too spooky.

You can read that post if you'd like to get the full story...I just did, and I was pleasantly surprised. I can also say I honestly recommend it, which I can't say about everything I've written.

In any case, I'm breaking tradition once again, as something spooky has made me share a dream with my small audience.

In the dream I was trying to have a conversation with my Auntie Erm, my closest great aunt and the sister of my late grandmother. We were talking about wine. As friends of mine from over the years began showing up at the house, our conversation began to get interrupted, and I was getting irritated. The last thing I remember hearing her say was, "You should check out Rolph's wine..."

Rolph? In the dream I might have said that, with a 'huh' attitude, but definitely when I woke up I muttered Rolph's to myself a few times.

The name stewed in my head for most of the day, until I had the chance to jump on a work computer and check out if there was such a thing. How wild, I thought, if there would be anything named Rolph, let alone wine.

It took Google a fraction of a second to give me address and phone number of a wine shop named Rolf's, a block from the intersection of the PCH and the 55, in Costa Mesa, les than four miles from where I work.



I was stunned. I knew I had to go there. They have a nice staff, and a great selection, and the next time I go, I'll plan it so we're at a crest in the bill wave-cycle for the month.