Two odd things strike me this year with the two Southland baseball teams, one thing from each.
The Dodgers, of the National League, have long been out of playoff contention, and while they're not mathematically eliminated yet, it would take an effort not seen since the film Major League to get back into the post-season conversation. That being said, the Dodgers have two super-star players that are serious candidates for the National League's two major individual awards--the MVP Award and the Cy Young Award.
Matt Kemp, playing superb defense in center-field, is tearing it up offensively this year. As of today he's fifth in batting average at .319, tied for first with 31 homers, in second with 100 RBIs, and has stolen 35 bases. Such a collection of power, speed, hitting-for-average, and Gold Glove defense at a premium position comes rarely in this game. If Kemp keeps up this pace for the last month of the season, it would almost be a crime not to give him the MVP award.
Clayton Kershaw is the Dodgers Number 1 pitcher, and he might even be the National League's top pitcher, which is tough with Roy Halladay around. Kershaw has more wins and strikeouts than the perceived "best pitcher in the game"--Halladay, and his team, the Dodgers, have twenty-one less wins than Halladay's Phillies, who are statistically the best team in baseball. Kershaw does it for a less than mediocre team. He has a chance to win the Cy Young award this year, but it'll probably go to Halladay.
Kemp and Kershaw could give a sub-.500 team both individual honors, a feat which I can't imagine happening often.
Another strange observation, this time about the Angels, in the American League. Back in the early aughts, and even back in the late nineties, the Angels had a player named Tim Salmon. An all-star player, Tim played in the outfield. Today, continuing the trend of outfielders with fishy names, the Angels have two youngsters who have monikers Mike Carp and Mike Trout.
Is it just me, or is than a little weird?
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Milestone Post 225 (of 2011)
This post is my 225th post on caliboyinbrooklyn of the year 2011. In the year 2010 I only managed 132, thought I thoroughly enjoy many of those posts. In 2009, I was able to cram 224 into the course of basically seven months, which took me eight months this time. June of '09, though, could be a record for single month posts that stands (on caliboyinbrooklyn) for quite some time: 51.
This marks a new annual record for entries, and will be broken each time I enter new posts. I'm already excited.
Thanks for following along.
Five hundred and eighty-one (581!) and counting...
This marks a new annual record for entries, and will be broken each time I enter new posts. I'm already excited.
Thanks for following along.
Five hundred and eighty-one (581!) and counting...
Holga Realizations
For those not combing every post on this blog and committing them all to memory, a Holga is a type of cheaply made Chinese camera that uses 120 roll-film (as opposed to the usual film, 35mm) that I wrote about in my Camera Follies post. The 120 film is quite interesting and fun to play with, with huge negatives, bigger even than photos from those photo-booths they have at carnivals and weddings nowadays.
I'm coming to realize some things since beginning to "enjoy" a new hobby. I've ridden around on my bicycle to find cool places in the vicinity of our apartment and snap 120 film pictures of them. Because of the huge size of the negative, an image can be blown up to almost 30" x 30" square while retaining full (softish) clarity. That's quite remarkable, and one of the reasons I wanted to find those beautiful scenes that Corrie's so good at making happen.
I've done the same thing plenty of times with my point-and-shoot Cannon. The beautiful thing about digital media is how easy it is to take any number of pictures...the sheer volume is where digital wins out.
Each roll of 120 film will give me 12 exposures. 120 film, in another quirk of the media, is not in a cartridge, so you really have to load it and unload it in a darkened room (I use the can), and always be careful you keep the wound spool of 12 possibles treasures safe and pocketed, or covered in some other way.
Those quirks are put of the fun, or maybe, "fun".
So, when I go out with my digi and take pictures from my bike (mainly for this site) I end up taking sometimes seventy shots, sometimes more than a hundred, sometimes less than ten, but that would be a quick trip. Seventy-five pictures with my digital camera might give the four I use on a post, and only two of those I may be proud of. Two awesome pictures from six dozen. That's how that works.
When working with only twelve chances, framing the picture becomes so important. Another kinda cool thing that turns infuriating later is not really knowing what you've got until it's developed.
And then developing! Criminy. A Holga camera is not expensive--around thirty bucks. Five-roll packs of color 120 film is usually under twenty bucks, so, the enthusiast hobby isn't so cheap, but compared to any of the three digital cameras I'm looking at right now, the hobby's affordable. Developing one roll into negatives and a contact sheet, just so you can see what you've got out of those twelve chances, runs just under twenty bucks. Prints aren't included yet.
For me, the camera and film were gifts, so I'm really just deciding what to shoot and then developing it, or, better yet, letting Corrie decide what to shoot, and then framing a large print of it and putting it up on the wall.
So, now, my realization is the same as any actual photographer, namely: Damn, film camera-ing can be cool, but it can also be a bitch.
I tried to make cool dynamic pictures on my latest roll, asking myself before each picture How would Corrie frame this, and still ended up with one lens-cap on exposure (what a stupid waste), eight or nine rather pedestrian pictures, and two or three maybe-okay ones.
At least I'm having fun, right?
I'm coming to realize some things since beginning to "enjoy" a new hobby. I've ridden around on my bicycle to find cool places in the vicinity of our apartment and snap 120 film pictures of them. Because of the huge size of the negative, an image can be blown up to almost 30" x 30" square while retaining full (softish) clarity. That's quite remarkable, and one of the reasons I wanted to find those beautiful scenes that Corrie's so good at making happen.
I've done the same thing plenty of times with my point-and-shoot Cannon. The beautiful thing about digital media is how easy it is to take any number of pictures...the sheer volume is where digital wins out.
Each roll of 120 film will give me 12 exposures. 120 film, in another quirk of the media, is not in a cartridge, so you really have to load it and unload it in a darkened room (I use the can), and always be careful you keep the wound spool of 12 possibles treasures safe and pocketed, or covered in some other way.
Those quirks are put of the fun, or maybe, "fun".
So, when I go out with my digi and take pictures from my bike (mainly for this site) I end up taking sometimes seventy shots, sometimes more than a hundred, sometimes less than ten, but that would be a quick trip. Seventy-five pictures with my digital camera might give the four I use on a post, and only two of those I may be proud of. Two awesome pictures from six dozen. That's how that works.
When working with only twelve chances, framing the picture becomes so important. Another kinda cool thing that turns infuriating later is not really knowing what you've got until it's developed.
And then developing! Criminy. A Holga camera is not expensive--around thirty bucks. Five-roll packs of color 120 film is usually under twenty bucks, so, the enthusiast hobby isn't so cheap, but compared to any of the three digital cameras I'm looking at right now, the hobby's affordable. Developing one roll into negatives and a contact sheet, just so you can see what you've got out of those twelve chances, runs just under twenty bucks. Prints aren't included yet.
For me, the camera and film were gifts, so I'm really just deciding what to shoot and then developing it, or, better yet, letting Corrie decide what to shoot, and then framing a large print of it and putting it up on the wall.
So, now, my realization is the same as any actual photographer, namely: Damn, film camera-ing can be cool, but it can also be a bitch.
I tried to make cool dynamic pictures on my latest roll, asking myself before each picture How would Corrie frame this, and still ended up with one lens-cap on exposure (what a stupid waste), eight or nine rather pedestrian pictures, and two or three maybe-okay ones.
At least I'm having fun, right?
Minor Changes Part 2
I've momentarily removed the "Followers" gadget from the left side of this site. It may be temporary, it may be gone for a longer period of time...
It hasn't been loading properly recently, and when it does load, it takes the longest time possible of anything on this site.
For my few loyal readers who follow along on their mobile devices, you won't be able to tell what the hell I'm talking about. The "Essential" column might even be a mystery to you...(I admit it: I read the site on my phone in down time at work...does that make me a narcissist?)
It hasn't been loading properly recently, and when it does load, it takes the longest time possible of anything on this site.
For my few loyal readers who follow along on their mobile devices, you won't be able to tell what the hell I'm talking about. The "Essential" column might even be a mystery to you...(I admit it: I read the site on my phone in down time at work...does that make me a narcissist?)
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Can I say this?
I consider myself a film buff, or maybe I'm a snooty cinema fan, but I do try to expose myself to all sorts of movies throughout time and countries of origin, maybe more so than other people. I own a few movies by Akira Kurosawa, I enjoy Ong Bak in the original Thai, I'll watch Melville's Le Samourai anytime. Our movie collection has Scorsese and Brooks and Fincher and Peckinpah and Lynch and even Steve James. I like a wide range of things, and own a wider range of things I thought it'd be cool to have in a collection rather than watching all the time.
There are plenty of movies, though, that I haven't seen that people, when they hear I haven't seen, are flabbergasted. In high school, some friends were having a movie/poker/sober-fun night, a night I attended and cleaned up at the nickel ante gaming, and the movie put on was a "classic" that everybody remembered fondly and had favorite characters and lines. I didn't even recognize the name of the film.
"What the hell is this?" I think I remember saying, to which I was scolded by such a chorus of voices that I still couldn't place any one thing any one person said. The movie was The Breakfast Club.
Now, in my defense, the movies of my youth, the movies of the 80s that I grew up with were not the same as most of my friends. I had the Indiana Jones pair (before the Last Crusade came out), Ghostbusters 1 & 2, Dream Team, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Beetlejuice...which are all movies most everyone also my age probably remembers, but I lacked the Molly Ringwald/John Cusack teen movies from the 80s. Molly Ringwald is from Roseville, CA, and I grew up in Citrus Heights, barely seven thousand feet from Roseville. I think the first project I saw more than commercials for that featured Molly Ringwald was the television mini-(mega-)series, The Stand.
What I'm trying to get at is that while I may have a wide knowledge and experience base for movies, sometimes I lag behind on certain movies that most everyone else has seen. It took me probably two years to see Gladiator, but once when I was recently bored, I looked up the list of films in the National Registry as deemed culturally significant and watched a few of the short films on Youtube if they were there. (How exciting were they? Have you read about them here?)
So, after a Pychonian digression or whatever, the meat of this post is about my reaction to a movie I recently saw for the first time ever, which, being at this age in my life, gives me probably the most critical and knowledgeable eye for films that I've ever had, and isn't such a bad place to be viewing a film...its merits will present themselves to me, its faults will glare like a bad reflection.
The movie in question: Ridley Scott's Alien. I was excited to watch it. It's another of the Great Salvage of Citrus Heights movies, though, having watched it, I can understand why my brother, who is I'm sure a fan of this movie, would be dumping it: the sound recording is terrible.
Finally getting to see it was going to be very cool. See, I convinced Corrie to watch it with me at night, with the lights off. That's significant because she doesn't like scary movies, or being scared, or anything that could keep her wild imagination running all night and make her lose sleep (The X-Files and Ghost Whisperer have, at times, proven too scary for her...but both of those shows, in their own different ways, have their own very tense and intense moments). Cuddling on the couch; perfect scary movie scenario.
Until Corrie passed out out of boredom. Maybe that's too harsh, if accurate. The fist ten minutes is the name appearing on the screen (which is a neat (long) moody mood setter)(I did enjoy it) and the stasis tubes opening. The next twenty minutes are people waking up and trying figure out why they're not closer to earth, and, like any vessel, some crew members bitching about pay. You get the feeling Sigourney Weaver's Ripley may have been promoted to Warrant Officer too soon, since she doesn't seem to have anybody's respect, and is basically second in command. Are we watching a moody labor strife saga confined to a malfunctioning space vessel, or one of the preeminent horror films of any generation?
I understand that it was made in 1978/9, so the computer is painfully outdated (watch it again...plugging in different 8-tracks to open the computer room's door?), but that can be overlooked. Maybe being in a leadership position in my own life now has clouded the way I view good leadership and bad leadership in movies I've seen. Here: Tom Skerritt doesn't have the kind of control over his crew that someone on a space mission aboard a space ship would absolutely need, and this is repeated by how his first mate (Ripley) is treated. No chain of command. (Russel Crowe in Master and Commander is a great example of good leadership.)
Who cares about outdated computers and bad captains? Because for the first half of the movie I find myself snickering whenever I see the computers and not really caring what happens to the crew, since they're all pretty bad at what they do and get themselves into trouble repeatedly. When the ship finally lands on the planetoid that has the eggs that start the whole main story into gear, does anyone remember what happens?
The ship descends, slowly, slowly, slower, almost touches down, almost there, then the moment it touches down everybody on board falls over like the school bus crashed and fires start and crazy warning sounds go off. I blurted out laughter loud enough to wake Corrie, if only momentarily (it was late and she was tired after a long work week...).
By the time the classic horror stuff goes down I wasn't emotionally invested anymore, so my overall opinion will be based on that. The gut-bursting alien-birthing scene was, I absolutely concede, very exciting, and must have been truly shocking in 1979 when the movie opened. But seriously, why the hell is he eating food with everybody? He'd just gotten some acid-bleeding face-hugging monster off of his damn face, and he's just chillin' getting some grub?
But, that kind of problem (recognizing plot holes and heavy-handed foreshadowing) sounds like my problem, and it interferes with my enjoyment of plenty of movies.
Thinking back on watching Alien now, I can say that my disappointment must stem from the ridiculously high expectations I had before watching it. Ridley Scott does do all he can to make it as moody as possible, and in one sense that's a component of certain type of horror or thriller movie.
Maybe I've been too harsh with one of the classics. I'll watch it again to see if my complaints about the timing are justified. Am I alone? Is this post treasonous?
There are plenty of movies, though, that I haven't seen that people, when they hear I haven't seen, are flabbergasted. In high school, some friends were having a movie/poker/sober-fun night, a night I attended and cleaned up at the nickel ante gaming, and the movie put on was a "classic" that everybody remembered fondly and had favorite characters and lines. I didn't even recognize the name of the film.
"What the hell is this?" I think I remember saying, to which I was scolded by such a chorus of voices that I still couldn't place any one thing any one person said. The movie was The Breakfast Club.
Now, in my defense, the movies of my youth, the movies of the 80s that I grew up with were not the same as most of my friends. I had the Indiana Jones pair (before the Last Crusade came out), Ghostbusters 1 & 2, Dream Team, *batteries not included, Short Circuit, Beetlejuice...which are all movies most everyone also my age probably remembers, but I lacked the Molly Ringwald/John Cusack teen movies from the 80s. Molly Ringwald is from Roseville, CA, and I grew up in Citrus Heights, barely seven thousand feet from Roseville. I think the first project I saw more than commercials for that featured Molly Ringwald was the television mini-(mega-)series, The Stand.
What I'm trying to get at is that while I may have a wide knowledge and experience base for movies, sometimes I lag behind on certain movies that most everyone else has seen. It took me probably two years to see Gladiator, but once when I was recently bored, I looked up the list of films in the National Registry as deemed culturally significant and watched a few of the short films on Youtube if they were there. (How exciting were they? Have you read about them here?)
So, after a Pychonian digression or whatever, the meat of this post is about my reaction to a movie I recently saw for the first time ever, which, being at this age in my life, gives me probably the most critical and knowledgeable eye for films that I've ever had, and isn't such a bad place to be viewing a film...its merits will present themselves to me, its faults will glare like a bad reflection.
The movie in question: Ridley Scott's Alien. I was excited to watch it. It's another of the Great Salvage of Citrus Heights movies, though, having watched it, I can understand why my brother, who is I'm sure a fan of this movie, would be dumping it: the sound recording is terrible.
Finally getting to see it was going to be very cool. See, I convinced Corrie to watch it with me at night, with the lights off. That's significant because she doesn't like scary movies, or being scared, or anything that could keep her wild imagination running all night and make her lose sleep (The X-Files and Ghost Whisperer have, at times, proven too scary for her...but both of those shows, in their own different ways, have their own very tense and intense moments). Cuddling on the couch; perfect scary movie scenario.
Until Corrie passed out out of boredom. Maybe that's too harsh, if accurate. The fist ten minutes is the name appearing on the screen (which is a neat (long) moody mood setter)(I did enjoy it) and the stasis tubes opening. The next twenty minutes are people waking up and trying figure out why they're not closer to earth, and, like any vessel, some crew members bitching about pay. You get the feeling Sigourney Weaver's Ripley may have been promoted to Warrant Officer too soon, since she doesn't seem to have anybody's respect, and is basically second in command. Are we watching a moody labor strife saga confined to a malfunctioning space vessel, or one of the preeminent horror films of any generation?
I understand that it was made in 1978/9, so the computer is painfully outdated (watch it again...plugging in different 8-tracks to open the computer room's door?), but that can be overlooked. Maybe being in a leadership position in my own life now has clouded the way I view good leadership and bad leadership in movies I've seen. Here: Tom Skerritt doesn't have the kind of control over his crew that someone on a space mission aboard a space ship would absolutely need, and this is repeated by how his first mate (Ripley) is treated. No chain of command. (Russel Crowe in Master and Commander is a great example of good leadership.)
Who cares about outdated computers and bad captains? Because for the first half of the movie I find myself snickering whenever I see the computers and not really caring what happens to the crew, since they're all pretty bad at what they do and get themselves into trouble repeatedly. When the ship finally lands on the planetoid that has the eggs that start the whole main story into gear, does anyone remember what happens?
The ship descends, slowly, slowly, slower, almost touches down, almost there, then the moment it touches down everybody on board falls over like the school bus crashed and fires start and crazy warning sounds go off. I blurted out laughter loud enough to wake Corrie, if only momentarily (it was late and she was tired after a long work week...).
By the time the classic horror stuff goes down I wasn't emotionally invested anymore, so my overall opinion will be based on that. The gut-bursting alien-birthing scene was, I absolutely concede, very exciting, and must have been truly shocking in 1979 when the movie opened. But seriously, why the hell is he eating food with everybody? He'd just gotten some acid-bleeding face-hugging monster off of his damn face, and he's just chillin' getting some grub?
But, that kind of problem (recognizing plot holes and heavy-handed foreshadowing) sounds like my problem, and it interferes with my enjoyment of plenty of movies.
Thinking back on watching Alien now, I can say that my disappointment must stem from the ridiculously high expectations I had before watching it. Ridley Scott does do all he can to make it as moody as possible, and in one sense that's a component of certain type of horror or thriller movie.
Maybe I've been too harsh with one of the classics. I'll watch it again to see if my complaints about the timing are justified. Am I alone? Is this post treasonous?
Tripoli Finally Falls
I'm just setting my own record straight, since six months ago I claimed that Gaddafi was barely holding Tripoli and was poised to lose control of his power quite soon.
I spoke too soon.
2011 might just be the Year of the Arabic Uprisings. Here's to hoping they get Syria figured out sooner rather than later.
I spoke too soon.
2011 might just be the Year of the Arabic Uprisings. Here's to hoping they get Syria figured out sooner rather than later.
From the Wince-Inducing Files (or) KAHNNNN!
Who remembers the creepiest scene in Star Trek 2? I'm not a trekkie, by any means, but at some point I do have a post about possibly one of the best hours of late night television I saw recently in the form of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I have, even if years ago, seen Star Trek 2: Wrath of Kahn. The creepiest scene is when Kahn, played by Ricardo Montalbaln, plants a control device in Chekov and someone else. This control device is a bug, like a grub or caterpillar that crawls into their ears and burrows into their brain.
The bug in the ear...(shudder)...still creepy.
Check out St. Louis yesterday. The St. Louis Cardinals were playing a baseball game against the LA Dodgers when a moth flew into the ear canal of St. Loo's star outfielder Matt Holliday, and got lodged. It wouldn't come out, so Matt Holliday did, out of the game I mean. They took him to a dark room in the stadium, pitch-black actually, and shined a tiny light near his ear in hopes of luring out the moth.
No good.
Eventually they settled on using some vaguely identified utensil to extract the still living moth from Holliday's ear.
I...I don't even...wow.
The bug in the ear...(shudder)...still creepy.
Check out St. Louis yesterday. The St. Louis Cardinals were playing a baseball game against the LA Dodgers when a moth flew into the ear canal of St. Loo's star outfielder Matt Holliday, and got lodged. It wouldn't come out, so Matt Holliday did, out of the game I mean. They took him to a dark room in the stadium, pitch-black actually, and shined a tiny light near his ear in hopes of luring out the moth.
No good.
Eventually they settled on using some vaguely identified utensil to extract the still living moth from Holliday's ear.
I...I don't even...wow.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
The Katella Connection
Friday night. No work, and two tickets to a ballgame. Pretty sweet. Corrie got to carpool to work, so all I had to do was get the nice car to her work in Newport Beach in time to make the game. I left at 4:30ish, which is the wrong time to try and take any highway in any direction, and knowing this, I immediately went for Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway.
The PCH is little more than a multi-lane road (in this area) that hugs the coast for stretches and rides through small beach-towns for other stretches. I knew it would be packed as well, but no more so than usual, which, while heavily trafficked, is usually better moving than most major freeways.
Within two miles of Corrie's work, our Passat started beeping at me in screaming tones, and quickly I found the computer screen that stated the problem: STOP it said in between flashes of "Check Coolant" and "Service Manual". The temp gauge was buried in the 260 degree range. I found a place to pull over and checked the coolant and oil. Both seemed okay. I started out again, and within two minutes the beeping and screaming and STOP wouldn't go away until I was at a stoplight again.
Finally making it to Corrie's work, we discussed the problem, and wanted to get to the game in one piece as well as getting home with a working car. Corrie drove most of the way to the game, having to pull over into parking lots every few seconds to let the car cool. At times while cooling off, we could hear the coolant in the system gurgling and boiling like crazy. At idle, it was fine, but not at any driving RPMs.
There we were, cruising with the heater on high, just limping our way through Newport and Costa Mesa and Santa Ana and finally into Anaheim.
After the game we'd hoped that maybe the entire system would have been cooled off enough, but that wasn't the case. Of course it wasn't, because the problem is mechanical, like the water pump not circulating the coolant throughout the engine.
Los Angeles, and here I'm lumping everything from Thousand Oaks in Ventura County all the way down to Anaheim and Irvine in Orange County, is known around the country as a patchwork quilt collection of freeways, organically connecting different cities and communities with each other. What's less well-known to drivers outside of California is that LA is also connected with a far-reaching network of surface streets. This network is what we took advantage of when we slowly limped home from the ballpark in Anaheim.
One of the major east-west streets in Long Beach is Willow Street. The hotel my company put Corrie up in during her trip to find a place for us back in April is on Willow. If you travel west on Willow, it leaves Long Beach and turns into East Sepulveda, and then West Sepulveda, before petering out after turning north in a community called Torrance. Heading east on Willow takes you past the 405, and then past the 605 Freeway, where you leave Long Beach again, and the name of the street changes again, this time to Katella. If you stay on Katella long enough heading east, you'll arrive at Angel Stadium.
Holy cow. Katella is one of the stadium's corner streets, and is our Willow. Awesome. That distance is less than nineteen miles.
So...we started out down Katella, heading west, and had to make a quick stop to let the car cool down. That was pretty much our modus operandi: limp home, jump off the main road and let the car cool as needed, and get back out and do it again until we get all the way back to our mechanic near our apartment. We planned to park in front of their driveway and come back in the morning and get the car serviced on Saturday.
The plan worked, but took plenty of time, like almost two hours. We got the car situated in front of the mechanics, in the driveway in front of the closed gate, ready to come back at 9 the next morning.
Too bad they opened at 8.
In the final kick to the scrotum, when we got there this morning to get the car worked on, it was gone, having been towed and impounded.
Now we're almost $225 lighter, and that was just to boost the car.
The impound lot was on Willow.
The PCH is little more than a multi-lane road (in this area) that hugs the coast for stretches and rides through small beach-towns for other stretches. I knew it would be packed as well, but no more so than usual, which, while heavily trafficked, is usually better moving than most major freeways.
Within two miles of Corrie's work, our Passat started beeping at me in screaming tones, and quickly I found the computer screen that stated the problem: STOP it said in between flashes of "Check Coolant" and "Service Manual". The temp gauge was buried in the 260 degree range. I found a place to pull over and checked the coolant and oil. Both seemed okay. I started out again, and within two minutes the beeping and screaming and STOP wouldn't go away until I was at a stoplight again.
Finally making it to Corrie's work, we discussed the problem, and wanted to get to the game in one piece as well as getting home with a working car. Corrie drove most of the way to the game, having to pull over into parking lots every few seconds to let the car cool. At times while cooling off, we could hear the coolant in the system gurgling and boiling like crazy. At idle, it was fine, but not at any driving RPMs.
There we were, cruising with the heater on high, just limping our way through Newport and Costa Mesa and Santa Ana and finally into Anaheim.
After the game we'd hoped that maybe the entire system would have been cooled off enough, but that wasn't the case. Of course it wasn't, because the problem is mechanical, like the water pump not circulating the coolant throughout the engine.
Los Angeles, and here I'm lumping everything from Thousand Oaks in Ventura County all the way down to Anaheim and Irvine in Orange County, is known around the country as a patchwork quilt collection of freeways, organically connecting different cities and communities with each other. What's less well-known to drivers outside of California is that LA is also connected with a far-reaching network of surface streets. This network is what we took advantage of when we slowly limped home from the ballpark in Anaheim.
One of the major east-west streets in Long Beach is Willow Street. The hotel my company put Corrie up in during her trip to find a place for us back in April is on Willow. If you travel west on Willow, it leaves Long Beach and turns into East Sepulveda, and then West Sepulveda, before petering out after turning north in a community called Torrance. Heading east on Willow takes you past the 405, and then past the 605 Freeway, where you leave Long Beach again, and the name of the street changes again, this time to Katella. If you stay on Katella long enough heading east, you'll arrive at Angel Stadium.
Holy cow. Katella is one of the stadium's corner streets, and is our Willow. Awesome. That distance is less than nineteen miles.
So...we started out down Katella, heading west, and had to make a quick stop to let the car cool down. That was pretty much our modus operandi: limp home, jump off the main road and let the car cool as needed, and get back out and do it again until we get all the way back to our mechanic near our apartment. We planned to park in front of their driveway and come back in the morning and get the car serviced on Saturday.
The plan worked, but took plenty of time, like almost two hours. We got the car situated in front of the mechanics, in the driveway in front of the closed gate, ready to come back at 9 the next morning.
Too bad they opened at 8.
In the final kick to the scrotum, when we got there this morning to get the car worked on, it was gone, having been towed and impounded.
Now we're almost $225 lighter, and that was just to boost the car.
The impound lot was on Willow.
The Big A
I surprisingly had a Friday night off, and we used it to go see the Anaheim Angels and the Baltimore Orioles play a baseball game. My bad, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, even though Anaheim is almost thirty miles from LA and has almost 400k people.
Corrie had procured very inexpensive tickets for the game, but because of car troubles we ended up missing the first four innings. (Car trouble post coming.)
The Angels play at Angel Stadium, which, because of this architectural formation, is known colloquially as "The Big A". (You might have to take my word that this shape is an 'A'.)
This was our first trip to the ball-park in Anaheim, the home of the Angels for almost fifty years now. I found an old photograph my dad took of Angels Stadium back in the late 70s, and the same Big A was propped up behind the left-field fence (it was later moved). Our seats were close to the left field fence, just inside the foul pole, on the foul-territory side. The view was pretty neat.
When we got there, the game was already 5-2 Angels over the Orioles, but the fireworks weren't over yet. We got to see Torii Hunter hit his second homer of the game (missed the first one), and got to see rookie phenom Mike Trout hit the second homer of his major league career. We also got to see a sac-fly from Baltimore to finish off the scoring at 8-3. It was pretty neat to see Vlad Guerrero as an O, a probable Hall of Famer in the twilight of his career.
This is the 50th Anniversary for the Angels as an expansion team, and all year long they've been wearing throw-back jerseys, their vintage outfits from over the years, many of which I realize I like more than I would have guessed.
In the recent past, since 2002 when the Angels dropped those dreadful cartoon logo-ed uniforms and went with the red scheme they use now, and beat the Yankees that same year, I've been an anti-Angel fan. It wasn't until they started really beating the Yanks regularly that I really started to despise them. I rooted for them against Bonds in 2002, I guess. The local television in San Luis Obispo was all Angels all the time, which grew annoying.
I didn't have a hate on, though, like I do for the Red Sox and Orioles (less so since The Wire, though, for Baltimore). The Oakland A's were my brother's team, not mine, so my natural rivalry with the So-cal counterpart is less developed. I admit that I probably do have an irrational religion-based distaste for the Angels, but it's mostly assuaged with the knowledge that the name is based on the city of LA's name.
In any case, the jerseys and throw-back uniforms with the dark blue interlocking LA and CA, seem to unfortunately hearken back to only the Angel's early years in the American League. They unfortunately don't seem to be wearing any cool PCL era garb.
I'll be putting up a post on the old Pacific Coast League in a while. The Angels are the younger LA baseball team, officially in MLB. The LA Angels, in a non-linear way, are the true Los Angeles baseball team, being the only southern California team in the 1903 charter year for the Pacific Coast League, which by all accounts was a third major league right before Brooklyn and the Giants moved west.
Since it was Friday night at the stadium, we got the fireworks show after the game.
Corrie had procured very inexpensive tickets for the game, but because of car troubles we ended up missing the first four innings. (Car trouble post coming.)
The Angels play at Angel Stadium, which, because of this architectural formation, is known colloquially as "The Big A". (You might have to take my word that this shape is an 'A'.)
This was our first trip to the ball-park in Anaheim, the home of the Angels for almost fifty years now. I found an old photograph my dad took of Angels Stadium back in the late 70s, and the same Big A was propped up behind the left-field fence (it was later moved). Our seats were close to the left field fence, just inside the foul pole, on the foul-territory side. The view was pretty neat.
When we got there, the game was already 5-2 Angels over the Orioles, but the fireworks weren't over yet. We got to see Torii Hunter hit his second homer of the game (missed the first one), and got to see rookie phenom Mike Trout hit the second homer of his major league career. We also got to see a sac-fly from Baltimore to finish off the scoring at 8-3. It was pretty neat to see Vlad Guerrero as an O, a probable Hall of Famer in the twilight of his career.
This is the 50th Anniversary for the Angels as an expansion team, and all year long they've been wearing throw-back jerseys, their vintage outfits from over the years, many of which I realize I like more than I would have guessed.
In the recent past, since 2002 when the Angels dropped those dreadful cartoon logo-ed uniforms and went with the red scheme they use now, and beat the Yankees that same year, I've been an anti-Angel fan. It wasn't until they started really beating the Yanks regularly that I really started to despise them. I rooted for them against Bonds in 2002, I guess. The local television in San Luis Obispo was all Angels all the time, which grew annoying.
I didn't have a hate on, though, like I do for the Red Sox and Orioles (less so since The Wire, though, for Baltimore). The Oakland A's were my brother's team, not mine, so my natural rivalry with the So-cal counterpart is less developed. I admit that I probably do have an irrational religion-based distaste for the Angels, but it's mostly assuaged with the knowledge that the name is based on the city of LA's name.
In any case, the jerseys and throw-back uniforms with the dark blue interlocking LA and CA, seem to unfortunately hearken back to only the Angel's early years in the American League. They unfortunately don't seem to be wearing any cool PCL era garb.
I'll be putting up a post on the old Pacific Coast League in a while. The Angels are the younger LA baseball team, officially in MLB. The LA Angels, in a non-linear way, are the true Los Angeles baseball team, being the only southern California team in the 1903 charter year for the Pacific Coast League, which by all accounts was a third major league right before Brooklyn and the Giants moved west.
Since it was Friday night at the stadium, we got the fireworks show after the game.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Uphill Both Ways
About forty miles outside of Bogota, the capital city of Colombia, is a village on the far side of the Rio Negro. The village's only lifeline to markets and schools and the rest of inhabited Colombia is a pair of steel cables, a half-mile long.
The footage, linked here, of people taking the zip line has been floating the internet for a few years.
The river gorge's span of a half-mile yields heights in excess of 1300 feet and speeds up to forty miles an hour. One cable goes one way, the other cable the other way. Riders, on average sixty a day, supply their own pulleys and sitting rope.
Imagine coming to a cable, setting your iron pulley on it, wrapping a rope under your tush as a cradle and hooking it to your pulley, and shoving off...soon dangling higher than the Empire State Building travelling at 40 mph. Did you see that footage? They use sticks for breaks! They transport their young siblings in cloth sacks!
How awesome is it knowing when you land on the other side of the gorge that you have to hike back up--not only once, but both ways?
The footage, linked here, of people taking the zip line has been floating the internet for a few years.
The river gorge's span of a half-mile yields heights in excess of 1300 feet and speeds up to forty miles an hour. One cable goes one way, the other cable the other way. Riders, on average sixty a day, supply their own pulleys and sitting rope.
Imagine coming to a cable, setting your iron pulley on it, wrapping a rope under your tush as a cradle and hooking it to your pulley, and shoving off...soon dangling higher than the Empire State Building travelling at 40 mph. Did you see that footage? They use sticks for breaks! They transport their young siblings in cloth sacks!
How awesome is it knowing when you land on the other side of the gorge that you have to hike back up--not only once, but both ways?
Wednesday, August 17, 2011
Long Beach Looming
I don't know why I like these views so much. The picture of Villa Riviera is closer than a similar picture I posted earlier.
This is a mostly frivolous post...I'm doing it because I can and this is my blog. There's something about these views that intrigues me...the alleys and the glitzy beach-front condos looming in the background...
"You're doing it again, that thing, that thing that drives me crazy, begins with an L...looming, yes..." Robert Downey, Jr, from Zodiac.
This is a mostly frivolous post...I'm doing it because I can and this is my blog. There's something about these views that intrigues me...the alleys and the glitzy beach-front condos looming in the background...
"You're doing it again, that thing, that thing that drives me crazy, begins with an L...looming, yes..." Robert Downey, Jr, from Zodiac.
Haircut in the LBC
Sort of a sequel to my "Haircut in the Stuy" post (now available for quick view as an "Essential" post). I went to a barber for the first time since that trip in November of '09. Corrie's been cutting it in the time being between then and today.
So...today I had my haircut by my new barber, Terah, quite the skilled young man. During the cut he got a call about an apartment, which was exciting. He's struggling like so many folks, but not with the sheers or straight razor.
Yup, I got my first, and probably last, straight razor shave (maybe for Dan's wedding I'll consider it, since it's close). The straight razor shave is an experience that guys as hairy as me should probably do every once in a while (Corrie'll love it), but an always type thing is a little taxing on my skin.
My hair, as evidenced by this picture from last night's WNBA game, had gotten somewhat out of control.
Terah did a good job of dealing with the curls, and trying to style it somehow. I'm not sure how long he's been at it, cutting hair that is, because it comes naturally to him.
Being a "barber" is more than just cutting hair, of course. A barber is like an old friend or local bartender buddy; chatting, giving advice, listening to petty bitching...playing an important role in the community.
Here's the new cut, from my lappy's camera:
So...today I had my haircut by my new barber, Terah, quite the skilled young man. During the cut he got a call about an apartment, which was exciting. He's struggling like so many folks, but not with the sheers or straight razor.
Yup, I got my first, and probably last, straight razor shave (maybe for Dan's wedding I'll consider it, since it's close). The straight razor shave is an experience that guys as hairy as me should probably do every once in a while (Corrie'll love it), but an always type thing is a little taxing on my skin.
My hair, as evidenced by this picture from last night's WNBA game, had gotten somewhat out of control.
Terah did a good job of dealing with the curls, and trying to style it somehow. I'm not sure how long he's been at it, cutting hair that is, because it comes naturally to him.
Being a "barber" is more than just cutting hair, of course. A barber is like an old friend or local bartender buddy; chatting, giving advice, listening to petty bitching...playing an important role in the community.
Here's the new cut, from my lappy's camera:
Sparks vs Dream: First Visit to the Staples Center
Yesterday Corrie and I made our first trip to the Staples Center, home of the LA Sparks and Lakers. Corrie has since joined the LA bureau of Goldstar, the company that hooks up crazy cheap tickets for events that we used in New York, and these were an awesome pickup.
With the Lakers and the rest of the NBA on hiatus for the time being, this is all the pro-basketball we're being supplied with around here.
The Staples Center is at the Pico stop on the LA Metro Blue line, the subway near our house, so we didn't have to drive or park, which is pretty sweet, especially since the city's okay'd the plans to build the football stadium right behind Staples Center, so if we ever get to those games...and if LA ever gets a team, which is taken as an inevitability everywhere around here.
In any case, the Staples Center is on one edge of downtown, now a nice and shiny part of town, probably lifted by the arena over the course of a decade.
When we got to there, we found our section, and then started looking for our seats, which were in Row F. All the seats we could find were labeled with numerals, not letters. We asked an usher, and he said, "Oh, see, you guys are down there," pointing down behind one of the hoops. The seats were the nice, padded, folding guys, set up each day by somebody.
From there you could really get a sense of "WOW! Those young lady's are, uh...athletic." Corrie, at one point, jokingly said, "I bet that big girl right there could probably kick your ass," nodding towards a giant that could have stepped on my head a few times. I scoffed and spoke the truth, "Honey, the littlest girl out there could probably kick my ass."
The lights inside made my camera not take as awesome of pictures as I would have liked, but you might be able to get the sense of how close we were.
There was a group of young, yarmulke clad men who were aggressively taunting the opposing team, the Atlanta Dream, and since the house wasn't exactly full, they could be heard by, probably, the entire crowd. You could see angry parents with their little daughters trying to enjoy themselves sending the stink-eye their direction.
The Dream haven't been playing so well recently, but neither have the Sparks. Our Sparks did get back star forward Candace Parker from and injury that's kept her out for the last 15 games, but she got ejected with literally less than one second to play for arguing a bad call and getting two technical fouls in a row.
The game went back and forth, the lead changed many times. For a while the Sparks were up by as many as 8, and just as quickly they'd be down 6. At one point I remember thinking that the Dream were in control, only to glance at the scoreboard and see they were losing by 5.
The Sparks were down by two with 27.4 seconds to go, and possession on their side of the court, and in those 27 seconds, a few offensive boards were overshadowed by the tossing of bricks at the hoop. After the third miss, a Dream player scooped up the rebound and bolted for a quick layup with less than a second to go. That's when Candace started her argument, and the free-thrower for the dream made only one of her two free-throws for the technicals, putting the game at the final, 84-79. If you look close at the action shot above, you can see one that last brick (the clock behind her says 4.0 seconds, and quickly going down).
Taking the subway there and home felt right. I'll have a better post about the train sometime soon, highlighting just what LA looks like, as well as how ridiculously close to homes the train actually gets at times.
With the Lakers and the rest of the NBA on hiatus for the time being, this is all the pro-basketball we're being supplied with around here.
The Staples Center is at the Pico stop on the LA Metro Blue line, the subway near our house, so we didn't have to drive or park, which is pretty sweet, especially since the city's okay'd the plans to build the football stadium right behind Staples Center, so if we ever get to those games...and if LA ever gets a team, which is taken as an inevitability everywhere around here.
In any case, the Staples Center is on one edge of downtown, now a nice and shiny part of town, probably lifted by the arena over the course of a decade.
When we got to there, we found our section, and then started looking for our seats, which were in Row F. All the seats we could find were labeled with numerals, not letters. We asked an usher, and he said, "Oh, see, you guys are down there," pointing down behind one of the hoops. The seats were the nice, padded, folding guys, set up each day by somebody.
From there you could really get a sense of "WOW! Those young lady's are, uh...athletic." Corrie, at one point, jokingly said, "I bet that big girl right there could probably kick your ass," nodding towards a giant that could have stepped on my head a few times. I scoffed and spoke the truth, "Honey, the littlest girl out there could probably kick my ass."
The lights inside made my camera not take as awesome of pictures as I would have liked, but you might be able to get the sense of how close we were.
There was a group of young, yarmulke clad men who were aggressively taunting the opposing team, the Atlanta Dream, and since the house wasn't exactly full, they could be heard by, probably, the entire crowd. You could see angry parents with their little daughters trying to enjoy themselves sending the stink-eye their direction.
The Dream haven't been playing so well recently, but neither have the Sparks. Our Sparks did get back star forward Candace Parker from and injury that's kept her out for the last 15 games, but she got ejected with literally less than one second to play for arguing a bad call and getting two technical fouls in a row.
The game went back and forth, the lead changed many times. For a while the Sparks were up by as many as 8, and just as quickly they'd be down 6. At one point I remember thinking that the Dream were in control, only to glance at the scoreboard and see they were losing by 5.
The Sparks were down by two with 27.4 seconds to go, and possession on their side of the court, and in those 27 seconds, a few offensive boards were overshadowed by the tossing of bricks at the hoop. After the third miss, a Dream player scooped up the rebound and bolted for a quick layup with less than a second to go. That's when Candace started her argument, and the free-thrower for the dream made only one of her two free-throws for the technicals, putting the game at the final, 84-79. If you look close at the action shot above, you can see one that last brick (the clock behind her says 4.0 seconds, and quickly going down).
Taking the subway there and home felt right. I'll have a better post about the train sometime soon, highlighting just what LA looks like, as well as how ridiculously close to homes the train actually gets at times.
Local Newspaper
I might have mentioned before how I subscribe to the Long Beach Press-Telegram, the local newspaper. I like reading and supporting dying media, and this paper is the prototype of a small-town gasping-for-breath paper, even if the small town is a half-million people deep surrounded by LA, the OC, and the ocean.
Most days there will be two sections, the front-page and the sports-page. Occasionally there's a third, highlighting health, food, or happenings. The comics, which arrive everyday with the paper, are either nestled in the back of the sports, or the back of the third section whenever it's there.
The charm of this somehow small-town paper never ceases to amaze me. Look at yesterday's two sections:
The main front-page article with the large color photo is about a pawnshop. Also, I really like how they cover soccer here, as can be seen with the new acquisition of Robby Keane, an Irish striker coming to play with Beckham and Donovan here on the Galaxy.
Most days there will be two sections, the front-page and the sports-page. Occasionally there's a third, highlighting health, food, or happenings. The comics, which arrive everyday with the paper, are either nestled in the back of the sports, or the back of the third section whenever it's there.
The charm of this somehow small-town paper never ceases to amaze me. Look at yesterday's two sections:
The main front-page article with the large color photo is about a pawnshop. Also, I really like how they cover soccer here, as can be seen with the new acquisition of Robby Keane, an Irish striker coming to play with Beckham and Donovan here on the Galaxy.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
The Madness Gene
It looks like I beat The New Yorker to the punch with an article about the Neandertals, Denisovans, and the scientist Boss Pääbo. My post about species and a Siberian cave can be found on the left as an "Essential" and to the right as the the most popular post by clicks, and predates their recent "Sleeping with the Enemy" article, about the mixing of genetic material between the various human species, by eight months.
My post is a post that I enjoy, and their article is also quite good. There is a point they make that I hadn't gotten to yet. Conversations I've had over the years with friends about species, humanity, and our ape-ness, have tended to focus on the similarities between us and all members of the animal kingdom, things that link us the biosphere on this rock, while maybe ignoring the obvious differences between us and everything else. Those things, the obvious differences, are less striking if you're frame of reference is one of utility and scientific progression in a geologic time frame.
Focusing on those differences and pointing to them as proof that we have dominion over all things on the planet is, I believe, a destructive and incorrect position.
An idea that this article looks at, labeled as the "Madness Gene", came about while Pääbo was sequencing the genome of the Neandertal (which he's still doing): since the differences between the genomes of Sapiens and Neanderatls are very small, the idea that maybe that thing that makes us us and not the likes of Neandertal, Denisova, and Erectus, might be a specific gene.
One difference is easy to point to, and the difference leads to the name of the Madness Gene. Erectus, Denisova, Neandertal: all three of them colonized all parts of Europe and Asia like other mammal species--right up to the shore. Only Sapiens got into boats and sailed out into open ocean, without visible land in sight (this claim might be disputable).
Only after Sapiens showed up in places did those place's mega fauna quickly disappear. Denisovans and Neandertals lived is harmony, or at least relative peace, with each other, and the record shows that this ended when Sapiens joined their scenes. After having sex with them, and having kids that were assimilated into their Sapiens group, they were quickly ousted, either by force or by happenstance. (I've deliberately skipped the "hobbits" of Indonesian Flores.)
The Madness Gene...taking us to Australia and the Americas and Madagascar...taking us, ultimately, to the moon and even to the precipice of nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War.
Can this Madness Gene, if it's the real reason, help us with the global climate change crisis?
My post is a post that I enjoy, and their article is also quite good. There is a point they make that I hadn't gotten to yet. Conversations I've had over the years with friends about species, humanity, and our ape-ness, have tended to focus on the similarities between us and all members of the animal kingdom, things that link us the biosphere on this rock, while maybe ignoring the obvious differences between us and everything else. Those things, the obvious differences, are less striking if you're frame of reference is one of utility and scientific progression in a geologic time frame.
Focusing on those differences and pointing to them as proof that we have dominion over all things on the planet is, I believe, a destructive and incorrect position.
An idea that this article looks at, labeled as the "Madness Gene", came about while Pääbo was sequencing the genome of the Neandertal (which he's still doing): since the differences between the genomes of Sapiens and Neanderatls are very small, the idea that maybe that thing that makes us us and not the likes of Neandertal, Denisova, and Erectus, might be a specific gene.
One difference is easy to point to, and the difference leads to the name of the Madness Gene. Erectus, Denisova, Neandertal: all three of them colonized all parts of Europe and Asia like other mammal species--right up to the shore. Only Sapiens got into boats and sailed out into open ocean, without visible land in sight (this claim might be disputable).
Only after Sapiens showed up in places did those place's mega fauna quickly disappear. Denisovans and Neandertals lived is harmony, or at least relative peace, with each other, and the record shows that this ended when Sapiens joined their scenes. After having sex with them, and having kids that were assimilated into their Sapiens group, they were quickly ousted, either by force or by happenstance. (I've deliberately skipped the "hobbits" of Indonesian Flores.)
The Madness Gene...taking us to Australia and the Americas and Madagascar...taking us, ultimately, to the moon and even to the precipice of nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War.
Can this Madness Gene, if it's the real reason, help us with the global climate change crisis?
"I'm a bicycle owner!" Part 2
Nowadays, the three types of two-wheeled human-powered machines are: recumbent, prone, and upright. Upright is what the meat of this, and the last post have been about.
I mentioned in the last sentence of the last post about the roadster. A roadster bicycle and a road bike are different in minor design ways, but these design differences make all the world of difference for the riding experience. On both, roadster and road, the center bar is parallel with the ground. In road bikes, the angle of the rake of the seat pole and the front wheel fork are steeper that in their roadster cousins, making for a more of a hunched, ass in the air ride.
Bikes that used to be called "ladies bikes" are now known as "step-through" frames, and there are two main types. The first type has the center pole at an angle and meeting the seat pole half-way down. This is a popular and comfortable design, but tends to be heavier due to the fact that the design is inherently weaker than the parallel center pole and must be made with thicker steel. The other main step-through type is called a "mixte" frame, and consists of two thin poles leading from the handle bar all the way to the rear axle, connecting with the seat pole along the way.
This is the kind of bike Corrie found:
She's quite lucky to have found this Peugeot Mixte in such good condition, considering it's from 1974. Peugeot, in classic French form, came up with the dual braking system that's so recognizable today. Before it, brakes were either of the back-pedal kind or single pads on each wheel. Corrie's bike has the original brakes, which themselves would cost quite a bundle.
After the stock market crash, bicycle sales came to a near stand still. Seen as a luxury, bikes weren't something regular people spent hard earned money on. Schwinn, trying to start a little something, constructed a children's bike that resembled a motorcycle, fitted it with large balloon tires and the cruiser was born. Cruisers reached their height of popularity in the fifties, and then the English roadsters made their way to America, and their relative lightness and comfort strangled the cruiser's market. (The roadster, being produced in mass quantities in China and India for the African and Asian markets, is considered the most abundant bike in the world today.)
In the seventies, in Marin County, a group of enthusiasts began racing their bikes down the rugged mountain hills. The terrain would occasionally crumble their street bike frames. Eventually these enthusiasts began buying up old cruiser frames at yard sales, outfitting them with hefty wheels and motorcycle brakes, and the basic mountain bike was formed. Today, a characteristic of mountain bikes is the raked center pole and heavy duty wheels, a vestige of their cruiser origins.
"Comfort" bikes and "hybrid" bikes are almost like mountain bike frames that have been de-fitted and dialed back to a kind of road bike style, usually absent of suspension. Poorly made hybrids are bad on your posture and knees, while the best of this kind, comforts, aren't so bad.
When I was in the market for a bike, before doing all of this research, I went to places and rode prospective bikes. Finally, I rode a bike that was affordable, and it was comfortable and smooth, and I bought it:
It's exactly what I originally told myself I didn't want. The company, 3G, is a local cruiser bike designer and manufacturer, which was a draw. The bike is awesome, but heavy.
Here're some badge shots:
Now, we're not quite done with the bike thing...we'd like to have a few more bikes on hand for when we have the rare visitor over. Personally I'm interested in those roadsters. There are some companies that make very nice, very beautiful roadsters: Pashley, from England and Velorbis, from the Netherlands, but their bikes run in the $1200 range. The next step is to purchase a bike from the period of the fifties to the late seventies and either fix it up or have it fixed up.
So, along with researching what cameras we're looking at, I've actually found an old English Raleigh from the seventies that I plan on picking up (on the cheap), and teaching myself how to fix it up. I like the idea of making myself more mechanically advanced.
Here're some parting shots of our bikes:
I mentioned in the last sentence of the last post about the roadster. A roadster bicycle and a road bike are different in minor design ways, but these design differences make all the world of difference for the riding experience. On both, roadster and road, the center bar is parallel with the ground. In road bikes, the angle of the rake of the seat pole and the front wheel fork are steeper that in their roadster cousins, making for a more of a hunched, ass in the air ride.
Bikes that used to be called "ladies bikes" are now known as "step-through" frames, and there are two main types. The first type has the center pole at an angle and meeting the seat pole half-way down. This is a popular and comfortable design, but tends to be heavier due to the fact that the design is inherently weaker than the parallel center pole and must be made with thicker steel. The other main step-through type is called a "mixte" frame, and consists of two thin poles leading from the handle bar all the way to the rear axle, connecting with the seat pole along the way.
This is the kind of bike Corrie found:
She's quite lucky to have found this Peugeot Mixte in such good condition, considering it's from 1974. Peugeot, in classic French form, came up with the dual braking system that's so recognizable today. Before it, brakes were either of the back-pedal kind or single pads on each wheel. Corrie's bike has the original brakes, which themselves would cost quite a bundle.
After the stock market crash, bicycle sales came to a near stand still. Seen as a luxury, bikes weren't something regular people spent hard earned money on. Schwinn, trying to start a little something, constructed a children's bike that resembled a motorcycle, fitted it with large balloon tires and the cruiser was born. Cruisers reached their height of popularity in the fifties, and then the English roadsters made their way to America, and their relative lightness and comfort strangled the cruiser's market. (The roadster, being produced in mass quantities in China and India for the African and Asian markets, is considered the most abundant bike in the world today.)
In the seventies, in Marin County, a group of enthusiasts began racing their bikes down the rugged mountain hills. The terrain would occasionally crumble their street bike frames. Eventually these enthusiasts began buying up old cruiser frames at yard sales, outfitting them with hefty wheels and motorcycle brakes, and the basic mountain bike was formed. Today, a characteristic of mountain bikes is the raked center pole and heavy duty wheels, a vestige of their cruiser origins.
"Comfort" bikes and "hybrid" bikes are almost like mountain bike frames that have been de-fitted and dialed back to a kind of road bike style, usually absent of suspension. Poorly made hybrids are bad on your posture and knees, while the best of this kind, comforts, aren't so bad.
When I was in the market for a bike, before doing all of this research, I went to places and rode prospective bikes. Finally, I rode a bike that was affordable, and it was comfortable and smooth, and I bought it:
It's exactly what I originally told myself I didn't want. The company, 3G, is a local cruiser bike designer and manufacturer, which was a draw. The bike is awesome, but heavy.
Here're some badge shots:
Now, we're not quite done with the bike thing...we'd like to have a few more bikes on hand for when we have the rare visitor over. Personally I'm interested in those roadsters. There are some companies that make very nice, very beautiful roadsters: Pashley, from England and Velorbis, from the Netherlands, but their bikes run in the $1200 range. The next step is to purchase a bike from the period of the fifties to the late seventies and either fix it up or have it fixed up.
So, along with researching what cameras we're looking at, I've actually found an old English Raleigh from the seventies that I plan on picking up (on the cheap), and teaching myself how to fix it up. I like the idea of making myself more mechanically advanced.
Here're some parting shots of our bikes:
"I'm a bicycle owner!" Part 1
That's what Corrie said as we stopped at a stoplight, mere minutes after she picked up her new bike. She turned to me with a goofy grin and enthusiastically uttered that phrase. Her bike, while new to her, was not a brand new bicycle.
The first two wheeled contraption was made of wood and steel and powered by a Fred Flintstone-like foot-power. It was French, like many of the subsequent bicycle innovations throughout the years.
A few years later, the first real two wheeled machine with pedals designed for mass production was introduced, and left lots to be desired. It was called then, and still known today as, the "boneshaker". It had a hard wood seat, pedals on the front wheel, and both wheels were made of cast iron, mimicking a train. Imagine how light and fun that would have been to ride.
The real innovation here was the pedals. That moved the motion of propelling to a central position. A hand brake, also designed from a railroad background, made stopping at least an idea.
Those "old timey" bikes that we think of fondly, the penny-farthings, with the very large front wheel and tiny rear wheel, were a welcomed replacement. Again, pedals adorned the front wheel, which had a tire made of hard rubber. These bikes became extremely popular, and were the first things actually called "bicycles". The large front wheel, while silly looking by today's standards, serves a very real purpose: because there were no chains or gears, the larger the power gear--in this case the front wheel--the faster you could go. The large front wheel made greater speeds available. In bikes with gears and chains, the smallest sprocket is the fastest gear because of the ratio of the diameters.
What we consider "bikes" today were originally called "safety bikes", in opposition to the penny-farthings, because riding them reduced the chances of having a header. Riders of retronymed "ordinary bikes" had a propensity for flying over the handle bars and cracking their skulls on the ground, an action that earned the name "header".
Safety bikes got chains, and later gears, again innovations from France.
In 2003, when Corrie was living in Chicago before leaving for SF and then overseas, I bought a Raleigh SC 40. I believe the SC meant Sport Comfort. In any case, the bike had a mildly raked center bar. In road bikes, the center bar is generally parallel to the ground. The bike I bought had a center bar at a slight angle. It was a wonderfully comfortable bike that I used a commuter and my main transportation in San Luis Obispo during my last few years of college and living there. It was worn out (I crashed it pretty bad one time) and needed lots of attention, and I gave it away to a neighbor before leaving for New York (limited space).
Since then, I've been wanting a bicycle. We never made it happen in Brooklyn, or Austin, but we have since we returned to California. I wasn't sure what I wanted, except that I didn't want a heavy, single geared cruiser. I got varying advice from people before doing my own research. I was pretty sure I didn't want real road bike, with my ass in the air and back hunched over. After renting a bike from a company, I figured that I may not really want a hybrid, since it was hell on my knees, and I still wasn't sure what a "hybrid" was. I wasn't sure how much riding through the mountains I'd be doing, and full suspension I wasn't really sure I needed either, especially if I was going to be touring through Long Beach and the other LA beach communities, so that made me go easy on looking at mountain bikes.
What does that leave? I found out that the answer is actually known as a roadster bike, but that's for later.
The first two wheeled contraption was made of wood and steel and powered by a Fred Flintstone-like foot-power. It was French, like many of the subsequent bicycle innovations throughout the years.
A few years later, the first real two wheeled machine with pedals designed for mass production was introduced, and left lots to be desired. It was called then, and still known today as, the "boneshaker". It had a hard wood seat, pedals on the front wheel, and both wheels were made of cast iron, mimicking a train. Imagine how light and fun that would have been to ride.
The real innovation here was the pedals. That moved the motion of propelling to a central position. A hand brake, also designed from a railroad background, made stopping at least an idea.
Those "old timey" bikes that we think of fondly, the penny-farthings, with the very large front wheel and tiny rear wheel, were a welcomed replacement. Again, pedals adorned the front wheel, which had a tire made of hard rubber. These bikes became extremely popular, and were the first things actually called "bicycles". The large front wheel, while silly looking by today's standards, serves a very real purpose: because there were no chains or gears, the larger the power gear--in this case the front wheel--the faster you could go. The large front wheel made greater speeds available. In bikes with gears and chains, the smallest sprocket is the fastest gear because of the ratio of the diameters.
What we consider "bikes" today were originally called "safety bikes", in opposition to the penny-farthings, because riding them reduced the chances of having a header. Riders of retronymed "ordinary bikes" had a propensity for flying over the handle bars and cracking their skulls on the ground, an action that earned the name "header".
Safety bikes got chains, and later gears, again innovations from France.
In 2003, when Corrie was living in Chicago before leaving for SF and then overseas, I bought a Raleigh SC 40. I believe the SC meant Sport Comfort. In any case, the bike had a mildly raked center bar. In road bikes, the center bar is generally parallel to the ground. The bike I bought had a center bar at a slight angle. It was a wonderfully comfortable bike that I used a commuter and my main transportation in San Luis Obispo during my last few years of college and living there. It was worn out (I crashed it pretty bad one time) and needed lots of attention, and I gave it away to a neighbor before leaving for New York (limited space).
Since then, I've been wanting a bicycle. We never made it happen in Brooklyn, or Austin, but we have since we returned to California. I wasn't sure what I wanted, except that I didn't want a heavy, single geared cruiser. I got varying advice from people before doing my own research. I was pretty sure I didn't want real road bike, with my ass in the air and back hunched over. After renting a bike from a company, I figured that I may not really want a hybrid, since it was hell on my knees, and I still wasn't sure what a "hybrid" was. I wasn't sure how much riding through the mountains I'd be doing, and full suspension I wasn't really sure I needed either, especially if I was going to be touring through Long Beach and the other LA beach communities, so that made me go easy on looking at mountain bikes.
What does that leave? I found out that the answer is actually known as a roadster bike, but that's for later.
Monday, August 15, 2011
Happening Again
As a New Yorker, or as someone living in New York, a person gets used to seeing movies and TV shows being filmed as well as photo-shoots commencing. Since living in New York puts a person in a perpetual hurry, these things are ignored.
Also, living in New York gives a person the ability to identify places throughout the City in films, television, and print ads and associate their own experiences with those places. A particular type of knowledge grows: the power of recognition, like the ability to see a filmed Manhattan skyline and be able to tell if was shot from Brooklyn Heights or Greenpoint or West New York. Or a scene in the Robert DeNiro/James Franco's The City by the Sea, where DeNiro goes into a building in Tribeca. Seconds later they show his window and fire escape, with Manhattan in the background, in a perspective that's definitely from Brooklyn. This mashes of two separate neighborhoods a few miles apart that New Yorkers would recognize.
One more scene I'd like to mention: in the opening episode of Season 9 of The Simpsons, one of the funniest episodes in their canon, "The City of New York vs Homer Simpson" ends with Homer driving the family over a bridge, ostensibly out of the city. The bridge is designed to look like the Brooklyn Bridge, but the background silhouette of the City places the actual bridge that was used for the visual aspect of the background as the Williamsburg Bridge, which means they're leaving the City for respite in Long Island.
Basically, living there makes a person used to seeing locations they recognize from everyday life all over the place in print, television, and films.
Since LA is mostly comprised of a patchwork of urban blight, I never expected to see this, when I opened one of my newly arrived magazines:
This is the Broadlind Hotel behind the Jeep, a spot I'm going to put up a post about later and that's right around the corner and down the way from us. Here's my mock up of the same photo with less airbrushing and a less awesome camera.
It's been a while since noticing a national advertising campaign that has landmarks I deal with in everyday life.
Also, living in New York gives a person the ability to identify places throughout the City in films, television, and print ads and associate their own experiences with those places. A particular type of knowledge grows: the power of recognition, like the ability to see a filmed Manhattan skyline and be able to tell if was shot from Brooklyn Heights or Greenpoint or West New York. Or a scene in the Robert DeNiro/James Franco's The City by the Sea, where DeNiro goes into a building in Tribeca. Seconds later they show his window and fire escape, with Manhattan in the background, in a perspective that's definitely from Brooklyn. This mashes of two separate neighborhoods a few miles apart that New Yorkers would recognize.
One more scene I'd like to mention: in the opening episode of Season 9 of The Simpsons, one of the funniest episodes in their canon, "The City of New York vs Homer Simpson" ends with Homer driving the family over a bridge, ostensibly out of the city. The bridge is designed to look like the Brooklyn Bridge, but the background silhouette of the City places the actual bridge that was used for the visual aspect of the background as the Williamsburg Bridge, which means they're leaving the City for respite in Long Island.
Basically, living there makes a person used to seeing locations they recognize from everyday life all over the place in print, television, and films.
Since LA is mostly comprised of a patchwork of urban blight, I never expected to see this, when I opened one of my newly arrived magazines:
This is the Broadlind Hotel behind the Jeep, a spot I'm going to put up a post about later and that's right around the corner and down the way from us. Here's my mock up of the same photo with less airbrushing and a less awesome camera.
It's been a while since noticing a national advertising campaign that has landmarks I deal with in everyday life.
From Latvia
The Baltic country of Latvia was visited by my mom recently, and among the things she brought back was this:
It's popular in Eastern Europe and Russian Europe as a mix between candy and a health bar. It developed as a sweet flavored nutritional supplement--a way to get kids to eat their supplements.
How's everybody's Greek etymological root knowledge?
Hemoglobin comes from the same root, and what is hemoglobin in? Yup...blood. It's made from "coagulated bovine blood products".
These bars are blood candy/supplement bars. My mom brought all of her kids these blood bars, egging us on to eat them. She's like that.
In any case, I ate mine.
I wasn't sure what I was expecting. What it turned out to be was basically tootsie. That's all, a tootsie bar, that faux-chocolate waxy piece of candy.
I was doing research on tootsie for this post, but didn't too deep. What I found was that the tootsie roll candy became popular because it could withstand all types of weather (wouldn't melt, wouldn't freeze solid) and was incredibly affordable. It didn't really state the original recipe, which I'd hazard a guess contained coagulated blood products.
I wasn't a real big fan of the blood bar, but only because I can't eat tootsie faux-chocolate anymore (a tooth needs work).
It's popular in Eastern Europe and Russian Europe as a mix between candy and a health bar. It developed as a sweet flavored nutritional supplement--a way to get kids to eat their supplements.
How's everybody's Greek etymological root knowledge?
Hemoglobin comes from the same root, and what is hemoglobin in? Yup...blood. It's made from "coagulated bovine blood products".
These bars are blood candy/supplement bars. My mom brought all of her kids these blood bars, egging us on to eat them. She's like that.
In any case, I ate mine.
I wasn't sure what I was expecting. What it turned out to be was basically tootsie. That's all, a tootsie bar, that faux-chocolate waxy piece of candy.
I was doing research on tootsie for this post, but didn't too deep. What I found was that the tootsie roll candy became popular because it could withstand all types of weather (wouldn't melt, wouldn't freeze solid) and was incredibly affordable. It didn't really state the original recipe, which I'd hazard a guess contained coagulated blood products.
I wasn't a real big fan of the blood bar, but only because I can't eat tootsie faux-chocolate anymore (a tooth needs work).
Slow Motion Fireworks
On the Fourth of July this year, after picking Corrie up from the airport, we walked down the street to find a place to stand and watch the fireworks being launched off the Queen Mary. Since we're so close, we didn't have to walk too far to see the large crowds, and because of the crowds, we could only find some leaning space. But since we didn't need to drive, and park, then join the crowds, it was totally fine with us.
After the show, on the walk back to our place, we passed this particular palm variant:
Having just watched a fireworks show got me imaging this plant, how the stocks looked like the smoke trails and the green like the colorful explosions. I imagined a scenario where the full lifecycle of this palm, maybe twenty years, maybe eighty years, would be compressed and viewed in a time-frame of less than one second. Under those circumstances it would look like a firework had been launched.
Those fractaling patterns throughout nature (and the universe) may be a defining characteristic of the universe. The repeating patterns of the universe...how creamer swirls on coffee, how debris collects into rings around Saturn, how planets and debris collects into rings around the Sun, collecting similarly into galaxies.
It's made possible by relationships between matter that we call gravity and quantum mechanics. Patterns...sand gently sliding down a slope, avalanches, waterfalls...smoke in the air and dye in water...
It seems like there may just be patterns, scale differences, and governing relationships.
After the show, on the walk back to our place, we passed this particular palm variant:
Having just watched a fireworks show got me imaging this plant, how the stocks looked like the smoke trails and the green like the colorful explosions. I imagined a scenario where the full lifecycle of this palm, maybe twenty years, maybe eighty years, would be compressed and viewed in a time-frame of less than one second. Under those circumstances it would look like a firework had been launched.
Those fractaling patterns throughout nature (and the universe) may be a defining characteristic of the universe. The repeating patterns of the universe...how creamer swirls on coffee, how debris collects into rings around Saturn, how planets and debris collects into rings around the Sun, collecting similarly into galaxies.
It's made possible by relationships between matter that we call gravity and quantum mechanics. Patterns...sand gently sliding down a slope, avalanches, waterfalls...smoke in the air and dye in water...
It seems like there may just be patterns, scale differences, and governing relationships.
Useless Post about Current Writing Project
I mentioned recently about having material not-yet ready to send to an agent, or editor (my father or wife or both) in a post about Publish America. This "Useless Post" mentions that material briefly.
In a post I'm cooking up on bicycles, I came across the terms "recumbent" and "prone" as the first parts of compound nouns with "bikes" the second term.
Recumbent bikes I'd heard of before, and are popular in SLO. These are the sitting in a chair type, and are easy to remember in that riders look like they're reclining. Recumbent--reclining...it makes a certain sense.
Prone bikes, though, I'm not sure I'd heard of, but maybe I'd seen somewhere. These bikes have the rider in the prone position, lying down like Superman on a pad.
It looks pretty weird.
I mention it only because the novel I'm working on that's the farthest along in development sports a facsimile of my alma mater, Cal Poly. In reality Cal Poly is California Polytechnic State University; in my story I've changed it to California Prone Specificity State University, and have switched the easy moniker "Cal Poly" to "Cali Prone". I wanted a tri-syllabic phrase with one part having the hard E sound.
Oh shit...I may have said too much. I don't like discussing my fiction projects on this site.
In a post I'm cooking up on bicycles, I came across the terms "recumbent" and "prone" as the first parts of compound nouns with "bikes" the second term.
Recumbent bikes I'd heard of before, and are popular in SLO. These are the sitting in a chair type, and are easy to remember in that riders look like they're reclining. Recumbent--reclining...it makes a certain sense.
Prone bikes, though, I'm not sure I'd heard of, but maybe I'd seen somewhere. These bikes have the rider in the prone position, lying down like Superman on a pad.
It looks pretty weird.
I mention it only because the novel I'm working on that's the farthest along in development sports a facsimile of my alma mater, Cal Poly. In reality Cal Poly is California Polytechnic State University; in my story I've changed it to California Prone Specificity State University, and have switched the easy moniker "Cal Poly" to "Cali Prone". I wanted a tri-syllabic phrase with one part having the hard E sound.
Oh shit...I may have said too much. I don't like discussing my fiction projects on this site.
Fatherly Comparisons
For guys who remember when their dads would wear dark socks and sandals, or other embarrassing things when we were young, there'll always be old photos to scour that might shed light on whether ultimately our fathers were cool before we came along.
When I started wearing Birkenstocks in high school and winter came, I wore socks and thought, well, utility and comfort win the day and maybe dad was on to something.
I've seen enough pictures of my dad to know that he wasn't a dork, like this one of him lounging in cut-offs:
Now, I did recently find a collection of pictures from a trip that Corrie and I took, pictures from a time where my dad and I are roughly the same age. I can imagine our kids looking at these and saying, Gah...what a dork!
Maybe I'm too hard on myself. That was from Europe, when my only other pair of pants was probably drying in some hostel bathroom. And those zipper-legged pants make anyone look ridiculous. Plus there are a few pictures, like this next one, where it works out a little better, and I look like just a hairy tourist.
When I started wearing Birkenstocks in high school and winter came, I wore socks and thought, well, utility and comfort win the day and maybe dad was on to something.
I've seen enough pictures of my dad to know that he wasn't a dork, like this one of him lounging in cut-offs:
Now, I did recently find a collection of pictures from a trip that Corrie and I took, pictures from a time where my dad and I are roughly the same age. I can imagine our kids looking at these and saying, Gah...what a dork!
Maybe I'm too hard on myself. That was from Europe, when my only other pair of pants was probably drying in some hostel bathroom. And those zipper-legged pants make anyone look ridiculous. Plus there are a few pictures, like this next one, where it works out a little better, and I look like just a hairy tourist.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Good Idea/Bad Idea
I was out running some errands the other day, and like other days off from work, all errands run in and around our little (large) hamlet of the LBC are done by bicycle. After finishing up, I went back to the veritable freeway for bikes on the west side of town, the LA River Bikeway.
At this point in the LA River's meandering path--near the terminus here at the LA/LB Harbors, is less meandering than forced linearity. It's not so much paved as it is controlled by artificial banks.
But, along the Bikeway that runs north from the ocean along the river twelve miles or so, at least here, there has been either purposefully planted, accidentally placed, or wildly growing grapes.
At some point I stopped and examined a few bunches.
The last few times I've been out on the Bikeway there haven't been even any grape buds, but this time, there were many unripened bunches.
The title of this post concerns a decision I had to make. Should I pluck an unripe specimen of a wild bunch of grapes that are growing on the LA River's freaking Bikeway? A flowing collection of water I would do my damnedest to avoid contacting?
If you know me, or have been reading this site long enough, I hope you can correctly guess how I proceeded.
Unripened fruit is something for which I've always had a weakness. My brother and my friend Chris Farley and I used to gorge ourselves on unripened plums from a tree on our street. Later that day we'd suffer the consequences of such snacks.
This experience was not without discomfort, which is quite remarkable considering the iron stomach I have hidden under my hairy beer-belly.
At this point in the LA River's meandering path--near the terminus here at the LA/LB Harbors, is less meandering than forced linearity. It's not so much paved as it is controlled by artificial banks.
But, along the Bikeway that runs north from the ocean along the river twelve miles or so, at least here, there has been either purposefully planted, accidentally placed, or wildly growing grapes.
At some point I stopped and examined a few bunches.
The last few times I've been out on the Bikeway there haven't been even any grape buds, but this time, there were many unripened bunches.
The title of this post concerns a decision I had to make. Should I pluck an unripe specimen of a wild bunch of grapes that are growing on the LA River's freaking Bikeway? A flowing collection of water I would do my damnedest to avoid contacting?
If you know me, or have been reading this site long enough, I hope you can correctly guess how I proceeded.
Unripened fruit is something for which I've always had a weakness. My brother and my friend Chris Farley and I used to gorge ourselves on unripened plums from a tree on our street. Later that day we'd suffer the consequences of such snacks.
This experience was not without discomfort, which is quite remarkable considering the iron stomach I have hidden under my hairy beer-belly.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Animation on TV Memories
Anyone like me with a blog could trove the internet for lists about things they have thoughts about and then discuss it themselves, there's really nothing to that. That's not original. Redundancy is not completely foreign here, and, as I hope to usually be original, that with rather unoriginal ideas I try to either bring something new or rekindle memories and help you, my readers, experience things.
In some meanderings through the virtual world of the Internet, with Mayor Flynn looking the other way (I did just make that reference deliberately), I came across a list that was from IGN, a site that deals with video games, flash animation, and the tech-ier side of pop-culture. It was their list of the Top 100 Best Animated TV Shows.
The Top 100 Cartoons? I was researching an animated show that appeared on the USA network back in the late '90s, Duckman, when I initially discovered the list. It came in at #48. Wow, I thought, there must be some way cool shows on here if the rather good Duckman is #48. If you, a fair reader of this blog, are unaware of Duckman, think amoral foulmouthed incompetent private investigator duck, voiced by Jason Alexander (George Costanza from Seinfeld), with music provided by Frank Zappa. That should be enough information to help you decide if you'd like to learn more about the show.
I'm not sure exactly what the list was meant to be. It wasn't exactly a list of the most influential shows...Rocky and Bullwinkle was in the top 20 but not the top 10, and it was responsible for an entire generation of comedy writers and would-be animators; and the Pink Panther, responsible for the basic Spongebob conceit, a single character infuriating those around him (actually this was a Goofy conceit from the 30s), cracked the top 30. It did have moments of going with things with which we grew up and loved, that, when viewed as adults, are mostly unwatchable (He-Man and Voltron), while ranking other shows lower that only get better with time (The Animated Star Trek, a vastly underrated show).
Under no circumstances are He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Voltron better than Duckman or Dexter's Laboratory. Samurai Jack is even behind G.I. Joe. Travesty.
The Maxx, from the comic of the same name by Sam Kieth, a beautifully stylized show that looked almost exactly like the comic, is probably ranked well, in the low 20s or high teens.
They have three different Sider-Man shows, but no Daria. So, Spider-Man from the 80s, 90s, and mid 00s were all better than MTV's spinoff queen? Daria started as a character forced upon Mike Judge (to his credit he welcomed the idea) by MTV executives as a strong counterpoint to his two lovable idiots. She, like the show, was caustic, sardonic, witty and smart. I didn't really watch Daria, but I respected it.
I'm not going to play up suspense about #1, because we all know what cartoon that is, and if you don't, you could probably guess from all the references I've put towards it here. Any show that is about to eclipse Gunsmoke as the longest running television program in American history, and remains, if not the most cutting edge and important show on TV, relevant all these years later, and was drawn by hand, has to be #1. Seriously, I have teammates that were born when The Simpsons was already a household name. Imagine the world in late 1992, specifically November 19th. That was the day the "Mr. Plow" episode aired. Having seen that episode recently, a tiny bit caught my eye, and I gained a whole new reference point to appreciate and love The Simpsons. Homer's about to go up and save Barney from peril which Homer himself was responsible. In a quick bit of animation, Bart opens a beer and pours it into Homer's thermos, and gives it to him as he gets into his plow. 1992.
I guess the real suspense for me was seeing the other shows in the top 10; the website loaded slowly and only showed one at a time. I'll go in bunches here, and I'm skipping #10, which was an anime show called Neon Genesis Evangeline. I hadn't heard of it until this list, so I'm probably not the best person to discuss its place in the Top 10 Animated TV Show list. It sounds cool from what I've read about it.
So...
9. The Flintstones
8. Futurama
7: Family Guy
The Flintstones, obviously...the Honeymooners rip-off changed the way America looked at prime-time animation, and made a world where the Simpsons can do what they did possible. I'm not clambering to purchase the shows on DVD, though. The next two make me sigh. I think Futurama is exponentially better than Family Guy, but, really, I think Futurama is better than most of the shows on this list anyway. If I were to make my own Top 100 list, would I really have it 1-2 go Simpsons-Futurama?
Maybe not, but...but, on the other hand, Futurama is a show that rewards viewers who pay attention to every single minute detail, almost necessitating rewatching, and it rewards those who have higher than usual knowledge of upper echelon math, science fiction stuff, Thomas Pynchon, and New York City. Basically it reward nerds. And I concede I'm a nerd. I like paying attention and getting math jokes; I like spotting all the silly references that I have to explain to Corrie...
Not everyone is like me, though, and that's where Family Guy comes in. To me, the enjoyment is lowered if you pay attention to closely and look at the deeper undertones. South Park did an episode where they skewered Family Guy with the one pillar of criticism that thinky bastards (like me) always attack the show with: the shows humor doesn't derive from the plot, it's a series of non-sequiturs. Which can be funny. Peter's obvious misogyny and lack of learning lessons, coupled with their utter dislike for their own daughter Meg, make it harder for me to enjoy the non-sequiturs. Maybe that's closer to reality. In any case, it sounds like my problem, not theirs.
6. The Tick
5. Beavis and Butt-head
4. South Park
Since I started at 10 and worked my way down, (after making sure #1 was #1) when I saw South Park at #4 I almost choked on my coffee. How can this show not be #2? I don't understand. Maybe that would displace Futurama on my list.
Back to the chronology..The Tick? Seriously? I'm glad it got a shout-out. I like The Tick. I remember hearing they were going to make a colorful cartoon out of the black and white comic that I passed on when I was collecting because I'd already missed the first six issues. The Tick lived in a city, The City, that City where all the other super-heroes who wear costumes lived and spent his time foiling completely absurd baddies. It was clever...in some way it was the humorous little brother to the dower Watchmen, a comic about the world where comics would be real, but here it was played for laughs.
It was funny and novel and clever and good. But, and not to say that these shows were necessarily better even though some were, but Rocky and Bullwinkle and Danger Mouse and Muppet Babies and Duck Tales and King of the Hill (which I like more than Family Guy) all meant more to me at different points in my life than The Tick ever did. Maybe that's what makes The Tick so good...it just is.
I'm not necessarily surprised that Beavis and Butt-head rank so high. Those two did and said all of the things that many young men felt like doing and saying, but which the little common-sense filter generally prevented. They were stupid, crass, unrepentant and had no empathy. They were awesome. We could watch the ramifications of mindless brute destruction with a pair that absolutely did not care about what they were doing. It was refreshing and safe. I'm sure that the brass, and writers, of IGN, the site that hosted the list, are all my same age (roughly) and grew up on the show as I did.
I've heard two things recently: the lady who's son started the fire that burned down the trailer and killed the two-year-old, prompting the permanent censoring of Beavis' favorite refrain, Fire! Fire!, actually did not have cable.
The second thing I heard that I had to research to believe was that Mike Judge is bringing the boys back. After fourteen or fifteen years, Beavis and Butt-head will be back, unaged, and ready to rip into all the crap they have on MTV nowadays. I've seen footage, and it's funny. Mike was approached by MTV, and he agreed after doing a bit for David Letterman, where the two introduced a scene from Judge's new (at the time) release, Extract (check it out on YouTube...(30-somethings waxing nostalgic follows)).
South Park? Not #2? Or even #3? Again, travesty.
#3. Looney Tunes
They mentioned that this was a strange pick, since the cartoons all aired originally before theatrical movies in the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. Okay...I'll give them this one. A world without Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Taz, Wiley and the Roadrunner, wouldn't have any of these other other shows on this list, or even this list at all. I get that. These are animated shorts as artistic entertainment, not allusion and allegory about current events, or math or Pynchon jokes. Why their Disney counterparts have been left off the list I'll never know. I grew up with those animated shorts more so than with the Looney Tunes. Cable, you might say, because they were on the Disney Channel, but heck, this list has shows from MTV, Nickelodeon, Sci-Fi, USA, Comedy Central, and even HBO, so I don't buy it. Maybe the general anti-Disney feeling that permeates those web-sites.
What came in at #2?
Batman: The Animated Series, from the early 90s.
Hmmm...an inspired pick, if anything. It was a well crafted program, very dark, very cinematic, each episode was a twenty-two minute movie. It also set the tone for the entire design philosophy of the DC animated universe, when it finally got off the groud, made possible in part by the high quality and popularity of this Batman iteration.
I wouldn't make it number two on my list, but I couldn't argue it out of my top 10, or even top 5, maybe, or would even want to.
Silly Long Post...
So, the last show I'll mention, #99: The Mask. Who remembers The Mask? It was another commercial for their toys, where these toys were about half the size of G.I. Joes, and all had masks that gave them certain abilities. The cast was rather well represented ethnically, and the show might have been one of the better toy-commercial-toons of the 80s (Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats...).
I think I set my all time record with the number of italics used...
In some meanderings through the virtual world of the Internet, with Mayor Flynn looking the other way (I did just make that reference deliberately), I came across a list that was from IGN, a site that deals with video games, flash animation, and the tech-ier side of pop-culture. It was their list of the Top 100 Best Animated TV Shows.
The Top 100 Cartoons? I was researching an animated show that appeared on the USA network back in the late '90s, Duckman, when I initially discovered the list. It came in at #48. Wow, I thought, there must be some way cool shows on here if the rather good Duckman is #48. If you, a fair reader of this blog, are unaware of Duckman, think amoral foulmouthed incompetent private investigator duck, voiced by Jason Alexander (George Costanza from Seinfeld), with music provided by Frank Zappa. That should be enough information to help you decide if you'd like to learn more about the show.
I'm not sure exactly what the list was meant to be. It wasn't exactly a list of the most influential shows...Rocky and Bullwinkle was in the top 20 but not the top 10, and it was responsible for an entire generation of comedy writers and would-be animators; and the Pink Panther, responsible for the basic Spongebob conceit, a single character infuriating those around him (actually this was a Goofy conceit from the 30s), cracked the top 30. It did have moments of going with things with which we grew up and loved, that, when viewed as adults, are mostly unwatchable (He-Man and Voltron), while ranking other shows lower that only get better with time (The Animated Star Trek, a vastly underrated show).
Under no circumstances are He-Man, G.I. Joe, Transformers, and Voltron better than Duckman or Dexter's Laboratory. Samurai Jack is even behind G.I. Joe. Travesty.
The Maxx, from the comic of the same name by Sam Kieth, a beautifully stylized show that looked almost exactly like the comic, is probably ranked well, in the low 20s or high teens.
They have three different Sider-Man shows, but no Daria. So, Spider-Man from the 80s, 90s, and mid 00s were all better than MTV's spinoff queen? Daria started as a character forced upon Mike Judge (to his credit he welcomed the idea) by MTV executives as a strong counterpoint to his two lovable idiots. She, like the show, was caustic, sardonic, witty and smart. I didn't really watch Daria, but I respected it.
I'm not going to play up suspense about #1, because we all know what cartoon that is, and if you don't, you could probably guess from all the references I've put towards it here. Any show that is about to eclipse Gunsmoke as the longest running television program in American history, and remains, if not the most cutting edge and important show on TV, relevant all these years later, and was drawn by hand, has to be #1. Seriously, I have teammates that were born when The Simpsons was already a household name. Imagine the world in late 1992, specifically November 19th. That was the day the "Mr. Plow" episode aired. Having seen that episode recently, a tiny bit caught my eye, and I gained a whole new reference point to appreciate and love The Simpsons. Homer's about to go up and save Barney from peril which Homer himself was responsible. In a quick bit of animation, Bart opens a beer and pours it into Homer's thermos, and gives it to him as he gets into his plow. 1992.
I guess the real suspense for me was seeing the other shows in the top 10; the website loaded slowly and only showed one at a time. I'll go in bunches here, and I'm skipping #10, which was an anime show called Neon Genesis Evangeline. I hadn't heard of it until this list, so I'm probably not the best person to discuss its place in the Top 10 Animated TV Show list. It sounds cool from what I've read about it.
So...
9. The Flintstones
8. Futurama
7: Family Guy
The Flintstones, obviously...the Honeymooners rip-off changed the way America looked at prime-time animation, and made a world where the Simpsons can do what they did possible. I'm not clambering to purchase the shows on DVD, though. The next two make me sigh. I think Futurama is exponentially better than Family Guy, but, really, I think Futurama is better than most of the shows on this list anyway. If I were to make my own Top 100 list, would I really have it 1-2 go Simpsons-Futurama?
Maybe not, but...but, on the other hand, Futurama is a show that rewards viewers who pay attention to every single minute detail, almost necessitating rewatching, and it rewards those who have higher than usual knowledge of upper echelon math, science fiction stuff, Thomas Pynchon, and New York City. Basically it reward nerds. And I concede I'm a nerd. I like paying attention and getting math jokes; I like spotting all the silly references that I have to explain to Corrie...
Not everyone is like me, though, and that's where Family Guy comes in. To me, the enjoyment is lowered if you pay attention to closely and look at the deeper undertones. South Park did an episode where they skewered Family Guy with the one pillar of criticism that thinky bastards (like me) always attack the show with: the shows humor doesn't derive from the plot, it's a series of non-sequiturs. Which can be funny. Peter's obvious misogyny and lack of learning lessons, coupled with their utter dislike for their own daughter Meg, make it harder for me to enjoy the non-sequiturs. Maybe that's closer to reality. In any case, it sounds like my problem, not theirs.
6. The Tick
5. Beavis and Butt-head
4. South Park
Since I started at 10 and worked my way down, (after making sure #1 was #1) when I saw South Park at #4 I almost choked on my coffee. How can this show not be #2? I don't understand. Maybe that would displace Futurama on my list.
Back to the chronology..The Tick? Seriously? I'm glad it got a shout-out. I like The Tick. I remember hearing they were going to make a colorful cartoon out of the black and white comic that I passed on when I was collecting because I'd already missed the first six issues. The Tick lived in a city, The City, that City where all the other super-heroes who wear costumes lived and spent his time foiling completely absurd baddies. It was clever...in some way it was the humorous little brother to the dower Watchmen, a comic about the world where comics would be real, but here it was played for laughs.
It was funny and novel and clever and good. But, and not to say that these shows were necessarily better even though some were, but Rocky and Bullwinkle and Danger Mouse and Muppet Babies and Duck Tales and King of the Hill (which I like more than Family Guy) all meant more to me at different points in my life than The Tick ever did. Maybe that's what makes The Tick so good...it just is.
I'm not necessarily surprised that Beavis and Butt-head rank so high. Those two did and said all of the things that many young men felt like doing and saying, but which the little common-sense filter generally prevented. They were stupid, crass, unrepentant and had no empathy. They were awesome. We could watch the ramifications of mindless brute destruction with a pair that absolutely did not care about what they were doing. It was refreshing and safe. I'm sure that the brass, and writers, of IGN, the site that hosted the list, are all my same age (roughly) and grew up on the show as I did.
I've heard two things recently: the lady who's son started the fire that burned down the trailer and killed the two-year-old, prompting the permanent censoring of Beavis' favorite refrain, Fire! Fire!, actually did not have cable.
The second thing I heard that I had to research to believe was that Mike Judge is bringing the boys back. After fourteen or fifteen years, Beavis and Butt-head will be back, unaged, and ready to rip into all the crap they have on MTV nowadays. I've seen footage, and it's funny. Mike was approached by MTV, and he agreed after doing a bit for David Letterman, where the two introduced a scene from Judge's new (at the time) release, Extract (check it out on YouTube...(30-somethings waxing nostalgic follows)).
South Park? Not #2? Or even #3? Again, travesty.
#3. Looney Tunes
They mentioned that this was a strange pick, since the cartoons all aired originally before theatrical movies in the thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. Okay...I'll give them this one. A world without Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Taz, Wiley and the Roadrunner, wouldn't have any of these other other shows on this list, or even this list at all. I get that. These are animated shorts as artistic entertainment, not allusion and allegory about current events, or math or Pynchon jokes. Why their Disney counterparts have been left off the list I'll never know. I grew up with those animated shorts more so than with the Looney Tunes. Cable, you might say, because they were on the Disney Channel, but heck, this list has shows from MTV, Nickelodeon, Sci-Fi, USA, Comedy Central, and even HBO, so I don't buy it. Maybe the general anti-Disney feeling that permeates those web-sites.
What came in at #2?
Batman: The Animated Series, from the early 90s.
Hmmm...an inspired pick, if anything. It was a well crafted program, very dark, very cinematic, each episode was a twenty-two minute movie. It also set the tone for the entire design philosophy of the DC animated universe, when it finally got off the groud, made possible in part by the high quality and popularity of this Batman iteration.
I wouldn't make it number two on my list, but I couldn't argue it out of my top 10, or even top 5, maybe, or would even want to.
Silly Long Post...
So, the last show I'll mention, #99: The Mask. Who remembers The Mask? It was another commercial for their toys, where these toys were about half the size of G.I. Joes, and all had masks that gave them certain abilities. The cast was rather well represented ethnically, and the show might have been one of the better toy-commercial-toons of the 80s (Transformers, He-Man, Thundercats...).
I think I set my all time record with the number of italics used...
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Some Changes (Again)
I'm experimenting with the "Look" again of tis site...check it out...
I finally have links to some of my most favorite posts, so I can retrieve and reread them faster. I'll rotate them on a semi regular basis...
I finally have links to some of my most favorite posts, so I can retrieve and reread them faster. I'll rotate them on a semi regular basis...
Monday, August 8, 2011
"My Blue Heaven" Memories
Another film from the Great Salvage of Citrus Heights Action, where I liberated a pile of DVDs that my brother was about to free himself of, is My Blue Heaven, the Steve Martin and Rick Moranis buddy flick from 1990. Rick Moranis plays an FBI agent protecting Steve Martin's character, a mobster stoolie who has a difficult time going straight, in a story inspired by Henry Hill's book Wiseguy, which makes it kinda like an illegitimate brother of Goodfellas.
Strangely, Steve Martin was originally going to play the straight-laced Barney Coopersmith, the special agent, and Rick Moranis was going to play the gangster in the Witness Relocation Program. If you have seen the movie, try imaging that.
In any case, I remember catching a scene on TV while living in San Luis Obispo, and saw the grocery store we went to regularly. Upon doing some research, I learned that the film was filmed in San Luis and nearby Atascadero, while minor scenes were shot in recognizable areas of San Diego, where the film took place.
Enjoying it as a kid propelled my to choose it as one of the films I liberated during the Salvage, as well as wanting to watch it from the start knowing where it was filmed.
The use of still frames with plot movement (words that explain what's going on) reminded me initially of Pynchon, since the first one starts "In which I...". That's how sections start in Pynchon's V.
In the opening five minutes of the film, we see the house the feds have moved the gangster Vinnie and his wife, Linda, into, and it's the last house in a line of developments that, to me and others familiar with the area, is obviously Atascadero. In a later scene Barney (Moranis) tells his superior "He's living in the middle of nowhere; he's safe."
After the movie I joked with Corrie about that "middle of nowhere" quote, and she laughed and said, "It's still the middle of nowhere." To many degrees, she's right. In the grand scheme of California population centers, Atascadero isn't quite Firebaugh or Coalinga, but it's pretty much out there.
It was cool seeing Bishop's Peak in the background of certain scenes, as well as the Fremont Theater.
It was also refreshing to realize that the movie didn't age so poorly, and retains some of the humor I remember as a kid.
Strangely, Steve Martin was originally going to play the straight-laced Barney Coopersmith, the special agent, and Rick Moranis was going to play the gangster in the Witness Relocation Program. If you have seen the movie, try imaging that.
In any case, I remember catching a scene on TV while living in San Luis Obispo, and saw the grocery store we went to regularly. Upon doing some research, I learned that the film was filmed in San Luis and nearby Atascadero, while minor scenes were shot in recognizable areas of San Diego, where the film took place.
Enjoying it as a kid propelled my to choose it as one of the films I liberated during the Salvage, as well as wanting to watch it from the start knowing where it was filmed.
The use of still frames with plot movement (words that explain what's going on) reminded me initially of Pynchon, since the first one starts "In which I...". That's how sections start in Pynchon's V.
In the opening five minutes of the film, we see the house the feds have moved the gangster Vinnie and his wife, Linda, into, and it's the last house in a line of developments that, to me and others familiar with the area, is obviously Atascadero. In a later scene Barney (Moranis) tells his superior "He's living in the middle of nowhere; he's safe."
After the movie I joked with Corrie about that "middle of nowhere" quote, and she laughed and said, "It's still the middle of nowhere." To many degrees, she's right. In the grand scheme of California population centers, Atascadero isn't quite Firebaugh or Coalinga, but it's pretty much out there.
It was cool seeing Bishop's Peak in the background of certain scenes, as well as the Fremont Theater.
It was also refreshing to realize that the movie didn't age so poorly, and retains some of the humor I remember as a kid.
Interesting Etymological Discovery
Heading home after dropping a teammate off at their house, I heard an interesting discussion on a late night NPR program, the BBC-America show Americana, about the origins of many strange phrases and words in American English.
It was a discussion of some of the obscure discoveries the writer of a book on the subject had made, like a "Californian prayer book" is a deck of cards and an "Arkansas toothpick" is a knife with an extremely long blade, and is meant to connote that an opponent is armed with one and has the upper hand in a conflict.
There were a few more, but the one that really stuck with me was a word that she included in her book just for the fellas, a word she knew we'd get a kick out of: "fart-knocker".
Anyone relatively my age and gender who had MTV as a kid and like to play with matches remembers quite fondly two idiots who made the word "fart-knocker" a regular member of our everyday lexicon.
The compound word comes from the South in the early nineteenth century. It means, essentially, a nasty fall from a horse, one bad enough to knock the wind out of you.
Apparently, their wind was different from how we understand that idiom today.
It was a discussion of some of the obscure discoveries the writer of a book on the subject had made, like a "Californian prayer book" is a deck of cards and an "Arkansas toothpick" is a knife with an extremely long blade, and is meant to connote that an opponent is armed with one and has the upper hand in a conflict.
There were a few more, but the one that really stuck with me was a word that she included in her book just for the fellas, a word she knew we'd get a kick out of: "fart-knocker".
Anyone relatively my age and gender who had MTV as a kid and like to play with matches remembers quite fondly two idiots who made the word "fart-knocker" a regular member of our everyday lexicon.
The compound word comes from the South in the early nineteenth century. It means, essentially, a nasty fall from a horse, one bad enough to knock the wind out of you.
Apparently, their wind was different from how we understand that idiom today.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
Happy Birthday Ryan!
This is the first year of my three years of keeping this blog of recognizing my good friend Ryan's birthday on time. I was late the past two August 7ths.
Happy Birthday Ryan, I hope you enjoy that round at the Morro Bay course, in the shadow of the rock.
I'd love to be there to celebrate with you.
Happy Birthday Ryan, I hope you enjoy that round at the Morro Bay course, in the shadow of the rock.
I'd love to be there to celebrate with you.
Monday, August 1, 2011
Stenciled PSAs
Different communities down here in the Southland have different identities, and out of these distinct identities come minor differences in how similar things get done. Something as simple as the heavy duty metallic stencil painting "No Dumping" notices that adorn the ground and accompany the street-level sewer drains, the kind that warn that runoff heads to the ocean, can take on interesting looks from place to place.
The most common look out here uses the fish skeleton. This look, and variations of it, can be seen from Santa Monica all the way down here in Long Beach, where from this particular picture comes.
In San Pedro, far closer to us than Santa Monica, they go with a different look, with a symbol that exemplifies our imagination's ocean-living counterparts; the dolphin.
And lastly, a city on an island uses it's own animal representative in a picture I've posted before; Avalon and its flying fish.
The most common look out here uses the fish skeleton. This look, and variations of it, can be seen from Santa Monica all the way down here in Long Beach, where from this particular picture comes.
In San Pedro, far closer to us than Santa Monica, they go with a different look, with a symbol that exemplifies our imagination's ocean-living counterparts; the dolphin.
And lastly, a city on an island uses it's own animal representative in a picture I've posted before; Avalon and its flying fish.
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