Year in Review

1.

'Tis the season. 2012 saw a few crazy things happen. Starting in January I tried to change the nature of the posts I placed here.

That took for a maybe eight posts, and eventually resulted in the starting of the second blog in the Caliboy Network, the Caliboy Observatory. I realized that the nature of this forum, the short-form idea release, shouldn't be focused solely on long-form literary posts.

Those posts from January are some of my favorite posts, and the ringleader is probably Maintaining on the Queen Mary.

2.

In February Corrie and I went to Honduras to visit some Mayan ruins for her birthday. I put all those posts up on the Observatory site, with a table of contents with links here. Some of the cool posts included therein are:
1) Birthday at the Ruins;
2) View from an Autobus;
3) Watching the Super Bowl in Honduras.

3.

Between March and April I started a whole series of new blogs. They covered food, sports, books and my twisted idea of what pop-culture used to be.

Some of the highlights include: 

1) From the home cooking site, Gonzo Cuisine an easy Indian food recipe;

2) From the sports site So Cal Sports Visions, Tennis Memories;

2) From the library blog Fond Memories;

4) Lastly, as an example of my pop-culture ideas, check out this about the Simpsons.

4.

The Olympics came and went this year, and I wrote some words about it after the fact.

5.

My brother Dan got married in June. Here are some of the ceremony pictures. The surrounding posts from those days have lots about the trip to Sac.

6.

I even wrote some things about some close friends. You know who you are.

7.

The post that most closely resembles a 2009 post: Phonic Discussion of Different Language Families.

8.

And then I broke my leg.

9.

I started some more blogs, one with Norm, one about flags and logos (which has turned out to be pretty popular), and one with my pops and brother. That one's called Sherwood and Sons.

It has been a lot of writing this year.

Lots...

10.

In October I tried to post something on each day of the month. I called it (after the fact) the October Folly. If you look at this--the Caliboyinbrooklyn site--for the month of October, you'll see links on almost everyday of the month, ending with the Halloween super post day: Halloween Links.

11.

Then we went on crazy adventures; Salton Sea, Joshua Tree, Arizona for Thanksgiving...

12.

Happy Decemberween; Happy Holidays; peace to you and yours.

Rekindling My Nerd Heritage

1.

The news came down recently that George Lucas sold his control of his Star Wars properties to Disney for a tidy sum. Fanboys, nerds, and regular fans of the Star Wars franchise started to imagine what having Disney in charge of the characters and universe meant in the big picture.

Surprisingly, the news was met with mostly good vibes. Really, as I told my mother when she was surprised that my brother wasn't more upset, Disney didn't invent Jar-Jar Binks, they seem to be able to make pretty good big action films (The Avengers was big hit, right?), and they seem to be able to find people who truly love the material. Did you ever get that feeling from Lucas, the High Lord of the Far Far Away Galaxy himself?

A website I follow had a movie sequel contest this summer, and in the finals were The Godfather Part II vs The Empire Strikes Back. That struck me a bit. I hadn't really ever considered The Empire Strikes Back as a great sequel before, but that's mainly due to my lack of intellectual attention paid towards the original trilogy after I became "too-cool" for Star Wars.

During my time collecting comic books, back when it was still a hobby you didn't talk about at school, I started picking up a series of Dark Horse books from the Star Wars universe called "Tales of the Jedi". It took place a thousand years before the events of the the movies, and was the last thing I think I genuinely and authentically cared about from the Star Wars universe.

2.

Summer 1976. An annoyed group of young nobody actors are busy running around Tunis, talking about some magic, er, stuff. They think they're making a science fiction movie, at least that's what they're being told, but there's also a space pirate and a guy in big dog suit and a old wizard, there are swords that are made of light (people have a hard time imagining that), and annoying robot sidekicks. The old wizard is a real actor, though, a well respected British guy.

Up until then, science fiction movies were either 2001: A Space Odyssey or Flash Gordon, with very little in between, and maybe a Planet of the Apes thrown in for good measure.

The crew and actors working on this strange project end up over budget and over schedule. The release date was supposed to be Christmas of 1976, but that's moved back to Summer 1977. Eventually, in order to avoid another movie, the release is moved up to Memorial Day weekend, at the end of May in 1977. 

All the post-production work has been finished, a whole new kind of special effect is about to be unleashed on the movie-going public, a mythology lesson is about to be interpreted anew, and the symphony will be making a triumphant return to film scores. Who knew?

3.

The filmmakers knew that if the opening of the film worked, they would have the audience. If the audience bought that first scene, the whole ride might just work. 

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Then the score starts. I know John Williams is a thieving conductor--this has been established--but the tweaks that he implemented on his major scores (Superman, Indiana Jones, and here, maybe the greatest of his ever) made what he was thieving so much better, turning them into icons of big-action cinema.

But the score starts, the scrolling words setting up the universe's main conceit--badguys vs rebels--and then we get a planet. A ship flies by, dodging laser blasts, and is tailed by another ship, a larger ship, a much larger ship, a ship that keeps going and going and the audience's eyes widen as it continues to fill up the screen, the dread of just how bad the badguys are starts to be crystallize.

The audience bought it. Fully.

4.

Between the sequel contest online and the news of the property rights changing hands, I decided I wanted to go and watch the original trilogy again with fresh eyes. I was going to watch them as if I knew nothing about the history, as if I grew up with none of the toys, as if I only was only aware of the sci-fi that was around in 1977.

We all know the story, right? Maybe? Lucas had a story that was too long, figured he could get the first act of his big story done, and figured he could retain the rights to his sequels if he figured out how to fund it himself. Lucas got that first installment down to two hours, the first act of a larger story.

One of the remarkable things about the structure of all three of the movies is their rigidity of form. Star Wars: almost exactly two hours. Ditto for The Empire Strikes Back. The Return of the Jedi is just a few minutes over, like maybe 126 minutes. Now, the fact that  they're only two hours each is important for this reason: act breaks.

Two hours is 120 minutes, and if you break that up into thirds, you get 40 minutes. George Lucas breaks up each of the moves into three almost exactly forty minute acts. I used to think that Star Wars, the first film, was slow. I came to this conclusion in 1997 when the newer version was released. After seeing it again, just recently, I realized that I was mistaken. The first act of the first movie gets a lot of the universe explained without having almost any direct expository dialogue.

What am I getting at? Check out Star Wars: at the exact 40 minute-mark, Luke finds the corpses of his guardians. End of Act I. He still needs to meet Han Solo and take off for Alderan, but that's structure for you. They end up in the trash heap at the 80th minute, but by minute 93, they're off the Deathstar and Obi-Wan is dead. End of Act II. And how about the end of the film? Deathstar get's blown up, they get the medals, and then the credits roll. No lingering.

Empire Strikes Back: 36th minute has Luke done with Hoth and heading to Yoda's, and at the 40th minute, Han and Falcon find their hiding spot on the big asteroid. End of Act I. At the 78 minute-mark, Han enters Bespin, the cloud city, and we're introduced to Lando in exactly minute 80. A few minutes later, at 85, Luke is leaving Yoda, against the tiny puppet's wishes. End of Act II.

Return of the Jedi: Jabba's dead and Han's rescued by minute 37. Luke heads off to meet up with Yoda while Han, Chewie, Leia and Lando go to the new rebel base. End of Act I. Guess what happens in exactly the 80th minute? Luke tells Leia they're siblings. End of Act II.

It's a pacing clinic.

5.

Star Wars went on to be the biggest money maker ever in Hollywood's history up til then. Lucas knew that now since held the rights to the sequels, he could do them how he wanted, and he knew that he could get the money he would need to make the movies he wanted to make. This sets up the sequel, 1980's The Empire Strikes Back.

How could George Lucas keep the audience intrigued and not cynical about a cash-cow movie franchise? Well, by making probably the most daring and dark sequel ever. People would have gladly paid to go see a rehash of the themes from the first movie. After seeing it they might be upset that Lucas caved and barely updated the first movie, but they would have gone.

Instead, Lucas grew the universe, then shattered it into pieces, changed the dynamic of the main characters, and dropped a bombshell. The ending didn't have a physical climax so much as an emotional one, and in any case, their universe was a far less settled one than at the beginning of the movie. That, and the entire second act itself hinges on whether or not you believe in a puppet character.

That takes a certain kind of balls to go for it like that. I respect that. The Empire Strikes Back won the contest for Best Movie Sequel, and, as I like The Godfather Part II more, this is a worthy adversary.

6.

I was four years old when The Return of the Jedi was released in 1983. I may have seen it in the theater (maybe not), but, between the toys and the VHS cassettes my brother and I had, if we were going to watch any of the three Star Wars films on a rainy weekend day, it would almost always be Return of the Jedi. The first was a little slow for us and the second was a bummer. The third wrapped up all the shenanigans, Han Solo was back, he was rightfully with Leia, Luke bests Vader, and also, Jabba the Hutt. Leia in the brass bikini slave-girl outfit? How many guys nowadays were effected by that Leia portrayal?

I can say that The Return of the Jedi was the episode that I've seen the most times (episodes II and III I've seen each only once)(well, mostly once, as I was likely pretty toasted before each one and we were late to II).

As a sequel, it again grows the universe. It again pushes forward the technology. And, if we picture the first three movies as an act each of a larger story (the redemption of Darth Vader), then Return of the Jedi is the loose-end tying uplifting third act. 

As a sequel, though, it doesn't stand up to the Empire Strikes Back.

7.

My connection to the films, like many guys my age, stems in part from the action figures and toys.

I dusted mine off for the following photos. This first is one of the older toys in this collection, a beast that wasn't actually, even though it was thought up and designed. Later on, George Lucas added it back during his remixing of his movies:

I'm not even sure what this creature was called. But check out the date on this toy--it's older than the Empire Strikes Back:

Now here's the remnants of my action figures:

How many characters can we name? There's forest walker operator, a storm-trooper, Bib Fortuna, two imperial guards (one with his robe taken off), the Rancor keeper, a version of Han, a headless Adm. Akbar, the squid-faced guy from Jabba's barge. Not mentioned yet is a Leia and a Lando, both from Bespin, the cloud city. Notice how those are the only two characters from Empire..., while all the other figures, besides the big lizard, are from Return of the Jedi? My connection to the toys...

When I showed Corrie what toys I still had, she laughed and said I was spoiled.

Here's one of the forest speeders. It originally had three or four pieces, and a button in the back that would cause it to fall apart, reminiscent of the scene where Luke light-sabers a speeder into pieces as it flies by. Pretty sophisticated:

Funny thing it, I lost those other pieces while I was still a kid playing with them regularly.

I also had two separate Luke Skywalkers from Return of the Jedi. The odd part, though, is that they're different versions of Luke wearing the balck outfit. The first is from the Jabba rescue, and the second is from the confrontation with Vader and the Emperor:

The newer trilogy makes it interesting that we should be alarmed maybe that Luke has decided to wear black. Jedis in black is not good news, right?

The older two action figures:

I did have a Luke from Hoth, the ice planet. But I through it up in the air and then I never saw it again. Don't ask...

8.

So, now, an older guy, me, sitting with his lady, pretending we know nothing about an iconic film franchise, and popping in some sci-fi movie and taking a look.

The music! It blows you away; each main character has a theme, and the themes are different but connected; plaintive longing is beating you over the head, and the badguy music is romping and stomping and chewing scenery like an aged actor. The music is almost silly in how manipulative it is.

There's a rebellion, there's a Rick Blaine-type pirate, who seems like it's just the guy named Harrison Forn playing himself. Actually, everyone seems to be playing themselves: Carrie Fisher was Hollywood royalty--she played a princess; Ford was a smug pretty boy--ditto; Mark Hamil was a wide-eyed goon--he was, eh, a wide-eyed goon...

The story's weird, romantic, and seems like its mythological archetypes are playing out in practice. Funny thing is, it works, pretty much. The technology is old and worn out, lived in. It seems like no other sci-fi movie when it comes to the shabbiness of the space crafts. (Now that's cliche: Firefly?)

The action! Wow! Who cares that space crafts wouldn't fly and operate like that in reality. This filmmaker made a space dogfight that keeps dynamic action going in ever scene with the space background. Good stuff, impressive still; impressive for anytime, really.

9.

The execution of the three movies blew us away once we were done watching them. The sets were big and baroque when they needed to be, small and shabby when that was needed, and just the right touch everywhere in between. Besides some poor "acting", these movies are more entertaining that I remember.

10.

There's a lot of talk about the lack of women in this original trilogy. This is a warranted position. Compare it with Firefly and Serenity...but that's not really fair to Star Wars, but neither is the lack of ladies.

That being said, Princess Leia is a strong woman, a resourceful leader and role model for the ladies. Even in the gold bikini that so bewitched us young boys.

11.

The only stuff that didn't work so well was the new stuff added later, that decades later meddling by Lucas and his computers. I wanted the original singer at Jabba's. I wanted the original celebration song on Endor. What can you do? That computerized graphics added later look bad, at least by today's standard. The old stuff holds up so much better than that plastic cartoony stuff.

Who'd a thought the computer graphics wouldn't fit as well as the models and blue screens?

12.

I spent a long time with a proverbial stink-eye pointed towards Lucas and his meddling in his own properties and his reboots. I ignored as much of the hype as I could, and was derisive at other times. Eventually I decided to check out the movies again, if only to point a more critical eye towards them. I found my nerd heritage being rekindled.

That was unexpected, like how much I enjoyed the movies and their universe this "second" time around.

Thinking About Football

1.

When you say "football" here, in America, what people around you think of, as long as they're fellow Americans, is either the NFL or the college version of American football. If you're in Calgary or Winnipeg and mention "football", people there understand you to mean a game we call Canadian football. If you mention "footy" in Australia, they assume you're talking about what we call Australian rules football. In London, "footy" or "football" means a game we usually call soccer.

In Dublin, the highest attended sporting event is football, but not soccer, rather, a game known outside of Ireland as Gaelic football.

An interesting thing about the term "football": in as many places as have unique games using a ball and feet in some capacity all colloquially refer to their game as simply football. 

America, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and England all have games that the locals call football, and all are different from each other. Is anyone more right than anyone else?

2.

Skipping the thousands of years of history of indigenous peoples use of games as battle practice would do a disservice to this discussion. But, a thorough discussion of those peoples and their games would take too much time. 

Believe me, almost all groups of native peoples throughout human history had games of some kind, many used primarily to keep young warriors fit and teach them coordination and teamwork, things that would help out in the eventual battles they'd end up in. Many of these games used a sphere of dense vegetation or and inflated animal bladder as the "ball".

It was this background of mobbed-sporting-event that we'll move this discussion to Europe, and, specifically, England.

3.

In Medieval England tiny villages would have game contests during major holidays. They started halfway between the towns with an unlimited number of participants ("players"), and the winner was the town that could move the inflated bladder-ball to the opposing town's abbey or church.

This "mob-ball" game was the basis for all our games today that bear the name football. In those contests, people were allowed to pitch the ball, kick it, advance it in someway that wasn't directly carrying it and running. People had loads of fun, and not too many were gravely injured.

4.

In the mid 1500s, students of the affluent and aristocratic classes went to schools instead of to work, like their poorer counterparts, in places we today "English public schools" that were in fact what we'd understand as being private schools.

As early as then, these institutions were trying to find ways to keep the kids fit and in shape, and teach them teamwork and cooperation. It was over the next two centuries that it's understood that these schools turned "mob-ball" from a day long playful battle into an organized sporting event.

The thing was, each school developed their own game (a few of which still exist). Almost all of these schools called their game football.

An interesting thing about the development of these games is their development through their limitations. For schools that had large amounts of open space, a carrying type of football game developed, where an oblong ball could be carried by hand and passed by foot, and tumbling and tackling could take place. One school that had this kind of game develop was named Rugby. 

Other schools that had less space to develop their games tended towards a kicking type of game, with less emphasis on tumbling, tackling, and holding the ball with your hands.

When rail travel made traveling easier, schools would travel and play opposing schools, playing one half of the game using one school's football rules, and the second half using the other's.

5.

In America, two specific years revolutionized the game we call football, and they involved rule changes. The first was 1880. That was the year that the Yale coach was able to implement rule changes to the version of Canadian rugby they played and convinced the schools they played against to switch as well. Not everybody switched right away, but they all ended up on the same page eventually.

Those rule changes? The establishment of a line of scrimmage and a set of downs to advance the ball a set distance before turning it over changed the strategy immensely. Now that the action stopped between advancing the ball, the game started to resemble its continuous-play rugby basis less and less. This development also started the evolution of scripted plays, something up until then was unknown.

In the football that's world known and beloved, known as Association Football, or soccer, scripted plays are reduced to set-plays like the corner kick, or the long free-kick.

The other year that made American football resemble what we see today was 1905, when the game was almost outlawed and the rules were changed to reduce violence. They made legal the play we call a "forward pass", they changed first down from 5 yards to 10, and lastly they changed the number of downs to make the yardage from 3 to 4.

A forward pass is still an illegal play in both kinds of rugby, our football's most obvious ancestor.

If you think football is violent now (it is, very much so), you should have seen it in 1905. There were some years when more than 50 players died on the field, and nearly 200 were seriously injured, like life-altering injuries. It's no surprise that they were talking about outlawing it. They were talking about making it safer then, as they are now. Nowadays, of course, the problem is brain injuries and long-term concussion issues.

6.

Canadian football is one of the three North American styles of "gridiron football". They use a different size ball than the NFL (and NCAA), they use a 110 yard field (instead of 100 for NFL), they retain the 3-down setup instead of the NFL's 4-down, and there's no limit to pre-snap motions on their backs on offense. That's a lot of words talking about the differences, but Canadian football is very similar to NFL and NCAA.

College football in America is different from the NFL, but not terribly. 

Gaelic football, the most popular football game in Ireland, is an amateur sport that resembles soccer and basketball, with players running down a field dribbling the ball like a basketball with their feet. It's hard tio explain, but fun to watch and easy to grasp what's going on.

Aussie rules football is played on a large oval, and the point is to kick the ball through uprights, or run it in; both plays have different point totals. It's exciting to watch, but takes a few minutes to tell why people hand over the ball after certain plays, and why certain players can't run, or can run...it's cool, though.

Rugby is split into two versions, and they resemble each other even if they're further apart than the NFL and NCAA. Rugby is the great-granddaddy of all grid-iron style football games, as well as those variations that use oblong balls and hands as well as feet (Aussie rules and Gaelic, et al). It is exciting, and as an American, I can see how the development of our football evolved through simple rule changes.

Association football is the world's most popular team sport. Soccer, baby!

7.

Happy Turkey Day! Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday in the Oct-Nov-Dec-New Years holiday season. As a harvest celebration, the basis is that the earth is giving gifts to you.

And a tradition here is to have our football on in the background--or foreground--during the Thursday itself. 

Not for everybody, of course, but I hope all have a nice few days, celebrating the great American pagan harvest festival.

I Dreamt I was a Condor

1.

Soaring above the coastline, circling and circling, hoping to find some kind of grub, some carcass to get into is all I really remember. The soaring. Maybe I dreamt I was a condor's beak. That seems like a more visceral thing, doesn't it? The hooking razor sharpness tells us all we need to know about this Pleistocene relic.

The California Condor is that which I speak. This ancient scavenger once roamed the skies of the last major glaciation with impunity, back when the megafauna was plentiful and dying regularly. Many of the aboriginal California tribes have their own stories about the condor. The Wiyot believed the condor recreated mankind after the Above Old Man wiped us out with a flood. The Chumash believed the condor was originally white, but turned black by flying to close to fire. Images of condors adorn ancient cave paintings and bones have been found buried with folks.

You can imagine how many people have dreamed of being this great flying beast.

2.

We were driving home from the Salton Sea, taking a scenic route, and traveled through the Anza-Borrego State Park. It's a beautiful spot in a varied state; desert to one side and the coastal range on the other, a little mix of both nestled between bodies of water.

We stopped in at a place to look for books; Corrie got a kids book and I picked up Willie Boy, a story of the last great posse manhunt of the dying old west of 1909. We got to talking with the older ladies at the shop, and they handed us all sorts of newsletters about the park full of various odd and/or important info: when the wild-flowers bloom; how to track coyotes; brief history about the Basque settler Anza, one of the park's namesakes; and about the repatriation of the California condor. They had a picture.

Is that...is that what one of these famous giant birds looks like?

As a kid growing up in California in the 1980s, I remember the hubbub that was stirred when in 1987, the decision was made to remove the condor from the wild---they were down to something like 19 specimens---and start a captive breeding program in the hopes of returning these majestic bastards to their perch as an apex scavenger. If such a thing exists.

Later on that day, after making it home, we were unwinding after dinner and watched an instant queue documentary from Netflix on Big Sur. The condor was a star of that show as well, and the focus was on the reintroduced population's troubles on the coastal scene.

Again, is that what these birds look like? I guess so.

3.

You'd be upset too if you had a ball-sack for a chin:

Seriously, have you ever seen one of these guys up close like this before? I thought I had, but I'd imagine I would have remembered scrotum-chin bird.

4.

One of the issues facing the California condor is biological. One thing about being a Pleistocene relic is that, well, advances have come along in other species that compete with you for resources that may be prove to be favored in the current setup of nature.

In other, less confusing phrasing, turkey vultures are proving to be biologically superior at finding carrion. Granted, the girth of the condor---if they can find some food, they'll scare most everybody away (except, of course, a hungry golden eagle--badgers won't even scare them) gives it an occasional advantage, but it may be to little too late. And that's when the condor can find food.

California condors have no sense of smell. They search for carrion using their great eye sight. This probably works better in the less cloudy interior of the deserts when the dead animals were huge, or on sunny beach days when the whales were plentiful, dying regularly and washing up onshore. Turkey vultures, on the other hand, can smell molecules of carrion from miles away.

Chalk that battle up to the turkey vulture.

5.

I remember these birds as being just huge, simply gigantic, the biggest birds on the planet.

Well, not really. That's one of those growing-up-in-80s-California false notions I developed.

Obviously there are the flightless birds: ostrich, emus, cassowaries, and penguins being the most famous editions. I had to look up cassowaries. If you can imagine a kiwi bird, that's like the smallest type of cassowary; the biggest ones are heavier than emus but shorter than the ostrich. Without flying, these large birds were able to develop great sizes, and even dense, marrow filled bones.

Okay, so, what about flying birds, right? The condor's wingspan is one of the biggest, clocking in at close to ten feet, and they're pretty fat too, weighing in at an average of 26 pounds.

It turns out there are some flying giants out there. The Dalmatian pelican is the heaviest on average bird that flies, something like 40 pounds, with a wingspan of 10 to 11 feet. Then there's the trumpeter swan. This is generally considered the biggest flying bird. It's six feet long, averages in the upper 30s in pounds, and has a 10 foot wingspan. There was a reported trumpeter that weighed fifty pounds and couldn't fly.

Wingspan wise the biggest is the wandering albatross. These guys look like sea gulls to me, but probably because I've never seen one up close. They have 12 foot wings. Twelve-fucking-feet.

Let's not forget the whooping crane. The whooper is the tallest flying bird, standing at a majestic five feet. (Soft spot for these birds from Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.)

So flightless birds, pelicans, swans, albatrosses, and the whooper all have some kind of claim to being slightly more giant in some way than our giant scavenger (with a scrotum as a facial feature), but one thing I found that seemed to top out in favor of this condor: age.

I couldn't find a bird with an average longer lifespan. Maybe a parrot? California condors live for an average of sixty years.

6.

Sixty years with a ball sack for a chin. And not even a mammoth to mack. Yeesh. See, even if you have a nut-sack on your face, if that face is buried in a mammoth, or a dead saber-toothed tiger, then your ass is dignified.

Yup, dignity comes to those who eat rotting mammoth and saber-tooth tiger corpses.

7.

Vultures are one of the three types of technical Birds of Prey.

I sometimes walk to the beach and watch the pelicans dive bomb fish. Yet they're not considered a Bird of Prey, with the capital letters of an official title. Ditto for penguins, who hunt fish nearly every day of their lives.

Official Birds of Prey are broken up into three groups, and scavenging vultures make up one. They developed from an early break with another group of surprise hunters. That seems to be the official criteria: swoop-surprise hunting.

The other two groups are the raptors and the owls.

Owls, raptors, and carrion vultures.

8.

Scoring one for the repatriation efforts: the condors are up over 400 specimens on the planet, I think it's at 419, with under 200 in captivity and over 200 wild. Strange fact: to be lifted from the "Critically Endangered" list to the plain "Endangered" list, which itself would be a coup of sorts, they just need to get to 450 birds.

Well, before us science types go congratulating ourselves, I should probably say that the baby condors growing up in captivity have a very hard time successfully scavenging on their own once repatriated, as they tend to be "taught" by their human overlords.

Also, maybe this animal's design is a relic for a reason, and the fact its time of this rock is limited is not necessarily a tragedy as much as an essential characteristic.

9.

After the Big Sur documentary ended and Corrie went to bed, I started doing some research on condors. Thinking about them for a few solid hours, and then once asleep, playing around in the quantum dream land, I was freed from the shackles terrestrial travel, and soaring above the coast.

The sky above was blue, and the crashing waves below were quiet at that height, their salty violence betrayed by the altitude. Around and around I circled, and soon I think I realized I might have been just the beak.

The sharp and powerful beak of a Pleistocene relic...

I Dreamt I was a Condor's Beak

A Victory for Monsanto in California

Ugh...Monsanto spent twenty-six million dollars well enough to defeat the GMO food labeling initiative here in California. They paid off every politician in the state to go on television and complain that the proposition was flawed and sure to bring death and destruction onto the heads of every person in the state. Even Diane "time to move on to a younger set of Dems" Feinsten was against the bill.

All we wanted was for food made with genetically-modified organisms to be labeled as such.

Gloom and doom was to be our lot if it passed. All that processed garbage that sells crazy well in this state (and everywhere else) would have to be labeled.

Did you know that corn is technically listed as a pesticide by the FDA? Corn is officially a pesticide, and it's in nearly every single edible thing on the market, and if that edible thing is processed, it most assuredly has corn present.

Oh well. Times are changing. Labels will one day be labeled as they should be. If Washington and Colorado can decrim pot and Maryland joining the ranks of states that recognize rights of folks with the same plumbing wanting to call themselves "married", then someday we'll get where we we need to be.

Stupid scary Monsanto.

VOTE!

Maybe the system is jacked beyond repair.

Maybe we should start a revolution. Isn't that what all this "Occupy" bullshit's about? Like I said back in a post about the Occupy movement: we (the non-super wealthy) got screwed because the system allows us to get screwed---well, actually, no, it's designed for us to get screwed. That's how it is. Nobody studies or even pays attention to civic politics anymore, and that's how they want it.

Both of America's political parties want politics to be boring and infuriating. That way apathy creeps in, and while some folks may get upset about getting shafted, nobody's really going to get involved or expect it to get better. People simply can't imagine a world where politics is civil and out to do good for the people.

It can change by one of two ways. The first is really hard and takes a large amount of sacrifice, while the second is unimaginably harder and asks for a life-changing kind of sacrifice.

The first way is for people to take time to read up on the laws that are being submitted to vote while also keeping in contact with your elected representatives regularly. Calling them, writing them letters, showing up at their offices. Do you think if you and five of your family members, or friends, or acquaintances, or work buddies who share maybe a similar stance, were to show up at your state senator's office that person would be able to ignore you?

The first method means people must get informed. And that takes a whole lotta effort, believe me. One may think 1) there's not enough time in the day; or 2) that after a long day of work they just want to relax. To that, Method for Change 1 says: 1) turn off the television and get studying; and 2) tough shit.

Look, I'm not saying every day will be grind after grind while relaxation and rest fully evaporate, but that's realistically the kind of work involved in getting really informed and then holding people accountable when the system does the screwing.

The second method is revolution. And here I'm not talking standing-with-a-joint-in-one-hand-and-an-inflammatory-sign-in-the-other-while-chanting-in-unison kind of revolution. I'm talking the real kind.

The "we've devised a radical redistribution of resources" kind. The "time to lockup or technicolor-haircut every CEO from a Fortune 500 company" kind. Storming the castle with pitchforks and torches, baby!

And I'm down. I have ideas for that kind of revolution. What I don't have is an army...or a militia...or even a gun...or an angry mob...or even a country full of people who in their heart of hearts truly wants a revolution.

Is that really what you want? Me, I don't really have anything accept debt and a ton of blogs, so, like I said, I'm down.

And if you ever get your act together, come and get me. (I'm looking at you, you smelly oddly-mustachioed hipsters. The hippies will never fight, but you young hipsters, your world devalues humanity far more than preceding generations...)

So what do we do today? The first step to getting informed is to get involved, and getting involved means voting.

VOTE!

Time Change Conversations with Tuxedo

Daylight savings time is upon us, and it has someone in our household all out of sorts. That someone though, is our fuzzy feline, Tuxedo.

For people who aren't familiar with our cat, he has some peculiar habits that confound us to this day. As an eight year old cat, Tuxedo still, twice a day (and every single day for the last eight years) whines incessantly for his meals for at least an hour before each meal. "Whines" may not be the best word--screams and wails and howls and makes a goddamn racket may all work better.

He's a big cat, but his lungs and vocal chords are from some kind of banshee or howling beast.

After all this time, I've been able to tune him out, but it's not easy. There's simply no let up. But Tux's body clock is on solar time, while our schedule is on (mostly) artificial cell-phone time.

For breakfast, during the week, there is a high-pitched and shushy dance between Corrie and Tuxedo, and he gets fed right before she leaves. On the weekends, he's up right before her alarm would start to go off, and at first stirring he'll be an obnoxious beast until he gets food. Up until this past weekend, the alarm would start going off right around day break, meaning Tux would be anxious for grub right as the sun breaks the horizon, and then not getting fed until maybe forty-five minutes later, but definitely when the sun is up. Come weekends, he'll be starting at sunup.

One benefit to this is when an alarm fails, Tux acts like a fail-safe alarm.

But now, the old seven am is six, which gives us an extra hour to sleep. Tell that to the cat. He's up and obnoxious with the sun, which is kinda like his thing. When I started this blog back in Brooklyn, we didn't get any sun, so this wasn't really the same issue. He was obnoxious, of course, but not on the solar time schedule like now.

I thought cats were supposed to mellow out...silly me.

Desert Rift Lake: the Salton Sea

The Salton Sea is California's largest lake, averaging fifteen miles wide by thirty-five miles long. It's the topographically lowest point in the Salton Sink, a large depression that had for many millenia been a very large lake. The Salton Sea is brackish, or salty, more so than the Pacific, but less so than the Great Salt Lake in Utah. It's also a rift lake, that is, it's filling in the lowest points caused by a rift valley, or a fault-line.

Also, it was accidently formed. A flood built up a plug that blocked the water's escape, and in other times, the Sea of Cortez would have gone all the way to Coachella. Water flows in, and evaporation is its only outlet.

There was even a time when the Salton Sea was a resort, and folks would venture forth from both the Southland and the Bay Area. Now...

...now the salt water is so salty that boat's engines break down quickly, so boating's done with, and airplane travel became much more affordable, so Salton Sea, like Catalina, became less of a destination. Catalina, though, as an island, retains an exoticism that is absent out here in the desert.

It is a sight to see, though, when you drive towards it, out in the middle of the desert, a lake stretching off to the horizon and no opposing shore visible:

Our adventure began earlier that day, leaving our place in Long Beach and driving out the two hours to the middle of the desert. The blue water stretched off, and we turned left into a "neighborhood" that had signs signifying that it was called Shoreline Village. It was a large collection of double-wides. The odd thing, though, was that the trailers closest to the water were burned out and abandoned:

This is just the closest one. It doesn't seem to resemble a meth lab explosion, more like a regular fire, but I'm not a forensic expert:

Here's another wrecked out domicile:

And here all that's left is a ratty couch and the chimney:

Another place with the copper wires all stripped, but this one didn't really seem like a double-wide:

One more eerie shot before we head to the water's edge---a series of dead palms trees:

The beach was crunchy, like brittle fresh snow, but was made of fish bones and tiny puka-like shells:

Here's a cool scary shot of the sea and a love seat...

Okay, so, a few words about the Stench, and the tilapia die-off.

There was a cloud of funky smell that floated in on the greater LA area (we didn't get it in the LBC), and it was eventually determined that it was a Salton Sea fish die-off that had caused it. The die-offs are caused by large algae blooms that take up all the oxygen and choke out the fish. They happen regularly over the course of the sea's life.

Currently the salinity is a bigger problem than the algae blooms, beside the stench of the dead fish. The salinity's growing regularly due to the salinity levels in the feeder streams and rivers, though their salt levels should be a point of concern as well.

The edge of the sea had an odd foam, and it some parts you could see where the foam had dried after it was left during a tidal change.

At one point the beach had thousands of balls of fishy crud that was soft like dog droppings. I imagine it was the algae having been rolled through the lapping wave action over the shore, but I'm not sure, and this was as close as I came to handling it:

Dead fish:

There weren't any flies, and it seemed almost too salty to have any bacteria also (there had to be some, right?), and the fish just seemed to be drying out instead of decomposing.

At an old school dock the effect of long term salted air exposure was quite noticeable:

More fish piled up. The smell was nearly unbearable, which meant they had to be decomposing somewhat.

We stopped at another spot south of Shoreline Village called Western Shore. Google maps had said that it was actually called Salton City. A desolate intersection cracked me up: how would like to meet at the corner of Sea Elf and Treasure?

One last oddity: more funkiness...

And then there was us:

And a new pal, a retired Japanese doctor who took our picture, and couldn't get the birds to eat his bread (have you ever heard of that?):

The Horror! Ghastly Visions from a Desert Sea

Perfect for Halloween, there are a few crazy pictures from the Salton Sea, our previous Saturday's destination. This is pretty much a preview of a few posts from that brackish lake, the stench still fresh on the brain.

The shore wasn't sandy; it was made of fishbones and those crunchy puka-looking shells. That, and lots of dead fish.

Lots.

The pictures don't do it justice. I'll revisit the fish in the later posts, but it was eerie. No flies. No bacteria to decompose the fish. The birds didn't even seem interested. Dead fish everywhere. Unsettling, for sure.

Day 30 Fake Out

The fake out is on how good the link is. I guess that's up to you, my fine readers, on whether or not a post about an old PCL team's caps and a word about their history is really all that great.

That was one of the problems with the post-a-day experiment. I have a few posts coming up, one about the Salton Sea, another about Condors, that take more time than I have to put towards them as of right now, and don't fit the rush of trying to do one a day on a deadline. The tiny posts are sometimes classic pieces of writing, little golden nuggets, but those are in the minority.

The jump link for today is an old idea, the essence of which I've been toying with for months; the Open Status of the PCL. I had a huge retrospective on west coast baseball working, but I never could find the right angle, or more information...something was missing. So it comes to this, a blip on a filler post about caps from the Pacific Northwest.

Day 29: Almost Done With October Folly

I'm almost done with the self imposed October a-post-a-day project. I have four here, right now, but they're mostly filler. There might be some cool stuff embedded here and there, but, that's for you, my lovely readers, to decide.

The first is one of today's two sports posts, about Giants teams dropping some science on teams from cities that begin with the letter D. Because that somehow makes sense. The second is about the Chargers.

The third is one of two food posts, a how-to on carving a chicken thigh, deboning it anyway, while the last post is about the lovely jujubee.

"Now It's Your Problem, Dickhead"

I mentioned a few times during the posts about riding our bikes to the Tar Pits that afterward sidewalk grilling we rode over to the old art-house theater--fancifully named the Art Theater--and watching Argo, which was pretty good. Being pretty well twisted on the ride over there (less than a mile down 3rd, and then up to 4th at Cherry) I was enjoying the visceral fact of it all: we could just ride down to an independent theater and watch a movie. Just like the Palm Theater, only farther.

I mentioned it a few times not because I liked the theater or the movie that much, but because some asshole cut the lock off our bikes and stole my fucking bike. For the second time. But left Corrie's. Which is great and surprising. If you could easily steal a vintage Ferrari or a lemon Caravan, being that they were right next to each other, what would you go for?

My fucking leg-breaking bike. My pain-in-my-ass creaky but regularly-complimented bike. I never understood how people loved my bike as much as they said...it was okay looking, I guess. Some jerkass doesn't know just what they've got.

Maybe it does looks kinda cool...

But, we didn't call it the "Death Bike" for no reason.

Now, while part of me isn't so upset that that shitty bike is no longer in my possession, I don't like having my personal belongings violated and taken from me. This bike, though, is Bad Karma with a capital Brooklyn (BK).

I wasn't about to take this sitting down.

I put that photograph above to good use. I designed a poster to paper the neighborhood where it happened, calling out the poor bastard who jacked it:

"This bike was stolen from Cherry and 4th on Sat, October 20th. It broke my femur. Now it's your problem, Dickhead" is what the paper says. I went out under cover of darkness and posted almost half my stock:

I was trying to shame the thief, and make it obvious that this "cool" orange bike was a stolen commodity. There were never any other types of this cheap Chinese made bicycle I'd seen, making it pretty unique.

I went back a few days later, some of the posters are still there.

Dumbass. Dickhead. A pox on thee....but I didn't even have to call it. It's just a matter of time.

Day 27: Link to Roasted 'Shroom Recipe

Mushrooms. If you like them, you'll be salivating over my butter-basted roasted mushroom recipe. If you don't, well, I'm sorry---there are sublime things you'll be missing out on. Maitakis man! Maitaki mushrooms...beyond description...

The truth is, this recipe works for any roasted vegetables or mushrooms. I've done it for cauliflower, broccoli, romesco, mushrooms of many kinds (as the recipe shows)...I even had a job in New York where we repeated the tactic over and over as part of our daily prep work. That was the most hard-core restaurant I ever worked, as probably as close to the Ratatouille environment as any other place I worked. Well, maybe Vong...maybe I'll write about those places later.

Don't cook your psilocybe mushrooms! I've read psilocybin breaks down at too low a culinary temperature.

Benoit for Detroit

Day 26 Notes: (Jump Link at the End)

I looked at the baseball game the other day, Game 1 of the World Series, and saw in a road Detroit jersey---the grey trimmed with navy and orange and the cursive name of the city "Detroit"---and noticed the I was looking at a pitcher named Joaquin Benoit.

And I thought: is that the first time two different words ever appeared on a shirt of any kind that both ended in "oit"?

After watching that first game, you just knew Pablo Sandoval was locked in. That first inning when Justin Verlander, the best pitcher in the game, was making the start for the Tigers, the announces were tripping over themselves to load superlatives over the airwaves. He was making his 94 and 95 mph pitches to wherever he felt like, until Pablo came up.

Verlander went up in the count 0-2. He threw one of his strikeout pitches, a high strike, 95 or 96 mph. He could have elevated it a little more, but it was not a mistake pitch; it wasn't fully unhittable, but most people wouldn't have had a chance.

Sandoval hit the shit out of it, out to just-right of straight-away center. You knew it, too, that second it left the bat. Giants up 1-0.

In the third inning the batter before Pablo, Marco Scutaro (who's the elder statesmen on the Giants and red-hot right now) drove in a run to make the score 2-0, when Pablo came up and hit a pop-up with some gas, and watched it sail over the fence in left-field. 4-0.

Next time he came up the pitcher was no longer Justin Verlander, rather it was a guy with his entire name on his jersey, a guy named Al Albuquerque. Why does he need his whole name up there? How many black guys named "Albuquerque" can there be in the big leagues? 

Pablo Sandoval hit a bad pitch out for another homer, making him 3 for 3 on the night, with three homers and 4 RBIs. His next at bat he got a single, giving him a batting average of 1.000, and a slugging percentage of 3.250.

Yesterday was game two, and the starting pitchers were named Fister and Bumgarner. Bumgarner's first name is Madison, and his nickname is naturally MadBum.

MadBum and Fister. You can't make this stuff up.

I think I have a rambling post in me about how San Francisco is the Head Capital of the world, but not 'til later.

Here's a link to a post about Two Things from The Garlic Ballads that I felt like sharing with Norm, two of the more interesting things in that angry novel.

Day 25 and Camera-Phone Picture Discussions

I found a few things to talk about from the pictures on my phone. There are actually more than a few discussions that I'll be getting into, but for the purposes of this "post-a-day" project I tied myself up with, the first two posts got churned out, rather mechanically.

The first is about doing laundry on Fridays, and has a nod to the Harvey Keitel movie Smoke. The second is about the artsy FX package of "filters", a discussion that I wanted to make after taking pictures of the same spot with and without one of my more favorite effects.

It was the pilings at the top of that quarry during the long hike with Norm in late May.

In any case, there will be more to follow, but there are the tasters--the appetizers, really.

Things You Can Vote on in LA County

"County Measure B: Shall an ordinance be adopted requiring..." is how the reading on the ballot starts. This is one of the Los Angeles County measures that we're voting on, and the beginning is similar to many other county measures on other ballots this November. It's what follows that sets it apart:

"...requiring producers of adult films to obtain a County public health permit, to require adult film performers to use condoms while engaged in sex acts..." Something about the government in the bedroom had me bristling a little bit back when they were collecting signatures. It makes some sort of sense in the realm of economics and what's a taxable thing, I guess, since there will be a product that can generate funds in multiple states, and if it generates a taxable thing, then the government tends to claim they have authority to regulate it. Measure B goes even further:

"...require adult film performers to use condoms while engaged in sex acts, to provide proof of blood borne pathogen training course," to make them post such data and make violators of the ordinance subject to civil fines and criminal charges. I paraphrased there at the end, but I left off the question mark that is necessary when we remember the beginning, "Shall and ordinance be adopted..."

It's known as the Porn Star Measure.

The ordinance would require porn stars to be educated in blood borne pathogens? Can't say that's a particularly bad thing.

I think this measure may be a little late. Isn't the whole world moving to a YouTube mentality, even the porn industry? I read a while back that the pornography was at that time a fourteen-billion dollar a year industry. I don't think that's a realistic projection going forward, though.

How do you regulate people who make bad decisions mixing alcohol with their digital cameras? I don't think you can, and since those people aren't out to make money, I don't think the authority even exists---it's just consenting adults and a film-making device.

I guess that's the heart of who gets effected by Measure B. "Big Porn" get's rocked, leaving the amateurs to Amateur Porn, which would seem still mostly unregulated. Government can't assume they have jurisdiction over consenting adults doing whatever the hell they feel like in the privacy of their own room.

But maybe Big Porn is due for a bit of regulation. Fourteen-billion dollars annually is a lot of cash; that's more than twice NFL money.

Twice the NFL. And then still some more.

So, now, shall we require them to wear condoms and learn about blood borne pathogens? That doesn't seem like it will even cost too much, besides setting up, and checking up on, the database.

"Rocked" doesn't seem like an accurate description of how Big Porn will be effected. And even the people out collecting signatures spoke of how Measure B enjoys wide support from industry brass as well as the rank and file.



Yup...this is my county and her votables...

La Brea Bike Adventure, Part 4: LACMA

We spotted a cool shaped building away from the sticky and softly smelling tar, and headed towards it. There was some cool bamboo, which is always photogenic:

What we were seeing was the Japanese Addition to the LACMA, the LA County Museum of Art. There were a few cool looks offered by the Japanese Addition:

What is it that's so cool about helix? (It's DNA, that's why.)

Following a walking path we went around a corner and entered a sculpture garden. There were a few cool looking things back there:

Then we cam to one of the front entrances for the LACMA. With it's towering lines it looks pretty impressive:

We didn't go inside (mostly time constraints, same as the Page), but we did walk around and noticed a cool hangy, yellow rubberband type material, an interactive installation. Something that was cool, that you could walk through and touch, it made quite an impression:

That one gives an idea on the scale.

After this, we pretty much turned and went back to the bikes, got a "snack", got the subway, switched at 7th back to the Blue line, and soon enough I was starting a sidewalk fire.

We would head to the movies later in the evening.

La Brea Bike Adventure, Part 3: Tar Pits

Hancock was a rancher who purchased land from the Rancho la Brea land grant, and today the park with the tar pits is called Hancock Park, and is in downtown Los Angeles. La Brea is Spanish for "the tar". It had been known as dangerous for a while, and the big pit with the elephant is man made.

For thousands of years petroleum would seep up through the crust to the surface, and is still occasionally pumped from under nearby 6th St. At this site, over the millenia, the elements that made the petroleum mostly liquid evaporates, and the remaining substance is called either "tar", which is coating and sticky, or called "asphalt", which we know as had blacktop but here is mostly mounds. Whether it's tar or asphalt depends on how much evaporation has occurred.

The sticky tar would get covered by dust or water, and animals would get stuck in it, and eventually die. Predators would happen by, see animals trapped, and jump and get a meal, only to get themselves stuck, and then they eventually die. Their bones would end up preserved in the tar/asphalt, only to be excavated today and shown off at the Page Museum:

The petrol products do smell pretty serious, but it's not as bad as you may think: it's not choking or an overpowering stench. But the tar pokes up all over the place, having little regard for the man made fencing around the larger spots. Here's a spot where you can get a stick all gooey, like I did:

This is an excavation shack, and if you look close, you can see some flags in the pit. Each flag represents a spot of a fossil that is corresponding to a larger drawing in the room from which we're looking.

Here's a gas bubble coming up through some tar, an iconic picture from this attraction:

We didn't go inside the museum, but we did notice that the LACMA (LA County Museum of Art) is also on the Hancock Park grounds, which gave us a little more stuff to check out. For us, on this adventure, the journey was part of the show...