The Making-Of a Caliboy in Brooklyn Post: "Searching for Birth 55"

From the very beginning of this blog, back in 2009, I had a few ideas of the types of posts I wanted to put here. Firstly, they weren't to be fiction. My fiction writing is my artistic goal, and I'm not going to post it for free. Little did I know that I would be creating a new type of literature, one of the pioneers of blog-posting as human-experience-chronicling, but here we are. So, as non-fiction, posts would seem to almost all fall under the realm of "Conversations with the Aether", and be split between a "Here're some deep thoughts about something maybe less deep" brand, and a "Here's an adventure I went on" brand.

Going to Governor's Island back while living in Brooklyn, or the Visceral Tuesday Walk in Austin are good examples of the latter "Adventure" posts. Those aren't exactly where I ended up with this Caliboy In Brooklyn blog, as going to Governor's Island was an activity that Corrie and I did as part of normal New York City activities, while the Tuesday Walk was originally for a novel for which I was piecing sound effects together (it's a long story). Those weren't one of the newer "Adventure" posts.

The ones I'm talking about are more of the Two Towns Over post, along with its two directly resultant offspring, What's the Catch? and Philosophical Basis for "Two Towns Over" Post.

This post here will give a glimpse of the madness that goes into hatching and executing one of these "Adventure" style blog posts.

1.

Everything starts with an idea. Using the "Two Towns Over" as an example, the idea there was that I'd had a bike for a while (two weeks) and hadn't gone on any "long" rides yet to report on any distinctly LA-based weirdness. There was a kernel of motivation.

So here, instead of "Two Towns Over", I'll be discussing my as-yet unpublished "Searching for Birth 55" as the post of reference.

Birth 55 is famous (that may be a bit much) in the downtown Long Beach area for having a fresh-fish market and restaurant scene. We had some friends who'd made a drive from their Long Beach apartment to the birth, and it had been featured in the newspaper as the possible victim of closure.

The location wasn't too far from where we live, according to Google Maps, but it was across the LA river, which meant it could supply fodder for maybe a good blog post. From this point I would locate it on the map, get the best directions available for biking purposes, because that's how I'm rolling these days, with broken femur healed and all, and then I'd set about picking a date.

In between hatching the idea and heading out, I usually try and get some research done on the place or thing I'm going to see, but sometimes that waits until after the trip is done and I'm compiling everything, and, sadly, sometimes it never gets done. I find having it done before is best; that way I'll know where to point my attention and camera at what I want readers to take from the narrative.

Around here weather issues are rarely a concern, even in February, and on the road, with my camera and occasionally a bottle of water, I would take an early establishing shot, trying to showcase the type of day for the ride adventure.

2.

Photographs make up a sizable element to a biking adventure post. I like to try and establish vistas that are only available at the places where my adventure has taken me. That sounds silly, but for me, having taken literally thousands of pictures of Long Beach's skyline in the two years we've lived here, each one of those shots is from a unique spot in the city, and many are largely unseen, tucked away in blog-post folder, only there for orientation of the location.

Once a trip is done and I've loaded the pictures onto the computer, I need a sheet of paper next to me to sort through the shots, their timing and placement scribbled as notes next to their numbers as descriptions:

That gets a little crazy, and my notebooks have pages and pages of barely legible scratches next to random number lists like this. I think this particular list is from my Essentially LA post on my Pop-Culture Wasteland blog.

On a quick tangent, other crazy things can be found while sifting through those lists in the notebooks:

That's an early sketch of how I was thinking of styling the cover to my book Robot Crickets. The second cricket was really just a screwed up drawing, it was always only supposed to be a single cricket.

3.

Once the location has been sought out on the web, the trip planned, then ridden, photographs taken and uploaded and sifted, I've usually been able to make some final judgments about the experience and feel ready to start typing.

Being back at the computer sometimes opens up a whole new avenue of thought that hadn't necessarily been part of the original plan. The "What's the Catch?" post mentioned above is a good example of that. That's a direct result of a few days having passed and sitting at the computer, doing some research.

Those are the main phases: (1) hatching the idea; (2) executing the trip; (3) compiling the ideas and raw data; and (4) writing the piece.

Inadvertently all of those aspects sometimes make it into the written post. For this post, I'll let you decide.

***

Searching for Birth 55

In the recent past, we've made friends with a childless couple who live in Long Beach. They're sort of our Marc-and-Linda-West, except that we don't hang out nearly as often. They're our age and as intellectually curious as us and fun to talk with, and we've done a few adventures of our own together. One evening we had dinner plans, and it was at dinner that they mentioned having earlier that day gone to Birth 55 and gotten some fish for lunch.

Ooh, I said, isn't that the same Birth 55 that was in the paper that was in jeopardy of closing? Located on an older, run-down arm of the vastly more interesting that I imagined Long Beach Port properties, the area Birth 55 occupied was about to be either rezoned or razed, or both, and the restaurants and markets would need to be relocated. (I do believe they've been given a stay of execution.)

Our friends had said that it was nice and crowded and that their food was fresh and delicious. I wasn't quite sure if it was a market or a collection of restaurants, but it sounded like it was both. That was reasonable.

Later on, after catching a glimpse of its location on Google Maps, I figured it'd be no problem getting over there and checking it out. I would have to cross the bridge that gets bikes to the Terminal Island and Ports properties, which is a little south of the Birth 55 tendril. The bridge itself is the Queen Mary drive, and on a silly bright and blue February Day (February in LA County, baby!) I set about it:

Not the worst February, let me tell you...

The path, apparently Rt. 17, would take me over to the Queen Mary, which would be to the left once we get over the bridge. But where I wanted to get to was off to the right, and up further north, up along the LA River on that side of town.

The road up and beyond wasn't as easy to find initially, so I wound my way around the path, looking for a tunnel or bridge to get past the highway to the main street I needed to bike along. I hadn't yet learned that I wasn't in the right place, but it was interesting to get a shot of downtown Long Beach that was an angle I'd never seen:

So, it took me a while to get a grip on where I had to go, and back tracking led me to what was the correct road. Since everything is on a narrow blip of land between the QM landing and the vast port system, the only cars on the roads are, in fact, big rigs. Below, see them snake away onto one section of the Port:

And here, they're thinned out a little, but that was the traffic I was about to be dealing with:

I made it back to an intersection and waited my turn, walking my bike most of the time, as there weren't sidewalks or a whole lot of shoulder. The spot itself was down the street in the above picture, down to the right. I crossed the main roads of a hard to explain area, and then started riding up the street I was pretty sure was the one I wanted.

Sometimes "pretty sure" only gets you so far. There had been construction going on on the shoulder of the direction I was heading, so there was no space for my bike.

Now, I don't consider myself a hipster: I'm too old and fond of whiskey for that, but I do have a decent cruiser bike and I do prefer to ride in the street as opposed to the sidewalk, and I prefer to go with traffic, like the law says. Why I follow that set of laws I'll never know.

But on this particular road, with absolutely no shoulder, rather a chain-link fence on the white road line, and the traffic going by consisting of almost exclusively big-rigs going sixty miles an hour, I reconsidered my adherence to those laws.

At the first opportunity, I scurried across the street, but seeing as how there wasn't a paved shoulder, and there was a high curb and ditch down the side, I'd decided to walk my bike until it became safe to again mount and ride it. I'm mostly a fearless jerk-weed when it comes to bike rides, but the femur action from last summer made me decide early to cross the street, and if I think it's unsafe for riding, then there could easily be a fundamental flaw in my planning.

As I walked my bike through a sweeping curve of the road, I saw enough signs that discouraged my further advance; they were of the "No Bicycles" and "Authorized Personnel Only" variety, used on special bridges back over the LA River and for entrance onto various Port companies' properties. I was mostly sure this road went through, but on this ever warming afternoon, reason got the best of me, and I turned back.

Here's my unpaved shoulder I walked my bike along:

Visible in that picture is some Port property right on the right and the fence along the street on the other side. Surprisingly I got a shot without any cars or trucks visible on my road.

After stopping and catching a breather before I started hiking my bike up the stairs to get back to bridge to come back to my side of town, I snapped a picture of myself, laughing snarkily at the image of a barrel-chested pink-skinned dumbass, out where he shouldn't be with his bike, protected by a straw-hat:

Birth 55, as far as I can tell as of right now, is either very hard to get to by bicycle, or impossible to reach. The jury's still out, but this half-adventure, half-reconnaissance mission yielded the hard truths: better leave this trip to the car.

(That's also why the title of this post is "Searching for Birth 55"...)

Exotic Creature

I spent this week taking care of some of the preliminary activities I needed to do for the new adventure I'm beginning, and it revealed a few things that I thought I'd share.

Specifically I spent most of the week observing math classes at Gage Middle School in the city of Huntington Park, an old LA satellite city. It's in a section that twenty years ago would have been known as South Central LA, or at least that's my guess, since it's just north of Florence Ave, which became famous in 1992 when Reginald Denny was pulled from his semi and attacked during the riots, an act caught on a helicopter's camera, at the intersection of Florence and Normandy.

In any case, the things I noticed were partially concerning ethnicity. To say that Huntington Park is today majority Latino vastly underestimates what I saw. The truth is closer to overwhelmingly Latino (97.4%, from my 2012 LA Almanac). Of the many classes I sat in, one 7th grade girl was black, but every single other student I saw at the school, in classes I observed or walking around, was Latino.

Those demographics had the effect of turning a golden haired, pale skinned, blue-eyed, hairy 34-year old guy into a rather exotic creature. It was almost like Bed-Stuy again, getting stared at by just about everybody.

Another part of the adventure was getting there and back using my bicycle and the LA Metro. I found that riding the Blue Line from Long Beach to the Florence stop left me with a simple two mile ride to campus. The sun was in my eyes going there and coming home, and the wind was tough and in my face on the way back to the train. But that's not the thing I'm reporting on here.

Don't let anyone tell you that "Nobody Rides the LA Subway Metro" (my bad, old habits...). That sucker was crowded pretty furiously on each day, with Thursday morning being the worst. It was crowded like the 6 train in Manhattan this past Thursday, but people here don't know how to get out of the way; they're not trained well enough. That could take more than years.

There was one moment as I patrolled a class where a group of girls was giggling loudly when I walked by, giggled again when I asked them if they needed any help, and then one told me that I "look like that guy from Spider-Man." I thought, Tobey Maguire, but then I realized that these kids probably meant the new movie, and that kid from Social Network. I said, "Uh, thanks, I think. Doesn't sound so bad."

I was corrected, "No. It's a good thing."

Getting Excited for 9/17

Oh boy. Like back in 2009 and Inherent Vice, Norm and I are getting excited for this new book:

Eschewing pre-orders, I'm planning on walking into a store on the first day it's available and making my purchase. Here's another post where I've shamelessly grabbed an online synopsis. (Thanks goodreads.com.)

The T-Rex Conundrum

One of the problems with this type of forum is that an idea might seem like a good idea at one time, and soon after a while doing some background research, while typing it up, as the hours slip away during the nights, you start to question yourself. Why did I ever want to write this? What can I possibly say or add to this topic? 

Those are valid questions in general, and sometimes I think I may actually be able to add something. I'm not so sure this is one of those times. 

Maybe that's what you get with "Caliboy in Brooklyn": the running internal monologue of existential ontology.

The following post I started last week, and it grew out of a separate idea I had in the Plate Tectonics and an Evolutionary Precipice post. I wanted to discuss Tyrannosaurus Rex. The more shows I saw, the less I was convinced T-Rex was a hunter more than a scavenger. Most serious scholarship points away from that, but still...

...Still, I'm not a paleontologist. So why am I wasting my time with this? I think because this topic is at the heart of what this blog was about back in April and May in 2009, the first two months it was live: conversations with friends that I was having with the aether and not with them.

This of this as a conversation with the aether.

1.

Why should there be a conundrum? The Tyrannosaurus Rex is the King of all Earthly Monsters, Kong's claymation enemy, and the hero at the end of the Jurassic Park film.

How the T-Rex became the King Monster is what I'm after. Ultimately it's because it just was, but in the years between the early stages of paleontology and the newer discoveries, I wanted to make sure that we were worshiping the correct marvel of terrestrial apex predator. Worshiping is a weird word for what I'm getting at. Most people on the street may know a few separate dinosaurs, at least from memory or school or movies or something. One probably is the triceratops, with the three sharp horns; another that's recognizable is stegosaurus, with the cool offsetting spinal fin plates and spiky tail. But the one dinosaur you'd truly expect someone off the street to be able to name is T. Rex.

2.

The Name. Tyrannosaurus Rex. That is a badass name if ever there were one. Dickensian as well as cool-sounding, it's the only animal that is best known as its full binomial classification name.

Not only does the animal have a super grip on the imagination of children everywhere (and plenty of adults and inner-children), it has the greatest name to boot.

3.

Some of the reasons that provided the motivation for this thought exercise post are that T-Rex wasn't the biggest predator back in the day, and some folks don't think it was even a predator, the this beast was primarily a scavenger. If T-Rex was just a scavenger, and not the biggest of the baddies, then what are really saying? Is T-Rex a scared cow, of does it need to have a Cartesian epistemological trial by fire?

The trial by fire will strengthen the bond of imaginational importance, or at least give us something new which to devote daydreams.

4.

Part 1: T-Rex vs Gigantosaurus/Carcharodontisaurus

Tyrannosaurs were giant theropods, and a theropod was a bipedal predator. It turns out that T-Rex was smaller, on average, than both Gigantosaurus, which got its name from being a larger version of T-Rex, and the even larger Carchrodon- (jagged-tooth) -tosaurus. Carcharodons are mostly used in taxonomy with sharks, since their teeth are serrated knives. This large dino had serrated knife-like teeth, as opposed to our buddy T-Rex.

How come tyrannosaurs are the one we recognize in this group? Well, Gigan. got their name out of reference to T-Rex, and Carch. is also a Johnny-come-lately with a ridiculous name. Neither had the ecological range nor the volume of success in terms of years that mark the tyrannosaurs

5.

Part 2: T-Rex vs Spinosaurus

Now this one is different. Spinosaurus gets the mercury moving. Here we're not dealing with just a bigger T-Rex with less time on earth, we're dealing with the largest theropod ever, equipped with ridiculously strong arms(!), and a nasty temperament that would not be afraid to rob the biggest female tyrannosaur of her dinner.

Why haven't we heard about the spinosaurs? Because we're just getting to know them. Here's one of the fullest skeletons, on display in Japan:

It gets its name from the spines that come off of their vertebrae. Their skull was much more crocodilian than the T-Rex family. It was longer and more slender, and it had less jaw muscle development than tyrannosaurs, but that's kinda the trade-off with the arms. Bigger and stronger arms means smaller jaw. The spines were actually elongated pieces of vertebrae, so if they were to fall over and get their spines broken, the spinosaurus would be dead.

Here's a relativity picture that shows spinosaurus in relativity with T-Rex (from Wikipedia):

The first real collection of spinosaurus bones were lost during WWII, not to long after being discovered, and by then tyrannosaurs were firmly entrenched as the Monster King.

The spinosaurus has an extra set of teeth in its mouth to help shove food down a gullet.

6.

T-Rex the Scavenger?

There have been a few paleontologists that have supported the idea that Tyrannosaurus Rex was primarily a scavenger. The support for this comes from some of the evidence: their arms were mostly useless; they had the best developed sense of smell out of any dinosaur, something that would greatly help a scavenger; their teeth aren't the serrated steak knives that others active predators were; triceratops and ankilosaurus were dangerous prey...

It turns out that there's enough proof that suggests that tyrannosaurs 1) actively hunted both triceratops and ankilosaurus, among other things; 2) used their bulky head as part of their weaponry; 3) routinely suffered mortal wounds while hunting; 4) and scavenged opportunistically.

7.

Physical Attributes

Maybe it's the teeth. Maybe the T-Rex's teeth are one of the things that help give it an edge.

Albertosaurus was a contemporary of tyrannosaurus, only slightly shorter with a skull nearly as long and tall, but less thick, full of serrated teeth. A mostly overlooked cool dino, it was likely the only predator that hunted sauropods that were bigger than it.

Well, if you wanted to slice hunks of meat off a mountain of meat that was running away from you, serrated teeth and a thin skull would work wonders for you.

T-Rex? Nope. Tyrannosaurs had spikes for teeth. Cylindrical cones in the largest and most powerful land predator's jaw ever on earth.

Spikes.

They were able to use their bulldozer skull and spike teeth to crush and crunch their way through prey. Also their eyes were stereoscopic and binocular, a development that is best used today for predators, which leads to the hunter theory. Also, healed wounds on triceratops helps the cause.

8.

Allosaurus begat Tyrannosaurus...

Notice that there was no Allosaurus vs Tyrannosaurus above. They've never been in direct competition. There are tons and tons of fossils of both, and they were from different eras. The Allosaurus was from the Jurassic, which was earlier than the Cretaceous when T-Rex was active, was smaller than the T-Rex, but faster. It was less developed in the brain area than T-Rex as well.

In common conceptions, the cool dinos were Allosaurus vs stegosaurus, and then, later, T-Rex vs triceratops.

Allosaurus was always my favorite, even before I was given Ricardo Delgado's The Age of Reptiles graphic novel starring Santo, an Allosaurus.

Spinosaurus probably won't ever reach the lofty levels of imagination inspirations that either Tyrannosaurus Rex, or to the lesser extant, Allosaurus reached in humans, young or old. Too bad.

9.

Maybe T-Rex does deserve its spot in the pantheon of Earthly Monsters.



[[And then watch it fizzle at the end, my steam gone...]][[What you get over here at "Caliboy in Brooklyn"!]]

A Birthday Post with Other Ambitions

I've been making a few changes to the looks of some of my various blogs, as well as in how I've been approaching the posts. That'll slowly continue, and some of these newer posts are kinda neat. Really, it's an attempt to partition my time between posts, novel work, and my other main thing right now.

I also wanted to put on the record my usage guidelines for blogging terminology. I don't necessarily see myself as the authority, but as far as reading my material here, the following conventions have been followed without explanation until now.

Clarifications

blog: (n) trendy shortening of word "weblog" (itself a compound noun of "web-log"); a forum for one or multiple contributors to post content of some kind; genrally, a forum;
(v) the act of putting written posts onto one's weblog; posting to that forum

post: (n) one of the entries on a blog;
(v) the act of putting entries onto a blog

I think my point is to clarify that I don't put up blogs, I put up posts onto blogs. Also, as verbs, "blogging" and "posting" are nearly interchangeable, yet I almost always prefer "posting" to describe the act of making entries (posts) available to the public on the forum (blog). But, however awkward, to say, "the other day I was blogging," would be accurate.

I've heard a few things from folks I've met out talking about Robot Crickets and writing in general that inspired me to clear up for myself the direction that this artform is heading.

These semantics are important only for wordsy punks like me. You should have the long conversations about the wording on our wedding invitations...

And since it's my birthday, I've decided to post this not-so-inside joke picture under the heading

FINALLY

Plate Tectonics and an Evolutionary Precipice

1.

We've been experiencing a sampling of Netflix's offerings about dinosaurs recently. Some of the topics aren't necessarily about dinosaurs exactly; an entire mini-series highlights the half-billion years from the dawning of life itself to the emergence of what we today call the Era of Dinosaurs; another revolves around different American cities and how these cities were situated throughout the entire history of the planet.

The city series starts with New York (of course), a place that today feels like the center of the world when you're living there. Well, at one point, it was the center of Pangaea, and was on the edge when Africa started to separate and pull away. The Palisades are a remnant of the volcanic shifting. New York was also, much later, the site of the final extant of the last major glaciation. Because of glaciers, there are no dinosaur fossils in Chicago, or, for that matter, all of Illinois. They point to an example of the problem in an Chicago-land creek: the rock that makes up the creek-bed is 450 million years old, while the dirt and sediment that comprise the surrounding land is less than 20 thousand. There's just nothing in between.

2.

The episodes about the cities had a neat little animation cycle: they'd zoom through hundreds of millions of years worth of plate tectonics on a digital rendering of Earth. Watch New York be fully submerged back when we didn't have any ice caps. Watch a different time when it was a landlocked muddy lake front in the hot, hot super-continent's center.

The idea, though, got me thinking about plate tectonics, and about how I'd been trying to find a sufficient title for this blog since getting back to California in April of 2011. Those two ideas don't seem like an obvious match, but plenty of things bounce around my head before getting together. Back in New York the idea was seeing the City as a Caliboy. In Texas it was the same concept. Once we got back to California, I had a notion like "getting home" in the title, and settled, for the majority of 2012, on titling the blog about the southern ten counties of California. I even used the Spanish term los Diez Sur, to emphasize the heritage. 

I wanted something that showed both the location and the central premise: A California Child Back East (3/09-12/09); A California Child Deep in the Heart of Texas (1/10-3/11); A California Child Makes it Home (4/11-12/11); Living in los Diez Sur (1/12-12/12). The los Diez Sur idea was supposed to signify that even as a Californian, I'm an outsider here since I'm from the North.

I think I like the "Pacific Plate" idea, since with just a slip and a jiggle shit could get real bad around here. It still needs modifications, though.

3.

Getting back on track, there were some things that these shows have focused on that help everyone's overall understanding of how the world developed. 

Before I get to that, there are two basic categories of production teams for these separate series. The first are from the BBC and range from '99-'06, and the second are generally from the Discovery Channel, and range from '06-'09. 

I've noticed that the BBC productions use animatronic heads for closeups, showcase no humans, and tell the story of the dinosaurs (or the other, non-dino, critters) like a nature show. The CGI is quite good, and the level of shot recycling is mostly minimized.

The Discovery Channel shows use quick editing, repetition, humans of all kinds, generally poorly rendered animations, repeat those animations often, and have animated some of the most violent scenes imaginable to tell their story (usually how one dino ripped another's body apart).

Somehow they're both wildly informative.

4.

How the biosphere developed...

There was a time in history when the oceans teemed with life, with small creatures and great big predators, nearly yard long arthropods, and yet there was no life in land at all. The dryland was just a bunch of desolate rock quarries and lakes maybe. No dirt, no non-rock dust, no photosynthesis happening on land anywhere.

Those big bad arthropods swam around the seas fighting their only threats: themselves. Arthropods are around today: they're the ones with exoskeletons; insects, arachnids, crustaceans... Back in that day, these were the apex predators, and when they fought each other, they'd suffer damage like cracks in that exoskeleton. This particular episode showed tiny thumbnail sized flits pestering the three-foot long bleeding loser of a territorial battle, swimming in and nibbling on the blood from the wound and darting away, mostly safe from the terrible gob on this giant archaic swimming scorpion.

The tiny thumbnail sized flits had their own advantage: organs on the inside, sure, but they had a tiny flexible centralized structure that supported a rudimentary vascular system. These were the first chordates; the first animals with backbones.

So that was the frame for the next few hundred million years: the alternating battle between the arthropods and the chordates. 

All humans today are descended from those tiny flits.

5.

Fast forward a few hundred million years and we get tiny mosses beginning to grow on the desolate landscape, the flits are more developed with better senses, and the arthropods look just like actual scorpions from today, except they're three feet long and live in shallow water.

It was how they breathed, the arthropods, that made them the first of the animals to climb out of the sea. They absorb oxygen through their skin. The large size of their body couldn't have lasted long on land, since the oxygen levels were pretty small, as oxygen is a poisonous gas that is a waste material from photosynthesis.

A few hundred million more years and amphibians and reptiles are the dominant land creatures, and again we have apex predators that only have each other to fear. The fin-back reptiles are the apex in their zone, and while they're not dinosaurs, they're pretty fierce. The fins let the reptiles regulate their body temperature, which makes them a precursor to mammals.

6.

The dinosaurs were tiny little turkey sized critters during the end of the fin-back lizard era, but they were ready to adapt. For over a hundred and fifty million years, the dinosaurs were the dominant animal design, filling all niches on land and in the air, and nary a non-dino larger than a turkey. Tables had turned.

Part of me wants to discuss the T-Rex conundrum...as in (1) T-Rex vs Gigantisaurus and Charcarondontisaurus; (2) T-Rex vs. Spinosaurus; and (3) was T-Rex primarily a scavenger?

That discussion will have to wait.

But here, before the mass-extinction-event at the end of the Mesozoic Era (the comet or asteroid that killed the dinosaurs 65 MYA) we can see the apex predators being pestered by fuzzy mammals. The Age of Dinosaurs had ended, and the Age of Mammals was beginning.

7.

What were common themes from the rambling history lessons above? Apex predators finding themselves being pestered, if not outrightly hunted, by better adapted smaller creatures. Meek inheriting the Earth and all that. Also, the apex hunters had only themselves to fear (except for T-Rex--their food was pretty damn dangerous), and they were pretty good at killing each other.

In the age of the mammals, who are the apex predators on land? Bears have claws and teeth; wolves hunt in packs, as do lions; boars are pretty vicious; tigers are pretty badass; but none of them are the true apex predator in this Age of Mammals.

That's us, folks. We may not have crazy claws or razor sharp teeth, but we do have big brains that have been making tools for millennia. Machine guns and dynamite beats claws and teeth.

Also, we're pretty damn good at killing ourselves. At least we're using our big brains to see ourselves killing each other and having discussions on whether or not it's such a good idea. Is it me or does war all of a sudden seem like a natural aspect of life?

Who pesters us, as apex predators? I remember the joke being that after the nuclear holocaust the roaches would be the only animals left, which is a bit of a mis-characterization, but it's just another chapter in the ongoing cycle of meekness, adaptability, and arthropods vs chordates.

8.

Namesake photo: 

(Details coming later on this.)

Happy Birthday Tony!

March went by quickly, and now we're into April, and it is my close friend's birthday. Happy Birthday, Tony!

(Sidewalk Grilling in Long Beach)