Touch a Truck in Long Beach

As part of a LONG weekend, we walked down the beach path (for an hour directly into the sun) to an event at a big parking lot. Inside the lot was a wide ranging collection of trucks and truck-like vehicles.

The draw was for families to bring their children (overwhelmingly toddler aged) to climb in and on and around the trucks, a Touch a Truck event held annually for a few years now.

Cass loves trucks, and the event was free with a donation of non-perishable food-stuffs for an AIDS shelter. The trip was a no-brainer.

They announced while we were there that the estimate on visitors would be eclipsing 10,000.

In a sun-blasted parking lot.

As it worked, two parents, or two adults, were mostly a necessity. One of us would wait in line as the other would run around with the Boy as he checked tires and tried to cut the line for other trucks, only to be corralled and brought to the spot where the other had been waiting, and hopefully quickly getting inside some humongous man-made contraption.

This was the first truck, an older dude's personal vehicle, and there was no line.

Check out how freaking big this thing is:

One of the crane trucks had a helmet, which lead to an adorable picture:

One older married couple brought a super modded Porsche. It had fiberglass outrigging that turned it into a boat:

The nice couple took pictures of families with their phones, which was helpful.

I'm saving this next picture in my imagination for when Cass is old enough to actually drive along a beach, or, more accurately, drive me along a beach:

Weird Design Similarities

I wasn't sure how to post this, but, here we go.

Cass has been doing a great job destroying most everything, and one thing recently was the dust jacket to my copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of War.

As I was heading to the garbage to show him where things end up that he tears into pieces, I noticed that the look of the Styrofoam container that held the remnants of the pizza from the previous evening's dinner out was eerily familiar:

This picture is of lower quality that I realized, but...

...so what?

Is this where we are? Showcasing pieces of garbage?

St. Paddy's Day Random Thoughts

Last year during the Cinco de Mayo time in early May I remember hearing lots of angry discussion from folks with Mexican heritage about cultural misappropriation.

I searched for similar bouts of anger from the Irish set over the drunken shenanigans associated with St. Paddy's.

I found an essay written by an Irishman about how, to paraphrase, We Americans tend to look backwards and revere where we're from, while in contemporary Ireland they pretty much focus on the future, and the current. He mentioned that if, maybe, you were born in Mumbai and emigrated to Ireland when you were five years old and no, at thirty, you speak with an Irish accent, you would be considered Irish.

He even added that, pretty much, if you live anywhere and speak with an Irish accent naturally, you'd be considered Irish.

That gave me some perspective on the Irish self-identity.

And then I heard interviews with the writer of the new book Say Nothing, Pat Keefe. He mentioned that one of the linchpins of the as yet lasting peace between the loyalists and the IRA was that only a focus on the future, and not the past and its atrocities committed on both sides during the Troubles, has lead to a moden society that has never dealt with the past in any meaningful way.

It makes sense that an Irish essayist would espouse the mantra of looking forward rather than backwards when it comes to self-identity.

Of course, its refreshing to focus on the future, on the Forward, but we can't deliberately forget whatever heritage we cling to.

It's one of our fundamental characteristics.

Happy St. Patrick's 2019

I missed Pi Day posting earlier this week. Bummer. Here are me and Corrie sporting our shirts gifted to us by my mom:

Cass tried wearing his Pi Day shirt all week, except for the day itself, 3/14.

Oh well.

Things have been busy, as usual, and today finds us having gone to the beach already and have since started the salted been dinner (coming up to boil right now). March 17th gives me a reason to wear my bowler all day.

A coworker/buddy of mine had his 40th birthday party last weekend, and he rented a double-decker red party bus and told everyone to wear flannel and dress like a grunge-fan from the 90s.

It was nice to not have to make any decisions and be on the peripheral of someone else's party.

Here's a group shot of us:

And here's the beach earlier today, so bright and warm and blue:

So far in the Southland in 2019, the weather has been wetter than all of 2018 and colder than any time in recorded LA history, and that's not hyperbole: February 2019 has been the first calendar month since they began keeping records in the 1860s in LA that a month did not hit 70 degrees.

LA folks hear that and go WTF? while everyone else hears that and shouts EFF YOU!

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

"Awwwww, it's 9 am and I'm not drunk yet!"
----Homer Simpson

WILT: Neighborhood Cross Street's Namesake

One of my favorite apps is called Daily Art. If you like art even a little, and if you like the stories behind the art, then the free Daily Art is all you. Each day a new painting or sculpture is delivered with a snippet about its context. It's pretty rad.

A few days ago the offer was the following painting, "Winter Scene of Brooklyn" by Francis Guy:

The story talked about how the studio that Guy painted in looked out on this intersection, where Fulton, Front and a third street come together. In today's Brooklyn, the intersection exists, but the buttresses for the Brooklyn bridge are closeby.

We used to live very close to Fulton, but not this exact iteration, as this section is known as Old Fulton today.

In the lower left corner there's a couple with a kid, and directly above the kid is a gentleman walking to the left, carrying a parcel of some kind.

The parcel is a leg of lamb, and the man was the butcher. The butcher was actually named in the app's anecdote, as the interesting part of the painting's history is that many people from the neighborhood were placed in the painting by Guy. The butcher's name: Jacob Patchen.

WHAT?!?!? I said to myself when I read that.

The following picture is one I took from the top of our building in Bed Stuy, and it has probably graced this website before. The trailer we packed our belongings in and drove from California is seen at the bottom in the center:

The street we lived on was Halsey, and the near cross street at the corner was Patchen.

We lived on Halsey between Patchen and Malcolm X, but much closer to Patchen. And while I've of course heard of Malcolm X, this app's story was the first time I ever heard any reference to Patchen's namesake.

Finally Watched "Solo"

My brother told me his feelings about Solo around the holidays, and I think I was surprised. Having heard the mostly negative din coming from the web, I didn't make it a priority to see it. Dan, though, said, "People compain too much. I liked the hell out of it. It's a western...like Rogue One was basically a war movie, like a WWII movie, Solo is a western, and it's fucking good. Yeah, it's not Harrison Ford, but, whatever. It's good."

Heady praise from Dan.

So we watched it and I have to agree. It was a nifty little sci-fi movie, that happens to be about a beloved American character. So, it was generally destined to fail in the realm of public opinion.

Some things I wanted to say about it, that are mostly original to the conversation Corrie and I had about it:

1. It seems to me that the kid playing Han is playing the character not as was included in Star Wars, and the subsequent sequels starring Harrison Ford, but rather playing the character whom Americans have gone on to make legend---the kid is playing our idea of what Han Solo is or should be. He's not playing Solo from Tatooine in 1977, he's playing (or the role was written as) "What America Believes Han Solo to Be."
2. The kid playing Solo is doing a characterization of "an American." I'll come back to this one

Harrison Ford played Han as an updated Rick Blaine: what seemed like an American only interested in money for himself, and not much else. The "Cause" wasn't his, until it was. He never seems interested in helping until after you've given up hope (or pretend that the film isn't predictable enough to understand he's not going away).

This Han is different, but so what? It's fun, unless you take Harrison Ford's role as a sacred cow.

Tatooine in 1977 was filmed in Tunis, and the only Americans on screen at the time were Luke, Leia, and Han; most everybody else was British. So Han as Rick Blaine would have made sense to European viewers.

I had this whole "American" archetype, or American caricature in film, thesis bouncing around my head for some time now. It comes back to Jiminy Cricket.

The main audience for Pinocchio, like Snow White before, was the European market, and Jiminy Cricket, while a natural character for American viewers, was profoundly American to European audiences: he's resourceful, positive--even cheery--and nearly a smart alec. The street-smart wise-cracker is American to Europeans.

Check out The Third Man for this representation as well: an Austrian, a Brit, and American...

Han, in this new movie, is an updated version of this idea. He's cheery, street-smart, puts himself into conversations he wouldn't otherwise be part of, and openly questions the wisdom of authorities.

One Timline Point Concerning Chewbacca

Chewie is around to help Yoda survive Order 66, the order that all Jedis were to be executed. How many years does it take for him to go from helping rescue Yoda to being imprisoned and fed other prisoners in the muck?

In anycase, the Han that we get in this movie seems like he would have needed less prodding to join the rebellion. But again, so what? It was entertaining enough.

Hot Stuff

It's weird when you may learn something new.

Imagine, for a moment, a chili pepper. Jalapeno, bell, habanero, ghost...there are a large variety. Chilis are what the aboriginal Americans named them (Aztecs?), and the "pepper" was thrown on the end by Columbus. Having taken a lot of money to go on a sailing voyage to find black pepper---and other spices---Columbus noticed that many chilis are spicy, some as hot as holy hell, and claimed that he found a version of what he was looking for.

Anyway, the active ingredient in chilis that makes them hot is called capsaicin, and there's a naming connection to the genus Capsicum, the nightshade family of plants that are the chilis themselves.

This is what I learned about the hot stuff:

Capsaicin, in mammals, produces the sensation that your mouth is actually on fire, rather, it tells the brain that your mouth is actively burning.

Birds, contrarily, suffer no such sensation, and enjoy the botanical fruits just like us, but without all the mouth burning.

The reason makes sense and is obvious once you hear why: mammals, ones that eat vegetation anyway, have grinding teeth, and the chewing action destroys the seeds; birds don't have the grinding teeth, and apparently the gizzards don't threaten the seeds, and so they pass through mostly intact.

Mouth on fire, people!