So...it begins with a Y?

In the American League this year, there's a very quiet chase for the Triple Crown occurring. That player got my attention and rekindled a list I had working in my head over the years.

The first point where I noticed this, a decade ago, caused me to look dive into the info, and some sense became apparent.

Check out this list of names:

• Yasiel Puig
• Yoenis Cespedes
• Yasmani Grandal
• Yordan Alvarez

What do they all have in common?

I mean, jeeze. I see a lot of names, and rarely have I seen one like these. Besides all of their first names begin, oddly, with the letter Y, they are all Cuban baseball players.

And I thought: What's up with Cubanos and Y-names?

Well, turns out, after the Commie revolution, when the US spurned helping the Caribbean nation, the Soviet Union came through with aid. The friendly nature of the Soviet government lead to a friendly view of Russian, eh, stuff. And Y-names are something that occur naturally far more in Russia than here. Like, a couple of big boys here, the first human in space and an actor, the King himself:

• Yuri Gregaran
• Yul Brenner

I did once have a manager who's name was Yurii, but he wasn't Cuban as far as I know. Maybe his folks?

Yordan Alvarez plays for the Houston Astros right now, and leads the league in batting average, is second in homers (only two off the lead), and second in RBIs (only four off the lead). Triple Crowns are quite rare, with the last one being captured in 2013 by Miguel Cabrera, and then the most previous one was Yastremski in the '60s. Quite the year in baseball, and maybe the last one for a while. Fingers crossed the lockout doesn't obliterate the upcoming season.

Auditory Illusions

We have a big ass fan in our bedroom, and by that I mean something like this (not this brand) and not an actual Big Ass Fan:

In the summer months (and often later) we bring it out of the depths of storage to put it on the dresser and aim at the bed, even when we have our AC blasting the cold air enough to make the inside of the apartment pleasant. 

While our fan is as loud as a small airplane, I can't say the effect is mind-blowing in terms of cooling us. It's like a tepid breeze, maybe. Lotsa bluster, but tiny effect.

Anyway, if I finish brushing my teeth and shaving and other bedtime ritual activities before Corrie and get into bed with this thing on, I lay my head on my pillow and wait. Usually my left ear will be down on the pillow, and during this time my brain tries to work with the blaring sound of this fan. 

Sometimes it will sound like a sprinkler is going, often of the type Ron uses at the Farm. Sometimes it will sound like Corrie's using her electric toothbrush, even though I was there next to her as we both used our toothbrushes at the same time for the pre-programmed two minutes. (On a side note: until I got an electric toothbrush, I'm not sure I ever brushed my teeth long enough.) Sometimes my brain tells me that the faucet is still on.

Every time I experience this phenomena, I've found that once I sit up and let both ears hear, whatever my brain was telling me it was hearing instantly disappears, and the roaring drone of the big ass fan surrounds my skull. 

And even though I know that my brain is just trying to work out the auditory information and put it into terms that it, and I, can understand, the illusion is something I oddly enjoy.

Somewhere my Youtube algorithm had a video that I actually watched, and I was thinking about it in terms of my auditory illusion with our fan. Now, just, follow me here...there's a scene in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey towards the end where we see the results of the Trojan Horse scam, and Odysseus and the guys sneak out of the horse, quietly kill a few guards and work their way to, and then open, the gate, letting in the rest if the Achaens (assembled Greek armies).

The scene has a pulsating percussion beat that keeps you keyed up, getting tenser by the second, until you find yourself white-knuckling the (uncomfortable) chair in the theater. (Side note #2: why were the chairs in our DTLA IMAX theater far shittier than the ones at our local DTLB theater?)

The video I watched that glommed onto this idea of auditory illusions is about the illusion that the film's composer Ludwig Goransson devised that sounds like an infinitely increasing tempo. It sounds like it amps up infinitely while remaining able to both be heard by human ears and played by human musicians.

If that sounds like something up your alley, a discussion of how that works, with the explainer trying to do his best to replicate something similar in his studio, then just click this link, baby: The Impossible Rhythm Illusion from The Odyssey.

The one who hates out fan the most, unsurprisingly, is Picasso. Sorry, bud.

How much do personalized license plates cost?

I mean...maybe the joke is worth it?

Good day, to you, good citizen, party on!

Rancho Los Cerritos

Before we left for Texas, I wrote about Juan Temple. I mentioned that the headquarters for his cattle ranch was located at the Rancho Los Cerritos, a spot on the land he bought from his wife's family, the Corta, and it stretched from the adobe down to the beach.

I was surprised that this piece of California history was literally up the street from us:

I tried to include the beach in the picture so you can get a feeling for how much space the cattle had to roam.

We went and visited the museum today. After a summer spent in Europe looking at historical artifacts and learning about how the culture in the vicinity of those former fortresses and palaces developed, it was nice to drive up the street for a few minutes and do the same for my own neighborhood.

An approaching shot

I read a few sentences about how the land made it into the hands of the Spanish: Cortez signed a land grant of 300,000 acres (nearly 470 sq. mi) to one of his soldiers, Nieto. I'm sure this happened often, frankly, but this was from the land grant I live on, so...

Nieto, in turn, signed a land grant over to one of his men, Corta, and within a few hundred years, one of the Corta daughters married a white man from Massachusetts, and sold him a piece of their land grant, in the southern portion, down by the beach.

Anyway, off a quick left turn and nearly immediate right, you drive onto Virginia Ave. A few blocks later you're passing gthe country club, and then there's a parking lot for the Rancho Los Cerritos.

After checking in at the visitor's center, and making a donation (if you feel like it, since it's a free attraction when open), you're free to explore the grounds.

The green gate from the approaching shot in the beginning of this post opens onto the courtyard of a large, rectilinear U-shaped adobe building. The central courtyard has a cute pond and fountain in the very center of it:

The down-leg to the right of the central courtyard has many doors that open with rooms behind that are in varying levels of explorable.

The first room was the mayordomo's room. Since Juan Temple lived mostly in Los Angeles proper and spent only a few weeks a year down at the RLC, the boss of the ranch while he was not present was the mayordomo, and this was his quarters:

We all liked how the chandelier had candles and a rope and pulley system.

The next few rooms we visited I snapped pictures of, and included them here.

Blacksmith Room

Laundry Room

Library

The library was in the main house, the top/bottom of the big rectangular U-shape, as was the parlor and dining room areas. It had an upstairs, but it was closed today due to issues with the flooring.

Main House Portion; Parlor (Living Room)

Main House Portion; Dining Room

Out and around the back had a large grassy area as well as various fruit trees, and way out back was a brick wall and ornate green metal gate. 

On the other side of that wall and gate was tghe country club's parking lot. It was a little jarring.

The backyard also saw the large second level's veranda:

The large adobe structure, the U-shape, was originally built in 1846 after Temple bought the land and wanted a place to keep as a headquarters for the ranch. After he passed away, it was bought in the 1860s by a Mr. Bixby, a name that appears all over the city today. It was lived in as he ranched sheep until the early 1900s, when it fell into disrepair. 

As immigration to California from Mexico grew, the RLC was rented out room by room to families and singletons, many were workers on the nearby ranches.

Eventually it was brought into the modern era with the addition of electricity and running water. Later still it was designated a historical site and turned into a learning center and museum. Cass had already been on a field trip, and he was our docent for the trip.

Below, you can see Cass standing, for scale, in the roots of a massive magnolia tree:

I can't imagien how old it must have been. Hundreds of years at least, I'd wager.

In the way back area off to one of the sides in the backyard were some earthenware ovens and cookers:

An early cistern remained in the way back, a rainwater catch for the irrigation system in the back for the food they grew:

It was a neat little walk through a slice of history, one much closer to home than the old walls, castles, hotels and eateries we visited earlier in the summer.

Not quite predating photography:

Is that...is that a magnolia?

Anyway, again local history provides wonder and entertainment.

Farm, 2026

Here we go...

We got back from our trip to the panhandle of Texas a couple days ago. It was, like all the summer trips we make to the Harrison Farm, a hot and sweaty affair. They are full of bugs of many kinds, often in the house (this year I was calling it a "mothpocalyspe"), as well as full of love. All of Corrie's siblings made it, save for her older brother Rob, but it was a great time. Michael, Corrie's sister's husband, and I catered a few days of events as well.

Getting there is always part of our adventure, and this year proved no different. For an hour, maybe, driving through Arizona, the following storm was visible from the road:

Looks crazy!

Then I had to drive through it.

That was less fun. More white-knuckle, 30 mph putt-puttering through near zero visibility and trying to limit the hydroplaning. But still, we made it to Gallup, and our hotel of choice in that great rez metropolis, the El Rancho, hotel to the Hollywood stars of the great Westerns era:

An exterior shot of the premises; cute

We even hit 100k miles in Corrie's Subaru:

And...we took Picasso, our cat. He enjoyed being a farm cat, as he always does.

We let him roam during the day most days early in the trip, but leaving the door open late into the night with alight on proved a bad idea, what with the moths, mosquitoes, hornets, and wasps.

The sunsets to the west are usually incredible, but this. year we were limited because of clouds...but not every day:

Picasso loved that window, paying special attention in the pre-seven am hours and sleeping later once it got hot:

Another day, another window sill nap

The grainery in Clarendon is the biggest building in the town, and can be spotted early on the road to town, and easily from most spots, even the parking lot to the Lowes/Ace Hardware grocery store/hardware store in town:

The farm pickup truck, Old Blue, seems to have been driven to this spot a few, er, seasons ago and hasn't moved since. Gas or battery issues, I guess:

The Farm is a place where the work never ends. It's a vacation, yes, but not in the sense of "let's go to the beach and relax with mai-tais all day." It's more like a transportation back to the nineteenth century. You have a building to sleep in, sure, but you're kinda at the mercy of the elements. It's relentlessly hot, and occasionally inside the kitchen is the hottest place. With all the work that needs to happen, and the spotty wi-fi, you find yourself using your phone less and less, hence the above collection may exhaust my "nice" pictures from the trip. I wasn't snapping pictures away, but I'm not the best for that enterprise anyway.

This iteration of the Harrison/Dolman Reunion was held at a school in Hedley, Texas. The school was a high school basketball powerhouse in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '90s and early aughts. It's crazy. Corrie's brother Pete and I examined the extensive trophy cabinet one afternoon. 

This is the first year that there won't be any high school students, as the space will accommodate only K-6 and still have less than 200 students.

Cass, Uncle Joey and I shot hoops for a while in the darkened gym until we were yelled at. Michael and I made burgers in their awesome school kitchen, as professional a kitchen as either of have worked in in decades. Pete, Michael, Joey, and I made a brisket in Pete's fancy new digital smoker, and it was fantastic.

One day in particular I felt like I should write about. A day begins at 12 midnight. On this particular day, around 12:30 am, two large projects were started simultaneously: the brisket clean up and marination start; and the pottery glaze mixing.

Corrie's dad, Ron, kept a watchful eye on me and my carving of the raw briskets, taking just the right amount of fat off, and then preparing the correct marinade. That sentence, while easy to type, in real life took at least an hour. Once the meat was trimmed properly, washed, placed into the tough bag inside the cooler, the marinade was prepared. Once it gets put into the bag and onto the meat, the massage starts, the bag gets tied, and the ice goes in. Now every few hours until it goes into the smoker it needs to be massaged and flipped.

At the same time Ron and I were starting the meat, Corrie started sifting one of the two fifteen-pound bags of glaze into one of the five-gallon buckets mostly full of water. The sifting takes time, and I even spelled her with the second fifteen-pound bag and second five-gallon bucket of water.

In the past I've talked about scientific magic (photography, baby!), and I thonk I'd like to return to this topic later, but ceramic pottery should qualify as well. You take clay...sometimes it's just mud from clay-y soil (Dan and Citrus Heights maybe?), let the mud settle, pour off the water after long enough and you have clay. Great. Once you form the clay into a shape (a cup or bowl, or watever) you can bake it really hot (over 1000F). Then you call it a bisque, and once you dip it into a liquid concoction of powdered metals and bake it again even hotter, what you get is a thing that is durable and awesome, a glass-type surface on a heavy duty, warmth-trapping core.

Anyway, That night I trimmed and then marinated the brisket, Corrie and I mixed up glaze, and then we fired up a whole set of greenware. "Greenware" is what the dried clay bowls are called before they're fired into bisques. You have to 'bisque' the greenware before you can even use the glaze. The firings in the kiln take between eight and ten hours to bisque a thing, and at least another six to eight to cool enough to handle. That night, we fired greenware into bisques that we'd need to glaze and fire into finished pottery, and have cool enough by the Saturday auction. The pieces were auctioned off to raise money for the Farm.

Above is the kiln, red hot inside, about 1400 degrees F, on the start of the cool down mode. This was later on the day I was talking about. Between the brisket, the glaze sifting, and the greenware firing, we didn't get to bed until after 3am. After I woke up and made some breakfast, I headed to check the kiln and got that picture. That was a Wednesday, when everyone would be arriving. Peter and his son Colton made it around 7pm, which was after Carol's return near dinnertime, while Stephanie, Michael, and their son Miles arrived from Austin closer to 9pm.

It was a long day, prefaced by things that had to get done. The brisket had to marinate for at least as long as we did before starting the smoker Friday afternoon (to be ready the next afternoon). The bisques had to be done so they could be glazed by grandkids before getting their firings even later.

Stuff always has to get done.

And Corrie's designing and trying to manage the construction of Ron and Carol's new digs onsite, which adds a nifty wrinkle to the whole endeavor. (It's looking freaking awesome, by the by.)

The times were good, the days long, the devices mostly stowed, and the feeling of accomplishment you get because you're doing something was ever present. That's what I generally fail to imaprt on people I talk to about the Farm trips. It takes twenty hours and we usually bring our cat. It's hot and there are too many bugs and goddamn-bastard-fucking stickers that are terrible, but you get shit done. Every day. Stuff gets done, and it's peaceful. And that's one reason we love it out there.

And when that house gets done...? It's going to be AWESOME!

How many were there?

Say you are on vacation with your six-year-old. Also say that it's been hot---like 100  and up---and you like to do nice walking things on vacation, like museums, galleries, and other public sights. Let's add to this mixture a new museum! It won't have air-conditioning, but because enormous former palaces have cavernous rooms, it won't be so bad.

How shall we keep the six-year-old engaged with such a long walk around the Royal Museum of Art in Brussels? When she'd rather be sitting anywhere else? Well...we chose a scavenger hunt of sorts. And I imagine this would work with six-year-old everywhere.

Corrie got Camille to count the butt-cracks they could see in any sculpture or painting. It went from, Maybe this will work, to Oh man! Look how pissed those other people are! This is awesome! And Camille was fully on board.

I think the number settled on 27.

More Research in Needed...

There is a street parallel to our street, Elm, about two miles east:

Temple Ave. This picture is a Google map street-view pic along 4th, with the Irish bar O'Reilly's on the left and possibly my favorite little commie book shop, Page Against the Machine, on the right in between the palm trunk and the building.

Anyway, I thought it was maybe named for a temple of some kind, but in all the years we lived there, I never really found anything worthy of the name.

Then I found out it was named for early land-owner, pioneer, and rancher Juan Temple.

And I thought...Juan...Temple. Cool. Then I saw a photo of Mr. Juan Temple:

Well...this didn't strike me as what I would have expected as "Juan Temple." I know many of these early dudes were from Spain, and they're lookin' white more than many American's would guess, but still.

But then I saw some details of this dude, Juan Temple, and I figured a good story about him should be done. Maybe a prestige show, like the Parker Saga, would be interesting. Check it out:

• Born in Reading, Massachusetts in 1796 as Jonathan Temple
• Worked as a merchant in Hawai'i before 30 years old (possibly arrived as a missionary, but it is murky); captained his own vessel (1823)
• Ran afoul of local Hawai'ian leadership (possibly for smuggling or running booze to natives), had his property seized.
• Things died down, but he knew he should probably leave; 1827 lands in the coastal Mexican city of San Diego. Converts to Catholicism, learns Spanish, changes name to Juan, moves to the puebla of LA by 1828, opens first general store in what would become DTLA
• Marries into the powerful local family, the Corta.
• Bought a large piece of land from his wife's family, Rancho Los Cerritos; puts tons of cattle on it. His ranchero adobe was a few miles from us in Long Beach, and he had cattle from his hacienda all the way to the ocean, at least 20,000 acres.
• During the Mexican-American War, the American troops used his adobe in LB as a headquarters, After pushing out the Mexican military, they were less cool to the relatively loyal locals, and Temple's wife, Rafaela Corta, led the insurgency with bullets from her husband's shop.
• What the American's knew is still murky, because after insurgency, they made Juan Temple essentially the mayor of Los Angeles.
• Enlarged fortune with beef sales to NorCal during the Gold Rush.
• 1850s-era economic downturn caused trouble; then floods one year and a drought the next, and eventually they had to sell the Rancho Los Cerritos land.
• Moved to San Francisco and died later, in 1866. Rafaela Corta moved back to her daughter's place in Paris, France,when she eventually passed as well. (Juan and Rafa had a daughter, Francesca, who married a Spanish merchant, who eventually moved back to Spain, and then onto Paris, a city in which everyone in their family found lovely and enticing.)

The Rancho Los Cerritos house is free to visit, and literally down the street, Long Beach Blvd, er, maybe up the street, just over five miles away.

We'll go check it out after we get back from Texas, which we leave for, like, day after tomorrow.

So many treatments to write up, right?