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.