Stan’s Obligatory Blog

We went to see “American Originals: Treasures from the National Archives” today at the Central Library in Downtown L.A. It was an interestingly random collection of stuff. Among the displays they had President Kennedy’s inaugural speech, Benedict Arnold’s letter to George Washington, and the speech that President Nixon would have given if the Apollo 11 astronauts had been stranded on the moon. It was a pretty wide-ranging sampling of documents.

We went to “Merry Member Nights” at the L.A. Zoo this evening. They had the zoo open after hours. We saw some animals, but a lot of them had gone to sleep when the sun went down.

We also walked the Griffith Park Festival of Lights. It was impressive in a weird sort of way. And Lucinda had fun looking at it.

Today we went to the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. We had heard that they had an exibit about Hedy Lamarr and the invention of spread-spectrum radio. When we got there, they said that the exhibit had been canceled, but we decided to go in and have a look anyway. They have the Max Factor collection from the former Max Factor Museum, so we wanted to see it again. We saw the head analyzer, the kissing machine, and lots of other fun stuff. So it was still a fun time.

Today we all went to the Science Museum in Exposition Park to see the Risk exhibit. This is about probability and perception of risk. It was pretty interesting. It also seemed somewhat appropriate, since fires are raging in the mountains. Lucinda was a bit afraid of the bed of nails at first, but after she tried it, she liked it enough to do it six more times.

There were also some exhibits on the second floor from the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

http://www.1134.org/lucinda/photos/index.php?string=&ayear=2003&amonth=10&aday=26&byear=2003&bmonth=10&bday=26&submit=Search

After the museum, we all had dinner at El Torito before going home.

Today we had two adventures. First, we went on a short hike in Rubio Canyon. We got to see some of the remains of the old Mt. Lowe Railway. We didn’t get far enough up the trail to see the big landslide that covered the waterfalls, though.

After this, we went to Griffith Park to see the L.A. Live Steamers, but when we got there, the sign said that they were closed today. So we went next door to Travel Town to see the trains there. Lucinda had fun climbing on the trains.

After all this, we had lunch at Chevy’s in Glendale.

I noticed that we are getting another surge of activity on the dead dot-com page. This time it’s coming from a Spanish site at www.putalocura.com.

We went to the Pasadena History museum today to see “Next Stop – Pasadena – From Red to Gold”. This presented the history of rail transportation in Pasadena. It was pretty interesting seeing the old photos and artifacts.

Then we went to see “The Weather Underground”. This is a documentary about the Weathermen and their attempts at overthrowing the U.S. government from about 1969 to 1980. Now they are pretty much all settled middle-class folks, so it was interesting seeing them now and how they were then.

Today was the Inkslingers Ball. This is the big event of the tattoo social scene. It was a fun time.

Lucinda had a sleep-over at Aunt Maggi’s, and so we went out to a party on Saturday night. On Sunday, we hiked up Echo Mountain before heading down to pick up Lucinda.

Today we went to San Pedro to ride the San Pedro Trolley. This is a 1.5 mile section restoration of the old Pacific Electric line along the waterfront. They have two cars that are new replicas of the old Red Cars, and one actual restored old car. We rode on Car 501, which is one of the replicas, and along the way, we passed Car 1058, which is the restored original Red Car.

We rode the trolley from to the end of the line and visited the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium. This is a nice, small aquarium that is focused on exhibiting local Pacific marine life.