Stan’s Obligatory Blog

…or why you should not automatically follow directions from Google Maps.

I was going down to Huntington Beach today to meet my friends from the Skeptics mailing list, so I asked Google how to get there. I mostly wanted to know how far it was. I used to live around there, so I pretty much knew how to get off the freeway to get on Beach Blvd.

When I saw the directions, there was a funny bit at the end, so I zoomed the map in to see. WTF? How and why is that more direct than just taking the ramp down to Center Ave, taking a left and then right on Beach? WTF?

I saw this on my way home from work today. Sadly, my Canon’s batteries were dead, so we have just a crappy camera-phone picture. But still, we can look and wonder, “what the hell is that?”

This evening, I looked out the back of the house and I saw a glow coming from the next block. So I went outside to see what it was.

Around the corner there was a film crew with a big light on top of a crane. They were lighting up a couple of houses bordering on the former hospital up the street from our house. They do a lot of filming there, so this wasn’t anything unusual, aside from the big light. I didn’t see any snow there this time.

I took a walk around to the back and saw that the parking lot was packed as full as I’ve ever seen it. The guard told me that there were two crews working there. The big light crew was filming for “Shark“, and there was another crew filming for “Rush Hour 3” inside the hospital building. The scenes that they were filming must have taken place during the day, since they had big tents and lights set up around the windows so that it would look like day from inside.

I walked around the building and had a look at the ‘crime scene’ that the “Shark” crew had set up outside.

It’s always fun to see a little bit of how they make the illusion.

In today’s Pasadena Star-News, there is an article about a survey of riders on the MTA Gold Line:

Light rail user survey shows preference over car use

They said that a large portion of the riders on the Gold Line own cars, but prefer to take the train. This is Not News. If they didn’t prefer to take the train, they wouldn’t be riding the train, and they wouldn’t have been part of the survey. Duh.

If they’d like, I’ll take a survey to show that people who own cars prefer to ride bicycles. Just because some people do it doesn’t mean that everyone will.

Yet, they are touting this survey as justification for spending the money to extend the line out to Montclair. While I like the Gold Line, I’m not sure that it is necessarily the best place to spend scarce money.

Today we went over to West Hollywood to meet our old friend Jenny for lunch. She lives in London now, so we don’t get to see her very often.

We met at the French Market Place and had a major lunch feast that involved absolutely no turkey, which was very nice. Lucinda looked at the koi fish in the pond there, and we also browsed around in the shops for a bit.

After lunch, we headed down to Hancock Park to the Tar Pits and also the L.A. County Museum of Art for Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images. I always thought it was kind of funny that the art museum is at the tar pits. After all, ‘art’ and ‘tar’ are anagrams and all…

Lucinda had some fun playing around the tar pits. She climbed a tree and got some tar on her arm. As always, a visit to to the tar pits is just not complete unless she gets tar on herself. One of the pits was making big tar bubbles, which were kind of fun to watch. There was even a palm tree growing like a weed in the middle of one of the tar pits. We also saw some people playing croquet on the grass. Playing on the grass in that park is always a bit dicey, since you never know where there might be a new tar seep hidden in the grass.

After playing in the park, we went into the art museum for the Magritte exhibit. I’d seen some of Magritte’s work in art museums in New York when I was on a school field trip back in 1974 or so, and I like the surrealist style. So we went through the gallery and looked at the paintings. We even saw the two works that I remember seeing way back when. It was a lot of fun.

Here’s a vanity license plate that I saw yesterday.

Not to perpetuate any Los Angeles stereotypes or anything, but I see more of these here than anywhere else. And sometimes they’re pretty funny. Sadly, digital cameras hadn’t been invented yet back in 1989 when I saw a pair of Rolls-Royces in a driveway in Beverly Hills, each with “My other car is a Rolls-Royce” on the back.

Anyway, this one was a fun one. And the frame around it really makes it. On the DMV plate application form, you have to put down what it means. I wonder what they put for this one? I once met a guy who had a plate that said “ILOVE SM”. He told the DMV it meant “I love Santa Monica”, which was where he lived. But then when he put a chrome-chain frame around it, it took on a whole new meaning…

We went to see “Borat!” over the weekend. It was tremendously funny. And today I saw this article in the Los Angeles Times about a Russian who traveled to L.A. to stalk Hilary Duff:

www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-duff7nov07,1,3641208.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true

Man is arrested in stalking of Hilary Duff
…Myaskovskiy “apparently came to Los Angeles a little over two years ago for the sole purpose of meeting and becoming romantically involved” with Duff, according to court papers…

Presumably he wanted to have “sexy time” with her. No word yet on whether or not he brought the traditional wedding sack.

There was an article in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times about the New Jersey Supreme Court decision that same-sex couples are entitled to some sort of ‘legal equivalent of marriage’. When I read this, my first thought was a snarky comment that ‘legal equivalent’ sounds a lot like the old Jim Crow doctrine of ‘separate but equal‘. So I dashed off a letter to the editor to that effect, and they printed it today:

So the New Jersey court says that same-sex couples are entitled to the legal equivalence of marriage. Hmm. “Legally equivalent” sounds a lot like “separate but equal.” And we all know how well that worked out.

www.latimes.com/news/opinion/letters/la-le-friday27.6oct27,0,4646427.story?coll=la-news-comment-letters

There are a couple of local political issues going on here in Pasadena right now. So I just wanted to mention them.

First is Measure A, which is an attempt at a referendum on trying to get an NFL team at the Rose Bowl. Los Angeles has been without a football team since 1995, and we’ve been getting along quite nicely without it. There have been efforts to get a team back here, but the NFL always seems to want the city to pay for either a new stadium or major renovations to an old one. This seems like a bad deal. Now they say that having a team would bring untold riches to Pasadena, which seems doubtful. What it would do is cause all manner of disruption to the area around the Rose Bowl. And again, we’re doing fine without it.

I read part of the text of the actual proposal. I didn’t read the whole thing, because it’s 96 pages long. But they laid out the basic argument for it in the first 10 pages. They say that the city is currently on the hook for several million dollars worth of maintenance and improvements to the stadium. They claim that the NFL would pay for this and more. That the NFL would sink something like 500 million dollars into the stadium. This seems very far-fetched. Judging by the past, the NFL usually wants to spend that much money on its stadiums, but they prefer to spend someone else’s money. Like ours. So even if this passes, it seems unlikely that the NFL would actually agree to its terms.

The second issue is that someone has bought the old Shakey’s Pizza at 2180 E. Foothill Blvd and wants to build a strip club at the site. Apparently, the city made rules years ago that forced all the ‘adult’ businesses like that out, and it seems that they want to keep it that way. But the courts decided some time ago that cities have to make some accomodations in their zoning to allow these sorts of things somewhere, and apparently the old Shakey’s qualifies. So the city council is trying to figure out a way to change the rules to not allow it. Changing the rules to not allow something is just because someone is uncomfortable with it is just not fair. And they are bandying about all sorts of improbable statistics in support of this, like claiming that a strip club would cause a 100% increase in crime and such. Sheesh. We’ve lived near things like this before, and it’s not that big of a deal.

You can read about the latest on this at the Pasadena Star-News web site.

But what it all really comes down to is: we hate football, but we like strip clubs. So there.

Route map and photo locations

Today’s Sunday club ride was a sightseeing trip to Downtown Los Angeles. I had read that they had a fake toll plaza built on 4th St as a set for “Live Free or Die Hard“. It was a kind of dreary day, with a slight misting drizzle, so there were only five of us today.

We rode down Sierra Madre and Huntington Drive to get to Downtown. On the way, I picked up another couch for the Abandoned Couches Blog. Then we took Main St into Downtown.

Crossing the 101 Freeway, we passed the old Hall of Justice. This building was ‘home away from home’ for Sirhan Sirhan and Charles Manson, as well as being Control Secret Headquarters in the title sequence from “Get Smart”.

We took a right on Temple and then a left on Grand to ride down through the towers on Bunker Hill. At the overpass where Grand goes over 4th St, we stopped and saw the ‘Toll Plaza’. It certainly looked real. The toll booths looked real, and they’d painted lines on the street so the whole thing looked like it had always been there.

We rode around to Hope St to get a better view. At the top of the ramp, there was a broken NYPD police barricade. The guard there told us they had filmed a stunt there yesterday. He showed us how the barricade was built of balsa wood, and it had cuts in it so that it would break in predetermined places. I got a picture of Vikki lifting it up to see how light it was.

Leaving Downtown, we rode down Grand to Wilshire. This is where we saw the street dressed up as Tokyo last winter. This time it was just plain Los Angeles.

Continuing on, we took Wilshire through MacArthur Park, passing the über-cool American Cement Association building. It’s been converted into lofts, and it’s a very dramatic building.

Turning off Wilshire on Alexandria, we rode up to 2nd St, where I picked up some more couches. Then we turned right on Larchmont and went to Noah’s Bagels for a snack.

At Melrose, we passed Paramount Studios, as well as a big sign for a burlesque show. Looks like fun. Then we took Bronson north all the way to Franklin. Then we turned right and rode over the Shakespeare Bridge to Rowena Ave.

At Fletcher and Riverside, I stopped to get a new picture of the hillside art project. Then we rode up through Eagle Rock to Yosemite Dr. I picked up one more couch there. Then we took the ’shortcut’ up the Colorado Hill. It’s short and sweet. I actually said ‘uncle’ and shifted to a lower gear to get up the hill.

The last bit was to take Orange Grove and Paloma back to the park. At that point, I had 38 miles, so I rode out to Sierra Madre and back just to pad it a bit.

42 miles.
cycling