Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This weekend is the 15th Annual Inkslingers’ Ball. We go to this every year, and it’s always a fun time. Sadly, this might be the last time that they have it at the Hollywood Palladium. I’d read recently that the building was sold, and the way things go here in Los Angeles, it might not even exist any more by next year.

I went over in the afternoon on Saturday, arriving about 3:00. It was kind of quiet compared to previous years, but there was still a pretty good crowd.

I found Big Rick there, doing photos in the corner. We talked for a bit, then I continued wandering around. I had brought along a big stack of photos that I’d taken at past shows, and whenever I see someone I’ve photographed, I give them a copy. I gave away a fair number of photos. And, of course, I took a bunch more.

At one point, I was approached by a very cute girl wearing nearly nothing. She was selling raffle tickets. What was I to do? I’m not made of stone. Needless to say, I didn’t win. But she was very cute anyway.

One person I saw was a girl we’ve seen at a number of recent shows. Being bad with names, I can’t remember hers. But she’s the one who’s always wearing wild outfits. But this time she wasn’t working. She was dressed normally. And she wasn’t wearing huge platform shoes, so it turns out she’s really not tall. That was kind of strange. I didn’t recognize her at first, what with being eight inches shorter and all.

Dinner break was down the street at Fabiolus Cafe, which is something of a tradition by now. Then it was back into the Palladium for more fun and frolic. It was about this time that Cathy came over. We saw Shannon and her posse there. Shannon told us about her experience on CSI. Apparently, the season opener episode story line involves a tattoo shop, so they hired her to play the tattoo artist. She said that the show will be airing next week.

We saw Anna from Anagram Fine Art. She always has a booth there, and Cathy likes talking to her. They get to trade mom-stories and compare notes, since they’re both moms who sometimes feel like they don’t quite fit in with the regular PTA crowd.

While they were talking, I noticed that Kylie Ireland was there. We had met her briefly on Thursday night at the “O” party, so I went over to say hi. I got a picture of her and her tattoos. She said that she’d have more tattoos, but that porn producers don’t like them.

Overall, it was a very fun evening.

We have a friend who is a pornographer. He’s also one of the smartest and funniest people we know. And he’s married to Nina Hartley, who most people know from the AVN Hall of Fame. She’s also quite charming. Thursday night they invited us to a party for his new movie, “O – The Power of Submission“, which is his hard-core ‘re-imagining’ of the erotic classic, The Story of O. Needless to say, we thought this sounded like great fun. Followed immediately by the question, “what are we going to wear?”

The party was at Boardner’s in Hollywood. We paid to park close by, since we didn’t want to have to walk far to get there, what with Cathy in six-inch stripper shoes. When we got there, we went in the door and saw a roomful of normal-looking people. That was odd. But then the bartender told us that the party was around the back, and to go down the alley next to the building. When we went there, we saw girls in latex spanking dresses and we knew we were in the right place.

The party was in the back room and patio area. This was a bit of a problem, since the floor there was very rough. This is bad for women in tall stiletto heels. And there were lots of women in tall heels there. There was also a door connecting the patio to the front room, where all the normal people were. When people from the front came down there, they looked through the door, and their eyes got big. It was pretty funny.

We expected to see a lot of people we know there, but as it turned out, there weren’t all that many. But that was all right. We met several of the cast members of the movie. Carmen Luvana was nice. She seemed very together, and everyone said that she was the consummate professional, always on time and pleasant to work with. But our favorite was Adrianna Nicole. She was smart and funny and we liked her a lot.

Overall, it was a very fun evening, and certainly something a bit outside our normal routine.

Of course, we have no pictures. There were a few officially designated photographers there, but otherwise it was one of those ‘cameras not allowed’ kind of events.

Have I mentioned lately that I love Los Angeles?

There was some filming on campus at Caltech yesterday. They were doing a couple of scenes for “Numb3rs“, but when I saw this truck, the first thing I thought was, “Isn’t this CSI spinoff thing is getting out of hand?”

Today was a day for playing tourist right here in Los Angeles.

We started out at the MPAA gallery in Beverly Hills for the “It’s Alive!” exhibit. This showed animatronic animals and monsters from movies. For some reason though, T-Rex from “Jurassic Park” just isn’t all that fearsome when he’s only 10 inches tall. We saw Aslan the lion, from “Narnia”, who apparently has no legs. And I got a picture of Cathy with Mighty Joe Young’s hand and head. It was interesting to see. The actual models were not animated, but they had TVs set up around the room showing clips from the movies that the models had been used in.

After lunch, we went to the Marvel Super Heroes exhibit at the Science Museum. This was really intended to be just a basic science exhibit for kids, and the super heroes were just there to try and get the kids interested. Still, Lucinda had some fun there, lifting the car with Iron Man’s mechanical arms and such.

The last part of the exhibit was about the history of comic-book super heroes and how they have evolved with our culture. There was a large poster of Peter Parker hanging up his Spider-suit while declaring, “and every boy… sooner or later… must put away his toys and become a man”. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought this was very sad.

Outside the museum, Lucinda did some climbing on the rock scupltures, and then she and Cathy both were swinging on the ropes attached to the ‘Big Lever’ exhibit.

By the time we were ready to leave, it was close to 5:00, so we thought we should just go to dinner, rather than brave the Los Angeles traffic to get home. Since we were close to Downtown, we went to Union Station so that Cathy could have her official Birthday Dinner at Traxx. We’ve been there a few times before, and it’s always been good. And this time was no exception. We had a very nice dinner outside in the courtyard.

It was a fun day.

I recently got a new camera. It’s a Canon Powershot S2 IS. My last two cameras were Canons, too, and I was very happy with them.

This morning, I looked out the front window and saw a hawk on our driveway. Hawks don’t usually come this far down out of the mountains, so this was kind of a treat. It was standing there, tearing up a small piece of meat. So I grabbed the camera and went outside. I managed to get pretty close to it. Close enough that the 12x zoom got a good look at it.

Actual nature, right here in the wilds of Los Angeles.

This evening we went down to meet my Chinese family for dinner. Uncle Hsin always knows where the best Chinese restaurants are, and it’s always a fun time to have dinner with them.

This time we went to New Capital Seafood in Rowland Heights. It’s the usual Chinese seafood restaurant, with big tanks by the door with fish, crabs, shrimp, lobsters and various other captured marine life awaiting their fate. I remember always being fascinated by the live fish when I was kid, and Lucinda is interested in looking at them, too. She doesn’t like actually eating them just yet, but she still finds them interesting.

One of the dishes we got was squid, which was the Sunday Cephalopod. It was fried with lots of garlic. It was tasty and all, and I made a lame attempt at assembling an entire squid on my plate for a photo opportunity.

My always favorite thing since I was a kid is when we get Peking Duck. Sadly, Lucinda has not developed a taste for this. But she likes the rice chips that it comes served on, so it’s not a total waste for her. We also had a lobster and a steamed fish, which she didn’t like either. I can’t remember how old I was before I developed a taste for fish. I think I was about 10, so there’s time. And she’s learning to use chopsticks now.

Overall, it was a fun time.

Today we went over to Hollywood to The Knitting Factory to go to “Baby Loves Disco”, which is an afternoon disco party for kids. We had read about this in the L.A. Times this week. It sounded like fun, but as it turned out, it was mostly kids much younger than Lucinda. Most of the kids there were babies and toddlers. So Lucinda was older than most of them. She still had some fun, but it wasn’t as good as it could have been if there were more kids in the 6-9 range.

After that, we walked down Hollywood Blvd for a bit. Lucinda wants to get a fairy backpack for school, and we thought we might be able to find one there. We immediately got caught in a crush of people in front of the Chinese Theater. Apparently there was some sort of event there and they said that Julia Roberts was supposed to be there. So we had to push our way through throngs of people in monsoon heat to get past. We didn’t end up finding a fairy backpack, but we did find a nice zebra-pattern bag for Lucinda to use for when she goes to swimming lessons, so it wasn’t a waste. And Lucinda was very amused by the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum at Hollywood and Highland. She wants to go back there some time.

Today we got a rare day out, so we went down to the Erotica LA porn show at the L.A. Convention Center. Despite the fancy name, this is basically a porn show for the masses, which means hordes of men with digital cameras. But hey, that describes me, too.

We got there and paid our $30 to get in. It seems a bit much, but the average porn consumer is used to being exploited by the people and companies that produce it. And so are we.

Inside we, wandered around. At the Babeland booth, they were giving away VHS tapes. Apparently, everyone wants everything on DVD now, so they brought all the old VHS stuff to the show as a teaser to lure people into the booth. And it worked. We snagged a copy of “The Fashionistas“, as well as about six other tapes.

We saw the ‘Monkey Rocker’ and also the ‘Pussy Shaver’, complete with a live demo of sorts. It was at least as much of a demo as they could have at an event where actual nudity was not allowed.

At one booth, Cathy was checking out a kegel-exercise-aid when I saw the Stupidiotic booth next door. I decided that I had to have a pair of the ‘Black Bar Privacy Specs‘ so I too can be anonymous.

We attended a seminar about female orgasm given by two women from The Pleasure Chest, which was interesting. We learned a couple of new things, and it was fun.

For some unfathomable reason, the room was chilled like a meat locker, so we had to go outside to warm up. On the way out, we saw the stretch-Corvette limousine, which is just wrong on many levels. Once we got outside, we saw the obligatory religious protester holding up a big sign and verbally abusing people as they walked in. I talked to the security guards and they went and told him to stop yelling at people and insulting them.

When we went back inside, we ran into Trisha, who we have met before at Inkslingers. This time she was working at a booth for an alt-porn web site.

Making our way across the giant room, we were wondering if we’d see Insanity Pictures, where we had met Michelle the last time we were there. But just before the end of the booths, we saw them. We got to chat with Michelle, and we also bought a copy of her new movie. Michelle is quite bubbly and animated, so we enjoyed talking with her. We also got a couple of pictures with her before we left.

They had a pole-dancing show on the stage at the end of the hall, which was very impressive. We also saw a break-dancing show that was very entertaining, too.

Then we browsed around just a bit more and then packed up all our loot and headed home. It was a fun afternoon.

Working in the earthquake business is great fun. Yesterday I got to take a tour of Pasadena City Hall, which is being renovated for earthquake safety. This tour was arranged through the Earthquake Programs Office at Caltech.

We met in the park across the street from City Hall. After signing the release, we walked across and went into the construction site. They are removing the entire original foundation of the building the putting friction pendulum isolators underneath it. The isolators are intended to allow the ground to move something like 24 inches in any direction underneath the building while allowing the building to remain relatively motionless.

They had some of the isolators stacked up in front of the building, so we got a good look at them. Being earthquake geeks, we all had our cameras out to take pictures. After that, we went down into the basement.

In the basement we got a look at the main supporting columns of the building. They are cutting each one off and building a new reinforced concrete mat underneath them. The mat sits on top of the isolators. They also dug a moat around the building, so that when we have an earthquake, the building can rock on the isolators within the moat.

City Hall is a U-shaped building, so they had to dig a big trench so that they could build the moat in a square. That way the two wings of the building will be tied together so that the entire building will move as a unit in an earthquake.

It’s not all that often that I see practical use of the stuff I do at work, so it was an interesting thing to see.

Yesterday and today there was some filming on campus at Caltech. There seems to be some sort of shark theme. I saw a cart with four fiberglass shark fins on it, and I also saw some people wearing plush shark costumes. This seemed a bit strange, so I brought my camera today. On my way in this morning, I saw a sign on the lawn for “Bight University”, with two sharks on it and a faux-Latin motto. They were set up and filming on the bridge over the pool by the library. I also saw a guy walking around in a shark costume. I have no idea what this is all about, but it looks pretty silly.