Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today we went out to West Hollywood for the Los Angeles Gay Pride Festival. Cathy and I believe that it’s important to expose our child to all kinds of culture, and also that it’s good for the soul for us to be in the minority from time to time. And besides, it’s just a lot of fun.

It was a perfect day, sunny, with a cool breeze. There were seagulls splashing in the fountains at the Pacific Design Center. When we got there, the parade had just ended, and there was a big crowd already. The outdoor dance floors were packed, and the thumping disco beat was all-pervasive.

They had lots and lots of food and drink booths. A few people were a little blotto, and we saw one man heaving in the gutter late in the afternoon, but overall it was a well-behaved crowd. There were booths selling real estate and gay-themed vacations. There was even a booth for a sperm bank marketing its services to lesbians who want children. It was all very cute in a weird sort of way.

We wandered around and took in the sights. Lucinda got a couple of beach balls, some balloons, and some other little trinkets. As always, it’s good to be a cute kid. She also enjoyed seeing all the costumes there. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence were there and dressed in their usual outrageous costumes. Lucinda was wondering where they get their shoes, so we told her about the stores that cater to the drag queens. She also got to see boy-couples and girl-couples walking hand-in-hand and kissing under the trees, so it was truly something we don’t usually see in Pasadena.

And yes, there is perhaps no sadder and lonelier sight than the Gay Republicans’ booth. They are there every year, and every year they get ignored.

Yes, we have wildlife here in Pasadena. Today, on my way into work, I saw a big frog by one of the ponds at Caltech. There are lots of them in the ponds, but it’s fairly rare for the really big ones to come out of the water, and it’s even rarer to get one that is mellow enough to get close to.

My second wildlife encounter was on the way to Lucinda’s school for the music program. There was a skunk on Sierra Madre Blvd. I have a book called Flattened Fauna: A Field Guide to Common Animals of Roads, Streets, and Highways. It has illustrations showing how most of the common animals of North America look when flattened by cars. And this skunk was a textbook example. Perfect ventral presentation, completely flattened into the pavement, with only its tail fur still retaining a third dimension.

Read the sign

Today we went over to the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. This was an amusing little bit of history, since Los Angeles is a city that grew up and was largely formed by the automobile.

The first thing we saw there was Art Arfons’s “Green Monster” out in the parking garage. Years ago I saw a documentary about him on PBS, and it was very interesting. Art is something of the hard-luck story of the land-speed record circuit. He set the record three times, only to have each record broken just a short time later.

On the second floor of the museum they had three special exhibits. One was about Hot Wheels, including full-sized Hot Wheels cars that were built for the exhibit. To an eight-year-old boy in 1968, Hot Wheels were the stuff of dreams. And it’s tremedously funny that someone took the time and effort to actually build real cars out of them. The second exhibit was “Cars and Guitars” with lots of rock stars’ cars. That was amusing. They had a couple of Elvis’s old cars, including one that he shot in frustration when it broke down.

The third exhibit was about the future and alternate power sources. That was mostly amusing because they talked about hybrid cars and had a 1917 Woods hybrid. Apparently it was an idea ahead of its time. They said that at the time it was the worst of both electric and gasoline, and it didn’t catch on. They also had a mockup of a proposed nuclear-powered car, but I think I’m glad that that never got serious consideration.

The last part of the museum we visited was the children’s area on the third floor. Cathy and Lucinda took turns climbing into the Indy car there, and they also posed in the Model T.

And of course no visit to a museum with a kid is complete without the gift shop. Lucinda got some little trinkets and Cathy got a “Built for Speed” pinup girl shirt.

Today I made arrangements to go for a bike ride at lunchtime with Vikki. So I rode my road bike in to work this morning, and at lunch we headed out.

On the way in I saw that they were setting up for some filming near campus, so on the way out we passed by there. There didn’t seem to be much going on at the time, but they had a lot of equipment ready to go.

We rode east out to Arcadia. Then we turned left on 1st Ave and took that up the hill into Highland Oaks. Then we went left on Virginia to get to Santa Anita, and then went up the hill some more to get to Grand View.

We rode across Sierra Madre on Grand View, and then went up the hill a bit more to go through Upper Hastings Ranch, which meant we went up the steep hill and passed by Lucinda’s school. Then we came screaming down the hill back to Sierra Madre Blvd.

From there it was a nice level ride back to campus.

When I was on my way home, they were finally filming something. They had a car on a flatbed truck with lights all around it and they were driving it down the street filming it from a camera on the edge of the truck bed. So at last they were doing something.

It was an achingly nice day, so it was perfect for riding.

16 miles at lunch, 24 for the day.

Mike over at Franklin Avenue noted that it’s been 10 years since he moved to Los Angeles. And at the end of his post, he writes:

My first day in Los Angeles, after finally finding my hotel, I popped on the TV and watched the news. The lead story? The suicide death of former “Family Feud” host Ray Combs.

If life were a cliche, I would have taken some big lesson out of my first moments in Los Angeles: I’m moving to a town that turns even mild-mannered game show hosts to suicide.

But life isn’t always a cliche, although my first impressions were just as valuable: I’m moving to a town that leads its local newscasts with news of a mostly unknown ex-game show host offing himself.

Reading this, I immediately thought that this might make an interesting blog meme. What was in the news when you moved to Los Angeles? Seems like everyone here is from somewhere else, so it could make for some interesting stories. Post it here or in your blog and leave a pointer to it here. I’d like to see it.

In my case, it was July, 1982. I was just out of college and the first week I was here the big news was the “Twilight Zone” helicopter crash. I’d never really thought before about where movies came from, and that there were actual people whose job was to make movies, and that sometimes things can go wrong. I found that collision of reality and illusion kind of jarring and also strangely fascinating.

So, for everyone who moved to L.A., what was in the news when you got here?

This is yet another story from the obituary pages of the Los Angeles Times.

Joyce Ballantyne Brand was the creator of the iconic image of the dog pulling down the little girl’s swimsuit in the Coppertone ads. While it’s not in the same world-changing category as the invention of the tortilla chip, it’s still something that became part of our cultural landscape.

There used to be a big animatronic billboard of this on the Santa Ana Freeway with the motorized dog rocking and pulling the little girl’s swimsuit up and down endlessly.

She also worked with Gil Elvgren and became an artist and model for pinup calendars:

During World War II, one of her college professors — Gil Elvgren, a well-known pinup artist — got her a job at a studio known for producing such calendars. Brand’s women “always had some clothes on or at least a towel on,” she said in 2004. Today, her pinups are collectibles.

“She was an icon for women in a man’s world, especially when it came to her pinups,” her friend Ed Franklin told the Ocala Star-Banner. “She was beautiful and used herself as a model for many of the pinups.”

Yet in all her years of producing commercial art, nothing is better-known than the Coppertone ad:

Brand never quite understood the Coppertone billboard’s appeal and was mildly irked that it was her most famous work.

“It was hardly the only art I ever produced,” she told the St. Petersburg Times in 2004. “But that’s what everybody remembers.”

For the full story:

www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-brand19may19,1,6436495.story?coll=la-news-obituaries&ctrack=1&cset=true

And the St. Petersburg Times interview with her from two years ago:

www.sptimes.com/2004/09/05/Floridian/Real_Florida__Red_fac.shtml

Cathy saw an item in the paper this week about the Fiesta of the Spanish Horse. It was at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank. I’ve been by there hundreds of times on my bike, but I’d never been inside. So we decided that this might be something interesting.

We don’t really know anything about horses, but it was interesting to see them close-up and see the riding demonstrations. Apparently, a big part of their training is teaching them the distinctive gait. It looks a bit funny at first, but we got used to it. And in the show, they did it a lot, along with other moves that made the horses look like they were dancing. So overall, it was an interesting thing.

Today we had a little adventure in Los Angeles. The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising downtown had an exhibit of costumes from movies last year. This is the same place where we saw the “Star Wars” costumes last fall. We’d only seen some of this year’s movies, but it was still fun to see them close up. We saw costumes from “Harry Potter”, “King Kong”, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, and such. We also saw the figures that were used for filming “The Corpse Bride”, as well as the Vogons from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. It was a nice little adventure.

After that, we walked across the park to the Museum of Neon Art and saw the current exhibit there. MONA is still easily our favorite art museum of all.

The last part of our adventure was to go to West Hollywood for lunch at the French Market Place. This was Lucinda’s first time there, and she liked it. And we found out that, despite it being a big gay hangout, they have a children’s menu and crayons there. They also have koi pond inside the restaurant, and Lucinda liked watching the fish. So overall, it was a fun afternoon.

This afternoon I had to go to the grocery store to pick up some things for dinner. While I was there, Cathy called me and said that our neighbor’s back house was on fire. It was fortunate that she was able to warn me about this, because there are few things more disturbing than to come around the corner and see three fire trucks and an ambulance parked in front of your house.

The fire department was very efficient, and they put the fire out pretty quickly. Have I ever mentioned that Pasadena has great city services?

Fortunately, nobody was hurt in this, although the entire neighborhood is probably going to be extra-sensitive to the smell of smoke for a while. Which is perhaps unfortunate in that I’m barbecuing dinner tonight…

Today there was a copy of “Putting Down Roots in Earthquake Country” included with the morning paper. Over the last ten years, I’ve handed out many of these booklets at disaster preparedness fairs all over L.A. I’m glad to see it getting wide distribution with the Times.

Next week is the 100th anniversary of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, which was the event that pretty much started all of modern earthquake science. This is what led ultimately to the current understanding of the earthquake cycle and why we need to be prepared for earthquakes. And in some small way, it’s also what led my having a job running the computers for the Southern California Seismic Network. (Have I mentioned ever that I really like my job?) And I even got to contribute a little bit to the book. I made the map on page 30, showing the first hour’s activity after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. The ‘recent earthquakes‘ maps didn’t exist back then, but I took a catalog listing of the first hour’s earthquakes and fed them into the map program to simulate what it would have looked like.

So for everyone who lives in California, keep watching the ground. And for everyone who doesn’t, Nyeah, Nyeah! there are earthquake hazards in lots of other places, too.