Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Yup. It’s time for another tattoo convention. This time it’s the winter edition of the giant Body Art Expo at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds. Today was a perfect day for it. The sun was out and it was warm.

When I got to the Fairplex, they were having the Easyriders bike show and an RV show, too. So the parking was packed. But that’s normal for any event that’s held there. There’s always something else going on.

When I got there, I saw my friend Stormy and her dog Nakai. Nakai is a service dog in training, so she get to go places where ordinary dogs don’t. She was also very cute and smart.

When I got inside, I saw David and his friend Justice. Justice recently moved back to L.A. after moving away after the Northridge Earthquake, and she had some concerns about Los Angeles and earthquakes. Since I’m in the earthquake business, I did my best to allay her fears.

A bit later, Mandy and Rob showed up. They were my ’straight friends’ for the afternoon, since they don’t really fit the freak mold. But it was nice to see Mandy again.

I saw Rick at the Mermaid’s Tale booth.

Anna was at here Anagram Fine Art booth again, so we had to visit and take a picture.

They had a fashion show, which was amusing. The outfits were from the Folter booth, and they were very nice. Brought out lots of cameras. The funniest bit was the first two girls who came out and posed. Then they turned around and flipped up their short schoolgirl skirts to show us their panties that said “PERV” on the back. Sadly, I was not able to capture that moment, due to digital camera lag.

There was also a booth for Utilikilts. I stopped in to just say hello. (waves to KarlElvis) And while I was there, two of the girls from the Folter show stopped by.

So it was a fun afternoon. All the pictures are here:

www.1134.org/stan/tattoos/gallery/bodyartexpo2006jan

I thought it might be interesting to make a note of the books I read this year. I’ve found some interesting books by seeing them mentioned on other people’s blogs, so I thought I’d just stick my little book list in a virtual bottle just in case anyone else might enjoy one of these.

The Annals of the Former World by John McPhee. This is his magnum opus about the geologic history of North America. It’s composed of five books, two of which I’d read before. While the subject sounds dry, it’s really quite entertaining. The stuff about conodonts was quite interesting, and the story of how California came to be was also very good. But that’s just because John McPhee is a very good writer.

Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants by Jill Soloway. It’s her memoir about growing up, chock full of funny stories and little rants. And reading it was great fun.

How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale by Jenna Jameson. Her story about how she became the well-known porn star. It’s kind of sad at times, and hilariously funny at times.

Lights, Camera, Sex! by Christy Canyon. This is another ‘how I got into porn’ story. I met Christy once, and she was quite charming and funny in person. And her book is the same way. It was tremendously entertaining.

Collapse by Jared Diamond. An examination of history and the reasons why societies collapse. Part historical tome and part cautionary tale for the present, it’s quite readable.

Conduct Unbecoming by Randy Shilts. The full history of gays in the military, told in minute detail.

Stiff by Mary Roach. All about uses for human cadavers in research and education. Tremendously funny, although that might not be immediately apparent from the subject material.

Astro Turf by M.G. Lord. A history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but from a viewpoint of examining its male-dominated culture and the women who now inhabit it.

Finding Fault in California by Sue Hough. I work with Sue, and her book is intended as a tourist’s guide to seeing the scarps, hills, and sag ponds formed by fault movements around California. I’ve found that going to see them makes for some nice little bike trips.

The Bone Woman by Clea Koff. This is a personal memoir of a forensic anthropologist who worked exhuming the mass graves of genocide victims in Rwanda and Kosovo. Well-written, but it’s ultimately a grim story.

Candy Freak by Steve Almond. A somewhat personal story about the history of candy in the United States, and in particular about the few remaining independent candy companies still in business. Tremendously funny.

Bare by Elisabeth Eaves. This is her memoir about being a stripper at a peep show in Seattle. Full of interesting stories and some introspective talk about why she felt drawn to stripping. Very entertaining.

And one re-read of note:

The Control of Nature by John McPhee. Three stories about how man tries to control natural forces. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, I had go back and read the section about the Army Corps of Engineers and their attempts at controlling the Mississippi River.

books

Today was the Rose Parade here in Pasadena. And it rained on the parade for the first time since 1955. So we didn’t go, and I’m told that lots of other people didn’t go either.

In the past, they parked the horse trailers on our street to collect the horses at the end of the parade, but this time they had the trailers at the St. Luke’s parking lot up the street. So I just got one soggy-horse picture.

The National Weather Service had issued a flash flood warning for Los Angeles County today. The rain was bucketing down for a while here. When it stopped, I went outside and snapped a picture of what passed for storm damage on our street.

Later, we took our dogs for a walk. We passed the shuttle buses for people who came to see the floats. I had to take a picture of the ‘Live in Baton Rouge’ advertisement. It’s always odd to see places advertising for people to move there. And the ‘viva mas barato’ just clinched the deal. Back when we lived in Hollywood, there was a store near our house called ‘Las 3-B: Bueno, Bonito, Barato’. So we always get a little laugh from stuff like this.

Since today is the first of the year, I looked at my records to see how much I used my car last year. I have a little notebook in the car where I record every time I do maintenance or put gas in the car. And according to this, I drove my car 1705 miles in 2005. I was actually a bit surprised by this. I thought it would be less. I guess that the 274 miles I put on going to San Diego this week made a difference. In any event, I guess I’m about due for an oil change. The last time I did it was May 1, 2004.

This afternoon, I went to Downtown Los Angeles to meet my friends Kathleen and Richard and Kathleen’s daughter Jenny. I used to work with Kathleen at Hughes Aircraft back in the late 1980s. At the time, I remember her saying that I’d have to meet Jenny some time, because she thought we’d be friends.

So yes, I like Jenny a lot. We’re a lot alike in many ways. I once taught her how to pick locks for fun. We used to go to the astronomy club together when she was in high school. I’ve known her now for something like 15 years, and she’s gone from being a little kid to being an actual adult. She lives in London now, sharing an apartment with her boyfriend. She was back in L.A. just for this week, so it was a treat to get to see her again.

Today’s weather forecast was grim, at least by Los Angeles standards. Chilly and wet, with the chance of rain increasing throughout the day.

So I went down to the park to see if anyone else was going to ride. When I got there, Michael was ready to go, so we decided to head up to Montrose. As we started out, Jon came down the road, so there were three of us for the ride.

We started out heading up to La Cañada. We took a little detour up Chevy Chase to Figueroa, then down Linda Vista and back up Chevy Chase, so we got in two big hills. Then we headed down Hospital Hill into Montrose.

Along the way, Jon told me about how they had recently filmed a scene for CSI in his living room. Apparently, a location scout had liked his house and asked if they could use it. This has no bearing on the ride, but it’s just a sample of how along-the-ride smalltalk is just different here in L.A.

When we were riding through Montrose, we noticed that we’d lost Jon. So we stopped, and about a minute later he came down the road. He said that he had to stop when he looked down and saw a dead bird lodged in his crankset. He had no idea how it got there, but he had to stop and remove it. I told him that if that ever happens again to be sure to call me so I can take a picture.

After passing through Montrose, we continued on into Tujunga. The weather seemed to be holding, so we decided to head over La Tuna Canyon. It got kind of cold during the four-mile downhill, but it was all right.

At the bottom in Sunland, we took a right on Sunland Blvd and headed up towards the mountains and Foothill Blvd. This was where we saw a road-killed dog. I didn’t take a picture because it was actually a very disturbing image. Its end was obviously violent, as it was torn in two.

We had a brief stop at a Starbuck’s in Sunland. I had a somewhat-dry bagel and some orange juice. Then we continued on back towards Tujunga.

I had to stop for a brief photo-op at Stan’s Liquor. I always make a note of any business that has my name on it. I also had to take a picture of the sign for the Poo Ping Restaurant. It was about now that we started to notice a few raindrops. It was also getting colder. We decided that we probably should just head straight home and not stop any more.

We took Foothill all the way back to La Cañada, then went back down past Descanso Gardens. At the bottom of the hill, we all split up to go our respective ways home. I took the standard route back on Woodbury Road. I stopped briefly to snap a picture of the towers on top of Mt. Wilson shrouded in clouds.

When I got home, I had a hot shower to bring my numb toes back. Despite the cold and wet, it was a nice ride.

43 miles
cycling

So on Monday we got the call that we dread. My father is retired and lives in a luxury retirement community in San Diego. It’s an ‘independent living’ facility, but the staff watches over the residents and helps them out as needed. And on Monday they called me and said that they had sent him to the hospital. They said he had slurred speech and weakness in his right hand. The first thing I thought was that he had had a stroke.

I called the hospital and they confirmed that he was there and they said that the doctor would call me after they had done some tests. About an hour later the emergency room doctor called and confirmed that my father had had a mild stroke. The doctor said that he would probably be in the hospital for several days, but that he was already improving. I also talked to his nurse, who said that he was doing well.

When I got there, he looked rather forlorn, sitting up in the hospital bed. They had him hooked up to the usual machines. This was hard for me to see, since it brought back memories of the time when he was poisoned by methyl iodide back in 1974. He tells the story of this on his web page, but his perspective was very different from mine. At the time, I was 14 years old, and I found it profoundly frightening to see my seemingly-invincible father brought low by neurological damage. When I was little, he was strong and seemed capable of anything. He could do gymnastics, walk on his hands, and ride a unicycle. And after being poisoned, his coordination never really came back. He seemed physically just a shell of his former self.

It’s been more than 30 years since that happened, and we’ve all grown accustomed to the new Paul, but now with the stroke, he was having new problems with coordination and vision. And seeing this brought back all the old memories from seeing him in the hospital in 1974. I could still feel the fear of a kid afraid that his father might die.

The physical therapist came soon after I got there, and she gave him a set of tests of strength, coordination, and vision. She gave him some instructions for exercises to do to help regain his right-hand coordination, along with a little tub of silly putty to do hand exercises with. She found that he was having vision problems with a blind spot on the right side. She said that this is fairly common for stroke patients. After that, the emergency room doctor who had examined him when he first came in stopped by. He said that my father was improving well and that he would be able to go home soon.

Around 15:00 or so, they moved my father to a different room, since they had decided that he did not need to be monitored as intensively as before. So he was wheeled over to a room in the ‘regular patient’ wing of the hospital. Then, a short time later, his new nurse came by and said that she had heard that he was going to be discharged that day. The actual discharge order came through at about 18:00, and I drove him back to his apartment. I stayed with him until bedtime to be sure he was all right.

The next day I came back to his place and we spent the day together. He did some of his exercises with the silly putty. He was concerned that his signature was now different due to his right-hand coordination problems, so I took him to the bank so he could make a new signature card. Late in the day he tried to play the piano, just to see what would happen. He was able to do it, but had a lot of problems with the right-hand parts. But overall, he is doing very well, considering what has happened.

Route map and photo locations

(With major apologies to Clement C. Moore, and thanks to www.rhymezone.com)

‘Twas the day before Christmas, and here in L.A;
We went for a bike ride, no snow for a sleigh;

Then down back to home, a nice downhill glide;
Merry Christmas to all, and it was a good ride!

51 miles
cycling

I have a home-made CAPTCHA on my pages to keep out comment spam. It uses an image with a random character string. I noticed that once in a while, the image would be broken and have unprintable characters in it.

I finally figured this out, so I figured I should write it down for my records and just in case anyone else ever has this problem.

There is a function that makes up a random string like ‘DGQZA’, which is then run through mcrypt to turn it into garbage. This renders it as an encrypted string that may or may not be printable. So then I run it through base64encode to make it into a fully printable string so it can be passed to the image-generation script to make up the image. The problem was when the base64-encoded string had a ‘+’ or ‘/’ or such in it. These characters break the URL. So the fix was to run it through the urlencode function to render the string as something like ‘wDhn8h%2BI2hg%3D’.

Nota Bene: The act of sending the encoded string through to the image-generation script automagically decodes the special characters in the URL, so it is not necessary to send it through ‘urldecode’. In fact, doing that breaks it.

So now it works.

I think.

If anyone notices it behaving badly, please let me know.

I was reading Digg today at lunch, and they had an article about another method of stopping bandwidth theft by hotlinking:

www.thesitewizard.com/archive/bandwidththeft.shtml

So I went and implemented this in my blog photos and also in my photo albums. Take that, myspace.com.

Here are the most popular photos with the hotlinkers:

1134.org/blog/images2005/IMG_0667a.jpg
1134.org/gallery/albums/random/ace.sized.jpg
1134.org/blog/images2005/IMG_0453a.jpg

All together, these three photos account for 2.6% of my total bandwidth for the month. Hmm. Maybe this isn’t as big a deal as I thought. Still, it’s annoying.