Stan’s Obligatory Blog

I sent an item in to Steve Harvey’s column in the Los Angeles Times yesterday, and he published it today, complete with the photo I sent in.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-only14jun14,1,6592639.column?coll=la-mininav-california&ctrack=2&cset=true

Also, my dead dot-com gallery got linked from Milk and Cookies the day before yesterday.

I have a Jade Plant in my office. I have a window with a southern exposure, and it’s generally pretty happy. I have to turn it every few months because it grows towards the window, but aside from that, it’s pretty low maintenance. But today I noticed that there are two little yellow mushrooms growing right by the base of the plant. They’re rather striking. I don’t know much about mycology, so I have no idea what kind of mushrooms they are. My first thought when I saw them is that maybe I’m watering the plant too much. But it seems happy. In any event, these mushrooms are the first I’ve ever seen that are quite that shade of bright yellow. So they’re interesting.

Of course, bein’ a geek and all, I did some searching with the Oracle (aka Google) and I found that they are likely Leucocoprinus birnbaumii, which they say is ‘possibly poisonous‘. Cool.

Today we went to see “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” today. As both Democrats and residents of California, it was predictably enraging. But at the same time, it was funny and entertaining. And a weird thing happened, too. One of the people interviewed in the film is the Dean of the University of Houston Law School. I knew her in college, and I’d heard about her being named Dean a while back. It’s weird that people I knew way back when are now grown up and getting close to the levers of power. On the other hand, I’m also happy for her. I’m always glad to see someone I knew and liked in college make good.

After the movie, we stopped by my office. I’d gotten a call earlier in the day about an electrical burning smell in the computer room. None of the critical computers were down, but since we were in the area I wanted to have a look. We’d had a M5.6 earthquake this morning, and there was one lonely-looking news truck parked outside the lab. My key card was broken, so while we were waiting for the security guy to come and unlock the door, we were talking with the reporter. The funny thing is that he said it was supposed to be his day off, but he was called in for the earthquake. He didn’t feel like getting dressed up for the occasion. So he was wearing his white shirt, tie, and jacket, but with jeans and sneakers. He said that lots of others wear shorts, but he felt a bit ridiculous dressed like that. Sadly, I didn’t have my camera handy, but if you’re in the L.A. area you might have seen him in the news tonight. After all that, I got into the building and checked out the computer room. Nothing obvious was out, so we will have to investigate more tomorrow.

detail of above

detail of above

Since I can’t go on the regular club ride tomorrow, I went for a ride by myself today.

It’s June, and one thing that the tourist books never talk about is the “June Gloom”. Gray, overcast, cool days are all part of it, and today was a textbook example. The sun struggled mightily to break through, but it never really did.

I decided to ride out to Beverly Hills and up Benedict Canyon. This is one of my sentimental favorite Hollywood Hills rides, another being Nichols Canyon.

It’s springtime, and the jacaranda trees are in full bloom, so the streets are just covered with little purple flowers.

I went across Pasadena and down through the arroyo, and then took La Loma up and over the hill into Eagle Rock. I started to ride up Nolden Street, which is the ridiculously steep hill there, but I thought better of it. For some reason, I was feeling kind of tired and dragging today, so I thought that perhaps I shouldn’t push my luck by trying to ride up a 32% grade hill. So instead, I took Yosemite Dr across to Eagle Rock Blvd.

After the ride south on Eagle Rock Blvd, I crossed over the L.A. River into Silver Lake. That was where I saw the art project with television sets arranged on the hillside, each with a short message written on the screen.

After crossing the Franklin Hills and the Shakespeare Bridge, I entered Hollywood. I saw one building with an interesting sort of bas-relief design on the fire escape. So of course I stopped to snap a picture.

Riding a bike down Hollywood Boulevard is always kind of an odd experience. Early in the morning there are very few tourists out, and the street crazies who live there are mostly still asleep.

I took a little side trip down to Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood to see the old Pussycat Theater. This was the flagship of the former porn chain, done in by the invention of the VCR. It’s now the ‘Tom Kat’ and shows gay porn. But the front of the theater still has the old ‘porn walk of fame’ from the ’70s. I got a picture of Linda Lovelace’s signature and hand prints in the concrete there.

Continuing west, I got on the famed Sunset Strip. I passed my favorite book store, Book Soup, and also passed the Viper Room, which I always remember as the place where River Phoenix died back in 1993.

Then I crossed the city limits into Beverly Hills. The street got wider, the pavement got smoother, and everything was fine and dandy. I passed houses with separately marked Service and Guest entrances. Then I got to Benedict Canyon. I took the right turn off Sunset and started up the canyon. It’s a nice, quiet street, and the first couple of miles are pretty flat. I passed Cielo Drive, which is the street where Sharon Tate lived before she was brutally murdered by the Manson Family in 1969. The original house was torn down years ago, so there really isn’t anything to see there any more.

Next came the actual climb up out of the canyon. The road got a bit steeper and switchbacked up the ridge to the crest of the mountains. There I turned right on Mulholland Drive. Back in the days when we lived in Hollywood, I used to ride up there all the time. I always remember seeing lots of women’s clothing lying on the side of the road on weekends. A shoe here, a skirt there, and underwear all around. I didn’t see any of that today, but I’m sure that sort of thing still goes on up there.

At Coldwater Canyon, I saw an odd street sign. It said that the road ends at night, but that implies that it doesn’t during the day. I thought it was funny, so I took a picture.

I continued on Mulholland all the way down into Cahuenga Pass. There I took Wonder View up the hill on the other side of the freeway to the top above the Hollywood Reservior. Then I went down Lake Hollywood Dr to Barham Blvd and on down the hill into Burbank. I took Zoo Drive back into Griffith Park before turning north into Glendale. That was where I saw the funny ‘falling softballs’ warning sign.

After that, I went up Verdugo Blvd to Hospital Hill. At the top of the hill, I turned and went down the hill past Descanso Gardens. From there, it was the regular route home across La Cañada and Pasadena.

60 miles.
cycling

Yesterday I was reading Slashdot and I saw an article about a guy who gets a million spams a day and how he deals with it. I don’t get anywhere near that much spam, but I get enough to be mightily annoyed by it.

One of the things he does is to implement greylisting, which is a really clever way to discourage spam. I looked, and they have it in the FreeBSD Ports Collection, so it was easy to install on my mail server.

I’ve been running it for 24 hours now, and the spam has been cut down by something like 95%. It’s a miracle I tells ya…

Today was the Spring Music Concert at Lucinda’s school. So I took a couple hours of vacation time to go over and see it. I rode my bike over there, which was a bit of an adventure, since the school is at the top of a big hill, but I made it all right. The kindergarteners sang “Going to the Zoo” and “John the Rabbit”. It was all very cute.

On the way back, since I had my camera, I stopped to snap a picture of a very weird palm tree in front of one of the houses near Caltech. I pass by it every day on my way to work, and it’s always a wonder.

I just read today that the people who brought us “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism are at it again. This time, they are going after Wal-Mart. Being a documentary geek, this sounds like a Good Thing. It should be entertaining, anyway.

DiRT Gallery in West Hollywood is going to be showing “Skeletal Systems” by Michael Paulus. This is a series about what the skeletons of cartoon characters would look like. The show runs until July 23, and they are having an opening reception on June 10.

Today’s ride was Gene’s “La Tuna Canyon Inverse”. This is basically the same route for La Tuna Canyon, but traveling over the hill from west to east.

We had a small group, perhaps because today was the first day where the ride began at 8:00 instead of 8:30. We began by heading west across Pasadena, crossing the Colorado Street bridge, and then going down the hill into Eagle Rock. There, we passed the offramp that is another remnant of the old Colorado Freeway that was built in the 1950s.

We crossed Glendale and Burbank on Glenoaks Blvd. That was where we passed the church sign about “religious nuts”. We all got a good laugh from that.

Next, we crossed over into Sun Valley, and then went though a little residential area to get to La Tuna Canyon Road. That was where we saw the sheep. They looked at home, even though one doesn’t normally think of sheep within the Los Angeles city limits.

The climb up La Tuna Canyon wasn’t bad. The sky was overcast, and it was still cool. The climb to the top is about four miles, and Matt and Newton left the rest of us in the dust. I managed to catch up to Jason at the top, but Karen was left way behind. She had warned us that she was going to be slow up the hill. At the top, I turned and went back down to be sure she was all right, and then we rode back up to the top.

Cresting the hill in the canyon, we had a nice downhill ride through Tujunga into La Crescenta. There, we found ourselves riding through the Montrose Arts & Crafts Fair. That made for a slow couple of blocks, but we saw some cute dogs along the way. Coming out the other side of the fair, we headed straight up Hospital Hill to our snack stop at Goldstein’s Bagels. I thought it was funny that they had a drive-through. We briefly considered riding through it, but decided that it was probably simpler to just go inside. So we got our bagels and sat down at one of the tables outside. That was where Matt was tremendously amused by my case of helmet hair, so he had to take a picture for posterity.

After that, we headed home through La Cañada and Pasadena. It was a very pleasant ride.

44 miles.
cycling

Today we were down in Orange County to drop Lucinda off at Aunt Maggi’s house for a sleep-over. On the way back, we decided to stop for dinner at Walt’s Wharf in Seal Beach. This was the scene of our first date, all the way back in 1986 when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The place hasn’t changed, and we’d like to think that we haven’t, either.