Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today’s ride was to Glendora. Gene found a new bakery out there and he wanted to get a loaf of olive bread, so off we went.

The first part of the ride was a bit of a blur to me, since there was a problem at work, and my phone was ringing. There was a M5.4 earthquake in Quebec this morning, and the computer that does the Community Internet Intensity Maps (a.k.a. the “Did you feel it?” maps) was having a problem. It’s a bit of a challenge to talk on the phone while riding.

Today’s new entry in the Flat Tire Gallery is Matt.

After that excitement, we continued on through Irwindale, passing the low-rent Irwindale Speedway. I always refer to it as the ‘low-rent racetrack’ because while a lot of racetracks might have events like the “Purolator 400″ or some such, I’ve seen the sign at Irwindale trumpeting the “Food-4-Less 150″, which just sounds a whole lot more downscale.

Continuing on, we passed a place to take a leak and the hot rod mailbox before heading into Old Town Glendora. We stopped there for a little snack at the bakery. Gene pulled out a backpack and stuffed an enormous loaf of olive bread into it for the trip home.

After the stop, we headed home across the San Gabriel River and then back through Monrovia and Sierra Madre. I snapped one picture of the town square in Sierra Madre, since it was a major filming location for the 1956 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.

Gene carried that olive bread all the way back, and the extra weight and wind resistance didn’t seem to slow him down too much.

40 miles.

cycling

I did some CSS tweaking on my Tattoo Artists Database, so I’d appreciate it if people could have a look at it and give me some feedback on it. Is the search interface intuitive enough? Any new features it should have? When I look at my site statistics it’s usually one of the most-requested pages, so I’m trying to improve it.

Also, today marks 10 years since we moved back from Texas. Yay.

Here’s a link for the Googlebot to follow: Online Poker

I got this from frenchfragfactory.net/ozh/archives/2005/02/19/bloggers-of-the-world-unite. The basic idea is that if we all put a link to the Wikipedia page about online poker, then that will become the #1 match for the phrase in Google. All the comment and trackback spam we’ve been getting lately is all in pursuit of page rank, so this is a way to try and prevent them from getting what they want.

Dunno if it’s going to work, but I thought it was a funny idea.

I was looking at my site statistics and I noticed a big spike on Thursday. Turns out a news site in Argentina had an article about the Pomona Body Art Expo, and they had a link to my tattoo convention photo album. So where we usually serve about 80-120MB a day, on that day we did just over 1GB. That’s the equivalent of about two weeks’ worth of normal traffic. So I guess this is where I stop and be glad that I moved our site to PHP Webhosting last summer. There is no way our little DSL-based home server could have handled this load.

Today’s ride was to Larchmont Village. This is a small-town-like shopping district just south of Hollywood in the Hancock Park area of Los Angeles. We were also very happy to have Matt along on the ride for the first time in months. Matt is in the Navy, and is just back from Iraq, so we were glad to see him back in one piece.

We started out going through Pasadena and Highland Park, where we passed the LAPD Historical Museum. This is definitely on our list of things to see one of these days. From there we took Eagle Rock Blvd and Fletcher across the L.A. River in to Los Feliz. Then we went past the Silver Lake reservoir. This was where we got into the ‘gritty urban cycling’ part of the ride. We rode through Koreatown, where we saw the ‘98 Cent Discount Store’. Glad to see that the 99 Cent Store has some competition. We also saw the LAPD in action near there.

After we crossed Western Ave, we went into the mansion district of Hancock Park. When we got to Larchmont Blvd, we saw the house where Adriana Caselotti lived. She was the voice of the original Disney Snow White, back in the days when voice actors in cartoons were not the big deal they are today.

We stopped for a bagel at Noah’s Bagels on Larchmont. That was where we saw the ‘Party in a Box’. We all had different ideas of what should be in the box.

After the stop, we went north past Paramount Studios to the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The recent rains made the pond there overflow, so there were squished crayfish all over the roads there. We stopped to see the statue of Johnny Ramone, as well as Dee Dee Ramone’s grave, which are both in the same area of the cemetery. We also saw another monument that looks like an Atlas rocket. We don’t know who is buried there, but we were all curious, since it was a unique monument.

Continuing north, we passed the somewhat creepy Scientology Celebrity Center, and then took Franklin Ave east to the Shakespeare bridge. From there it was the standard route home through Highland Park and Eagle Rock.

44 miles.

cycling

Through a strange set of circumstances, I stumbled on this today. It’s a hoot:

www.helpinganimals.com/feat/ronjeremy

My page is back to #1 in Google again. Yee-hah!

We took Lucinda to the newly-rebuilt Kidspace Museum today. They’ve done a pretty nice job of rebuilding it. Lucinda had fun in the two big climbing towers. I got to climb one of them, but she told me that she didn’t want me to climb the other one. We both went through the ant hole, though. Anyway, it was a fun afternoon, so I guess it’s a hit.

We’re having more rain today, and it’s kind of windy. Whenever it’s windy here, the birds are all lined up on the wires with their beaks into the wind. When it’s not windy, they don’t all face the same way.

We went to see “Inside Deep Throat” today. It was a hoot. Very entertaining, and informative, especially if you’re not really up on the history of the porn industry and the government’s attempts to shut it down. They tracked down and interviewed a lot of the people who were involved in making, distributing, and prosecuting the film. They told lots of funny stories about their experiences, and talked about how this little movie they made became part of history. It’s also funny to see people such as Roy Cohn and Charles Keating denouncing “Deep Throat” in the film, since their ’skeletons in the closet’ were not yet known at that time.

The guys who made this documentary are the same ones who made “The Eyes of Tammy Faye“, which was also very entertaining. Overall, we recommend this film. It was great fun.