Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This is a rant. California license 4SHZ840, if you ever put your license plate into Google, this is why I was yelling at you.

First off, let’s have a look at a bit of the California Vehicle Code:

Circular Red or Red Arrow

21453. (a) A driver facing a steady circular red signal alone shall stop at a marked limit line, but if none, before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection or, if none, then before entering the intersection, and shall remain stopped until an indication to proceed is shown, except as provided in subdivision (b).

(b) Except when a sign is in place prohibiting a turn, a driver, after stopping as required by subdivision (a), facing a steady circular red signal, may turn right, or turn left from a one-way street onto a one-way street. A driver making that turn shall yield the right-of-way to pedestrians lawfully within an adjacent crosswalk and to any vehicle that has approached or is approaching so closely as to constitute an immediate hazard to the driver, and shall continue to yield the right-of-way to that vehicle until the driver can proceed with reasonable safety.

(c) A driver facing a steady red arrow signal shall not enter the intersection to make the movement indicated by the arrow and, unless entering the intersection to make a movement permitted by another signal, shall stop at a clearly marked limit line, but if none, before entering the crosswalk on the near side of the intersection, or if none, then before entering the intersection, and shall remain stopped until an indication permitting movement is shown.

(d) Unless otherwise directed by a pedestrian control signal as provided in Section 21456, a pedestrian facing a steady circular red or red arrow signal shall not enter the roadway.
Amended Sec. 1, Ch. 14, Stats. 2001. Effective January 1, 2002.

So I was out riding on Saturday morning. Coming home, crossing Lake Avenue on Mendocino Street. I had the green light, and I was coming through the intersection. And suddenly, there was a silver-gray Lexus coming across the intersection, right in front of me. If I was in a car, I’d have honked the horn at her. Being that I was on my bike, and had no horn, I yelled at her. She had her window open, so she heard me and stopped, looking a bit surprised. This sort of thing happens from time to time, and it’s generally not a big deal. She made a mistake on the road. I think it was most likely an honest mistake, and that she meant no harm. It happens to everyone. Nothing bad happened, so it’s all right.

So I kept going. Then she pulls up next to me and starts yelling at me from the moving car:

“I stopped at that light before I turned! I didn’t do anything wrong!”

People make mistakes. It’s just part of being human. We all do it from time to time. In this case, the mistake she made was a pretty minor one. No harm was done, so that should have been the end of it. A truly proper and gracious response on her part would have been to say something like, “Oops. I didn’t see you. Sorry about that.” This is very rare. In fact, in nearly 40 years of riding, I can count the number of times I’ve heard this from a motorist on the fingers of one hand. And still have several fingers left to spare. But that’s all right. It’s all part of the gig when you ride a bike. Still, for her to come after me and start yelling at me about how she didn’t do anything wrong and that, by implication, this is all somehow my fault, well, this crossed the line. This is no longer an honest mistake. This is acting like an asshole.

Now, I’m of the opinion that there are two kinds of people in the world:

1. People who make mistakes, but are willing to own up to them;
2. Assholes.

So I want to convey this to her, but I can’t give the fully-detailed and nuanced response above, since I’ve got to fit it in eight words or less as she’s driving away from me. So the abbreviated version came out like this:

“Through traffic has the right of way, ASSHOLE!”

By this time, she’s passed me, but she slows down, and I can hear her yelling at me more from inside the car. I can’t make it out. But by this time, I’m feeling more than a little threatened. After all, in any physical altercation between our respective vehicles, I’m the one who stands to end up dead.

So she pulls over a little bit ahead of me and stops. I see her starting to get out of the car, still yelling at me. I just ride past, and I say something to the effect that I don’t want to talk to her any more. I also made a point of showing her that I’d taken pictures of her and her car. Then I turned down the first side street. I put on some speed down the hill, and went down lots of little streets, just to lower the chances that I’d encounter her again.

There’s no good way to wrap this up. Yes, I think I lost my cool, and that didn’t help the situation. It’s just that people who won’t admit they made a mistake is a major peeve of mine. So driver, if you ever read this, this is how you managed to take a not-especially-bad situation, and turn it into something truly horrible and disturbing. And I sincerely hope to never, ever see you again on the road.

This Sunday’s bike club ride was the route out to Glendora to see the Glendora Bougainvillea. The last time we went to see it, it wasn’t blooming that much. I’d read that winter is the time it blooms the most, so I thought we’d go see it again to see how it was doing.

It was a nice day for riding, and the ride out there was pleasant. The bougainvillea had some flowers on it. More than last time, but not as much as others we’ve seen. That may be because this particular plant is over a 100 years old.

In any case, it was a nice ride.

42 miles.

This is great!

On Thursday evening’s stair practice, I did yet another personal best. I climbed the practice course from 4 up to 60 in 9:56. This is four seconds faster than my previous best, and about 30 seconds faster than the practice times I was turning in last year

I’m getting better at the stepping patterns I worked out to even out the load on each leg, and that seems to be helping. It’s also good from a mental standpoint, since it gives me something to focus on as a distraction from how much it hurts. So all around, it’s a Good Thing.

Tonight was the “Kickoff Party” at the Aon building in downtown Los Angeles. This was an event to try and drum up interest for the stair climb at the end of March. And for the occasion, they opened the stairwell door on the ground outside the building, so we could practice doing almost the entire climb. The normal practice sessions rn from 4 to 60, but tonight we could go from ground level up to 60. They were also keeping the stairs open an hour longer than normal tonight.

I rode the train downtown after work. My plan was to do the climb once for speed, to practice my footwork for changing which leg was leading every other floor to even out the loads on them. After that, I planned on going up a couple more times to take pictures, kibitz and just play tourist.

My first time up was a pretty good run. My time was 10:49. I had a look at my watch when I was passing the place where we start the normal practice runs, and it was at 42 seconds at that point, so this was about the equivalent of doing the regular practice course in 10:07. Not my fastest time, but still a good solid pace.

After a few minutes recovery, i went back down. The second time I just walked up to the 4th floor to check the count of steps there. This time, I came out with 80. So I walked back down and counted it again. It was 80 every time, so that means I must have made a mistake when I counted them the other day. It also means that the full count is 1,378 steps from the ground up to the landing at the door to the roof. So I think this is where the published count of 1,377 came from. They probably sent somebody up to count the steps, and when he got to the door that said “ROOF” he figured that was the end of it and stopped, without counting the last flight up on the outside of the door.

I started up the stairs for the second time. I walked up with Mary, and I took some pictures along the way. I particularly wanted to get some pictures from the top of the middle section of the stairs, which is about floor 42. The stairway shaft is wider in that section, and it’s possible to look up and down about 260 vertical feet in the shaft. I thought this might make for some dramatic pictures. I got one dramatic shot of Mary by bracing the camera on the railing and using a long exposure. I’d heard that they might get Norman to come take pictures, so I think that the landing around 42 would be a good place for him to set up. His pictures at the CFF climb last December were great.

Near the top, I heard a loud panting sound coming up behind me. I know I’m pretty loud when I’m going full speed, and Jeff is pretty loud, too. But this time it was Madeline. She was really going, and she told me later that she’d set a new personal best tonight.

I went back down again. I was waiting for Kathleen to get there, since I’d told her I’d walk up with her once. But it was cold just standing around, so I decided to go up again just to keep warm. This time, I got to 42 and I could hear someone coming up. This time it was Veronica, and she was on her third of five times up the stairs. But she was still moving very fast. And both of those pictures looking down the stairway shaft give a sense of just how endless the stairs seem when we’re climbing them.

When I got back down, I was still waiting for Kathleen. I thought she was stuck in traffic somewhere. But then I saw her coming down the escalator. She had gotten there while I was walking up the third time, and she just started up the stairs. She said that she didn’t think I’d have my phone with me, so she didn’t try to call to tell me she was there. Oh well. We still got to visit with everyone, and afterward we went to have a little dinner at McCormick and Schmick’s, which is inside the U.S. Bank Tower, just a couple blocks away.

It was a fun evening. And climbing the tower three times wasn’t hard at all. The trick was to just take it easy and just play tourist the second and third times. I was climbing it in something like 20 minutes, even with stopping to make notes and take pictures. And it was good practice, since I was still able to practice my footwork and turns.

It’s the last Sunday of the month, so it’s time for our ‘longer’ ride. This time, we rode out to Encino to see Los Encinos State Historic Park. This is the one that I discovered some years ago when I was building a web site with a list of all hot springs in California. Looking at the list, I noticed that one of them had a latitude and longitude that put it inside the city of Los Angeles. So I looked it up, and we rode there one time.

The route there was as direct as I could make it, since the park is quite a bit farther away that we usually ride. Not much remarkable happened on the way there, aside from when I got a flat. When I was fixing it, I noticed the cords peeking through the tire tread, so I figured it was time to finally get a new tire.

It turned into a very nice day, and it was quite warm and sunny by the time we got there. We had a look around the park and read the historical markers before heading back. We took the bike path along the Metro Orange Line for the trip back across the Valley. Our snack stop was at Panera in North Hollywood.

When I got home, I had 59 1/2 miles, so I rode around the block once, just to make it a nice round number.

60 miles.

A few days ago, I posted a bit about how Sadie, the new dog in our house managed to break off the bottom of one of the fence boards and get out of the yard. I had to do a quick repair to keep her from getting away. But this morning, I could see that she’d already started gnawing or clawing or something on the patch, and she was getting through the wood. So I had to come up with something. I had a look in my workshop junk drawer, and I found a stainless steel switchplate. That was just about the right size for what I needed, so I attached it to the wood with some screws. So let’s see her gnaw through that.

We have a new dog staying with us. She’s been here for about a week now, and she’s been getting into some trouble. Today, she found the cracked board at the bottom of the driveway gate, and somehow managed to break off the cracked part and get out through the hole. I was impressed by this, since I didn’t think she’d even fit through that hole, but both dogs got out and were running around the neighborhood when I got home from work. Suzie came running back when she saw me coming home, but I had to chase Sadie down and bring her back. Then I locked them in the house while I patched the hole as best I could do on such short notice. I’m reasonably sure she won’t be able to get through that any time soon.

Today was another practice at the Aon building in downtown Los Angeles. I wanted to practice my footwork for changing which leg was the lead on the first and third major portions of the stairway. I also wanted to do some more counting, since I want to know the actual count of steps.

As always, I rode the train there. When I got there, I did one thing differently this time. Before starting up, I followed Theodore down the stairway to the ground floor. He started his run from there, but I just walked it and counted steps. It’s 82 steps from the ground up to the 4th floor where the main stairway begins.

At the mechanical floors where the stairs reverse direction, I paid attention again, and there are exactly two floors that are different from the standard 22 steps per floor. Those are on 22 and 42, and they are both 24 steps. Aside from that, it’s 22 steps per floor all the way up to 60.

If you look at the picture of the building on the Glass Steel and Stone web site, you can see two dark floors. Those are the mechanical floors at 22 and 42. I counted the windows to be sure that those are the right numbers.

When I got to 56, I looked at my watch, and it said 9:30. So I knew I wasn’t going to break any records today, but I was on track for a good time anyway. I managed to put on a little sprint from 57 to 60 before doing the traditional face-plant in the hallway. After a few minutes, I had a look at my watch, and it said 10:05. Five seconds slower than my best time so far. Not bad.

On the train home, I did some math, since I now have accurate step counts from the ground all the way to the roof door above 62. And here’s the story:

82 steps from BL to 4
22 x 56 = 1,232 steps from 4 to 60
4 extra because the mechanical floors at 22 and 42 have 24 steps
24 from 60 to 61
28 from 61 to 62
10 up to the roof door
——
1380

Right off, this means that the published count of 1,377 steps for the whole climb is wrong. It’s close, but not quite right. I think the actual count will be just shy of 1,400. I wrote to Vanessa at the Lung Association, and she’s going to try and find out how long that last flight after the roof door is.

This started me wondering if the step counts on other climbs are also inaccurate. The U.S. Bank Tower climb is said to be 1,500 steps. But that building was built in 1989, and since about 1980, the building code has specified that steps are 7 inches. Doing some math:

1500 x 7 = 10500 inches
10500 / 12 = 875 feet

The U.S. Bank Tower is 1,018 feet tall. We climb to within about 8 or 10 feet of that level, since the finish line is just below the helipad on the roof. So clearly it has to be substantially more than 1500 steps.

So that’s my stair-geek story for the day. And on the way home, I saw a funny electrician’s truck. “Shock-a-Doodle Doo! Don’t let this happen to you!”

Since it rained on Saturday, and the forecast called for rain on Monday, I thought it was prudent to plan for the possibility of rain on Sunday. So the Sunday bike ride was the route that goes 42 miles through Los Angeles, but never is more than two miles from the nearest Metro Rail station. That way, we have a bailout option if the weather decides to go bad on us.

We rode downtown by way of Huntington Drive and Mission Road, and we passed by the little street that I’d seen a few weeks ago when I was out riding with Carla. We’d noticed that there was a little street called “Supreme Court”, and we thought that was funny. But at the time, we failed to noticed that the next street was “Superior Court”. I suspect that this was not a coincidence.

We rode through downtown Los Angeles, so we stopped off at LAPD headquarters to have a look at the “Three Weeks in January” art installation that we’d seen last week. As we expected, there were more reported rapes plotted on the map.

Continuing through downtown, we saw the crazy guy on the bike we’d seen last week. He was riding down Spring St yelling.

When we got to one of the turns on the route, we came around the corner and found a very large fallen-over tree blocking our way. But that was all right. It meant that the traffic on that street was going to be less than usual, so that’s not a bad thing.

Our stop was at Noah’s Bagels in Larchmont Village. There was a very cute tiny dog on the table next to us.

We rode back through Silver Lake, and then up Figueroa St through Highland Park. It never did rain, but we stayed on the route so that we were never far from a Metro Rail station. All told, it was a good ride.

42 miles.

Last week, I saw a review of “Pulp Shakespeare“. This is a play that is a ‘re-imagining’ of “Pulp Fiction“, if it had been written by William Shakespeare. It had been years since I’d seen “Pulp Fiction”, but this sounded amusing. And since we’d seen “Hamlet” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor” last summer, we were relatively ‘up’ on our Shakespeare. So I got tickets, and we sat down and watched the movie again before going. And yes, it was truly hilarious. All the dialogue had been reworked into faux-Shakespeare, and they worked in a lot of well-known Shakespeare quotes in the mix. But the story and characters were pure “Pulp Fiction”. They even adapted the music, so the show had a lot of the same music, but reworked into an appropriate style to maintain the 16th-Century Elizabethan feeling.

All told, it was a great show, and I recommend it highly. We may have to go back again before it closes.