Stan’s Obligatory Blog

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.

It was February 19th, 1978. I got up at some ungodly hour like 3:30AM to go down to Bud’s Bike Shop in Claremont to meet the guys who were going to give me a ride to the Malibu Time Trial. This was a little 10-mile time trial that used to be the first event of the Southern California racing season. The race started at something like 06:00. The course was out-and-back twice. They sent us off the line at 30-second intervals. This was good, since it meant that the guy who started before me was still in sight when I started. So I just concentrated on trying to catch him. When I did, I just chased the next guy in line. I passed at least two other riders that day. The photo is when I was turning for the second out-and-back. When it was all done, I was in second place for Category 2, and tied for third place overall with a time of 23:19. There were no prizes. It was just an opportunity to see how fast everyone was riding. And it was great fun.

cycling

Our dog Buddy is a jumper. Lucinda likes to climb up on top of the bookshelf with a couple of dog treats. Then Buddy jumps up to get the treat. Ripley isn’t a jumper, but she is a good catcher, and she can catch a treat dropped from up there. So here is an “action shot” of Buddy in mid-jump.

I see that my “I hate Texas” page is up to #4 in a Google search now. It’s been almost six months since I moved our site to it’s present domain, and I guess that a lot of the sites that archive the Tattoo FAQ have now archived the new versions with my new sig that has a link to our new site. So our page rank is climbing again. Heh. It’s amusing, if nothing else.

Something amusing. Last summer, I posed for some pictures for a photographer for “Skin and Ink” magazine. And now I see that they used two of them in the latest issue. I’m taking up almost a whole page. It’s kind of weird and novel.

Today’s ride was down to Whittier Narrows and back. It was cloudy, but not raining, so conditions were adequate. We went east through Sierra Madre and then straight south on Santa Anita all the way down past the 60 freeway. Along the way, we felt a few little sprinkles, but actual rain never quite happened.

One road we went on was marked closed, apparently due to flooding during the recent rains. It was passable, and it was a nice treat to have the road to ourselves for a bit.

After we passed the Whittier Narrows dam, we turned west and then north, heading back through Montebello and into Monterey Park. There were a few small hills there, but nothing spectacular.

In Alhambra, we saw a car with a license plate frame that said “Nothing’s Fucked”. I’m not sure if that is an expression of optimism or what, but we all thought it was funny. We also got to see how to write “Washington Mutual Bank” in Chinese, in case anyone was wondering.

Heading north through San Marino, we passed Lacy Park and then climbed up the scarp of the Raymond Fault. Then we continued on into Pasadena, where we stopped at Noah’s Bagels on South Lake. That was where we met the little white dog who was sitting outside waiting while his owner got coffee. He was very friendly.

From there, we went south again and went through San Marino some more before heading home.

39 miles.

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I’ve been playing around a bit with bikemetro.com. This site will do route mapping like Mapquest, but for bikes. And they include information about hills and such.

So I decided to look up Fargo St. They say it’s 0.13 miles and 151 vertical feet. Then I looked up Nolden St in Eagle Rock. This is the ridiculously steep hill that I like to ride up. I figure it’s good practice for Fargo St. They say it’s 0.11 miles and 134 feet up. So they are pretty comparable.

Just for comparison, I went to www.topozone.com to get the maps for both places. Looking at the contours on the map for Fargo St and the map for Nolden St indicates agreement with the bikemetro elevation data.

But we know what’s really important here: It’s fun to ride up ridiculous hills.

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We got another 166 spam trackbacks last night. This is getting mightily annoying.