Stan’s Obligatory Blog

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

We had Lucinda’s birthday party today. We had about 12 kids and associated parents, so our little house was pretty full. The theme was a ‘cooking party’. We had the kids each assemble their own little lasagna and a ‘salad on a stick’. Only a few kids poked themselves with the skewers, so I guess it worked out all right. And almost all of them liked the lasagna. As always, there are pictures in Lucinda’s photo album.

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.

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.