Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This evening we went to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. This is a an all-male comic ballet company. They perform classic ballet en trasvesty. The ‘ballerinas’ have faux-Russian stage names like Ludmila Beaulemova and Tatiana Youbetyabootskya and such. The actual dancers are all trained in traditional serious ballet, but they do this as a form of ‘ballet outreach’. A lot of the humor is based on sending up the traditions of classic ballet. Since we’re not that familiar with the conventions of ballet, we probably missed a lot of the jokes. Still, it was very funny and very entertaining. The ‘dying swan’ was particularly hilarious, with feathers falling out of her tutu all over the stage, followed by two very serious-looking janitors coming out to sweep up afterward.

I had seen the Trockadero ballet on PBS’ “Egg” several years ago. At the time, I made a note that we should see them if they ever came to Los Angeles. And we were not disappointed. It was a very fun evening. And Lucinda has a story to tell now that probably no other kid in her class will be able to match.

Today’s ride was down to Whittier and then up Turnbull Canyon. We were supposed to continue on down the other side, but several of us had to get home early, so we turned around there and cut the ride short.

I started out meeting Gene at Victory Park for the ride down to Live Oak Park, which was the official start of the ride. It was a nice morning, bright and sunny, but on the way down there, we rode into a fog bank. It got cold. By the time we got to the park we were chilled.

From the park, we went east a bit and then south to Lower Azusa Road, then east again to Santa Anita, where we turned south again. After a bit, Santa Anita turned into Workman Mill Road, which took us down to Beverly Blvd in Whittier.

While we were on Beverly Blvd, we had the first flat of the day. It was Bob, who had picked up a big piece of glass in his tire. Sandy stopped to help him change the tube, and I stopped to get a picture for the Flat Tire Gallery.

From there, we continued on up Beverly Blvd until it turned into Turnbull Canyon Rd. The climb up the canyon was nice except for two things:

• It was cold in the shade;
• The road was wet with dew in the shade, and we all found our back wheels slipping.

On the way up, I got another picture for the Flat Tire Gallery. This time it was Carl, who had taken a shortcut to get ahead of the group, but then got a flat.

At the top, we regrouped. Then Gene, Philippe, Rick, Maria, and I all headed back down. We all needed to get home relatively early for one reason or another, so we all headed back together. At the bottom of the canyon, we took Beverly Blvd west into Pico Rivera. This was for a short side trip to see Dork St. We’ve been there before, but every other time it’s been cloudy, so I never got a good picture of the sign. So today was the day.

After the photo op at Dork St., we headed north on the San Gabriel River bike path. We went over Whittier Narrows Dam and then went west a bit to get on the Rio Hondo bike path. We took that bike path all the way back to Lower Azusa Road.

From there, we got on El Monte Ave, which has the biggest bike lane in the world. That brought us up into Arcadia. Then we took Fairview back to Sunset and then back into Pasadena.

45 miles.
cycling

Everyone knows that the real estate market is insane here in Los Angeles. And so far, we’ve been absurdly fortunate in it through sheer dumb luck. While reading Curbed L.A. recently, I discovered Zillow.com, which has all sorts of information about real estate. I looked up our house and marveled at what they said it is worth now. More than triple what we paid for it back in ’95. Yow.

Then I looked up our old place in Hollywood. This was our first little condo that we bought when we were married. And it was seriously little. 954 square feet. We had a hard time fitting all our furniture in it. But it was ours, and we were happy to have it. This was during the late ’80s real estate frenzy here, and we bought it when everyone was going nuts and prices were skyrocketing. We sold it about three years later, and although we didn’t know it at the time, we sold right at the peak of the boom. After we left, prices fell for four years.

So Zillow shows the sale history of our old place, and it says that it was sold in 1999 for $169,500. This is less than what we sold it for in ’91. So that means that the guy we sold it to most likely ended up taking a bath on the deal. Oh well. If you’re reading, sorry about that…

It’s officially winter here in Pasadena. The egret is back hanging around the ponds at Caltech. I see this bird every year here. The ponds are stocked with mosquito fish and frogs, so the bird likes to eat the tasty little fish and tadpoles.

Yum.

I just noticed this link on the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program site today:

New USGS Website and Earthquake Notification Service Simplify Ways to Get Information You Need

“The new Earthquake Notification Service will replace the old system. Now with a user-friendly interface, users will be able to define their own multiple regions of interest, enter various notification addresses, set magnitude thresholds for day and night, and opt for “Aftershock Exclusion,” among many other options. The system can be found on the “Earthquake Center” section of the site.”

So it’s official now. It’s been public for a little over a week. About 1,000 people have signed up for accounts on it so far. We moved about 5,000 more over from the old ‘Bigquake’ mailing list. So far it’s been working like a champ. And today I found and squashed one little bug that’s been bothering me for months. So I’m pretty happy with it, even as I’ve been so obsessed with it that I’ve actually had dreams about PHP and Perl this week.

So check it out.

This was on the obituary page of the Los Angeles Times today:

Rebecca Webb Carranza, 98; Pioneered Creation, Manufacture of Tortilla Chip

“It was 1950, and the El Zarape Tortilla Factory, among the first to automate the production of tortillas, had used a tortilla-making machine for three years.

Corn and flour disks poured off the conveyor belt more than 12 times faster than they could be made by hand. At first many came out “bent” or misshapen, as company President Rebecca Webb Carranza recalled decades later, and were thrown away.

For a family party in the late 1940s, Carranza cut some of the discarded tortillas into triangles and fried them.”

And the world changed.

Sadly, she apparently never realized the full financial success that ought to come as a result of changing the world:

” After Carranza and her husband divorced in 1951, she signed the business over to him.

He soon opened a tortilla chip factory in Long Beach but closed it in 1967, partly because of competition from national companies that had discovered the sales potential of the salty chip.

Rebecca Carranza returned to East Los Angeles and worked into her 80s, first as a meat wrapper at grocery stores and then as a U.S. Census taker.”

Still, it’s a great story.

Around our house, Superbowl Sunday usually involves completely ignoring the Big Game. Cathy and I have a long-running contest to see who can go the longest knowing absolutely nothing about it. This year I accidentally found out who one of the teams playing was, so I was behind from the start. But aside from that, we managed to ignore it pretty well. Lucinda had a sleepover at her friend’s house on Saturday, and she was playing over there all day. Cathy went to the gym and then went out to do some errands. And I went and got tattooed. So we all managed to have no contact with The Game.

It was good.

Today’s ride was yet another tour of Hollywood and the Sunset Strip, and then a little jaunt up into the hills.

I met Gene at the park at 8:00 and we set out. We took Orange Grove west and then went down through the arroyo, past the stables in South Pasadena. The road there is kind of rough, and I always seem to end up losing my water bottle on the bumps there. But after I went back and picked it up, we went up the little hill and got on York Ave for the trip across Highland Park.

Heading south on Eagle Rock Blvd, we took a right on Fletcher and took that across the L.A. River and into Silver Lake. Then we crossed the Shakespeare Bridge and then turned south to Prospect Ave, which merges into Hollywood Blvd. Riding down Hollywood Blvd in the morning is always a somewhat surreal experience. The street crazies are all still asleep in the doorways, so it’s quite a bit different from how it is later in the day.

A bit west of La Brea, we turned south and took Hawthorn Ave to where it ended, and then went down to Sunset Blvd for the last bit out to the Strip. We passed a car lot that specialized in old Cadillacs. We also passed the Laugh Factory. Back in 1990, I took a class at UCLA Extension called “How to perform stand-up comedy”, and we had our ‘mid-term exam’ at the Laugh Factory. That was an interesting experience.

Continuing on, we got to the famous Sunset Strip. We rode for just a bit there and then decided to try an experiment on one of the side streets. We took a right on Miller Drive. But it was not ‘Miller Time’. It was 15% grade time. Yikes. We took that up for a while until it wound down to Queens Road, where we took a left. Then the road got steep. I had to say ‘uncle’ and shift there. It felt like close to 20%. But it brought us up to Hollywood Blvd, where we took a left.

Continuing on up Hollywood Blvd, we passed a house that had a waterfall over the driveway. Then we merged into Sunset Plaza and took that the rest of the way to the top of the hill. We stopped for a bit to take in the view, but there wasn’t much of a view today, since it was still kind of foggy. Then we went over the crest and down the other side into Laurel Canyon.

At Wonderland, we took a left and then headed up Laurel Pass Road and then Allenwood. On the way up I picked up a real-estate flyer for a ‘Dramatic private gated mini-estate’. $1,995,000. Yow. The house was pretty, though.

We came out on Mulholland Drive at the top of Fryman Canyon at the little park. We stopped for water and then headed back east down the spine of the Hollywood Hills. At the bottom in Cahuenga Pass we took some little side streets to come out on Barham Blvd. A right turn there took us down the hill to Burbank.

At the bottom of the hill, we headed east into Griffith Park. We rode all the way through the park and out the other side, passing the Mulholland Fountain at Los Feliz. Then we kept going back to Fletcher.

Turning left on Fletcher, we headed back across the river and into Atwater Village. Then on up into Highland Park. We took a little side trip to ride along the Gold Line tracks where they go down the middle of the street. Then we took Ave 60 across the arroyo and got on Monterey Road for the trip across South Pasadena and San Marino.

The last part of the ride was up Sierra Madre Blvd back into Pasadena and back to the park where we had started.

It was a nice ride, even with the 20% grade part.

53 miles.
cycling

I saw this in the L.A. Weekly today, and it’s just too good to not mention:

The Mr. Fish cartoon about the State of the Union Address