Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This afternoon, we all went over to West Hollywood to see “What Would Jesus Buy?” at the Sunset 5. I think that this may be the first time we’ve taken Lucinda to see and art-house movie, and it turned out to be quite a little adventure.

The film follows Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping when he and the Stop Shopping Gospel Choir go on a nationwide tour to try to stop the commercialization of Christmas and to raise awareness of the costs of our consumer culture. They visited the Mall of America, Disneyland, and lots of places in between, preaching the gospel of anti-consumerism. It was hilarious.

For a special treat, the director was there to answer questions after the film. The film was produced by Morgan Spurlock, who did “Supersize Me”, and this film is done in a similar style, with Reverend Billy and the choir doing guerilla ‘interventions’ at big-box stores and malls. He uses his bullhorn to preach of the coming ‘Shopocalypse’. They also performed exorcisms of credit cards to drive out the demons of debt. Overall, it was a fun time, even though Lucinda was the only child in the audience.

Route to Oven Fresh
Route back to Victory Park

Today’s ride was number 8 in Gene’s “Noodling” series. This is the one that we test-rode last summer. The high point of the ride is the steep hill on Pinecrest Drive in La Crescenta. There is a sign there warning us that mountain lions have been seen in the area. So ever since then, we’ve always referred to this route as the “Mountain Lion Ride”.

Since Gene is out of commission for a while, I agreed to lead the ride today. I went down to the park to meet the group, and we set out.

The first part of the ride was to climb up into Altadena, and then across before dropping back down to Woodbury Road to get to La Cañada. Then we started the real climbing.

We rode up and across La Cañada before going down all the way to Foothill Blvd. Then we went west for one block and rode back up the same hill on Briggs St. At the top of that hill was where we got on Pineglen Road and rode up Mountain Lion Hill. That was as much fun as the first time. I even said ‘uncle’ and shifted all the way down to my 39×22 for the steep part. I still reserve the 39×24 for the really steep hills.

After climbing Mountain Lion Hill, we headed down into Tujunga. We rode through there until we got to the Viking House. I’d put horns on my helmet today in honor of this house. So James took my picture in front of it. Then we continued on. We took Apperson all the way down to the end. Then we came back on Day St and McGroarty, which basically parallel it. We stopped for water at a park along the way, and we also stopped to take pictures of some peafowl and an abandoned couch. Finally, we came out on Tujunga Canyon Road and took the long downhill back into Montrose and our snack stop at Oven Fresh bakery.

After the snack stop, we headed straight back to Pasadena and the park.

42 miles
cycling