Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today I had a little adventure in the city. It was actually three somewhat-unrelated adventures, but each was fun in its own way.

In the afternoon, I met my friend Sherri at the Museum of Death. We had done the Dearly Departed Tour last spring, so this outing was just another foray into the world of death. We saw a collection of odd advertising objects for funeral homes, beds from the Heaven’s Gate house, Jayne Mansfield’s stuffed chihuahua, art by John Wayne Gacy, and other odd things. The owner also showed us a living conjoined turtle, complete with two heads, four front legs, and two back legs. It was a delightfully weird afternoon.

After my brush with Death, I headed down to Silverlake to meet up with an old online friend for dinner. We’ve known each other online for years, but never actually met in meatspace before. So, since we both had time, we decided to finally remedy that situation. We had a nice dinner at Lamill, followed by some wine at Silverlake Wine.

Finally, I headed up to North Hollywood to Yup, it’s that damn redacted text again party.

Overall, it was a fun day.

On Friday night I went to Hollywood for the premiere party for “The Surrender of O”. This is the sequel to the 2006 feature “O: The Power of Submission”. I’d gone to the party for that one, too. This is because both were made by my pornographer friends, Ernest Greene and Nina Hartley. They were having the party at Boardner’s in Hollywood, and they invited me to come over for it. Apparently, Boardner’s is where they do Bar Sinister on Saturday nights, so I guess it’s an appropriate venue for this sort of thing.

It was a pretty amusing evening. Lots of familiar porn stars were there, along with lots more that I didn’t recognize. And of course I saw lots of my friends from the leather-and-chains scene here in L.A. So overall, it was a pretty fun evening. I kept thinking that I wish they’d had stuff like this back in 1983. I’d have been there every night if they did.

Earlier in the evening, I’d also stopped off at the Dresden Room on Vermont to join the Center for Inquiry crowd for their monthly Drinking Skeptically event. They were amused because I came dressed for the party, so I sort of stuck out. But I made a point of demonstrating the use of the vampire gloves I’d brought along, which was quite amusing.

But alas, the party was a ‘no cameras allowed’ event, so I don’t have any pictures. But there were a lot of photographers from the porn industry press, so if you’re curious, there are probably pictures out there on the net.

On Saturday afternoon, Susan and I went out to Santa Monica to Bergamot Station. The occasion was to visit Track 16 Gallery for the “No Spitting, No Kidding” exhibit. This is a retrospective of Robbie Conal’s work. He was the midnight guerilla artist in Los Angeles during the ’80s and ’90s. He did satirical paintings of prominent political figures and then his crew would plaster the entire city with posters of them in big overnight raids. I always enjoyed seeing his work around the city, so it was a nice treat to see the original paintings, as well as a lot of other works that never were made into posters. The photo is one of his posters that was on a wall down the street from my old house in Hollywood back in 1990.

Afterward, we strolled around and looked in a lot of the other galleries at Bergamot Station, since there are a lot of different ones there. We particularly enjoyed the Gallery of Functional Art.

On the way home, we stopped off to visit my friend Kathleen in Westwood. I’d been telling Kathleen about Susan for some time, so she wanted to meet her. That was a fun time.

Today, I took Lucinda down to the ADT Center velodrome in Carson to see the last day of the USA Cycling national championships. We went to see this last year, as well as the year before, and we’ve always had fun.

When we got there, they were doing the finals of the team sprint. After that was the women’s points race, which was a lot of fun to watch. The winner was part of a breakaway that lapped the pack. They each got 20 bonus points for doing that, and that was enough to clinch the victory.

The highlight and last race of the day was the Madison final. There’s a lot of action with the big group of riders doing their exchanges. It’s hard to photograph, since the light inside the building is not so good, but it’s still lots of fun to watch.

Lucinda and her friend also got to meet Sarah Hammer there, since she was at a table promoting the OUCH Pro Cycling Team.

It was a fun afternoon.

Today’s club bike ride was over Turnbull Canyon, which is always a fun time. But due to scheduling difficulties, there was no way I could make it to the start in time. So Susan, Steve, and I went on another ride. We went over to North Hollywood to see the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation at Valhalla Cemetery.

We rode out across Eagle Rock, Glendale and Burbank to get to Burbank Blvd, which took us across the 5 freeway to Victory Blvd. Then we rode west to get to the cemetery.

The cemetery is just off the end of the runway at Burbank Airport, which is a fitting place for a monument to aviation. There were planes taking off over our heads the whole time we were there. A lot of major figures of early aviation are buried there. And befitting the tribute to flight, there was a very large bird’s nest built near the top of the building, too.

Coming back, we headed south to Toluca Lake and then down the L.A. River bike path. Along the way, we saw the Motion Picture Costume Cleaners, which seemed appropriate, since there is a lot of movie business going on in that part of town.

We finished by coming across Highland Park and South Pasadena, and then back home to Pasadena. It was a fun little ride.

44 miles.
cycling

On Sunday afternoon, Susan and I went out to Pomona to the Los Angeles County Fair. Neither of us had been to it in years, so we thought it might be a fun thing to do.

We saw lots of animals, which is perhaps a bit surprising, since there is very little agriculture going on in Los Angeles County. On the other hand, ‘very little’ is not ‘none’, so there are farmers here, and they have crops and animals and such. So that was fun and interesting.

On the other hand, they did have a booth selling body jewelry, which is fitting for L.A.

We went to see the crafts and food, too. After looking at the baked goods, I’m totally going to enter my perfect blueberry muffins next year.

We had some pretty good barbecue for dinner, and then we got ice cream from Dr. Bob’s. It was a fun afternoon.

I’d mentioned that Susan and I went to Lake Tahoe to do the bike ride around the lake, but here’s the rest of what we did there.

We got there about 3:30 on Friday. We rested a bit at the house before going out to dinner. And that was about it for Friday.

On Saturday, we went for a short bike ride, just to limber up a bit. Then we went and did the Heavenly gondola ride up the mountain. The views were great from up there, and we also saw the small sign about Lake Tahoe that reminded us about what we were going to be doing on Sunday.

When we came back down, we got our picture taken with a large wooden bear. Then we went to Tahoe Sports to pick up our packets for the ride on Sunday. After that, we went back to the house and cooked and ate dinner on the deck. Then we went to the pool and sat in the hot tub for a bit. We were thinking that that was going to feel particularly good on Sunday afternoon after the bike ride.

On Sunday, we did the ride around the lake. After that, we had the pasta lunch that they provided at the finish, and then we went back to the house. We went to the pool, and we also spent some time in the hot tub. That was nice. And that evening, we finished out our trip with dinner at Evan’s, which is my favorite restaurant there.

It was a very nice, albeit short trip.

This past weekend’s cycling adventure was a bit different. Susan and I did the Tour de Tahoe, which is a 72-mile ride around Lake Tahoe.

The weather was perfect, albeit a bit chilly when we started out at 7:15. But as soon as the sun came up over the mountains, it was quite pleasant.

The ride itself was very spectacular. Sadly, some of the best vistas were on downhill stretches where it wasn’t practical to stop and look. But in any event, the views were very good all the way around.

There were really only two big climbs. The first was up the switchbacks to the overlook by Emerald Bay. The second was where we went part-way up the mountains on the east side of the lake to meet highway 50 for the final descent back to the finish at South Lake Tahoe. Each of these was about 1,000 feet of climbing. The lake level is about 6,200 feet above sea level, so the tops of the climbs were both close to 7,000 feet. We were able to notice that the air was a bit thinner than what we’re used to here in Pasadena, but we hoped that the lack of smog may have helped make up for the lack of oxygen.

I took so many pictures on this ride that I had to make a separate album for them.

It was a very nice ride.

74 miles.
cycling

The Witness Protection Program goes on vacation.

Actually, there’s a real story here, but I don’t have time to write it up now. I’ll have to do it later. But suffice to say that it was a very nice, albeit short vacation.

Did I say that I hate Texas? Well, perhaps those reports have been greatly somewhat exaggerated.

The occasion was the big 15th anniversary party for -ahem- a social group I co-founded while living in Austin, Texas in the early ’90s. This was a big and remarkable occasion, and it actually prompted me to go there for the first time in many years, since they were putting on a big all-weekend event for the occasion.

We flew there on Jet Blue, which was really very pleasant. And it was non-stop to get there, which was a treat. In the past, it was always necessary to change planes in Phoenix or El Paso, which made it into an epic journey. But this was straight-through and very easy.

When we got there, we took the shuttle to the Airport Hilton, where the event was being held. The group had rented the presidential suite for the Hospitality Suite, and they gave us the key so we could stay in the suite at night. We felt a bit like the Beverly Hillbillies, since we’re just not accustomed to staying in such luxury. It was fun.

The event was Great Fun. Everyone was very nice and happy to see me. Susan said it was like traveling with a rock star. On Sunday, they had a picnic out in the country and a big birthday cake for the group. My co-founder Joel and I did the ceremonial cake cutting.

We stayed over one extra day in order to visit with a couple of other friends of mine there. My friend Stu picked us up at the hotel and then we all had breakfast at Kerbey Lane Cafe with my old college friend Mike, who now owns Waterloo Cycles. We also went and visited Mellow Johnny’s, which is the bicycle shop that Lance Armstrong owns. I got a picture of Susan with one of his framed yellow jerseys from the Tour de France. Then we went to Zilker Park to see the Hartman Prehistoric Garden which was built around the dinosaur tracks that were found there in 1992. And finally, we visited Barton Springs, since I’d seen “The Unforeseen” back in March.

It was a fun little trip.