Stan’s Obligatory Blog

A friend of mine went to a coroner’s convention recently. There were some crime-scene cleanup companies there, and one of them had this for an advertising item. Heh.

This afternoon, Lucinda and I went down to Carson to see the last day’s races at the Elite National Championships at the ADT Center velodrome. We went this last year, and we liked it enough to go back this time, even though nobody we know was racing this time.

We got there just as they were starting. For some reason, we had to go through metal detectors at the door. I’m not sure what they were trying to prevent there.

The events we saw were the team sprint, keirin, team pursuit, and the Madison. They were all fun to watch, although the Madison is the best of the bunch. It has lots of action, and it lasts long enough that you won’t miss the whole thing if you go to the bathroom.

There were a few crashes in the Madison, including one that made a little gouge in the wood surface of the track. They ‘repaired’ this by putting some tape over it.

I also found it amusing that there were at least two riders competing there whose fathers were champions back in the ’70s when I raced.

The final event was an exhibition race. They have a track racing program for kids, and they had a short kids race at the end of the day. Lucinda wanted to try track racing, but when she tried getting on the bike they had there, it was just a bit too big for her. So she needs to grow about another inch or two before she can do it.

We got to see some good racing, and I got to tell a bunch of old ‘war stories’. Overall, it was a fun afternoon.

Yet another little adventure from the obituary page of the Los Angeles Times.

Randy Van Horne, whose Randy Van Horne Singers performed the theme songs for “The Flintstones,” “The Jetsons,” “The Huckleberry Hound Show” and several other popular television cartoons of the 1960s, has died. He was 83.

He was yet another icon of my youth who I never really knew existed. I watched “The Flintstones” when I was a kid. When I was 16 and started bike racing, I used to ride with a guy who told me that he still liked watching “The Flintstones”. He said, “you should watch it again, it’s really funny, and we didn’t get most of the jokes when we were kids”. And he was right.

On some level, I knew that a group of people had to have sung the theme song, but nobody ever said who they were. So it’s kind of nice to be able to put a face and a story behind it.

Last night, we were awakened at 02:45 by chain saws and a wood chipper running down the street. A big branch had fallen off one of the trees, and a city forestry crew was out cleaning it up.

This has happened before. And as always, I marvel at how efficient the city services are here in Pasadena. But at the same time, I was wondering if perhaps there might be a point where they are too efficient. It might not have hurt to let that branch just stay in the street until morning…

I found this article on BME the other day:

http://www.bmezine.com/news/guest/20070818.html

It’s the story of a man named Louis who was a pioneer in the field of body and genital piercing. Reading the story, I realized that we had met him once. Back in 1988, we went to a video show and party at EZTV in West Hollywood. And we met him. He was a nice guy. But when I got to the surprise ending of the story, I just about fell out of my chair.

After reading the article, I heard that one of his old rings is on display at Anomaly Piercing here in Pasadena. So I stopped by on my way home to see it.

In the kink world it’s sometimes said that the weirdest people are Republicans.

Tuesday is trash day in a big swath of Pasadena that I ride through on my way to work. But today I saw some deeply strange things on my way in.

First was this. My first thought was that maybe Barney had some bad gambling debts or something:


A little later, I saw this. It’s just plain weird. It’s not quite a horse’s head in your bed, but it’s still strange:

With all the excitement about the new “Simpsons” movie, we are seeing Matt Groening everywhere. He was on “The Daily Show”, he was in last week’s L.A. Weekly, and he’s in today’s Los Angeles Times. And we had to marvel about how he’s really hit it big. Back before “The Simpsons“, he drew “Life in Hell“, which ran in the L.A. Reader and later in the L.A. Weekly. We were big fans of “Life in Hell”, and we went to several of his signings for the “Life in Hell” books. We have all the early books signed by him, complete with a drawing of a rabbit in each one.

I recently found this calendar that he’d signed for us back in 1988. This was when he was doing the animations for “The Tracy Ullman Show”, but just before the debut of “The Simpsons”. So for once, maybe my pack-rat tendencies paid off.

KCET is going to be doing a special program about earthquakes sometime soon. They were out at the lab filming today. So I got out my camera and played tourist at the office for a few minutes.

The most amusing thing I saw was how they were positioning Val Zavala in front of the earthquake map on the video wall. Apparently, having her stand on top of two phone books was just right for the Southern California map. But when they changed it to the world map, it just wasn’t quite right. So they added a sandbag. For some reason, I thought that seeing her standing on the sandbag was funny.

I saw this in the parking lot at the grocery store in our neighborhood.

Today we took Lucinda to the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum in Hollywood. She’s been wanting to go there for several years now, ever since she saw the building with the T-Rex head sticking out of the roof on Hollywood Boulevard.

The museum itself is perfectly located. It’s in the middle of the tourist-trap section of Hollywood Blvd, right down the street from the Chinese Theater, and diagonally across from Hollywood and Highland. Inside, it’s a weird collection of stuff. Some of it old, some of it morbid, some of just plain weird. Pictured here is the vampire killing kit, the two-headed baby skeleton, and the most unbelievable of all, an original press kit from “Mr. Ed“.

Like I said, it’s a weird collection of stuff. But it made for a fun afternoon. Now, if only the Museum of Death would re-open…