Stan’s Obligatory Blog

D’oh! I had a whole plan set up for Sunday’s bike ride. We were going to ride down to Lynwood and sightsee the jail where Paris Hilton was staying, but then she got sprung from da joint.

Sheesh.

Well, it sounds like the judge is pissed, and she’s been ordered back to jail. But I’ve already made other plans for Sunday, so we’ll have to go next week.

The L.A. Times has a small obituary today for Maurice Marsac. The headline says:

Maurice Marsac, 92: French actor often portrayed snooty waiters

What a way to go. To have your life and career summed up so tidily.

Reading the obituary, it sounds like there was much more to him than that. He was part of the French Resistance during World War II, and a highly-ranked croquet player. And he and his wife were married for 55 years.

Read it here at the L.A. Times website

Today’s Los Angeles Times has a couple of articles about the continuing train wreck that is Lindsay Lohan. One is on the front page, and talks about how underage movie stars go drinking at trendy nightclubs in Hollywood. Following the article inside to page A-16, we see the paparazzi photo of Ms. Lohan passed out in her car with her AA sobriety necklace hanging from the rear-view mirror. And right below the article, a large ad for a summer acting camp for teens. You know, so they can learn to act and be movie stars, just like Lindsay Lohan. Talk about great product placement.

Click the picture to see the whole page.

So, I’ve just spent the last two days on jury duty. At least this time I didn’t have to drive my car downtown. I rode my bike to the station and took the train, which is a pleasant ride. And at lunchtime I went and saw Los Angeles City Hall. I’d been on a tour there back in ’99 when they were doing the earthquake retrofit on it, so I was curious to see how it turned out. It looked much nicer with the scaffolding gone and the walls rebuilt. Sadly, since they don’t allow cameras in the courthouse, all I have is crappy phone-camera pictures.

There were also a lot of TV crews hanging around there for the Phil Spector trial, or ‘The Spectorcle’ as I heard some people in the elevator refer to it. This was going on down the hall from the courtroom I ended up in, so we all had to go through a double-layer of metal detectors and X-ray machines. And they insisted that I leave my bicycle pump at the guard desk downstairs. They thought it could somehow be used as a weapon. I whacked a dog on the snout with it once.

And the courtroom I was put in was Room 101. Of course, the first thing I thought of was George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Room 101 was where the Thought Police took you when torture didn’t work and they wanted to break you by making you meet your deepest fear. Seemed appropriate.

This is Nth time I’ve done this, and it’s the same every time. I go in. I get put in the box. They ask me the Five Questions:

• Place of residence
• Occupation
• Marital status
• Occupation of spouse
• Previous jury experience

Then they throw me out. I’m kind of getting a complex about it. I’ve asked a lot of lawyers about this. Nobody seems to have a good idea why this is so. For some reason, they just don’t like me.

On the other hand, I’m not exactly excited by the prospect of sitting on a jury, but still, it’s weird that they reject me so consistently. They never ask me any questions about my attitudes about things or anything. I even saw one of the attorneys make a mark on the post-it for my seat right after I sat down. Even before the Five Questions. So it seemed clear that something about my appearance put him off. Back when I took the ‘How to Perform Stand-Up Comedy’ class at UCLA, the consensus in the class was that I looked like the kind of guy who pays his bills on time. What the hell?

My fondest wish would be that the jury duty summons that comes in the mail would have a little checkbox on it like this:

Last week, we saw a restaurant review in the L.A. Weekly for a place in Eagle Rock called The Oinkster. OK. I’ll admit it. We thought the name was funny. And the review was good, too. So we decided to try it.

We went there, and we liked it immediately. The place smelled a lot like the old-style barbecue places we went to in Texas. We got our food and sat down.

Sadly, we didn’t like the food as much as we thought we would. It was tasty, but it was all too salty. I got the pastrami, which I expected to be salty, but the pulled pork was also too salty. Jonathan Gold’s review had made special mention of the Belgian-style fries. They had an amazing crunch and texture, but they were also über-salty. But they still tasted great dipped in the garlic aioli.

Cathy and Lucinda had the Oinksterade, which was very good. And Cathy had the peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcake for dessert. She said it was weird, but quite good.

So overall, it was a mixed bag. The food was tasty, but the saltiness put us off. Still, it was an interesting experience.

Today I went to a screening of “Quantum Hoops” here on campus at Caltech. This was easily the most entertaining sports documentary I’ve ever seen. It tells the history of the athletics at Caltech, and the Caltech basketball team’s effort to break a 20-year losing streak. And, above all, it’s great fun.

The film describes Caltech as exhibiting the ‘purest form of amateur athletics’. The players are recruited out of the regular student body. There are no athletic scholarships, and no special preference for admission. One funny part of the movie talked about the basketball coach’s experience trying to recruit players. He visits basketball players who are also smart. He encourages them to apply to Caltech. And then they don’t get in.

And like all sports documentaries, there’s a climactic ‘big game’ that will have you on the edge of your seat.

The director was there, and he said that the movie should be released later this year. Go see it. It’s good.

This is an odd sight on the Caltech campus. It’s 8:00 in the morning, and all these people are lined up to get tickets to hear Stephen Hawking speak tonight. Among scientists, he’s apparently something of a rock star.

On Sunday Morning, I went out to Beverly Hills for their annual Safety Fair at the farmer’s market. I’ve been there before, and it’s usually a pretty fun time.

The people from Quake Cottage had their portable earthquake simulator there. Erik and I both rode it, and it was pretty realistic. Although I suppose when the Big One actually happens, what are the odds you’ll be sitting in a chair that’s bolted to the floor and has nice big handles to hang on to?

This year I didn’t see the gourmet tamales place there. But that was all right. I still had a nice carne asada sandwich for lunch, followed by a chocolate Nutella crepe. Yum.

And of course, we got to talk to lots of people, hand out earthquake information, and answer lots of questions. So overall it was a pretty good time.

This year, I’ve been seeing a lot of public-service ads about how the bottle deposit has gone up to 5¢. This is because recycling rates in California have stayed low. And this is largely because they have made it monumentally difficult to get the deposit back.

They passed the bottle-deposit law back in 1987. At first it was 2¢, and almost nobody bothered to recycle. This was largely because there was no place to go to get the deposit back. So they raised it to 2½¢, and still, nobody recycled. At that time, they had a few machines outside grocery stores that would take bottles and cans. For every two, the machine would spit out a nickel. But it was slow, and the machines broke down a lot.

So now it’s up to 5¢, and I decided to try and see if it might actually be possible to get the deposit back now. So I looked up where I could go. There is a recycling center at a grocery store close to my office, so I went up there at lunch with 20 plastic bottles. The place is outside the store, on the edge of the parking lot. There was an attendent and a couple of homeless people there. It’s only open from 8:30 to 4:30. It smells bad. And then they wonder why only the homeless recycle bottles. Sheesh.

They have a machine that you can feed the bottles into. It scans them and counts them, and it’s pretty fast. So I fed it my 20 bottles. The instructions said to push the button when I was done. And it spit out a voucher for $1. That I had to take inside the store.

So I went inside the store and went to the customer service counter. They said I had to wait in a regular register line. So, after waiting in line, I finally got my damn dollar.

Was it worth it? I dunno. Given that it was a nice day and I just wanted to get out of the office anyway, maybe. And I rode my bike there, so it’s not like it cost me any gas money. But no matter how you slice it, it was a huge pain in the ass.

We went and had dinner with my aunt and uncle and cousins this evening for Chinese New Year. After dinner, Lucinda wanted to go into one of the stores there. It was filled with Hello Kitty and Monokuro Boo and lots of other things I’d never seen before.

But a couple of items made me stop in my tracks and say, “?” The first had Betty Boop and said, “You Will Be Relieved When You Can See Your Favorites”. And of course, my favorite was the scissors with “Welcome to Pig Pig Family” on them. Offhand, I’d guess these are just more examples of Engrish.