Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Route map and photo locations

Today’s bike ride was a nice jaunt through the Hollywood Hills to stalk Lindsay Lohan. I’d read yesterday in the gossip column that Lindsay Lohan had checked into rehab. The article mentioned Wonderland Center. So I looked it up. They have a web site and everything. But when I saw the address, I thought, “I’ve been by there on my bike a hundred times, and I’ve never even noticed that there was anything there.” So I figured a ride out there was in order, just to see how they have the place hidden.

I started out across Pasadena on Orange Grove. Then I went down the Colorado Hill, but I took the ‘shortcut’. I’d never been down Brixton before. It’s steep, so going down was a whole lot easier than going up. Then I took Yosemite and Eagle Rock Blvd down through Glassell Park.

The church on Eagle Rock Blvd had a new sign up today, so I got a picture. Then I took Fletcher down to the river, pausing to take a couple of pictures of the Muffler Men in Atwater Village.

Crossing the river, I rode through Silver Lake and over the Shakespeare Bridge into Hollywood. I rode straight down Hollywood Blvd, which is always kind of a surreal experience early in the morning. At the Chinese Theater I saw a big crowd of tourists looking at the footprints and getting their pictures taken with someone dressed as Charlie Chaplin.

Leaving the tourist-trap Hollywood, I continued on to Nichols Canyon Road. I took a right there and headed up the canyon. Nichols Canyon is easily my favorite road in the Hollywood Hills. It’s nice and quiet, it was recently repaved, and it’s not too steep. I stopped for a picture in someone’s driveway mirror, and also for a picture of the Keith Haring mailbox.

At the top of Nichols Canyon, I took a left on Woodrow Wilson to get to Mulholland. Along the way, I passed number 7734. Our house number is ‘1134’, and I tell people it’s easy to remember because you can put it in a calculator and turn it upside-down to spell ‘hEll’. But 7734 is even better. It spells ‘hELL’. So there.

Woodrow Wilson comes out on the crest of the hill right at the intersection of Mulholland and Laurel Canyon. I went left on Mulholland to pass by the rehab center gate at 8207 Mulholland. When I got to the gate, I could see why I’d never noticed it before. It’s just a little driveway, and you can’t see the gate unless you turn and go up to the bend in the driveway. Of course, there’s no sign. There was just one lone paparazzo staked out in a Land Rover with blacked-out windows parked across the street. I snapped a quick picture of the gate and then continued on Mulholland to go refill my water bottle at Fryman Canyon Park. For some reason, I felt like I needed a drink.

I filled my water bottle up at the park and then headed back down Mulholland. At the second intersection with Woodrow Wilson, I took a left to take the shortcut down to Cahuenga Pass. I also wanted to pass by for a look at Harrison Ford’s old house, which is for sale. They’re even having an open house there on Sunday if you want to see it. It’s “Reduced!” to only $1,299,000.

Coming out down in Cahuenga Pass, I took the bridge across the freeway and then went up Wonder View to avoid riding on Cahuenga Blvd. Usually, I have trouble convincing other people to go this way, since it’s a pretty steep hill. But since I was riding alone, I was free to go up any hill I wanted. And this one was it. Then, at the top, I went down Lake Hollywood and came out on Barham for the ride down to Burbank.

I rode down through Griffith Park to Riverside, and then into Glendale. I took the direct route across Glendale to get to Colorado in Eagle Rock. Then back across Eagle Rock on Yosemite, up the Colorado Hill, and back home.

It was a pleasant ride.

47 miles.
cycling

Route map and photo locations

Today’s ride was a sightseeing trip to see Powers Place. This is reputed to be the shortest named street in Los Angeles. It is 13 feet long.

Setting out from Victory Park, we rode down Sierra Madre Blvd to Huntington Drive. Then we went right and rode almost all the way to downtown L.A. Forking off on Mission Road, we skirted the east side of downtown, passing through the warehouse district. I saw my first abandoned couch of the day there. Then we turned right on 4th St and rode across the bridge. We got a nice view of the downtown towers, as well as the Metro Red Line yards.

Coming in to Little Tokyo, we went left on Central Ave and headed down into the industrial underbelly of downtown. There was a strong smell of food processing there. Then, at Pico, we went right, and I took a picture of the Coca-Cola building there. This is a famous building that was built to resemble a ship.

Riding west on Pico, we went through the garment district, and also passed the site of the oozing oil last year. Then we rode through the convention center and on to Powers Place.

At Powers Place, I stopped for a couple of pictures. It really was that short. Then we headed north on Hoover to 11th and over to Vermont.

Vermont Ave was really wretched to ride on, but the whole point of it was to get a picture of the “Porno Mania” sign at Olympic. It’s not every day that you see a store with such a straightforward name.

Turning on Wilshire, we got off of Vermont and then took some smaller side streets to get up to 2nd St, which we rode all the way over to Larchmont. Along the way, we saw the second abandoned couch of the day, as well as the Harbin Deer Antler Trading Company. We were happy to see that the health department gave them an “A”, so they are handling the deer antlers in a sanitary manner.

At Larchmont, we stopped for a bagel at Noah’s. Then we continued north, passing by Paramount Studios on Gower. Then we heard a tremendous “POP!”. I looked back and saw Jon stopping and looking at his back tire. The tire had come off the rim and blown out the tube. There was a rip about four inches long in the tube. So I took out my camera and took a picture for the Flat Tire Gallery. Jon replaced the tube, and we were on our way again.

The rest of the ride home was the standard route back from Hollywood. Across the Shakespeare Bridge and then home by way of Fletcher, Eagle Rock, and Yosemite. That was the site of the third and final abandoned couch of the day. Then we got to the Colorado Hill. We climbed the hill and then rode back across Pasadena to the park.

Aside from the traffic on Vermont Ave, it was a very pleasant ride.

43 miles.
cycling

Today we took Lucinda out to Santa Monica to Magicopolis. They have an afternoon show on Saturdays.

Inside the theater, I was glad to see that the building had been retrofitted for seismic safety. And in between the steel beams, they had had various famous people sign their names on the bricks. That was kind of fun. David Bowie’s note was just behind our seats.

The show was a lot of fun. They did most of the standard magician’s tricks, but with their own spin. The show stars Steve Spill and his wife Bozena Sparrow, and part of the act centers on her being from Eastern Europe. In one bit, she comes out on stage with a box labeled “Acme” and talks in her fractured English about how she ordered a trick from Acme Magic. It is the ‘disappearing bandanna’, but then she pulls out a banana. She follows the intructions, folding it over and totally squishing it. Then she makes it disappear. This was a new twist on an old trick.

Overall, this show was a lot of fun. They also have a little magic shop in the front of the theater. Lucinda got a set of foam balls, complete with instructions on how to do a few tricks with them.

After the show let out, we decided to walk down to the beach. It was a nice day, and it was only a few blocks away. When we got there, Lucinda ran around in the surf and collected shells until the sun went down. Then, on the way out, we saw a seagull resting on the sand next to an empty malt-liquor can. We figured he was sleeping it off.

At the top of the bluff, I got a nice picture of the sunset over the beach. Then we went home. It’s days like this where I just marvel at how much I like living in Los Angeles. It’s really and truly my most favorite place.

I woke up early this morning to the sound of the B-2 bomber circling overhead. Normally, this might be cause for some alarm, but today it just meant that the Rose Parade was about to start.

Being an airplane geek, I got the ladder and climbed up on the roof for a better view. I got a pretty good shot of it when it made the turn at Colorado and Sierra Madre. The planes banked over towards my house, so I could see them pretty well, even if they were a mile away.

A bit later, we all walked down to watch part of the parade. As always, there was a tremendous crush of humanity there, and since I don’t like crowds, it was somewhat unpleasant. But it was still worth it to see the über-geeky Stormtroopers in the parade. I don’t really understand this, since the Stormtroopers were just about the least sympathetic characters in “Star Wars”. They were just anonymous agents of evil. It was also funny to see them in the park after the parade, eating In-N-Out burgers while still in costume.

We walked back home to see the horses. They always park the horse trailers in our neighborhood. Along the way we saw a guy shoveling horse shit off the street. I always marvel at how they manage to keep our streets pretty clean despite the number of horses.

On the way back to the house, we stopped to pet a llama. That was a new experience. Its fur was very soft.

Next, we walked up the street to where the horse trailers were parked. I had a bag of carrots, so Lucinda, Claire and Rose could have some treats for the horses. We got to pet the miniature horses from the “Petite Elite” group, which were all very cute.

We also visited with some of the other horse groups. The girls got to sit on top of one of the big horses so I could take pictures of them. We hung around the horses until the carrots were all gone.

It was a fun day.

…or why you should not automatically follow directions from Google Maps.

I was going down to Huntington Beach today to meet my friends from the Skeptics mailing list, so I asked Google how to get there. I mostly wanted to know how far it was. I used to live around there, so I pretty much knew how to get off the freeway to get on Beach Blvd.

When I saw the directions, there was a funny bit at the end, so I zoomed the map in to see. WTF? How and why is that more direct than just taking the ramp down to Center Ave, taking a left and then right on Beach? WTF?

I saw this on my way home from work today. Sadly, my Canon’s batteries were dead, so we have just a crappy camera-phone picture. But still, we can look and wonder, “what the hell is that?”

This evening, I looked out the back of the house and I saw a glow coming from the next block. So I went outside to see what it was.

Around the corner there was a film crew with a big light on top of a crane. They were lighting up a couple of houses bordering on the former hospital up the street from our house. They do a lot of filming there, so this wasn’t anything unusual, aside from the big light. I didn’t see any snow there this time.

I took a walk around to the back and saw that the parking lot was packed as full as I’ve ever seen it. The guard told me that there were two crews working there. The big light crew was filming for “Shark“, and there was another crew filming for “Rush Hour 3” inside the hospital building. The scenes that they were filming must have taken place during the day, since they had big tents and lights set up around the windows so that it would look like day from inside.

I walked around the building and had a look at the ‘crime scene’ that the “Shark” crew had set up outside.

It’s always fun to see a little bit of how they make the illusion.

In today’s Pasadena Star-News, there is an article about a survey of riders on the MTA Gold Line:

Light rail user survey shows preference over car use

They said that a large portion of the riders on the Gold Line own cars, but prefer to take the train. This is Not News. If they didn’t prefer to take the train, they wouldn’t be riding the train, and they wouldn’t have been part of the survey. Duh.

If they’d like, I’ll take a survey to show that people who own cars prefer to ride bicycles. Just because some people do it doesn’t mean that everyone will.

Yet, they are touting this survey as justification for spending the money to extend the line out to Montclair. While I like the Gold Line, I’m not sure that it is necessarily the best place to spend scarce money.

Today we went over to West Hollywood to meet our old friend Jenny for lunch. She lives in London now, so we don’t get to see her very often.

We met at the French Market Place and had a major lunch feast that involved absolutely no turkey, which was very nice. Lucinda looked at the koi fish in the pond there, and we also browsed around in the shops for a bit.

After lunch, we headed down to Hancock Park to the Tar Pits and also the L.A. County Museum of Art for Magritte and Contemporary Art: The Treachery of Images. I always thought it was kind of funny that the art museum is at the tar pits. After all, ‘art’ and ‘tar’ are anagrams and all…

Lucinda had some fun playing around the tar pits. She climbed a tree and got some tar on her arm. As always, a visit to to the tar pits is just not complete unless she gets tar on herself. One of the pits was making big tar bubbles, which were kind of fun to watch. There was even a palm tree growing like a weed in the middle of one of the tar pits. We also saw some people playing croquet on the grass. Playing on the grass in that park is always a bit dicey, since you never know where there might be a new tar seep hidden in the grass.

After playing in the park, we went into the art museum for the Magritte exhibit. I’d seen some of Magritte’s work in art museums in New York when I was on a school field trip back in 1974 or so, and I like the surrealist style. So we went through the gallery and looked at the paintings. We even saw the two works that I remember seeing way back when. It was a lot of fun.

Here’s a vanity license plate that I saw yesterday.

Not to perpetuate any Los Angeles stereotypes or anything, but I see more of these here than anywhere else. And sometimes they’re pretty funny. Sadly, digital cameras hadn’t been invented yet back in 1989 when I saw a pair of Rolls-Royces in a driveway in Beverly Hills, each with “My other car is a Rolls-Royce” on the back.

Anyway, this one was a fun one. And the frame around it really makes it. On the DMV plate application form, you have to put down what it means. I wonder what they put for this one? I once met a guy who had a plate that said “ILOVE SM”. He told the DMV it meant “I love Santa Monica”, which was where he lived. But then when he put a chrome-chain frame around it, it took on a whole new meaning…