Stan’s Obligatory Blog

This weekend is the big Body Art Expo at the L.A. County Fairgrounds. This is billed as “The World’s Largest Tattoo and Piercing Convention”. I don’t doubt that. They spend a lot on promotion to make it so that pretty much everyone in Los Angeles knows about it. So the sheer size of it is impressive. Still, perhaps I’m getting jaded in my old age. It’s just not as much fun as it seems like it should be.

I got there around 3:30 or so. I stayed until about 9:00. I had an acceptably fun time. Highlights included the girl with the corset piercing. She had one of the best outfits there. I also enjoyed seeing my friend Rick at The Mermaid’s Tale booth.

There was a barbershop booth there that was doing a brisk business with hot towel shaves. That was a bit odd. One funny bit was the massage booth with the big banner announcing “MASSAGE CONFORFAblE”. That looked like something straight out of engrish.com. And call me old-fashioned, but I still think The Jerky Hut looks strange at a tattoo convention.

Anyway, it was an amusing afternoon and evening.

Keith Alexander, an old online friend died yesterday in a bicycle accident. The witness said that he wasn’t hit by a car, and if he’d been wearing his helmet he would probably still be alive. Keith, I can’t believe that you were riding in NYC without a helmet.

Addendum: Here’s Dee Snider’s eulogy for Keith.

This evening, our dog Buddy was barking out the front door at something, so I looked out the window and saw a supremely weird sight.

There is some group that does a ‘fitness boot camp’ thing at the park down the street from us. They run around the park and do calisthenics and such. Apparently, this evening the instructors decided to take them out of the park. So I looked out and saw a whole bunch of people lined up down our street, all holding poles and doing calisthenics. So I grabbed my camera and went outside and took their picture. They thought this was funny, but I told them that I thought it just looked supremely weird. Then the instructors barked something at them about not talking, and they all jogged off down the street.

Now I’m not one to shy away from exercise, especially when it involves a bicycle. But this sort of thing, and especially paying for it, just strikes me as weird. But whatever. After all, I used to be an aerobics instructor, and that struck most everyone who knew me as weird. Anyway, it’s just all part of the stuff that goes on in our neighborhood.

Since Grace and Beth have been posting pictures of their cute dogs, I decided that the whole dog thing is just an elaborate blog meme. So I thought I’d play along. Our dogs are not special breeds or anything like that. But they’re still very cute. Especially when I have their full attention. Like when I have a bowl of ice cream on the table. They are very attentive until I finish and let them lick the bowl.

Today’s ride was a nice ride out through Glendale, with a stop at Paradise Bakery.

The morning was kind of gray and hazy, but the weather forecast said that the haze would go away.

We started out heading west. We skirted the Rose Bowl and headed up into La Cañada. Then we took Chevy Chase up and over the hill. On the downhill side, we got going fairly fast. I saw my speed get up to 38, which is probably the fastest I’ve gone in 20 years. Back when I was young and fearless, that was no big deal. But now that I’m older and more cautious, I tend not to go so fast down the hills. But every time we do a fast downhill, I think of the day back in 1976 when I was riding down a big hill in Harriman State Park in New York. I had an old analog speedometer on my bike that had a little plastic wheel that read the speed off the front tire. Going down this hill, the speedometer pegged at 50, and then the little plastic wheel couldn’t handle it any more and broke off and flew into the woods. And all I could think was, “I broke my speedometer – Cool!” Ahh, youth.

At the bottom of the hill, we headed down through Glendale for a bit, and then came back north to Glenoaks Blvd. We took a left there and rode a bit to get to Paradise Bakery. They have the best eclairs there, so I always get two of them.

After that, we went south on Sonora, where we passed Jimmy’s Super Lunch. We have no idea what’s so super about it, but it was funny. Continuing on, we passed the Bette Davis Picnic Area and headed into Griffith Park. We did one loop around the park, going up the hill behind the Zoo and down past the golf course, and then out to Los Feliz Blvd. Then we went back, passing the Autry Museum and the front side of the Zoo.

From there, we went back up Sonora to Kenneth in Glendale. By this time, the sun had burned off the early-morning clouds and it was starting to get hot. We continued on Mountain back to Verdugo Blvd. Then it was time for the long climb up to Hospital Hill.

When we got to the top of the hill, it was all downhill from there. We went down Descanso and Chevy Chase, and then crossed the freeway to get back to Woodbury Road. Then we took Woodbury and New York back to the park.

52 miles. see the route map
cycling

Saw this today:

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyID=2005-07-07T140454Z_01_N06702090_RTRIDST_0_SCIENCE-SCIENCE-MEAT-DC.XML

The best part:

…scientists could grow cells from the muscle tissue of cattle, pigs, poultry or fish in large flat sheets on thin membranes. These sheets of cells would be grown and stretched, then removed from the membranes and stacked to increase thickness and resemble meat.[emphasis mine]

Actually, I don’t think this is such a bad idea. It’s just a way to get processed meat without having to go through the intermediate stage of having to grow an actual animal. Then there’s less waste, since you don’t have to grow bones, beaks, and hair. And then there’s less temptation for the processors to try and stretch the meat by grinding up skin and such. So, even though I’m sure the organic-food-types would recoil in horror, I actually think this might be a Good Thing for the average person’s diet.

Found this today on Lifehacker:

It’s a great hack for Google Maps: the Google Pedometer. But it’s not just for walking. It works for bike rides, too. For instance, here’s last Saturday’s ride to the Encino Velodrome as plotted on the map: see the route

Note that the final calculated mileage of 60.9 agrees pretty well with the 61.<mumble> measured by my bike computer.

Now, if only this could be combined with Bike Metro’s route service to give elevation data, it would be perfect.

The August issue of “Outside” magazine has an article titled “The New American Dream Towns”, and Pasadena made the list. There is an article about this in the Star News today.

I’ve always been skeptical of these ‘places rated’ surveys, since they always seem to end up liking dreary little cities that I’d hate to live in. I always remember when Rand McNally’s Places Rated Almanac picked Pittsburgh as the most livable city back in 1984. I was living in San Diego at the time, and everyone there was incensed that anyone could think that Pittsburgh was a better place to live than San Diego. The irony of this was that while I was pretty sure I’d hate Pittsburgh, I hated San Diego, too.

My personal rating scheme has a complex checklist:

Is it Los Angeles or close by?

• Yes
• No

We’ve lived here in Pasadena for just over ten years now, and we like it a lot. It’s a very pleasant town, and we have lots of city culture here. If you want real gritty urban culture, it’s close at hand in Los Angeles. The mountains are pretty. But calling it “a Paris on the 210 Freeway” is perhaps a bit much.

I put the monkey bars up this morning. It was a bit of an adventure, since the assembled bars with their 4×4 rails were quite heavy. Then I mounted the end posts and added an “X” brace for stiffness. Lucinda took the inaugural trip across them, and then we posed for a picture.

Next up, I have to make a ladder up on the posts at the end of the monkey bars. Then, I’m going to make a real ladder up to the second level, and finish the railings around the top.

Since I can’t do the regular Sunday ride this weekend, Gene and I rode out to Encino to the velodrome today. We figured it would be a nice ride, and we could watch a bit of the racing there.

We started out heading west across Eagle Rock and Glendale. That was where I saw Tep Thai and Tip Top right next to each other. Coincidence, perhaps?

Continuing on through Burbank, we passed the Igloo Cafe with its Eskimo caricature on the front. Then we took Moorpark across the east end of the Valley, passing an apartment building with cube-shaped topiary trees in front.

When we got to the 405 freeway, there really wasn’t any good way to go, so we just took Ventura Blvd for a short stretch. This was the ‘gritty urban cycling’ portion of the ride.

When we got to the velodrome, there wasn’t much going on. We just sat and watched the riders warming up for a bit. Then they started the preliminary heats in the Keirin. This is apparently a new form of racing that they didn’t have back in the ’70s when I was a racer. It was a bit odd, but still fun to watch.

I was never much of a track racer. I did most of my track riding at Kissena Velodrome in New York, which was widely regarded as the worst velodrome in the United States. Imagine, if you will, 1/4 mile of typical New York City street rolled up into a banked oval. That was Kissena. It was rough, it had weeds growing through cracks in the pavement, and it had a big hump in the last turn where the track had settled after it was built. There was a sewer pipe running underground across the field, and the ground settled less over the pipe, so the track had a hump. But, being a road rider at heart, Kissena suited me just fine. The back stretch was oriented right into the setting sun for the Wednesday night races, so that was always where I made my move. I used to attack at a lap and a half to go. I managed to win a few races that way, because at first, nobody thought I could go all-out and last for 600 meters to the finish. I even have a picture of this. Those were fun times. When I first came to California in 1978, I raced a few times at Encino. It seemed weird, not having the bumps and hump, and the track was shorter. It felt like riding around the inside of a bathtub. But it was a lot of fun. And it was fun to see it again.

Leaving the velodrome, we looked for a drinking fountain so I could refill my water bottle. Apparently, all of the fountains by the baseball fields there were broken. So we left. We took the bike path across the Sepulveda Dam Recreation Area, where we finally found a working fountain. I refilled my bottle, and all was right with the world.

At the end of the park, we got on Burbank Blvd for a short stretch, before turning south on Van Nuys to get to Chandler. Chandler is a nice quiet street, and we took that all the way over to North Hollywood, where it ended. Then we went south a few more blocks to Riverside and headed back into Burbank. I snapped a picture of the Work Boot Warehouse babe, since we’d been seeing her on lots of billboards all across the Valley. We figured that she is part of a time-tested marketing strategy for businesses that have clientele primarily composed of young men.

It was just before we got to the Bette Davis Picnic Area that I noticed that my back tire was going flat. So we stopped there, and I changed it. I had Gene take the obligatory picture for the Flat Tire Gallery. This also marked my second appeance the gallery, and so far I’m the only one with two flats in it.

From there, we headed up into Glendale to Verdugo Blvd for the climb up Hospital Hill. Gene had an accident back in May, so he missed riding for a few weeks, and he was fading out a bit as we went up the hill. But when we got to the top, it was all downhill back to Pasadena, so we made it home just fine.

61 miles.
cycling