Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today when I was on my way home, I had a WTF moment. I was riding my bike when I heard the sound of a small object hitting the pavement. I looked back and saw my phone lying in the street.

We recently got new phones, and since the new one is smaller than my old one, I got a new holster for it. The old one was open at the top, and the swivel on the clip allowed it to turn upside down and dump the phone out. This new one is a better design because it has a little velcro strap over the top to keep the phone from falling out.

So whose bright idea was it to have a snap on the other end so the bottom can open up and drop the phone on the ground? WTF.

Today’s ride was one that didn’t really go anywhere in particular. We just went in a big circle around the San Gabriel Valley. There wasn’t much notable about it. Andre showed up and got a flat before we even left the park. Other than that, there wasn’t much to take pictures of. Still, it was a fun time.

Here’s the route, as recorded by Gaurav’s bike computer: http://www.allsportgps.com/Data/ActivityDisplay.aspx?tripId=76717

50 miles.
cycling

It’s time for the July edition of the Body Art Expo. This is the big tattoo show at the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds. They promote it pretty heavily, and it usually gets a good turnout.

I usually go to these things on a Saturday, since that’s the big party day at them. But this time, I couldn’t go then, so I went on Friday night. This is usually a little slower and a little less crowded. But that’s all right.

I saw several people I’ve met before at these things. So we got to compare and see who got what new tattoos since the last time. That’s always fun.

Shannon had a booth there this time, so I was able to visit her, and also got to see Amy eating a big tub of popcorn. If you knew Amy, you’d know that that’s totally out of character for her. But she was desperate for food.

Overall, it was a pretty fun time, even though it was a Friday night.

Is it weird that I sometimes find the most entertaining things on the L.A. Times Obituary page?

Today, we have the story of Shirley Slesinger Laswell. Her first husband had bought the merchandising rights to Winnie the Pooh from A.A. Milne in 1930. When he died, she supported herself by designing and selling Pooh merchandise. But in 1961, Walt Disney came and made a deal for marketing Pooh, and agreed to pay her royalties.

“The battle over Pooh’s money pot had its genesis in a 1981 trip to Disney World in Florida, Lasswell told The Times. Lasswell, a self-describe ‘Pooh shopaholic’ noticed that she wasn’t receiving royalties for much of the merchandise she bought — and hired a lawyer.”

So the battle was joined.

“More than three judges and a dozen law firms were involved in the breach-of-contract suit. Disney was chastised for destroying more than 40 boxes that contained Pooh papers, including one marked ‘Winnie the Pooh, Legal Problems’.”

Read the whole story at the Times web site.

Route map

Today’s lunchtime ride was the Lida loop again. We like the two-mile downhill at the end. That’s great on a hot summer day.

The only funny thing I saw was the house for sale with the big banner advertising “LOW PAYMENTS/PAGOS BAJOS”. You don’t see that often around here.

Right after that, I got a flat. So I sat down in the shade of a building and fixed it, while Eric took the picture for the Flat Tire Gallery.

Finally, it was time for the nice, long downhill back to the office. Along the way, I picked up two more abandoned couches.

It was a very nice ride, even with the flat tire.

The year before last, when we were on vacation at Lake Tahoe, we found my parents’ old slide projector in the closet at the house. There was a carousel in it filled with slides of bike races I rode back in 1978. Included were the big races in Hartford and Fitchburg on July 4th weekend, and also the races from Super Week in Milwaukee.

This year, Cathy took these slides to Ritz Camera and got them all scanned onto a DVD for me for Father’s Day. So I’ve been going through them and sorting them out. Today I put up the first set. This is from the Hartford Criterium in Hartford, CT. At the time, the race was sponsored by Travelers Insurance, and it had a very rich prize list. This race was very popular with racers on the east coast. They had a little sticker with the Travelers umbrella logo that they put on bikes when they passed pre-race inspection. Lots of racers kept this sticker on their bikes long after the race was over, even going so far as to glue it back on if it fell off.

Apparently, they are still doing this race now. It was on Memorial Day weekend this year.

The race is held on a short course around Bushnell Park in downtown Hartford. The Category 1/2 race was relatively short. My recollection is that it was something like 25 miles. There were only a couple of real corners on the course, so the race was very fast. I don’t remember much about it. I just stayed in the pack the whole way, and I didn’t place. But it was an exciting race, since it was a big pack on a fast course.

So here are my pictures from that day. It’s old-school racing at its best.

Today’s ride was Gene’s “South Pasadena Cafe” route, which takes us up through La Cañada and then down through Glendale and Glassell Park. Then we climb Mt Washington and pass the Self Realization Fellowship before heading back through Highland Park to South Pasadena to our snack stop at Kaldi’s. I don’t have a route map for it, but it’s pretty much the same route as we’ve done before.

Along the way, I spotted a pretty girl with a nice tattoo filling her car up in Glendale. We also stopped to see the tiny house we’d looked at last year. At the time, it was for sale. 450 square feet, boarded up, and listed as “uninhabitable”. But today it appeared that someone had bought it and was fixing it up.

In Highland Park, I spotted an abandoned couch, so I got a picture for the Abandoned Couches Blog.

When we got to Kaldi’s, Jon took my picture in front of the Twinkies and Ding Dongs. Apparently, it was hot. I didn’t realize just how sweaty I’d gotten.

I was glad to see the big steel girder next to the toaster. That meant that the brick building had been reinforced, so it wouldn’t need a warning sign like the one we saw in Covina one time.

After the stop, we headed home by way of San Marino and San Gabriel. When we got back to the park, I rode back up to Woodbury Road to get photos of a couple of other abandoned couches we’d passed earlier. There was a pair of them on Hill Ave, and then one on Woodbury, followed just a few blocks later by another. It was a very good day for feral-couch spotting.

Finally, on the way home, I saw a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s car going through the drive-through at Jack-In-The-Box. I guess those guys have to eat, too.

It was a very nice ride.

50 miles.
cycling

Today we went out to Santa Monica to Track 16 Gallery at Bergamot Station to see “The Secret Life of Cows“. This was a photo exhibit of digitally composed photos showing real cows in weird, funny, and impossible situations. It was tremendously amusing.

Sadly, they’d sold out of the book, so we didn’t get a copy. But we are going to order one from the gallery next week when they get more.

We also browsed around some of the other galleries. We saw some nice art, but nothing that quite matched the cows.

So if you’re in L.A., head over to Santa Monica and see this. If not, get the book. It’s great. The show runs through August 4th.

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.

Well, I was supposed to go riding today. I rode my road bike in this morning. But when lunchtime came, I changed my clothes and pulled the bike out into the hall. At that point I noticed that the front tire was flat. The front tire on that bike has a funky valve that sometimes doesn’t seat properly. So I reached for the pump to pump it up again. That was when I realized I had no pump. And I recalled Gene’s sage (and probably hard-won) words of wisdom:

“Each bike should have its own pump so you don’t have to remember to switch the pump when you switch bikes.”

Yep. Them’s words of wisdom.

So I changed back into my regular clothes and started walking. I walked to the bike shop that is closest to my office. In this case, it’s Incycle. I don’t go there often, even though Gene mentioned that we can get a discount for being members of Foothill Cycle. But since I was in a bind, it was the place.

I got there and found a suitable pump. I took it up to the register and asked if I could get my discount. The guy looked at me like I was asking to see Bigfoot. He rummaged around in the papers under the counter and finally, grudgingly, gave me the discount. Sheesh. The whole point of offering a discount on products to groups of people who are enthusiasts for your product is to create word-of-mouth to get people to patronize your business. And if they ask for the discount, that means it’s working. But then the exact wrong thing to do then is to treat them like they’re doing something wrong. That negates any possible good, since any time I tell the story of how I got a discount at Incycle, it’s going to be accompanied by the story of how the counter guy acted like he thought I was trying to examine his prostate. Sheesh.

But in the end, I have a new pump on my old bike, and I was able to pump up my tire for the ride home.