Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Today we had to go over to the costume shop in Arcadia to pick up some of the supplies we ordered for Lucinda’s birthday party. While we were there, we noticed a little display on the counter. It was a little plastic squeeze bottle sitting on a wooden base. The label said, “Liquid Ass“. So, of course, we smelled it. And it was easily the most horrible odor any of us had ever smelled. (Between growing up in New Jersey, and my father being a chemist, that means something.) So in the true spirit of the Internet, I just wanted to spread the word about Liquid Ass. This is one gag gift that will truly make people gag.

So I’ve been living here in L.A. for many years now, and I like sightseeing around the city. So I decided to put together a list of things I’ve seen that I think are amusing. Just to have it all in one place for future reference.

http://www.1134.org/photomap.php?xmlfile=sightseeing.xml

I’ll add new things to the map as I find them. And needless to say, Disneyland and the other usual ‘tourist’ things are not on my map.

There’s an article in Salon today about the big permanent bases in Iraq and how this story is pretty much being ignored. But they made a big deal about how big these bases are, so I thought that maybe I could find them on Google Maps. And it wasn’t all that hard. Here’s Balad Air Base:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=baghdad,+iraq&ll=33.940939,44.369659&spn=0.086587,0.172005&t=h

Here’s the article where a reporter visited the base:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/03/AR2006020302994_pf.html

And here’s a bit of background about it. Apparently it used to be an Iraqi Air Force base. You can still see the airplane shelters mentioned near the ends of the long runway.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/iraq/balad-ab.htm

This evening we went to see Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo. This is a an all-male comic ballet company. They perform classic ballet en trasvesty. The ‘ballerinas’ have faux-Russian stage names like Ludmila Beaulemova and Tatiana Youbetyabootskya and such. The actual dancers are all trained in traditional serious ballet, but they do this as a form of ‘ballet outreach’. A lot of the humor is based on sending up the traditions of classic ballet. Since we’re not that familiar with the conventions of ballet, we probably missed a lot of the jokes. Still, it was very funny and very entertaining. The ‘dying swan’ was particularly hilarious, with feathers falling out of her tutu all over the stage, followed by two very serious-looking janitors coming out to sweep up afterward.

I had seen the Trockadero ballet on PBS’ “Egg” several years ago. At the time, I made a note that we should see them if they ever came to Los Angeles. And we were not disappointed. It was a very fun evening. And Lucinda has a story to tell now that probably no other kid in her class will be able to match.

Today’s ride was down to Whittier and then up Turnbull Canyon. We were supposed to continue on down the other side, but several of us had to get home early, so we turned around there and cut the ride short.

I started out meeting Gene at Victory Park for the ride down to Live Oak Park, which was the official start of the ride. It was a nice morning, bright and sunny, but on the way down there, we rode into a fog bank. It got cold. By the time we got to the park we were chilled.

From the park, we went east a bit and then south to Lower Azusa Road, then east again to Santa Anita, where we turned south again. After a bit, Santa Anita turned into Workman Mill Road, which took us down to Beverly Blvd in Whittier.

While we were on Beverly Blvd, we had the first flat of the day. It was Bob, who had picked up a big piece of glass in his tire. Sandy stopped to help him change the tube, and I stopped to get a picture for the Flat Tire Gallery.

From there, we continued on up Beverly Blvd until it turned into Turnbull Canyon Rd. The climb up the canyon was nice except for two things:

• It was cold in the shade;
• The road was wet with dew in the shade, and we all found our back wheels slipping.

On the way up, I got another picture for the Flat Tire Gallery. This time it was Carl, who had taken a shortcut to get ahead of the group, but then got a flat.

At the top, we regrouped. Then Gene, Philippe, Rick, Maria, and I all headed back down. We all needed to get home relatively early for one reason or another, so we all headed back together. At the bottom of the canyon, we took Beverly Blvd west into Pico Rivera. This was for a short side trip to see Dork St. We’ve been there before, but every other time it’s been cloudy, so I never got a good picture of the sign. So today was the day.

After the photo op at Dork St., we headed north on the San Gabriel River bike path. We went over Whittier Narrows Dam and then went west a bit to get on the Rio Hondo bike path. We took that bike path all the way back to Lower Azusa Road.

From there, we got on El Monte Ave, which has the biggest bike lane in the world. That brought us up into Arcadia. Then we took Fairview back to Sunset and then back into Pasadena.

45 miles.
cycling

Everyone knows that the real estate market is insane here in Los Angeles. And so far, we’ve been absurdly fortunate in it through sheer dumb luck. While reading Curbed L.A. recently, I discovered Zillow.com, which has all sorts of information about real estate. I looked up our house and marveled at what they said it is worth now. More than triple what we paid for it back in ’95. Yow.

Then I looked up our old place in Hollywood. This was our first little condo that we bought when we were married. And it was seriously little. 954 square feet. We had a hard time fitting all our furniture in it. But it was ours, and we were happy to have it. This was during the late ’80s real estate frenzy here, and we bought it when everyone was going nuts and prices were skyrocketing. We sold it about three years later, and although we didn’t know it at the time, we sold right at the peak of the boom. After we left, prices fell for four years.

So Zillow shows the sale history of our old place, and it says that it was sold in 1999 for $169,500. This is less than what we sold it for in ’91. So that means that the guy we sold it to most likely ended up taking a bath on the deal. Oh well. If you’re reading, sorry about that…

It’s officially winter here in Pasadena. The egret is back hanging around the ponds at Caltech. I see this bird every year here. The ponds are stocked with mosquito fish and frogs, so the bird likes to eat the tasty little fish and tadpoles.

Yum.

I just noticed this link on the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program site today:

New USGS Website and Earthquake Notification Service Simplify Ways to Get Information You Need

“The new Earthquake Notification Service will replace the old system. Now with a user-friendly interface, users will be able to define their own multiple regions of interest, enter various notification addresses, set magnitude thresholds for day and night, and opt for “Aftershock Exclusion,” among many other options. The system can be found on the “Earthquake Center” section of the site.”

So it’s official now. It’s been public for a little over a week. About 1,000 people have signed up for accounts on it so far. We moved about 5,000 more over from the old ‘Bigquake’ mailing list. So far it’s been working like a champ. And today I found and squashed one little bug that’s been bothering me for months. So I’m pretty happy with it, even as I’ve been so obsessed with it that I’ve actually had dreams about PHP and Perl this week.

So check it out.

This was on the obituary page of the Los Angeles Times today:

Rebecca Webb Carranza, 98; Pioneered Creation, Manufacture of Tortilla Chip

“It was 1950, and the El Zarape Tortilla Factory, among the first to automate the production of tortillas, had used a tortilla-making machine for three years.

Corn and flour disks poured off the conveyor belt more than 12 times faster than they could be made by hand. At first many came out “bent” or misshapen, as company President Rebecca Webb Carranza recalled decades later, and were thrown away.

For a family party in the late 1940s, Carranza cut some of the discarded tortillas into triangles and fried them.”

And the world changed.

Sadly, she apparently never realized the full financial success that ought to come as a result of changing the world:

” After Carranza and her husband divorced in 1951, she signed the business over to him.

He soon opened a tortilla chip factory in Long Beach but closed it in 1967, partly because of competition from national companies that had discovered the sales potential of the salty chip.

Rebecca Carranza returned to East Los Angeles and worked into her 80s, first as a meat wrapper at grocery stores and then as a U.S. Census taker.”

Still, it’s a great story.

Around our house, Superbowl Sunday usually involves completely ignoring the Big Game. Cathy and I have a long-running contest to see who can go the longest knowing absolutely nothing about it. This year I accidentally found out who one of the teams playing was, so I was behind from the start. But aside from that, we managed to ignore it pretty well. Lucinda had a sleepover at her friend’s house on Saturday, and she was playing over there all day. Cathy went to the gym and then went out to do some errands. And I went and got tattooed. So we all managed to have no contact with The Game.

It was good.