Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Chuck is trying to start a new meme:

Go to Google. Paste whatever’s on your clipboard right now into the search box and click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Report your result — IN YOUR OWN BLOG.

Well, you gotta be explicit in these things. Memes are like religion. They don’t spread themselves. Somebody’s gotta stand on a soap box and shout about it.

Apropos of nothing, this reminds me of my old friend Stu’s joke about religion:

“Marx said that religion is the opiate of the masses, but I think religion is more like cocaine. It makes people paranoid, it makes them crazy, and it makes them give all their money to sleazy characters.”

Anyway, so here are my results:

I got:

Your search – mailparams where pid=274; – did not match any documents.

The only thing that made it funny is that there was a text ad on the side of the page that said:

Sponsored Links
Learn PID Control
Self-Help Training Manuals
Help You Master PID Control
SimpleSolvers.com

I’m curious just what ‘PID Control’ is.

I was looking at my site statistics, and I saw some referrals in the logs from a livejournal site that I didn’t recognize. She had hotlinked one of the images in my photo gallery. I’m on record as being annoyed by hotlinking, but I’ve not found a fully-reliable way to prevent it, so I just let it go. She also had this ‘Are you a Republican‘ quiz linked there. With a score of 86%, I’m guessing that this is someone I wouldn’t get along with.

Anyway, I scored only 6% on their scale. So my soul is safe. But the little cut-and-paste code to display the badge and link back to their site was broken. And I’m not going to spend my time debugging somebody else’s silly blog toy.

Gene said that today’s ride would be hilly. And it was. It was fun.

Back in my racing days, when I was out riding it was always a point of honor that I had to be the first one to the top of every hill. And no matter how much it hurt, I almost always did it. That urge has never left me, even though now that I’m 45, I don’t always have the strength to do it. But I still want to.

Today’s ride started out up Altadena Drive. We went up the hill to the mountain front, and then west over to the arroyo, just across from JPL. Then we went down Windsor, passing the house with the two plastic cows in the yard. We took Woodbury across into La Cañada. Then we started climbing. It was about this time that Jon got into the Flat Tire Gallery. This was his second flat of the day, but since the first one was in the parking lot at the start of the ride, I only took pictures of the second one. While we were waiting for John to fix his flat, we met up with another rider. Dan is new to the area, so he decided to join us for the rest of the ride.

A bit farther up the hill, we passed a house that looked like it must belong to a firefighter. The gate was decorated in a very ornate flame motif, and it had a fire extinguisher in the middle of it.

We went up a bunch of different streets to end up at the top of the hill between La Cañada and Glendale. The road up there was closed to traffic, due to a small landslide, but that wasn’t a problem for us. We crested the hill and then went down Mountain Ave into Glendale. At the bottom, we crossed Verdugo and then went up into the Verdugo hills.

We cruised along through the hills for quite a while. We passed one rather interesting-looking house up there before coming down into Burbank and Glenoaks Blvd. Then we went left and headed back into Glendale, where we stopped for a snack at the Paradise Bakery. They have the best chocolate eclairs there. Jon and I both had two each. We also all ate some homemade olive bread that I’d brought along.

After the stop, we headed back across Glendale. We passed by the Harp Center, and then headed up Chevy Chase. After a bit of uphill, we turned on Linda Vista to cross over the hill into Pasadena. At the top, we paused briefly for a souvenier picture, and then headed down the hill to the Rose Bowl.

From the Rose Bowl, we went east across Pasadena on Orange Grove and back to the park.

45 miles.

cycling

Well, since Carol got the Evil from me, I had to try the Commonly Confused Word test:

English Genius
You scored 100% Beginner, 100% Intermediate, 100% Advanced, and 80% Expert!

http://www.okcupid.com/tests/take?testid=14457200288064322170

So I’m a grammar geek, too…

Found this thanks to Karl Elvis and Ray. While I can’t compare to the essential evil of Karl, I think 35% is pretty good:

One of the great things about living in L.A. is that we can just go out and play tourist any time we want. So today was the day.

We went over to West Hollywood and had lunch at the French Quarter, which is one of the big gay hangouts for Sunday brunch. The food is pretty good, too. And for us, it’s a chance to see what it’s like to be in the minority.

Next, we went to the Hustler Hollywood store. I got a DVD player for my 10th anniversary at my job, so we wanted to get something to play in it. Outside the store, we saw Ron Jeremy’s hand prints in the concrete. They had several others, but he was the one we are most familiar with.

After that, we went back to Hollywood Boulevard. Along the way, we passed Rock-n-Roll Ralphs on Sunset. We used to shop there sometimes when we lived in Hollywood, and it was always an adventure. When we parked, we saw the to the Skooby’s Hot Dogs car, as well as the dancing shoes on the parking structure. Then we went to the Erotic Museum for the Hollywood Sex Gods exhibit. It was interesting, giving the history of movie censorship from the Hays Code up through the establishment of the present ratings system, as well as a little bit of history of the association of porn and Los Angeles. We also saw some original Vargas Girls, Hugh Hefner’s robe, slippers, and pipe, and the inside of a Real Doll. Yikes. It looked kind of like the Terminator’s love-doll fantasy, with the metal skeleton exposed.

When we left to come home, we passed the former Pussycat Theater on Hollywood Boulvard. I find it immensely amusing that the former smut palace, done in by the invention of the VCR, has found new life as a church.

Lucinda has been taking piano lessons for about a year now. All this time, she has been playing a little toy piano at home, but she’s been getting quite good at it. Recently when she was at ballet, she asked to play the grand piano they had there, and she sounded quite good. Since a real piano is out of our range, both in terms of money and space in the house, we got her a little Casio keyboard to practice on. It sounds pretty good, and the key feel is pretty close to a real piano, right down to the pressure sensitivity of the keys. So she’s having fun playing with it.

It was April 23, 1978. It was the Acton Road Race. I was excited, because they had separate races for categories 1 and 2. Usually in those days, 1 and 2 were combined, and if you were a Cat 2 like me, it meant that it was harder to place in the top ten. So the prospect of a separate Category 2 race was very nice. On the other hand, it was in the mountains, and there were some climbs on the course. I was generally pretty good at hills, but being from New Jersey, I wasn’t used to the size of the hills here.

The course was a nice 24-mile loop through the hills north of the Antelope Valley Freeway, about half-way from Los Angeles to Palmdale. The race was three laps, or 72 miles.

The course was very nice. The roads were smooth, and it was a perfect spring day. The pack was about 50-60 riders. I was hoping just to stay in the pack and finish with the group, since I’d had some bad experiences in the last two road races in the mountains.

The pack stayed together for the whole race. On the last lap, when we were going up the last big climb, I lost contact with the pack. I was feeling discouraged, and I was having trouble going up the hill. But then, about half-way up the hill, I suddenly started thinking:

“I am not going to let this happen again. I got dropped at Pyramid Lake. I got dropped at Bouquet Canyon. I am not getting dropped again!”

And suddenly, I was suffused with the strength of ten Grinches. I caught up with the pack at the crest of the hill. At that point, I was going so fast, that I ended up at the front. We crested the hill and went flying down the other side. We crossed the freeway and took the right turn that meant we were almost at the finish. I was so excited that I’d caught the pack that I was able to stay at the front all the way to the end. The finish was an uphill sprint, and I managed to reach the proper mental state of Zen Hulk-dom to do the sprint.

I came in 8th, which was pretty good, considering that I recovered from getting dropped. In fact, that was the only race I ever rode where I was able to catch the pack after being dropped. So overall, it was a remarkable and perfect day.

And sadly, as with most of my favorite racing stories, I have no pictures to go along with it. Just my own memories.

Last Monday, I saw an item on cnn.com about a street in Pico Rivera named Dork St. Of course, my first thought was to look it up on the map and see if it was close enough to ride to. It turns out to be just below Whittier Narrows Dam, so I wrote to Gene and we made plans for a ride.

We met at Victory Park here in Pasadena and headed south. We went through San Gabriel, passing by the convalescent hospital where Curly Howard died. Then we turned south through Whittier Narrows and into Pico Rivera.

When we got to Dork St., I had to take some pictures. Sadly, my photo-op with the sign didn’t come out very well, so I guess we’ll have to go back again some time.

After that, we got on the San Gabriel River bike path and headed north. The path took a kind of strange route around and over the dam, but the rest of it was pretty much straight and slightly uphill. It was along here that Newton met up with us for the ride into Glendora. We also passed the big Irwindale gravel pit, which was also Fred Flintstone’s gravel pit.

Then we headed east and north into Glendora. In Old Town, we saw a store that apparently specializes in Beanie Babies. And I’d thought that Beanie Babies had peaked some years ago.

Next, it was time to see the Castle. Rubel’s Castle is something of a landmark in Glendora. Sadly, like all good castles, it was surrounded by a high wall, so we couldn’t see much. Still, it was interesting.

From there, we headed back by way of the San Gabriel River bike path, and then through Duarte, Monrovia, and Arcadia.

51 miles.

cycling

Today, Lucinda’s class did a little performance at lunchtime. The had been rehearsing some songs for the last few weeks, and today was the day that they invited the parents to come and see. So they all filed in and took their places on the front steps of the school. They sang “It’s a Grand Old Flag”, “America the Beautiful”, “God Bless America”, and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee”. It was all very cute.

It was also an interesting adventure, since I rode my bike to the school from the office. It’s about 5.5 miles, and the last bit is pretty steep uphill. It wasn’t bad, though. I’ve done it before. And on the way back, I passed by some filming near Caltech. Whatever this was, it was a big shoot. There were trucks and trailers parked along the streets for a couple of blocks on both sides.