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I wouldn’t yet assign blame for the total structural failure to Chudo’s (nee Buster’s) hiding place to this morning’s 4.4 earthquake, but of course I would stop everything I’m doing and use whatever I have available — in this case a  pair of small hinges — to put it back together so she can get back to napping and to avoid the city unnecessarily red-tagging her residence:

Yep, Los Angeles got shook out of sleep this morning with a preliminary-estimated  4.4-magnitude quake reportedly striking the Whittier fault beneath Pico Rivera at approximately 4:04 a.m. I immediately started tweeting:

Alternate Title: Just In Time For The Ides Of March 2010, Let’s Flashback To My Finest Moment As An Acting Student With A Monologue From Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”

I was a far better acting student than I ever was an actor. In fact, I’m not quite sure what drove me to study acting, other than it sounded like a fun thing to do and a fun way to meet people and it was something to do besides go to a real school and learn a real trade.

There was probably more to the story than that — like my secret desire to be a world-class movie star — but during the course of my days at the mouthful that was The Stella Adler Conservatory of Acting – West, I never took acting nor the business of it too seriously.

The school can now be found in the space above the Hollywood Wax Museum, but the conservatory’s original home was further east on Hollywood Boulevard just south of the Walk of Fame on Argyle. Like many of the landmarks of my past it’s gone, bulldozed in the early ’90s for the Hollywood & Vine Red Line subway station.

The year was 1987 and I was 22. My technique teacher was a fellow named Arthur Mendoza, and I don’t think I could’ve asked for a better one. He was flamboyant, outrageous, outspoken and fully centered in his own universe, but he was also quite perceptive, motivating and intuitive, which are things a student wants from his acting teacher.

As to my fellow students, there was a bunch of talent there, but there weren’t too many names to drop from that class in particular — save one you’ll certainly recognize: Benecio Del Toro. Arthur referred to him as “Beno.”

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I biked a relatively epic amount Saturday to get to and from the heights of Chatsworth where a celebration was taking place in honor of my grandson Aiden’s first birthday.

Happy birthday, little cheese puff-faced dude!

So as part of the 63 miles involved in my cross-city tour Saturday from Silver Lake to the rocky tops of Chatsworth and back in order to be in attendance at my grandson Aiden’s first birthday party, I ventured across the San Fernando Valley via first part of the Chandler Bikeway in Burbank, and then joined the Orange Line Bikeway in North Hollywood for the rest of the journey to Woodland Hills.

The Orange Line portion is not without its issues. There are interminably long waits for lights at many of the streets the bikeway intersects with some of the worst being along the practically rural stretch between Tarzana and Woodland Hills. In addition, the crosswalk call buttons are situated in pretty much the worst possible location if you’re on a bike; far enough away from the curb apron to make a cyclist consider whether all that additional work is worth it to get to it, push it and then back in position to roll into the street. And the answer is, probably, but it’s a pain, and glaring proof that whoever designed it and approved it did so with pedestrians in mind, not cyclists.

But for all its faults it’s a huge improvement to what was. In a past life having biked from my Encino apartment to the first magazine job I had in Woodland Hills, I can remember pedaling down Oxnard and Topham trying to stay as tight to the gutter as possible so as not to incur the wrath of unforgiving motoristas, and dreaming of the day when that defunct rail spur to the immediate north might become something useful and bike-related, and now it is.

And of course my sunglasses cam recorded the whooooooole thing. The main problem was it did so in a 1-gig file that I had to shrink down to super tiny-sized in order to make it even close to remotely streamable/viewable.

So if you’ve been hankering to vicariously ride that route, got about 75 minutes of your life you’re not doing much with, and won’t be angry that you can’t get it back afterwards, then I invite you to click here to view a much much smaller version of the following frame from the video :

Thanks to this post about failed parking meters I found on Atwater Village Newbie’s blog, this otherwise unrelated piece of parking meter nostalgia fell out of my mental archives so I just thought I’d take us back to the mid-1980s and share it.

Back then I worked for a company in Hollywood as a courier and one of my jobs was to go pick up the mail in the morning at its box in the post office on Wilcox south of Hollywood Boulevard.

It was a cool post office in part because there was always a chance you’d be in the line to get packages with a celeb of some sort. Once it was actor Dennis Franz who was familiar to me from his role on “Hill Street Blues.” Once it was the entirety of Guns ‘N Roses before they’d hit it big.

But the point isn’t that the place was a focal point for recognizables so much as it was for the area’s invisibles.

Most of the homeless would do the standard panhandling, but there was this one conniving and clever fellow who set up something of a cottage industry manning the parking meters out in front of the place. I got to know his con pretty well seeing as I saw him in action practically on a daily basis.

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As found peeking up through some backyard blades of grass near the hammock stand (click for the bigger picture):

You know what the problem is? The problem is that “It Is The Wiser and Better Motorist Who Realizes That Fucking With Me In Any Way Shape Or Form Will Have Its Consequences” is really too big to put on the back of a tee-shirt. And even if it wasn’t, it would get covered up by my backpack.

So instead some people have to learn the hard way, which brings us to today’s incident with the idiot in the white SUV on La Brea.

I start the following clip back aways to show you that the soon-to-be-offending motorist coming past me was obviously lacking basic awareness while we were both southbound on La Brea. Had the driver been even slightly less attention-challenged going by me then something along the lines of “bicyclist!” might have registered and been retained in better preventing the blind and entitled veering into me in an unsafe attempt to change lanes. But of course with a pea brain like the driver’s it didn’t.

As a back-up plan to such a lack of awareness had the driver simply turned and looked first to the right before changing lanes into me chances are good none of what follows would have transpired. But it did.

And then, to leave no shadow of a doubt as to the quality of assbag involved, the driver had to go and honk at me for interfering with the vehicle’s righteousness and forcing an application of the brakes. Now, I can put up with half-asleep lane poachers, but when you sound the horn at me like your fail is my fault? Ah, well… the rest as they say is MeNotPuttingUpWithThatBullShit:

In case the comment from the person I passed at the bus stop got lost in all the street noise, she said “A lotta nerve, huh?” Indeed. Me and the jerk in the Explorer.

And speaking of nerve, if there are any folks with enough of the stuff to think what a big man I am for yelling at a woman, please understand two things: 1) I’m an equal opportunity confronteducationalist and I stopped and turned not knowing or caring if the jackass behind the wheel of the vehicle was male or female.

It was in March of 2004 that the miracle with Buster the Russian Tortoise happened — and I don’t use the term “miracle” lightly. That’s what it was: a miracle. Trust me. You can read all about it here if you’d like.

In a nutshell, while Susan and I were out and about running errands all over town the normally heights-wary and edge-aware Buster somehow fell 15-feet off of the balcony of the apartment I was living in at the time, and a whole big series of events transpired to deliver us back to the building at the exact same very moment that a neighborhood kid was walking away with Buster in his hands, who had not only survived the fall uninjured but then managed to make her way around from the back of the building to the side of the building to the street where the kid found her a few moments before we drove  up with me saying something like “Hey, that’s my tortoise!”

Seriously, give or take a few seconds earlier or later and Buster would’ve been gone and I’d literally be spending the rest of my days perplexed and dumbfounded wondering how she just vanished. It would’ve driven me crazy.

So like I said: MIRACLE.

Shortly after that I decided to rename Buster, whose moniker had been bestowed because the tortoise’s expression resembled Buster Keaton’s famous stoneface, and also because back in our first days together I was incorrect in thinking she was a he.

Her new name? Simple and entirely fitting: the Russian word for “miracle,” which I set out across the internest to find. But the only thing I learned was that it was much easier read than said. See, the trouble was back in that time, there wasn’t one single translation service I knew of that offered anglicized phonetic pronunciations of words in Russian. Seeing as that alphabet is entirely different from our own, I would type in:

miracle

and after selecting English-to-Russian, would get back:

Which is absolutely lovely, but didn’t do a whole lot of good for someone trying to find out how the word sounded.

I guess I could have called the nearest Russian consulate or language instructor, or posted an ad on Craigslist begging to be told how to speak the word, but I didn’t. Instead I gave up and Buster, who of course couldn’t have cared less what we called her, stayed Buster. Occasionally I’d get on the web and try to find the answer again, but always ran into the same dead end.

Until yesterday, when I learned that Google’s released a mobile translator app that spoke the words and phrases, only to be disappointed that it wasn’t available for the iPhone. Shaking my head I went to Google Translate and for the countless time entered “miracle” into the appropriate box. Then I selected the proper “from” and “to” languages and sure enough all I got was:

But wait a minute… what was that and where did it come from? Before my eyes was a “show romanization” text link and when I clicked it — wait for it… it was a miracle, Below the cyrillic version was how it sounded out:

So. FINALLY. After five years of occasionally wondering and ever-failing to find out how it is one pronounces my miracle tortoise’s long sought-after name, I’ve found it. It’s Chudo!

Kinda catchy!

I knew upon leaving the house yesterday morning the high winds would undoubtedly bring down a substantial measure of the fronds from the smaller of our two backyard palms, which has been long overdue the attentions of a tree trimmer.

Sure enough when I got home last night I found that the blustery day-long blowings conspired with gravity to bring a decent load of the ungainly things to ground, and I spent a chunk of this morning corralling them off the walkway to the side of the yard, where they will then await me and my desire to break them down and dispose of them, probably this weekend.

In an epic duel with the last frond, stuck up in a neighboring tree, I first valiantly attempted to dislodge it with about 20 tosses of a broom. When that finally proved futile, instead of giving up, I tied a long length of old coaxial cable to a rock that I then launched in a trajectory that took it up and over the top of the trapped frond’s shaft and I was able to pull it down where it joined its brethren.

And yes, in triumph I did a fist-pump. I may have even made “crowd goes wild” noises.

But trust me, that won’t be the last time. There are literally scores upon scores more waiting the chance to fall: