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I admit it: I can be a tunnel-visioned jerk.

I can look at something as monumental as  the first-ever Los Angeles Bike & Pedestrian Count — the results of which were just recently released by the L.A. County Bike Coalition (LACBC) — and instead of being all ecstatic I wind up getting all grrrr, bogged down in disappointment by a minor matter concerning it… possibly even immaterial to some.

Not to me.

That matter — selfish and meaningless as others might argue that it is — is this: my name’s not found anywhere in the 43-page document.

The work I did is in there from that morning a few months ago when I got up early and left the house at 6:30 a.m. to stand armed with a form, clipboard and pen at the intersection of 8th and La Brea for a couple hours counting the people who passed through on bike or on foot. Later that evening after work I dutifully pedaled out of my way to the LACBC offices downtown to drop the completed data sheets off.

But my name apparently wasn’t worth including — and I’m not alone. None of those of us who did the actual observing and tabulating got a mention. Is it ironic not to be counted for being a counter? Or is it a coincidence? You can always count on me to confuse the two.

The only attention we warranted is the following near the end of the list of recognizees:

Also we want to acknowledge all the count volunteers and office interns who collected, processed and organized the data.

Really LACBC? Wow. Don’t mention it. Seriously.

Now before anyone pulls back on their bow to fling a STFU arrow at me, hold off a sec. Hear me out.

In fairness, no one gets mentioned. Be they a top dog, or a bottom dweller like myself. It’s all anonymous, which is one way to go and I guess is better than just mentioning the executives.

But it should’ve gone the other way.

Especially since there weren’t 12,575 of us out there working in concert to bring this thing to fruition. There were a few hundred of us, tops, whether we were behind desks organizing the whole thing or out on the front lines of this landmark survey marking down whether we saw a pedestrian or cyclist and if they were male or female or were riding on the sidewalk and wearing a helmet or not.

That’s not too many names to fill up four alphabetized columns on a page or two and turn the 43-page PDF into a 44- or 45-page document, but only if someone at the LACBC had understood the importance of recognition and inclusion and demanded that an endeavor as groundbreaking and potentially invaluable and immediately historic — The Inaugural Los Angeles Bike & Pedestrian Count — and as this deserved to have everyone involved in any capacity — top to bottom — listed in it. A to Z.

But for whatever reason or excuse that didn’t happen. And if you’re the type of person to defend or be satisfied with such an end result, be itfrom oversight or after consideration, then fire away, but you’re wasting your ammo.

Because me, it’s a fail — nothing less then a a double-dog damned and lousy shame slathered in a bucket of half-assed sauce.

Leaving for work yesterday morning I found the rear tire partially deflated. While I can’t equate the lesson strictly to riding a bike, one thing I’ve learned from my time in the saddle that sometimes little setbacks have a purpose far beyond being a nuisance.

My assist in the rescue of Acorn the Jindo last July near USC pretty well illustrates that.

So while I don’t look forward to flats with anything resembling unchecked glee, I understand when they happen there may be a bigger picture involved.

In this case, nothing remotely heroic resulted from the delay. But the deflation probably saved me a future flat from this teensy fragment of glass I unembedded in the tread of my tire (that’s the edge of a dime in the back there):

See it turns out the flat wasn’t caused by this fella. It wasn’t until submerging the re-inflated tube under water and searching for the hole that I discovered the wee breach on the inside of the tube near the base of the stem, probably resulting either from a defect on the rubber or from basic wear/tear, or both. But had that flat not happened I might not have ordered up an inspection of the tire’s tread and found this potential culprit.

So the other lesson is that it always pays to get your eyeballs and fingertips close to the treads just as a regular matter of course, because you never know what’s gonna get stuck in there to eventually push itself through to make the tire go pssssssssssssh! at a later date.

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.