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There was supposed to be rain today but being Earth Day, I put away my lazy/don’t wanna get wet excuses and got on my bike for the ride to work. As I discovered on the way in it must have also been Block The Bike Lane Day as demonstrated by a variety of motorists, including the most ironic one (pictured in sequence  of my approach/arrival below): a Department of Transportation Parking Enforcement officer sitting in her vehicle that she has parked in full obstruction of the bike lane on Venice Boulevard while issuing a citation to the vehicle parked at the curb — despite there being ample curb space in front of the violating vehicle for the officer to park and thereby avoid me yelling at her not to block the bike lane as I passed (click for the bigger pictures).

Here’s the deal. This morning I’m stopped at Jefferson Boulevard, just west of the 405, kinda at the gateway to Playa Vista, which is Westide Spanish for Why Have The Ballona Wetlands When You Can Build All Sorts Of Shit All Over Them.

Anyway, the light on Jefferson turns red, the light for me turns green, but a westbound MTA bus, still not even in the intersection barrels through after tooting its horn, which from repeated personal experience is becoming pretty much an acceptable way of breaking that law.

Just tap your horn and come on through because that honk or beep is more than just an announcement of your awareness that you’re premeditatedly running the red, it’s a veritable shout-out that you care about those of us in the cross traffic. Seriously, it’s almost as conscientious as you can get, short of — call me crazy: STOPPING.

But nevermind the bus! Because after that monster had long fully cleared the intersection here comes today’s King Of Distracted Drivers — cellphone firmly plastered to right ear just moseying on through like red means go in his world while at the same time of course he’s on the phone, probably an important call like with the AARP trying to explain how he lost his membership card — again!

But enough of me narrating, let’s go to the half-speed no-sound clip taken from my sunglasses cam, beginning from the moment after the bus honks its horn and gets my attention. When the King promenades on by afterward you won’t be able to see his phone, but trust me it’s there. His cell number probably spells out BAS-TARD.

Couple weeks ago I posted on LA Metblogs about the irony of that “Need Repairs?” sign pictured at right (that I saw on my way to work), screwed there by some brainiac handyman so damagingly — not to mention unlawfully — high up the trunk of a palm tree in Hancock Park. But this wasn’t just any palm tree. It was one of all of those trees on the median of Highland Avenue between Wilshire and Melrose, which collectively make up Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Landmark No. 94.

I wrote about calling the phone number on the sign, getting the person’s (his name is Jake) voicemail and leaving a message suggesting Mr. Fixit get back over from the 818 at his earliest opportunity and repair what he hath wrought.

He ignored me, as I figured he would. So at the same time I contacted him I also filed a request with the Bureau of Street Services that the sign be removed. They fulfilled my request about a week later.

Oh and I almost forgot! I also googled the gentleman’s phone number and wouldn’t ya know it matched up with a Hollywood-based construction outfit’s website, which in the wake of his noted unwillingness to rectify, made it all the easier to post up a review of his company’s negligent promotional strategy on Yelp:

The proprietor at Hopwood Construction may very well be one of the finest craftsmen around. But unfortunately all that’s known is that he saw fit to promote his business by screwing a sign advertising his services into a Hancock Park palm tree, which is not only unlawful but also damaging to public property.

In addition, he ignored a request to remove the sign, leaving it instead to our taxpayer dollars via the city’s Bureau of Street Services to do so more than a week later.

As said, the level of quality of this person’s work is not something that can be spoken of here, but this sign and his unwillingness to remove it, is something that speaks volumes and such willful negligence should be taken into account if hiring this person becomes a consideration.

Lastly while the sign was removed successfully by Bureau of Street Services personnel, they neglected to extract the seven ( seriously, seven!?) screws that held the sign to the tree, as you can see in the picture at left (click to enlargify). Though I pointed this out in the follow-up call I received advising the sign had been removed, I wasn’t given much hope that personnel would be in a rush to return any time soon and finish the job.

Nothing against the worker who got rid of the sign, but it was enough to bring to mind one of my favorite lines from  the movie Poltergeist: “You moved the cemetery, but you left the bodies, didn’t you? You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the head stones. You only moved the head stones!”

So I expect that, while it might take a couple weeks, I’ll load my truck up with a ladder one of these Saturday or Sunday mornings and extract those bodies myself.

Unless of course, Jake beats me to it.

UPDATE (03.25): It crossed my mind that removing those and any other older screws embedded in the trunk might be detrimental to the tree’s health, leaving wounds that could potentially make it susceptible to infestation and disease. So I called the city’s Urban Forestry Division and spoke with a supervisor who advised that the only removals that could pose a threat would be those older foreign objects that the palm’s trunk has actually grown over. He said to leave those alone and just go after the screws and nails that are easily pried or screwed out without doing further damage to the trunk.

So I checked email this morning and found a comment to a two-year-old YouTube video clip I posted of an encounter with wrong-way cyclists, one of my random and occasional “This Is Why I Hate” series.

YouTube User “Berlitz777″ wrote:

@wildbell  I live in L.A. and it really irritates me to see you people riding all over the right hand lane in traffic. I often imagine running you over and speeding away. I think if I ever have the chance to hit one of you on Sepulevda blvd; you know, that long stretch of road near Skirball Center where it sometimes get’s lonely? If I ever have the chance to hit one of you and get away with it — I’m gonna do it. Free Christopher Thomas Thompson.

To which I responded:

Thanks for the comment Berlitz, but I don’t think it’s going to help free Dr. Thompson. It does reinforce the need for me to be triply careful when I ride. I’m pleased you haven’t yet acted on such an irrational and violent impulse to injure or kill someone simply because they ride a bike on the streets that you do, and I hope for your sake and for the sake of bicyclists in Los Angeles that you continue to vent your hate-filled venom online rather than on the streets.

As you can probably tell my considerate reply was through clenched teeth, but one executed successfully because of my personal goal to promote peace — too meet evil, with good.

But don’t go  congratulating me for my insane ability to meet fire with nice,  because I am no Ghandi. Not by a loooooooong shot, what with my first impulse being to invite Berlitz777 up to that lonely stretch of Sepulveda near Skirball Center where I’d promise he’d have no trouble finding me because I’d be the determined looking motherfucker with the bike on the side of the road and a crudely crafted cardboard sign hoisted over his head of which one side would read: “Hey, Berlitz777! Your Momma Rides A Bicycle!” and the other side: “Berlitz777! Queen Of The Gassbags!”

And the main reason I didn’t go that route? Not for lack of hackle-fed motivation, but rather because taking the hate bait from such chickenshits of the city accomplishes nothing but a waste of my time. So instead of behaving reactively and meaninglessly calling him out, I opt to proactively recognize that he did me a favor in reminding me that he and other 120-pound cowards driving 3,000-pound egos like him are out there somewhere, and to be that much more alert, cautious and considerate when I ride.

I’ve long had it with Audi. Like most cliché-loving car companies that can’t help but sell the sizzle for the steak they hypervaunt their cars to be magical life-changing devices full of sexy. In the past Audi’s claimed their product line can “reawaken one’s long-lost love of driving.” Really Audi? Is that the best you could do?

But then it gets even worse with this most recent ad above — slickly filmed here in Los Angeles to add insult to injury. My wife Susan can attest to how much I loath it. The several times we’ve seen it she’s had to endure me involuntarily contorting, usually followed with obscene gesticulations that underscore a monologue laced with foul language directing where Audi can uber-shove their stupid and stupidly expensive cars.

Do I take it too seriously? Absolutely. But why shouldn’t I what with the cheapshots Audi felt compelled to take at such easy targets as crowded buses (trundling along the 6th Street Bridge), bike commuting (in fake rain no less while going the wrong way up one-way Flower Street south of the Disney Hall), Segways (at 7th and Grand), and veggie-powered wagons (in Griffith Park). Bastards. Go pick on someone with your own overinflated sense of self-importance.

Particularly rankling is the spot’s elitist tag line: “Many people are trying to do their part,” the narrator intones over a scene of a Segway rider having trouble negotiating through pedestrians at the aforementioned downtown corner. Then it cuts to a winding section of what looks to be Mt. Hollywood Drive (ironically closed to vehicular traffic) wherein an Audi A3 TDI “Clean Diesel” five-door aggressively blows by an aged Volvo wagon sporting a “Powered by Vegetable Oil” bumper sticker (passing on a blind curve no less). After that comes the narrator with the kicker: “Some, just have more fun doing it.”

At 5,141 commuter miles biked this year Audi: some of us just have more fun calling bullshit.

I’m southbound on La Brea, pedaling in the curb lane. There’s a parked car between me and Wilshire Boulevard so I work my way to the left edge of the lane and as I get there a sedan in the center lane passes me and I see there are four males in it — all of them wearing identical redshirts. Maybe they’re carpooling to work or a job site. Or a parole hearing.

The light at Wilshire is red and as they come to a stop in their lane I pass them noting both front and rear passenger-side windows are down as I come a stop in mine. At the green I get going across the intersection and by the time I get to 8th Street they’ve pulled abreast of me and slowed slightly and I’m getting a sense something’s up. Keeping my focus ahead of me I brace for anything from a “Get off the fucking road!” to having something thrown at me, but nothing happens until the driver hits the gas and the four bust out loudly laughing and they pull ahead. Then the passenger riding shotgun sticks his arm out the window with his fingers splayed wide yells out “Honk!” a couple of times as he makes ass-squeezing gestures with his hand.

One might argue that perhaps it wasn’t about me. That maybe I wasn’t the subject of their moronic attentions. I’d counter that given the arm’s-length proximity of my rock-hard gluts to their soft-serve intellects, it’s hard to imagine the display being meant for anyone else but me. Either way, I smile at the buffoonery, mostly in relief that that’s all there was to the encounter.

But that’s not all there was.

(more…)

Wowza! Via a post at LAObserved about a wholly defaming and highly suspect slammajam made by an unnamed source about a downtown restaurant on the Eater LA blog, I just learned about something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which apparently holds harmless from liability any “providers and users of an interactive computer service who publish information provided by others.”

So basically if some anonymous blogger with full intent to defame and malign however baselessly or biasedly writes that someone  who we’ll call “Jonas Dough” is a “raging pedophile and serial killer” I am entirely under no obligation to verify and/or debunk or in anyway research such opinion and am at entirely protected liberty to reprint it verbatim as fact.

Not that I do much in the way of such ax-grindingly libelous and patently damaging garbage like that found in the above-mentioned post at Eater LA, but it’s really good to know I can if I want to.

And by “really good” I mean really lame.

And by really lame I mean that if this kind of full-assed, irresponsible reporting being condoned and allowed to stand by Eater LA’s overlords at Curbed Network simply because there is precedent to do so (and probably because the resulting increased traffic is a cha-ching) then the least I can do is wipe Eater LA’s sister site Curbed LA from my blogroll and delete my account as a commenter.

UPDATE (11:04 a.m.): Eater LA has offered the owners of the restaurant the opportunity to argue the unsubstantiated allegations presented in the post. That’s a bit like Salem giving its alleged witches the chance to argue against their guilt with nooses tightened around their necks.

It almost pains me to spell this out because it’s common fucking sense, but instead  of “equal time” after the defamation (while also leaving it live), the simple and proper and legitimate and fair and ethical action Eater LA should have taken would have been to use the “tipster” accusations as a springboard to contact the eatery’s owners and get their responses to them and then post a balanced item about it. But instead Eater LA and Curbed Network is condoning laziness and irresponsibility and doing so from behind the protection afforded this indecent section of a so-called Decency Act, while snickering as it reaps the benefits from the increased traffic the controversy has generated.

Dear Neighbor Who Drives The Jet Black Chevy Suburban Whose Clackalacka Sound The Engine Makes Means You Either Use Crap Valve-Wrecking Gas Or It’s A Noisy-Ass Diesel-Powered Earth Killer,

I saw you this morning, you turd with appendages. You meatbag with a pulse. You backed your ship out of the driveway across the street, straight into our driveway because with such a monster truck and such a fershit turning radius, that’s the only way you can get it turned out onto the road so you can go get your Starbucks or more fucking fuel for the trip back home from Starbucks.

I’ve got no problem with that other than you’re this tiny little guy  looking hugely foolish behind the wheel of such a big stoopid vehicle, but it’s a free country. Looking like an idiot is an inalienable right.

My problem is that having just put the trash cans out for pick-up, I watched and listened as you backed out of your driveway across the street and up onto my apron and in the process you collided with the black can, piling it back to the curb and knocking it over.

It doesn’t surprise me that you couldn’t see what you did, because your Suburbass is really just one fucking self-centered, self-entitled  blindspot.

What surprises me is that you didn’t do the right thing and go full stop on your clackalacka engine, get out and pick it up — and don’t even argue that you weren’t aware of what you did, because I know you heard it. Maybe even felt it too. I know this because as you went full rudder to get your house on axles out of my driveway and and pointed southward, you stopped looked over your sloping left little-boy shoulder, took a moment to observe the havoc you wreaked, and then turned back like it was somehow not your problem that you just knocked a trash can over and jammed it up against the curb. Then you, gunned your battleship and drove the fuck off probably thinking about more important stuff like the donuts that awaited you down the road. Or maybe it was Rooty Tooty Fresh ‘N Fruity Day at IHOP if you didn’t run out of gas getting there. Yay!

Had I not had to spend an extra second or two picking up my dropped jaw from the floor I wouldn’t have gotten a slow start out the house and down the front steps, and you and our neighbors would have heard all about what a four-star asswipe you just demonstrated yourself to be. But by the time I got down to the street you were clackalacking it over the the top of the hill, leaving me to right what you’d wronged. Fuckstick.

Can’t WAIT to tell you aaaaaaaallll about it.

UPDATE (01.25): While out doing some garage clean up, here came the Suburban clackalacking up the road into a parking place across the street from me. So of course after he made the long leap out of the truck to the pavement I asked him (congenially, I’m only a foul-mouthed blowhard on my blog… and my bike) what his FAIL was for not stopping to pick up his mess might be. At first he denied knowing what he’d done, but when I told him I witnessed him stopping and looking at the downed trashcan after he hit it he then changed his story to say he didn’t realize he knocked it over before sheepishly apologizing for being so careless. I’m sure he then went home and blogged rich with expletives about the jackass neighbor with trashcan issues and a heightened sense of responsibility, but that’s the way of the world nowadays.

Given my self-competitive nature, I’d been hoping to top last year’s haul of seven trees, but could only lash down a matching number — albeit with a couple asterisks that make this pick-up “better” than 2008′s.

Asterisk No. 1: Last year the seven trees  included our own — which was one of the reasons I started this silliness of sweeping our neighboring streets for pitched pines. I figured if I’ve gotta go to the recycling center anyway, I might as well pick up any others I see that would otherwise just sit there on the curb decomposing for weeks. This year we decorated our fledgling living tree, so technically there was no reason for me to go much less make the rounds and clean up after my thoughtless neighbors.

Asterisk No. 2: The volume of this year’s catch was far greater than last years, which included a couple dwarf trees.

Thankfully this didn’t take a lotta time. The first three were found in the two blocks south of our house and, the final four were stationed at that popular drop zone on the corner of Bellevue and Silver Lake Boulevard, which is where Susan snapped the picture of me lashing down the last of them.

The really good news is that along the surface street route we took from there to the recycling station at the L.A. Zoo’s parking lot, it was entirely tree-free.

The disappointing news was that upon transfer of our trees to the city employees involved, there was no reward. In past years there were energy efficient lightbulbs, coupons for free mulch, and seedling trees given out. This year. Nothing but a thank you.

But I’m not in this for the freebies. I’m in it because someone’s gotta be and because I take far greater pride in my neighborhood than any of the seven lame tree tossers in my immediate vicinity who don’t.

Small Flickr photo set here.

I’m not often prone to political snarkage here, but I can’t turn around in the blogosphere lately without having to STFU and read diatribes from apopleptic people who are ready to kick Barack Obama to the curb because he apparently signed off on whoever in his inauguration committee picked Pastor Rick Warren to say a few religious words at the president-elect’s big day.

From the venom and outrage and yowls of betrayal and FAIL being shoveled around the internest you’d think Obama had tapped Duhbya as our next energy secretary, or Osama Bin Laden to head up the defense department… not some conservative evangelical pastor from Orange County to give an invocation.

And this comes too quickly on the heels of all the misdirected hate-filled lameness after Proposition 8, which passed not because the No On 8 campaign put up so little of a pre-election fight thinking they had it in the bag, but apparently because  a mormon lady working at  El Coyote gave a hundie to the Yes side when her church told her to. Who knew!

But just as I mostly kept my mouth shut through that tumult, so did I keep clammed up when the Warren news broke and the liberals starting harmonizing their choruses of outrage.

But now I’m reading there’s going to be anti-Warren protests this weekend in Hollywood and Silver Lake and frankly I’m  sick of these big whiny battles being waged over such meaningless machinations — and don’t start with all the scary talk about how this selection portends an evangelical shift in Obama’s religious leanings. Even if that’s true: So. The. Hell. What.

I don’t know who frustrates me more: righteous rightwingers or lock-step lefties. I think I despise them both equally.

The irony is that many of the protesters that will be out there feeling ripped off and disappointed and sporting “Impeach Obama” signs spent good parts of his campaign nodding wistfully every one of the 12 million times Our Next President said sincerely that you better expect him to reach across aisles in an effort to bring the country together.

Guess that’s only okeedookee until Obama actual goes and does it.

Look: I get the anger and in fact I don’t agree with the greenlight given to Warren. He’s anti gay and pro-life. He probably thinks the earth is only a few thousand years old and it’s all intelligently designed and for Obama be it directly or indirectly to give a fella like that a soapbox from which to proselytize is questionably suspect.

But that’s about it.