bi [sic] le

Since this may pretty much be the first I’ve mentioned anything about us wanting a new car, you might think of our purchase yesterday of the above-pictured Ford Escape Hybrid was something of an impulse buy. To the contrary, this is the end result of a process that began about two years ago with me telling Susan that while my trusty 1997 Nissan truck and her trusty 1994 Honda Civic hatchback would last us pretty much forever, it would be pretty nice: A) not having to rent a vehicle whenever we wanted to go for a road trip, and B) having a vehicle capable of carrying more than the two of us… you know, for those rare instances about once a decade when we’re sociable and want to take someone out — but not need them to pick us up because while technically our vehicles can each seat four, we don’t hate anyone enough to make them have to struggle getting in and out of the backs of either ride. And I do mean struggle.

But two years ago we were in no hurry, what with hopes of refinancing and renovating the upstairs. Neither were we much more in that hurry a year ago when that monumental task was finally completed.

But then came last December when we went to Yosemite and back with my mom in a Ford Escape rental and we really liked the car. And while we remained pretty laid back over the idea of  a new addition at that point, we recently got the ball rolling on another refi that shaved a couple hundred off the monthly mortgage payment, and we were thinking that with year-end clearances coming up, now might finally be the best time for a vehicular upgrade.

So Susan put on her research cap and started comparing models and prices and options and narrowed it down to what she wanted in a 2010. About the only thing our opinions differed on was the color. I preferred the dark gray, she the silver.

As luck would have it, Vermont Ford is basically down the street from us, and it just so happened to have a 2010 that most closely matched what we wanted. Susan signaled her interested to the dealership via the internet and yesterday we went over there first with something of an unusual request. We told the first salesman to intercept us that we didn’t need to test drive it so much as test park it in our tight 1916-built, two- jalopy river rock-walled garage — not so nuch to make sure it would fit (we measured that out already), but to make physically certain it would fit comfortably.

We were a bit disheartened to learn that the one Susan wanted (and pretty much the only one in the greater Los Angeles area that had the package she wanted) had sold. So instead we took a base model they had and sure enough it fit in the garage beautifully.

As we were driving back the salesman mentioned they had a new 2009 practically identical to the 2010 we wanted that they saddled themselves with in a dealer trade and had unsuccessfully been trying to get off the lot for months. So when we got back to the lot we looked at it and not only did it have all that we wanted (and only 200 test-drive miles on the odometer), but it was in Susan’s color and at a remarkable deal not just several thousand below the sticker price, but a couple hundred more below the invoice.

But it wasn’t quite enough below invoice for hardball-playing Susan who wouldn’t budge from the price she wanted and neither would the salesman from what he begged was the lowest he could go. So we left, and literally a minute after we walked in the door the phone rang and it was him willing to move down $500 of the $700 Susan wanted.

Good enough for us. So we went right back and bought it and brought home the poor 2009 Ford Escape XLT  Hybrid that no one else wanted.

Welcome to the family, Silver — which is what we named her. As in “Hi ho, Silver. Away!” And by “away,”our first trip with her is next month to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Park.

But first, who wants to go to dinner? We’ll drive!

When you last saw our beloved 1954/55 O’Keefe & Merritt Model 535-2 With Grillevator and Hi-Vue oven periscope, she was enjoying a new oven safety valve and functionality to all her burners, but was short a couple cosmetic elements in the form of the frames around the Grillevator vent and periscope window and that left her looking a little less awesome.

She was missing those parts because they were both in a sad state of disrepair and we entrusted them with the fine folks at Antique Stove Heaven who left with them to work their restoration magique.

Well, today the repairman returned and installed them, bringing her back panel to a gleaming level not seen since she rolled off the assembly line so long ago (click for the bigger picture).

I came thiiiiis close to ordering a rechromed “griddle in the middle” but decided to give it some thought first.

Above is our beloved mid-1950s O’Keefe & Merritt stove that I’ve gotten so enamored with in since the oven’s valve failed and we had the fine folks at Antique Stove Heaven come out to make repairs last week — which included fixing the range’s “Grillevator” broiler that has not functioned for at least the 10 years Susan’s lived here and cooked with it, and perhaps a lot longer than that.

As an aside, the only reason I knew about Antique Stove Heaven wasn’t via The Google but rather The Old-Fashioned Way. I found the place on Western Avenue when me and my friends Julia and Dave and Jeff and Amanda put on our crazy shoes and spent a day walking the 28-mile length of the street from Griffith Park to the sea in October 2008.

As we await the repairman’s return with the repaired and rechromed frames to the gaping holes you see behind the burner/griddle deck — that’s the broiler’s vent on the left and on the right the oven’s “Hi-Vue” periscope window (a niftycool and energy efficient golden-age gimmick that allows looks at whatever’s cooking in the oven rather than opening its windowless door) I’ve paid some attention to some of its long-neglected bits. I’ve put lights back in the oven’s dual sockets, and I’ve cleaned the periscope’s mirror as well as the internal piece of glass in the oven’s roof that one looks through to see a reflection of whatever’s in there baking, like so:

And in between such administrations in hopes of finding out if the unit was made in 1954 or 1955 (the internet is surprisingly lacking readily available pages devoted to these dinosaurs), I’ve tried unsuccessfully to read the info on the ID plate attached rather inaccessibly under the deck’s lid, down there with burners, and worn down by wear and tear and time and grime.

So today I finally quit craning down in there and failing and just extracted the plate:

Trouble is after 56 years it’s pretty much as hard to read out in the open as it is down in its regular location, but here’s what I’ve deciphered through the wear and tear of time and grime:

Sadly, no actual year is stamped into the plate, but it’s cool knowing it was made right here in L.A. In fact, odds are our O’Keefe and Merritt didn’t travel far from its birthplace as the company’s main manufacturing plant was on OLympic Boulevard in Boyle Heights.

When I found out Modern Warfare 2 was available for the Playstation3 platform I wasted no time getting a copy… that I then let sit around unplayed for more than a month.

Why? Well, part of it was because I knew it was the kind of game that I could end up playing for hours and hours and hours, and I just haven’t really had that kind of free time lately. And part of it is that it’s a shoot-’em-up that Susan would no doubt enjoy for about 30 seconds  before leaving me to be a big kid while she goes back to acting like an adult and wishing for games that weren’t so violent and loud.

But there was something else. Frankly I was a bit apprehensive of it. This after reading a review in which the writer didn’t hold back the horror he felt upon discovering a nightmarish mission early on in the game. His rational side couched the episode as being a bold and risky move for the games makers to take, but his gamer side was pretty totally freaked out by it.

Well, I finally got around to giving the disc a spin, and yeah it’s freaking awesome. The first couple missions are standard Good Guys v. Bad Guys and you’re tasked with killing anything and everything that’s trying to kill you — first in some Middle Eastern urban hot spot, and next in a frozen military base in Afghanistan. The action’s intense, the graphics are stellar.

Next up, you’re given an undercover operation and your commander cryptically says something like “You don’t want to know what it cost to get you in this close, but it’s a small price to pay with what we can ultimately accomplish blah blah blah.”

I’m all: whatever. Bring. It!

Next thing you know the screen is black and there’s just audio of weapons being loaded and movement of some sort and such for a few seconds, and when the scene fades in you find your character in an elevator with several other men all dressed alike. At first, you’re thinking these are fellow soldiers. Cool, good guys. Then the elevator stops, the doors open and all of you walk almost casually out of it into a Russian airport terminal jam-packed with people waiting in lines to check-in.

Some of the would-be passengers and an airport police officer look over at you almost disinterested as you enter, and for a second you’re wondering what’s going to happen next. And then it happens. The carnage. And the panic. Without warning your fellow gun-toters open up on the innocent civilians. When they’ve mowed everyone down there they proceed through the building killing more. They even slay people who stand with their hands up in surrender. One guy caps a wounded man dragging himself across the floor.

Once pretty much everyone inside is dead or dying, the squad heads outside and confronts an army of Russian law enforcement. You advance through them just as bloodily and violently until the end of the level is reached in the form of an escape vehicle.

My first time through, I just watched, gape-mouthed and in total wide-eyed chilling shock from the first shot and the first scream. I didn’t fire a shot until I finally got angry and tried to kill the killers. The first time you wing one you’re warned rather ironically to watch your fire. The next time you hit one of them he turns, yells out “Traitor!” and kills you.

So the next time through I clench my jaw and fire a lot of rounds, but I aim at everything but moving targets. The idea of killing innocent people was sickening to me — even if those innocents were just essentially cartoon characters in a fictional game scenario. Once outside, I let the real bad guys do most of the dirty work while doing the same wild firing, while trying to avoid getting shot by the cops firing back with much greater accuracy. Unfortunately I had to kill a few who got too close for my survival, but at least they were armed.

Eventually all five of us arrived at the escape vehicle, and for a fleeting moment I think I’m free and clear until the leader climbs inside and turns around suddenly — having apparently known all along I was an infiltrator — to put a bullet in my head.

In short, it’s a game you can’t win.

Holy shnittzle, how’d he do dat?

Secret revealed after the jump…

(more…)

When Susan discovered that upgrading to a TiVo HD DVR would be worthless since the thing ridiculously doesn’t work with satellite service, we decided to go with DirecTV’s equivalent, and since it seemed just a matter of swapping out the DTV HD Receiver for the new one I selected the self-install option rather than schedule a service call.

So the new box arrives Thursday night and being eager to get the HD DVR party started I install it only to encounter a roadblock and then find out during a call to customer service that there needs to be two cables going from the multiswitch between the dish to the box — which was a showstopper because the HD receiver only had one and the self-install page of the DTV website made no mention of that little additional cable being required.

So all I could do was schedule an install visit and of course the earliest available was Monday, which I set up — and was going to cost me $49, dammit! To string a freakin’ cable. So all day yesterday that festered and thus on the way home last night I stopped at a Target, bought myself a 100 feet of coaxial cable for $21, and this morning ran it from the multiswitch down the side of the house and underneath it,  then up through the livingroom floor and into the back of the HD DVR receiver.

The next thing my badassness did after admiring my self-install success was save myself the $49 (or at least the $49 minus the $21 I spent on the cable) — not to mention the time off work  spent waiting for the guy to show up and complete the job Monday — by calling and canceling that service visit because I’m Capt. DIY!

The floor-level outlet that has provided the power to our entertainment unit has long needed upgrading. It’s old two-pronger (as evidenced by  the interesting decorative detail around the plugs, as shown above) that has been an overloaded trooper in steadily supplying the needed juice through an eight-outlet powerstrip to all our audio/visual stuff. But it wasn’t until I was back there this weekend trying to make heads and tails of the massive tangle of cables and cords coming and going from the stereo, Playstation, VCR, TV, turntable, DVD, speakers, TiVo and satellite receiver  in order to get the DVD player and TiVo working with the TV and the TiVo working with our new DirecTV receiver that I found out how old when I opted to replace it for a more modern three-prong plug — and one without a metal faceplate.

After removing it, I looked on the back and found a series of patent numbers listed, the first being the top one in this pic:

Using Google to put the pieces together I eventually found a series of websites that told me this particular outlet had been in service in the house going back as long ago as 94 years, maybe a year or two less. One can only imagine the variety of things it powered over all those years.

U.S. Patent No. 1, 146,938 for an Attachment Plug Receptacle was applied for by inventor Harvey Hubbell on July 23, 1914 and approved July 20, 1915.  Hubbell’s most famous creations were the pull chain electrical socket and his original 1904 plug, which eliminated the need to hardwire devices directly to their power source. This plug adapted any of the past attachment plugs to now standard or knife blade plugs common to that era.

In the most desperate days of my long stretch of unemployment — I mean freelancing — I drove all the way down to Dominguez Hills in the summer of 2007 and applied to be a dependent contractor for DirecTV, installing their satellite TV systems.

In fact, perhaps the only reason I didn’t take the $10-per-hour shit job when they called a couple weeks later and offered it to me is that even though I had gone out of my way on very short notice to wait in line for almost two hours without an appointment to pull my DMV record so that I showed up with it for the application/interview process, the young lady who’d called said the job was mine  as soon as I provided her with a current DMV printout.

“But you have the one I gave you two weeks ago,” I said.

“Yes, but a lot could have happened since then.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Unfortunately, no,” she said.

Well, the thought of waiting around at the DMV for another couple hours and paying for another driving record  just so I could have the privilege of driving around town in a van installing dishes and receivers for $80 a day proved too much for me to bear so I said to the young lady she could take that job and shove it and thus ended any opportunity to be professionally affiliated with that outfit.

This week when DirecTV showed to upgrade us to an HD dish and receiver, the better with which to take advantage of our new TVs high definition capacity, I realized I’d made the right choice. I wouldn’t have lasted a week on the job because I would’ve insisted on quality installations, not quantity.

When the DirecTV dude showed up, he was on time, affable and knowledgeable and in a few minutes was  at work installing the requisite new dish atop the rear dormer. Between then and a couple hours later I’d put a $20 in my pocket to tip him with, but later when he powered everything up and  we were in the living room admiring the crystal clear picture coming out of our Sony Bravia, my joy at the beautiful image was tempered by the absolute crap job he did laying the cable on the roof.

As a result, the $20 in my pocket wasn’t going anywhere near the guy, and I invited him into the backyard to see what he had to say about the wickedly unappealing display of thick blazing white cables running down the dormer wall and oozing along the roof where he then ridiculously wrapped it around the outside of the rain gutter, as shown at right (click for the bigger picture) before tucking it under the eave and nailing the excess to the wall.

He shrugged somewhat sheepishly.

“If this were your house, would you be happy with that?” I asked.

He said he understood my disappointment and gave me some song and dance about not having enough black cable with him and that with free installations it was pretty much the best he was allowed to do.

The reason I didn’t call bullshit is that I’d already figured out how to make practically all of it invisible and decided to DIY it where DirecTV was unwilling to tread. Sure I could have stomped my foot and demanded to talk to his supervisor and bitched and moaned until things got made right, but I hate doing that almost as much as I hate dealing with people who have to be harassed into doing anything more then the least amount of work, so I thanked him for his marginal efforts, bid him farewell and then suffered the shoddiness until this morning when I got busy undoing his deeds and redoing it right: by drilling a small hole through the wall under the eave, dropping the cables through that vent to the right of the dormer and moving it all under the roof to connect up inside into the crawlspace off the master bedroom. I’m sure you’ll agree the end result (at left, click for the bigger picture) is as it should and could have been in the first place.

In addition, as you are just able to see sticking into the right side of the picture at the roof line, the installer didn’t see it fit to remove our old dish, so I took that down too, along with all the old coaxial cabling that ran down the north side of the house. While I was up there I also removed the dish unseen on the south side of the roof formerly connected to our upstairs tenant’s TV.

Our roof hasn’t been so uncluttered in years.

When flat-panel TVs  became all the rage several years ago, the main thing I raged against were the multi-thousand-dollar pricetags. Just as I vowed never to ever own a car that cost me more than $30,000, I swore I’d never suffer a four-digit pricetag for a boobtube no matter how mind-blowing the picture.

On top of that even as little as a couple years ago (when the prices came down enough for my mom who bought a $1,200 Vizio model from Costco) there wasn’t all that much in the way of high-definition broadcasting. Hooking up my mom’s TV for her and flipping through the channels I was immediately put off by the prevalence of non-HD programming accompanied by the requisite vertical bars bordering a picture that really looked no better than it did on a regular box.

But in keeping with rewarding myself for all the bike commuting I do (last year’s prize was an iPhone), I’d decided early on in this year when digital finally killed the analog star that I was finally going to get the Campbell household some true 1080p flat panel goodness too replace the trusty but tiny 27″ Sanyo we’ve been watching since 2004.

But still I wasn’t in any frenzied impulsed hurry… that is, until a couple weeks ago when a mailer arrived from Costco that alerted me to a website-only offering beginning September 14 for a limited time of a 46″ Sceptre model for $799. I did some online research and for the most part reviews for that model were positive. And so I began counting down the days.

Then, last week, it dawned on me that 46″ is pretty big and I’d better bust out a tape measure and get the dimensions of our TV cabinet, which is a very good thing seeing as how it’s only 39″ wide. Dangit.

Fixated on the 46′er I’d briefly scoped out the ideas of either getting a new cabinet or mounting it on various walls or putting the thing way up high on top of the existing cabinet. Dutifully I pitched the various scenarios to Susan after she saw me eyeballing the wall behind the sofa and wondered what was on my devious mind. She did her best not to laugh out loud at the options, especially since my jonesing for a new tube took her a bit by surprise and she wasn’t as excited about it as I was.

Last but not least, I told her, was the most sensible solution. That instead of buying new furniture or rearranging the entire room to accommodate the TV, we get a TV that actually fit inside the furniture we had. She was all for that one. Gave it her enthusiastic endorsement.

So back to the research drawing board I went on the hunt for TVs that the cabinet could contain. While it seemed that a 37″ model was as big as we could go, I did find a 40″ Sony Bravia, whose 38 7/8ths-inches width meant that I nervously quadruple-quadruple-checked my cabinet measurement to make sure it was indeed 39″, since there was hardly room for error — basically 1/16th-inch on either side.

Then it came to the price. Samy’s had been selling it for $899, but that ended Saturday, gah! Both Costco and Best Buy had it for $1,199, which as previously mentioned was $200 more than I was genetically and morally able/willing to spend. Just when I thought all was postponed, up came Howard’s to the rescue with their advertising insert in the Sunday LA Times: 40″ Sony Bravia, $899.

So Susan and me and the tape measure loaded into the truck and drove out to the Howard’s in San Gabriel where they had one on display and I triple-checked that it was for sure a pinch less than 39″ wide. Even with that proof I was still thinking of going with a 37″ Samsung, but it was only a hundred cheaper and so the Sony Bravia kept calling me back to it.

It’ll fit, I kept saying. To myself. And to Susan. And Alex the salesman.

After mulling a bit more we thanked Alex and split telling him we’d be back, and utilizing our regional proximity to the wonderful San Gabriel Mission and the magnificent L.A. County Arboretum and went and played tourists in our own town at those two landmarks. Then we went and got a bite to eat. Then we went back and bought it and brought it home.

She fit into the cabinet as if they’d been custom made for each other, and the installation was pretty painless. She was up and running in time for us to enjoy the season finale of “True Blood,” on HBO. And if Susan had been previously uninspired at the thought of a new TV, she was on the same page as me as we sat in front of it and took in the big new shiny screen.

But we’re not quite all the way to high definition magic yet since we’ve got a standard satellite receiver box and a standard TiVo DVR. So what we need first up is an HD receiver upgrade from DirecTV (ordered this morning and coming this week), and then down the road we may have to think about an HD DVR.

Far more important than an HD DVR at this point is a Blu-Ray DVD player, of course. But in the meantime, I dropped in a disc to our regular DVD player just to check it and the trailer for “Shutter Island” popped up and looked awesome enough.

For now.

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…)