[sic]

Caught you! You lousy… paper… thieving…

Cat?!

Alas, after putting out the decoy paper this neighborhood feline proved to have the most interest of any of the parade of beings that my surveillance camera caught passing by between about 8:30 p.m. last night and a little after 9 a.m. this morning.

The switch-and-bait manuever occured around 5:40 a.m. and even though I finally declared the covert operation unsuccessful and shut it down about four hours later, I had fun reviewing the video clips captured from the cam to the computer and have compiled a sequence of stills for your viewing pleasure:

Better luck next week.

I credit/blame Julia for pointing me from her blog to the “Dramatic Chimpmunk” clip (beside-the-point point of zoological order: it’s a prairie dog, not a chimpmunk) that’s been making the rounds and rounds on the internut and being watched in numerous variations on YouTube by millions.

I have only but myself to blame for contributing to and perpetuating the madness with my own version titled

Sorry.

Ahh but I love how the internest brings us together from all walks of life. Checking my Wordpress dashboard this morning I find a comment to a post titled “Pupdate No. 1″ written July 20, 2006, reflecting on our first week with the four pups we rescued in Utah while on vacation that month.

Like most comments to old posts, I click on it thinking it can’t be anything more than spam, but instead I find the comment is from one Katherine Von Drachenberg, who writes:

“I Googled for something completely different, but found your page…and have to say thanks. Nice read.”

I suppose I run the risk of getting fished in and it in fact being spam of some sort, but what the hell; I replied in the comments thanking her for reading then I clicked on the link to her name to see where it led, and I found out. Dang. Perhaps I can blame my age, my unfamiliarity with the rarefied world of tatoo and its practitioners, or my lack of diverse television viewing as being the reasons why I’d never heard of Kat Von D, but a lot of other people have and it’s nice that a little Google misdirection brought me to her attention and her to mine.

The young lady’s got 486,016 friends on MySpace. She’s apparently quite the up-and-coming artist , boosted primarily by her unique talent with a needle on skin but also perhaps by her connection to Bam Margera of “Jackass” fame and moreso by her place first on the TLC show Miami Ink, and now its spinoff L.A. Ink, coming in August.

It’s as close to a celeb encounter as I’ve ever had here at my humble little e-bode and I’ll can my skepticism and just appreciate Kat for dropping by and saying hi.

UPDATED (6/25): Nah, it’s spam after all. I got a comment this morning to my year-old post about the Franklin Avenue meet-up at Coles from an “Interior Lighting” whose ambiguous praise just screamed spam. What connects the two is not only that they’re formatted exactly the same way:

But it’s linked to the same generic type of dot-info webpage as Kat’s. On top of that the IP addresses of both comments originate from the same Atlanta, GA-based service provider Pffft. Cullah me gullahbah.

Agh, what a tangled chain. I had to go to three different online bike sources to get the parts needed to repair The Phoenix, but they’re all ordered and hopefully will be here by Thursday so I can hit the Bicycle Kitchen and reanimate my beloved ride.

• From Harris Cyclery: Suntour 160mm double ring crankset; Shimano UN54 bottom bracket; crank bolts
• From Nashbar: time trial handlebars
• From Performance Bike: 20T Bottom bracket tool and 32mm wrench

Obviously I would’ve like to have gotten everything from one place, but for whatever reasoning, Nashbar no longer carries roadbike cranks for taper-axled bottom brackets (which is why I went last week with the “octalink” (octacrap) compatible cranks and bottom bracket that weren’t compatible with each other and resulted in Friday’s crash). Strangely enough Nashbar carries taper-axled bottom brackets but no appropriate cranks. Nice.

So I went over to Performance and there selection w of brackets and cranksets was minimal and expensive. Thankfully Harris Cyclery in Massachusetts understands that some of us like things old school and had the appropriate pairing (and sizes) of crankset and tapered bottom bracket.

Nashbar also doesn’t carry 20-tooth bottom bracket tools, which is the kind I need to deal properly with the type of BBs I’ve been using. Performance Bike did and they also had time trial handlebars but at $12 more than Nashbar’s.

Confused? Me too.

Back in December was when I unearthed one of the more unique artifacts (pictured above) that’s now part of the permanent collection of the Will & Susan Campbell Museum of Backyarcheology. It was a mailing label plate for the uniquely surnamed P. Engensperger and I posted about it with the headline “What’s In A Name?”

Wouldn’t you know in my inbox is an email from a Canada-based Engensperger who happened upon that post during a cruise of the internet and sent me some more information about the name:

Hello!

I read with interest your blog re P. Engensperger, which I happened upon entirely by accident.

I am an Engensperger in Canada, and as far as I know we are the ONLY Engenspergers in Canada. I know that there are some Engenspergers in the USA, but as far as I know there aren’t many.

My father immigrated from Switzerland, and there aren’t many there, either. My grandfather in Switzerland was the curator of a museum and he did a significant amount of research. He traced our line back to the 14th century, about which time our line appears to have crossed the border from Hungary. I’m told there are plenty of Engenspergers there. (He joked that we were a band of gypsies.)

Our name used to be spelled: Enggensperger. I have an old ring that had been used to emboss a wax seal with our family crest, which is a dove standing on three hills with two stars in the sky. I’m told that our name comes roughly from “of the mountain village.”

It is interesting what one can find on the internet, and your blog is a good example!

Cheers,
Norman Engensperger

 Man but the internet is a marvelous thing.

Like most things internet I’ll probably play with this a little while and then cast it off into the e-dustbin with so much other online gadgets after I tire of it, but for now I’m part of the allegedly growing Twitter nation wherein via that orangy badge over on the right and any inclination I may have to text updates about myself you’ll be able to get realtime insight into what I’m doing at any particular moment I feel moved to share. Exciting stuff. Maybe.

You knew it was inevitable that someone would take an issue, right? In this case it was some guy whose YouTube screenname is Dink65. And his issue is with the post I made there of a short clip you might have watched of my first attempt up Fargo Street this past Sunday. In the video it shows my last few feet of forward progress as I attempt to wend my way back and forth about halfway up the steep street, ending abruptly as I draw up to another entrant and was forced to semi-evasively move around because he was stopped, after his own unsuccessful ascent, and stationed directly in my path perpindicular to the curb. Immediately I mumble something like “I could’ve made it past you. It wouldn’t have hurt for you to move.” As he emptily said he was sorry I then do what he should have done out of consideration for anyone coming up behind me: I moved off the street onto the driveway that was right there beside him.

Seems pretty cut and dry to me. That cyclist’s lack of awareness contributed to me stopping, didn’t it? Nope, not according to Dink65 who saw it entirely different and felt compelled to post this brilliant comment:

“Uhh, you went right at the guy. How is it HIS fault? He was only taking up 2 extra feet. There was a car parked on Fargo most of the morning that didn’t cause any issues, why should a bike parked matter?”

Since I’m only allowed a 500-character response on YouTube, I excised all the “who the hell are yous?” and “where do you get offs?” and kept my reply on-topic:

“Actually I saw the car present an obstacle to several entrants. The point is he had the responsibility to move off the course to the driveway (that I dutifully bailed out onto) and he didn’t and instead presented a 5′ wide obstacle (not 2′ as you incorrectly observe). As to my going right at the guy, I went where my bike took me and where I had every right to go. He however had every choice to get out of my way. And didn’t.”

With such a limited amount of reply room I didn’t have the luxury of wondering where Dink65 got off thinking I was blaming the guy. Sure, in the description I included with the video (below), I expressed myself in exasperated and demonstrative form, but nowhere do I directly put all the responsibility on him and his laissez fair approach to evacuating the road. Instead I simply use his actions or lack thereof as an educational tool:

“Let this video be a lesson to all and especially the #@$$!%*& who aborted his climb and then got in my way by not getting the hell off the dang course. If you abort a climb up Fargo with others coming up behind you, it’s best to WASTE NO TIME GETTING OUT OF THE FREAKIN’ WAY!!!”

I even prefaced my Blogging.la post on the matter with “I’m not one to make excuses, and in fact I may not have made it up to the tippy top of Fargo Street this morning even if the gentleman I’m approaching hadn’t ever been born.”

Instead I primarily blame my lack of technical skill on such alien terrain for that — and for not being able to negotiate around him. I certainly would have been able to continue on another few seconds at least (as I did on my second attempt) if he’d not been where he was… and there may have been the possibility that I somehow could have kept the momentum going onward and upward, but we’ll never know.

The only thing I know is that out there on the internest now matter how you think something is crystal clear and indisputable there will always be an idiot out there to say you’re an idiot.

UPDATE (03/28): So Dink responds to me saying “I went where my bike took me” with a semi-aghast and accusatory “aren’t you in control of your bike?” before settling down with more sympathy for the dude who bikeblocked me saying maybe he just was “getting his wits” together following his own failed attempt.

As to the control issue I wrote that under such strenuous conditions in such alien terrain control is debatable and in fact I was amazed that I avoided hitting him. And to debunk Dink’s assumption I went to the long version of the video and pulled stills and posted them here on Flickr showing just how much sympathy this guy deserved since he basically parked himself on the course loooooong before I got up to him.

Weird. Weirdweirdweirdweirdweird. Sometimes you just can’t anticipate the twists and turns a post might take.

Last Wednesday evening , biking up from El Segundo to West Hollywood, I rolled past the corner of Robertson and Olympic in Beverly Hills to find the southeast corner seriously and semi-psychedelically shrouded. I stopped, dismounted and took a picture of the screen. Then I noticed a small tear in the material and knelt down for a peek. Inside was a far-out structure and some people enjoying some sort of private gathering. I poked my camera through the rectangular tear and documented the scene with a picture. Then I got on my bike and left.

Later on that evening I posted about it here on Blogging.la wondering what the place was, and soon found out the next morning from a B.la reader that it was a new-fangled go-green gas station getting set to grandly open.

End of story. Or at least until today when came a late comment this morning from a “Calvin” who basically disputed my chronology of events, adamantly stating that there was no way I got the photos when I said I did:

Nice photo trick. Just for the record the privacy screen came down on Wednesday the 21st at night and the opening party was on a later date. Had you put a camera through the screen and taken a picture you would of seen wall to wall workers & construction equipment. I see the gas pumps are lighted up so that means this picture was taken after the screen was removed as they did not even have power to them until Thursday night. Looks to me that you took the picture standing next to the price sign. If you dont believe when the screen was removed just check with the local police as they were there checking to see what was going on.

I was helpless not to reply with the following WTF?

Am I catching your drift Calvin? Are you suggesting that I’m pretending to have snapped these two photos on the evening of February 21, sometime around 6:15 p.m.?

What would be the point of that?

Let me get this straight… You’re conjecting that I somehow took the picture of the screen on one day, then because you know believe there was no party Wednesday evening that I came back on an entirely different date and got a picture of the party, thus lying about sneaking the snap through the breach in the barrier.

Your contention is that the party people weren’t there Wednesday night, that the event I captured somehow happened at a later date yet I somehow recorded it, traveled back in time and uploaded it Wednesday?

Yikes.

It’s simple, Cal. I rolled up on my bike that evening of Wednesday February 21 and the screen was still up. I took a picture of it. That screen had a hole in it as indicated, visible in the picture I took. I knelt down on that same Wednesday night and put my cam through and got the shot of all the party people milling about inside. Then I got on my bike and I left. The end.

If you want to go conspiracy theorist and insist that didn’t happen, I got three questions for ya:

1) Why would I go to all that trouble?
2) What are you smoking?
3) Where can I get some?

I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it live, but in the aftermath of my successful failure in wi-fi’d webcam tagger surveillance earlier this week, I have resurrected the “pupcam” that we had in the kitchen after coming back from vacation last summer with the four dogs we rescued in Utah. Only this time the low-res images coming to you live from the immediate vicinity of the cat and dog food bowls has been renamed “Caminalz.”

Agh, don’t ask.

Back last summer the CBS2 website put out a call for its visitors to “Show Us Your Tees,” and I obliged by taking a photo of my torso bearing my favorite shirt and in my email included the following background:

Attached please find my very favorite T-shirt, which qualifies not only from a local cultural perspective but also from a vintage one as well. While not as old as some to be sure, it is nevertheless 15 years old and the primary reason it’s in such good shape is because for most of that period I was too out of shape to wear it.

Purchased as a souvenir after a 1991 tour of the landmark Hollywood Hills home, I soon outgrew it horizontally and for all those years that the weight stayed on me the shirt stayed folded up and put away. After finally hopping onto a healthier bandwagon at the beginning of this year I’m able to wear it after dropping 50 pounds the old-fashioned way, by eating right and exercising.

Now I’m making up for lost time by sporting the shirt almost as often as it comes out of the washing machine — and in recalling a better time for the architectural masterpiece perhaps I’m increasing awareness of how much effort and support will be needed to bring the residence back to its former glory as an important part of Los Angeles’ historical cityscape.

After sending it off to the designated email address I looked to see if it made the cut, but never found it online until today, when I happened to be visiting CBS2.com and saw a link to its Most Popular Slideshows of 2006. Taking a chance I clicked it and way down on the list were the the tees. One more click and there it was, and a thumbnail click later there I was… or rather my beshirted chest:

In other news, I transitted myself publicly again today. I’m not sure if the 10 minutes earlier that I left had anything to do with it, but the hat-trick ride MTA bus to Blue Line train to Green Line train with about a mile-mile walk in between only took a zippy 65 minutes getting there and a more normal 95 minutes getting home — and I knocked out about 50 pages of Norman Klein’s “The History of Forgetting.”

Of course I went onto Gmaps and charted the 22.5-mile walk-bus-walk-train-train-walk journey.

In comparison, the drive to work Tuesday was a spiff 40 minutes, but the hellride home was a disgusting alterna-crawl involving surface streets, the 405, briefly the 10 then from Palms on in the rest of the way surface streets. CLOGGED surface streets. I pulled out of the company parking lot at 5:20 and didn’t arrive home until the clock read 7:02. And the only reading I got done was of the streetsign variety.