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(click for the bigger picture)

For the last couple years (at least), every time I’ve passed the Sun-Lake Pharmacy’s neon at night it’s been off and I grumble to myself about what a shame it is that it’s not blazing bright on the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Parkman in my section of Silver Lake.

See, I’m one of those who thinks it should be a fineable offense to neglect neon signs.

Anyway, I’m not sure the occasion, but biking home tonight from work I was pleasantly amazed to see it shining in all its glory, and so of course I stopped, busted out the cam and snapped me a shot for posterity.

I was alerted to its presence by a scree’ing mockingbird in the vicinity, but it wasn’t until I looked into the boughs of the camphor laurel across the street that I spotted the predator — a juvenile Cooper’s hawk — clutching in its talons what remained of an unfortunate pigeon:

The heavily photoshopped image gets much bigger with a click, but not any better dangit. The light was low and diffused and behind the bird, and I was about 40 yards away handholding my SLR with its ungainly 70-300 lens. This was pretty much the best of the bunch I snapped until the hawk had enough of my intrusions flew northeasterly away.

This morning while doing my regular backyard waterings ‘n dogpoop scoops I found not only some early blooms on our neighbor’s San Pedro cactus, but in one of them a busy carpenter bee.

I managed somehow without falling or without to unsteady a hand to cantilever myself across the the tortoise hutch with my cam held at arm’s length and get a few seconds of footage of the find:

And on the San Pedro cactus tip, if you’re new (relatively or otherwise) to this blog or just wish to see them again, here’s the timelapses I got back in from August 2007 and August 2008 of one of the cactus’ famed nocturnal blooms:

Just me, a magnolia blossom and a hungry green June beetle on a Sunday morning in Silver Lake with me perched somewhat precariously atop our garage to get the shots and quick video that make up this Flickr photoset.

Check out Dan Turner, L.A. River Hater, in the L.A. Times. The dude goes for a five-mile bike ride along the path from Griffith Park to Fletcher and comes back like some definitive expert with things like this to say:

“…I’d like to write some Whitmanesque stanzas about the atomic oneness of nature, but the diesel fumes have aggravated my asthma and my ears are still ringing from the trucks blaring past on the Golden State Freeway.”

Or this:

“Picture a mountain stream, then line its banks with graffiti-scarred concrete, smoke-belching industrial buildings and the snarling, lung-burning, 10-lane tornado that is the I-5, and you have the Glendale Narrows.”

And this:

“Admittedly, it is reassuring to see wildlife thriving in the midst of such blight — the waters teem with great blue herons, egrets, black-necked stilts and other beautiful birds — but this is a nature experience only for those who have never actually experienced nature. Those birds are wading in treated sewage during the dry season and urban runoff replete with deadly chemicals, dog feces and other nastiness during the wet season; at any time of year, it’s also a garbage dump.”

Oooooo, I hope LA Creek Freak Joe Linton doesn’t read all that.

The Los Angeles River is certainly an acquired taste, one I’ve distilled from some 30 years spent appreciating its varied parts, from sections picturesque and stark — always ever hopeful of its potential.

Another thing acquired with that developed affection is a ready defensiveness to tell people like Dan Turner to just give it a rest with all that tired snark and overwrought hyper bollocks — especially if it indeed  derives from a single spin along a short section of its banks. If that’s true: way to put some dedicated research in there, Danny boy.

The river is what it is because of us and it can be something far better because of us. Yet Turner sees fit to turn his back on the wretched waterway, citing money and time as the reasons why revitalizing it is a lost cause.

Those are valid concerns but see, I’m the kind who’s a bit more willing to support such a dynamic restoration effort — even if I might never see it’s completion. In part because we owe it to the river and to our future as a liveable city. And also in part because I’m far more tolerant of the sensory distractions that troubled poor Turner so. Whether it’s in the river’s bed under the 6th Street Bridge or on the east bank marveling at never-before-seen-bird, for some reason the noises and the smells don’t get in the way of me taking my time to marvel at the oasis that the L.A. River is now and might one day become.

UPDATED (6/5): I guess I’d been hoping that the writer of the column was just an average joe freelancer-type who’d decided to submit his kneejerk thoughts on the river to the L.A. Times. Nah. Turns out Dan Turner’s on the paper’s freakin’ editorial board:

I read he lives in the Hollywood Hills. I’ll bet you he racked his bike and his anti-river bias to his car and drove both to the river.

As our renovation project nears closer to completion (still some 3-5 weeks out), we’ve begun letting dogs Ranger and Shadow up into the second floor for lookabouts, and to get them more comfortable with the (still-unfinished) stairs. Ranger has the legs to allow a smoother more refined traversal, but Shadow with her stunted stems demonstrates a somewhat more unorthodox method of galumphing down the steps, finishing things off with a stair dive at the end that fully skips the starter step, but she sticks the landing. I score it a 10!

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.

A not-quite-so still life of Ranger’s far wetter-than-usual morning constitutional:

My friend and fellow-L.A. Metblogs contributer Frazgo posted up news yesterday about an animal attack in Monrovia in which a bicyclist was reportedly aggressively chased by a pair of coyotes near a city park and bitten.

Fraz included news of the mountain lion killing last week that triggered my first post on the subject and linked to a post about it on the Monrovia City Watch blog, as well as to another post in the aftermath of mountain lion killing in September that I did not know about. The post itself is pretty straight-forward, but a follow-up comment by the same writer — written in response to a commenter who wondered why the creature couldn’t have been tranquilzed and lamented human encroachment — really blew me away and not in a good way, Here’s what he had to say:

I’m tired of hearing that we moved into their land. This isn’t their land they were not alive when homes were built here, they were born much later. If you want to be dinner for wild animals than be my guest or if you want to feed your children or pets to them then do it but don’t tell me that this is their land.

If you subscribe to that theory then where do you start and finish. Man doesn’t have a place on the planet because others were here before him. Non Native Americans don’t belong in the United States, we need to leave. Mountain Lions shouldn’t kill deer because they have a right to be here this is their land also.

We have a duty to keep ourselves, our families and neighbors safe and sooner or later we are going to have to start killing the animals that would kill us. We are the reason that they are so prolific because we provide an easy living for them that allows them to thrive in numbers that were unheard of a few hundred years ago.

There is no place to relocate them that does not allow their quick return and that makes all in danger and they have become accustom to us and we and our pets have entered their food chain and we are quickly becoming the prime target because we are the weakest, slowest and easiest Kill.

Obviously I submitted a differing point of view — surprisingly diplomatic in tone — that attempted to counter this fellow’s misperceptions. Unfortunately they were sent via an email form that the blogger can then decide to post or not (I’m betting not) and I didn’t copy them to paste them up here.

So suffice it to say that such a myopic and misinformed point of view is pretty aggravating.

Most mornings, such as today’s at 6:27 a.m., I make a point with bedhead and coffee to head to the upper reaches of our Silver Lake backyard and try for a minute or two to take in the day’s breaking bracketed between the cactii before me and and the hills of Griffith Park in the distance. Doing so not only provides me with a chance to appreciate the wonderfully robust northwesterly view across the community I live in and love, but it also affords me the opportunity to greet the new day positively.