[sic]

As the crow flies the dead body was found a half-mile from my front door. As the bike rides it’s about two-thirds of a mile away. Far enough away for some, but too close for comfort for me.

I pedaled upon the cordoned-off scene above on my ride home from work last night. It was about 8:30.  I’m on Vendome looking west up Dillon Street, which is immediately south of the 101 Freeway.  After answering my question of “what happened?” with the question “do you live around here?” that I dutifully answered, an officer told me a homicide investigation was taking place.

My first thought was that it was gang-related. But then I watched as officers stepped over  a low guard rail and disappeared into the foliage adjacent to the southbound lanes of the freeway, and that struck me as decidedly un-driveby. When I got home I posted about it on L.A. Metblogs and then emailed Ruben Vives who writes The Homicide Report blog for the L.A. Times.

This morning I learned from Vives that the victim was woman and that detectives aren’t sure how long she’d been dead as her body had been there for some time given its state of decomposition.

In an eerie coincidence, it was only yesterday that I found myself looking through the Los Angeles Public Library archives at photos from the Hillside Strangler serial murders case, wherein a number of the victims were dumped along roadsides and freeways.

It was only later that I learned that barely a half-block away from us this EARLY this Friday morning some kid mistook the gas pedal for the brakes and plowed down a driveway and through a converted garage where his dad was sleeping, pinning him injured beneath the vehicle.

I’m pretty sure everyone involved is going to be OK, but at 5:30 a.m. the only thing I knew was that some loud ass news helicopter decided to park itself a couple hundred feet over our house for more than 45 minutes as the breaking new story “developed.”

Here’s what 30 seconds of it looked and sounded like from our backyard at 5:36 a.m.:

And now for a bit o’ the Silver Lake neighborhood news. Nothing major, just that as I was biking home from Wednesday Hollywood Burrito Project ride around 11:30 p.m. I noticed the nice neon martini glass that served as the sign for the departed Johnny’s Bar on Sunset across the street from Silver Lake Lounge was lit for the first time in awhile, like so:

And upon closer inspection after snapping the pic I found a “Notice of Application To Sell Alcohol” displayed in the window above the door stating that the new establishment is to be called “Lucky Tiki.” Interesting.

I wrote about the mystery demise of Johnny’s initially on Blogging.la last year, and then followed up with the fun reply to my emails sent to the huffy lawyer in charge of evicting Johnny’s here.

It seems as if I’ve been freelancing in various capacities for the L.A. Times for the last couple months, as an agent, writer and photographer — not that I’ve gotten paid for any of those efforts.

First I was contacted to recommend a bicycle advocate who might be available to write a brief op-ed piece and I recommended my friend the indefatigable Stephen Box and they said cool and he wrote a great piece on why bikes rule, which was payment enough. But these other two? Showing me even a token woulda been nice.

Next on deadline crunch at my real job I was contacted to partake in a five-day Dust Up debate on latimes.com on the pros and cons of biking in the big city… which essentially involved me penning five 500ish-word columns either pointing or counterpointing whatever the topic was.

At around the same time I was contacted by someone at L.A. Times magazine looking for permission to use this photo at right that I snapped of Susan and the Silver Lake reservoir last April when the meadow was opened to the public for one day. The person at the Times wanted to use it as part of a photo illustration to accompany an article on the plans to turn the meadow into a public park slated to open this summer.

The article is supposed to be in tomorrow’s paper, but it’s already online. Turns out they cropped Susan from the published image, pfffft.

In the front section of today’s L.A. Times there were three items that caught my eye. One was how not to report about tarantulas, another was how to report about ground squirrls and the last sparked a bit of a personal outrage:

Let’s take the first one last…

In a page-one story about how Sudan is just saying pffft to U.S. economic sanctions against the country over the past and continuing genocidal violence in Darfur, I learned that both Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are utilizing a loophole in the embargo that allows them to sell their products to Sudanese factories. Apparently gum arabic, a tree sap used as an emulsifier in a bunch of consumer products — among them Coke and Pepsi syrups — was strategically left out of the sanctions put in place by Congress because Sudan controls most of the world’s market for that commodity.

While I can understand the cola giants’ need to purchase that ingredient, what bothers me is the decision made to keep selling their stuff there. Well, it’s good thing they’ll be making profits there because they won’t be making any off me anymore, or at least for as long as they still continue to reap what amounts to me to be nothing more than blood-stained revenues from their sales there.

And now in overtly sensationalistic spider news…

It’s a trifle really, but one that irked this spider lover. A short item in the paper’s “Nation In Brief” section looking quickly at how SPCA officials in New York have taken in a pet tarantula that its guardian said he could no longer look after. But from there on through the quick end of the piece you’d think golden baboon tarantualas are the evilest arachnid out there:

“This is the kind of spider that nightmares are made of,” said Roy Gross, chief of the Suffolk County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

He said the African spider can jump three feet and its bites are dangerous to humans.

Of course the hardly veiled implication from that last sentence is that this tarantula is deadly to humans and won’t fail to take an opportunity to sail unprovoked the yard distance between it and the nearest person to plant its fangs into a neck or ankle.

Please. The things eat roaches and crickets and mealworms — that make the mistake of entering its denweb!
Sure, the golden baboon tarantula is considered one of the more aggressive of the species and not a good tarantula for beginners to keep in captivity, but it would’ve been nice if in the short-shrift the Times Wire Report spent painting the creature as “nasty” or “mean” had even the slightest attempt been made to balance the coverage with a little less exaggeration, or at least made mention that their bites are not deadly (except to some of those at risk of anaphylaxis).

And lastly yet more reason why ground squirrels rock:

In the “Science File” section I found this awesome story about coming to understand why ground squirrels employ a certain weapon in their defensive aresenal to ward off rattlesnakes. If you didn’t know it already, ground squirrels are literally fearless when confronted by the predators and won’t hesitate to go nose-to-nose with them to protect their young — in part because they’ve evolved with an immunity to rattler venom.

In a face-off, the rodents will kick dirt, scratch and bite and do a lot of exaggerated tail waving, the latter of which Aaron S. Rundus, a doctoral student at the University of Nebraska, recently figured out why — and it’s totally righteous fascinating… at least to me:

Researchers long ago noticed that squirrels used their tails to wave off rattlers, even at night when the effort seemed useless. But snakes’ heat sensors don’t require sunlight.

On a hunch, scientists staged a confrontation between a snake and a squirrel, separating the adversaries with a wire mesh while recording the action on infrared video. The squirrel’s tail shot to 82 degrees, which made the animal’s infrared image look bigger.

To study the snake’s reactions, researchers created a robot from a taxidermy squirrel. As the robosquirrel’s tail grew warmer, the snake’s body posture shifted from a slithering offensive mode to a coiled defensive position.

Photo I took of Mayor Villaraigosa at Lincoln Park autographing a girl’s t-shirt September 4, 2006, during the annual Los Pobladores walk celebrating Los Angeles’ 225th birthday.

About six weeks overdue for a haircut I finally dragged my hairy self over to Tony’s Barbershop on Glendale Boulevard, my regular place for the past four years. When my turn arrived I clambered up into Tony’s chair and told him to take about 10 pounds off the top and a couple off each side.

As he went to work whittling my mop down to a more manageable level I noticed missing from the shelf on the wall opposite his chair the pictures of him and his family with Mayor ‘Tonio that have been up for the past couple years. I started to ask him about them but I realized I didn’t have to. Their absence spoke volumes.

I haven’t felt the need to comment on the mayor and his troubles. Though I’m ashamed of how he’s comported himself so as to make his private life public, I’ve always had issues with him as a politican since his campaign for the office and never bought into him being anything but a power-hungry opportunist who’s pretty much getting by on his looks and charisma — but certainly not anything regarding accomplishments.

Moving beyond the affair itself, media coverage is now looking at the potential long-term negative effects his adulterous relationship might have not only on a second term as mayor but also on his future chances at higher office. I’m jaded enough to look at the re-elections of Schwarzenegger and Duhbya and think that if those two could keep their offices in the face of their shortcomings, a tawdry affair ain’t much of a big thing to overcome in the grand political scheme.

But then to see a reaction like that of my barber Tony eliminating the evidence of his approval and I may be wrong about that. In so unceremoniously divorcing himself from the support and pride he’d previously displayed for Villaraigosa it makes me consider that there may be enough Tonys out there who feel duped and betrayed, and repairing their trust in him will be tough if not impossible no matter how good he looks or how much charisma he projects.

One of my daily must-see sites Boing Boing has linked to an excellent article in London’s Daily Mail newspaper that explores how drastically less free-range we’ve allowed our children to become, as parents and guardians and technology restrict them to perimeters much tighter than their own when they were young.

When George Thomas was eight he walked everywhere.

It was 1926 and his parents were unable to afford the fare for a tram, let alone the cost of a bike and he regularly walked six miles to his favourite fishing haunt without adult supervision.

Fast forward to 2007 and Mr Thomas’s eight-year-old great-grandson Edward enjoys none of that freedom.

He is driven the few minutes to school, is taken by car to a safe place to ride his bike and can roam no more than 300 yards from home.

Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder recalls walking a half mile unescorted to kindergarten every day and how he would now never let his kids do such a thing.

As a latchkey kid raised by a single mom I have plenty of recollections of stepping out solo, beginning with walking to school my first day of first grade at Beverly Hills’ Horace Mann Elementary (although my mom later admitted she anxiously tailed me in the car). Granted it wasn’t six miles backward and shoeless through the snow, but it was still a grand one-kilometer adventure for a 7 year old.

A far more intriguing pediatric pedestrian event came a couple years later as a nine-year-old third grader when one morning my mom dropped me off at the long-gone Beverly Hills YMCA on Little Santa Monica Boulevard for a couple hours while she ran some errands. As she pulled away and drove off I found the Y’s front door locked and a closed sign on it (whether it was a holiday or some unexpected event that shuttered the place I can’t recall), and though I yelled after my mom she was too far away to hear me and thus I was stranded. I suppose I should’ve stayed put and been bored out of my gourd waiting there on the sidewalk for mom to return but that could’ve been forever so instead I struck out for home on my own even though I was not at all familiar with the terrain.

(more…)

Cell phone rings a few minutes ago and on its screen it shows the number as “restricted.” I answer it anyway and low if it isn’t L.A. Times columnist Steve Harvey saying hey and wanting to know if he could quote from my Blogging.la posts (here and here) and use the photo I took from a few months back regarding the mysterious danglebirds appearing in many intersections throughout the L.A. area and their equally mysterious artist.

I told him to go right ahead and he said to look for it in his page-four Metro column possibly as early as tomorrow’s paper.

Cool!

By no means am I an avid YouTuber. Sure, I post occasional vidclips of the night bike rides I go on or of unique events such as the YMCA “Stair Climb To The Top” of downtown’s U.S. Bank Tower, but I usually put ‘em up and shut up.

As such, if any of my uploads get viewers into three digits I’m amazed. So you can imagine my surprise to find my clip of the A380 landing at LAX Monday punctuated with a couple of my “good gawds!” as she passed by has logged more than 1,200 2,800(!) views and even some complimentary comments and four-star ratings as well as various fluctuating “honors” in certain top rankings categories.

Dang!

A couple posts ago I mentioned that on the subway ride up to Universal City between the bike tour and the marathon, I spoke with a Daily News reporter. Turns out some of my babblings made it into staffer Billy Witz’ marathon day report:

It was an interesting day, too, for Will Campbell of Silver Lake. And a long one.

He rode in the bike race at 6a.m. and then walked the marathon…

The rest is down at the end of the article here.