The buzz on the blogs is that the Hollywood Sign is soon scheduled to undergo an authorized transformation of some sort. I’m fuzzy on the details of the metamorphosis but I believe it has something to do with raising money to publically procur the parcel of land near to it that’s been for sale some time.
Anyway, since our second floor guestroom affords us a view however distant and semi-obstructed of the landmark through the palms standing atop the Micheltorena ridgeline, I thought I’d zoom the webcam in as far as it could go in hopes of maybe capturing a timelapse of any activity undertaken.
Here’s a still from this morning. As you can see it’s signage as usual:
The image updates (and archives) about once a minute so for a current view (probably of more of the same), click on the Webcam thumbnails in the right column or visit my Webcams page.
I heard the news via an unlikely source on January 28, 1986. I was in my Mazda GLC going from my apartment in Van Nuys to my job in the small business complex behind the gas station Barham Boulevard deadends into in the Cahuenga Pass. I was traveling on the gridlocked southbound 170 Freeway approaching the 134 interchange it passes under to become the 101. I was probably late.
I was listening to Rick Dees on KIIS-FM as I usually did, and coming back from a commercial break instead of launching into more of his usual shenanigans he spoke in a tone that was part solemn and part disbelieving in telling his listeners that the Challenger space shuttle had apparently exploded shortly after lift-off a few minutes earlier, reportedly killing all seven astronauts on-board.
To this day I’m not sure why the news hit me so hard, but I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach by it. Overcome with sorrow I burst into tears, and sobbed as I crept my car along with the slow flow of vehicles while Dees and his on-air cohorts discussed what they knew and what they didn’t.
Eventually they ran out of things to say and put on a melancholy, reflective song that was a hit back then. It was “Life In A Northern Town,” by The Dream Academy. And just as my waterworks started to dry up, the song got to the last stanza of lyrics that close like this:
And though he never would wave goodbye,
You could see it written in his eyes,
As the train rolled out of sight,
Bye-bye.
I didn’t know who or what the song had been written about. All I knew was that those last few lines spoke of someone’s death, and for me from that point on they became about the Challenger crew never getting a chance to wave goodbye, of the space shuttle rolling out of sight and the sad and slow byyyyyyyyyyyyye byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye reflecting mine and the country’s heartbreak and loss.
I can hear this song today without so much as choking up, but it never fails to transport me back to that moment of profound tragedy.
Later that evening President Ronald Reagan was to give his State of the Union address, but postponed it and instead spoke to the nation about the disaster, closing with:
“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ’slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”
There is something about rampaging unstoppable wildfires and the literal and figurative pall they cast that both agitates and depresses me to marked degrees. It’s like such disasters create an internal tug-of-war wherein I want to got to irrational extremes — on one end I want to seek out destroy anyone even remotely resembling a past, present or future arsonist, and on the other I want to move to a place of permafrost and ice wherein there’s no chance of such disasters happening to me.
Because they do happen to me. Sure I’m not someone in the inferno’s path who’s lost property or suffered injury, but however indirectly and from whatever distance I am from the devastation I am nonetheless deeply affected by it.
As the following timelapse video of the Station Fire shows, I’m physically far away. From the roof of our Silver Lake home I set up the camera and captured the footage, condensed down to four minutes from an hour that passed last night beginning at 5 p.m.
It’s not very dramatic from a visual level, but with the spewing white plumes that power up above the hanging haze of ash and smoke, it makes me imagine gargantuan steam locomotives unseen behind a curtain of poison, destroying everything in their predatory paths. And it breaks my heart.
Well, me going cold turkey in canceling my subscription with the L.A. Times lasted all of two weeks. No, I’m not going back. Not yet at least. But being that my newsprint addiction is lifelong and irreversible, I can’t go any longer without a fix — and sorry, but all the internet news out there does not replace the literal and tactile and olfactory joy of holding and perusing an actual paper.
That’s right, I even love the smell of ‘em.
The words told me by George Lucas, the Herald Examiner distributor who gave me my first job, still ring true.
“Don’t even think about looking at the porn in my briefcase!”
No, that’s not it. Before he told me that he told me something else back in 1977 as he smoked filterless Camels and drove me around in a beat up Ford F150 truck showing me what would be my paper route. “People may not know where their next meal is coming from,” he said. “Or their next pair of shoes. They may not even know whether they’ll be sleeping in a bed or on a bus bench. But people will always want their newspaper.”
Champions of the online news revolution may scoff at such sentiment as quaint at best and extinct at worst. But I know it isn’t. It’s alive and well in me today. I want my newspaper.
So first I thought about keeping my source local and going with the Daily News — and I probably would’ve had someone over there thought to put a subscription page on their website. But instead the only sign-up option I was given online was a tollfree number to call and good grief but I imagined getting connected to a call center in Manila or Mumbai with someone wrestling to subdue a marked accent with painfully perfect grammar whose name was not Eddie or Nan or Brendan even though that’s what they’d say it was.
Instead I went to the big dawg. The New York Times. I have never before subscribed to the New York Times, mainly because it is hella expensive. My L.A. Times rate was an awesome $99 a year, which works out to about 27 cents an issue. The New York Times “special introductory” offer is $6.70 a week for 12 weeks — or about $1 an issue — and after that it’ll double!
That’s a lotta paper for a paper.
But this morning when I looked out on the front steps and saw today’s issue sitting there waiting for me I didn’t doubt its worth, nor my willingness to pay such a premium. I was just happy to see it, and will be at least for the next four months. I can’t say at this stage if I’ll pony up $2 an issue after that, but maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll give the Los Angeles Times another look. By then, the changes that resulted in my breaking things off will be implemented and maybe at that time I’ll find my first love better for it.
Among the variety of people, things and events the L.A. Times gave thanks for in its lead editorial in today’s paper they made sure to appreciate me too:
We also thank those who can drive but don’t, who bike and carpool and make good use of their EZ transit passes on two dozen public transit systems from Lancaster to Long Beach. Whether they’re motivated by gasoline prices or the health of the planet or the chance to just look at the city, block by block, we thank them for leaving their cars at home.
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.
Back in the summer of 2000 I got the opportunity to meet the Ontes family of Trabuco Canyon — Arnold, Martha and their 8-year-old daughter Analisa — to discover and later tell their remarkable story of love, hope, and enduring faith in a feature that was published in the January 2001 issue of Orange Coast magazine, thanks to my friend Nancy Cheever (who I met and worked with at the end of my days at the Pasadena Weekly) landing a gig as editor there.
You can read it here if you want… sorry that it’s only in PDF.
In the aftermath of the story — which Arnold and Martha were very pleased with — a friendship sprung up between us, born partially from how much I fell in love with their remarkable little girl and also from how much Arnold and I loyally loved the Oakland Raiders. In the years that passed we would get together on occasion. Maybe I would go down to their place for a Raiders game or they would come up and we’d go to the zoo or a Dodger game. In fact, it was during one of those visits up that they took me and Susan to meet our first monstrous Manuel’s Specials at the legendary El Tepeyac in Boyle Heights. The mammoth burritos there were almost as big as Analisa.
I’m pretty certain the last time the five of us saw each other was when they came up for our wedding reception a waaaaay too long three-and-a-half years ago.
In the time that passed Arnold and I would drop the occasional email to each other to commiserate about the endless decline of our Raiders or cheer Analisa’s resilience, but those also tailed off and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s been a couple years since we touched base.
As such I did a double take when his name showed up in my inbox, then my pleasant surprise turned to heartbreak when I opened the email to learn the worst. That his spunky, punky, spirited, tough, smart and adorable little girl passed away this past Saturday, succumbing I assume to complications from the enigmatic disease she’s suffered with all of her 16 years.
I’m pretty much sitting here dumbfounded between being subsumed by waves of grief and not a little guilt. I’d thought about them pretty regularly — always kept meaning to write or call just to say hey and see how Analisa was faring and wonder what the hell was so wrong with our beloved Silver and Black.
But I didn’t. And now instead of ever seeing her again or hearing her gleeful and slightly mischevious laugh I must say goodbye at her funeral Thursday. But if nothing else I will rise from Analisa’s passing to be a better friend to Arnold and Martha, whose strength and faith will doubtlessly be enduring the greatest test of their lives.
It must be tough out there if you’re somehow ancillarily connected to the subject of a story topping the current news cycle — in this case the super-tragic one involving the Porter Ranch man who killed his children, his wife and her mother reportedly from a growing despondency fed by worsening financial woes.
I try to empathize with you out there: the ex-boyfriend or the high school teacher or the next-door neighbor or the coworker. You’ve got reporters from a variety of media outlets calling you and calling you and calling you. They’re hungry for kernels of connection and insight that might help flesh out the background. They pressure you with loaded questions seeking conjecture and opinion in hopes it will help sell newspapers and/or ultimately answer the question of why would someone do such a horrible thing.
Like I said, I try to empathize with you, but sometimes I don’t do very well. Especially in the case of Greg Robinson, an entrepreneur who apparently employed the killer in 2003 and 2004.
He’s quoted in the LA Times saying he had to terminate Karthik Rajaram because “his life wasn’t moving in the right direction,” whatever that means. And he goes on to describe the father having demonstrated some behavioral issues.
“He wasn’t reliable… He was not an emotionally stable person. It was a real problem and would affect any business he was involved in,” Robinson said.
See, here’s the thing: that may totally be true — and given the horrifying outcome discovered inside that Porter Ranch home, calling the man emotionally unstable is putting it mildly. So I’m not at all doubting the veracity of Robinson’s perceptions. I’m just pretty dead certain they didn’t need to be said. For one, kicking the dead — even the heinous dead — so soon is pretty much bad form. And if that’s not enough, let’s look at the purpose such statements serve: none.
Regardless of those two entirely sufficient reasons to just STFU, Robinson instead felt the compulsion to denigrate the man when what he should have said when fielding the question was simply, “No comment.”
I knew as much, but a quick search of the Google shows me that I didn’t coin the term “indignorance,” which can best be defined by the statements of one angeleno named Graham A. Rowe in a letter to the editor he wrote to the Wall Street Journal, responding to that paper’s entirely slanted and negative August 1 article on bicycling in Los Angeles (yes, the one I had issues with). Here’s what Rowe couldn’t keep himself from saying:
Bicycle riders believe that they should enjoy all the benefits of both car drivers and pedestrians. They choose to ride both with and against traffic. They obey no traffic signs, never stop at red lights or stop signs. At a red light they decide to become a pedestrian and simply ride across the crossing. They ride on the sidewalk at danger to pedestrians. Bicycles should be required to have a fee-paid license plate and be ticketed for infractions. Maybe then they would be more careful and get more respect.
Rowe could have gone a long way to make himself look less a kneejerk idiot if he’d just started the rant with “Some,” but instead he choses to lump us all together as law-breaking, sidewalk hogging, wrongway riders hellbent with ill anarchistic intent.
Individuals Barred Or Suspended Jonathan G. Fink, (Registered Representative, Los Angeles, California) and Graham A. Rowe (Registered Principal, Los Angeles, California) submitted Offers of Settlement pursuant to which Fink was suspended from association with any NASD member in any capacity for 60 days and ordered to requalify by exam as a general securities representative. Rowe was fined $5,000, jointly and severally with a member firm, suspended from association with any NASD member as a general securities principal for 15 days, and required to requalify by exam as a general securities principal. Without admitting or denying the allegations, the respondents consented to the described sanctions and to the entry of findings that Fink engaged in numerous purchase and sales transactions in various securities for the account of a public customer that were excessive in size or frequency in view of the financial resources and character of the account. The NASD found that Rowe failed to establish or follow adequate procedures reasonably designed to carry out the supervision of Fink to ensure compliance with applicable rules and failed to respond when confronted with various situations that indicated that the recommendations by Fink were unsuitable. The findings also stated that Rowe failed to approve promptly in writing each discretionary order entered in the discretionary account or to review such account at frequent intervals to detect and prevent the transactions
A front page feature in today’s Wall Street Journal does a pretty good job perpetuating that tired old stance of Los Angeles as a cyclist’s endless hell. I’m not saying its heaven on wheels out there, but it’s not covered wall-to-wall in broken glass with psycho ando/or drunk drivers lurking around every corner as the writer would have us believe. From the sensationalized headline, “Risking Life and Limb, Riding a Bike to Work in LA,” and pretty much via sources quoted throughout the entire piece, writer Rhonda Rundle goes that same exhausted route of showcasing how bad and ugly things are out there on the streets for people who opt to travel them on two wheels.
“Drivers scream at me to get off the road,” said one. “”It’s nerve-rackingly crowded, and people give me dirty looks,” says another, adding, “Everyone I know who has biked has met with some kind of injury.” A former pro bike racer reveals “people seem to like to get their aggression out on cyclists.”
On top of that it’s got a couple errors and erroneous statements, as follows (emphasis mine):
• In describing her first source’s commute home in the San Fernando Valley, Rundle writes:”On Friday evenings, as the sun sets, she feels menaced by drunk drivers. Such threats compel her to sometimes swing onto the sidewalk, even though that could get her a ticket.
Reality: If the cyclist lives in an incorporated municipality in the valley where it’s illegal to ride on sidewalks, Rhundle should have stated that because most of the valley is Los Angeles and it is not against the law to ride your bike on the sidewalks in the city of Los Angeles.
• Ms. [Lynne] Goldsmith [manager of the Metropolitan Transit Authority's bike program] says the city has 1,200 miles of bikeways…
Reality: 1,200 miles sounds pretty good in my book — and it would be nice if it were true. But the term “bikeway” is all-encompassing and very vague, That 1,200 miles that Goldsmith cites may be taking into account the entirety of L.A. County, because from a city perspective it’s an exaggeration when you check out how bike paths break down into three classes:
Class I: Completely separate from traffic.
Class II: A lane set aside on city streets for the exclusive use of bicycles.
Class III: A city street that is purportedly safe. Unmarked beyond basic signage.
Taken together, I just don’t see how all three classes of bike paths can total to 1,200 miles within the city of Los Angeles. In fact, there are only 320 miles of Class II bike lanes existing inside the city limits. And Class I paths total out to 133 miles. That would mean the remaining 750 miles is made up of virtually meaningless Class III “Bike Routes,” and I highly doubt it.
It’s a shame Rundle couldn’t find someone who’d say get the fuck out to her and drop the knowledge that it’s really not all that bad out there. But I guess calls she may have placed to me went unanswered.
So of course I wrote her a letter:
While it’s great to see the topic of urban cycling being explored with greater consistency (and in the WSJ to boot!), I’m disappointed that in your story (“Risking Life and Limb, Riding a Bike to Work in L.A.”) you mainly managed to accentuate the negative and present Los Angeles as a city whose cyclists and motorists are at war — and don’t get me started on the ridiculously inflamatory headline.
I’ve commuted by bike to varying degrees throughout most of my life, and presently ride 30-miles roundtrip every workday in L.A. and have logged 4,000 miles across the city since the beginning of the year. No doubt I’ve encountered the occasional close-call or irate/inconsiderate motorist, but I choose this alternate method of commuting ultimately because I enjoy it thanks to the vast majority of the miles I’ve pedaled being entirely uneventful, like this 13 seconds of this morning’s ride in to work:
That may not make for good copy, but its far closer to the reality than the limb-risking picture you’ve helped perpetuate.
