[sic]

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.

Word got back via Andrew at Liquid Premium, who emailed me with the news that the L.A. Times shined a light on my interview on Blogging.la this past week with the unknown artist responsible for the growing number of wooden birds hanging from wires over intersections throughout the city (and beyond in Santa Barbara, San Francisco and, as of this week, New York). The Times not only posted it on their website, but found room for it on the second page of the Arts & Music section of this Sunday’s Calendar… which I’d missed this morning and had to go digging through the recyclables bin to retrieve it for posterity a a digicam snap:

[click image for large version]

Interestingly enough both online and in print the Times ran the photo I’d taken of one of the birds back in September, but without any type of photo credit. Is that greedy of me to want that credit? I don’t think so. Greedy would be me wanting some level of compensation for my work being used for free by the Times to fill its news hole.

Instead I’ll take whatever measure of exposure the mention provides as payment enough.

Not sure if the tragic story made it beyond Southern California, but a piece that’s gotten understandly heavy play this last couple days is the manhunt for the person wanted in the Sept. 24 murder of a 3-year-old girl. Authorities went wide and hard with their call for public assistance in his apprehension by stating that the suspect intentionally shot the child in the chest:

“Police believe that (Jonathan) Banks jumped out of a vehicle Sept. 24 and approached the young victim, Kaitlyn Avila; her father; and her 6-year-old sister as they were getting out of a car outside their Pinafore Street apartment building in Baldwin Village. The family had just returned from a Sunday afternoon outing to a fast-food restaurant.

Banks allegedly shot and wounded the father, a glass worker, wrongly believing that he was a member of a rival gang. Authorities said Banks then aimed at Kaitlyn and shot her once in the chest.

Authorities said this week that the gunman intended to shoot the child and did not, as originally believed, strike her inadvertently while firing several shots at her father.”

This has triggered obvious outrage throughout the area communities, some of which made its no-holds-barred way onto the group blog I write for by a fellow contributor named David Bullock who didn’t mince words in headlining his Blogging.la post “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“How the fuck could you walk up to a toddler, a cute little 3 year old and shoot them point blank? What kind of a sick, heartless piece of shit are you to do something like this? Do you think you’re tough, to kill a young child at close range? It’s bad enough when gang shooters accidentally take a life of an innocent bystander child, but walking up to them and shooting them point blank in the chest… FUCK YOU!”

Given the information provided by law enforcement, Bullock’s incredulous rage is certainly understandable. Hell, a large parts of me wants to share in that anger. But another part of me never fails to kick in and back away from the vehemence and instead engage what I consider a healthy skepticism — especially when it comes to police “version” of events.

That whole “innocent until proven guilty in a court of law” thing seems an ever-increasingly unpopular stance to take in this day and age. In this 16X fast-forward world of ours we want our judgment as quickly as our drive-through burger combo. But to me it’s too easy a thing to convict a person in the media. It’s too simple to stare at the always unflattering mugshot being displayed in the newspaper or on the TV and say “Oh yeah, he did it.”

Well I’m one of those people that don’t do that. Yeah, one of them. Call me a conscientious objector. And I certainly don’t blank-check subscribe to what the police spin — especially when what they do is by design. Think about it… had police officials gone on camera with their cards close to their vests showing a photo of the suspect and the grieving father in the background and putting a standard reward on Banks’ head for “information leading to the arrest and conviction of…” do you think he would’ve been coughed up so quick? Doubt it. But factor in that he did the intolerable and unthinkable in killing a child with malice aforethought? Presto, the guy’s in jail. Mission accomplished.

But what I ask myself is “how do the police know that?” Eyewitness testimony? From who… the wounded father? The surviving 6-year-old sister? Bystanders? Given the short chaotic amount of time within which the crime took place how can anyone be certain this guy deliberately killed the little girl?

Certainly it may play out that he did indeed do exactly what witnesses and the cops have said he did, but I’ll suspend my irrational impulses and recognize it just may very well have been accidental. Not that I’m excusing him of any responsibility in the slightest, but there is a vast chasm between the degrees of murder and I would rather not accept so eagerly and one-sidedly that someone is so capable of such soullessness. Not that I’m naive as to believe there aren’t people capable of such evil, but until the facts come out in the trial that lead to Banks’ conviction on charges of first-degree murder, I’m going to refrain from validating it. And in the meantime I’m left yet again with a bad taste in my mouth — not just because once again a suspect has been prosecuted in the press, but also because the police felt they had to irresponsibly manipulate and oversell the crime. As if the death of Kaitlyn Avila isn’t horrific enough.

Cross-posted from Blogging.la

My inbox Wednesday held an email from someone otherwise unidentified save for the “silverlakenews” in the sender’s address. The message within included a link to an April 4 story on cbs2.com headlined “Man Shot And Killed After Opening Front Door.”

The sum of the short article is as follows:

(CBS) SILVER LAKE, Calif. A man was fatally shot when he opened the front door of his home in the Silver Lake area after hearing noises in his yard, police said Tuesday.

The man died at a hospital of a gunshot wound he suffered about 8:20 Monday night in the 3900 block of West Marathon Street, the Los Angeles Police Department reported.

Authorities withheld the man’s name, pending notification of his relatives.

According to police, the victim was sitting in his living room when he heard noises outside. When he opened his front door to investigate, he was shot once in the face.

Detectives were unsure of a motive for the crime, which apparently involved two male suspects. No arrests were reported.

Since a hospital transport was involved, I immediately clicked over to the indispensable LAFD News & Information blog to see if LAFD Spokesman Brian Humphrey, its equally indispensable primary contributor, had posted anything about it… but found nothing there. So I emailed him directly and received a speedy reply back saying he was out of the office and would look into it as soon as he returned. So in the meantime, I detoured from my plan of poachin’ more ‘quats and took a walk over there yesterday to see what I could see.

The 3900 block of Marathon in East Hollywood is bordered by Virgil on the west and Hoover on the east. I entered it from the Hoover side and found it to be a quiet, tree-lined street with a mix of bungalow homes among a variety of apartment buildings. Four days removed from the crime I was expecting to find little evidence of the murder and its subsequent investigation — and I wasn’t disappointed.

So I was left searching for clues — anything that might point me to the scene of the crime. Could it have happened here at this quaint little craftsman whose front porch and steps was marred by some sort of pink discoloration, maybe from spilled blood mixing with some sort of chalk outlining that didn’t get the clean up it deserved?

Upon closer inspection I surmised it to be nothing more than aged spray paint and kept going west. A few more doors down at 3920 there was an apartment building with a U.S. flag attached proudly from a stucco’d balcony above a carport, but nothing that could be said to resemble a remnant of foul play.

A few more steps and I thought I’d found something, a fragment of tell-tale caution tape flapping in the wind near the entrance to a building’s garage… but drawn across to it on the north side of the street I found that instead of demanding bystanders to stay back, it only warned of wet paint.

it was about then that I gave some thought as to why I was here. What is it that draws me on these goose chases searching through the aftermaths of violence and death? Certainly the proximity of the crimes to where I live is a strong factor as is my obvious curiosity. Sure, I’ll even admit to something of a morbid fascination.

But there’s something more to this pilgrimage. There’s a basic need to seek out and bear whatever witness I can. Though it might be nothing more than a strictly symbolic gesture, it is important for me to stand and recognize the location of the horrible waste of a life. I guess for me it’s a way of fighting back, of beating the fear, or at least mitigating it. It’s too easy to read an online news brief and automatically judge a place like the 3900 block of Marathon Street as a no man’s land to be avoided at all costs. But standing on this stretch of street under blue skies and clouds and sunshine with birds in the air and people coming and going and life happening… all of it helps to reduce the shadow of death and with it the desire to judge this place unfairly. Nothing can minimize the murder that has taken place, but being here does go a distance in understanding that the place is not to blame.

Almost directly back across on the south side of the street some movement catches my eye along a walkway above a vast bed of ivy and I find a man in an official looking orange vest taking measurements. LA’s version of a CSI investigator. maybe? Perhaps following up with additional data on bullet trajectories? No, the nearby equipment and tripod pointed to him simply being a surveyor. But then again, when I passed the heavily tagged house-number board at the entrance of the seven-unit complex he is working in it seemed I could very well be getting warmer.

<

Or not. I keep moving west looking around. But all I find is a group of four men standing between me and Virgil within the shadows of some under-trimmed curbside trees. They’re holding paper-bagged cans of beer and they don’t see me until the dog and I are almost upon them. Then they do double takes and make way while making half-baked attempts to hide their beverages. As I pass they all smile and one of them comments about Shadow.

“That’s a pretty dog. Is it male or female?” he asks. I say thank you and tell him Shadow’s female.

“Ohhhh, nice!”

I get beyond them then stop and turn. “Say, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure!” he says and he walks a bit unsteadily up to me, ending up a little too close. HIs eyes have that numb and watered-down look of trying to see the world through a six-pack of beer.

“By any chance did you hear about a shooting around here earlier this week?” I answer by making the international hand symbol for a gun, and he answers quickly and expansively and solemnly in the affirmative. His breath confirms my assessment of his wholly inebriated condition.

“On Monday?” Again he lets out a slow and low “Yesssss!” and he weebles a bit on his feet.

“Do you know where it happened?” This throws him and he gives me an abrupt “Hunh?”

“Did it happen here?” I point to the run-down apartments nearest to us. He pauses for a second, but again I get nothing more than “Hunh?”

“The shooting…” I make my hand into a gun again, this time pulling the trigger and making a soft boom sound. “Do you know where the shooting took place on this street?” He swings his head to look at my hand, rolls it back to look at me, weebles a little more before letting go with an “Ohhhhh… I dunno.”

“You don’t know?”

“I dunno.”

“OK then!” I say with a laugh and thank him as I turn and continue toward Virgil. From behind me he calls out “That’s a nice dog!” I wave without looking back. At the corner of Virgil and Marathon I find this:

A couple blocks up the irony of the street’s name that I cross isn’t lost on me:

In my inbox this morning was the information that Brian Humphrey was able to provide. Here’s a digest of it:

• The incident was reported to the Los Angeles Fire Department via multiple 911 calls beginning at 8:07 p.m. April 4.

• Witnesses reported hearing shots and discovering one wounded male inside the apartment building at 3951 Marathon Street.

• The victim was a 26 year-old male who despite the best efforts of the team of LAFD paramedics, went into cardiac arrest during transport to County-USC Medical Center and was pronounced dead shortly after arrival at the hospital.

The dawning day painted the air an eerie orange, but I didn’t know why until I ventured outside with Shadow for our walk and I found an ominous smoke cloud hovering over Silver Lake and its surroundings.

(larger version and a couple more images found here)

From a vantage point up on Micheltorena I snapped a few images with my phonecam. And once back home only then did I find out the smoke wasn’t from nearby but came a long way from a fire in Orange County.