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In these years of fading memory I can’t seem to recall the specfix of how I came to have this image below that I rediscovered this weekend whilst stumbling around my archives. My best recollection is that I found it via my fellow LA Metblogger Frazgo, either via a post he made on the find somewhere or from his Flickr photostream.

What is it? Well, I’m a little fuzzy on that as well. Obviously it’s a weathered treasure from the 1932 summer Olympic games here in L.A., but specifically I’m thinking that in the original image the badge was attached as an ornament  that adorned either the grille or the hood of a car from that time, and that the end result you see above is from my efforts in Photoshop to separate it out and stand it alone, maybe to put it on a shirt or a —.

[Sound of tires screeching]

Mystery solved! Instead of sitting here writing about scratching my head about it, I zipped over to Frazgo’s Flickr photostream and found the original image. Yep, it’s just as I’d thought.

Next stop: shirt creation!

You might have checked out my post earlier this week on LA Metblogs cumbersomely titled “89 Snaps Of People I Passed While Biking This Morning On The Strand Between Hermosa Beach And The Ballona Creek Bridge.”

If not, in a nutshell, I had my sunglasses digicam on while biking from Hermosa Beach back to work this last Wednesday morning, and when I later reviewed the video I decided to capture stills of the frames featuring people I encountered along the way and ended up with 89 of them, which I then ran through some basic Photoshop filtration to give them an illustrative look.  Liking the results and feeling  it made for an interesting slice of SoCal life I tossed ‘em all up on Flickr and linked to them from the aforementioned Metblogs post made that evening.

Then came this arrogantly assuming comment yesterday morning from someone who apparently thinks they know everything  and to prove it used the pseudonym “Privacy rights violated:”

Apparently you are unaware of the rights of individuals to control the use of their image in publicity. You legally are violating their rights to privacy. Just because people appear in public, does NOT mean you have the right to publish their images online for the world to see, and associate this with a blog. You have a right to take a photo for yourself, but not the right to make them public. An exception is when they are PUBLIC FIGURES and most all of these people are not. You need signed releases!

It was chuckle-worthy both in the person’s intense disregard for the true applicability of a person’s expectation of privacy in public places, and his or her blatant lack of awareness of my rights as a photographer and — for want of a better word — artist. Not to mention my 19 years’ experience in various journalistic endeavors.

I especially enjoyed the person’s apparent Freudian slip of “You legally are violating their rights…” Because that’s, in effect, absolutely correct. I am well within my rights not only to take photos of anyone and everyone on that bikeway, but also to publish them to Flickr and LA Metblogs.

And while it amazes me that there are people like “Privacy rights violated” who are so ignorant and adamantly demonstrative of it, at its core such a dimwitted display is an appreciated opportunity to explore and enforce the truth.

These five cactus pads were rescued as tiny sprouts a from a single dying pad (its remains visible on the right side of the pot) that had disconnected from the main plant. I’m particularly fond of the  exulting “arms” the pad in the middle has grown.

After Saturday’s rains, this tiny forest of mushrooms sprang up literally overnight.

One of my favorite signs of spring, this little flowering plant beneath the behemoth bougainvillea to the north of the front steps blooms annually, but usually only with one or two flowers. This year thanks to the increased rains it got an early jump and is really putting on a show.

Speaking of getting an early start, the backyard stand of callalilies has wasted no time making its presence known.

Nah, that headline ain’t some sorta code. Just the general compass points I was facing when I snapped the following images in the vicinity of Dante’s View while on our way up to the top of Mt. Hollywood Saturday morning.

What I’m taken most with is the fact that though the two shots were taken literally steps away from one another, they look like they could be hundreds of miles apart. Such is the grand topographical diversity of my city.

Click for the bigger pictures, but be warned: For the sake of my own personal enjoyment, they have both been somewhat rigorously run through my fauxtography filter cycle in Photoshop (click each for the bigger pictures):

Chicken Boy on Broadway 1974

Originally uploaded by mr. rollers

My friend and fellow walking and biking and Los Angeles history enthusiast Walt has posted on his 90042 Blog the picture at right taken by my friend, awesome photographer and urban cyclist extraordinaire Stephen “Mr. Rollers” Roullier.

Beyond being awesome, it reminds me I don’t do enough to chronicle and document my city. My biggest internal struggle as someone who always has some sort of camera with him when he ventures out and about, is one of apathy and procrastination pitted against a latent desire to document street scenes such as this one.

In the immediate they might be dubbed mundane, worth little more than a glance, but in a city as ever-evolving as Los Angeles, they have value as they age, demanding closer examination of what was and what’s changed.

As a teen, when my friends were blowing their allowances or minimum wage money on video games and cigarettes and clothes and drugs and music, I spent a few months saving up the $120 needed to step me away from the Kodak Instamatic of my childhood and up to my first “real” camera, a simple SLR outfit from Sears, back in 1980-81. Little did I realize that the initial cash outlay for the hardware would be the least of one’s expenses. The package deal even came with a couple 12-exposure rolls of film and I burned through those. Then came the need for money for more film and money for developing. And more film, and more developing. Having so little of the former, subsequently I often went long times without being able to acquire the latter.

And as an obvious result I did a lot more not taking pictures than taking them. I was pretty strict in what I snapped — even as I got older and had more disposable income. It was a simple matter of economics. Of making resources count.

Today, powered by a rechargeable battery, my digital camera can take thousands of pix stored on its memory card. As such, you’d think I’d have pixelized my city like mad, but I have not. One might presume that’s because old habits die hard, but I think it’s primarily laziness coupled with an attitude of “Agh, it’ll be there tomorrow.”

But that’s the point. Just like Chickenboy, and that RTD bus (and the RTD!) and that sapling tree, and Cisco’s in Stephen’s photo: it might not be there tomorrow.

I often wistfully imagine what long lost people, places and things and events of my youth and early adulthood might be contained in my archives had digital cameras been born 20 years earlier than they were, and I’d been able to snap away with a greater degree of reckless abandon.  I envy and respect people like Stephen who’ve done what I couldn’t or wouldn’t, as well as those who’ve grown up with the technology. To them I say don’t under-appreciate it. Exploit it for what it can do to capture the past in the present. For the future.

(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.

It’s been purty quiet around these here blogparts this first few days of the new year/decade. Not a lot going on but chores ‘n stuff: de-cluttering of the yards, de-decorating of the house, re-vacuuming of the floors, recycling of the Christmas tree, laundry, revisiting of the Costco, reviewing of the Rose Parade, along with a couple replacings of electrical outlets from ancient two-prong to far more contemporary three-prongers. On the entertainment tip we extended our streak of not seeing “Avatar,” while instead allowing ourselves to beoh-so-visually and morally assaulted seeing “Bruno.”

Generally these first three days were filled with stuff so ultra-compelling I thought it best to refrain from subjecting you to such awesome fascinatingness.

Was I right? Or was I right?

But now it’s time to look forward to a couple happenings I’m planning to start planning, so if’n they interest you getchur pencils sharpened and calendars out:

Long ago in the final September of the naughty aughts, I conjured up the Five Presidents bike ride, but stopped short of doing it or attaching it to a specific date. Since then it’s happened only in my mind, but two things are getting it out of my head and into reality:  1) the upcoming Presidents Day weekend in Feburary, and 2) the chance discovery last week/year/decade on my way to work of two other semi-residentially, full-presidentially named streets in Culver City (Madison and Jackson) that can be incorporated into the route, thus necessitating the ride’s renaming to the “Seven Presidents” ride.

That’s friggin’ unpresidented!

But whoa: better make that “Eight Presidents” because I just found a Van Buren Place in the vicinity of Madison and Jackson. Somebody stop me!

We now pause for a moment of clarification because I can hear some of you saying “Yo Willy, what’s the big whup pedaling along seven or eight or however many streets whose names happen to be the same as past presidents?” To that I first say, don’t EVER call me Willy. Secondly I say there is no big whup. It’s just an excuse to ride bikes with other people along a pre-determined route, connected by a certain theme that coincides with a certain day related to that theme. Was there ulterior motive to the “10 Bridges” ride? No. Existential depth to my Frank Lloyd Wride? Nah. It’s mainly just a chance for people who like to get together and ride bikes to do so. So don’t hurt yerself looking for meaning or relevance where there is just a reason to have fun and perhaps a chance to do something trivial that’s never been done before in the history of civilization as we know it.

More details to come posted here, and crossposted at LA Metblogs, Midnight Ridazz, Twitter, et cetera (but not MyBook or FaceSpace), but for now the most important thing you need to know if you’re thinking of joining me is that it will happen the morning of Saturday, February 13.

Nextly, in the wholly appropriate month of March (tentatively scheduled for Saturday the 6th, but that could change), I’ll be doing the next in my occasional series of urban walks, this one involving Jefferson Boulevard between the Shrine Auditorium and the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook Park.

Stay tuned for further, less sketchy details.

And in the meantime before getting my ass in gear and back into work mode, here’s my first photo of 2010, whose subject is brought to you by our potted tomato plant who worked hard these past few months nurturing this proud little fella until it dropped this weekend. Clearly the plant doesn’t know the concept of seasons or the meaning of the word quit. Ladies and gems I bring you:

Wintermater

Tonight’s blue moon, two days from its full stage on the last day of the year and the decade, as seen from my office window via the 6.1x digital zoom of my cam with the lens against the eyepiece of my 12×25 binoculars and the whole thing balanced on my knee with my leg propped up on the sill as I sat at my desk.

It won’t win any awards, unless there’s an award for blurry pixelized moon pix made with the use of binoculars. And limbs. Could happen. Once in a…

Here’s another one of my 30-second exposures, taken of the view outside our Lucia Lodge cabin in Big Sur at 9:21 p.m. September 3 (click for the bigger picture):

I’ve gotten a whole bunch of snaps up on Flickr in the following sets:

• Big Sur Scenery
• Carmel Mission
• Carmel Scenery
• Animals

On Thursday night, our first at Lucia Lodge in the village of Lucia on the coast, Susan and I marveled not only at the full moon that had risen above the Santa Lucia Mountains at the exact time the sun set over the seas to the west, but also the fact that one of my favorite constellations — Scorpius — was fully visible in the south-by-southwestern skies.

So of course after dinner, I had to set up the tripod and pretend I knew what the hell I was doing in taking timed exposures of the moonlight cabins, coastline and waterscape, but it wasn’t until I offloaded images today that not unlike an amateur fisherman lucking into landing the big one on his first cast, I’d pointed the cam in the right direction and hauled Scorpius in all its glory from out of the inky blackness, see (click for the bigger picture):

Uh Scorpius? Where? Here, maybe this connect-the-stars will help (click for the bigger picture):

You know the mythology right? Scorpius is the creatures that killed Orion the Hunter, sent to do so by Artemis, the Goddess of the Earth, after Orion bragged that he could kill any animal on the planet that he wanted to. After he died from the scorpion’s sting Artemis put him among the stars where the scorpion still stalks him. Lucky for Orion he stays just out of reach. By the time Scorpius rises in the early summer, Orion’s already booked it below the western horizon.