[sic]

The news is that E. Howard Hunt died yesterday at 88. In today’s obit in the L.A. Times the headline proclaims him the “mastermind” behind the break-in of the Washington, D.C. offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Hotel in 1972.

Maybe I’m in the minority or it’s such a trifflingly banal point or both, but personally I’ve always thought the term “mastermind” has been incorrectly used… that it should be a descriptive reserved only in reference to someone who is successful in planning or directing a project — criminal or not — and not at all for anyone who isn’t, such as Hunt who wasn’t. Being the mastermind of a bungled caper isn’t being a mastermind at all, otherwise it wouldn’t have been botched and he wouldn’t have been arrested, charged, tried, convicted and incarcerated for almost three years

For better or worse I consider L. Ron Hubbard a mastermind. Definitely for better the same goes for NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz who coordinated the team that saw to the rescue of the crew of Apollo 13. But Charles Manson or the Enron gang or basically anyone made to pay for their transgressions? Nope. No masterminds there.

How’s this for an odd job: See my wonderful wife Susan works for a company that does all sorts of presentations for trials and such. She hears of a lawyer representing a client paralyzed in an auto accident who is looking for a male between 6′ and 210 pounds and 6′4″ and 230 pounds to serve as a body double for a video/photo session demonstrating an aspect of the vehicle’s restraint system.

So since I fall well within those parameters (currently I’m 6′2″ and 217), Susan calls me yesterday to see if I’m interested in the stand-in gig. I say sure and when she gets home she gives me the where and when: today at 2 p.m. at a facility in the San Gabriel Valley that specializes in the storage and presentation of large-item evidence.

I arrive about a half-hour early and by 2 p.m. all the interested parties are there and introduced and not very much long after that we’re taken through a door where I see the vehicle — a 1997 Nissan Pathfinder and I learn that the accident was a solo crash back in 2001 up somewhere off Highway 395 in the region of Lone Pine. A bad one. Apparently the vehicle rolled several times, ejecting the driver. The roof is crushed in and it’s hard to imagine the 6′4″ 230-pound client being ejected out of the driver’s side window, whose opening had been severely misshapen and minimized in the collapse of the truck’s roof. Horrible. It’s almost as hard to imagine how he survived.

The argument the client’s lawyers are making is that the seatbelt failed. And after the legal team onsite does some prelim examinations and observations and discussions my job is to climb in behind the Pathfinder’s wheel and go through several iterations of pulling the seatbelt across and latching it, all the while being photographed and video’d for evidence to be presented in court.

Beyond the strangeness of getting into a totaled vehicle whose last occupant is now a paraplegic, it was eerie for two more reasons. First, I wouldn’t have been able to sit in the driver’s seat if there hadn’t been a sunroof. The roof had caved so bad in the rollovers that my head was sticking two-thirds out of it once I got situated. Second, it’s a 1997 Nissan truck whose dashboard is practically identical to my 1997 Nissan truck. So it was very weird seeing a destroyed version of the same speedometer, tachometer, climate controls, stereo, ashtray and such.

Then there were the personal aspects. A Tim McGraw cassette still stuck out of the deck and there was a BofA ATM receipt showing a balance of $467 in the bank. It left me thinking how lives can be so drastically and dramatically changed in an instant.

Anyway, I did as I was directed and the cameras clicked and rolled and by 4 p.m. I was cut loose with a thank you and a nice check for stand-in services rendered.

I drove home very carefully. Tried to look at the dash as little as possible.

So today afforded me the opportunity to meet up with Sean Bonner and Michael Baffico and several other firearm loving sonofaguns at the Los Angeles Gun Club on 6th Street east of Alameda where we put a fair amount of lead through a bunch of paper. I started with a Smith & Wesson 9mm that failed on me so I turned it in and switched to some Croatian-made niner that I liked a lot. But the high point among all the cordite and gunfire residue was the opportunity to fire off a World War II-era Russian Mosin 7.62 bolt-action rifle:

Many thanks to the carbine’s owner Michael Pusateri of Cruftbox for not only allowing me to go a few rounds with it but also for capturing me on video shooting the thing both left and right-shouldered.

Well, it was a short tenure to be sure. My temp gig in El Segundo dried up today. Situations beyond my supervisor’s control necessitated cutting me loose two weeks earlier than had been contracted. The alternative was to have me sitting around and getting paid for doing nothing. In theory I have nothing against such a situation, but in practice it does go against my principles. Plus it’s pretty boring.

My hasty exit certainly didn’t come as a surprise. With the projects I’d been given this week it was clear they were just monotonous time-occupying tasks cobbled together in order for me to at least be doing something… anything. One mind-numbing operation involved me cataloging search results, any duplicates along with link successes/faiures of some 1000-plus keywords. That took the better part of three days, and in the end was so meaningless that when I handed in the 50-plus pager that meticulously documented what I’d found for every single keyword and phrase, my supervisor thumbed through it and handed it back to me trying to figure out what I should do next. And what I was charged with doing next was even more inconsequential.

The supervisor — a very nice person tasked with keeping too many plates spinning in the air — expressed regret at the present “lack of available resources” and hoped that inter-divisional ducks would be better aligned properly enough to allow me to be brought back sometime in January and finish what I hadn’t even really gotten a chance to start. I told her if I was available I’d very much be game for that.

Now that we’re on the downhill side of the last month of 2006, it’s time for a no-muss no-fuss look at my resolves for the coming new year:

• To conversate in Spanish
• To comprehend Flash and build me a new-fangled website with it
• To continue to pound the pavement of my neighborhoods and build a catalog of imagery
• To go to Yosemite
• To stand atop Death Valley’s Eureka Dunes
• To put more miles on my bicycle than my truck
• To read Cervantes’ “Don Quixote”
• To stand on a scale and have it read 195
• To document the rise and demise of next year’s Echo Park Lake lotus grove with a daily photo of its progress

On a much tighter time frame, today I resolve to:

• Get a haircut
• Replicate a photo of mine someone found on Flickr who is interested in running it on the cover of a local literary catalog but needs a high-res version I don’t have, dangit
• Get a Christmas tree
• Decorate it
• Sweep/rake up the backyard
• Review my planned public transit route to get me to/from work tomorrow
• And if there’s any other time left after all that’s done, maybe a bike ride as payback for the pizza we had last night while watching the thorougly enjoyable “Cars”

UPDATED (5:12 p.m.): Got everything on today’s list done. Yay! Except the bike ride. Boo!

I’m not going to worry about linking back to the previous frustrations regarding the water heaters other than to remind anyone who might recall how the initial Building & Safety Department inspector wouldn’t sign off on it when he was first out way back at the end of May and I pretty much blew a gasket over that and the faulty job the contractors did that resulted in the inspector basically saying “Pfffft!”

So I huffed and puffed and grrr’d and snarled and blogged then we went on vacation and put the whole thing out of my mind until Susan was like “Hello! Where does this thing stand!?” and I was like “Oh, right!” and finally got around to doing the job myself last month — very well, I might add, though I’m not the inspector… who I then promptly forgot to call to come back out until last weekend when Susan was like “Hello! Where does this thing stand!?” and I was like “Uh, oh right!” and scheduled an appointment for today for the inspector to come out and when he showed up I crossed my fingers as he took a good look around and in the end gave me this (queue the angels singing):

And I said hell yeah!

Even if I have nothing of importance to say, I really dislike letting the blog stagnate, and rare is it that I go so many days without slapping something up — a photo or a flashback entry. Anything. So howsabout some bulletpoints that fill in the blanks and myabe look forward a bit:

• Films watched: All (surprisingly) of Poseidon, 15 minute of Hoot, Most of Hombre, All of Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold.
• TV watched: The finales of Deadwood and Entourage followed by two-minutes of the horrid Lucky Louie. A buncha HGTV. Five minutes of Monday Night Football on ESPN.
• Events attended: Saturday at the Sunset Junction Street Festival.
• Errands run: Ranger to the Echo Park Animal Hospital Saturday morning for her second round of puppy shots. Bike wheels taken to Bicycle Kitchen for long overdue truiing (aka balancing).
• Books picked up:  The Adventures of Theodore Roosevelt by Theodore Roosevelt. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. The President’s Assassin by Brian Haig.
• Books put down:  The Adventures of Theodore Roosevelt by Theodore Roosevelt (after 97 pages) . Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (after 10 pages). It’s a lame reason but they’re both just too much work to read.
• Jobs applied for: 2.
• Freelance assignment accepted: 1.
• Current percentage level of confidence that I will ever work full-time again: 54.
• Current weight: 214.
• Number of days (at six days per week) the painters have been on premises: 19.
• Current percentage level of desire that they will be finished soon: 97.
• Number of evenings Bink spent outside, refusing to come in: 2.
• Number of Diet Pepsis consumed: 18.
• Things being considered for the upcoming Labor Day weekend: Hike to Mugu Peak with lunch at Neptune’s Net afterward. Walk the nine-mile route from the San Gabriel Mission to Olvera Street to celebrate Los Angeles’ 225 birthday. Take Shadow to Balboa Lake in the Sepulveda Basin for 12th anniversary of us finding each other there.
• Things I’d like to do right this minute but can’t: Take the Red Line out to North Hollywood with my bike and cycle the bike path along the Orange Line route to Woodland Hills and back.
• Things I can’t do right this minute but would like to:  Relax.

I got my hair cut today. Other than come home and rinse it out, I had no idea how severely short it now is until I saw an older webcam snap from earlier today. So I promptly assumed as similar a post and did a before-and after:

Feels about five pounds lighter.

Back in May I posted about having an inspector call to examine what turned out to be the unapprovable installation of the venting pipes leading from the new water heaters put in earlier that month. I had grand plans of making it a DIY job instead of attempting to get the negligent plumbing company in question back out here to rip us off further, but one thing led to another and dang if the whole thing didn’t slip my mind.

Well a couple weeks ago Susan and I pow-wowed over our upcoming agenda items and with me duly reminded that this was still on the books we decided to get the job done once and for all so last week we made a Home Depot run for what yesterday I discovered turned out to be the wrong sized piping. So back I went and returned all of the stuff and got the right size stuff and a couple hours later I’m happy to say that our water heating vents are now as up to code as I can hope (or at least until we get the inspector back out here to find something else wrong). it was a relatively easy job of changing out about eight feet of single-wall piping for double wall in the basement, and then adding enough sections to extend it at least 12 inches above the roof line (I went a little beyond that mark), like so:

Despite the installers “guarantee” the work was up to code, given the multiple messages I left for them that went ignored and unanswered, I have no doubt the shisters would’ve loopholed out of that responsibility and raked us for overcharged materials plus another mass of labor had we gotten them to come back out here.

And besides, it gave me a sense of accomplishment that resulted in a big proud hug from my baby, plus a chance to get up on the roof and check out the nice view (click to biggify):

Buster the tortoise, goes cuckoo for two things: hibiscus blooms and the blossoms that a plant called the snail vine produces (no doubt because the little purple flowers have something of a resemblance to snail shells… personally I don’t see it).

When my mom lived in Sherman Oaks she had a snail vine plant growing all over the north fence of the backyard so whenever I was over there I’d always be sure to load up on the morsels to bring him for Buster to enjoy — and boy did she. But ever since my mom sold that house a couple years ago, the supply of snail vine blossoms tanked. So much so that last year Susan and I got a snail vine plant and tried to get it to grow in the north yard but it hasn’t been doing very well, producing only the occasional bloom. We planted a hibicus as well that’s put out some flowers, but they’re all over the neighborhood so supply isn’t at all an issue with them.

Leave it to my mom to find nearby a snail vine source while she was minding our animals during our vacation last month. No, not just a source. A mother lode that’s readily accessible from the sidewalk on Hyperion north of Sunset. I made a trip over there last weekend and plucked 50 blooms off in a matter of minutes and there were thousands left:

Taking the long way home I ended up stopped on Rowena and relieving the hibiscus plants lining the south sidewalk of some of their bounty as well:

The result is Buster has been in food heaven all week.