Happy birthday, little cheese puff-faced dude!

The Orange Line portion is not without its issues. There are interminably long waits for lights at many of the streets the bikeway intersects with some of the worst being along the practically rural stretch between Tarzana and Woodland Hills. In addition, the crosswalk call buttons are situated in pretty much the worst possible location if you’re on a bike; far enough away from the curb apron to make a cyclist consider whether all that additional work is worth it to get to it, push it and then back in position to roll into the street. And the answer is, probably, but it’s a pain, and glaring proof that whoever designed it and approved it did so with pedestrians in mind, not cyclists.

But for all its faults it’s a huge improvement to what was. In a past life having biked from my Encino apartment to the first magazine job I had in Woodland Hills, I can remember pedaling down Oxnard and Topham trying to stay as tight to the gutter as possible so as not to incur the wrath of unforgiving motoristas, and dreaming of the day when that defunct rail spur to the immediate north might become something useful and bike-related, and now it is.

And of course my sunglasses cam recorded the whooooooole thing. The main problem was it did so in a 1-gig file that I had to shrink down to super tiny-sized in order to make it even close to remotely streamable/viewable.

So if you’ve been hankering to vicariously ride that route, got about 75 minutes of your life you’re not doing much with, and won’t be angry that you can’t get it back afterwards, then I invite you to click here to view a much much smaller version of the following frame from the video :

Back then I worked for a company in Hollywood as a courier and one of my jobs was to go pick up the mail in the morning at its box in the post office on Wilcox south of Hollywood Boulevard.

It was a cool post office in part because there was always a chance you’d be in the line to get packages with a celeb of some sort. Once it was actor Dennis Franz who was familiar to me from his role on “Hill Street Blues.” Once it was the entirety of Guns ‘N Roses before they’d hit it big.

But the point isn’t that the place was a focal point for recognizables so much as it was for the area’s invisibles.

Most of the homeless would do the standard panhandling, but there was this one conniving and clever fellow who set up something of a cottage industry manning the parking meters out in front of the place. I got to know his con pretty well seeing as I saw him in action practically on a daily basis.

What he would do is keep his eye out for two things: people parking at expired meters and knowingly gambling they could beat a ticket from the nearly omnipresent enforcers; or people parking at meters who far whatever reason didn’t check whether the meters had time left on them or not.

If it was a mark of the first order and they were driving a nice vehicle, sometimes he’d conspicuously invest a nickel or a dime of his own and feed the machine — especially if a meter maid was on the prowl. If it was a sap of the second order and there was some time left on the meter’s clock, it didn’t matter if they rode in on a Rolls or a Rabbit, he’d just as flamboyantly pretend to feed it.

Then he’d stand around and wait for their return. When they did come out of the building  he’d  excuse himself to them and courteously point out that he just dropped a coin of his own and saved them a parking ticket (I think they were a quaint $13 back then) before respectfully asking if  they would return the favor with whatever they thought was fair, be it 25- or 50-cents or perhaps even a dollar or two.

Sure, most people declined to pay back his assistance, and when they did the dude’s demeanor would drop like a rock from from polite to prickly — especially in those rare instances when he unintentionally did spare someone a parking violation fine. But in terms of a return on his investment, the dude made a killing. His grift worked best if a parking enforcement officer or vehicle was anywhere nearby (and it seemed they always were), but even if the coast was clear, there were a good percentage of saps — me included, once early on — who’d fish out whatever spare change we had and gratefully hand it over.

The second time with me he wasn’t so successful, in part because by then I figured out his game, and on that particular morning  I saw that the meter I lucked into  had five minutes left on it. In and out of the post office in much less than that, I found him leaning on the meter by my Mazda hatchback smiling widely up at me and begging my pardon as I came down the steps.

Before he could get going into his shtick I held up a hand.

“Sorry,” I said.

Instantly he turned frosty.

“So that’s the thanks I get for helping you out?”

“If that’s how you want to play it.”

“But you owe me!” he yelled desperately as I made my way past him to the driver’s side of my car, telling him I didn’t owe him jack.

“There was five minutes on the meter when I got here and I wasn’t inside for more than two.”

The liar called me a liar so I pointed to the two minutes remaining on the meter’s clock and wondered how thinly he’d sliced the coin he’d allegedly deposited for it to only give him that amount of time.

“Dude, I come here Monday through Friday and know your routine. It even worked on me once, but I don’t get fooled twice.”

With that he cut his losses and quit the fight by walking away and making the mistake of suggesting I watch how close I park to the post office in the future lest something happens to my car.

“Because I didn’t give you a fucking quarter you don’t deserve? I asked incredulously.

“Just saying you best be careful,” he said over his shoulder.

I laughed and advised he’d better do the same.

He turned. “Why’s that?”

“Because I’ll be back here tomorrow and the next day and the next and all of them after that and I don’t care if I have to wait a half-hour for a space here in front,” I said. “Do what you think you have to but do it knowing there’ll be consequences.”

He pretended to be frightened, but never bothered me or my Mazda with anything more than hateful glances after that.

So instead some people have to learn the hard way, which brings us to today’s incident with the idiot in the white SUV on La Brea.

I start the following clip back aways to show you that the soon-to-be-offending motorist coming past me was obviously lacking basic awareness while we were both southbound on La Brea. Had the driver been even slightly less attention-challenged going by me then something along the lines of “bicyclist!” might have registered and been retained in better preventing the blind and entitled veering into me in an unsafe attempt to change lanes. But of course with a pea brain like the driver’s it didn’t.

As a back-up plan to such a lack of awareness had the driver simply turned and looked first to the right before changing lanes into me chances are good none of what follows would have transpired. But it did.

And then, to leave no shadow of a doubt as to the quality of assbag involved, the driver had to go and honk at me for interfering with the vehicle’s righteousness and forcing an application of the brakes. Now, I can put up with half-asleep lane poachers, but when you sound the horn at me like your fail is my fault? Ah, well… the rest as they say is MeNotPuttingUpWithThatBullShit:

In case the comment from the person I passed at the bus stop got lost in all the street noise, she said “A lotta nerve, huh?” Indeed. Me and the jerk in the Explorer.

And speaking of nerve, if there are any folks with enough of the stuff to think what a big man I am for yelling at a woman, please understand two things: 1) I’m an equal opportunity confronteducationalist and I stopped and turned not knowing or caring if the jackass behind the wheel of the vehicle was male or female.

In a nutshell, while Susan and I were out and about running errands all over town the normally heights-wary and edge-aware Buster somehow fell 15-feet off of the balcony of the apartment I was living in at the time, and a whole big series of events transpired to deliver us back to the building at the exact same very moment that a neighborhood kid was walking away with Buster in his hands, who had not only survived the fall uninjured but then managed to make her way around from the back of the building to the side of the building to the street where the kid found her a few moments before we drove  up with me saying something like “Hey, that’s my tortoise!”

Seriously, give or take a few seconds earlier or later and Buster would’ve been gone and I’d literally be spending the rest of my days perplexed and dumbfounded wondering how she just vanished. It would’ve driven me crazy.

So like I said: MIRACLE.

Shortly after that I decided to rename Buster, whose moniker had been bestowed because the tortoise’s expression resembled Buster Keaton’s famous stoneface, and also because back in our first days together I was incorrect in thinking she was a he.

Her new name? Simple and entirely fitting: the Russian word for “miracle,” which I set out across the internest to find. But the only thing I learned was that it was much easier read than said. See, the trouble was back in that time, there wasn’t one single translation service I knew of that offered anglicized phonetic pronunciations of words in Russian. Seeing as that alphabet is entirely different from our own, I would type in:

miracle

and after selecting English-to-Russian, would get back:

Which is absolutely lovely, but didn’t do a whole lot of good for someone trying to find out how the word sounded.

I guess I could have called the nearest Russian consulate or language instructor, or posted an ad on Craigslist begging to be told how to speak the word, but I didn’t. Instead I gave up and Buster, who of course couldn’t have cared less what we called her, stayed Buster. Occasionally I’d get on the web and try to find the answer again, but always ran into the same dead end.

Until yesterday, when I learned that Google’s released a mobile translator app that spoke the words and phrases, only to be disappointed that it wasn’t available for the iPhone. Shaking my head I went to Google Translate and for the countless time entered “miracle” into the appropriate box. Then I selected the proper “from” and “to” languages and sure enough all I got was:

But wait a minute… what was that and where did it come from? Before my eyes was a “show romanization” text link and when I clicked it — wait for it… it was a miracle, Below the cyrillic version was how it sounded out:

So. FINALLY. After five years of occasionally wondering and ever-failing to find out how it is one pronounces my miracle tortoise’s long sought-after name, I’ve found it. It’s Chudo!

Kinda catchy!

Sure enough when I got home last night I found that the blustery day-long blowings conspired with gravity to bring a decent load of the ungainly things to ground, and I spent a chunk of this morning corralling them off the walkway to the side of the yard, where they will then await me and my desire to break them down and dispose of them, probably this weekend.

In an epic duel with the last frond, stuck up in a neighboring tree, I first valiantly attempted to dislodge it with about 20 tosses of a broom. When that finally proved futile, instead of giving up, I tied a long length of old coaxial cable to a rock that I then launched in a trajectory that took it up and over the top of the trapped frond’s shaft and I was able to pull it down where it joined its brethren.

And yes, in triumph I did a fist-pump. I may have even made “crowd goes wild” noises.

But trust me, that won’t be the last time. There are literally scores upon scores more waiting the chance to fall:

I get the immediate sense I should just just get the hell away and bail right onto National like that’s what I meant to do all along, but against my better judgment I opt to gamble that things’ll be cool, staring straight ahead for the few seconds until…

“That’s a nice bike, ” says the passenger to me over the lyrics that are mainly muthafuckin this and the muthafuckin that.

At face value that may seem a nice thing to say. But more often than not, such a statement is not a nice thing. More often than not, such a statement is not a compliment. More often than not it is not paid by a Century City lawyer or a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, but rather by some covetous lowlife, and it translates roughly into “I want your bike.” It’s a statement in the form of a demand along the converse lines that  “Where you from?” is a demand in the form of a statement. In short, it’s mostly rhetorical and arrives carrying a lot of baggage.

I give him a glance to find him presenting a general demeanor that would qualify as a definite lowlife. The hairs on my arms rise.

“Thanks!” I say too cheerily and I watch him looking over 8Ball like it’s another guy’s girl that he wants to get to know better 10 minutes ago. Looking away and ignoring him might have been the better tactic, But I didn’t employ it.

“What’ll you give me for it?” I ask and he takes his eyes off the bike and puts them on me and sits up a bit.

“How ’bout a beating?”

I take a breath and hold it. At this point I should dismount and get my feet under me, because Rule No. 23 of My Personal Defensive Cycling Code states:

At the outset of any confrontation a cyclist should always and immediately dismount his bike because with any potential for escalation to violence it’s easier to defend against and counterattack an assault without a bicycle between your legs.

But I decide not to follow Rule No. 23 for two reasons: One, he made no move to back up his talk with any action of exiting the vehicle. Two, executing such a maneuver might have been interpreted as some form of “Bring it then, bitch!” and thus forced him to get himself all up in my stuff.

But none of that happens. I stay put and he stays put and the thug and I hold each other’s stares the way enemies might tensely hold a handshake until he finally rocks his head back and bursts into laughter that the driver joins in on until I get let in on the joke.

“Nah, man. I’m just fuckin’ witcha.”

And I look away, not just a little in relief. I remind myself to breath.

It takes another lifetime until our light turns green. When it does, the Chevy starts to pull forward, belching smoke.

“Besides,” yells the asshole, “bikes are for pussies.” The laughter recedes as the car does, getting smaller and smaller like the imploding house at the end of “Poltergeist.”

I just let it and them go, physically. Mentally I spend most of the rest of the quiet ride home dwelling on what it is that makes certain people think they’re entitled to antagonize cyclists, be it passive or aggressive.

Lacking content for an actual post, I’ll occasionally dive into the photo libraries and dredge up an image from the past, such as this captivating if otherwise unknown species of flying — presumably sting-capable — insect who was pretty protective of its sandy spot midway up Eureka Dunes in Death Valley, during the first time Susan and I visited there in November of 2005.

We’ll be in Death Valley next month, and while Eureka Dunes isn’t on the itinerary this time around, we’re looking forward to a demonstration of the park’s wildflower prowess, thanks to some above-average rainfall this winter.