Monthly Archives: June 2021

June 30, 2021 · 23:44

My Own Micro “Urban Light”

An art exhibit at the LA County Museum of Art which I’ve always wanted to see but haven’t ever yet motivated my butt to do so is Chris Burden’s “Urban Light”. While out walking this last Saturday I noticed my own micro version.

I had walked from Here to There on a Quest. It was along some busy, wide streets and I had strangers ignoring my attempts to help them. On the way back from There to Here I saw this side street running parallel to the Big Wide Boulevard and decided to take it just for the variety.

The first two street lights on either side of the street were these wonderful, ornate, cast iron (probably?) street lights that are probably 100 years old. It’s not a LACMA exhibit by a favorite performance artist – but it will do for now.

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Filed under Art, Los Angeles

June 29, 2021 · 22:56

No Context For You – June 29th

Shades of gray.

Is it true that “gray” is the American spelling and you can remember that because “a” = “American” and “grey” is the English spelling because “e” = “English?”

There’s got to be a catch, right?

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Filed under Deep Thoughts

June 28, 2021 · 23:06

Midnight Moonrise

From last night, a pleasant surprise as I did a last lap around the back yard just before midnight.

The moon is a few days past full and it was a dark orange coming up over the San Gabriel Mountains and Griffith Park thirty miles off to the east. The air was finally a bit cooler, there was a breeze, the owls were hooting down by the ball fields, and through the light pollution and haze I could just see the brighter stars of Scorpius to the south.

I’m going to miss this view one of these days.

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Filed under Astronomy, Los Angeles, Photography

June 27, 2021 · 23:01

I’ll Reject A Little Help From My Friends

I was taking a stroll today in an unfamiliar area of town, having a couple of hours to kill and in need of some exercise.

Walking along a major boulevard (four lanes in each direction with an occasional center turn lane which was often replaced by a concrete center divider with plants & trees) I was approaching a driveway leading out of a small shopping center. A car was waiting to pull out of the parking lot onto the main boulevard.

It was obvious that this was a driveway in which a right-turn was the only legal turn. While there wasn’t a concrete center divider here, there was a broad painted divider that was painted in a cross-hatch pattern that indicated that crossing it was forbidden. This made sense since turning left involved crossing at least five lanes of traffic – very dangerous.

But the lady waiting to pull out was obviously waiting for an opportunity to turn left. I walked behind her car and checked just before the sidewalk – yep, two signs there that said “Right Turn Only.” I also saw something else across the street, in a church or school parking lot…

I waved at the lady and got her attention, pointed at the “Right Turn Only” signs. She flipped me off.

Okay, so much for counting on common sense or intelligence. So I waved again, got her attention, and pointed across the street. She once again indicated that she thought I was “number one.” Then she saw her opportunity and floored it, crossing four lanes of oncoming traffic, cutting left onto that painted center divider, almost hitting a car coming from the right in those lanes, and then continuing her illegal and dangerous left turn.

At which point the police officer in the black & white cruiser in the school or church driveway across the boulevard, who had been watching her the whole time just waiting for her to do something stupid and dangerous, lit up his siren and lights and pulled in behind her. She was pulled over within about fifty yards.

I understand that people make stupid, dangerous, illegal turns. I’m sure they do it in other cities, but it’s an artform in Los Angeles at times. But ignoring the cop that’s right there in plain sight and figuring that you can get away with something blatant? I don’t understand that at all.

Finally, a show of hands of who out there thinks that she learned anything from this? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

Okay, who thinks she tried to blame me for distracting her or some other bullshit when she tried to talk her way out of the ticket after being pulled over?

Yep. Me too.

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Filed under Distracted Driving, Los Angeles

June 26, 2021 · 23:22

It’s All Fun & Games Until Someone Gets Squished!

Monsieur Badass has developed an annoying habit of treating it like a game of hide-and-seek when he’s sunning himself while simultaneously hiding from the crows by hiding under the tires of the car.

This is not Monsieur Badass but a different lizard. Still, you get the idea. M. Badass tends to be way, WAY in there in the shadow and it’s tough to get a decent picture of him there.

It’s COVID’s fault. For the past fifteen months these cars have only been driven twice a week, sometimes only once. To this generation of Household Fence Lizards, these are permanent objects.

But now that I’m going out several times a week, they have to either be shoo’d away from instant death by squishing flatter than a pancake, or they have to be squished to death (see, “flatter than a pancake” reference).

The guy shown in the picture and the other Doctor Lizardo clan are as skittish as normal lizards are, so if you walk to the care and look at them funny they’re scurrying for the bushes and rocks. No worries.

But Monsieur Badass is different! He’s started to turn it into a game.

First of all, he doesn’t run away when you approach. He’ll actually wait until I get to the car, bend over, and poke my finger or some paperwork at him.

Then, if he’s behind the rear tire, he’ll run around to the front side of the rear tire, which only means that he’ll get squished by the front tire.

So I poke at him again and he’ll run back around the backside of the rear tire. Poke again and he’ll go over to the left side rear tire. Poke again and he’ll go up behind one of the front tires…

This can go on for several minutes, especially when it’s HOT out there. He loves it! Me? Not so much.

Yesterday I thought that I had killed him. We did this whole dance, I knelt down on the scorching driveway to peek under the car, and it looked like “all clear!”

Just to make sure to scare him off if he was hiding I turn on the car, let it idle a minute (as well as get the air conditioning going on full), then put it into reverse and rock the car just a skosh a couple of times, let it roll back just a smidgen, and then finally back up slowly. I mean, jeez Louise! How much warning does he need?!

But then when I got down to the bottom of the driveway and was ready to back out into the street, I looked back up into the driveway and saw him sitting there, right where he would have been underneath the car as it backed up. From that distance I couldn’t tell if I had squished him or if he had been in the middle between the tires and I had backed right over him. He was gone when I got home a couple hours later and was back out there this morning, so it looks like he’s not only a Badass, but a Daredevil.

I want to think that he’s figured this out and he’s only moving as much as he needs to. Then I remember that his brain is like 1% the size of the head of a pin and the only three thoughts it’s capable of are “eat,” “lizard sex,” and “RUN!!”

Long live Monsieur Badass! Or, at least, if he gets squished as I’m backing out, let some crow haul off the carcass before I get back so that I can carry on in blissful ignorance!

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Filed under Critters, Photography

June 25, 2021 · 23:57

The New Normal – June 25th

This afternoon I went to get a smog check on my car. There was just the one guy in the shop. He wore a gaiter, I wore a mask. I was in his open-air shop for maybe ten minutes.

It was not quite up to the standards of “exhilarating,” but by the current standards it was definitely “novel.”

When I was done I drove over to the FedEx place to drop off a package. There was one other customer and three FedEx employees in the small-ish, indoor office. I was there maybe five minutes, everyone was wearing masks. I joked with the counter personnel about the truly helacious noise that the automatic sliding door makes every time someone walks in or out. I said it would make me insane, I would have to bring in my own can of WD-40 to lube it. They said they had already tried that and it hadn’t worked – you got used to the noise.

It’s “normal.” It’s not the same old normal.

 

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Filed under CoronaVirus

June 24, 2021 · 23:31

Random Old Photos – June 24th

I’ve probably seen more garish things in an office – probably. Maybe?

This wasn’t hung in a gallery or someone’s home – it was in a reasonably small office. And trust me, it was freakin’ HUGE. I’m guessing 3+ feet tall, probably four, four and a half feet wide? And heavy as crap, the frame probably weighed 30+ pounds.

Is the painting valuable? Famous? Maybe, but if I had to guess I would bet it was a cheap knockoff or something mass produced and bought online for $79.99. It would have fit in with everything else…

The things you find when you go diving blindly into the old photos files…

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Filed under Art, Photography

June 23, 2021 · 23:33

Making Plans

I did some ordinary things today that I was surprised to see felt very much not ordinary. I blame COVID and the last fifteen months of quarantine and pandemic conditions.

First, there was an announcement that Elton John’s final US tour was coming in 2022, and it will end with two concerts at Dodger Stadium on November 19th & 20th, 2022. Tickets don’t go on sale to the general public until June 30th, but there are presale deals for American Express customers, so I was able to get “floor seats” (the stage will be in the outfield, we’ll be sitting on the outer edge of the infield dirt just to the right of 2nd base – which was not ever a sentence I expected to write…) for a very reasonable price. (Let’s define “reasonable” as considerably less than the $500 to $1,000 each, which is what I expected to be paying for those seats.)

So, seventeen months from now, we’ll presumably be at Dodger Stadium seeing Elton John live.

Or at least that’s the plan – what was the world like seventeen months ago and how much has it changed? How “normal” will the next seventeen months be?

Shorter term, the 79th Worldcon (World Science Fiction Convention) will be in Washington, DC in mid-December. It’s normally in August or early September, but a huge problem with the convention hotel going bankrupt due to COVID has caused a change in schedule. It’s also caused the convention to only have about a quarter of the hotel rooms they normally would have reserved. While the hotel room block opened up just on Monday, it’s already sold out. We’ll be staying at the Hilton about a mile away and figuring out how to grab cabs or Uber or Lyft or whatever to get back and forth between the venues. I also went over the schedule with my bosses since that’s a busy time for us and made sure we had a plan for me to be gone then.

So, six months from now, we’ll presumably be in Washington, DC seeing friends we haven’t seen in a couple of years and probably on our first plane trip in over two years.

Or at least that’s the plan – what was the world like six months ago and how much has it changed? On that time scale the changes are mostly for the better, but only because it was so bad at the beginning of 2021. Watching the news, both medically and politically, I think we’re all a lot more sensitive to how fast things can change for the worse and I know that I personally am not convinced at all that we’re completely safe and away from the thin ice.

Yet…

Hope springs eternal. We see threats coming on the horizon, but they’re vague and uncertain. We’re exhausted from the last eighteen months of COVID, and even more exhausted from the previous four years of one political party trying to turn our country into a third-rate dictatorship – yet we’re making plans. Plans for travel, plans to see friends, plans to go to concerts.

It feels normal and simultaneously feels anything BUT normal.

We might need to get used to that feeling, as much as we may dislike it.

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Filed under CoronaVirus, Politics

June 22, 2021 · 23:51

No Context For You – June 22nd

Too many Diet Cokes, or too few?

The bridge of the Enterprise? The Nostromo? The Millennium Falcon?

You’re getting warmer…

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Filed under Photography

June 21, 2021 · 23:32

Golden Hour Backyard Lizards

You’ve seen plenty of the front yard lizards recently, hanging out under the Volvo or the van, eating ants, living their best lives (except for all of the missing limbs and mutilations). But what about those in the back yard? I think the last one I showed you there was probably Tux.

Can you find that lizard? (That’s not original – watch on Twitter for the #FindThatLizard game to return in a few Wednesday nights. Earyn McGee [@Afro_herper] runs the game and she’s been successfully completing and defending her doctoral dissertation!)

It was one of those times when my watch had whined at me to get off my ass and walk a bit, so as I often do, I took a lap around our backyard sidewalk. This time it was just before sunset, the “golden hour” for photography due to the light. As I walked, almost every step had one of these little guys darting from the grass or bushes or dirt off into the shrubs that border the yard.

This dude didn’t make it to the shrubs, but made the smart move of freezing and hoping his natural camouflage would save him. It didn’t, but the fact that I wasn’t interested in killing and eating him (not necessarily in that order), did.

These skitterish backyard lizard dudes need to chill!

 

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Filed under Critters