Category Archives: Los Angeles

November 19, 2016 · 23:32

Was There A Sale On Running Red Lights This Morning?

In Los Angeles, the “rolling right on red” is commonplace. If you’re coming up on a red light with the intent of turning right (which is legal once you stop, traffic is clear, and it’s safe to proceed) a lot of folks just slow down (-ish) and roll through after a quick glance to see that they’re not actually going to T-bone you. The expectation is that you will watch out for them, stopping before you rear-end them after they pull out in front of you.

Good little neurotic Catholic-educated boy that I am, I don’t do this and don’t have a lot of respect for those who do. But I’ll watch out for them. I’m nowhere near sanctimonious enough to actually get into a car accident deliberately, no matter how much the freakin’ asshole other driver may deserve it.

Today was a whole different kettle of fish.

On the way out to the hangar, between my house and the freeway, about five miles, I had not one but two freakin’ idiots run through red lights without even bothering to slow down or look. I can understand the one guy (not forgive, just understand in a snarky way) since he was busy texting while he was driving so it’s no big surprise that he sailed right through the light. He probably never even saw it, let alone noticed if it was red or green.

The other lady didn’t have that “excuse” but had enough attitude to make up for it. A half block after I had to stand on the brakes and swerve into the other lane to avoid her, we were stopped at another red light. (I assume she stopped at this one only because other people in front of her had stopped.)  She noticed me glaring at her, rolled down her window, and just yawned and rolled the window back up when I recommended that she drive by the same rules as the rest of us.

Okay, I might have opened the conversation with a suggestion that she should begin by removing her head from her ass. It seemed like a reasonable request at the time.

There’s an old Don Henley song (“If Dirt Were Dollars”) that talks about vacuous, brain-dead people like her. “She just looked at me / Uncomprehendingly / Like cows at a passing train.” Aside from the truly clever use of “uncomprehendingly,” the lyrics are perfect for describing people like this.

Never a cop around when you need one.

Tomorrow, we’re expecting to get our first good rain storm in many, many months. If you think people in Los Angeles were driving like blindfolded morons today, just wait. You haven’t seen anything yet!

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Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Los Angeles

October 17, 2016 · 22:05

A Little Bit Of Weather

A little bit of weather goes a long way in Southern California!

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A 0.10″ of rain and presto chango! The freeways are gridlocked. But at least the sky looks lovely while you’re going nowhere fast.

I swear, it would cause less congestion to get 6″ of snow. At least then (most? some?) people would pay attention and drive just a hair more cautiously.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Weather

September 22, 2016 · 23:24

Third Gear Is Not Your Friend

My little Hissy is not quite a “gutless wonder,” but you can see it from there. To say the least, going from my Fit to The Long-Suffering Wife’s Volvo convertible sports car one will notice a world of difference.

But for a teeny tiny four-cylinder engine, she’s got a fair amount of get up and go. It helps that the red line is waaaaaaaay up there at 7,000 RPM, and while most people freak out and want to shift at about 3,000 K RPM, under the right circumstances I’m not afraid to wind her up to about 5,500 RPM.

Stop and go traffic between street lights does not qualify as “under the right circumstances.” On the other hand, there’s no reason to sit there and pick lint out of your belly button once the light turns green, so I generally step out quite smartly when given the signal to do so.

Yesterday night was quite pleasant as I headed home from work, so I had the windows all down and the moonroof open and the tunes playing. Nothing too loud or obnoxious, but I wasn’t trying to be stealthy.

As I pulled up to a light on Ventura Boulevard, in the lane to my left I saw a newer Mustang convertible. Nice looking car, top down, also with some tunes playing. “Money For Nothing” by Dire Straits. The unedited version. A quick glance showed the driver to be a younger guy, shaved head, three-day beard, probably a guy that spent his fair share of time in the gym.

The light turns green and I pull away – he pulls away a lot faster. He’s driving a stick (if I had one thing I would change about Hissy, I wish I had gotten a 5-speed manual instead of the automatic, but that’s another story) and doing some quick downshifting as he speeds up. But he’s not tearing away at 70 in a 35 MPH zone – he’s just accelerating quickly and then cruising.

Which he sort of has to because we’re hitting every single stinkin’ light on Ventura, all the way from DeSoto (where my office is) down to Fallbrook. Every. Single. Light.

So that’s about a dozen times we get to play this game. Green light, he roars off, loudly up into second, roaring up into third, followed by me in my Fit just humming along and catching up about a hundred yards down the road.

As we’re doing this repeatedly, I realize that each time I’m pulling away from the next green light just a fraction of a second faster than the last time. Not deliberately and it’s not a huge difference, but I’m definitely losing less ground to him on every green light.

We both turn north on Fallbrook and again hit every single light. When we get to Victory, for the first time he’s gunning the engine as we’re waiting. The light turns, there’s no one anywhere near us, the road is straight, flat, and empty. He’s off! I’m trundling along behind.

Lots of RPMs, lots of torque! Second gear! He’s pushing red line again. Third gear!

Well, at least the plan was for third gear.

From a couple hundred yards back I see him start to slow and with the car all opened up I can hear the grinding of gears. I don’t know what it was he thought he was putting it into, but it wasn’t third gear.

The Mustang starts to jerk and there’s more grinding. I would have thought that a newer car like that would have a better synchronized transmission, but now that it’s started to act up, this guy apparently is not old enough to have learned how to double clutch in and out of neutral to get synched back up. As I saunter by he’s finally found a gear, accompanied by yet more grinding and jerking.

Unfortunately for him it’s probably first gear, since he’s now engine breaking like mad. Good thing he had his seat belt on. It’s also a good thing that the light ahead has turned red.

He gets his car over into the left turn lane to go into the shopping center. I’m over two lanes now and trying really hard not to start laughing. He seemed like a nice enough guy, he’s got a cool car, he’s got a nice tune on… But none of that means that he wouldn’t come over and kick my ass just on general principles if I’m laughing at his misfortune. Driving a stick in a cool, drop-top Mustang is obviously a macho stud-muffinly thing for him, he’s just blown it big time, and I’m not going there.

But Hissy is laughing. She doesn’t care.

Keep practicing, Money-For-Nothing Dude! You’ll figure it out. But might I suggest a more remote location for practice next time?

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Filed under Los Angeles, Paul

September 11, 2016 · 22:24

Brush Fire Aftermath

After yesterday’s Habitat For Humanity SF/SCV Key Ceremony, we actually had a second event for the evening.

You will remember that we’ve had some huge brush fires in the area. One such fire was the Sand Fire, which burned in the area around the intersection of the 5 and 14 Freeways, in Santa Clarita and environs. Yes, that would be the exact same Santa Clarita where we’re building those new homes.

While our houses were fine, the Sand Fire ended up covering 41,432 acres. While there were relatively few structures destroyed and lives lost (some of these fires can burn down thousands of homes and kill a lot of people), four of the people who lost their homes were firefighters who were away fighting the fire to protect other areas. Our benefit yesterday evening was to raise funds to help those four families.

In order to get to the site of the event, we had to drive through some of the areas that got burnt. You don’t normally see this unless you go looking for it since the majority of the acreage lost in these fires is in the mountains and canyons. But it’s stark and stunning to see up close after the fact. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to be fleeing this on a narrow canyon road with twenty to forty foot flames shooting up all around you.

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These burn areas are sometimes described as “moonscapes.” It’s easy to see why.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Photography

August 28, 2016 · 23:19

An Empty Nest?

No, not us. We already know that we’re empty nesters.

No, I’m talking about Rocky and Raquel, the raccoons that live in our neighborhood, often on our roof under the eaves from the garage.

You’ll recall that Raquel has been cruising about (pictures here, here, and here) for the last couple of months with at least three kits. But ever since we got back from our New York City vacation about two weeks ago, I haven’t heard any of them gallivanting around on the roof.

Tonight when I went to take the trash out, I spooked something large on the roof right outside the door. It was well after dark so I could only see an outline for a second when it was silhouetted against the sky, but there wasn’t much doubt that it was a large raccoon. Later, I’ve heard some movement on the roof, both over by their garage hidey-hole and by where they drink the water that condensates and runs off from the air conditioner.

But I’ve only heard one animal, not three or four.

I’m speculating wildly, but I think it’s probably Raquel and that the kits are grown enough to all be off on their own.

The question is where “off on their own” is. Given that we’ve had this cycle going on for years here, you would think that almost every house would have their own raccoon tenant. But while we do see a lot more than I ever expected to see in the LA suburbs, it’s not exactly a crowd of trash bandits.

I suspect the other half of the circle of life is at work here. We have some big hawks that could easily pick off a cat or a small, young raccoon. We have dogs in almost every back yard and while most of them are just, well, dogs, one of them has got to get lucky and catch a critter every now and then. We have our share of coyotes who roam the area from time to time and they could take down a full-sized raccoon, although it might be a pretty equal battle.

But I think that the biggest “predator” is probably the automobile. One will occasionally spot a raccoon carcass out there among the other suburban road kill. I don’t know what the average life span of a suburban raccoon is, but I’ll bet it would be a lot longer if they learned to stay out of the streets.

Time to put the TrailCam back out there.

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Filed under Critters, Los Angeles

August 24, 2016 · 22:20

Like Sauron’s All-Seeing Eye

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First use a five-year drought to turn everything to tinder. Next toss in any random spark in order to fill the sky to the west of us with megatons of smoke.

Repeat as necessary so there are so many fires burning across the state that they can’t possibly fight them all as aggressively as they would like. This leaves fires like this one that are out in the middle of nowhere in the mountains to just be allowed to burn for the most part while the bulk of the firefighters and planes are trying to save tens of thousands of homes elsewhere.

Sort of a brute force way to get spectacular sunsets, but it seems to be working well!

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Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Weather

July 28, 2016 · 22:45

Late Night Walk

FYI, at this time of night there are a LOT of folks in these parts who don’t even pretend to slow down for stop signs.

Fortunately, these pictures are the result of me playing around with the iPhone camera while I was walking, not because I was running for my life or rolling down the pavement after being bowled over by a BMW doing 80 right through the crosswalk.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Photography

July 27, 2016 · 23:12

Walking The Crazy Off

The sky was wonderfully clear tonight after the smoky haze of the last few days (the big Sand Canyon fire is still less than half contained, but they’re getting the upper hand and it’s burning away from civilization and up into the mountain forests) and it was lovely going out for a 22:30 stroll around the block.

Up high in the southwest you can see Mars and Saturn in the head of Scorpius. Jupiter had set earlier (I’ll have to walk off the crazy earlier in the evening tomorrow to see it) but I could clearly see stars down to about magnitude 4, which is pretty good for Los Angeles. No sign of the Milky Way to the naked eye, but I know it’s there.

The skunks and raccoons left me alone and my fellow residents of the neighborhood actually stopped at the stop signs and didn’t run me over. A cat got freaked out because I walked by her wall and a couple of dogs expressed their displeasure with my existence, but that’s acceptable as long as they’re not lose and trying to gnaw on my leg.

The things that had me so frustrated and pissed off were still here when I got back, but I was able to separate them into the things I couldn’t do anything about tonight (they’ll still be here tomorrow) and those I could. I then did the ones I could.

Some days, that’s all you can hope for.

I’ll count it as a win.

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Filed under Astronomy, Los Angeles

July 25, 2016 · 22:56

Sky Dandruff & Super Sunset

I usually leave the sunroof on Hissy open a half-inch or so just to keep the heat from building up when it’s parked for a long period. This morning, even though that opening wasn’t much, I found the black seat to have some white ash on it.

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This evening this translated to some amazing shadows on the white water vapor clouds, being cast by the much darker clouds of drifting smoke.

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Fires like this can be terrifying and enormously destructive, but their side effects are not without a certain beauty despite that.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Weather

July 23, 2016 · 23:04

Brown & Orange Sky

img_9635Smoke from the Sand Canyon fire is rising at the far left, about 20 miles to our northeast. The smoke plume has today blown more to the south than to the east and it covers much of the Los Angeles Basin and beach areas. Once it hits the onshore breeze, it’s scattering back along the coast to the north and west.

Here you can see the brown & orange cloud stretching all the way around to our west. So far the fire has covered over 20,000 acres and is only 20% contained.

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Filed under Los Angeles, Panorama, Photography, Weather