Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times published an article about the surge in bicycle commuters in the city. It’s a fine article and for those who haven’t read it, it’s about bicycle commuters. And how there’s a surge. But what’s cool about the article, aside from the spellbinding photo of bike repair in action, is they included the LA Metro map for cyclists in the article. I did not know this map existed. Check it out here.

Confusing? I should say so. Look at all those squiggly lines! But don’t fret. I’ll take a moment to help disambigu-fy things for you. Soon, you’ll be zipping around the city as if it were the back of your hand. Check out the legend after the jump.

	White Lines: There are no bike lanes here. Cars rule. You will have to carry your bicycle or strap it to the roof of a passing car. Please ask for permission before doing so. No one likes a stowaway.
	Pink Lines: LycraZones. Cyclists must wear kaleidoscopic, form-fitting outfits if any cycling through these corridors is to be attempted. These also denote a high density of coffee houses for stopping on Saturday mornings in lieu of actually biking anywhere.
	Blue Lines: Drag racing corridors. Watch for illegal events. You’re likely to get plowed under. Also, triangles denote possible sniper turrets.
	Green Lines: No Stop Zones. Traffic lights have been installed along these routes, but they’re just for show. No one actually stops. Keep this in mind when cycling in these areas and try not to stop at red lights yourself–it makes you less predictable.
	Freeways: Bicycles allowed, though all riders must be actively filming their ride. There are CHP checkpoints at every onramp for enforcing this rule.
	Bus: There are a few of these around. Don’t approach unless absolutely necessary. If the bus is on blocks, you may park your bike on the front convenience rack. Just ask the friendly man living inside for assistance.
	Information: Oh, man, you are SO lost.
	There Be Dragons Here.

It’s been said that there are more people alive now than that have ever lived throughout history. It’s not true, at least with respect to the whole planet, but it’s an intriguing thought, anyway. I wonder, though, whether it’s true for Los Angeles? I’m not about to pull out a calculator and figure it out (I can’t come up with the math on my own, and anyway, I wouldn’t know what button to push) but it’s the sort of thing I love to ponder. And where do you think I chose to do my pondering? Check it out, after the jump.

If you die in Los Angeles and no one shows up to claim you as their own, the city cremates your body and sets your ashes on a shelf. If you’re still unclaimed after three years, the city has a modest memorial service and puts you in the ground with the other 1500 or so (sometimes as many as 4000!) unclaimed bodies from that that year. Your final resting place? Evergreen Cemetery near downtown LA.

After hearing about this on the radio, I decided to pay the cemetery a visit and see if I could find these mass graves myself. I’m into the whole aura thing, and I happen to find cemeteries strangely picturesque.

Evergreen is fascinating. It’s wedged into the dense, noisy kaleidoscope of Boyle Heights, a strange, sprawling patch of open space in an otherwise metropolitan free-for-all. The cemetery is a multicultural affair, as varied and colorful as LA itself. Haratounian lies next to Chavez lies next to Hayakawa lies next to Lankershim. Some stones are regal and stately, others caked with dirt and surrounded by dead grass. In spite all of these differences, of course, they all share one simple characteristic.

Yeah, you know what it is.

The one thing about cemeteries I find most depressing, is not all the dead people, but the dead things that living relatives leave at the grave sites.

Alice Marie Longyear’s lifespan echoed her surname.

Vera M. Ware died at 23 years old. She rests in a desolate a corner of the cemetery. Lonely? Yes, but she got her own tree.

The Japanese population here is impressively large.

N. Hama clearly lived life as an outsider, not afraid to stand apart from the crowd.

The most depressing gravesite in the cemetery. If I were buried here, I’d have to zombify myself long enough to rectify things.

Also worth checking out: The Issei memorial, honoring the first generation of Japanese immigrants.  The shrine is attractive and moving.

I never did find the graves of the forgotten Angelenos, despite wandering the length and breadth of the cemetery for the better part of two hours. There was no one to ask, either, because the office was closed. I will return, maybe next time with a date.

For more information on this cemetery, check out the nice multimedia thingy over at KCET.

Last weekend I went searching for Evergreen Cemetery. By the time I got there, it was closed. The dead were, apparently, off duty. So faced with nothing else to do I explored the area between the 10-710 interchange and the San Gabriel Mountains, delving into a neighborhood that, even after five years in the L.A. area, was still a mystery to me. I wound up on a bluff in Altadena, overlooking JPL where, happily, I found a trailhead. The next day, I explored it with a friend and found this:

And this:

And this, too:

According to Wikipedia, when the Gabrielino Trail was created, the Forest Service said this:

This trail has been created for you – the city dweller – so that you might exchange, for a short time, the hectic scene of your urban life for the rugged beauty and freedom of adventure into the solitary wonderland of nature.

So get out there and frolic!

Do you know what a sampo is?

Do you find yourself absently singing the line, “Who’s the puffy guy who’s a big blurry sex machine? Mitchell!”

You ever wake up in a cold sweat in a twist of sheets and realize you were dreaming about Torgo’s knees?

Chances are, you’ll be at The Ford Amphitheater on June 21st when the crew of Cinematic Titanic steam in for the Los Angeles Film Festival. Mystery Science Theater 3000 is no longer, but its two chief alumni are still out there tearing bad movies to shreds. One of them, the show’s creater, Joel Hodgson, is bringing his current incarnation to Cahuenga Boulevard where he and four of the show’s greatest comic minds will be riffing on the film Wasp Woman in front of a live audience.

Torgo terrifies me, Mitchell is a sex god and I haven’t the faintest idea what a sampo is. But I do know where I’ll be that night. See you there, right?

Here’s the scoop.

On a more serious note, yesterday was National Donut Day.

I didn’t realize this until I was at work. One of my coworkers mentioned it in an offhand manner and inadvertently kicked off a noisy countdown inside my head. I clocked out, hit the gym (to bank a few points) and headed for the Burbank Krispy Kreme to pay homage to the Donut Day tradition.

This is a big deal. I’m relentless in the exclusion of sugar and flour from my diet, but the appeal of honoring the day, which has its roots in World War I and the Salvation Army was too good of an excuse to pass up. My donut (pictured above with a Padme action figure) was soft, warm and weighty with historical import.

It’s not too late to honor the “Lassies.” Grab a donut this weekend. If we actually had Dunkin Donuts in Los Angeles, I’d urge you to combat the asinine boycott. So go to Yum Yum (where anything is possible) or Randy’s (and appreciate guerrilla art.) If your powers of rationalization aren’t as robust as my own and you don’t want to actually eat a donut, track down a copy of Homer Price. It’s much better for your heart.

Great script, great acting, great fun (and a pants-less cameo by California’s governor,) but what really blew me away was Gould’s Hollywood Hills pad, which had so much personality and presence, with its spectacular views and free-standing elevator tower, that it became a character all its own. My friend Maria, companion for the evening and old coworker from my Rocket Video days, told me she used to live on the same street. That was the only clue I needed. The next day, because I do that sort of thing, I went exploring in the hills until I found it. It’s on Hightower Drive. (another monster pic after the fold)

Think it’s rent-controlled?

I know, we were all on pins and needles over that, but as of next week I’ll be a Glendale resident. And let me tell you, there’s nothing like technology when it comes to the ol’ apartment hunt. Type the address into Google Maps, hit ENTER, and then marvel at your ability to check out a prospective neighborhood from the comfort of your laptop. Save on gas!

‘Course, you’re not getting a live feed (and for that, I think we should all be thankful.) The images are a little out of date. But, intrigued by the time lapse, I found myself cruising up and down streets looking for differences. That, naturally, became a hunt for gas stations, looking for prices. Now, I remember the gas rationing days of the late Seventies under Carter. Gas was at about $.77 per gallon. That’s almost unimaginable. But I find that when I look at these images, I feel the same sort of nostalgia.

Is that wrong?

More images after the jump.

Everyone’s talking about bicycles these days. it’s almost like, “Hey did you see that wacky new invention? You ride around on only two wheels, not four!” Not since the days of Ginger has there been so much hoopla surrounding locomotion. Well, alright, I’m exaggerating a little, but there a lot of people discovering the excellence of pedaling to work this week. I hope the fascination sticks.

For the past four years I almost never rode my bike to work. But then I didn’t have to since work (Amoeba) was only a few blocks away. I walked. But now that I’m back in Los Angeles and I’m looking for a new place to live I realize that I may not be as fortuitously near my workplace, I’m starting to consider just how I’m going to get around L.A.

In my search for a place I ended up wandering around Montrose a little. Montrose! I didn’t even know that place existed! It’s that lovely berg wedged into that gap between mountain ranges out past Glendale. And I love mountains. But I think it’s just a bit further from Hollywood than I’d be able to reliably cycle every day, and, while the Glendale freeway is nice on a Saturday, at 8 AM on Monday morning it’s a parking lot. So Glendale it is. But I’m asking Glendale residents, or indeed, anyone who cycles around that Los Feliz-adjacent terrain if they’ve discovered any terrific little routes into or out of the Sunset/Gower area.

Los Feliz Blvd to Sunset? Hyperion to Fountain? What are some of the better ways around Glendale and Silverlake on two wheels?

No one I know likes Rush. Not a soul. My circle is so hell-bent against the Canadian power trio, I decided to ask them all if they wanted to catch Rush at the Nokia Theater downtown with me on Tuesday, just to see how many Rush Rejections I could get. I got a lot.

When I asked Maryann, she made this little exclamation of surprise and then laughed at my wildly funny joke. I sent Sara a text invite. She texted back, “Sounds lyk my idea of hel.” Chaz merely texted, “Ugh.” I’m alone among my friends. But when it comes to Greater Los Angeles, things are a bit different. I parked downtown at 7:30, headed for the venue and soon found myself in a crowd–a big, black-clad, slightly grizzled throng. And we were all here for one thing.

Rush, dude.

Rush is aging well. I first caught them at Tingley Coliseum in Albuquerque. 1985. Tickets were just $12.50. It was my first concert sans-parents. They had taken me to see both the Allman Brothers Band and the Dead, so I was no stranger to amplified music, but this was my first one on my own. And wow, did it make an impression. They packed a monster punch back then, and while the music may have changed and the tempo slowed a bit, they’re still roaring on stage. And the fans are roaring back.

The show kicked off at eight and wrapped at just past eleven. In that three hour span they played everything from the solid classics (“Tom Sawyer,” “Freewill,” “Subdivisions”) to spellbinding rarities (the seldom heard “Between The Wheels” and the always magnificent “Digital Man,”) to clunkers (“Spindrift,” from the recent, Snakes & Arrows and “2112,” which, I’m sorry, I’m just sick of hearing.) They played a lot, and most important, they played with a passion and energy and ferocity remarkable after more than thirty years onstage.

My big complaint about Live Rush is that, well, they don’t sound too different from Album Rush. Last night was no exception. The music that the trio pounds out on stage clings to the tried and true album versions of the songs with such loyalty that I found myself longing for a moment of improvisation or a brilliant re-working of an old tune, something to keep us on our toes. But if you’re in the “don’t fix it if it ain’t broken” club, and you missed last night’s show, you’re in luck. The boys from Canada still have another night here in L.A. They return to the Nokia theater Thursday night.

Ticketmaster’s got tickets, y’all.

In case you hadn’t heard, Reuters (and therefore, every other news service in the world) is reporting that Roger Waters’ pig has been found. Two couples in the Coachella Valley will split the $10,000 prize and each get Coachella Tix for life. Apparently the pig tore in half; one pile of plastic landed in one yard, and another in someone else’s. Which means we’ll find the wreckage of the plane that hit it in the next day or two on a remote mountainside.

I’m disappointed and confused. Disappointed because I thought that pig had some serious wings when it lurched into the sky I was hoping it would end up in Uruguay, not just down the street. And confused because I’d thought the reward was for the pig’s safe return. Unless this is a new form of the word, a pig in two pieces isn’t safe. It’s more … well, butchered.