One of the cool things about biking around Los Angeles is the stuff you get to discover that’s hidden in plain sight, with a favorite of mine being sidewalk vandalism. Most of the time you’ll just see a name and maybe a date scratched in the concrete or perhaps a decades-old shoe print. But sometimes you’ll come across more enigmatic stuff — like the following for example, written into the sidewalk by George, Bobby and Robert on the east side of San Fernando Road south of Figueroa Street, directly under the Arroyo Seco Parkway overpass (here) and right at the bottom of the steps leading up to what I like to call the “super-secret freeway bike/ped path” paralleling the southbound 110 between here and the what once was Chavez Ravine (click to enlargify):

I’ve accessed those steps easily a couple dozen times over the last few years, but it was only today that I looked down and found this odd permanent record of the existence of George, Bobby and Robert. That crack running around it like a frame is interesting, but I’m at little more than a guess at the significance of the comma-delineated numbers that follow each name: 28, 1969; 27, 1969; 29, 1969. Birthday date and birth year, maybe? Or their ages during that fateful year? Or perhaps a year yet to come in the lives of these future thinkers?

What’s most curious is the decidedly more faint shapes scrawled at the bottom: a five-pointed star bookended on either side of it by swastikas that mirror each other. Three names, three figures. Kinda makes you go hmmmm.

Waiter: Will there be anything else for you this evening? Moon: No thanks. I'm totally full.

Coming in a close second to my deathless obsession with measuring rainfall, is my never-ending crush on the moon, particularly when it hitsa your eye like a bigga pizza pie, such as last night’s full version. So after this morning’s pre-dawn dog walk I situated my 60x spotting scope on the porch (illustrated after the jump), got my point-and-shoot all up in its viewfinder and managed to hold everything steady long enough to land this big fella at 6:31 a.m., juuuust before it got tangled up in the frontyard tree branches and power lines (click to enormify).

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Here being this spot around sunset yesterday, about three-quarters of a mile downstream from Fletcher Drive on the westbank of the Los Angeles River, from which I did not previously know that the Hollywood sign was visible. One gets so used to looking at the landmark straight on that it’s a bit of a surprise when it pops into view from such wider angles (click to embiggen):

After the jump I also caught a bit o’ video of a great blue heron successfully fishing in an eddy for dinner, and after that in about the same place as the shot of the Hollywood sign grabbed a really crappy still of a perching osprey, one of the rarest birds to be found around the waterway, who swept in for a landing while I stood there gaping.

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1" @ 9AM • 3" @ 11AM • 4" @ 3:30PM

OK, yeah… so, second off that is a full-on rain-o-meter you see pictured above, which for better or worse definitively demonstrates the degree to which I am a raincatching geek. Seriously, I’ve been quantifying the wet stuff since I was 10 years old. I have no idea why. And if it’s any consolation, I didn’t buy the decorative contraption myself,  it was a gift from my beloved wife (probably because Susan got reeeeeal tired of me taking Sharpies to various vases/glassware and inking inch mark approximations all up and down them).

Thirdly, if you look in the background of the middle shot you can make out most of what is in fact a 9-foot-tall wooden heart leaning up against one of our trees in the backyard. That’s a longer story I won’t bore you with here, but yup: we have a rain-o-meter AND a 9-foot-tall wooden heart in our Silver Lake backyard. WIN!

But firstly: Dang if today’s cloud action didn’t dump one,two, three, four inches of precipitation between the hours of 8AM when I set the precipitometer up and 3:30PM when the storm called it a day. Of course your inch-count will vary, but still that’s pretty badass as far as water falling from the sky during the fall. I don’t have LA’s meteorological history in front of me but I’ll bet you October is typically one of our drier months and this drenching could rank as one of the biggest October storms Silver Lake — or perhaps Los Angeles as a whole — has absorbed.

Too late.

Since leaving my outgoing mail by our house’s mailbox isn’t really an option, I’ve been in the old-school habit going on the seven years I’ve lived here in Silver Lake of walking down to the mailbox at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Parkman.

I did just that this morning. Only this time I did a WTF having found not the familiar blue USPS receptacle, but instead just the air and space that the mailbox now no longer occupies, as pictured at right.

It was a small consolation that I timed my trip just right so as to be able to hand off my mail to the postman making his delivers there, and he said this wasn’t the only box in the area to get the hook. With a smile and a shrug he said the closest box still standing (for now) was nine blocks east at Alvarado.

Sigh.

Any boxes missing in your neck of the hoods?

Something captivating is happening in Hollywood about a half-block south of Santa Monica Boulevard on Orange Drive, almost midway back from the street along a nondescript business complex. It’s happening at the Art of Acting Studio, which until Saturday night had been unknown to me like so many of the scores upon scores of small theaters throughout greater Los Angeles that live so often under the radar hosting productions week in and week out.

Within the cozy theater on that sold-out night I was to see the Harold Clurman Laboratory Theater Company’s premiere staging of Clifford Odets’ landmark 1935 agit-prop drama “Waiting For Lefty,” directed by Don K. Williams. And what I saw was a brilliant embrace of a classic that was absolute magic.

Consisting of a series of vignettes threaded through the framework of meeting of cab drivers (with the title character being their absent and expected leader), Odets’ masterpiece is what launched the Group Theatre into the minds of the social conscience in the 1930s. “Waiting for Lefty” centers on union members meeting to discuss a possible strike while offering glimpses into their desperate lives as they search for a way out of poverty in a world where greed outweighs the value of human life and the only way to escape was to fight together.

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Screencap from LA Times' LA Now blog

Bonus points for Best Mugshot Ever and a first paragraph that cracked me up. Story here.

Biking home from downtown this morning I detoured around the drained Echo Park Lake, which is a couple months into a $65-million rehabilitation project that will leave it closed to the public for the next two years.

Peering over the screened chainlink fence that surrounds the entire park I found several egrets and a great blue heron gathered around the little bit of lake left looking into the brackish water for a meal:

(click for maximum panoramification)

I, for on, think the above epically detailed and amazing celebration of Rod Serling and his “The Twilight Zone,” which I found today next to the vacant lot on the corner of Beverly Boulevard at Commonwealth (pinpoint map) in Historic Filipinotown is The Most Awesome Mural Ever — and not just because as a diehard “zoner” geek it’s my favorite television series of all time. Along with a portrait of Serling, you’ve got iconic characters such as Talking Tina from “Living Doll”, one of the aliens from “The Invaders,” the doc from “Eye of the Beholder” and the jet and wing-dancing gremlin from “Nightmare at 20,000 feet.”

The 2011 work is signed by “DOCBAMCKRH” but Google gave me nothing when searching for that as the keyword. Anyone know who did this?

I’ve spent a fair amount of time leading up to today’s anniversary putting off thoughts on how to commemorate it. But when I was awakened far too early this Sunday for no good or known reason, I moped around drinking coffee as the clock advanced toward the moment that changed everything when that first jet struck the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 EDT. When it arrived I was of a mind just to pour another cup and let it march past unacknowledged, but that didn’t seem right. So instead I lit a candle and set it out on the porch in the dark next to the American flag and I said a little prayer to no entity in particular about no one in particular. Amen.

Thanks to the Internet Archive by way of Blogdowntown I found this high-resolution digitization of some amazing footage of 1940s downtown, apparently filmed for use in some unidentified motion picture. Look close and you might see John Fante (or perhaps even Arturo Bandini) walking around.

The clip is made up of several segments, and is literally the next best thing to actual time travel. As best as I can plot it the car follows this route from 2nd Street to Grand, to 5th Street to Flower and back up to 2nd. I’ve already spent too much time scrolling through it frame by frame just entirely mindblown at the slice-of-life details to be discovered in the people and places and passenger vehicles the camera captures in passing, and invite you to get lost in this record of a long-gone Bunker Hill (best viewed full screen in 1080p) :

Last week I found the above banner installed just south of the Sunset Boulevard Bridge over Silver Lake Boulevard, and this morning when I discovered it torn to shreds, my suspicions were confirmed: It was printed on a material that if not plastic is at least heavily plasticized.

It’s been going something like this for summer after summer after summer: I’m in the backyard. A western tiger swallowtail swoops in and busies itself fluttering along the overgrown bougainvillea, never fully stopping at one bloom. I rush into the house, grab the camera, and by the time I rush back out, the elusive creature is either long gone or it lingers haphazardly just long enough for me to get one reeeeally blurry shot before it leaves.

Today it went exactly like that up until the last part where I got one shot that was as if the gorgeous thing decided it had enough fun playing with me and posed, and I offer it for your pre-Labor Day weekend viewing enjoyment  (click to biggify):

Hope y’all have a great holiday.

It was spray painted onto the sidewalk a few doors down from where I live a week or so ago, and I’ve given it glances passing by it coming and going on easily a half-dozen dog walks, but it wasn’t until this morning on a stroll to the nearest mailbox around the corner that I finally stopped and gave it a scan (click to biggify):

Need an 8-minute frivolous diversion?

With my camera rigged up to the eyepiece of my spotting scope (with duct tape and adhesive putty), from my backyard I pointed it at Sunset Boulevard between Descanso (just out of view at the bottom) and the Maltman bend in Silver Lake (at the top) to timelapse capture the afternoon traffic flow.