Villaraigosa, you are SO FULL OF SHIT!

Tent City at Venice Beach

Yesterday was my annual pilgrimage to Venice Beach with the kids for their end o’ summer/back to school field trip.  (I celebrate the latter).

It is so sad to see the changes going on in Venice right now.  Where the sidewalk was once lined with artists and musicians it is now packed with EZ-up tents selling mostly swap meet type crap.  To even get to the tent city one has to wade through a gauntlet of a dozen or so “independent musicians” hawking their latest CD in a very aggressive in your face manner.

I can count on my hand the number artists left on the sidewalk of Venice Beach.  It was sad to see so few of them left.  It was even sadder to see the number musicians has dwindled to less than a handful.  I miss them all, they were the heart and soul of the Venice Beach that I have come to love over my years here.

In talking with the merchants of Venice Beach during my meander yesterday I learned a few things.  Many are not happy with the tent city that has been set up for a lot of reasons.  The tent city folks don’t pay rent and are undercutting them.  They are cluttering up the view of the ocean from the sidewalks.  They are aggressive in staking out spots in the morning, often violently which they say detract from the spirit of Venice.  A lot of reasons they aren’t happy.  Some even made mention of a movement underfoot to try and set up a permit system to help control them.

One of the more interesting changes was the number of “no photos” signs popping up all over among the tent city folks.  It was mind boggling how they can set up for sale on a public sidewalk then expect to be able to control hundreds, if not thousands of folks each day strolling past from taking pictures.

Finally, the best new thing I discovered at Venice is Schulzies Bread Pudding.  The stuff is inexpensive and really a nicely twisted up departure from the regular bread puddings out there.  I opted for the “Duff’s Peppercorn Raspberry” and was not disappointed.  A slightly spicey/peppery bread pudding with a fresh raspberry puree on top.  Add in the freshly squeezed lemonade and the day was complete for $6.50!

Schulzies

I’ll be back as I’ve always loved Venice Beach.  I do hope that they do find a way to control some of the changes that have occurred there to help bring back the old artsy vibe that I loved there.

All pics by me and get bigger with a click.

When I checked it out I found the first commenter, “Mattapoisett in LA” who decided to get critical equating a few typos found in one of our posts as somehow indicative of a lack of organizing skills. His skills at spotting mistakes was promptly applauded by “kauma.” Then commenter “sushigirlie” responded to that saying it seemed “pretty telling that they couldn’t get the donuts shops to donate donuts.”

In defense of the awesomeness of tomorrow’s event and the triple-deckered phenomenality of everyone here at Blogging.la who’s chipped in and pitched in to put this thing on, I posted what I considered to be a fair and untrollish rebuttal, replete with wink at the end in the form of a typo-laden twist on a biblical reference, because, yeah, that’s how I roll. Sometimes.

Checking back awhile later to see if anyone responded I found something magical must have happened because my comment was nowhere to be found in the thread. A dubious poof: had it been a posting failure on my part or had someone in that thread closed to opposing points of view (and/or snarkily cliché’d twists on bible quotes) intentionally deleted it?

So I decided to re-post, trying to get as close as I could to my original thoughts. After it, too, successfully posted, I took a screencap (after the jump; click it for enhanced readability).

The proof is in the posting!

Well, wouldn’t you know when I checked back a few minutes ago, my second comment was also axed.

You can read it all there at the bottom of the image… no expletives, no insults. Just a congenial interest in shedding a little history on the event to counter “sushigirlie’s” tellingly point-missing assumption, and closed with an easy-going parry to the thrust of “Mattapoisett in LA’s” all-to-narrow assessment that typos are a be-all/end-all indicator of how smoothly things will go.

Yet someone somehow found a way to find it offensive and execute it. The question might be less “who did it?” and more “who gives a shit?” But I’ve gotta tell you if it’s uptight chickenshit delete key stompers like this that are finding stupid excuses to avoid Donut Summit, the farther away they stay the better. More donuts for those of us who know a good thing, nothing but hurt donuts for them.

Bathroom Etiquette

Bathroom etiquette takes many forms.  Yesterday I was in a high-falutin office complex in Santa Monica and spotted this sign in the mens room.  It made me laugh, then it made me wonder what the hell happened that made them post the warning.  They not only ask you to clean up after yourself but then enumerate the steps to do so.

The image is kinda crappy as it was done with a cell phone.  To save you the squinting eye strain here are the steps in short.  Flush more than once to leave a clean bowl, make sure the ass gasket is flushed completely, make sure the seat is dry and lastly wash your hands.

Granted it made for a really nice clean restroom and there are plenty of others in the city that could use similar instructions.  Where is your favorite potty stop in the city?  Least favorite?

Pic does get bigger with a click.

Los Angeles Magazine June 2009

As far as I’m concerned Antonio Villaraigosa walled himself off from me way back a few months before his first election in 2005. First he started posting election signs that phonetically spelled out the pronunciation of his last name (ELECT Vee-ahh-ray-go-sah!) to help educate those who were obviously having trouble wrapping their tongues around that contrived conjunction of his and his then-wife’s last name. Shortly after that, he led me to vote for Hahn when he decided to pander to the animal activist vote and kneejerkedly blurt out his support for closing the elephant exhibit at the Los Angeles Zoo, as if that’d be the most important order of city business to get to the moment after being sworn in.

Then came all his missteps and failures and that silly affair with that TV news reporter and the divorce and more missteps and more failures, which just built the divide between him and me all that much thicker and higher.

In fairness, the wall came down a bit shortly after his re-election when I’m guessing his Hummer-lovin’ transportation deputy Jaime de la Vega had someone phonetically spell out “bicycle” (bye-sea-cull) for ‘Tonio and after practicing it diligently he actually said the word publicly for the first time. Shortly after that revelation someone got a picture of him astride a borrowed fixed-gear at a community event in Baldwin Hills, and that endeared me him a little more to him me. Then, as we all know, that high was followed by the low of him pedaling along Venice Boulevard where he took a bone-breaking tumble trying to avoid an inattentive cab driver. But from that near-disaster came his understanding that supporting bikes on the streets and cyclists’ rights to safely ride them there would be a lot easier and more positive a pet project than, say, taking over the school system or running for governor, or spending more time out of the state campaigning for a presidential candidate, or dating other local news reporters… well, scratch that last one.

And my belabored point is? Belabored more after the jump.

As if all that figurative barrier building wasn’t enough, now comes the news from LA Curbed that the mayor’s building a literal wall around his temporary home –  the official mayoral residence, known as Getty House in Hancock Park. In February he put in a request to the Department of City Planning for a variance from the 42″ wall height allowed so that he could wrap the house with a 72-incher (correction: 75″, according to Park LaBrea Press). The purported logic? Security features “embedded in the wall” (probably cameras, heat-seeking missiles, poisoned darts, and an endless loop of Justin Beiber singing “Baby! Baby! Baby! Oh!”) will save taxpayer money spent on personnel. In other words he can fire the guards.

I guess my being so aghast at that enough to overwrite a blog post about it begs the question why? And to be honest, beyond the fact that the building of walls is just a stupid thing for an elected official to literally and/or figuratively endorse, my outrage can be seen as trivial.  See, I have a bit of only-in-LA funky history with Getty House, thanks entirely to its lack of perimeter walls.

My first encounter with the accessible place on the corner of Sixth Street and Irving Boulevard came on my last year of trick-or-treating, Halloween night 1978. I knew it was the mayor’s home and the kids I was with thought the odds of anyone answering were pretty remote. But we decided to give it a try and marched up to the front door, me in my hobo costume. Ringing the bell, I figured at best a member of the staff might open up.  To say I was surprised when Mayor Tom Bradley himself opened the door with a big smile and holding a basket of candy goodness would be an understatement, and I left with an unforgettable moment forever etched in my brain.

My second experience came about 20 years later — again unforgettable, but not for good reasons. At that time in 1997 I was working at the corner of Sixth Street and Western and on my lunchbreak I got in my car to go to the nearest ATM at Wilshire and Irving boulevards. So I headed west on Sixth to Irving and waited for traffic to clear to make a left. The problem was opposite me waiting to make a left and go north on Irving was a big Sparkletts truck that impeded my view of any oncoming eastbound traffic. Inching forward I thought the coast was clear and began my left turn only to discover in horror an oncoming Mercedes whose path I knew immediately I wasn’t going to clear. Sure enough, the sedan punched into the back end of my beloved Honda Civic four-door hard enough to spin her a full 180 degrees with just enough momentum left to roll the vehicle up onto its driver side where it stopped and stood almost as if it was all a choreographed film’s action sequence.

From such an unconventional position inside and entirely (miraculously) uninjured, I calmly turned the ignition key shutting off the frighteningly hyper-revving engine. Then I unstrapped my seatbelt, stood up, pushed up and open the passenger side front door before popping up and out of and down from the totaled car like it was a cake at a stuntmens’ convention. And I stuck the landing facing, yeah… Getty House. Its resident this time being Mayor Richard Riordan. Standing there trying to process what had just happened, one of the guards (who’ll no doubt be replaced by Villaraigosa’s wall) hustled over and asked me and the other driver if we were OK. Amazingly we both were, and I asked the guard if I could use a phone. Without hesitating he escorted me through the same front door Mayor Tom Bradley had given me Halloween candy two decades earlier and into the kitchen where I shocked my boss calling to tell her that I was going to be late returning from lunch.

I suppose if I hadn’t had those decidedly disparate personal experiences with the place, I might not really give a damn about the walling off of Getty House — or at least not so big a damn. But I also know that had a wall been there all along it would have prevented me from getting candy from one affable mayor, and getting assistance from another mayor’s security detail. Plenty of people believe that old saying about good fences making good neighbors. But this barrier Villaraigosa is getting for his last couple years living there is a bad one that cements him further to me as a bad politician.

embiggen with a click

Sigh…one really can’t win at my kids ortho for parking in the tiny lot.  It doesn’t help when some douche in a giant SUV takes up two spaces.  What you can’t see as it is hid by the shadow is the demarcation line dividing the two spots ol’ lard ass hogged up.

Pic with my trusty cell phone…gets bigger with a click.

Thankfully, it was only water spurting out under high pressure this morning and not blood, but the intrepid (and so handsome!) dudes appeared in a jiffy and had the situation under control in short order.

Did I mention they were gorgeous? And that after battling the water I looked like a drowned rat?

Oh and before you downgrade my IQ by 50 points you should know that They couldn’t find the water shutoff to the house either.

In fact, now that daylight is upon us and calm is restored, I’d really like to know where that shutoff is….

(and PS, kids: if you’re gonna sleep naked, maybe have some clothes in your handy emergency kit. Just sayin.)

I saw This Person shopping at a Santa Monica Ralph’s last week, fully without irony.

She and her friends were not looking to see if anyone would notice the robe, nor were they in any sort of Dude-like good humor.

I would have been willing to Consider giving her a pass if she at least bought milk and/or Kahlua, but all they bought was a few bags of Doritos.

They wandered the store, jabbering in a language I failed to identify (and I’m pretty good at that), and exuding general bitchiness.

Ugh.

No thank you.

(No, I don’t show her face. And neither should she.)

I think sidewalk bicyclists are both annoying and dangerous, and lately I’ve noticed a marked increase in their numbers. I don’t know if it’s the high price of gas forcing more and more people to self-locomote, or if there’s some sort of bike-on-the-sidewalk-to-work campaign I haven’t heard about, or if it’s just part of the secret plot to make my commute more ever-more obnoxious. Regardless, I had a whole bloggy rant planned today about scofflaw cyclists and how you shouldn’t expect motorists to be looking out for you if you’re not obeying the traffic laws.

And then…I actually researched the traffic laws.

Who knew? Apparently you are, in fact, legally allowed to bike on the sidewalk in L.A. So go on with your bad self, bicyclist. Ride that vehicle on the sidewalk. Hell, take your whole family with you. Annoy everyone and endanger yourself. Because L.A. law allows it. We can’t legislate good manners or common sense.

(Daquella manera’s photo used through creative commons license.)