Verdugo City

Mr. Farnham

2011-01-27T16:54:00.000-08:00

This is the message I left at the memorial site when I learned my High School Biology teacher, Mr. Richards Farnham, had passed away.

Mr. Farnham was a great teacher. For me his greatest lessons weren't about Biology, although I did learn a few things. What I remember most was that he had no patience for pretense or sham. He taught me that ideas, and learning, and animals, and science, and people all matter, but that school doesn't. School is just an annoying set of arbitrary rules made to be subverted. Tests and grades are distractions. What matters is looking, really looking at the world around you, observing carefully, thinking and making connections. I spent a year as an assistant in his classroom, changing smelly paper under mouse cages and carrying jugs of sea water for the turtle, so I could hang around him and learn.

My mother, my uncle, my aunt, my brother, my sister, and I were all students of Mr. Farnham. And all of us carry a little piece of him into the future. Thank you Mr. Farnham.

My sister's memories of Mr. Farnham

Piece of my Heart

2010-10-20T19:58:00.001-07:00

On Thursday afternoon I am scheduled to have a procedure performed on my heart to correct a condition called atrial flutter. Some of my friends have been curious and some concerned so I thought I'd try to explain it as well as I can. The good news is that the procedure is very low risk, and highly likely to permanently repair the atrial flutter.

The Wikipedia description of atrial flutter is quite clear and seems completely consistent with the information I've received from my cardiologist.

In a normal heart, the atrium fills with blood and then an electrical impulse causes it to beat and force the blood into the ventricle. With atrial flutter, extra beats cause the heart to beat too frequently. This means that instead of a good strong "woosh" I get lots of half or quarter wooshes. It's kind of like a toilet that keeps running and never really flushes.

While the consequences of this aren't that dire, it does mean that my heart works harder for less effort. My resting pulse before medication was routinely 130 beats per minute, and I was getting out of breath with even small amounts of exercise because my blood doesn't get as much oxygen as it is supposed to get. In the long run, it's not so good for the heart, so it needs to get taken care of.

In my case, the atrial flutter (call it a-flutter if you want to sound like a medical person) is in the right atrium, the part of the heart that gets the blue, oxygen-depleted blood from the veins and pushes it into the lungs. The good news is that this is the low-pressure side of the heart, so it's easier and safer to work on.

The ablation procedure consists of inserting a catheter into a vein on my right side and sliding it up to the heart. This is done while I lie on top of a table with big magnets that make it possible for the electro-physiology specialist to see a 3D image of my heart as he works. It's scheduled to take about an hour to get the tip of the catheter to the right position on what's called the isthmus and then burn a small ridge that will interrupt the extra electric flow, stopping the atrial flutter and returning my heart permanently to a normal rhythm. This is all done under sedation, not a general anesthetic.

It's customary to say that someone is lucky when they have a health problem that's not too bad or easily fixed. Actually, I would say "lucky" would be not having atrial flutter. But I am grateful that I have a problem that medical science knows how to repair at very low risk.

I'm not looking forward to this but I'm really not too nervous. It will be good to have it over with! I'll try to post something on Friday about how it went.

Looking Through the Telescope at Griffith Observatory

2010-05-24T21:57:00.000-07:00

Sunday was a beautiful day in Verdugo City so we ended up riding over to Griffith Park for a walk to take in the view. The Griffith Park Observatory is one of the places that I truly love in Los Angeles, and one of the few that, on the surface at least, looks much as it did when I first visited as a kid, perhaps 50 years ago. But in all the times I've visited, I've never looked through the telescope before.

Griffith Park Observatory was never a scientific observatory - it was built for public education. The unlikely-named Griffith Griffiths gave the land to the city, which I suspect coveted it mostly as valuable watershed. But from the beginning the park was dedicated to public recreation and education, with the Observatory as the most prominent landmark - not counting the "Hollywood" sign, nearby but not quite in the park.

Anyone who thinks that there aren't lots of people hungry and curious to learn about science need only come down to the Observatory. Create a beautiful and interesting place that's free and you can draw a crowd. I've probably been there at least 30 or 40 times, walked the grounds, toured the exhibits old and new and viewed the planetarium show, but I've never been there at the right time, on a clear night, to look through the 1935 12" Zeiss Refracting Telescope. By the time I had my look, 7 million people had beat me to it. This is telescope that more people have looked through than any in the world.

And what do you get after you wait in line for this purely analog scientific experience? You get to see the surface of the moon close up with your own eyes. That's the real sunlight reflected off the surface of the moon, bouncing off the ridges and crater edges, looking remarkably bright and hyperrealistic. You can look at all the photos you want and it will never look the same as the view through the telescope.

It saddens me that so many science museums are so rotten and boring. When I was growing up, the Griffith Observatory and the California Museum of Science and Industry (especially the "Mathematica" exhibit that I only learned later was created by Eames and Eames) changed my life - they motivated me to the ask the questions that framed my career and my interests. So many museums misuse media and digital technology in ways that remove children from science rather than drawing them in. When I was a kid, the most popular exhibit in the Observatory was the Giant Tesla Coil. Guess what everyone flocks to now? The same old Tesla Coil. Simply seeing a giant spark shoot out of the coil doesn't teach you how electricity works - but it makes you wonder! And that wonder is the root of the motivation that makes some of us try to understand the world for the rest of our lives.

Seeing a print of Van Gogh's "Wheatfield with Crows" is enjoyable, but seeing the painting can change the way you see forever. And you can learn a lot about the moon by looking at photographs, but seeing the moon in the sunlight reflected off its surface and passing 230,000 miles to be resolved by a telescope and your retina is a completely different experience. I feel very lucky to have had both experiences in my lifetime.

Who's Left?

2010-02-19T20:21:00.000-08:00

When I heard that "The Who" would play halftime at the Super Bowl, I cringed. Jeez, I thought, do people really want to see two old guys from a once great band that had its last hit 30 years ago? Why would they be invited? Why would they do it, except for the money? Do they really need it?

I was tempted to not even watch, but I couldn't help myself... and it was worse than I had hoped. I knew Daltrey couldn't hit those notes anymore, but Townshend seemed to be having problems with his guitar too... and the attempt to cram 6 songs into 12 minutes was pathetic. I mean, they used to take a 2 minute song like My Generation and jam on it for 12 minutes. I would have felt bad for them, but hey, nobody forced them to do it. I reminded me why I've avoided going to see my rock heroes now that they're old.

For years, I avoided going to see the Who. I got my copy of "Tommy" when I was 13 and had no way to get to concerts. By the time I was going to concerts, Keith Moon was in bad shape, the Who weren't touring that much (and they really sounded pretty bad - I listened to a recording from 1977 today, and Moon was horrible.) I wanted to hold on to the sound I loved, from the raw energy of "I Can't Explain" to the humor of "The Who Sell Out"; the wonderful "Tommy", the awesome "Live at Leeds", and my all-time favorite, "Quadrophenia". I loved the sound of the Who, Pete Townshend's guitar moves, Daltrey's intense energy, Entwistle's melodic driving bass and Keith Moon's manic brilliant drumming. To me, the Who from about 1968 to 1973 were everything a band could be.

I could have gone to see them in the 80's or 90's, but I always wanted to remember how the original band with Keith Moon sounded - to me it just didn't seem like it could be the Who without him. Then Entwistle blew his heart out with cocaine, and I figured that was it, they were done. I would never go see Townshend and Daltrey - I called them the "Who's Left".

But when my 16 year old son told me about the VH-1 Rock Honors the Who concert at UCLA Pauley Pavilion in June 2008 and asked if I wanted to go, what could I say? My son wants to see the Who? I can't pass that up. And it sounded cool, a bunch of bands playing Who covers followed by a set from the Who. The good seats were $500, but I got a couple of nosebleeds at $25 and we went.

Through a couple of lucky breaks, we were able to "trade up" our seats and we moved from the second-to-last row, where you really could just about touch the ceiling of the basketball arena, down to seats 20 rows from the stage on the right. The first half of the show was fun but not really great - Foo Fighters did a decent job with Young Man Blues, Incubus played a nice set. But the Flaming Lips were terrible - I mean, if you are going to play a medley from Tommy for a live and TV audience, you don't have time to learn the words and chords? And Jack Black singing? Yeah, I get it, he loves the Who but so do I and I'm not up there embarrassing myself. Give me a break. But an amazing rock and roll moment was yet to come.

We got to our good seats just in time to see Sean Penn introduce (with a snarky swipe at MTV) Pearl Jam. And oh-my-god they were amazing. You can see it here and please do! Eddie Vedder made the entire audience feel like he was born and lived his entire life just to perform "Love Reign O'er Me" and "The Real Me" from Quadrophenia. This was true, transcendent, ecstatic rock and roll. My son and I were transfixed and transformed by two songs that seemed to last forever and be over in a moment. This was everything that was great about The Who, and Rock and Roll, and Pearl Jam, all in 9 minutes. I've had a few amazing concert experiences, and this was certainly one of them.

At the end of "The Real Me", Pearl Jam's guitarist tossed his Les Paul in the air and let it fall to the floor. It seemed totally appropriate, spontaneous, real. I saw in the YouTube comments some complaints about destroying a beautiful guitar. C'mon, this was a WHO tribute - someone had to do it, and Pearl Jam earned the right. Yeah it was sad and painful and violent. I loved it.

And then... The Who... Pete Townshend looked like an old college math professor, Daltrey like a botoxed tennis instructor trying to look under 40 so he could try to pick up college girls. Townshend was grumpy and angry and really, kind of cool. At one point he stopped a song in the middle, cursing and stomping about the sound, and started over. It wasn't great rock and roll, but it was fun, and Townshend played pretty damn well, a lot better than at the Super Bowl this year.

Sometimes the best rock moments come at 2 in the morning at a club with a band that you've never heard of and never will hear of again. Sometimes it's just a lick or a scream or the way the drum and the bass get in the pocket and drive the beat. It's almost never where you expect it.

When I heard the Daltrey sing "hope I did before I get old" in 2008, it didn't seem ironic; it seemed like a desperate plea to the rock gods that he could still bring it, that he could still rock. And there were moments when they still could. And when they sang "nobody bites back as hard on his anger", I could feel the anger and the pain and the frustration that Townshend expressed so well when he was 20 - and he's still sad and angry and frustrated, just a different set of frustrations. I'm glad I saw them.

But Pearl Jam - that was Rock. I wish they could play the Super Bowl now, not in 2035...

Se solicitan trabajadores!!!

2009-06-16T20:15:00.000-07:00

When I drive out to Cal State Channel Islands, the last 10 minutes of the drive passes through farmland, most of it planted with strawberries. Here and there along the straight lines of raised strawberry beds, groups of men and women stoop to pick the berries and place them carefully in boxes. Every so often, one of them stands up with a completed box, and walks quickly, or sometimes runs, over to the truck where the berry boxes rise in stacks.

Strawberries are one of the most labor intensive crops around. Unlike many fruits, they ripen unevenly, so you have to look at each berry to see if its ready to pick. The teams of laborers work from one end of a field to the other over the course of a few days, then they go back to the beginning and start over.

California is in the middle of the worst recession in my lifetime. The official state unemployment rate is over 10%, and I read today a prediction that it won't drop back below 10% until late in 2011. As I drive I often think of how incredibly fortunate I am to have work to go to that I like and that doesn't require me bend at the waist for hours at a time, starting in the chill of early morning and finishing with the sun hot overhead, day after day.

I'm told that nearly all the workers are Spanish-speaking, from Mexico and Guatemala and El Salvador and Honduras.... I am sure some are American citizens and many have Green Cards, while others are "undocumented" or "illegal" or "unwelcome". This is not a political essay and I don't know what the right answer is; all I can say is that the people in these fields work hard everyday to support their families and to put strawberries on our tables, and I am in awe of the work they do.

"Why Advertising is Failing on the Internet"

2009-03-28T20:34:00.001-07:00

I found this article very interesting - http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/03/22/why-advertising-is-failing-on-the-internet/

My basic premise is that the internet is not replacing advertising but shattering it, and all the king’s horses, all the king’s men, and all the creative talent of Madison Avenue cannot put it together again.

The Montrose Flood

2009-01-25T12:17:00.001-08:00

The area where is live is laced with an extensive system of concrete culverts designed to channel rain water. Shown here is the Verdugo Wash. These culverts lead to the Los Angeles River, which is partially restored but mostly a concrete culvert as well, and then to the ocean.

Up above, at the base of the 5000 foot high steep wall of the San Gabriels sit huge boulder fields with concrete dams designed to trap the boulders that are washed down from the mountains in a heavy rain. Around our house the earth is a sandy loam with dozens of grey rocks of various sizes embedded in it. All of this is evidence of the thousands of years of periodic floods that were the harsh, natural environment of this area that lies in a valley just above the LA basin.

I was reminded of this history by an article this morning in the Los Angeles Times about the Great Montrose Flood of 1934. About a dozen people died when a wall of water, mud, and boulders came crashing down out of Pickens Canyon on New Year's Eve. It's hard to imagine the violence that such a flood would have represented. The San Gabriels are steep and rocky, and the kinetic energy represented by the flow of water and earth must have been staggering. Sometimes we sneer at our concrete "washes" in LA - they seem like such a crude substitute for the natural arroyos that existed before - but another way to look at them is as a triumph of civil engineering that lets human beings live safely in a harsh environment.

From Melting Pot to Pizza

2009-01-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about LA is the way cultures are mixed together in unexpected ways. Los Angeles is a city of mashups! This pizza spot I saw near downtown last night summarizes it rather well. Unlike a melting pot, where everything is merged into one undifferentiated goo, people come from all over the world and then maintain their identities. Of course that's true over most of the USA today, but it's in front of you constantly in Los Angeles.

Morning on the 405

2009-01-15T20:27:00.000-08:00

This is pretty much how I've been spending my week...

I-95

2009-01-11T10:34:00.001-08:00

IMG 1695
Originally uploaded by robotbrainz

I love songs that can evoke a place, whether it's a place I know or one that exists just in the mind of the songwriter. Two that come to mind immediately for me are Waterloo Sunset and Strawberry Fields.

One of the things I like so much about the band Fountains of Wayne is that their songs are specific - real people, real places. They have names like Julie and Stacey and Michael, and they live in places like Brooklyn and they shop at Costco and at... Fountains of Wayne, on Route 46 in Wayne, NJ.

Their latest album, Traffic and Weather, is really wonderful - and at the moment, my favorite song is "I-95":

They sell posters of girls washing cars
And unicorns and stars
And Guns N' Roses album covers
They've got most of the Barney DVDs
Coffee mugs and tees
That say Virginia Is For Lovers
But it's not
Round here it's just for truckers who forgot
To fill up on gasoline
Back up near Aberdeen

It's a nine hour drive
From me to you
South on 1-95
And I'll do it 'til the day that I die If I need to
Just to see you
Just to see you

I spent many years doing that drive 2 or 3 times a month, from New Brunswick, New Jersey to Durham, North Carolina (and a few years before, from Falls Church, Virginia to New Brunswick). The words and the sound of the song put me right back there on the highway, stopping for gas at the big truck stop in Aberdeen with the giant sign you can see two miles away as you rise and fall over the rolling hills of Maryland.

(Thanks to Robotbrainz for using a Creative Commons copyright for the photo above.)

The Differential Engine In Operation

2009-01-10T12:25:00.001-08:00

The Amazing Differential Engine

2009-01-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

I've always been fascinated by the story of Charles Babbage, who had a passionate interest in applying the tools of the industrial age to building machines that could solve problems. He completed the design for a super calculating machine, the Differential Engine, and he worked (along with Lady Ada Lovelace) on the design for the Analytic Engine, which anticipated the modern digital computer.

In his lifetime he ran through some large grants from the British Crown attempting to build the Differential Engine, but was never able to complete a working prototype. In the 1980's a curator at the London Science Museum discovered the original plans and embarked upon a project to build a Differential Engine. While modern manufacturing techniques were used, it was built to tolerances that would have been attainable in the mid-Nineteenth Century. The working machine was displayed in London starting in 1991 and I got to see it in 1992. It's a beautiful creation of gleaming bronze and steel and a remarkable intellectual and manufacturing feat.

I had no idea when we made plans to visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View that they now have the SECOND Differential Engine model, and furthermore they demonstrate it in operation. And even better, they have completed Babbage's vision by including a printer/typesetter - the purpose of the machine was to typeset tables of mathematical results that could be used to print books and eliminate human error. The machine was commissioned by Nathan Myhrvold ex-Microsoft guru, and fortunately he agreed to show it off at the museum for a year. If you're anywhere near Mountain View between now and April, come by and take a look - and be sure to stick around to watch them operate the machine. It's a beautiful thing.

Did You Feel It?

2009-01-08T20:32:00.000-08:00

I was sitting at home this evening when I heard a creaking sound coming from the ceiling fan, noticed a slight vibration, and though, "oh, an earthquake". If you've lived in Southern California a while you tend to note these quakes which are either very small or very far away or both, and then move on without much thought.

The USGS has a WONDERFUL site, earthquake.usgs.gov, that gives you all the data you could want about every earthquake, so later on I took a look. A 4.5 magnitude out near San Bernardino - enough to make you a bit nervous if you were close by but not likely to do any real damage. I'm about 80 or 90 miles away. On the site, there's a link - "Did You Feel It?" - you click on it and it collects your location and then asks you about your perception of the quake.

So how many geeky people (like me) do you think would go to this site for a small earthquake, click on "Did You Feel It?" and then complete the survey? So far, over 3,400 from all over Southern California. What a fabulous way to collect data about the perceived intensity of an earthquake, the range of perceptions, and the patterns of intensity in the area around the quake. I imagine someone at USGS proposing the idea and being told, "why bother, nobody would do that!" For a moderately large quake they get many tens of thousands of responses. (Of course, when the big one comes, the Internet's going down!)

Keeping the Gorillas out of Manhattan

2009-01-06T22:14:00.001-08:00

Just north of San Francisco in the Marin Highlands, some of the most beautiful terrain in the world, lies the only restored Nike Base. The Nike rockets were set up in the 50's as surface-to-air missile sights to try to "vaporize" incoming formations of Soviet bombers. The Nikes could carry tactical nuclear warheads of 40 kilotons. I'm not sure I understand why you need a nuclear warhead to take out jets, except that you'd get a bigger margin of error, but I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The missiles were guided by a ground-based analog computer system that used radar to track the incoming bombers and the missile and would adjust its path to try to put them in the same place at the same time. It's hard to imagine you could make that work but the guys who have restored this base, and who worked at Nike sights in the fifties, sixties, and seventies claim that in tests the missiles were remarkably accurate.

There were about 300 bases but the Fort Barry site is the only one that's been restored as a museum. The Nike site vets who work as volunteer guides are pretty proud and passionate about the technology and they've obviously spent 1000's of hours in volunteer labor, restoring lift elevators and launch systems.

One of them explained the purpose of the program to me:

It was all about deterrence. It's like the guy standing on a street corner in Manhattan waving his arms around, and someone asks him what he's doing, and he says "Keeping the gorillas away", and the other guy says "there aren't any gorillas around here" and the crazy guy says "see - it's working!"

Yeah, that pretty much sums up the Cold War.

Don't Text While Driving

2008-12-29T22:08:00.001-08:00

This message has sprouted over the last week on our wonderful information displays on the Southern California freeways. If this works as well as the "no holding a cell phone and driving" law, the amount of texting-while-driving should go down 10 or 20%.

Thank God we have a law against texting-while-driving. Now we need a law to ban biting your toenails while you drive, and trimming your eyebrows while you drive, and reading books while you drive (I suspect there's no law against this....) How about taking photos while you drive?

I was a bit concerned about these signs however. Usually at this time of year, they say "Don't Drink and Drive". Just think of all the people who will die because they didn't see a sign that reminded them not to drink and drive. But I guess the texting thing is pretty important.

Memories with no one to remember them

2008-12-28T10:10:00.001-08:00

This photograph was taken in 1925 or 1926. The girl on the left is my grandmother, Adeline Hellwig Kreiner.

Adeline died just over a year ago, and as my family was gathered for Christmas we were sorting through a cache of her photos. I thought I'd seen them all before, but this one, which initially was in the pile "nobody we know", jumped out at me. When I suggested the girl was Adeline, everyone agreed right away. That flirty, mischievous smile stayed with her to the end.

We threw out a big stack of old photos - friends of my grandmother, proud school photos of children and grandchildren of her friends... photos that might be memories for someone but not for us. My son A. did grab a selection of photos that he liked.

I wonder about that day on the beach. I imagine it was summer in Cleveland, Ohio or at least somewhere along Lake Erie because I don't think my Grandmother went anywhere further than a trolley ride from her home when she was growing up. It looks like a fun, happy moment - but there's no way to know, because there's no one to ask. It's a memory that is now gone.

We Used to Send Out Christmas Cards

2008-12-25T15:12:00.001-08:00

A song, written and recorded on Christmas Day 2008. Thank you to all my many wonderful friends. I don't think I could have made it through this year without you. I hope you find joy in this season.

Browsing for Records With my Son

2008-12-20T18:07:00.000-08:00

I spent many many hours in my youth browsing through record stores. Big stores like Tower in Hollywood, small ones like Field of Zaad in Venice, looking for new records, imports, cut-outs, boot-legs. The rhythm of flipping through the records, pulling one out, showing it to your buddy, shoving it back in... out of one store, on the road to another... the enjoyable or awful music blaring over the store P.A.... friendly and helpful or snotty and obnoxious clerks in the stores... it's a memory of a time that has certainly passed. Tower is gone, Rhino Records is gone, nearly every decent "record store" is gone.

Fortunately there are a couple of decent ones left in LA, and oddly enough my 17-year-old son A. actually likes to spend time in them. We started out this afternoon at Rockaway Records in Silver Lake, where he picked up an Electric Light Orchestra album and one by XTC. "If I'm going to get music, I'm either going to buy it on vinyl or pirate it," says A.

Later we ended up at Amoeba Records in Hollywood where he picked up another ELO album. He'll add it to his small album collection that includes a couple of Zappa albums. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the Voxtrot EP he wanted. As we were digging through the records, he commented that "if it wasn't for the Internet, this would be REALLY fun..." We managed to have a good time anyway.

A. was never really that interested in baseball, or hiking, or many of the other things I did with my Dad and I had imagined sharing with him. I certainly never imagined watching my son buy an ELO EP. You don't know where the connection is going to come, you just have to be ready to let it happen when it does.

2008-12-16T20:52:00.000-08:00

When I was a boy in Mar Vista, my parents used to take my sister and me out one evening in December to see Christmas lights. We used to go up to Grand View Blvd, which at the time had a line of houses with impressive displays.

"We ought to go where the rich people live," I remember suggesting to my Dad. "They would have the best lights."

"Naw," he replied. "They didn't get rich by wasting their money of Christmas lights."

Generally he's right, but the Balian Mansion in Altadena is an exception. The Balian family made their money selling little cups of ice cream to LA City Schools. I think they were a nickel, and came with a wooden spoon.

I don't know how the neighbors can stand it. I wonder if the real estate agents have to disclose this when someone buys a house on the same block. And I don't know what the appeal is - but I enjoyed taking my daughter there nonetheless.

Riders on the Storm

2008-12-15T22:44:00.000-08:00

A long slow slog through Monday traffic in rainy L.A., and then just as I was getting to my destination, the crash of distant thunder and the sound of rain drops coming from the radio, then Ray Manzarek's haunting piano line, and Jim Morrison singing "Riders on the Storm"... a perfect morning.

(photo by Lee Kelso, some rights reserved)

Welcome to the Hotel California (not)

2008-12-10T07:34:00.001-08:00

For the past few weeks I've had the pleasure of spending a couple of days a week at California State University, Channel Islands. Despite the name, the campus is not on an island - it's in Camarillo. The campus is nestled against the hills at the western end of the Santa Monica Mountains, surrounded by an alluvial plane that stretches to the ocean just a few miles away.

The campus opened about 10 years ago on the site of what was the Camarillo State Hospital, the main hospital for the mentally ill in Southern California. Before I visited the campus the first time, I had imagined a cold, industrial, prison-like setting, but instead it's a beautiful example of California Mission Architecture. Given our embarrassing history of mistreating the mentally ill, I'm sure it wasn't such a great place in its heyday, but it feels like a peaceful resort, a place to get well.

View Larger Map

The history of Camarillo State Hospital is rich - many of the people on campus and in the community have friends and relatives who worked there in its previous incarnation, and there are many stories about the early days of the campus when it was common to find former residents who had returned looking for sanctuary. Of course, there are lots of ghost stories. I'm only there during the day but people get spooked at night.

The most persistent rumor is that the hospital was the original "Hotel California", the place where "you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave". This has been denied many times by members of the Eagles, but the myth persists, and people say they know someone who knows someone who's seen the secret register of celebrity patients, and they are certain Don Henley stayed there despite any evidence to the contrary. (But jazzman Charlie Parker did spend time there, and wrote a piece "Relaxin' in Camarillo".)

Whatever the history, it's a beautiful campus, and the people I meet there mostly seem happy to be there. It's a nice place to spend some time, and a wonderful place for a student who wants a somewhat bucolic campus to think and learn and grow.

Why is it called CSU Channel Islands if it's not on an island? That's a story for another time.

Uppers

2008-12-06T19:51:00.000-08:00

While standing in the 7-11, waiting for my daughter A. to find a tube of blue candy that she needed for a gingerbread house, I was startled by this display of "energy supplements". It seems to me that not that long ago there was just NoDoz and Jolt Cola. There must be a lot of people who feel crappy and think that the right magic mix will make them feel better. I'd rather take a nap.

This is the funniest thing I've read in a long time...

2008-12-01T21:47:00.001-08:00

"I hate cave crickets" by Dan Greenspan. (Not recommended to be read while eating...}

On Modding a 70-year-old Bed

2008-12-01T09:33:00.001-08:00

My daughter A. owns a beautiful handcrafted bed made from black walnut in the 1930's by her grandmother when she was in high school. As such things happen, it suddenly became an urgent project to replace her perfectly functional twin bed with the old walnut full-size bed.

We needed an inexpensive way to get a mattress that would fit, and she liked the $149 dollar foam mattress at Ikea coupled with the curved birch bed slats. So we got it home, set up the bed, and... the 53" slats were too small for the 54" bed, they barely made it to the edges of the wooden rails and would easily slide through. So we needed to come up with a way to make it work...

When you're dealing with a bed that was lovingly crafted from black walnut, you don't want to muck it up. I'm happy that we found some nice 1"X2.5" red oak strips at Home Depot, screwed them in with way more screws than it probably needed, gently nailed a half-inch pine spacer on each side, and put it back together in less than an hour. My new cordless electric screwdriver worked great! A. is very happy with the result and I'm not embarrassed by my work, which stands up adequately with the integrity of the original piece of furniture.

Going shopping? Take the Ferrari.

2008-11-30T17:17:00.001-08:00

I can't really imagine ever owning a Ferrari, but I've fantasized about driving one. However my driving fantasies don't include driving to the Ralph's on Foothill. I suppose if you own a Ferrari you can take it wherever you want, but I think I'd probably use the Porsche Cayenne for shopping... or maybe the Land Rover, just in case there was a flash flood and I needed to ford an arroyo...

I love going to the movies

2008-11-30T14:34:00.000-08:00

Last night my family and I went to The Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood to see West Side Story. It was projected from a beautiful new 70mm print on a huge screen in one of the last of the great movie palaces. The music sounded amazing, the design and cinematography and lighting and editing are phenomenal - and the print was so good that you could pick out spots where the focus wasn't quite right or the lighting was a bit off. I love the dancing in this movie, and I love Natalie Wood.

My son the critic pointed out that some of the acting was rather wooden, and he's right. The movie doesn't really have the emotional impact that it ought to, because it just doesn't seem believable, at least watching it today. And there's a few changed lyrics that really gall me, that apparently were nods to the censors in 1961. I grew up with the LP of the stage play, and for me, that's the gold standard, but the movie is a wonderful experience. Seeing it in a big theatre full of fans, listening to their reactions, watching the dancers looming 30 feet high, there's nothing like it.

It's popular to dis movies - too expensive, audiences are rude, movies are lousy - all true, if you go to the local cineplex on a Friday night and watch most of the junk coming out of Hollywood today. Relatively recently I got a DVR and a high-def TV and for most movies that's a perfectly adequate way to watch them if they are worth watching at all. But I love the epic movie on the big screen - and I love the really good "small" movie, in the dark with others.

And I usually love the crowds in Hollywood and Burbank and Glendale. You're often sitting with members of the Hollywood working class, the gaffers and the transportation captains and the animators and the studio musicians and the special effects programmers, who sit 3 or 4 minutes into the credits so they can applaud their buddies. If the movie is good, or even decent, they sit in rapt attention. With the right movie and the right conditions, there's still something magic there.

I can't wait to see Australia. In a theater.

Where I live

2008-11-29T16:46:00.000-08:00

If you met me and asked me where I live, I probably wouldn't tell you that I live in Verdugo City.

If someone from, say, Barcelona, or Baton Rouge, or Cleveland asks me where I live, I'll probably say Los Angeles. And indeed, I live in Los Angeles County, and just about 14 miles from the center of the City of Los Angeles - there are lots of people who live in the Los Angeles city limits who are farther from the center than that.

If you live around L.A., I might say I'm from Glendale, which is my mailing address and the city that I live in. Glendale is one of the larger cities in L.A. County, and most people around here have a vague idea where it is, although most have never had a reason to come here so they are not really sure. "Is Glendale in the valley?" they ask? Well, it sort of it... it lies right between the San Gabriel Valley and the San Fernando Valley and just above Dodger Stadium.

But the part of Glendale that I live in is about 5 miles from the part of Glendale that people know if they know Glendale. So for people who know the area, I tell them I'm just west of Montrose. Montrose is known mostly for its old-fashioned shopping district, with a few sort-of-trendy restaurants that draw people from the surrounding area.

The neighborhood I live in is just a block from the crossroads of Honolulu Ave and La Crescenta Ave, and back in the 1930's some optimistic real estate developer (is there any other kind?) decided that this land should bear the name Verdugo City. We're at the base of the Verdugo Mountains, on the old Verdugo Spanish land grant. But there never was a city here, just the quiet, pleasant, and semi-rural suburb in which I live. Nonetheless, the California Department of Transportation recognizes Verdugo City, and there's a post office and a zip code (but no houses bearing that zip code, just post office boxes).

I would say that you can't find Verdugo City on a map, but of course if you type it into Google Maps it will point you right at the intersection of Honolulu and La Crescenta.

So I live in Verdugo City and I figure I'll be here for a while. It's a good place to live.