Big Beer, Part Three

AKA SoCal Brewing. This is loosely related to the OG site's Big Beer, Part 1 and Big Beer, Part 2, in that it's about the fastest growing market for beer: the microbrew and brewpub scene.

Southern California has, in the counties of Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego, a wide variety of brewpubs and mircrobreweries, complete with tasting rooms and rare collectible special vintage beers. Ryan is the expert here, and over the weekend we enjoyed a quartet in SD county, and another two locations in the OC.

First stop was Green Flash Brewing Co, in San Diego. They offer tasters for a buck each. In the picture below there are 9 different tasters, three each for me, Corrie and Ryan. Getting an early start and drinking tiny cups of beer make it all seem okay.

Next stop was the Ale Smith, and their tasters:

The next place we went that actually had handsome tasters was the next day, Sunday, when Ruan and I went to The Bruery in Placentia, a town in Orange county nestled between Orange and Fullerton. They had sweet snifters and wooden glass holders:

Back to Green Flash, our first spot...I took a picture of their offerings and kettles behind:

The kettles are kinda cool for someone like me to see. I've brewed my own beer before, and know the basic crazy amount of sanitation that's involved. Seeing these kettles, and knowing that these guys are a small operation makes a person appreciate how much beer we as a country drink:

(Full disclosure: I'm drinking beer as I type these very words.) Small operation...

After the stop at the Ale Smith, just down the street from Green Flash in San Diego, we headed over to Ballast Point Brewing. Ballast Point has more distribution in Long Beach than either Green Flash (which just started showing up at my local grocer) or Ale Smith (which I haven't seen before). Their tasting glasses werre nicer than the plastic ones from Ale Smith, but by then I had a hard time remembering to take pictures of those tiny glasses. Here's their big board:

My mom said, upon seeing this picture, Sea Monster and Wahoo Wheat sounded neat. I wanted to say that I sampled both of those. The Sea Monster was an imperial stout with an ABV of 10%. Those words translate in reality to a thick coffee-grounds-and-chocolate syrup with hints of bourbon overtones, like somebody spiked the syrup. The Wahoo Wheat actually had a flavor profile written next to the name: it reads "Thai chili, ginger, lime". The beer was interesting, tasting almost like hefeweizen mixed with chili pepper flavor (but not heat) and lime. It wasn't bad.

Our fourth and last stop on Saturday was a mecca of tiny, super-in-the-cut, mountain breweries. Outside of San Diego, nestled in the mountains is tiny Alpine, CA, home of:

That's probably the best picture from there. We had dinner and their food was better than serviceable, but my level of, eh, inspiration, was pretty elevated.

The next day, while trying to figure out why the hell I'd started drinking tiny beers at noon the day before, I started the same thing again at the Bruery:

The Bruery is interesting in that they've got pretty good distribution even though they're a rather young brewery, and they refuse to brew IPA.

For the few readers I have that don't know, IPA stands for India Pale Ale, a reference to the beers that England would send by ship to India, and to keep them preserved during the long voyage, they loaded the beer up with a ridiculous amount of hop flowers, the ingredient that adds the bitter flavor as well as beer's only natural preservative. IPA's tend to be more hoppy and bitter than other beers, as well as having an elevated ABV. Also, they're pretty trendy right now.

So it's pretty cool for the Bruery to refuse to brew them. What they do brew, though, is almost as acquired a taste as beer itself is to a kid. I bought a large bottle of their fall seasonal brew, Autumn Maple, a play on traditional pumpkin beers. They use yams. Lots of yams.

After the tasting room of The Bruery, we headed south from Placentia to Orange, just a few minutes, right past Chapman University to get to The Bruery Provisions store in Old Orange. From the entrance, looking across the street (we stood in line on Monday for a special release) yields this next picture (we ended up grabbing a bite to eat at Smoqued):

Old Orange is quaint and cute.

As much as I love beer, my body has a hard time recovering from days like we were having. While we're camping is one thing. While on a lazy vacation is one thing. (Sigh) Just getting old, I guess. That's not so bad, really.

Thanks Ryan for exposing us to the riches right down our proverbial street!

Long Held Understandings Overturned (in Christmas Music)

Christmas songs. Every year at malls and restaurants and other spots the ubiquitous Christmas music and Christmas songs seem to be everywhere. They're public domain, so anybody can sing them and anybody can record albums of them; that seems to be why there's so many.

And, up until last night, December 17th of 2012, I had an incorrect understanding of a lyric of "The Twelve Days of Christmas". For my entire life I thought a lyric was one thing, only to learn it was not.

See, a comic strip in the paper is doing a pun-heavy parody of The Twelve Days, and one of their drawings I had no idea what it was punning. So I looked it up, and remembered. 

Then I noticed something. On the fourth day the true love gave "four collie birds". What? Four collie birds? Is this new to anyone else? And what's a collie bird? I looked it up: a "collie" bird, or "colly" bird, is a regular common European blackbird. That changed my whole concept of the song.

I'd been under the impression for my entire life up until last night was that the lyric was "four calling birds". I guess I'd always figured they were myna birds or some other mimic. Am I the only one there?

Thanks Liene

This is a Thank You note for a Latvian coworker of my mom. Liene, a nice young newlywed (who won a photo contest I held last year), heard that I enjoyed the airy chocolate truffles she'd brought back from a trip back to her Baltic homeland.

Using that information on a more recent trip she brought back (or had sent over) an entire bag of the awesome, awesome truffles:

That was the bag. With just a single truffle left. I have a hard time not eating all of them in just a few minutes. Here's a few of the last truffle:

Thank you very much Liene! I appreciate it. Wishing you guys the best!

Is it Because of Obama?

Guillermo del Toro, the Spanish Peter Jackson (can I get away with that comparison?) is making a movie called Pacific Rim due out in 2013. From the teaser trailers it looks like a modern del Toro-take on a Godzilla-vs-Giant Robots type of movie.

I read that the role of the general, Gen. Stacker Pentecost, was originally going to Tom Cruise. Instead, they cast Idris Elba in the role. I have two words for giving a role designed for Tom Cruise to motherfuckin' Stringer Bell:

Fuck, & Yeah.

Maybe we can thank Barry the Prez for that. Maybe Idris is just the right guy for the gig. He captained the eponymous ship Prometheus in that stinker, and that was pretty sweet.

I don't really care so much about the movie, I guess, but anytime Idris, or Michael K.Williams, or Wendell Pierce, or any one of the awesome black folks from The Wire gets work (like Cutty, even if I would never watch his show), I count it as a cool thing.

Idris Elba here, playing maybe the second coolest television character ever, Stringer Bell:

Michael K. Williams next as Omar, the coolest character in television history (even taking Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen into consideration)(those are probably the top four, well, easily for HBO those would be the four #1 seeds in a bracket...)(Williams is currently featured on Boardwalk Empire, the Steve Buscemi AC show on HBO.)

Pierce as Bunk Moreland (currently stars in Treme on HBO):

Guess which member of this cast is Chad L. Coleman, the actor who played Cutty, former drug soldier, convict, and boxing trainer in various seasons of The Wire:

Can you believe this television show had the ludicrous name of "I Hate My Teenage Daughter"?

I even saw Bodie in a Fed-Ex commercial once.

And They Called Them Joshua Trees

And they let the Mormons name the trees. And they called them Joshua Trees. And they reached towards the sky, like some guy in a book those Mormons liked. And they're pretty sure that guy was named Joshua, because otherwise the name for this yucca variant would be rather silly.

Is it a succulent? Is it a palm? It's a yucca! So...both?

And lo, they let the narcissistic blogger play with the camera with the zoom on:

And lo, he needs to shave.

And someone walked through the gnarled tree covered valleys of this region, and lo, they thought it would be neat if no one could build homes there, and make the valley and surrounding mountains into a preserve, and lo, it was so.

And lo, when you live in an area that never gets colder than 68 degrees, you better believe that you're ass will be near frozen off by the upper 40s you'll witness in this high desert spiritual paradise.

Halloween Links

I decided to sprint through a  bunch of Halloween posts. I'll be taking a break for a while afterwards.

I've already posted on the original site, and here are another set. Seriously, I think I'm done for a while.

This is something about a book I'm reading, a note for Norm, and a Walken memory.

Inspired by my brother, this is a movie quote-and-clip quiz.

This is about one of my favorite flags.

Some Laker and ha-ha Harden notes are over on my sports blog.

Oh, the humanity! Check out the new Super Group in the pop-culture wasteland.

This is another Salton Sea preview on the travel blog.

A Halloween special book discussion.

Spicy grilled corn, anybody?

A mostly wasteful post for show; a Long Beach post on a blog that I've unfortunately neglected.

This is just ridiculous.

Happy Halloween!

Camera-Phone Pictures: FX Filter Comparison

The title of this post makes the entire enterprise sound boring. Let's prove it's not!

One of the earliest free apps I downloaded was a thing called "FX Camera". It had a series of things it would apply to the photograph taken by the camera lens to make it look like it was taken with a special camera. The original effects were Toy Camera, Fishbowl, Polaroid, Pop Art, and "Quadro-Mirror".

The Toy Camera filter is my favorite of those, and it tries to give the picture the color and quality of an old Holga or Diana plastic camera, something I'm pretty familiar with. The Polaroid effect is also pretty neat. The Fishbowl effect is too grainy; the Pop Art effect turns one photo into a postcard with four of the same pictures tiled and in different colors (which makes it really hard to make anything out), and what I call "Quadro-Mirror" flips and spins an image, to make something resembling a Rorschach blot.

I just wanted to compare some of the effects here, since I just took the pictures off the camera.

Here are two pictures, one taken with the regular camera on my phone, and the second taken with the Toy Camera "filter" activated. This was from the long hike with Norm at the end of May:

You can see how the colors of the pilings have gone from what it looks like normally in the top picture, to the greened look in the bottom. I think it just messes with hues and saturation. I think I like the second picture better.

Then I thought I'd throw in some of the other filters I spoke about, so they can be seen.

Here's the mirroring effect (it can be controlled where it centers to Rorschaching:

Here's a pile of coins and a few bills (our retirement) rocking the Polaroid effect:

And here's the Pop Art filter. This is a bounty from the Farmer's Market, placed out on the table to be photographed.

Camera-Phone Pics: Laundry on Friday

Tuesday, eight minutes 'til eleven in the morning. I stepped outside the laundromat and took a picture with my new mobile device. It was June 7th.

I thought it might be a cool place from where to take pictures on future trips. Less than a month later, on a random Friday night, July 1st to be exact, I stepped out and took a picture at 7:38, wondering just why exactly I was doing laundry on a Friday night, a rare off night for me at the time:

We got into a habit of doing laundry every two weeks, but as I had five white chef coats, I found I needed to get them washed and ironed as needed, so I pretty much ended up at the laundromat every week. But, I realized on one trip that the last time I'd gone out to take a picture was also a Friday. This Friday was a morning, right at 9:45, on the cloudy 26th of August:

Just over a month later, on September 30th, another Friday, I was back, and at almost the exact same time, 9:39 on a notably less cloudy that morning:

Now it was just getting weird. Friday had become this day where I had to wash and iron five big white chef coats. It wasn't until going on a trip to Seattle in early November that I was able to break the chain. But before then, I was back again, Friday morning again, 9:12 on October 7th, exactly a week later than the last trip:

Some days my phone was at home charging, other days I just didn't think about it. Also, it was hard to go from picture to picture, so when it came to lining them up, you can tell I was using the palm on the left as an anchor, and oscillated (unknowingly) at centering the shot on the round condo or between it and the pointy-roofed Villa Riviera.

I don't really miss having to do laundry every... single...Friday, though.

(I just found an efficient way of getting my pictures of the phone, so there'll be a few more posts like this in the coming days.)

Lonely Harvest of a Long Beach Balcony Garden

You know what's cool? Putting a seed into some dirt and then, after a considerable wait, getting to eat food that the seed's grown. It's awesome. Gardening, man.

On the original blog I've mentioned gardening in strange places, because that's how we do it. I think the first mention might have been in 2009 back in Brooklyn, with the tomato plant in the window sill. The next might have been from the Dwyce house in Austin, and Auntie Martha's backyard garden. In our own apartment in Austin we had a balcony garden.

Balcony gardens are where we're at at this moment. And since it doesn't get nearly as hot here (holy cow it's 83!) as it does in Central Texas, our heat loving tomatoes weren't exactly a bumper crop this year. Also, there's not exactly enough sunlight.

But this picture caused me to label it the Lonely Harvest:

Yup. Those are our two beefsteak tomatoes. The red one, while fully grown here, was slightly smaller than a golf ball. That made the flavor super-great, but the skin was a little tough. It was seriously delicious; we ate it yesterday at breakfast (eggs and market sage-cheddar with left-over rice and sausage, with the tomato on top)(leftovers and eggs: a tip from Tony).

Then I started looking around our garden to see what we had left. Earlier we were able to get some broccoli, but it was only enough to snack on in the raw. As of that day, the one a few days back, our dill had bolted and gone to seed, but was very good. We used the seeds a few times, even crushing them with the mortar and pestle and adding the powder to vinegar to add to a sweet potato salad dish:

Our rosemary soldiers away, getting plucked on average twice a week for things I'm cooking. I don't use very much...

And here are our pollinators. We have a working agreement: I don't bother them deliberately, they get to pollinate our flowering plants and anyone else's; they stay out of the house, and I don't set them and their nest on fire. It's worked out fine so far:

Wasps...both they and we want peace, so there's peace. If only certain parties in the world could learn the lesson that we've learned on our Balcony Garden...and if it were only that easy...

A Few From the Balcony

Occasionally I head out onto our back balcony and take pictures. When I put a new roll of film in Corrie's manual 35 mm camera, it takes a few clicks of the shutter and windings to get the film ready for actual taking pictures, and I usually aim it at the magnolia tree off one side:

This picture is from my Old Reliable camera. One way to tell is because it's over-exposed. It's too bright, and is actually brighter than you'd see with your eyes. But, here's the darker one...

You want the middle ground. In the first one the tree is too bright, but closer than here, while the roof here is much closer to reality than the roof in the other picture.

Sometimes at night I come out and take pictures of the "L" on the top of the Lafayette Building, a condominium, and the results are pretty sweet:

It looks like I fell, or took a step, but I was probably just shaky. Here's the same building during a rare foggy morning:

The balcony is a spot where we eat on occasion, take guests for a relaxing evening cocktail, and have our garden. The garden's next...

Moon in Perspective

Ever noticed how big the moon looks when it pops up over the horizon? You get a sense that it's a huge disc and looks so much bigger right at the horizon than it does hours later high above in the night sky. See what I mean:

The looming moonrise. Pretty sweet.

I was taught a trick though, a trick that helps trick your brain back into seeing the truth. At the horizon with the buildings and trees around, the moon looks bigger to our brains because of its line of sight relative to the ground.

It turns out that the moon never changes size (uhh, yeah), and one way to tell is to use the finger pinch trick. Extend your fingers to arm's length and make a pinching motion, like this:

Later on in the night, higher in the sky the moon will be in the exact same proportion to your fingers. My camera had a hard time with the darkness, and when I figure out how to get that picture, I'll show it off. You don't need to take my word for it, you can try it out yourself. It'll work.

Found a Four-Leaf Clover

I was going through a whole bunch of old books, culling my library for a book drive through Corrie's office, and I came across something kinda cool.

On page 125 in a dusty copy of The Last Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb:

I guess I grabbed the book from Cal Poly's library dollar bins--books that have been discarded. I guess a book of old essays seemed like a good idea on the day I bought it.

This four-leaf clover is brittle and delicate, and you can see the stain that it created in the book.

So far the clover's been left in the book and the book has been removed from the discard pile.

This might be the first four-leaf clover I've ever "found".

Reclaiming this Bikepath for the West-Side

I got my groove back. Or something.

I carried down my bike, slowly, and went outside. I climbed on top, and started pedaling. Mostly. My left, surgically repaired knee, couldn't stay on the pedal all the way through the motion, so I had to pull out each time after putting force down on the pedal.

Pushing off was fine, then I'd have to pull out, and repeat the motion.

A few days later it was the weekend and Corrie and I went out biking, and after my stretches all week, I was able to keep my left heel on the pedal all the way through the pedaling motion. Also, Corrie was able to snap some pictures of my, eh, triumph.

This is the bike path we use to get around from the West Side, where we live, to the Belmont Shore, on the east side. This is also the Death-Bike, Causer of the Distal Fracture:

If you look close, in the shadows you can see Corrie with the camera and my shadow looking like a seahorse.

This next picture is an action shot; a grimace on my face. This happens when my knee was pushed beyond it's flexing point.

I went out today on a longer ride, and over the weekend we went on a nice ride when Tony was around, and on both days, I could keep my foot on the pedal just a little more than the last time.

Like today, I could keep my foot on the pedal for nearly the entire motion, and by the end, I was able to pivot my ankle and hold almost my entire foot on the pedal, instead of just the heel.

Progress, baby!

I like the way the clouds obscure the sun here:

This was a trip we made to the Belmont Brewing Company, a brewery along the beach right off of the pier. Not a bad selection, nothing too offensive. That is until I had a strawberry monstrosity from the Belmont Brewers at a tasting night in San Luis last week. That stuff was worse than a wine cooler.

Rather Complicated

Okay...think about it slowly. The heel comes down as the momentum is moving "forward". As this is happening the muscles in the middle are readying the toes, which get rolled into as the knee gets right above them, lifting the heel. Now the weight is moving from the palm of the foot to the ball, with the weight now more onto the toes. The knee is far forward now, and with momentum still carrying the lever arm, the ball of the foot is lifted, and lastly come the toes.

The amount of bones, ligaments, and muscles being contained in the ankle/foot conglomerate, like some multinational corporation abusing workers, gets overlooked on a constant basis, like folks who just want cheap bananas.

Taking for granted how complicated a thing like walking is, you never think about having to think about doing it. That's kinda where I am at the moment: having to learn how to walk.

My knee is achy, at most, but my ankle (holy shit my fucking ankle!) is what is causing my wrinkles in progress. My thigh still looks like a crackhead thigh, while my calf is starting to regain mass. Every day I take steps towards taking a step, and this all happens in slow motion, as I balance myself and watch in a mirror. I hop and hobble through daily activities, all the while imaging the motion and action of taking a step.

Learning to walk is much harder than you think. Maybe because most of us learn to walk at a time that we don't have faculties to understand that we're learning a complicated balancing act. When you're a toddler, you make it up on your hind legs and wobbly get around.

Balance is another thing of mine that's screwed up and needs to be adjusted. Now that I'm on two feet, I've come to notice that when I stand upright, my right foot--and the main bulk of my weight--is behind my left foot, by about three to four inches. When I bring my right foot even, making both sets of toes on the same line, my hips feel twisted, which is an unnerving situation for my brain. Part of my exercises are about centering my meridian and consciously working on my balance.

That and slow-mo walking, stair stretches used to strengthen my Achilles, and knee stretches to lengthen the tight ligaments.

Would've lost money on a bet about a broken femur recovery...never would've guessed it'd be my ankle causing the most pain.

Relearning to walk, though, is a challenge to which it's nice to finally be getting.

Birthmark and Rory Calhoun

Being dropped off at the bus-stop by Corrie, who needed to get to a meeting, I crutched it over an onto the carriage. There is a bus that, for just a buck, takes passengers from Long Beach all the way to Redondo Beach. One stop along the way is the hospital I've been using. Easy money.

The bus had two separate times where it filled up with high school kids, and then emptied nearly entirely at specific stops. Wild.

Eventually I was getting up to the openings, and the day's heat was beginning to make itself known. The heat wave that struck the Southland hadn't broken yet, and at ten after eight in the morning it was pleasant out, but the high pressure front was tapping you on the shoulder and whispering in your ear.

My appointment was at 8:30, so by 9:25 I got called back to go and get my x-rays taken. Well, I mean that by 9:25 I was sent to a different waiting area to wait for the x-ray. Before then I had befriended a nice Latino descent man in a wheel-chair, around my age (maybe a little older), with his left leg in a cast. We were able to commiserate about left leg issues. He'd broken his tibia and fibula, both pretty cleanly, in a slip down three measly stairs at his mother's house. A lawyer was telling him that homeowner's insurance could reward him handsomely. He looked at me with a mix of sadness with the world and anger at greed and said, "I'm not suing my mom."

Eventually I got called back to have x-rays taken, maybe a few minutes before ten, and once on the table, trying to get into position, the technician asked me if I'd had surgery yet. I glared at him, and ran my finger along my 14" scar and said, "No. This is just a birthmark."

He was not amused.

Eventually we got to talking and joking, and he talked about how hot it was outside. I told him that I'd been at the hospital for so long that it had been nice outside when I'd arrived. I said it with a grin, and the guy was Nigerian, so he didn't really know what to make of it.

Finally I got to see a doctor, and by that I mean "doctor". It was another young ortho resident, another person I'd never met before, like all my visits to see my "doctor". Every room was full, so at first we talked while I sat on a gurney. She admonished me for still using crutches.

"The last time I was here they guy told me not to put any weight on it. Then, right before I left and after pushing the point, he said I could put just a little bit of weight on it," I was getting fired up and my tone in the last ten or twelve word was getting harsh. This ortho doc, a young lady that would otherwise be checking out my ass in tight jeans, looked into my eyes, but like she wasn't listening.

"I've been getting mixed messages every time I come in here," I followed up.

She just went into detail about how the femur is totally healed but since I hadn't been using it, the bone had degenerated a bit, and I was sporting a 55-year-old's leg-bone. She said I had to stop using the crutches soon, like really soon, and be aggressive about rehabbing.

I crutched it out of the office and into Torrance's sweltering early afternoon sun, and made my way to the bus-stop, seething with misplaced anger...maybe not misplaced, but not really useful. At the stop, I was muttering under my breath about the events and lifted the bottoms of the crutches off the ground, and started to take steps, baby steps.

By the time the bus came, I'd been pacing wobbly and gritting my teeth, but not needing the crutches. My ankle, through lack of use had become quite tender, and still is the bane of my recovery. But, I managed to hobble my way from the downtown Long Beach stop to the coffee shop I'd done so much work, and then hobbled my way home, all the while carrying my crutches instead of using them.

I resembled a drunken pimp. Right now it's not about grace, it's about strengthening the bone.

A scene played out in my head as I made my way from the stop to the coffee house, played over and over many times as I painfully went for it:

"You know who he reminds me of?"

"Bob Barker? Snoop Doggy Dogg? David Brenner?"

"No, no. You know the one I mean. The one who's always standing and walking."

"Rory Calhoun?"

"That's it! Look at him, standing like a little Rory Calhoun!"

That's me, standing and walking like a little Rory Calhoun. I might even accidently respond to "Little Monty".

How did we get here? Czolgosz to the Soviets...

Okay, see if you follow this:

I think it was Wikipedia that had a picture of President McKinley up on the home page, and I remembered that Leon Czolgosz was an anarchist that killed him in 1901. The event was highlighted in Thomas Pynchon's book Against the Day, where anarchists--at the time the equivalent to today's terrorists or the mid-fifties communists (all around boogeymen)--had a place at the table of main-periphery-character attention. It was another anarchist, Gavrilo Princip, that killed Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 and set off what was then called The Great War, but later retconned to World War I.

Then I set about trying to find a picture of Czolgosz, because I had an idea of what he might have looked like (it wasn't the same guy). When I found the picture, using his name and the Google images tab, one picture had a scene from a play (starring women) and there were other names of assassins, one being Giuseppe Zangara, who in 1933 shot and killed the mayor of Chicago. In Miami.

See, Zangara's target, most everyone believes nowadays, was FDR, who was sitting right next to the Mayor.

That led to a link to the Philip K. Dick novel "The Man in the High Castle", which is an alternate universe in which Zangara's assassination of FDR was a success, and the story takes place in the 1960s, after the Nazis and Imperialist Japanese and Fascist Italians were victorious in WWII.

Reading a synopsis of the book, I was struck by an early sentence: "In 1941, the Nazis conquered the Soviet Union..."

Uhh, I don't think so. With Japan attacking in the east and the Nazis in the west, I guess, after maybe twenty years of straight war, those two may have been able to put the pinch on Moscow, but I don't know. What I do know about Russia is: 1) Invading has never been a good idea; and 2) it's full of fucking Russians, man!

With absolutely no intervention from America or any kind of help from China, who'd been battling the invading Japanese hordes since 1937, maybe...I dunno, I still don't see it, and definitely not by 1941.

I've never read any of Philip K. Dick's books, but I respect him. Blade Runner and Total Recall are some movies based on his stories, and that's pretty cool. The Nazis beating the Soviets? Funny that that's the stretch for me, and not androids or memory fabrication and implantation.

Tow-Happy Long Beach Department of Errant Automobiles

I was in the apartment, like most days, the later afternoon sauna hadn't happened yet---it was still early and nice inside. I imagined an era with a guy at a sun-bathed chair, a typewriter and a bottle of whiskey within reach.

Out that window above, on that particular morning as I awaited a Skype phone call, I heard somebody pounding on a neighbor's door. "They're taking your car! Get up," pound, pound, "They're taking your car," over and over again in a raspy voice.

I craned my neck and tried to see which apartment. I never found that out, but the car that was being towed was actually parked in the position that's visible in the provided picture. I was imagining a groggy person, stepping out on their porch and lighting that day's first cigarette---and then seeing that the car isn't there anymore. Maybe the long sleep was induced by a long night of boozin', and maybe the person thinks that maybe it got stashed somewhere else.

Fat chance on that though: the car had been in the same spot for five days, a big red '80s-era Camaro.

Damn, I thought. Lame for that person. My coffee was ready and my call happened, and just a pit later, still before noon, I heard someone else out that window. Standing on a second floor balcony not wearing a shirt was a dude, "Nah, man! Shit! I need that car...ahh! Man!"

I looked out a different window and saw the overzealous LB Dept. of Errant Auto Collection snatching up someone else's car. Meanwhile there's been a Volvo parked illegally for a week now: just a single ticket in the window.

In the span of two hours two cars get snatched up and stolen by the cops.

"Shoulda' paid your tickets," the official who'd been blocking the road to make it possible to tow someone on our one-way street was calling up to the guy on the balcony.

Taking their car away sure makes it easier for them to earn money, right? That system fucking works well.

Watching My G-Men Shouldn't Suck This Much

I try not to get too attached to my football team, the Giants. I have mixed feelings about American football, but I do have a very strong fondness for Big Blue.

While watching them fuck up their opening game against the Cowboys, I was getting agita. The last football game that I watched that mattered also featured the Giants, and we were in Honduras, the G-Men beat Tom Terrific, and I was drinking rum and beer and shouting at a quiet television.

For some reason the game was getting to me. Football isn't like baseball. In the World Series, say, you can watch the Yankees get beat by the Phillies while enjoying a nice buzz in New Orleans, and know that there are more games left. Football has a slow, in-game level of "ah, fuck they're not gonna fucking do it" set in, and I try to never let my emotions get that involved.

The first game of the season...it just shouldn't produce agita this early...

Shots Fired! They Tell Me!

Living here in Long Beach you hear firecrackers, and other pops that are usually written off as other kinds of tiny toy explosives. Other times...well, you never know. I've never felt in danger, and never even felt like I've had to be paying attention to everybody like was the case in Bed-Stuy.

But the other day, I heard some strange voice over a digital loudspeaker outside. I couldn't make it out, but the tone was very insistent. I looked out the window, and then got as fast as I could over to my camera and back to the window:

Pardon the blinds reflection, but, if you look close there are a number of things you can notice. The first, is that there are two cops with guns drawn on that black gentleman. The second is that nearly centered near the top of the screen are cops hiding behind a champagne colored civilian car. The third is that there are cops huddled behind a cop car in the upper right hand side of the picture.

I watched the scene long enough to tell you that the guy who they had guns on, the black guy in the white tank-top, looked drunk to me. He wobbled and swayed and generally looked harmless. If he had still been armed, I'll bet you anything he would've been shot dead.

I went out to take out the trash, no small feat for a guy in my condition, and asked the crowds that had been watching from all angles what was going on. Somebody told me that there were shots fired.

Here's some of the crowd across the street:

The cops hung out in a variety of forms on the street for maybe a pair of hours afterward. You could hear people heckling them from the safety of their darkened windows for the entire time. But that's not really the whole story; folks spent almost the whole evening out on their stoops and front areas, laughing and talking and blaring music and mostly ignoring the hecklers.

Etymology and States

I'd been thinking about state manes, for some reason. I was thinking about the rhyme they taught us in school, the alphabetical rhyme, "Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas...", and it started to dawn on me that each of those four states has an Indian name, a native aboriginal language name.

That idea had sitting somewhere in my craw, and I finally went out and crunched the numbers, and tried to get a count of the native names in our states. Before looking it up, you get the feeling that there are a lot.

This is true and the numbers bear it out. Besides each of the "A" states, you have: Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Wisonsin, and Wyoming. That's 22 total so far.

I didn't list Indiana, which is an English word meaning "land of the Indians". I also didn't list Idaho, which is most likely an Indian term, but it seems to look like a white guy made it up (invariably inspired by Indian words) and it stuck around Congress long enough to finally get used. I also didn't list Oregon, which is either formed by a misinterpreted map of an Indian word, or from the french word for "windy", "stormy". How about North and South Dakota, combining English and Indian? Same goes for New Mexico, since "Mexico" is a word from the Aztecs about a region in their lands.

That would bring the total to 28. More than half.

While we're at it, the English clock in with the next most: Delaware (from Baron De la Warr), Georgia, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Virginia, Washington, and West Virginia. That's 14.

We're up to 42.

Next we have the Spanish: Colorado, Florida, Montana, and Nevada.

That brings our total to 46.

Then from the French: Louisiana; and from the Austronesian Hawaiian: Hawai'i.

Up to 48.

Only two left. The first: Vermont.

Vermont has no real forbear in either English, French, or Indian. Since one of the militias that fought to keep free the area fought over by New York and New Hampshire, the area today called Vermont, was called the Green Mountain Boys, I think it's safe to say that "Vermont", when broken up like "ver-" and "mont", can be seen as roots beaning "green" and "mountain". This doesn't seem that crazy to me.

Lastly, we have California.

Many think the term is Spanish, since it's generally agreed upon that it comes from the Spanish novel Las sergas de Esplandian, written around 1500. In the novel, Calafia is the queen of an Amazonian warrior nation, and her island-kingdom, California, is one of the exotic places Cortez went searching for.

Scholars tend to agree that Montalvo, the writer, used the word "Calafia" as the name of the leader of an exotic people because the Spanish public would recognize the Arabic root "caliph", which is a leader of a group of Muslims. It would make sense to his readers.

That pretty much makes California the only US state with an Arabic etymology.

Two Quick Movie Notes

Recently Corrie and I watched a pair of movies, and and I felt compelled to write a few words.

1) Holy shit! The first movie we watched was The Expendables, from streaming Netflix.I was compelled to sit through it after talking with Tony and then reading somethings about the sequel. If all you want to see is an orgy of violence and corny one-liners, this one's for you. I'm almost tempted to go see the sequel, which is something else for me, a guy who counts On the Waterfront and Chinatown as two of my five favorite movies.

I only wanted to day two things about this movie. The first: the dive-bombing, machine-gunning, fuel-dumping, flare-shooting action sequence is about as cheer-worthy a scene as I've ever witnessed in big action movies. Hell yes. The second: when did the AA-12 come into existence? Nobody told me that Terry Crews, the same guy playing Chris Rock's dad in "Everybody Hates Chris", carries around and rules the day with the craziest gun ever made. And I thought the tommy-gun was sweet--that only fires .45 magnum rounds. This thing is an automatic shotgun. Here's a link to Crews in action

2) We also watched Wing Chun. When we noticed that it starred a young Michelle Yeoh, we decided to try it out. The movie was directed by Wing Po, who is the martial arts coordinator in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Matrix, and although he was mostly unused, Kill Bill Vol. 1.

Wing Chun is a lady warrior who ran off and learned kung fu instead of marrying her betrothed. She was condemned to live the life of a roving fighter/warrior, and won't be able to wed. She is played by Michelle Yeoh.

Michelle Yeoh played Lu Shien, the older lady warrior in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Chow Yun-fat played the retiring swordsman, Li Mu-bai, who's giving up the life because he's in love with Lu Shien, and the Zhang Ziyi plays the young girl trying to avoid marriage by becoming a warrior.

That's a lot of background from Crouching Tiger..., but I state it because Wing Chun is, for all intents and purposes, a direct prequel to that movie. Michelle Yeoh plays basically the same character in both, just at different stages of life.

I remember having a long conversation with someone (Murphy, RIP) about how Lu Shien is probably the most bad-ass warrior in the whole movie, and in Wing Chun, Yeoh is easily the most bad-ass character in the movie. Easily and by far.

Zhang Ziyi plays a girl that tries to live the life that Wing Chun lived, follow the path blazed by Chun. If you like Crouching Tiger..., check out Wing Chun if you come across it. Seriously, you could watch them back to back, Wing Chun first, then Crouching Tiger..., and it could flow seamlessly.

Looking Shiny, Feeling Shiny

I spent more than 33 years without crutches, but it's like they never existed. My life just started back on June 15th. Before that, who knows what happened. Memories of the "before-time" are even more blurred now than they'd ever been with drink and smoke. My arms are big and strong now, like that summer I set tile.

Oh yeah, I set tile...worked with Boo...he even came to the graduation party at the Madonna Inn...

My right leg is toned and muscular, and my right foot is probably a whole size larger than my left. That's probably due to shrinking rather than extra growth, but still, I notice it. My left leg looks like it needs to go to a rehab clinic, like it's been hitting the pipe or needle or too long.

I've become quite the killer of Musca domesticus; to keep the breeze circulating I keep our back door open, and we don't have a screen door.

The other day I looked down at the incision, now healed up and smooth looking, sealed up and all, and I noticed it looked shiny.

The sun was hitting it just right, and all along the incision, along a path a half-inch wide to each side, it looked like someone slathered Vaseline. I started to notice something else: feeling was returning to the area.

It was feeling shiny as well.

During all this time, I noticed that the area around the incision, maybe an inch and a half total centered on the cut-line, was totally numb. I could feel in my leg as my finger would get closer, then I could only feel it in my finger, like I was touching someone else.

Only the other day, when it was shiny and glimmering in the sun, I realized that the feeling was returning to the numb no-man's land. I imagined the life shining out of it, and the return of feeling personifying that life.

The doctor told me that in time full feeling will return (he said it could take years), and that it was the shock of the trauma (making the incision) had caused the local nerves to wig out and turn off. I think his "years" estimate is off, by, eh, years. It's almost back right now.

I've spent a few weeks doing exercises that strengthen and stretch the ligaments and muscles in my muscle-less left leg, and now I'm allowed to put some weight on it. Not full weight-bearing yet---they want to be sure everything is fully healed before they let me go crazy with it.

That just means more time before Corrie and I can go play some tennis. Bummer.

But soon enough...

Two Anecdotes from Today

As I waited for my X-ray, a nurse was pushing a bed with a blanketed man laying in it. I heard her ask him, "So, what are you here for?" There had been an older man with a large cast on his left leg sitting in a wheel-chair and taking up lots of hallway space, enabling me to hear this exchange by way of their reduced speed through the hall.

The man in the bed responded, "I swallowed some glass." 

"And how did that happen?"

"When I was smoking." 

The nurse, who obviously had prior knowledge of what was going on, started in almost immediately about how that's the real concern, and that's what we need to focus on, and that makes these other current problems a little less important.

Wow. I could tell this wasn't some resin covered colored hand-blown glass, if you get my drift.

Minutes later I heard the call from the X-ray tech, "Pah-teeq Sur-wuud?" Uh, what?

I'd never heard my name butchered as bad as that in this country. Seriously, no "s-h" sound in my last name. As I was getting up from my seat I laughed and looked at Corrie and said, "Ssssuuuurrrr-whad? Okay..."

I got into the room and the tech, a short and young Vietnamese girl, asked me which knee was bothering me. Bothering me? I said with my eyes as I took my seat on the bed.

"Neither of 'em." 

"Huuuuuuhhhh?" with a slight valley-girl upward lilt.

"Well I broke my left one, so that's probably the guy you'll wanna X-ray."

She gave a cutesy laugh that would be a chuckle in someone else, someone with more girth. Then she had me pose a certain way for the picture, and kept saying things like Wow, that must be a huge pin in there, assuming that the long incision meant I was carrying some serious hardware. I told her no, there wasn't one long pin, there were multiple screws and a plate, but no single long thing.

The second shot she wanted the inside of my left knee up. She jammed the plate that collects the X-rays under my leg (which was unpleasant), and had me turn towards the left, bringing my knee into the orientation she wanted. It was like I was trying to spoon. The knee wasn't quite in the right spot, so she had me swing my right leg over my left, leaving it dangling over the side of the table, and incidentally crushing my testicles.

As I was getting into this position, a guy had entered the X-ray room and was having a talk with this tech about what they were going to do for lunch. That's probably why they couldn't really understand me when I yelped, "That's my balls!"

I was adjusting myself when she admonished me to stop moving, to which I said clearly, I'm just adjusting my testicles, which were getting squashed. I don't think she was listening though.

I couldn't help by have a laugh about it after leaving and heading to the other waiting room.

Exceeding my expectations, depravity and all...

Heat Wave

Yes, yes, I know, the weather in places I used to live is much worse than we're currently getting.

Brooklyn right now? Or Sacramento? Or fucking Austin? Yeah, those places are like blast furnaces or even-the-shade-sucks muggy, or both.

But our little slice of paradise has been suffering from---get this---a low '90s heat wave!

Well, that's just us in Long Beach. In the upper reaches of the valley or the desert on the other side of the mountains it's been well into the triple digits, like the sort my mom in Phoenix has been suffering through.

When everyday is the same and really nice, when it gets above 85 your body starts to yell at you and bitch and moan about how "hot" it is. When I get outside, it's pretty nice, but there is a nice (see: shitty) level of humidity that we normally don't get here in the Southland. So when I get to my destination, I'm extra super sweaty. Then when I make it back to our apartment, the passive heating and cooling it uses makes it so the apartment doesn't need an air-conditioner---except for when it's extra hot, which happens about ten days a year.

Our apartment is nice and cool in the morning, as it has let off all of the previous day's heat throughout the night. By noon, you know it's gonna be a warm one, and by three in the afternoon, it's probably fifteen to twenty degrees hotter inside than it is outside. In fact, after ten in the morning it'll be hotter inside. The peak of the heat outside is between 1:30 and 3, but the apartment is between 3:30 and 5.

After doing dishes, beside being even more winded than normal (try doing dishes on one leg and you'll get the idea), I find my face, arms, legs, hands, and feet are all covered in sweat. It's really quite gross, actually, to be literally drenched in sweat. I eventually sit to do my later-day stretches and exercises, and I'm flush, sweat beading and dripping from my nose like I'm jogging in Round Rock in late July.

I've been to Bangkok with the white sky of a 97 degree day with humidity so bad my balls chafed in seconds. I remember days in Brooklyn when you step out of the shower, having "dried off", you find yourself still too wet to put on clothes. Then there was the warehouse job in Austin (actually it was Round Rock) that was so hot you went outside to cool down.

This wave has been different, most likely because I have limited ability to get out and defeat the hottest part of the day by just being away.

Just tough sometimes...

Olympic Observations: High Jump Hi-jinks

So, stop me if you heard about the drunken Russkie who lost his shirt on the way to the Olympic High Jump event?

Well, I did lump some of the different aspects of Ivan Ukhov together, in one of the more memorable events from this installment of the Olympics.

Ivan Ukhov is seen below, the long-haired Russian guy holding the gold medal he won in High Jump. Up until then, he was best known as the "Drunk Guy", a Youtube star now for a 2008 match he showed up at hammered. He had just had a huge fight with his girlfriend and had missed the Olympics and was disconsolate, so he did what anyone in that state would do: get drunk. Then he went out and competed". That 2008 footage is pretty amusing.

Ukhov fared better in 2012, and made the Olympics, and apparently after every event, he would take off his singlet--his little Russian-branded tank-top. At one point, he lost it. He lost his shirt, literally. He couldn't find it, and started to panic.

He was told he could pin his number to a t-shirt, and that he better do it fast because he needed to go do his next jump, which was coming up fast.

He ended up finding his singlet, jumping again, and winning the gold.

Now, in that picture above, you see five guys, which is weird in itself. Here's a link to an article about those four other guys, one of which posed nude for a gay magazine. Guess who?