Riviera Pictures

I posted on the original site a while back about Riviera Living, and then I searched out some pictures from some various riviera locales we've been to.

The first is from Nice, along the French Riviera, right down the coast from Monaco. (My pictures from Genoa weren't very good.)



The second is from a surprisingly riviera-ish feeling place, or area of that particular mid-west city:



Any guesses?

The third is a remnant of my last bike ride on my 3G beach cruiser, Dino.



I named him Dino because I felt like Fred Flintstone stopping occasionally...and a bike is like a trusty friend and horse. So, trusted pal, one that you can ride, and I'd get feelings of Fred Flintstone while trying to stop...Dino seemed natural. (Sigh)

I'm officially a resident of Long Beach now.

Colleges in LA Country

We received in the mail a while back an almanac of LA County. It had a nice breakdown of each of the cities in Los Angeles County, their populations, areas, city elected officials, and helpful numbers for citizens of those cities: trash departments, school districts, newspapers, all as needed since some cities are small.

They even list the resident colleges and universities in the respective cities. I looked over the list and jotted some notes, because it interests the nerd in me. I noticed that there was only one for-profit university on the list: DeVry. I looked it up: DeVry University is the only for-profit university that's regionally accredited. Regional accreditation is the accreditation that most traditional colleges and universities get, while national accreditation is what most for-profit universities get, a status where units won't usually transfer. I think I wrote about for-profit colleges on the other blog, but I can't locate the post.

So, back to the list.

There were a total of 50 colleges spread over 52 campuses (barring human errors during the counting committed by me).

Some interesting observations:

The city of Los Angeles does not, in fact, have the most colleges. It has the second most--five, but it probably has the most college students. The five: UCLA, CSU LA, LA City College, USC, and Loyola Marymont.

Claremont has the most universities with seven. Seven colleges in a city of less-than 25k. All seven are organized around a central area of town though, and are famous or well known in some form: Pritzer, Scripps, Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna and Pomona are the five undergrad schools, while Keck Graduate Institute and Claremont Graduate Uni cater to the graduate element.

Harvey Mudd I know of, certainly, but didn't know it was in LA (basically). It's number 2 in the country in Math and applied sciences, behind only Caltech (Pasadena), but ahead of MIT.

I found West LA College (Culver City), as well as East LA College (Monterrey Park).

There were a quartet of community colleges that used "City College" in their name: Los Angeles CC, Long Beach CC, Pasadena CC, and Santa Monica CC.

A pair chose "Community College" in the name: Glendale and Rio Hondo (located in Whittier).

There are three California State Universities: CSU LA, Long Beach State, and Cal Poly Pomona. Well, there is also a CSU Bakersfield satellite campus in Lancaster (Called CSU Bak. Antelope Valley Campus).

There's only one University of California: UCLA. This could be seen as misleading. The UC system regards itself as the top university system in the state, and has the fewest campuses. While there is only one in LA County, there are three in the area: UC Irvine, in Orange County, and UC Riverside, in Riverside County.

On the same tip, there's CSU Fullerton in Orange County.

There were even a pair of private colleges named after their respective cities: University of La Verne and Whittier College.

Strangely, there was a college with a pair of campuses that shared the name of my high school, El Camino: the main campus in Torrance supported by the secondary in Compton.

Finishing up with a college I'd never heard of in an equally foreign town: Citrus College in Glendora. Turns out it's a community college servicing the northern cities on the LA side of the mountains separating the Valley from the Basin.

Photo Contest Results

It didn't take Norm very long to get the correct answer for the most recent photo-contest: Grant's tomb in Manhattan, uptown to be exact...I think in the 130s on the West Side.

Good call. I'll figure out a cool prize...I have another idea of a picture from a spot in the vicinity to Grant's Tomb.

That actually backs me up a little bit, since I'm still lagging on getting Liene's picture to her (seriously, my bad).

Some Friday Errands...

I redeemed our beer bottles and decided to go over to one of our fine used Dollar Book Stores. That's the name of the store, literally, Dollar Book Store. But there was a book I wanted to get for my father-in-law. They didn't have it. I did pick up some things, though.

As I was leaving, directly across the street is one of the many entrances to the Long Beach Convention Center. Our Dollar Book Store lives in an old Borders establishment, which itself is housed in an New&Shiny kind of shopping complex, you know, the kind that usually crop up across the streets from large beach-side convention centers.

People were streaming out of the Center, coming and going, up and down the stairs, all dressed up in finery and plastic badges on lanyards. I'm not sure what they're here for, but I imagine them all staying in nearby hotels. Maybe some of them live in the Southland and drive home at night, only have to pay daily parking rates.

I, a local resident, out playing on my bike, am dressed in mostly clean jeans and a mostly dirty long-sleeved shirt.

They're working in a vacation atmosphere, gabbing insecurely and protecting their tablet compys and smart-phones.

I returning home with my newly purchased dollar copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago.

Just a regular Friday in our riviera town.

"Groundhog Day" Notes

Groundhog Day, the Bill Murray film from 1993, was on commercial television a few days back. I couldn't stand to watch too much of it, even though I thoroughly enjoyed the film. It was one of those movies when you're a kid that makes you realize that "soul-searching" is a thing that you must force on yourself, since your days won't be repeating like they do for Phil Connors.

Dan and I tried occasionally to figure out how many days Phil lives through. We joked that it had to be, like, at least a few years.

Well, after I saw it was on, I decided to look the movie up on the interweb.

The original story for the script was wildly different from what made the final film. Rita, Andie McDowell's character, was also going to be living through the days with Bill Murray's Phil, and they weren't going to fall in love until later in their travels through the day.

There was a person who did some studying, and despite only showing forty something days in the film, his calculations meant that it would have been a minimum of eight years and a handful of months.

Harold Ramis, the film's director and regular Murray co-conspirator, said during production that he was guessing that Phil lives through about ten years during his stay on Groundhog Day.

The original script had Phil Connors living through 10,000 years. 10,000.

Well, it had him and Rita living through those 10,000 years.

Later Ramis said that he's come to believe that Phil Connors lives for many more years than his first guess of 10 years.

If we think about it: he learns to play piano to the point of being excellent; he masters ice sculpting; he learns almost everything about almost everybody in town; he kills himself at least a dozen times; he tries to save the old man as many times; he spends countless nights committing crimes when he first realizes there aren't any repercussions for his actions; he eventually learns the day's mini disasters and is able to help everybody who needs it; and he fails to seduce Rita so many times he actually learns French.

That sounds like at least a few hundred years to me. Maybe even a thousand.

Maybe even ten-thousand.

Photo Contest

Still lagging on the last prize (sorry Liene), and not quite sure what I'll make this prize, but the question spawned by this picture is: what and where is this?



Good luck.

Let us have peace indeed.

Now I get it...

Corrie used to have her feelings hurt by the fact that our cat, Tuxedo, when he would curl up with us when we went to bed, would curl up next to me. I would end up in a cuddly sandwich between Corrie and Tux.

Tux was outside the covers though, actually on top of them, and if you've ever seen our cat, you'll know that that means something. By the morning the inert bowling ball covered in soft fur that is Tuxedo could have been rolled off the bed and onto the floor and barely register it.

Since we've had our furnace blaring (it has actually dipped under fifty!) Tux has spent the majority of the time in front of it.

That's not a hap-hazard exaggeration. The furnace has some issues of it's own, like being on constantly, but during the many moments that it blasts, literally the only things that could drag Tux away from it is food and a trip to his shit box.

I even wrote a post about it last month.

Tux totally abandoned curling up with us while the heaters on, and now Corrie and I get it. He doesn't like me better, as Corrie always feared.

He just likes the warmth.

I'm a bit of a heat generator while asleep.

And awake, too, I guess.

Tuxedo, always the selfish and shrewd little big guy.

Direct from Season 5

When I rap about Season this and Season that, without other qualifications, I'm talking about The Wire and only The Wire. The only other show I'd probably talk about as much that has demarcations that are important for seasons would be The Simpsons.

If you're unfamiliar with The Wire, trust I'll set the context for you.

Season 5 is about the institution of the media, specifically the newspapers, and even more specifically, the Baltimore Sun.

One of the sensationalized newspaper stories, rather, the main story that gets highlighted over the course of Season 5, is the (mostly fabricated) serial killings of homeless people.

That very same thing has been happening out here, down in Orange County.

It hasn't been treated by the media in the same way, but this los Diez Sur, so...unless those homeless people were former television or child-actor stars or both, people around here have a hard time paying attention.

But, apparently, they have their main suspect in custody. I was sure to use our very own Long Beach Press-Telegram as that link's source, as a call-back to Season 5 and the Sun.

Season 5 is also, incidentally, one of the reasons I was inspired to subscribe to our local Long Beach paper.

For No Reason...

Fickt nicht mit dem Racketnmensch!

I almost copied and pasted the eighth post from the Caliboyinbrooklyn site. For no reason, of course.

It was an open letter to Norm about Gravity's Rainbow and a German Imipolex movie. Imipolex is a substance, a type of thinking rubber, that a suit is made of in that novel. Something so radical sounds almost like it should be a key component to any novel, but, like so many other incredible things in Pynchon novels, is barely a passing thought, like the were-beaver or super-sonic mechanical duck in Mason & Dixon.

Happy Friday th 13th

Once again, brought to you by Churchy LeFemme, Pogo, and the rest of Walt Kelly's critters.

This is almost exactly the same post as the original (if you follow the link).

Old Pictures

I received an email from Carol, my mother in law, that was of the "Quotes from Bygone Eras" type, where they showcase photographs accompanied with quotes about all the amazing things that were wrong in that era. Today's readers laugh at the things that are being complained about, since prices and social mores have changed in the intervening years.

I usually don't choose to discuss those things on my blogs, but there was an element in one of the pictures they showed. Check out the picture:



So, besides, the price of poultry being only moderately more expensive today (WTF?), look at the sign on the counter in the foreground: Save Waste Fats for Explosives.

Ummm...okay?

Nature Show

On my off day today I was out on my bike riding down the beach path, enjoying the brief sun through the thick cloud cover, when I noticed a sea gull with an object in its beak.

It flew to a height of twenty feet or so with the object still in its beak, flew to a spot directly above the concrete path, and dropped the object.

I watched this entire thing, and it was cool. The object was a mussel, and it broke on the concrete.

The gull swooped down after it, snatched it up, and took off.

As I passed the spot, I smiled and looked around. For the rest of the ride, or for at least the next fifty feet, there were broken shells littered all over the bike trail.

Congratulations Barry Larkin

Barry Larkin, the longtime shortstop of his hometown Cincinnati Reds, has been eected to the baseball Hall of Fame.

I always thought he was a hall of famer, and was surprised when he wasn't elected on his first try. Barry Larkin was a leader on both good and mediocre teams, winning a World Series in 1990 and an MVP in 1995. He was an above average ball player for his entire career.

Roberto Alomar, a second baseman who was elected last year, was another player who I figured would have had an easier time getting elected to the Hall.

Go figure. Jack Morris should be next year. What about Barry and the Rocket, also eligible next year?

That's why I think Morris will get in. He was at 66% this year, when you need 75%, and since he was a pitcher, and an ace at that, I think he'll get the push he needs because people will want to send a message to Roger Clemens.

Jack Morris was an ace on 3 World Series winners, even pitching a 10 inning complete game in a World Series Game 7.

2014 though is the Year of the Pitcher, when both Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine will be eligible, and their 660 combined wins. How cool, a couple of old school throwers, smart and precise, the last of a dying breed.

Another Culprit in Dying Bee Fiasco?

At first it was simply labeled sudden hive collapse, and they had a few guesses as to what was the cause.

Then it was a type of mite. That report was out of March of 2011.

Now they seem to have some evidence of a parasitic fly that infects the honey bee with it's larva and basically turns it into a zombie. Hijacking the bee is a pretty useful way to keep you larva warm and provide the eventual first whole food meal.

Here's a link to a recent story about it.

Bee's are far too important to the world's food supply for scientists to ignore the baffling and spiking rates of hive colony collapse.

I had a story I was working on a half dozen years ago that used the recurring imagery of repeating black and yellow stripes, and I had worked a set of distinct solitary and random set of dead bees into scenes.

Living in San Luis at the time I'd noticed randomly at more times than ever before single dead unsquashed honeybees on the sidewalk or street. I thought it was weird enough that it eventually blossomed into this strange story (that is as yet unfinished) about absurdity, Venetian blinds, newly paved streets, the slow churning of The New, and dead bees.

Come to think of it, it was eight to nine years ago, while Corrie was abroad and I lived at Oceanaire.

Damn...the slow churn of The New right here...

Surprising My Friends

I got a text last night from my good friend Ryan. It said something like "I have a question for you. I told Brady [his younger brother] you would know it. Who was the first commissioner of baseball?"

I hemmed and hawed at work, thinking. I wasn't going to cheat and look it up. I ended up imaging the commissioner from the farthest back in time I could remember, and went with it.

I responded with "Landis..."

His response, hours later, was "Yep. Surprised the hell out of Brady."

Yup. Kennesaw Mountain "Ain't gonna be no black folks in our game" Landis.

Maybe he wasn't the originator of the "gentleman's agreement", the euphemism for the "no black folk" rule, but under his stewardship, the status quo was upheld and no black folks were allowed into the "major leagues".

Trying Something New

With the new direction my caliboyinbrooklyn blog is taking, I've found that I'm having a hard time subduing my many various useless thoughts. So, whenever I get one--an idea less artistic than the los Diez Sur ideas but one I still want to share--I'll throw it up here.

I guess I just couldn't stop.

This is the observatory--my observatory--to peer into the depths of the human condition.

I once wrote about the observatory being a non-ironic symbol that inspired me.

Well, here I am using it again. I also have a silhouette logo idea of an observatory with four capital letters working as an acronym followed by a question mark: WDWG?

Maybe someday I'll discuss what the acronym stands for.