Long Bike Ride

In an attempt to fill up my days with hours sold to other folks doing stuff, I found myself chasing down some leads. Those turned out to be at Cal State U. at Dominguez Hills. CSUDH has one of the best teacher credentialing programs in the nation, and I've been doing some things with them, but on this particular day, I had a meeting up at campus.

CSU Dominguez Hills, in Carson, could be the only college campus with a professional team's field onsite. The LA Galaxy and Chivas USA soccer teams both play at the Home Depot Center, which is on campus.

In any case, with campus in Carson being close by, mostly, to Long Beach, I decided to ride the subway and take my bike and ride from the stop. Then, when I saw which stop I needed to get off at, I looked up the sheer miles: our apartment to DH campus.

Only ten miles.

That's when I decided to just go for it, and ride the whole way there. My knee needs the work, right?

If you start at the ocean, put your back to it, and then head away from it, it makes a certain sense that you'll be heading uphill.

That's how it worked out on paper. Ten miles. Five straight up the LA River bikeway, maybe one or one and a half from our house to the bikeway entrance. Two or three more from the river bikeway to Central Ave, and three or two up Central to campus.

That last stretch up Central is literally up Central.

Later on, talking with Vic (Tux's babysitter while we went to Europe), telling him about it he stopped and kinda yelled at me. Then, when Corrie got home, he asked her how she could let me do that, and told her she has to put her foot down on my crazy ideas. We all had a good laugh at that.

On the way home I took the train. Del Amo Blvd isn't really bike friendly (go figure), and I rode the sidewalk (when it was there) back to the train station and rode it home. I iced my knee afterwards, and the next day when I got back on the bike, my knee felt fine and maybe even a little stronger.

Carson and Long Beach and Southgate and Norwalk and Lynwood and Compton are all little "cities" that seem to snuggle altogether in South Central Los Angeles County, and they all look pretty much the same, and they're divided by invisible lines on maps. What Vic remembers the area being like (one that's certainly unsafe for a shaggy whitey like myself) and what it is today aren't congruent anymore..

This is NO Turkey

I lifted this from Cracked's site, but I think it's pretty creative. Gruesome, sure, but creative:

Not much to say about this, besides, "Cool, huh?"

Black and White Madness!

Action shots from all across the internet---and history!

When I heard that there was a spot called "Auto Polo" I thought, Now that's an awesome way to spend an afternoon. After I broke my leg, though, my days of dreaming of a revival of this game got shelved:

Places and times that had cool games like car polo also had other cool shit going on, like big cylinders with motorcycles and autos driving horizontal along the walls.

How can we make a motorcycle driving along the inside of a cylinder even more exciting?

Staff a sidecar with a lion. Ethel Purtle and the King, baby! Now here's a spectator activity I'd thoroughly enjoy.

The last two old-timey black and white pictures are from WWII. The first is a shot of the D-Day invasion after the beachhead was taken and the people and equipment started getting offloaded. It looks like a video game still, like it's too fake to be real, but it isn't, it's all reality:

Another thing about WWII pictures is that you'll find things that are so spectacular that if you were to use it during an action movie, the audience would believe that the explosion or whatever would be solely the work of the special effects team, because war can't be like that. Until you see the pictures from the aerial dogfights.

Spectacular...

Meaty Diagrams

Here are some diagrams for beef and pork. The first are from the UK, and the seconds (for both) are from the States.

Now, after working for some time in the restaurant industry, I can say I never committed these to memory. I almost would have thought the first diagrams are the US one, but I'd be wrong.

I think they're pretty cool.

Again, the UK beef diagram:

And the US beef diagram:

Here's the UK pork diagram:

And here's the US pork breakdown:

Everywhere I worked in New York had pork belly back when it was starting to trend in 2007. It was reasons like that that would trip me up in a blind quiz of these two sets of diagrams.

Random Picture: 2 and 3...

This picture is a slide from, obviously, Cracked.com.

I like the fact that Kat Dennings has a starring role in the show, or in any show really; there's not enough real looking girls on television. This show, however, has other problems. I've tried to watch it a few times, and can't ever sit through scenes long enough to fully grasp the character dynamics.

But this slide easily captures one of the things that bothers me.

Random Picture: Anwan Glover

I decided to mix these random picture posts up between the two main blogs.

This random picture is of the main public face of Anwan Glover, a Washington DC hip-hop artists, but in the style of the region, by which I mean go-go music. Go-go music is a style that is oddly clustered around DC. It is similar to other East Coast hip-hop, except with the call-and-response you find in Caribbean house-party music, or black churches.

Back in the '80s go-go clubs were getting shuttered. The violence from the heroin trade was finding its way into the spots where the soldiers were hanging out. Anwan himself has been shot a few times, and a close friend or family was killed.

The violence has largely subsided and go-go music has returned as the most important DC hip-hop music. And Anwan Glover turns out to be, with his many bands and incarnations, one of the leading figures in the go-go world.

Anwan Glover played the character of Slim Charles on The Wire, one of the great side characters in television history. Always a soldier and mercenary, he was one of the few gangsters with ample screen time who survived the series: no jail, no death. His beaded braids clacked faintly from Season 3 to Season 5.

Lunch?

Doesn't seeing a food-truck named as such make you hungry for sausages or grilled cheese?

Maybe you want to see their hand-sanitizing station...

Located right outside a San Diego brewery...

Happy 2013 everybody!

And by everybody, I guess I mean, the half-dozen people who read this site.

Now, I'm familiar with many things easily found on Urban Dictionary. I can say, though, that this honestly wasn't one of them. Dirty Sanchez, Angry Dragon, Rusty Trombone, Alabama Hot-Pocket (possibly the worst legal thing ever)...all acts that had definitions I was familiar with. But, for some reason, not "gooch". It seemed too easy, I guess. Still does.