Life In Los Angeles - Clownwhig Man

Guy wearing a clown whig asks me for seventy five cents, specifically, because he wants to buy a TV dinner... I give him a quarter and take his picture.

Irritating TV - House & orifices...

Flipping through the channels, every now and then I let the clicker rest on House - It seems like a slightly above average show at times... One thing I have noticed however - and maybe it's just luck of the draw as I'm not a regular viewer - but almost every episode has someone bleeding from an orifice... and usually it's their anus. Sometimes it's the mouth and the anus. For all I know I just haven't been tuned in at the right time to see someone bleeding from the nose, ears, mouth and anus simultaneously... Does someone on the writing team have a fetish for bleeding orifices?

Los Angeles loves a good FIRE!

Los Angeles loves a good brush fire - it's kind of a love/hate thing. Everyone hates getting their house burnt down, but at the same time the majority of people - the ones not in any danger of having their homes burnt down - get all excited and rush to watch the plentiful news coverage. This year promises to be an active one if sparks are provided... Like in the case of the two teenage firebugs from Illinois who caused the March 30th fire on the Valley side of the Hollywood Hills...

It's the first time that I've noticed everyone with a digital camera taking photos and immediately emailing them to everyone in their address book or posting to a blog... I can't say I'm not guilty of taking photos of fires - there's something mesmerizing and primal about the cloud of smoke. This is a composite I put together from cell phone snaps - one floor below the location Kevin took his from. [Friday Fire In L.A.]

A Dirty Job: A Novel

[A Dirty Job: A Novel
by Christopher Moore - 2006, William Morrow]

Christopher Moore seems to love putting the mystical, fantastical and improbable into his novels - while at the same time providing the detail and feeling of the real world to such and extent that the reader forgets the improbabilities and sinks into the story. I would highly recommend his books to all who love satirical tales which involve the supernatural.

Charlie Asher finds himself dealing with death in a highly personal way as he tries to navigate life as a widower and father of a newborn daughter while accepting the fact that he's also been recruited to be a Death Merchant. This tale had me chuckling from the very beginning with poignant insight such as this from page 19:

Charlie hadn't really counted on killing a guy that morning. He had hoped to get some twenties for the register at the thrift store, check his balance, and maybe pick up some yellow mustard at the deli. (Charlie was not a brown mustard kind of guy. Brown mustard was the condiment equivalent of skydiving - it was okay for racecar drivers and serial killers, but for Charlie, a fine line of French's yellow was all the spice that life required) [...]

If this brief, yet masterful parable isn't enough to convince you of Moore's prowess with words and truth, here's another example - a description of a 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham.

The 1957 Cadillac Eldorado Brougham was the perfect show-off of death machines. It consisted of nearly three tons of steel stamped into a massively mawed, high-tailed beast lined with enough chrome to build a Terminator and still have parts left over - most of it in long, sharp strips that peeled off on impact and became lethal scythes to flay away pedestrian flesh. Under the four headlights it sported two chrome bumper bullets that looked like unexploded torpedoes or triple-G-cup Madonna death boobs. It had a noncollapsible steering column that would impale the driver upon any serious impact, electric windows that could pinch off a kid's head, no seat belts, and a 325 horsepower V8 with such appallingly bad fuel efficiency that you could hear it trying to slurp liquefied dinosaurs out of the ground when it passed. It had a top speed of a hundred and ten miles an hour, mushy, bargelike suspension that could in no way stabilize the car at that speed, and undersized power brakes that wouldn't stop it either. The fins jutting from the back were so high and sharp that the car was a lethal threat to pedestrians even when parked, and the whole package sat on tall, whitewall tires that looked, and generally handled, like oversized powdered doughnuts. Detroit couldn't have achieved more deadly finned ostentatia if they'd covered a killer whale in rhinestones. It was a masterpiece.

A Dirty Job is a perfect gift for someone you know who drives a hearse and loves to read - I know because I do both.

They called a Pillow Fight...

...and those that came were rousted. In the case of this fellow who showed up displaying a little bit of spirit wearing PJs, he was promptly cuffed and arrested. I hope the LAPD didn't waste my tax payer dollars to actually run the guy in and book him for trespassing.

This is a great example as to why nothing ever really happens in public spontaneously in Los Angeles - except for riots and earthquakes - because for the most part, public places are on privately owned corporate land which is administered without a sense of humour. The terrible band cranking out cover tunes about twenty five yards from where the pillow fight would have taken place was more of a nuisance than a spectacle of pillow fighters could have been.

However the Grove got the word, they took it pretty seriously, treating the potential "threat" as they might a terrorist attack on their Sunday money earning potential. I counted at least three LAPD uniformed officers, several of the white shirt Grove security (with forest ranger hats), two goofy looking dudes that seemed to have walked off the adjacent CBS lot having finished shooting some cop show... They were bald, goateed with dark suits and sunglasses... As if that weren't sufficient, there were some gray shirted fellows from the Farmers Market security, a couple of "undercover" Grove security guys in shorts and T-shirts... and some sort of official Grove executive type that had a name tag on. Anyone showing up would not have known to take the back way to the Abercrombie & Fitch clock tower so they would have to run the gauntlet from the west end of the Grove or come out of the parking structure.

I spotted a few people that looked like they were there for the event. A few with pillows in shopping bags made it to the spot only t be immediately rousted, but not cuffed like Mr. PJs. One genius actually walked up to a security guard and asked what the deal was with the pillow fight and that he was there to cover it for a blog... Way to go, stealthblogger...

Everything seemed to wind down in about half an hour and I assume that most people called their compatriots and spread the word of impending doom for anyone showing up with a pillow... Another typical Los Angeles style fizzle.