Fast Fiction

I don’t think my URL made it into the show notes for GOOD FOOD, so if you’ve found your way here, you’re probably looking for the Candy Blog.

I’ll be on KCRW’s radio show Good Food tomorrow (7/9/05) at 11:00 AM talking about candyblog.net. If you don’t live in Southern California where it airs, you can also catch the show on the web via real player on this page after it airs. KCRW also offers PodCasts of its shows.

I did the interview with Evan Kleinman a couple of weeks ago and was incredibly impressed by her show and the entire experience. I was always fond of the SNL Delicious Dish version of the show, but this was better. Good times.

I found this via franklinavenue and posted on b.la, but here goes my personal take on this list.

National Geographic Traveler Magazine published a list of 30 things you should do when in LA (I doubt they meant all in the same trip). In August it’ll be 13 years I’ve lived in Los Angeles. Let’s see how I did on the list. Starred items are ones that I’ve actually visited.

1. Hollywood Entertainment Museum
2. Venice’s Abbot Kinney Blvd. shops
3. Topanga Canyon’s Inn of the Seventh Ray
4. Catalina Island *
5. Downtown’s Flower Market *
6. One spa at Santa Monica’s Shutters on the Beach
7. Pink’s hot dogs
8. Fred Segal’s
9. Free TV tapings *
10. La Brea Tar Pits (from the outside, not the museum) *
11. Chinatown’s Chung King Road galleries
12. Hollywood Forever cemetery (and Cinespia screenings)
13. Museum of Jurassic Technology (in Culver City)
14. Larchmont Blvd. (especially Cafe Chapeau) *
15. Shopping at Robertson and 3rd *
16. Grand Central Market *
17. American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre
18. Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels
19. Live music at Santa Monica’s McCabe’s
20. Los Angeles River (Los Feliz to downtown) *
21. Beverly Hills Hotel *
22. Venice’s canals
23. Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park *
24. Little Ethiopia restaurants
25. The Grove *
26. Koreatown’s Brass Monkey (for karaoke)
27. Farmer’s Markets in Hollywood and Santa Monica * (not Santa Monica)
28. Melrose’s Urth Caffe *
29. Adamson House
30. Philippe’s french dip sandwiches *

Well, I got 14 out of 30. There are some I’m not terribly interested in like Pink’s hot dogs, as I don’t eat hot dogs (tofu, beef, pork, turkey or otherwise). I have no clue what the Hollywood Entertainment Museum even is, but working on the Paramount lot is like coming to a museum every day, since there are little historical displays all over the place and I’ve had the pleasure of scanning historic photos of not only movies but the lot itself.

Will mentioned last night that I have not yet shared my thousand or so photos from my vacation.

Well, to save you the trouble of looking through what seem like dozens of identical photos of the same subjects, I narrowed it down to a scant 83 photos. That’s 9% of the whole take!

Check out my flickr set (click on the photo to be whisked away ...)

The NY Times published an obituary today:

William J. Brink, Editor, Is Dead at 89; Credited With Vivid Headline

The editor of New York’s The Daily News, his best known headline was FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD from the seventies during the financial crisis faced by NY.

The obituary ends with the following line “The corresponding headline in The New York Times that day, FORD, CASTIGATING CITY, ASSERTS HE’D VETO FUND GUARANTEE; OFFERS BANKRUPTCY BILL, remains unsung.”

I went on vacation and took 964 photos.

Friday:

 
• Arrived.
 
• Looked at Morro Bay, walked the bluffs of Montana de Oro.
 
• Saw a quail.
 
• Watched the sun set.
 
• Had Chinese delivered.
 
• Started reading Candy Freak by Steve Almond.

Saturday:

 
• Back to Montana de Oro for more bluff walking and cove-combing.
 
• Kayaked across the upper part of Morro Bay.
 
• Landed on the sand spit ... twice. Thwarted from crossing by the skittish snowy plover.
 
• Had a fabulous dinner.

Sunday:

 
• Walked the beach on Morro Bay near the house to watch the birds.
 
• Went to San Simeon and saw elephant seals and even a far off sea otter.
 
• Ate lunch/dinner in Cambria and experienced a small earthquake.

Monday:

 
• Wine tasting (well, I didn’t taste any of it) in Paso Robles.
 
• Back to Montana de Oro to take the stupidest hike imagineable over a 400 foot sand dune (straight up, straight down) to a lovely and deserted beach.
 
• Dinner in town.

Tuesday

 
• Packed up and hit Nipomo Dunes and Oso Flaco Lake.
 
• Drove to Los Angeles to enjoy traffic.

I’ll post later when I’ve gone through my photos. Unless you’d like to see all of them?

This is one of the scariest rulings I’ve seen come out of the Supreme Court in my lifetime. The Supreme Court ruled that local governments may seize people’s homes and businesses—even against their will—for private economic development.

Total control over these seizures is handled by the city. So, if you’ve never paid attention to your city council, now’s the time to. You’d better make damn sure they have your best interests at heart and not some developers under the guise that it’s fo the “tax base.”

Of course the other option is to never own property in anyplace desireable.

The justices in the majority on this were Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. I’m totally baffled by who voted on which side. Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her dissent, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

The other dissenting votes were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, as well as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

UPDATE: As I’ve read more I have further thoughts. In that article it addresses one of the questions I had, just what the public good has to do with tax bases? Is a government obligated to create a tax base? Is a strong tax base actually part of the common good? Is a government’s obligation to make money so it can spend it on the public? In the case in New London, the community was not blighted, what they were replacing it with had no more “community” value than the homes that were there, but the fact that they were putting in businesses that might help the depressed economy were what swung it in the developer’s favor.

I just see this whole thing as being a huge temptation for corruption, especially in smaller communities.

Having worked on a large photo scanning and restoration project, I can tell you that there is lots of info in old photos.

Here’s an interesting gallery at Houseplant Picture Studios, it’s of a photo album they found at the swap meet of an unknown family who probably owned a liquor store.

This photo says to me that they really wanted to get the light fixture in the shot, even if it meant that the people weren’t really featured.

The photo gallery features fashions, a liquor store (with candy at the counter!), vacation adventures, poker games and people sitting on couches or standing in front of drapes.

I’m really flabbergasted.

Candy Blog is doing well. Better than I ever expected. At the moment I’m getting about 50 hits a day according to my NedStats. I’ve also logged that there are at least four subscribers to the feed via bloglines, and another bunch via other aggregators. My webalizer stats say that I’m getting about 96 hits average this month per day, so I have no idea how to measure such things or if it’s even possible these days. Fast Fiction, by comparison on nedstats gets about 15 hits a day and it’s been around for nearly four years now.

The thing is, I’ve done very little to promote the site. I use it as my URL when commenting around the web, and made a few references on la.foodblogging.com to reviews. About 40% are coming to the site via search strings (usually a candy name). Another 20% seem to be via links from other people who have found me and are recommending the site. The other 40% seem to be coming without any link from anywhere ... that means bookmarks!

The thing that really sends my head reeling is that I’ve been writing for a long time (pretty much as a career choice since I was 18) and I’ve been trying to connect with audiences all that time through a variety of themes and formats (plays, blogs, short stories, essays, novels, etc.) and here comes a modicum of success via something that reaches so many people already, CANDY.

I know that the stats aren’t fantastic, but I figure with a little more promotion and a more robust site with more content it can succeed.

It brings me to ask myself, is this something I could devote my life to?

And the answer is an unequivocal YEAH!

I saw an article in the New Scientist about time travel. Apparently the universe has some very strict laws and one of them prevents time travel paradoxes.

It turns out that the latest understand of quantum physics explains that the universe might allow time travel, but not the ability to exact any changes in the past. Which might make me wonder if we can make any changes in the present either. Of course we’re not quantum objects. At least not by the current definition.

Earlier this week I was sitting in the back yard and saw a scrub jay flying up to the top of a nearby utility pole with a whole tortilla chip.

He sat up there and pecked at the chip until it broke into several pieces. He flew back down to my yard and set about scratching a little spot in the mulch under the orchid tree and covered up his piece of tortilla.

He flew back to his pole and repeated this, until he’d secreted away three pieces of his tortilla chip.

I went over to where he’d been doing this and could find no trace of his chips. I’ll keep an eye on the spot, lest we get those pesky tortilla trees sprouting up. Once they get established, watch out, you’ve got a yard full of them.

So, the Candy Blog is going well. But I’m getting growing pains and I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed.

The feature I miss most on Candy Blog is category tagging.

But then I have to remind myself that’s a feature I’m missing. I have no clue if any of my readers give a rat’s ass.

I get the sense that RSS is the wave of the future and categories would be pretty much irrelevant.

I guess my issue is that if I’m gonna do something about it, I should do it now, before people start actually linking to me.

Anybody else have any thoughts? I’ve looked at Word Press, Moveable Type and Expression Engine. They’re all great, but of course I have to install stuff on my servers and maintain them with updates and stuff. One of the reasons I like Blogger is that they do stuff to keep it running. Of course they’re not innovating as quickly as some others. I could go round and round like this.

Should I stay or should I go?

You know me and my transient obsessions.

At the moment I’m obsessed with two different things:

My candy blog is going along swimmingly. More than 50 reviews so far and I haven’t even gained any weight. In fact, I’ve not done a damn thing to promote it and it’s already come to the attention of Good Food on KCRW and I’m set to be interviewed for a segment later this month! Holy Cow! Anyone have any tips on what I should do, talk about, what to wear for radio (no noisy taffeta, right?), bring?

I’m ordering some new candy for review. Some more Wilbur chocolate (really just my “summer supply”) and I placed an order with a Japanese place for some cool new things that I haven’t seen in the American stores in Little Tokyo. I also want to redesign the blog and perhaps migrate to a different blogging platform. One with categories because this manually indexing is a pain in the arse.

I’m also on a kick about photography since I was confronted on Wednesday night in Hollywood about taking photographs in a public place by some private security people. I haven’t really blogged some of the other details and I don’t plan to, because I think they’re largely irrelevant to the issue of private security people being uninformed about the public’s rights. My plan is to go back to the same location next week and try again to get the photos I want and see if the same thing happens again. If it does, I’m takin’ names!

Okay, I can retract my earlier statement about the Huffington Post.

It’s a blog now. Not all blog, but mostly blog. Many of the contributors have some cajones and are opening their posts to comments. And based on what I read on Harry Shearer’s latest, I think the comments might end up being more fun that the post themselves. These are really well informed, strongly opinionated folks. That’s what blogs are made for!

Poor Evangaline Lilly. She made a bad decision somewhere along the way. Or at least that’s what I’m guessing. Now she’s a big star on the ABC series Lost.

I know that it happens to actors all the time. They’re struggling, thinking that the big break is never gonna come along and then an opportunity comes along for something, either softcore porn or some sort of infomercial/advertising.

I suspect that’s how Evangaline is now the spokesperson for something called LiveLinks. Or maybe she has been for quite a while and I never noticed. What a coup for LiveLinks (which seems to have Single Life as a registered trademark!).

I was watching Kids in the Hall last night on Comedy Central and there was a commercial with her in it, sandwiched in between some sort of advert for a DVD for Girls Gone Wild Olympics and the David Chappelle show. Sure enough, the website for the chat line has her heavily featured.

A few months ago I was reading some list somewhere of the best movies you’ve never seen. On it was a film called “The Awful Truth” starring Cary Grant and Irene Dunne. I ordered it up on Netflix and watched it last night.

I’m sorry. I’m not sure what’s so fabulous about this film.

I think there is a kernel of something wonderful in there, but either the writing or the directing leave something to be desired.

The story is of a couple who divorce. He lies to her about something that could be improper in his behavior but when she’s caught in something that appears to be improper (she comes home after being out all night with another man and a story of being stranded with car trouble). The couple fights and then decides to get divorced. They go through the proceedings and fight over custody of their delightful dog.

Okay, this is where I have to say that this is probably the first movie to ever portray the love and friendship of a dog accurately ... it’s a great dog.

The wife gets the dog and the husband gets visitation. The wife moves in with her aunt and starts dating a fellow from across the hallway. Of course the husband finds out and is terribly unhappy about this and does his best to destroy the relationship. The same happens when he starts dating. The final event takes place when he starts seriously dating a wonderful girl and on the night that the divorce is to be final, the new girlfriend calls and finds the soon-to-be-ex in his apartment. He lies and says that it’s his sister. The girlfriend says bring her along to dinner, he says no. He shows up and later the ex shows up with all sorts of weird stories that shock the family and girlfriend.

The husband goes to drive the ex home (still pretending she’s his sister) and she gets them pulled over by the cops, then gets him tested for driving drunk, crashes the car (they’re not in it) and then takes him back to her aunt’s cabin where they realize, while staying in adjoining rooms that they’re meant to be together.

Sigh.

I don’t know if I’ve done it justice or not.

It’s a nice idea, and the cast is fab, but there’s some sort of spark or pep missing to the whole thing. It’s no “Lady Eve.”

The news is just bad. I wasn’t happy about the seal culling in Canada, and this news isn’t much better:

Virginia to Shoot Gulls Nesting on Highway - too many gulls on the highway are causing accidents so the solution is to kill the gulls.

Wildlife Officials to Kill 4,000 Cormorants - Cormorants are thought to be behind a decrease in the number of walleye in Leech Lake. So they’re going to kill 4,000 of them to see if the fishery will rebound. I’ve seen lots of coromorants, they lovely birds to watch and very graceful under water. I wouldn’t call them “voracious, predatory birds.” So much for dispassionate reporters.

There’s also a contract out on about 500 cormorants on the western side of Lake Erie.

The trouble seems to be that we don’t remember there being so many cormorants in the Great Lakes area because we killed them off so long ago with habitat incursions and DDT.

The DDT problem has brought a host of other conservation/restoration issues here in Southern California. The loss of Bald Eagles on the Channel Islands meant that there was no top predator. Even though there is still plenty of residual DDT floating around (literally) in SoCal, the effort is underway to re-establish the Bald Eagles. But the struggle doesn’t end there, in some areas the Golden Eagle has taken the Bald’s place, especially on Santa Cruz island, where domestic pigs were released scores of years ago and have now become prey to the Golden Eagle. Not only have the pigs destroyed the native flora, but now the top predator on the island, the Island Fox is severely threatened because the Golden Eagles find Island Fox kits so damn tasty.

The process of saving the Island Fox is complex and they’re approaching it from all sides ... reintroducing Bald Eagles to displace Golden Eagles, killing the non-native pigs and building protected breeding pens for the foxes. Hopefully the combination will help to return Santa Cruz Island to a better balance.

Aw, I’m flattered. One of my most typetive posts ever on blogging.la was just listed as a Best Of for the metroblogs.

Whee!

I don’t often share personal details on my blog. But that’s not really the point of this story:

It was about two weeks ago, after some rather inept weeding in my yard, I noticed a little blister on my palm. After hung around for a couple of days I decided that there was a pricker or thorn at the heart of the blister so I dug around in there with a needle and found nothing, so I washed my hands and thought nothing more of it.

Two days later, not only was the initial blister back, but suddenly it was bigger (about the size of a pea) and had two other, smaller friends.

This was not normal blister behavior. Either you get a blister from abrasion or from getting into something that you’re allergic to.

A week went by and they got bigger. I kept it clean, washed them often with very hot water and soap then either wiped them with an alcohol swab or slathered them in neosporin. It didn’t seem to help so I finally gave in on Friday and went to the doctor.

I stumped him.

He looked at them and we talked about all the things they could possibly be. They didn’t seem to be an infection because they weren’t red (just clear fluid filled blisters), my temp was normal and my glands weren’t swollen. If they were poison oak they either would have subsided by now or burst and probably would have itched more and of course would be red. Chiggers aren’t found often in Los Angeles, and if you do get them they like to burrow into the softer areas like between the fingers, not the callouses on the palms. If they were boils or cysts they would originate deeper in the skin ... if they were shingles they’d be painful. We could rule out all the causes within the realm of normal possibility.

So the doctor sent me away with a prescription for Keflex (cephlaxin) and to call him on Monday if it wasn’t better. The only thing he could do is treat me for what was the most likely cause, which was some sort of infection.

And I’ll be damned if they’re not better.

I’m still curious how I ended up with some sort of infection that didn’t behave like an infection or if it’s not, it’s just going away on its own, coincidental to the antibiotics. Whatever it is, I’m going to finish the rest of this foul smelling Keflex.

I mean, I like feeling unique and special; but when it comes to medical matters, I’d like things to be rather by the book. I want my heart in my chest and my kidneys to be found on either side in my abdomen, my small intestines small and my large intestines large and my brain in my skull. And if I have something wrong with me and I go to the doctor, I want him to know what it is and know that they have a verified treatment for it.

Unfortunately it really doesn’t work that way. Luckily flesh is rather resiliant, self-healing stuff.

Most of you who read know me. You know that I’m not necessarily a luddite, but I am a girl of simple needs.

Unfortunately I’ve been afflicted by gadget lust this past week.

I’m obsessed with a camera. No, not a fancy Nikon or anything, just the next model up from my Sony DSC-V1, which is this Sony DSC-V3.

They’ve fixed some of my major grievances with the DSC-V1 with the new model. There’s virtually no shutter lag now - so you just point and click and it comes out focused. A lot of the shots that I get, especially of dolphins are pure luck. Well, more a demonstration of the scattershot approach.

It also has a RAW mode, which means no degradation of image quality and a larger LCD display (though I really don’t have complaints about the display).

Longer battery life and 7 megapixels, which means 30% more detail. Same carl zeiss lens. A burst mode of eight frames instead of three.

Anyway, it’s captured me. I don’t need it. Instead I’m ordering another battery and pledging to carry my iPod with me on longer trips in order to suck the photos off my memory sticks. Of course I’ll also keep my eye on eBay for a cheap one, too.

I’m a little confused about this blogebrity thing. I’ve seen it linked at the best places (tony pierce & sean bonner), but I think they’re just as confused as I am about what the hell it is.

If it’s a place to dish where you see bloggers in real life, I’ll have to say that bloggers are about as interesting as TV anchors. Unless we can catch photos of Sean Bonner in a kilt and uggs.

I know some folks like to debate what a blog is. And I tend to be liberal with the definition.

But I’d like to point out something that’s not a blog. The Huffington Post is not a blog. It’s not a blog because it’s not interactive. There is nowhere to respond to posts except on your own blog. There are places to respond on the news bits they post, but there’s nowhere to post a comment to one of the “blog” entries.

Further, there’s no forum. I mean, if you’re not going to let people interact right there, a forum is a pretty fair way to do it. That’s what the NY Times does, and that’s a newspaper.

Anyway, I gave it a looksee and was a bit frustrated by it right away. The Newswire feature is nice, but I’m not sure they understand the way a blog works, if you correct something, you should note it in the post.

As an example, when they first launched, I saw a headline something like “Wired News Investigated for Plagiarism” or something with the word plagiarism in the title. Now, I’d read a story about it the night before and as far as I could tell it was an investigation into making stuff up. Surely a transgression, but a completely different one than plagiarism. So I commented on this. They fixed it, but left no comment or text to indicate the correction. So there are comments there (including mine) that kinda make no sense.

Mostly I’d just like to see responses to posts ... or at least trackback folks so I can find what folks are saying in response. Maybe they’ll figure it out. Or, as it appears, maybe we’ll all get a chance to be a blogger for Arianna. She’s sure got a lot of them!

Here’s how heavily the mayoral election has been on my mind:

I forgot to vote this morning.

I like voting in the morning, mostly I got in the habit back in the day when the east coast media called elections before the polls were even closed in California.

I’m still leaning heavily towards writing in Eric Garcetti for mayor. He’s not even my councilman. We’ll see how I feel after work. I can’t possibly show up at a blogger event without voting. The big question is do I run home and get my camera to document my write-in or not?

Since Bush was able to convince us of the WMDs in Iraq, I think he believes that he’s going to be able to convince us that Social Security needs to be overhauled.

I wanted to believe that there was a greater good at stake in Iraq, after all, we were killing tens of thousands of people. And if it were all about money, then what sort of society are we? Honestly, if they want my money to NOT go to war, I’m willing to give it up more readily than to take my taxes and use them to kill people.

Here’s something I suspected, Social Security is not in trouble. And here’s someone who can argue it much better than I.

According to an article by law professor Richard L. Kaplan at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from the April issue of ElderLaw Report, “Factoring in the huge annual surpluses currently collected by Social Security, general taxpayer revenues would not be needed to fund Social Security benefits until 2052, or 47 years from now.”

I can’t help but marvel at the continued fight over teaching evolution. I think this image sums it all up, but here’s a synopsis:

Warning: Chemical Periodicity is a theory. The theory keeps changing. The theory is under dispute. Teach alternative theories to children!

I do wonder if the creationists would have us stop predicting the weather, drilling for oil, sending satellites into orbit and fighting birth defects.

Amy found me this morning taking the laundry down to the basement, and showed me this pair:

They were near their front door, and seemed to be there for quite a while. I put in the load of laundry and went back inside and got my camera and they were still going at it.

You might recall, loyal readers, that I found another (perhaps larger) one last year about this time in the front yard. I’ve gone back and done a little more searching and I’m quite sure it’s a White-Lined Sphynx Moth (Hyles lineata).

As usual, I was playing around with something without knowing what I was doing.

I’ve deleted about half of my flickr gallery. Grrr.

I was trying to delete my “sets” because I’m using the groups feature to do the same thing. Well, I didn’t just delete the sets, I deleted their contents.

I don’t suppose anyone cares, they were older photos, but it included all my good neon and dolphins.

I can simply re-upload them all again, but that pushes all my more recent photos off the front pages. Gah. Well, I bring these things upon myself. I can fix it. Not sure I want to, but I can.

It’s been pointed out that this faster fast fiction is lacking in new content.

I did read a few days ago that one of my favorite sites is seeking a sponsor. It’s the typing monkeys. They’re still banging out characters, but no one is watching what they’re doing. They stopped posting the recent records at 24 characters.

If anyone out there wants to help with one of the greatest experiments ever, they should look into sponsoring the Monkey Shakespeare Simulator.

I’ve decided to get rid of the Flickr daily zeitgeist and the Buzznet photos over on the left nav area. They were just slowing things down.

Now you can get in, get your regular fix and get out.

If you’re really interested in the photos, have a looksee either from the top listing of my other sites or the left nav listing of other blogs.

We’re efficient like that.