I Saw Space Ghost!

It’s pretty common to see celebrities around L.A., especially around the Arclight or The Grove, so it’s sort of a cop out to crow about someone that half of Defamer’s Privacy Watchers have seen already. Except for today…

I was on lunch break and killing time in Book Castle in Burbank today when someone came in to speak with the shop owner and I didn’t even have to look to confirm that it was Gary Owens, I just instinctively knew it was him because of his voice. I sorta wanted to do the fan thing and say hi, but I probably would have blithered out a “OMGILOVELAUGHINGONGSHOWRENSTIMPYSPACEGHOST!” in one syllable. Besides he was talking to the Book Castle guy about the Coconut Grove, old Los Angeles, and Frank Sinatra’s paintings and that was

I did find the book I was looking for (Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns Of August) and one I inexplicably didn’t have yet (Future Noir: The Making Of Blade Runner)

Me = nerd

Adventures in AOL User Search Profiles

Like everyone else, I’ve been killing time plowing through the search records of AOL users and once you get past the pervs, murderers, and the general cluelessness I discovered that the search profiles are a dynamite source of characters for fiction writers who might be stuck in fleshing out their characters.

Just plugging in some random search terms came up with an instant “strangers thrown together” sitcom or suspense show.

User #854617
Found by: Searching on Pi (“31415”)
Female in Savanna, GA (Zip Code 31415) who’s interested in minor home repair, Better Than Ezra, Bob Dylan, and the Bonnaroo Festival. Beginning on May 3rd, she searches on “baby names,” “odd baby names,” “flowers,” and wedding dress combinations so it looks like she got a surprise. Hopefully, the “zodiac symbols” work in her favor. Maybe she’ll find a sensible car at “grainger honda”

User #15728506
Found by: Searching on “jfk dallas”
Wanna-be male model in Texas who’s very interested in/has business with the Texas state comptroller’s office. He has nagging suspicions about his height and the JFK assassination but doesn’t let that interfere with keeping up with the latest soap operas. Last seen at Panera bakery, Starbucks, and Houston-area massage parlors. Favorite search term: “judith campbell exner- miscarried jfk’s baby”

User #929313
Found by: Searching on “it’s all over now baby blue”
NYC biology student who lives in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She’s concerned that her dual major in medicine and sociology might be giving her ADD, but she still has time to send out Purim Baskets and worry if her dog has lice. Writes poetry in her spare time and is fond of quoting movies at parties. Not sure if her parents approve of who she’s dating. Favorite search term: “how did plath die”

User #1167199
Found by: Searching on “las brisas”
Conspicous consumer of cars (BMW 750il, and a vintage Plymouth Roadrunner) golf gear, and LA-area Chinese restaurants. When he’s not thinking about investing (he’s heard something about nanotechnology!) and thinking about cars, he has a somewhat disturbing obsession with Desperate Housewives and Chloe Sevigny. I’m don’t believe that Iceland will let pervs emigrate there though, especially if you have to search to find Google’s page. Sheesh. Favorite search term: “waste management corporation”

Put those four together and the plot just writes itself… “A sudden snowstorm forces down a commercial jet in an unknown territory. Thrown together, the four survivors: a hot-tempered yuppie with dubious friends in ‘waste management’, a pregnant woman desperate to find her way home, a doctor who’s secret is that she isn’t a doctor yet, and a male model, learn to survive as they discover the shocking secret of this strange new world.”

Hell, I’d even watch that. Sure beats the hell out of Lost.

CKB: Prognosticator

Three things I thought would happen that have come true.

Ban on all carry-on luggage on airlines
When predicted: Early 2002
When the new TSA rules went into effect after 9/11, I figured that it would be only a matter of time when the prohibition would be expanded to include all carry-ons. As of this morning, this has now happened because of fear of “the liquid bomb.” Of course, fear sells a lot of ad revenue regardless of whether the fear is reasonable or even makes any goddamn sense (quote from CNN: “Don’t use your cellphone within 50 feet of a suspicious object, you might detonate something…”) Case in point, these TSA workers who have ordered “potentially dangerous liquids” to be emptied into a tank of other “potentially dangerous liquids.” Maybe it’s just me, but don’t you think that if something is airplane-unsafe, a big container full of the stuff in an airport is, um, really unsafe?

Remember, the TSA is here to protect you.

Anyone care to take any wagers on how long this ban will stay in effect and/or when it is expanded to include domestic flights? Assuming that the terrorist plot of this morning is legitimate, you could argue that the terrorists achieved a partial success in terms of permanently disrupting passenger air traffic, given now that you’re recommended to arrive at an airport a full four hours before departing.

Also, anyone care to wager on how soon this “victory over terrorism” will be connected to a strong and vigorous domestic spying program?

Soviet-style tourism (not to be confused with Soviet-era tourism)
When predicted: Early 1991
As soon as the Berlin Wall collapsed and Germany set about reunifying, I predicted that Checkpoint Charlie would become a tourist attraction and that paintball fans would soon be re-enacting escapes with one group playing the East German military and the other group as escapees. I suppose it was a little too much for the Irvine Albertsons grocery store I was in when I was exclaiming this to friends, as some guy shouted “that’s not funny!” at me.

Apparently, the current lag time between political oppression and ironic political oppression entertainment is fifteen years. Take a trip to Club Gulag…

Care to stay the night in a former KGB prison in Latvia? How about a weekend in an abandoned gulag 100 miles above the Arctic Circle? Or do you just want to make like a Volga boatman, pulling a barge up the river? According to The Age, the night at the KGB prison is already a hot destination for masochistic tourists. “On some nights, for extra money, they call out the guard, and the shivering guests can witness a mock execution, with the ‘corpse’ being flung like a sack of potatoes into a lorry before being driven away, presumably for a reviving cuppa,” Allan Hall writes. “Once past the humiliating stripping and donning of prison garb, the gruelling physical exercise regime, the interrogation and the solitary confinement cell—for those that answer back to Ivan—there is dinner. It is a delicious melange of stale rye bread, pickled fish heads, pressed meat from some unidentifiable mammal, pickles and black, sweet Russian tea.”

Manic home buying speculators = Manic home losing foreclosings
When predicted: 2005
Home buyers in 2006 = tulip speculators

“Orange County’s foreclosures nearly doubled in June, rising to 65 property sales from 35 in May. Overall, foreclosure activity, including default warnings to delinquent homeowners, was up 60 percent last month, the report shows. The county had 639 new foreclosure filings last month, up from 399 in May.”

As one commenter noticed, a big November housing tax installment payment may put a big wet blanket on Christmas spending. Stay tuned for unexpected ripple effects coming soon to a shaky economy near you!

The South African Riviera

Audi has some fun with a speed camera in South Africa, but what I zeroed in on is that fantastic 1972 Buick Riviera boattail merrily cruising along. I used to own a 1972 Riviera years ago and I’m pretty sure that South African one is a 1972 since there’s no vents on the trunk lid. Nice to see one so far from home in such great condition. Can’t tell if it’s right-hand drive – it’s pretty rare if it is.

P.S. Attention Autoblog: 228K for a 369 x 417 picture is friggin’ ridiculous! Do you just not know how to optimize a jpg for the web, or do you just like wasting money on bandwidth? Even a basic Photoshop “save for web” drops it down to 32K.

FileMaker serial number follies

For the past couple of days I’ve been bonking myself on the head repeatedly trying to figure out what would seem to be a simple FileMaker operation. I want to create an alphanumeric serial number that increments as follows:

A1
A2
A3
…
A998
A999
B1
B2
B3

…and so on until it rolls over at Z999 and resets back to A1. Resetting is OK – there’s no need to keep a permanent archive as once these references have passed out of the larger tracking system they just get deleted.

In a sudden flash of post-ice coffee-enhanced thought, I came up with the solution. Make sure that the serial field is set to auto-enter a serial number on commit. Set “Next value” to A1 and “increment by” to 1. Create a “New Record” script that looks like this:

New Record/Request
If [ Int(SerialField) > 998 ]
Set Next Serial Value [ SerialField ;
Let ( [
alphabet="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" ;
CurrentLetter = Left( SerialField ; 1 ) ;
CurrentLetterPosition = Position ( alphabet ; CurrentLetter ;
1 ; 1 ) + 1 ] ;
Middle ( alphabet ; CurrentLetterPosition ; 1 ) & 1 )
]
End If
Commit Records/Requests

It’s an obvious solution in retrospect and I can’t believe it had been vexing me for so long.

The Official Beer Of Global Warming

When you’re in Sisimiut and you’ve finished up your lovely Chinese dinner, don’t forget to pick up some Greenlandic beer on the way home.

A brewery in Greenland is producing beer using water melted from the ice cap of the vast Arctic island. The brewers claim that the water is at least 2,000 years old and free of minerals and pollutants.

The first 66,000 litres of the new dark and pale ales are on their way to the Danish market.

The beer from Greenland – a semi-autonomous Danish territory – costs 37 kroner (£3.40; five euros) per half-litre bottle.

It is the first ever Inuit microbrewery – located in Narsaq, a hamlet 625km (390 miles) south of the Arctic Circle.

…

It is claimed that the Greenland beer, officially launched in Copenhagen on Monday, has a softer, cleaner taste than other beers, because of the ice cap water.

El Lay

My rant about “Silver Lake” and a subsequent conversation with Nicholas reminded me of some old struggles over how to pronounce “Los Angeles.” A series of fights that involved rival car dealers and a separate fight between the Los Angeles Times and the east coast.

Back in the 1920s, the Los Angeles Times promoted the Spanish “Loce Ahng-hail-ais” pronunciation, even printing the Spanish phonetic pronounciation below the editorial page masthead. The popular pronunciation was the anglicized “Loss An-je-les,” and when the U.S. Geographic Board officially recognized that pronunciation in 1934, the Times was outraged, complaining that the pronunciation made the city “sound like some brand of fruit preserve” and intimated that Easterners were plotting to remove Spanish pronunciations all along the west coast and that “Sandy Ego,” “San Joce,” and “San Jokkin” were next.

Meanwhile, the rivalry between Packard dealer and NBC broadcast station magnet Earle Anthony and Cadillac dealer and CBS broadcast station magnet Don Lee spilled over into pronunciation. The NBC stations (KFI and KECA) used the common “Loss An-je-les” pronunciation, however Don Lee insisted on a hard-G pronunciation for KHJ announcers: “Los ANG-less.” Lee died of a heart attack in the 1930s, but the hard-G pronunciation continued to be used through the late 1940s.

You can sort-of hear the early KHJ pronunciation in the 1931 aircheck file at the top of this page.

2011-07-15 update: The LA Times looks back at the different pronunciations.

Putting the Silver in Silver Lake

Los Angeles City Nerd throws down the authority on the proper name for Silver Lake. Folks, it’s TWO WORDS, not one word. May the ghost of Herman Silver smite you otherwise.

People who contract it into one word are clearly newbie hipster gentrifiers who are not to be trusted. As a geography snob, misuses like this are a completely irrational hot button issue with me.

Still unsolved (so far) is the name origin for Silver Dry Lake – the basin just northeast of Baker. I suspect that it’s related to the long defunct Silver King mine, but during the era (1900 – 1940) when the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad was operating there was a small town on the line called Silver Lake. Only a few foundations and a cemetery are left, but on older road maps you still might see a “Silver Lake” listed there.

Dead Car - Silver Dry LakeI had no idea that folks had found meteorites at the desert Silver Lake. Best I was ever able to do was this wreckage of an indeterminate-looking car embedded in the playa.

More Harbies!

Harbie #1 (Harbor Blvd.)I recalled from some net research that there was supposed to be another Harbie The Harbor Gasoline Seal on Harbor Blvd. in either Garden Grove or Anaheim and a short drive revealed not just one, but TWO new Harbies – both of them cheerfully guarding the front of an RV park in Garden Grove.

These are actually Harbies #3 & #4, Harbie #2 is at a used car lot in Bellflower that I don’t have a picture of yet. Of course, there’s the Bisbee Harbie that started it all.