I used to live in an old apartment building in Encino. Good old number 19 on the second floor was worn out inside and somewhat rundown. It was located behind a car wash off of one of the main streets in town. One of the great pleasures living there was listening to the guy at the carwash use his loudspeaker . You haven't lived until you wake up hung over to the dulcet tones of "Jim, yellow '78 Gremlin ready for pick up now!"
The interior of the place was a little old. It was an older building so it was a larger one bedroom that included a real living room that I divided in half so that I would have a dining room off of the kitchen.
Speaking of the kitchen the yellow laminate on the counter was peeling and the stove looked as if it could have been used by an angry group of Hells Angels. In the living room there was a big wood panel on the wall was in need of paint and the bathroom looked like it should have been part of some cheesy 1970's porno movie.
The bedroom was rather nondescript. White walls and a window that overlooked the neighbors below me. They had a small dog that yapped all of the time. The neighbor to the left of them also had a little dog that yapped its little head off. It wasn't uncommon to be serenaded by these little rodent dogs, nor was it pleasant.
During the summer in the Valley it is not uncommon for the temperature to exceed 90 and not altogether unexpected for it to push past 100. My little hideaway had an old and decrepit air conditioner that looked like it should have sitting in the back of the red truck Lamont on Sanford and Son used to drive.
Consequently the temperature inside the unit was three degrees short of a bazillion. And on one particular day in July it hit about 117 inside or so the internal thermometer showed. All I know is that this was the day that Lucifer handed me his pitchfork and a letter saying that he quit.
Part of the charm of this place was that during Winter my unit stopped trying to pretend to be a sauna and became part igloo. There were days where it was just slightly above forty degrees in there and for this native Californian that is freaking cold.
The tenants of this particular building made for kind of an odd collection. I was a 24 year old single male who was busy trying to make a name for himself at the office. The two units to the left of me were populated by some very colorful characters.
There was R, who worked for Paramount building sets for the various shows that they produced. For a while he shared it with M and three pit bulls. Eventually M and one of the dogs moved out leaving just R and the two remaining dogs.
Thanks to the proximity of those dogs to my apartment I never bothered to lock my door. Whenever someone would start to walk up the stairs to the second floor they would begin barking furiously. If you didn't know better it sounded as if it was coming from inside my unit and consequently there were times when my own visitors wanted to know if I had dogs living with me.
B and E lived to the left of R. They worked in the music industry and had all sorts of interesting guests come by their place. One night we split a bottle of tequila with one of Stevie Nick's backup singers. Somewhere there are some silly pictures of me in a cloak doing my little spoof of Stevie spinning in one of her dresses.
I spent a lot of time with all of those guys. During the evenings you could find us wandering back and forth between apartments. They were all between five to seven years older than I was. At the time that seemed like quite a bit, not to mention that their lives had been so very different from my own.
That building holds so many memories for me, I may yet blog about them. But foremost among them are the memories of floating away the days and the evenings on a raft in the pool. We would grab a cooler full of drinks and share the contents of our refrigerators.
Now so very many years later I work just down the street from there. Sometimes when I am stopped at a red light I'll turn my head and remember warm summer nights listening to the Eagles. There is a cold beer in my hand and my raft is gently rocking me into the evening.
Alaskans eager for long night's journey into day
Extended night would be very tough.
"ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Lloyd Leavitt shrugs off the subzero freeze that blankets the Arctic town of Barrow each winter. It's the weeks of endless night that get to him, filling him with insatiable cravings for carbohydrates and sleep and natural light.
"There comes a time when you don't know if it's morning or evening. You get confused," said Leavitt, who has lived all his 49 years in the nation's highest-latitude community.
No wonder residents here anticipate the winter solstice Wednesday, the shortest day of the year and the psychological turning point toward spring.
Leavitt has plenty of company when it comes to dealing with Alaska's dark side. Yes, winter brings shorter days in other states as well, along with extreme cold. But Alaska is the U.S. vortex of seasonal blues.
The sun won't rise again in Barrow for another month after the solstice. For Leavitt and others in the largely Inupiat Eskimo town of 4,500, it marks the countdown to daylight.
In the meantime, Leavitt floods his home with rainbow-colored Christmas lights.
"They keep the spirits up," he said.
Winter is a drag to some extent for one out of five Americans, studies suggest. A smaller fraction -- mostly women and young adults -- suffer from seasonal affective disorder, a type of depression stemming from decreased daylight.
Nearly 10 percent of Alaskans suffer from SAD to some degree, according to a study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1992; in sunny Florida, the rate is only about 1 percent.
SAD symptoms include lethargy, a heightened desire for sleep, cravings for carbohydrates, feelings of melancholy, fuzzy thinking and loss of libido or sociability, said Suzanne Womack Strisik, an assistant psychology professor at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. She's also a practicing psychologist in the state's largest city, where daylight has dwindled to 5 1/2 hours by the solstice."
Researchers Find Barbie Is Often Mutilated
"LONDON - Barbie, beware. The iconic plastic doll is often mutilated at the hands of young girls, according to research published Monday by British academics."The girls we spoke to see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity," said Agnes Nairn, one of the University of Bath researchers. "The types of mutilation are varied and creative, and range from removing the hair to decapitation, burning, breaking and even microwaving."
Researchers from the university's marketing and psychology departments questioned 100 children about their attitudes to a range of products as part of a study on branding. They found Barbie provoked the strongest reaction, with youngsters reporting "rejection, hatred and violence," Nairn said.
"The meaning of 'Barbie' went beyond an expressed antipathy; actual physical violence and torture towards the doll was repeatedly reported, quite gleefully, across age, school and gender," she said.
While boys often expressed nostalgia and affection toward Action Man — the British equivalent of GI Joe — renouncing Barbie appeared to be a rite of passage for many girls, Nairn said.
"The most readily expressed reason for rejecting Barbie was that she was babyish, and girls saw her as representing their younger childhood out of which they felt they had now grown," she said.
Nairn said many girls saw Barbie as an inanimate object rather than a treasured toy.
"Whilst for an adult the delight the child felt in breaking, mutilating and torturing their dolls is deeply disturbing, from the child's point of view they were simply being imaginative in disposing of an excessive commodity in the same way as one might crush cans for recycling," she said."
Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned.
Peace In Our Time- Peace In The Middle East
Students of history are probably familiar with the Munich Pact and Neville Chamberlain's role in it.
Not unlike so many others I am quite concerned about bringing peace to the Middle East. I look at Israel and wonder when the time will come when real peace will come. Will I live to see it. Will I be part of the generation that sees a new dawn. What will I witness?
Treppenwitz and Soccer Dad have a couple of posts that I think are applicable here. I'll address them separately.
Soccer Dad's post is called Beneath The Surface in it he writes about the current situation. I strongly encourage you to read the whole post because you'll miss some key elements if you rely solely on this excerpt.
Most of the comments I have read essentially say that if it happened it was a terrible thing but what Israel did was much worse. This is not the language of people who are interested in establishing real relations. It is not all that different from justifying rape because of the clothing the victim wore. It is a deflection from the real issue.
In this case I think that part of the problem is the education that people are receiving. I blame the Arab nations for teaching their children that there is not a real Jewish claim to the land, their painting of Jews as being subhuman, monkeys and thieves.
And just so that it is clear I don't completely absolve Jews/Israel of responsibility. It takes two to fight, but I am not interested in getting into a pissing contest about who did more. I'll save that for a different post.
On the flip side so to speak was Trep's post Shifting Perspectives. Read it. In the meantime here is my excerpt.
Not to end this on a downer, but I really think that the major problem and the reason why I don't expect to see peace anytime soon is that we are still too quick to call each other animals and inhuman. Until we get beyond that and teach our children about our similarities we are bound to be stuck on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
Chamberlain left Munich with a declaration signed by Hitler that assured peace. The prime minister returned home happy, believing that he had achieved 'peace with honour. I believe it is peace in our time'.The echoes of his decision and so many others are still being felt today. Millions of people were slaughtered during the war, not just Jews, but millions upon millions of people. I think that it is incumbent upon us to look at the past and to learn from it. Appeasement is not a successful policy. It is not something that brings real peace but a sad, pathetic facsimile of it.
Not unlike so many others I am quite concerned about bringing peace to the Middle East. I look at Israel and wonder when the time will come when real peace will come. Will I live to see it. Will I be part of the generation that sees a new dawn. What will I witness?
Treppenwitz and Soccer Dad have a couple of posts that I think are applicable here. I'll address them separately.
Soccer Dad's post is called Beneath The Surface in it he writes about the current situation. I strongly encourage you to read the whole post because you'll miss some key elements if you rely solely on this excerpt.
The comments and gist of this are in reaction to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's declaration that the Holocaust is a myth. Or should I say the lack of or limited reaction. There is no attempt to understand why this would be considered offensive, outrageous or unacceptable."(The Arab/Muslim world holds a number of contradictory assessments about the Holocaust: it denies it, it claims that the Holocaust is the reason that Europeans were allowed to build a country in the Middle East, it claims that Israel now carries out a Holocaust against the Palestinians.)
You don't need to read that statement closely to realize that Prince Turki is denying Israel's right to exist. According to him the only reason that the world acted to create Israel was sympathy to the European Jews. The idea that there's any historical tie of Jews to Israel is absent."
Most of the comments I have read essentially say that if it happened it was a terrible thing but what Israel did was much worse. This is not the language of people who are interested in establishing real relations. It is not all that different from justifying rape because of the clothing the victim wore. It is a deflection from the real issue.
In this case I think that part of the problem is the education that people are receiving. I blame the Arab nations for teaching their children that there is not a real Jewish claim to the land, their painting of Jews as being subhuman, monkeys and thieves.
And just so that it is clear I don't completely absolve Jews/Israel of responsibility. It takes two to fight, but I am not interested in getting into a pissing contest about who did more. I'll save that for a different post.
On the flip side so to speak was Trep's post Shifting Perspectives. Read it. In the meantime here is my excerpt.
"Each terrorist attack forced me to see every Arab as a potential stone thrower, sniper or suicide bomber... turning me into an unapologetic racist and bigot.I'll be obnoxious and quote myself. This is from the comment I left about blogging and its relationship to changing perspectives.Every response to these attacks (curfews, road blocks, check points etc.) forced the Arab villagers to view each Israeli as the architect of their horribly inconvenient lives... turning them into unapologetic racists and bigots.
So can two communities of unapologetic racists and bigots ever come to terms?
All I know is that a couple of years ago I couldn't look at individual Arabs any differently than I did their communities. Over time this perspective has changed. Perhaps the terrorists are losing their ability to drive their wedges quite so deeply.... or perhaps the racism and bigotry hasn't taken root as deeply as I'd originally suspected.
It might just be a small shift in perspective on my part... but if it's happening to me, who knows where else perspectives might be shifting?"
"A snapshot of life that lends itself to promoting the humanity of all."I think that part of the value in blogging is that it offers us a window inside a world we might not ever see. Inside our homes we have the luxury of learning about others. We have the opportunity to see the person on the other side and to learn about what we share in common. I truly believe that in some cases it can lead to improved understanding and goodwill among all people.
Not to end this on a downer, but I really think that the major problem and the reason why I don't expect to see peace anytime soon is that we are still too quick to call each other animals and inhuman. Until we get beyond that and teach our children about our similarities we are bound to be stuck on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.
When Santa Claus Goes Wild
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Forty drunken Santas rampaged through central Auckland, stealing from stores and assaulting security guards, the New Zealand Herald reported on Sunday, in a protest against the commercialization of Christmas.
Police said some of the Santas threw beer bottles, one tried to climb the mooring rope of a cruise ship and a security guard was punched during the fracas.
"They came in, said 'Merry Christmas' and then helped themselves," convenience store staff member Changa Manakynda told the Herald, which reported the Santas also attacked a Christmas tree.
The event organizer, Alex Dyer, had warned the antics would only stop when someone was arrested, said the Herald, which linked the incident to "Santarchy."
Santarchy (www.santarchy.com) and online encyclopedia wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) record protests going back around 10 years in the United States, with participants marking Christmas in anti-commercial manner involving street theater, pranks and public drunkenness."
Or how about
"Look, a flashing Santa! Oh, wait..
LONDON (Reuters) - British police said Friday they were looking for a Santa acting suspiciously -- a flasher who had repeatedly exposed himself to women, including on one occasion while dressed as Father Christmas.
Officers in Swanage on the south coast of England said the flasher had struck a number of times since December 6, and a week later exposed himself whilst wearing a Santa Claus outfit."
or perhaps this interests you
Santa Wars as deposed British world champ fumes
LONDON (AFP) - The British Father Christmas who lost his Santa of the Year world crown has lashed out, citing a suspected campaign to stop him from winning again that has damaged "Santa morale".
Ron Horniblew, 70, has been authorised by the Master Santa in Greenland and is part of the elite international Santa circuit who compete at the Santa Winter Games, where up to 50 Father Christmases compete for the world title.
Estonian accordionist Aare Rebban grabbed the crown "amid dark mutterings of political voting, professional jealousy and backbiting", The Mail on Sunday newspaper said.
At the Games in Gallivare in Swedish Lapland, Santas sled, race reindeer-drawn sleighs, eat porridge -- with a splash on the beard earning instant disqualification -- climb chimneys and deliver presents under the watchful gaze of a panel of judges.
Horniblew said it all came down to the reindeer sled race.
"You go up two at a time, head-to-head," he told The Mail on Sunday.
"I was up against the Estonian and I won the race. He actually fell off his sleigh. But he got awarded extra points for falling in a particularly Santa-like style.
"I was pretty miffed at that, I can tell you."
Horniblew revelled in his world title win the previous year but revealed just how tough it is at the top.
"We are all very serious. It's not a fun thing. These guys are all Santa Claus in their own right in their own countries," he said.
Matisyahu
One of the local alternative rock stations has latched onto Matisyahu and is playing King Without A Crown as part of their regular rotation. Within the last week I have heard it being played in cars throughout the city.
Now we all know that their is no one color for being a MOT but I suspect that at least a couple of the people I saw singing along are not. Since I know the lyrics it made me smile for a whole variety of reasons.
Now we all know that their is no one color for being a MOT but I suspect that at least a couple of the people I saw singing along are not. Since I know the lyrics it made me smile for a whole variety of reasons.
Chorus:
What's this feeling?
My love will rip a hole in the ceiling
Givin' myself to you from the essence of my being
Sing to my G-d all these songs of love and healing
Want Moshiach now so it's time we start revealing
You're all that I have and you're all that I need
Each and every day I pray to get to know you please
I want to be close to you, yes I'm so hungry
You're like water for my soul when it gets thirsty
Without you there's no me
You're the air that I breathe
Sometimes the world is dark and I just can't see
With these, demons surround all around to bring me down to negativity
But I believe, yes I believe, I said I believe
I'll stand on my own two feet
Won't be brought down on one knee
Fight with all of my might and get these demons to flee
Hashem's rays fire blaze burn bright and I believe
Out of darkness comes light, twilight unto the heights
Crown Heights burnin' up all through till midnight
Said, thank you to my G-d, now I finally got it right
And I'll fight with all of my heart, and all a' my soul, and all a' my might
Chorus
Bridge:
Me no want no sinsemilla.
That would only bring me down
Burn away my brain no way my brain is to compound
Torah food for my brain let it rain till I drown
Thunder!
Let the blessings come down
Strip away the layers and reveal your soul
Got to give yourself up and then you become whole
You're a slave to yourself and you don't even know
You want to live the fast life but your brain moves slow
If you're trying to stay high then you're bound to stay low
You want G-d but you can't deflate your ego
If you're already there then there's nowhere to go
If you're cup's already full then its bound to overflow
If you're drowning in the water's and you can't stay afloat
Ask Hashem for mercy and he'll throw you a rope
You're looking for help from G-d you say he couldn't be found
Looking up to the sky and searchin' beneath the ground
Like a King without his Crown
Yes, you keep fallin' down
You really want to live but can't get rid of your frown
Tried to reach unto the heights and wound bound down on the ground
Given up your pride and the you heard a sound
Out of night comes day and out of day comes light
Nullified to the One like sunlight in a ray,
Makin' room for his love and a fire gone blaze
Chorus
Reelin' him in
Where ya been
Where ya been
Where ya been for so long
It's hard to stay strong been livin' in galus (exile) for 2000 years strong
Where ya been for so long
Been livin in this exhile for too long
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