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Playing Havoc With the Weather

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An Old Relief Map of Southern California

I remember from my early days in Cleveland, whatever happened to one side of the city also happened to the other sides. That’s because Cleveland was, if not as flat as a pancake, pretty darn flat. In fact the highest elevation in the whole State of Ohio is 1,549 feet (472 meters).

Compare that with Los Angeles County where I live. When I look out my front door, I can see the Santa Monica Mountains just a few miles north of me, where the highest elevation is 3,111 feet (948 meters) at the curiously named Sandstone Peak. Curiously named because it actually isn’t sandstone. And there is one peak in the San Gabriel Mountains—Mount San Antonio, aka Mount Baldy—which rises to 10,064 feet (3,069 meters).

When the news gives the regional weather report, it has to differentiate between several different weather zones:

  • Coastal (where I live)
  • Los Angeles basin
  • Valleys (San Fernando and San Gabriel)
  • Mountains
  • “Inland Empire” (San Bernardino and Riverside)
  • Lower desert
  • Upper desert

If the forecasters warn of an upcoming rainstorm, we in the coastal region might see only a few stray drops, while the San Gabriel Mountains might have a foot of snow dumped on their peaks.

So any “all-purpose” one-line weather forecast for Los Angeles is pretty meaningless. Los Angeles County is pretty big—4,084 square miles or 12,310 square kilometers, exceeded in area by only eight States. So if you’re flying into LAX from the East, you might want to check out Weather.Com or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) website—provided that the Musk-Rat doesn’t gut it.

Two Auto Museums Bite the Dust

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Martine Sitting in a Classic Corvette

I was dismayed to find that two superb auto museums closed down in 2024. In both cases, the museums grew out of personal car collections. When the museum founders passed on to that garage in the sky, both museums started to run into hard times.

The first was the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard with its Bugattis and Art Deco paintings and furniture which closed in February 2024.

Hitting closer to home was the closure in October of the Zimmerman Automobile Driving Museum in El Segundo. There was a time when we visited the museum every few weeks. Martine loved it because they concentrated on American cars and because they allowed visitors to sit behind the wheel. She was particularly fond of a classic Corvette illustrated above.

There is an excellent article in Hemmings.Com about the Zimmerman Museum’s frantic attempts to raise cash after Stanley Zimmerman died in 2020. The article contains some excellent photos of the museum’s holdings.

Museums based on private collections have a high mortality rate. They are like restaurants, which, especially after the Covid-19 lockdown, are dropping like flies.

“This Disorganized Room”

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Chilean Writer and Poet Roberto Bolaño (1953-2003)

It’s a pity that Roberto died so young! Only fifty years of age! Over the last ten years he has brought so much enjoyment to me with his novels, stories, and poems. Here is one of his poems of which I am particularly fond:

The Memory of Lisa

The memory of Lisa descends again
through night’s hole.
A rope, a beam of light
and there it is:
the ideal Mexican village.
Amidst the barbarity, Lisa’s smile,
Lisa’s frozen film,
Lisa’s fridge with the door open
sprinkling a little light on
this disorganized room that I,
now pushing forty,
call Mexico, call Mexico City,
call Roberto Bolaño looking for a pay phone
amidst chaos and beauty
to call his one and only true love.

An Upcoming Road Trip?

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Saguaro Cacti Near Tucson

Martine has generally not been interested in travel. Lately, however, she mentioned the possibility of two Southwest road trips: One up U.S. 395 and other to Tucson, Arizona. Years ago, Martine had fond memories of a visit to an aunt who lived in Tucson.

I, myself, have never been to Tucson or even Phoenix. My knowledge of Arizona is mostly the area north of I-40 along the Kingman-Williams-Flagstaff-Winslow axis.

Today, I took my car in for its 39,000-mile service so that if we went to Tucson in March or early April, I would not be forced to make any last-minute decisions. Since I am also due to visit my brother in Palm Desert in two weeks, I will try to talk Martine into coming with me. It seems that the Coachella Valley is on the AAA preferred route to Tucson, and it would be killing two birds with one stone.

I will write more about the upcoming trip after I do a bit more research.

Sidewalk Contamination

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Author Renata Adler (Born 1938)

The following paragraph was pretty much self-contained in Renata Adler’s Speedboat, which consists of hundreds of similar paragraphs, some of which are loosely linked.

Kate was walking along Forty-second Street from the subway station. She saw a tall, young, scholarly-looking man obviously about to say something to her. “Excuse me,” he said at last. He said he was from the Stanford urban-contaminations study. Kate said nothing. “Sidewalks,” he went on, frowning slightly. “Sidewalk contamination.” He said they were working on the right shoes of pedestrians. He wondered whether he might take a slide from hers? Kate nodded. She felt a flash of unease the moment she leaned against a wall and raised her foot to take the shoe off. He was already on the sidewalk, quietly licking the sole. No passerby took any notice. In another moment, he had stood up and walked away.

My Own Nationality

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A Different Kind of Hungarian

As I get older, I am increasingly unwilling to interact with strangers. Chatting with people I do not know is just something I would rather not do any more. I don’t even like sharing an elevator. The absolute worst is having to interact with American tourists when I am traveling abroad.

And yet I remember helping a group of French tourists in Iceland get guesthouse accommodation in Höfn, Iceland, when they couldn’t find any locals who understood them.

The difference was they didn’t have any expectations of help, whereas many or most American travelers, on the contrary, would. It is at that point that I reply to their question(s) very politely in my off rural Hungarian dialect from the 1930s. I could be telling them in Hungarian to get stuffed, but I actually try to answer them politely in my native language.

There is always the danger that the person accosting me knows the Magyar language. That actually happened to me once in Vancouver’s Chinatown, when the beggar asking for spare change recognized what I was saying and answered me back in Hungarian. I immediately melted and gave him a five dollar bill. He actually invited me for coffee, but I was on my way to a movie screening and didn’t want to be late. Else I would have obliged him.

I am not that way, of course, with my friends and acquaintances. Or even with waiters or cashiers. It’s just that I have a phobia of dealing with demands placed on me by strangers. That even includes the unsmiling visage that I characteristically assume—all to avoid having to deal with the public at large.