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Hurry Sundown

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The Dread Santa Ana Winds Are Blowing

The Dread Santa Ana Winds Are Blowing

Generally speaking, the western beaches of Los Angeles have the cleanest air in Southern California—except when the Santa Ana Winds are blowing. A high pressure area parked over Nevada and Utah is sending winds from east to west (the opposite of the usual direction) and blowing all the pollution of the Los Angeles area out to sea. Today, the temperature was around 90° F (33° C)  with a brown horizon and smog over the sands of Santa Monica Bay.

Although we get some of our hottest weather this time of year, our only salvation is that sundown comes much earlier. Throughout the month of October, each day is approximately two minutes shorter than the one before it. That’s two minutes of intense sunshine in the bone-dry air that is not beating down on the uninsulated roof of our second-floor apartment, which was built almost seventy years ago. Another nice thing about sundown is that all the blowing dust in the air makes for occasional beautiful sunsets.

Also, around October the mercury drops down to about 60° F (16° C) at night, so the apartment cools down earlier. During the humidity of July, with its long days, it frequently doesn’t cool down until 3 am, if at all.

The Santa Ana Winds are also noted for virulent brush fires that spread uncontrollably through the hills and mountains surrounding the L.A. Basin. Right now, the wind is blowing around 20 miles per hour, which is approximately 9 meters a second. With some luck, we’ll get through this period without having the San Gabriels and Santa Monica Mountains erupt in flames.

 

 

A Jaw-Dropping Moment

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The Grand Salon of the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar

The Grand Salon of the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar

One of the best places to visit in Southern California is the Nethercutt Collection in Sylmar. a world-class museum of rare automobiles and mechanical musical instruments, including the private railroad car of Clara Baldwin Stocker, millionaire heiress of tycoon “Lucky” Baldwin. Martine and I met up there with my best friend and his sons. We took the tour in the larger of the two buildings, and then saw the additional cars and music machines in the museum building.

On one hand, the cars and other objects on display are easily worth an admission price of ten dollars or more. But both the tour and the museum are free of charge, thanks to a foundation set up by J. B. Nethercutt of Merle Norman Cosmetics. There is one jaw-dropping moment when, on the tour, one enters the Grand Salon (illustrated above), where the Collection’s rarest and most beautiful cars are located. Perhaps the single most distinguished rarity is a silver Duesenberg shown near the center of the photograph.

Among the music machines, I was most impressed by a superb player piano that played a recording of Rhapsody in Blue played by the composer himself, George Gershwin. Mr. Gershwin’s interpretation of his work was nothing less than superb, and was a great accompaniment to viewing the cars in the Grand Salon.

Some of the best places to see in Los Angeles were the result of bequests from millionaires, including Descanso Gardens (Manchester Boddy), the Huntington Gardens and Museum (Henry E. Huntington), and the Getty Museum and Villa (J. Paul Getty). It somehow smoothes the rough edges on these otherwise rapacious tycoons, to enjoy the bounty of their collections.

This is the third or fourth time that Martine and I have visited the Nethercutt, and hopefully far from the last.

 

 

Predicting Heat Waves

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Southern California Has Been Sweltering

Southern California Has Been Sweltering

I dcon’t know why this is so, but whenever rain is predicted by the weather man, there is only a 30% chance we’ll ever see it. But if we’re in the middle of a heat wave, as we are now, whenever the weatherman predicts an early end to the heat, there is a greater than 80% chance that it will persist for at least several days more, or maybe even a week.

On Sunday, I worked with our network consultant installing a new server and workstations in our offices. Being the weekend, there was no air conditioning—it would have cost us $1,000 or more if we had requested it. It had something to do with paying building engineers overtime to turn the HVAC on and off. So we sweat our way through the job.

Eventually, it will cool down. Every day, the sun sets a minute or two earlier, meaning that there is ever so much less exposure in our uninsulated apartment to the searing heat which doesn’t seem to let up until 3 am or so. Martine and I set up fans all around our apartment to encourage to cool outside air to nullify the fetid heat radiating downward from the roof. It works moderately well, but still both of us have a hard time getting a good night’s sleep.

 

The Story of Will Rogers

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Lobby Card from the Film The Story of Will Rogers

Lobby Card from the Film The Story of Will Rogers (1952)

It has become a tradition for Martine and me to attend the annual outdoor screening each August to mark the anniversary of the star’s death in a 1935 Alaska airplane accident. This year, it was held last Friday. The event is co-sponsored by the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation, to which we belong, and the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation. This year, instead of screening a film starring Will Rogers, we got a film about Will, starring Will’s son, Will Jr., who is a dead-ringer for his father.

The Story of Will Rogers is an A-list film starring not only Will Jr., but Jane Wyman as Betty Rogers and a great cast of supporting actors, including James Gleason, Slim Pickens, Noah Beery Jr, and Mary Wickes.

As usual, the film was screened outdoors as soon as the sky darkened (around 8 pm). The audience sat around on either blankets or (like us) chairs that we brought from home with us.

I have always thought that Will Rogers was, in many ways, the ideal American. Not only did he have Cherokee blood from both his parents, but his sense of humor was completely non-partisan. Everyone got gored—and fairly, too!

Just to leave you with one of his thoughts: “Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t want, to impress people they don’t like.”

Petting a Lizard

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Pepperdine College Main Campus in Malibu

Pepperdine University Main Campus in Malibu

The Pepperdine University campus in Malibu is, to my mind, one of the prettiest in Southern California. It is scattered across several foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains and boasts a spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean.

It was a warm Sunday in August, so Martine and I decided to take a walk across the up-and-down campus. A ring road surrounds it, and it takes about an hour and a half to navigate it.

During our walk, Martine managed a feat that astonished me. She snuck up on one of the little lizards that are scattered through the area and actually managed to pet it for a second or two before it realized what was happening, whereupon it fled into the underbrush in abject terror. Having gotten away with this feat once, Martine tried it on all the other lizards we encountered, but to no avail. The word must have traveled fast.

deeratpepperdine

Deer on the Pepperdine Campus

Then, as we left, we drove around the ring road looking for deer, which we can usually see in abundance around sunset. Of course, it was hours to go until sunset, so we saw nothing.

But we had a  nice walk and an interesting talk about old time TV.. Martine is a bit of an expert on television series in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. She has a collection of autographed 8 x 10 photographs of many of the stars which she got from attending the old Hollywood Collectors’ Show in the San Fernando Valley, mostly in the 1990s and through the late 2000s, when many of the celebs were still alive.

“6-2-6, You’re Wild and Free!”

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The SGV’s Fung Brothers

The SGV’s Fung Brothers

I must be going out of my mind: I am about to recommend for your consideration an Asian-American rap duo which calls itself the Fung Brothers from the SGV—that’s San Gabriel Valley to you libtards. The SGV is where L.A.’s Chinese-American community is centered, in communities like Monterey Park, San Gabriel, San Marino, Rowland Heights, Rosemead, Temple City, and a dozen other places.

Where does 6-2-6 come from? That’s the Area Code of much of the SGV, and is used much like Beverly Hills 90210 for that hoity-toity place west of West Hollywood.

I recommend you visit YouTube first of all, to see their song and dance video about their neighborhood, and then their website, which you can find here. (Beware, however, their website reset my cursor to chains, but restored it when I restarted the system.)

This is a part of Los Angeles I love visiting when I want authentic Chinese food, such as when I wrote this blog earlier in the week.

The Greatest Show on Earth

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Ringmaster Andre McClain of the Ringling Bros Barnum & Bailey Circus

Ringmaster Andre McClain of the Ringling Brothers Circus

When I returned from Iceland, I noticed that Martine had printed out a couple of sheets about the latest show of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Since she had been waiting patiently for my return, suffering from an obscure nerve disorder (apparently still not officially diagnosed as fibromyalgia) that has robbed her of sleep and caused a steady level of back pain, I thought it would be a good idea to take her out on Saturday afternoon to see the show.

It was playing at the Staples Center downtown, which Martine had never seen; so I reserved a couple of VIP seats and hopped on the bus to go downtown. (A Santa Monica #10 freeway flyer bus straight downtown picks up only a block from our apartment, and it is far more convenient than hassling the downtown parking scene.)

I had seen several circuses in Cleveland while I was growing up, both the Ringling Brothers and the Grotto Circuses. In Los Angeles, I had seen Circus Vargas twice. Even in Mexico, I had seen small local circuses in Zacatecas and San Cristobal de las Casas. The latter was a family affair which I saw with my brother Dan in 1979. The 15-year-old aerialist also sold popcorn. Having taken a shine to Dan, she sat several rows behind him and tried to get his attention by tossing popcorn at him.

Ringling Brothers is several thousand times bigger then the Circulo del Sureste in San Cristobal, but it was all the same sort of fun. Instead of an adolescent boy rolling around in broken glass and Mamacita balancing furniture on her chest, we had a tiger tamer from Chile that had me on the edge of my seat. There was also an all-African-American unicycle team that played basketball, a young lady shot out of a cannon, a parade of elephants, various high wire acts, and a husband/wife pair of clowns from Russia who were outstandingly funny.

Outside the Staples Center were scores of protestors claiming that the animals in the show were being tortured to perform. Yes, true to some extent, but so were the humans; and no one was protesting about that.

The only sour note was that my cell phone holster fell apart, and I lost my cheap cell phone. I’ll make a few calls to lost and found today, but I’m not exactly disconsolate about the whole thing. I never answered my cell phone anyhow unless I was expecting a particular call.

The Japanese Garden

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The Japanese Garden at Huntington Library and Gardens

The Japanese Garden at Huntington Library and Gardens

Closed for over a year for a $6.8 million overhaul, the Japanese Garden at the Huntington Library and Gardens in San Marino, California, has recently marked its centenary. It had reopened in April looking as stunning as ever, with its koi ponds, ornamental trees, its moon bridge, traditional Japanese house, and scattered strategically-placed temple-like structures.

Now with the addition of the equally spectacular Chinese Garden, the Huntington remains one of the primo tourist attractions in Southern California. Sometimes, I wonder why people visiting here make the needless trek to Hollywood with its crumbling Walk of Fame and decaying footprints at Grauman’s Chinese Theater. My vote for the best tourist attractions in the Southland are, along with the Huntington, Descanso Gardens in La Cañada-Flintridge and the Los Angeles Arboretum in Arcadia.

Sometimes I think that people from out of town who dislike Southern California do so mainly because they have been badly informed.

 

By the Lily Ponds

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Watchful Heron

Watchful Heron

While we were spending some four hours at the Huntington Gardens on Saturday, we spent an inordinate amount of time at the two large lily ponds. Not only did we see a heron (above), but also Canada geese with two ungainly, very adolescent-looking goslings, and a mother duck with seven little ducklings. Then, too, there was a supersized turtle and a whole lot of koi.

Below are the goslings, both of which have their heads tucked away in “You can’t see us” mode:

Two Goslings

Two Goslings

For the better part of an hour, the goslings sat at our feet while we occupied front-row seats at a strategically located bench. Sure, Martine tired herself out; but we both had a good time.

If you’re interested in seeing all the pictures I uploaded to Yahoo! Flickr, click here and scroll about 80% of the way down to photo DSCN3853, where Saturday’s pictures begin. As yet, there are no captions.

The Luminescent World of Cacti

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The Cactus Garden at the Huntington Library and Gardens

The Cactus Garden at the Huntington Library and Gardens

Although she is still struggling to get a good night’s sleep, Martine wanted us to go yesterday to the Huntington Library and Gardens in San Marino. So off we went. We usually take the same route through the gardens, ending up in the large and rather spectacular cactus garden on the eastern edge of the park. It is Martine’s favorite, and for me shares top billing with the lily ponds (about which more in a future posting).

There is something otherworldly about cacti. They catch the light in a certain way and play with it. The result, as with the cholla cacti above, is eerily luminescent. One feels a desire to hug the thorny plants as if they were overstuffed teddy bears. Ah, but the thorns of the cholla are barbed like tiny fishhooks and are difficult to remove. Beautiful, but deadly.

Part of the fascination that Martine and I feel wth the cactus garden is that in the slanting light of late afternoon—and it is always the last stop of our round tour of the gardens—the cacti have an almost supernatural look to them. One result is that my photos of the cacti are usually the best pictures of the lot.