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An Old Friend from Patagonia

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Young Magellanic Penguin at the Aquarium of the Pacific

Young Magellanic Penguin at the Aquarium of the Pacific

Today, Martine and I cashed in on a two-for-one discount ticket at Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific. As usual, it was a wonderful experience—with one exception: the large numbers of small children in evidence. Although we were there at opening time at 9:00 am, so were the crowds; and they only grew as the day wore on. But then, there was enough to see to keep the curmudgeon side of me in abeyance. It is a rare achievement for me not to have thrown any whining, obstreperous toddlers into the shark tank. And the sharks also looked mighty appreciative at my consideration.

Before the crowds got too large, we saw a presentation about penguins at the Aquarium’s Molina Animal Care Center. On display was a young Magellanic penguin, of the type Martine and I saw two years ago in Patagonia, first at Isla Martillo in Tierra Del Fuego and then at the giant rookery at Punta Tombo in the State of Chubut. These are not to be compared with the larger Empire and King penguins to be found in Antarctica. Instead, they are to be found mostly in the southern parts Argentina and Chile. Below are some Magellanic penguins Martine and I saw on Isla Martillo on the Beagle Channel in Tierra Del Fuego, near Estancia Harberton.

Adult Magellanic Penguins

Adult Magellanic Penguins

Penguins are having a rough time of it because of the changes in ocean temperature due to global warming. Instead, jellyfish seem to be taking over by eating the penguins’ favorite food, krill. For more information, click on this article from The Telegraph. That would be a shame. No one ever had the urge to hug a jellyfish, but there is something about penguins that makes one’s heart go out to them.

Inspiration Point

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At Will Rogers State Historical Park’s Inspiration Point

At Will Rogers State Historic Park’s Inspiration Point

Tomorrow is the 134th anniversary of Will Rogers’ birth. In commemoration, the Will Rogers Ranch Foundation had a birthday party for him, complete with music, an art show, and free cupcakes. After the music, which was mostly 1930s vintage (Will died in a 1935 plane crash in Alaska), Martine and I hiked up to the top of Inspiration Point. The trail is along a relatively easy fire road with a 116-foot gain, about 1.25 miles in length. From up top, you can see a broad swath of Los Angeles extending from downtown to Westwood to Santa Monica and south along Santa Monica Bay to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. You can see the bay behind me and a piece of Will’s polo field just to my right.

Will Rogers State Historic Park is the nicest stretch of greenery near where I live. For a $12.00 day use fee per car, one could watch a polo match (the season is over for now), barbecue some hamburgers, tour Will’s ranch house with a docent, loll aound on the lawn, or take a hike. The Inspiration Point hike is more in the nature of a stroll, but branching out from it is the Santa Monica Mountains Backbone Trail, linking Will Rogers with Topanga State Park, Malibu Creek State Park, and ultimately Point Mugu State Park in Ventura County—some forty miles up and down the ridge line of the Santa Monica Range.

Martine and I usually wind up visiting the Park three or four times a year. Even on the hottest days of summer, its proximity to the ocean usually means there is an occasional breeze. (Farther inland, there is no such relief.)

It was a good day.

 

Halloween at the Grier Musser Museum

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We Are Welcomed at the Door

We Are Welcomed at the Door

Today, Martine and I visited the Grier Musser Museum near downtown Los Angeles for their annual Halloween display. Susan Tejada, the museum’s curator, has gathered together an incredible collection of memorabilia relating to All Hallows Eve, from paper to dolls to battery-powered moving skeletons. (The most frightening is one in a cage above a toilet in the bathroom screaming that he wanted out.) Almost every inch of the rooms open to view is crammed with Victorian memorabilia (the house on Bonnie Brae Street goes back to the 19th century) and exhibits relating to Halloweens past and present.

In addition, there is a room with television and film exhibits relating to The Wizard of Oz (about to celebrate the 75th anniversary of its release), The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Monster High. If it weren’t for the fact that the tour is guided by Ms. Tejada, one could spend hours among the thousands of items on display.

The late Huell Howser, whose PBS television show visited the Grier Musser Museum twice over the years, had a sure knack for highlighting the very best of California, especially the Los Angeles area. Two visits was a singular mark of recognition.

A Rare Victorian Beauty: The Curator’s Grandmother

A Rare Victorian Beauty: The Curator’s Grandmother

In a room on the second floor, we saw the above photograph of Susan Tejada’s grandmother. I am always stunned when I see a photograph from over a century ago of a young woman who, even today, would be accounted a great beauty.

For some reason, this year we are spending more time getting into the Halloween spirit. In my case, it involves reading several books of spooky stories and visiting the Grier Musser Museum. Unfortunately, children have not come here to trick-or-treat for almost twenty years now. The schools have attempted to replace door-to-door trick-or-treating with school parties—especially in neighborhoods such as mine consisting mostly of multistory apartment buildings. Neighborhoods of posh single family homes still are inundated with lisping ghosts and monsters of short stature.

Rocking with the Hungarians

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Members of the Kárpátok Hungarian Folk Enesemble

Members of the Kárpátok Hungarian Folk Ensemble

Last Sunday, Martine and I went to the First Hungarian Reformed Church of Los Angeles in Hawthorne for their annual harvest festival. It was a good opportunity to catch up with L.A.’s Hungarians, who are all spread across the landscape of Southern California. And it was a great opportunity to have some home-cooked Magyar dishes (kolbasz and hurka) and enjoy the energetic dancing of the Kárpátok Hungarian Folk Ensemble (pictured above).

I am always pleasantly surprised to find out how musically talented my people are. (And me with a tin ear!) In addition to the dancing, there are always several musicians playing musical instruments from the accordion to the violin. The small church hall fairly rocked with all the musical acts.

Although I do not belong to the Hungarian Reformed church, my mother did. My Mom and Dad had an agreement between themselves that any sons in the family would be brought up as Catholics, and any daughters as Protestants. Well, it turned out there were only my brother Dan and me. We were both were baptized Catholic and attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools. For some reason, the Hungarian Catholics in L.A. don’t seem to have any festivals—at least, none of which I am aware. As a result, Martine and I usually hang out with the Protestants.

Martine may have been born in France, but she loves Hungarian food and music. And she loves Hungarian pastries. So these few local church events are high points in our year.

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.