Westward Ho!

Shameless Self-Promotion

Yesterday Green LA Girl ran a Q & A with me as part of its weekly series about car-free female bloggers in Los Angeles. It's a great series and I encourage you all to check out the other entries as well:

Kenya
Kristina
Browne
Kathryn
Enci
Paula

It's noteworthy that all of these females (including me) do not have children. Unfortunately this is not representative of a sizable segment of transit riders in L.A. -- the mothers who rely on Metro to get their children around. A few posters have noted this; I hope we get to hear from the car-free parents out there soon. Another thing I've noticed: the overwhelming number of bicyclists in the series. I'm not one. I support riders' rights and want cities and suburbs to plan for bikes in their circulation elements, but I occasionally worry that the alternative transportation community is too bike-centrist in its collective voice and its commentary. Not everyone who's car-free is a rogue culture-jammer on a fixie. (To be fair, not every cyclist is one, either.)

The Award For Best New Meme of the Holiday Season Goes To...

Siel at Emerald City for "enviro-grinching."

As for me, my major faux-pas this December will be flying cross-country. Being Jewish, I'm not going to have a tree, nor Xmas lights. The few presents I'm buying will be (a) for grownups (no lead-containing toys from China) (b) minimally packaged. I'll be in NYC, and my parents do have a car that they use on the weekends, but aside from trips with them, my M.O. is to ride the subways and walk everywhere, possibly taking cabs if it's late and I'm drunk. :-)

I'll try to keep the grinching to a minimum.

Slap the Nerd: Whack-a-Mole + Wedgies

Are you a masochist with a yen for projecting your self-flagellatory impulses on those who happen to look and act a lot like you? Do you have excellent fine motor skills? Are you on a high-speed connection? If yes, then by all means, slap yourself silly. (via MeFi)

OK, I'll Bite

Time capsule for 2057, you say? Here are three things I'd throw in.

1) The Tower Records sign. It might be a more relevant artifact of 1980 than 2007, but at least it's still meaningful to many of the people that watched the chain close this year and divebombed the liquidated stock with glee. This entry comes to me as I sit in Dialog Coffee & Bakery, across the street from the erstwhile Sunset Strip Tower, temporarily rechristened Icky Thump Records as a promotion for the White Stripes' new album.

2) Comedy clubs (well, just one for posterity). A concept that hangs by a thread after somehow surviving into a new century, as Tower was before those final days. Every one I pass now looks so worn and sad, secreting desperation from every crooked letter on the marquee. Along with our comedy club we can also bury a homebrew DVD-R with footage and news coverage of Michael Richards' standup meltdown.

3) Circulars (the ever-present print advertisements and coupons that clutter up our newspapers and mailboxes). I'm hopeful that 50 years from now we'll be inching closer to the paperless society we were once promised, and businesses can learn to be less wasteful, saving some money and some trees in the process.

What Jeff Killed

"Jeff is a large orange tomcat that lives and kills in Shadow Hills, CA.

Jeff has adopted our back porch and yard as his home. He uses our dog's house when it rains, but mostly he likes to sleep on our patio chairs and keep watch over his domain.

Though he doesn't really belong to us, we provide Jeff with food and water; however, this does little to lessen his killer instinct. To humans, Jeff is an exceptionally good-tempered and friendly cat; to rodents and other small animals, he is death itself.

It could be that Jeff likes to bring us gifts to repay our hospitality. Perhaps he is simply a hardwired killing machine. All we know for certain is that he hunts down a wide variety of small animals and disembowels, decapitates, and dines on them. Often."