Yucca do it!

Our pal Lizette showed us her spiffy hillside house in Oceanside a couple weeks back. She cooked up a batch of delicious yucca with a tremendous garlic-onion-olive oil-lime (G.O.OO.L.) concoction, and ever since we've been on a huge yucca kick.

Yesterday I was in Hollywood for a conference, and I had some time to stroll the neighborhood. Couldn't miss the newish 54-unit condo development at 6735 Yucca Street. You know, it actually looks like our yucca dish. The concrete walls remind me of the yucca, and the redwood siding would be the GOOOL. Somebody really needs to keep up the landscaping (the side salad?) there...

Sherlock Holmes Doused by Guy Ritchie

Dunno about you, but a pet peeve of mine is seeing film stars in magazines dripping in bucket water looking all sexy. Madonna's done it, so has Mel Gibson, Christian Bale, and even Viggo Mortensen. How embarrassing is that. And my point is...that style of corniness should pass like gas and never be seen again.

When I heard that Guy Ritchie was going to direct a new Sherlock Holmes movie, I rolled my eyes. I read and reread the complete volumes when I was eleven, and I feel that I ought to be heard about this subject. Sherlock, after all, has been my father for years (in my head) even though he was a dope fiend. My mother, incidentally, was Irene Adler, the only person that ever eluded the great detective. Then I read that Robert Downey, Jr. was going to play the great sleuth himself.

At this point, I started picturing my father lathered in sea water, his houndstooth hat dripping over his nose and cape. Holy fuck, I though, they're going to ruin my main man. First of all, Robert Downey is SHORT and he is American. Secondly, Jude Law is going to play Watson who is TALLER than Downey.

Sherlock Holmes is over 6 feet tall. His nose is aquiline or hawkish. Downey is too pretty. Jude Law is even prettier. Watson was a military guy stationed in India. He was kinda old already. Sherlock and Watson didn't meet until they were already in in their 40's.

Please don't massacre my little world of 221B Baker Street, Guy Ritchie. Stick to your imitation Tarantino and Scorsese movies. Leave my dad alone! Don't let him roll around in the sand while you douse him with cold ocean water until his sex appeal is milked out of his pores.

Meet the Mathlete

We often wake up on weekends and take in a morning run at the Santa Ana College track. Today I was feeling kinda under the weather, so I tagged along and brought a book. Instead of reading I looked at the new (well, about a year old) athletic complex. As I admired the row of exterior metal fins, I was struck by the mathematical soundness of the design. Equal spacing, structurally correct. Maybe I was having a Beautiful Mind moment...

I used to be a math whiz. Numbers and new mathematical concepts would come easy to me, and I actually had fun solving equations. My last hurrah was probably in 9th grade when I won a tricked out HP calculator in a math competition held at Stanford University. Then I can only chalk my stagnation to laziness...spent too much time listening to the radio, fell behind on my homework, started taking long naps after school. I coasted my way through high school, and in my undergrad years I didn't take a single math class. I tested out on day one, and never looked back.

And that calculator...EzraPounded sold it on eBay a year back for about $15o. Even my depleted, laughable mathabilities of today figure that's not bad for a 20-year old contraption.

Bananas for Santa Ana

Santa Ana is the Barney Rubble of Orange County. You know, after about five television seasons in the '60s, the producers never even bothered to tell the viewers where poor Barney worked. No respect.

One of OC's more depressed cities, Santa Ana is also one of the most neglected. We have one library, for instance, and we have to pay $2.oo to rent video tapes - that's right, 2 bones for VHS! But BaddicusFinch wrote extensively the library issue, so I won't spend any more time belaboring our sad state of affairs.

While crime has let up in most OC cities, Santa Ana's went down from last year but at a lower rate compared to other cities. A few high visbility shootings have rocked the town in recent weeks. This may all sound depressing, but I have to say that I love this city. I'd lived on the Westside most of my adult life and when we moved here I was depressed as hell until we started exploring.

There's downtown Santa Ana where the Artist's Village, the Spurgeon clock tower, and my favorite pupusa spot are located, Santa Ana College where I run the track every morning, the wild parrots I see and hear everyday, and sundry other joys this city brings me.

I have to say that I despise two things about SA. One is the Bowers Museum which charges New York museum rates and screws Santa Ana residents by not giving us enough free days despite millions of dollars in grants they're getting from the city.

The second thing I hate are the stupid taggers the make our already messed up streets more crappy. I don't mind tagging - good artistic tagging like the Urban Guerrillas type with giant eggheads and such. But just ugly initials for pissing territory, forget about it. BaddicusFinch has the graffiti hotline programmed on his phone. The first sign of tagging, he calls them up.

Anyway, enough about the negative. We're near all sorts of good places like Little Saigon, a Korean enclave in Garden Grove, the Middle Eastern hub along Brookhurst in Anaheim, and a lot more. For foodies this area is Mecca.

So don't despair, Santa Ana. You are loved like our friend, Barney Rubble.

More Cityscapes...Cuz I Miss L.A.

Here they are...Two versions of Clifton's Cafeteria on Broadway in the heart of Downtown, Machos Tacos in Los Feliz, and a painting of our dogs that hate each other.

Vodie to the max

I'm sure I'm not the only one who tosses the yellow pages phone book straight to the recycle bin when a new edition appears on the front doorstep. Strange how the more obsolete the hard copy phone books have become, it seems we're bombarded with more and more versions - the "original", the Spanish language edition, the chamber of commerce book, etc. etc.

This might sound nuts, but when I was a wee lad I couldn't wait for the replacement phone books to arrive. I was fascinated by the write-ups on the local San Jose attractions, and wondered which photo would land the coveted cover spot. I'd read up on how to telephone strange sounding countries, and flipped to the z-section of the yellow pages to check out the listings under "zoo."

When I was really young and still illiterate, I'd page through the yellows browsing for ads that caught my eye, like that creepy Buster Brown and his dog, and my favorite, the auto bears. I'm pretty sure the first time I ever picked up the phone and dialed out was to the auto service shops that advertised with that damn cuddly bear. "Do you sell toys?" I asked the workers who must've thought they were getting cranked.

Here in Sana Ana we have the surviving Vodie's bear sign specimen on 17th Street, just east of Bristol. The site was developed in 1956, which fits for this type of happy bear sign. The property was on the market earlier this year, so our bear has dodged another bullet for the moment.

Santa Ana Library doesn't stack up!

As cities throughout California have beefed up their library services in recent years, as California voters approved a $350 million state library construction bond, as the neighboring City of Orange more than doubled the floor area of their main library to 45,000 square feet, the City of Santa Ana has done nothing. Unless you count slashing the bookmobile service.

Santa Ana is the 9th most populous city in California. I compared Santa Ana's library system (focusing on number of libraries in relation to population) with the 8 California cities with more residents than Santa Ana and the 8 cities just below Santa Ana in population.

The result...

The only large city in California with as pathetic a library record as Santa Ana is Modesto. Holy cows, what an embarrassment!

City	Population	Libraries	Residents per Library
Los Angeles	3,834,340	72	53,255
San Diego	1,266,731	36	35,187
San Jose	939,899	19	49,468
San Francisco	764,976	25	30,599
Fresno	470,508	12	39,209
Long Beach	466,520	12	38,877
Sacramento	460,242	15	30,683
Oakland	401,489	18	22,305
Santa Ana	339,555	2	169,778
Anaheim	333,249	6	55,542
Bakersfield	315,837	8	39,480
Riverside	294,437	6	49,073
Stockton	287,245	5	57,449
Chula Vista	217,478	4	54,370
Modesto	203,955	1	203,955
Fremont	201,334	4	50,334
Irvine	201,160	3	67,053