The Enchanted Tiki Room

If you don’t know what this is, I’ll tell you. It was one of the older features at Disneyland while it was still there.  I was in it about twice, maybe three times before they removed it.  I have a very vague recollection of what was there.  But I think you walked into this Polynesia themed room, and there were all sort of creatures that elements the walls including animatronic birds, flowers, and other tropical themed displays.  

I don’t know why I was thinking about this…or…maybe I do.  I heard on the news just a few days ago that the Walt Disney Company is getting extremely pissed off at Governor Newsom’s reluctance to open amusements parks and other such large, live venues.  Disney gets a lot of their revenue from their parks, into which their various creative efforts are funneled from such divisions such as live-action films and animation, and turned into another huge revenue stream.  

License Plate Scanners

Did you know that there is such a thing?  A lot of law enforcement entities use license plate readers both around the city that they are charged with protecting and serving, and also on some police cars.

I’ve seen a bunch of “Dateline” and “48 Hours” episodes in which people who are fleeing have been sited by patrol cars with license plate readers on their vehicles.  The reader simply scans license plates of cars that are driving by.  I would imagine that they are able to read plate in front of them (such as plates of drivers that the patrol car is behind at a light, or cars approaching them from the other side of the road), and also behind them (such as cars that have passed them on the other side of the road, but which didn’t happen to have a front plate…these would be able to read the rear plate receding away from them).

I also know first hand that cities often have fixed license plate scanner cameras placed in locations with high traffic volume to read passing cars in case someone has done something illegal.  I was in South Lake Tahoe renting a cabin for a weekend not long ago.  When we arrived, there was yellow tape blocking the road two houses up from us.  We got out of our SUV and started unpacking it when a detective came up and asked if the house we were at had any camera around its exterior.  I said I wasn’t sure since we were leasing it, but he was welcome to check.

My Serendipitous Meeting of Bo

To tell this story, I have to take us back to the year, 1976.  My parents had let go of a home that we had on Malibu beach which we enjoyed anytime year round, and we had then for the first time rented a summer apartment on Venice Beach as our vacation destination for that year, just behind the speedway (the easement that runs parallel to the beach).  We were just north of Washington Blvd, and south of the large L.A. Lifeguard complex.  

It was a summer of just enjoying the beach front.  Venice had not long before installed a separate cement bike path from the asphalt strand that hugs the houses on the sand.  This bike path, which is the one still in place today, turns every few hundred yards to give the bike rider more esthetic enjoyment rather than riding in a straight line.  

I had a transistor radio that I’d carry around everywhere with me tuned to 93 KHJ (930am), Boss Radio.  The song, “Moonlight Feels Right,” had become popular during this summer.  It felt great on the air waves being a song about love and romance associated with the moon and the tide’s presence.  My friend, David, and I used to listen to the radio while skateboarding on this new bike path.  

How To Know If You’ve Got The Vankies

What are the vankies?  Well, let me tell you a story so that we can both figure it out together.  

When I was first graduated from University (U.S.C….go Trojans!), I started looking for work in the field of psychology.  The first job I got was at a group home in Woodland Hills.  It was associated with a school for children who had various forms of both behavioral problems and bio-psychiatric needs.  I’ve written about some of these places I worked in a blog called, Psychiatric Smoking Wards.

The way that the shifts in this particular home worked was that there were two counselors on duty most hours.  I say most hours because there was a lone worker for a few hours while the kids were in school, rather than at the residential care facility.  

911’s Complete Failure

This last Sunday, September 6th, I was driving back from Monterey, California on Route 156 eastbound, soon to connect with Route 152 eastbound when in front of me appeared a dark coup, such as maybe a Honda of some sort.  The driver was clearly intoxicated or disabled in some way and should not have been driving.  He or she was weaving slowly between the number one lane, the number two lane, and the shoulder of the highway.  

Just to be technically correct, since it was past midnight, it was now actually Monday, September 7th, 2020.  I called 911 at 12:31am and reported the driver to them.  Within about five minutes, Route 156 had connected to Route 152 eastbound and so I updated 911, speaking with someone in the same call center.  I knew this because they instantly knew my name from my phone number.  Staying well behind the driver (about four-hundred feet or so behind with my flashers on to warn drivers coming from behind), I told them that we were now on Route 152 eastbound.  This second call was made from my phone at 12:35am.

Strange Celebrity

Today, I saw the two parter Donny Wahlberg hosted, “Very Scary People”about L.A.’s (and apparently S.F’s…I didn’t know that) “Night Stalker,” Richard Ramirez.    

One thing that came to mind while I was watching the show was a connection I made visually back in 2009, when Michael Jackson announced his final tour.  His hair and glasses immediately reminded me of Richard Ramirez.  Not that Michael Jackson was a serial killer…he may have been a serial some other things…but I don’t think he ever killed anyone.

But his resemblance to Richard Ramirez that one night of his announcement was just uncanny to me.  I mentioned it to a few other people the next day, but for some reason, it didn’t illicit any response in my friends.  

Double Nickels

I have had, as of this writing, three close friends of mine call me or email me about how they are taking stock of their lives, the decisions they have made, and what could have gone better.  These three people have contacted me within the last four days, literally.  

I started thinking about that “co-incidence,” and what it could mean.  I think it has to do with the time of life that we are all in.  The mid-fifties.  Most of us have had a few iterations of our occupations and have re-invented ourselves over those changes.  All four of us, including me, have lost at least one parent (I’ve lost four, but that’s part of a much bigger story).  And it seems at this stage of life, given that all four of us are fifty-five years old, we start to wonder how our time and energy have been spent.  

Equity Set Up

My sense is that after some time; that is, after some more hurting from corporate earning’s reports that are much less than stellar, is that once we hit another equities bottom, and especially when we get a Covid-19 vaccine, then there will be a lot of upside potential to the stock market. 

The reasoning on this is that those companies that will have survived this pandemic time will have been forced to survive not only with loans and Federal Reserve corporate bond buying, but also via their own thinning of employees to essential workers.  The same goes for their processes.  By being force to re-think the efficiency of their businesses to have survived what is commonly called, “unprecedented times,” there will be a baked in efficiency to their businesses that will allow for much greater profits once things start to lift again. 

That said, there is the potential for a equity shit-storm still with regard to possible spikes in the pandemic, especially heading into the fall and winters months when people really do tend to get sick anyways.  And again, it’s anyone’s guess what will happen until Moderna, Pfizer, Inovio, or any other of hundreds of companies trying to figure out a vaccine are able to get through the various phases of testing and human trials and is actually able to market a successful drug to kill off and avoid this virus.  

Image:
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/moderna-s-rumored-50-plus-price-covid-19-vaccine-draws-ire-as-company-touts-new-animal-data

Disembodied Image

This is one of the stranger things that’s happened to me.  Not long ago, a photo appeared in my iPhone’s photos album from a source, from what source, I don't know.  I didn’t put it there, and it was not airdropped there.  It is exceedingly strange because it looks like an image of someone in an ethereal state.  As if this is a ghostly, or disembodied person, and part of his being was somehow dislodged from his physical body and ended up moving aimlessly through the nothingness.  It was just very, very odd. 

Warm Wet Splashy Summers

This entry could really be about any of the summers I had between 1975 and 1978, that three year period when I was in fifth grade to eighth grade, because they were all somewhat similar.  I’m ultimately picking 1977 because of one event in particular.  That is, the release of the movie, Star Wars.  This film is not the center focus of this entry either. But it is a nice milestone to have in about the sweet spot of this series of summers.

My family and I moved from the Hollywood Hills down to the flats, actually slight inclines of the boundary between Studio City and Sherman Oaks, south of Ventura Blvd.  This change allowed me much more freedom of mobility on my bicycle.  In the Hollywood Hills, my effective radius of bike-riding was about half a mile, because if I went any further, which was always down, I inevitably paid the price by having to walk my bike back up painfully and excruciatingly steep hills. 

Israel's Home-Imprisoning of Citizens

In a disturbing segment on Wednesday’s CBS Evening News, it was reported that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has authorized the nation’s intelligence agency, Shin Bet, to track people’s locations retroactively who have been exposed to the COVID-19 virus, and then order a mandatory quarantine of anyone who was around that person during those backtracking searches. It’s yet another disconcerting move by a government that also forces all men to serve in the armed forces. 

Canine Corona Company

Every dog who has a home in America is all the happier because of COVID-19.  It has meant not being alone nearly the same amount as usual during the day, someone to always play with, and someone to give them too many treats. 

What no dog knows is that we’re going nuts during large portions of the day, finding new shelves to clear off, online classes to take, and doing a whole lot of thus far, neglected gardening. 

I have gotten sideways glances from my two dogs while moving plants into newer, larger pots in the past week.  I know that our white dog wonders, “What has gotten into this guy?” 

The Great Lakes’ Waterways

I’ve got something to run by you, the reader.  There are areas of our nation that often are in need of great amount of water.  The rainfalls concentrations have always been patterns that shift back and forth.  There are areas that flood, more often the south and southeast, but it happens everywhere from time to time.  The point is that one can’t count on consistent rainfall.  Sometimes it’s too little, and sometimes it’s too much.  But areas, especially in the western mid-west and in the west are definitely prone to droughts.

My idea, and I say it’s my idea because I’ve never heard anyone suggest this before, though I’m sure lots of people have thought of it individually, is to pipe water from the Great Lakes (Lake Michigan, Lakes Superior, etc.) into those areas that have been proven to be drought prone.  If that sounds ridiculous at first, think about the State Water Project in California, an infrastructure that was built to move massive amounts of water from the central and northern sierra, as well as from the southern Cascades into the great central valley for the farmers and then, into the large cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles.