Monday, October 29, 2007

Hard Sun

On the soundtrack of Sean Penn's new move "Into the Wild", Eddie Vedder covers (yes, covers) a 1989 tune by the name of "Hard Sun" from the band Indio of Toronto. It took some digging to find it. If you were listening to alternative radio in the late 80's as we were lucky enough to have here with KUKQ, you may have heard it, too. Some wonderful person has posted it here. Listen!

Oh, and on a side note, in another one of those god-I-feel-old moments last month, my nephew Kiefer (18) and I were listening to his Fall Out Boy cd and they covered "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division. And I had to explain who Joy Division was...and who New Order was (is?). Ugh!

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

More on the World Without Us


I was just checking out their web site, and it's really cool. The multimedia art on NYC is neat, and this week's journal post is of an exchange of the author with the formal local Sierra Club staffer, Raena Honan (now of Flagstaff), regarding population and the club's policies. Nice.

Plastic Blows

I'm in the middle of reading The World Without Us by Alan Weisman and I just finished the part about our plastics. There is a continent-sized island of plastic in the middle of the Pacific and we don't know if it will EVER go away. There's an article about the plastic graveyard from the SF Chronicle today here. I'm only midway through the book but I highly recommend it. I can also loan it out once I am through so let me know if you are interested. I just need to find it, I left it at the beach place somewhere....

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Matching Donations at UNICEF


Double your donation right now at UNICEF. Also, don't forget about Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF, you can pick up your boxes at your local Hallmark Gold Crown store or Pier 1.


Monday, October 15, 2007

On Death, Cats, Dr. King, and Hollywood


Saturday morning we were watching Elizabethtown, a Cameron Crowe film starring Orlando Bloom, Kirsten Dunst, and Susan Sarandon (who my dad says he had a date with in middle school, but he had no idea she was "that girl" until maybe 5 years ago). Anyway, towards the end of the film Bloom's character drives across America scattering his dad's ashes in various places. Amelie was watching with us and first we had to explain cremation. We related it to our dearly departed cat, Mookie, who sits, cremated, on a shelf in our house, and has for um, 4 years now. We discussed scattering those ashes, but that would just make the house (more) dusty with cat cremains so we offered a funeral. So she cried, briefly, over missing Mookie. Then, there was a scene where he visits the scene of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination in Memphis. Amelie was very upset to learn that Dr. King was assassinated (and what that even meant). When I considered the appropriateness of our viewing choices that morning, I wasn't really considering the consequences of having to discuss these life issues with a just-turned-5-year-old. So, she cried about that, too, briefly (and I am really not sure how sincerely, she is sooo dramatic sometimes, honestly), and for the next four hours we were fielding questions on the mechanics of the assasination (I had to quickly google to get James Earl Ray's name on my phone at lunch, I admit, but I am LOUSY with names).

Lunch was in NoHo, L.A.-speak for North Hollywood. We trekked up there to check out North Hollywood Scooters, one of the better scooter shops in the country, as the industry mags report it. Nice people, low-key operation. Then, we drove around for a few blocks, saw the liquor store where Cher was mugged in Clueless (NoHo is actually in the Valley), and stopped at Pit Fired Pizza, which was decent.
After that, we toured back into Hollywood and decided to cruise a bit of the famous Mulholland Drive. In retrospect, I was wishing I had a $6 star map, it would have added to the interest a bit. We drove the non-Beverly Hills section (Laurel Cyn to the 101), so it was a bit less intensely populated with the homes of the famous. We did get a nice view of the Hollywood sign which was across the 101 and up another hill from where we were at.
Since we were doing the whole tourist thing that day, we headed to Universal CityWalk, which is like the Universal Studios version of Downtown Disney. At least at DD you can park for 3 hours free and then validate after that. Here it was $10 to park, at a MALL, and the only validation was if you were there for a movie. So lame. We ate at Wolfgang Puck's (it sounds so fancy - it's not, really). Then got ourselves back to the relative quiet of the South Bay.
Do I even need to mention how traffic sucked? By L.A. standards it surely could have been worse - they had the I-5 closed down that weekend, I read about a family that had to wait that out near Anaheim, and the accident was in Santa Clarita by Magic Mountain. If you have ever been there you know these two places are in separate counties. They were parked on the freeway for 5 hours, in the middle of the night. Good god. Living in this place is so not for me.

Blog Action Day

It's the day for everyone to blog for Planet Earth, so first off I want to congratulate Al Gore on his Nobel Peace Prize for his work in raising climate change awareness. Awesome!!

More in a bit.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Mickey's Halloween Treat


We also did the Disneyland Halloween party for Amelie's birthday.

Done! Now time to paint.


They finished and it's nice! Plus, somehow that storm went just to the east of us and missed us by BLOCKS. So now the wood must be painted before the sun kills it. So I set off on a google quest for ecologically-friendly exterior paints (much harder to find than interior), and lo and behold, a nicely priced company, Ecological Paint, is based in Tucson! Here is their site. They say that they can match any color. Cool! Now, to pick some pretty colors....

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Just My Luck

NATURALLY, for the first time all month (all summer, practically) that the weather is this:



The one day that my roof looks like this:



Perfect.