Cranksgiving Los Angeles 2017

Charity scavenger bike ride for Para Los Ninos....ride starts at Echo Park with all riders dumping shoes into a bag and then finding them; next grap list of stores all over central LA and items you need to get; next get on bike and get items - with receipts and times stamps; get back to 3rd and Loma fast after you hit 10 stores - see if you're the first.  I always win the senior division - only entrant. 

Open Letter to Charlie Rose: Hang in there Fella !

I didn’t understand when you  moved to a morning news show on CBS.  Why you started doing all these specials, and travel assignments and now, now, you started a ‘week in review’ show – with predictions no less.  Silly.  You’re like 10 years older than I am – and you had a heart, medical something; I mean, Charlie….WTF.  What are you thinking?

And then I heard you interview a fellow reporter, who’s a millennial, and I realized why you need to stick around.  I mean the guy was trying to track the Russian investigation and the politics of it all and he regurgitated some press coverage from MSNBC and said nothing about the week’s huge story; the acrimony that’s happening on Capital Hill around the issue.  No nose for the news…tone death; clueless.  Your questions were the only thing that saved his ass.

If that’s the caliber of your replacements; hang in there Charlie!  We especially need you right now.  I mean guys like Huntley and Brinkley are the past (and Uncle Walter ate his last tuna fish sandwich), so we need you Charlie.  At least you remember who Liz Smith was and know who’s the last ambassador to South Korea and why the Justice Department should never be political.   And once more; you still care about these things.    People are fast forgetting how to do that; or why you should.

You are daily fighting the aging process to do all that you do,  and now I understand why.  You gotta keep up ‘cause you’re needed. We need you Charlie to be a journalist. A beacon of truth, justice and even handedness.  We need you to train new ones.   To set some kind of standards (or at least pretend to).  We need you to work just as along as you can; or until Walt Whitman’s words ring out:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done, 

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won, 

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

Forget, the rest of that poem, Charlie.  Its strictly not a good tweet.  (No one’ll knows the dif anyway.) 

THE NOT SO GRAND STORY BEHIND THE WILSHIRE GRAND

Not done.  That's right.  All the hype....tallest this, tallest that, first whatever...its all deflated by the reality of a building that's unfinished.  Not ready for prime time.  Not ready for the public.  Its missing signage, unfinished leasehold improvements for the shopping frontage on Fig and worse of all a spooky elevator without buttons that feels like being trapped with Hal in  '2001: A Space Odyssey'.  There's a deep, dark story behind the reason this multi million dollar structure is finished off like a cheap apartment building in a undesirable part of Van Nuys. The court forced them to open - like now
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Trapped in a spooky elevator ride into the clouds:  Note the faux skyline view.  Why not the real?

Clearly, this place got forced open before the finishing touches could be put on it.  Its just not ready to accommodate any serious influx of patrons.

    According to an employee who knows, the contractor had a finish date that got extended not once, not twice, not even less than a dozen times - more times than anyone could count.  Except the courts.  The courts forced the opening with heavy fines, and that clearly shows.  If the place was not open by a that June day the Mayor proclaimed how great it all is - June 23rd - then there would be hell to pay.  Yeah, maybe it WILL BE great, when it gets finished.  Til then, its empty, hostile to pedestrian traffic and just plain unfinished.

On my recent Friday afternoon pedestrian visit entering from that grand entrance off Fig, I expected to see the grandeur of a press photo - like below - note the people replicas scurrying below:

Instead, what I saw was and desolate entrance to nothing - without one inviting sign or friendly indicator that the building was even open, let alone, ready for business.  You kept wanting to turn around at every step up from the street because the place looked abandoned.

 On a Friday afternoon, you would expect the bar  on the 70th floor should be humming 'cause of the view, and tourist should have been streaming in, and the ground floor should have been packed with folks drinking and eating at the open eateries.  But  nothing was happening.  Here's one of LA's newest most exciting tourists attractions and no one at the street level even knows its open.  No signage. Nothing that invites a pedestrian in.

   Not many folks visiting  for a space meant to be crowded.  Photos below are at  3 pm on a  Friday afternoon:

And the InterContinental Hotel has no check-ins:

And the bar's empty too:

Could be a good thing.  Forget the signable and the normal crass commercialism tailored at inviting folks in and being friendly.  Stay cold and forbidding Wilshire Grand.  I like an empty spot to take a date or an out of towner who thinks LA is overcrowded.  Let's keep this a secret kinda place - even if it is the tallest whatever, whatever.  I like it empty.

Cruising Downtown LA's Art District - Late Nite

" Never have so many paid so much to be on the wrong side of the railroad tracks." 

- Bernie Dubinsky@DubinskysDigest

DubinskysDigest: The Cut-Rate Sugar Daddy

Being cheap is a way of life for me and my much younger paramour.  Partly out of necessity but largely because we compete with each other to see who can be smarter about not spending money or who can get something for less.  Our motto is:  " The trouble with money is, you can only spend it once."

For example, Whole Foods Supermarket.  Its a rip off - everyone knows that, especially in their prepared food section - where a hot plate meal can cost as much as dinner at the Four Seasons.  And you still won't have enough to eat.  So we figured out that if you stuff a lot of rice and curry in a large soup container it costs much less ( no weighing by the pound ) and you can have more than enough left overs for the next day.  That's a good example of being cheap/boarder line psychotic that we're talking about.  

We take buses everywhere - me buying the monthly unlimited senior pass for $20 of course.  And we would sooner choke each other to death rather than NOT purchase the advertised Subway Sandwich of the day - its always at least 50 cents cheaper.  We almost never eat out - unless its Norm's and we buy all our veggies at the 99 cent store - but never the frozen ones (they come from China). Our biggest thrill is use every last coupon we can clip, find on the street or at the supermarket.  Of course we bicycle a lot (to save on gas)  and sometime it gets kinda tiring going that extra 3 miles to the right supermarket to redeem those coupons.

Now this doesn't exactly fit the paradigm of big spender 'older man' with his oh so young, voluptuous girlfriend dressed in revealing lingerie and giving a Lolita lick on her lollipop.   And that's because that is not exactly our  situation.  I ended up dating my biking buddy - for a number of reasons - the chief being she's a pretty women and I found her irresistible; the other one is that she's very cheap.  Which means we always enjoy the same things together - like biking to the beach, walking along the sand and eating at little Formica  topped  joints in Koreatown where the menu only gives you half the story.  (Ya gotta read Johnathan Gold in the free LA Weekly to find out the rest.) 

Being cheap is not just a Sunday affair with us.  It extends into our sex life together as well.  Now while it is  true that sex is free, contraception is not.  Although condoms are sometimes free at health clinics, it always seems that they are never free when you really need them.  So we resolved not spend that money by resorting to certain, uh..... 'deviate' practices; which I'm certain my readers are already very familiar with so I need not belabor that point. 

We find that this a very satisfactory. if not satisfying, relationship that puts a much needed new spin on the 'older man' cliche that helps us escape the creepy dimensions of a May-December relationship.  No one ever accuses my friend of being in it 'just for the money' and conversely, the 'dirty old man' baggage doesn't quite fit on a bicycle.    We do attract quite a bit of attention when we she calls me 'Dad' and we have a lengthy colloquium on the joys on incest at parties or other public gatherings.  ( That's one taboo that still manages to raise an eyebrow.)   Mostly we just fun about things like why my girlfriend never needs to buy lottery tickets.  My life insurance policy, that names her as the beneficiary, is a much surer bet.