Sunday, July 17, 2011

Carmageddon Leads to Schwin-graLA

"Six bicyclists ... beat a JetBlue flight from Burbank to Long Beach by a wide margin"

Daisy, Daisy, this is how we'll commute
It sounds crazy, but saves money and time, to boot
We won't get stuck on the highway
If we traverse L.A. my way
Our shorts look dumb
And our butts get numb
But a bicycle beats JetBlue

Watch for news of L.A. gangs taking to committing crimes on bicycles and eluding police cars that can't keep up in traffic. Peddle-by shootings become the norm. Stars show up for the Oscars on custom-made bikes while Joan and Melissa Rivers ask, "Who are you riding?"

Thursday, July 14, 2011

The Most radical College? Yeah, I went There

The Huffington Post lists "The MOST RADICAL Colleges" in the country. Number 1 is Occidental College, where I got my BS in Economics.

Oh, I wasn't there in 1970 when "Oxy students wrote 7,000 letters to Washington D.C., protesting U.S. involvement in the war in Southeast Asia" But a couple years later my friends and I did way radicaler stuff.

Once, the Director of Food Services started serving cheap, fake steaks with artificial grill marks on them instead of the real, cheap steaks we had before. We marched our partially eaten foodish substance into her office and politely set the plates down on a table in protest.

One time, during lunch, a band was playing on that quad seen in the picture above. When one o'clock came, someone climbed up on the tower and turned the clock back and almost none of us went to our one o'clock classes until almost twenty after one.

There was the time several of us stood on the balcony of the Student Union, overlooking that quad, and protested the poor economic conditions in our country of Germany. It was part of our history class, "1908", where each student took a role of some actual government official from a European country in the year 1908 and then played history out during our actual days outside the classroom. The course wrapped up with a ball where we all waltzed until midnight, or maybe 10 pm. They were such wild, radical day, it's hard to remember

Monday, July 11, 2011

Hopeless Carmageddon

Residents brace for closure of 405 freeway

On a West L.A. highway, we were getting nowhere
Hot smell of exhaust fumes, clumps of smog in the air
Up ahead around Westwood, I saw the CalTrans sign lights
My world grew shaky and began to spin
I would be stuck for two nights
They had closed down the freeway
Mulholland Drive as well
We can’t get through the Sepulveda Pass
Or as we call it: the Third Ring of Hell
As we inched toward an off ramp, taking most of a day
CHiPs were clearing out the diamond lane
I thought I heard them say

Welcome to the hopeless Carmageddon
Won’t get out alive (won’t get out alive)
From the 405
No one will move in the hopeless Carmageddon
It’s your darkest fear
You are all stuck here