Boycott!

Why I will never, ever, buy Charmin. Even if it's on sale.

Just fucking disturbing. 

Dear Parking: You're a Bitch

In the words of the great Randy Newman, 
I Love L.A. But I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate parking in L.A. Deciphering parking signage in this city is absolutely insane. Non-Angelenos: check out the picture to the right, and you tell me when you want to park there.

The latest infuriating parking inhibitor? Those god-damned PODS. As if parking wasn't hard enough, some lazy neighbor has had one of those PODS delivered to the curb outside their building/house. The POD takes up at least 1.5 legitimate parking spots and it sits there FOREVER.

The Los Angeles Department of Transportation states, "no vehicle may be parked continuously at one location on any public roadway for more than 72 hours." In addition, "parking of unattached semi-trailers is prohibited on any street."

However, LADOT also states, "parking an unattached semi-trailer on any street is prohibited, except for semi-trailers used for carrying personal property or for recreational purposes."

I don't know what the POD is. It's not a vehicle, so it must be a trailer of some sort, but I suppose it's carrying personal property. In any case, how come it gets to sit there for weeks at a time taking up seriously valuable real estate on the curb outside my apartment? Does it have to move every 72 hours? Does it have to clear out between 4:00pm and 7:00 to facilitate the rush-hour lane? Does it have to set it's alarm for 7:45am one day a week to move before street-cleaning?

Besides my jealousy over the POD's giant parking spot, those things are also something like 37,000 feet tall and stick out into the street much farther than a regular vehicle. Find one near the corner and then try to turn around it. Better yet, have one parked next to your driveway, and then try to back out on to the street. Your death would be ruled a suicide.

So, all prepared to wage war against the city for allowing these crazy things to hang out, I make a few calls. Parking Violations Bureau, LADOT, DMV, and finally the Bureau of Street Services, where I talk to a woman who informs me that before I get all uppity, I should know that these things are actually illegal. Woohoo!

Well, OK, the actual POD is not illegal, but putting random crap out on the street is. She even gave me the municipal code: 56.08 regarding the obstruction of public streets. When asked how companies like PODS get away with dumping these things on the corner, my Street Services source tells me "they just hope no one will say anything."

Luckily, we can stop this madness! OK, maybe I'm being a little dramatic, but it's the little things in life, you know? In any case, Street Services Lady shared my passion, and was more than happy to provide the phone number for the Street Services Investigation & Enforcement Department, where you can file a complaint. And don't worry about any POD related retaliation. You can file anonymously, and SS will send a Sherlocke Holmes/ Nancy Drew type out to do the dirty work. Renters of the POD will be warned and potentially fined, and YOU get your parking spot back!

Oh City Services. I (sometimes) Heart You.

Ready to dial? Call 1-800-996-2489 or 1-800-996-CITY to file a complaint.

Oh right, one more note that is completely unrelated but somewhat interesting for all you Prius drivers. Discovered this while browsing fascinating City of Los Angeles websites...

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) will begin citing alternative fuel vehicles parked at expired parking meters starting March 1, 2009. Therefore, starting March 1, 2009, the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) will begin citing all alternative fuel vehicles parked at expired meters. FYI.



"Parking Rules" Photo by Flickr User John and Keturah
Pod Photo: Seattle PI

I'll Tell Me Ma | When I go Home...

And so it is that I've decided to go on a European adventure. England, Ireland, Scotland. Long lost family, heritage, pints and chips.

It's on. September, 2010.

May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back...

In Which I Twitpic Midnight Mass

So I was raised Catholic. I went to church every Sunday. I was baptized. I took part in the annual Christmas Eve pageants, and wrote award-winning essays about the meaning of the Christmas Star. I wore a tiny wedding dress to my First Communion. I even went to confession.

When I got to be about 13 years old, I started thinking for myself. I decided I was over it. Church didn't really do it for me. I eventually stopped going. I stopped praying. I started questioning.

I haven't been to church in about 10 years, but for who-knows-what reason, this year I thought Christmas Eve midnight mass at the Los Angeles Cathedral sounded like a good time.

Minus the part about having to get there over an hour early to secure seats, it started out OK. Kids everywhere, news cameras, and police directing traffic outside.

The mass ran like a machine. Always flowing, perfectly choreographed. Songs of praise, sung by a chorus of 5,000, echoed throughout the enormous, modern hall. It was sort of beautiful, and I couldn't fucking stand it.

By the time we had praised God and begged for mercy and proclaimed our unworthiness more times than should be legal, I was ready to flee. I stayed just long enough to hear Cardinal Roger Mahoney's Christmas homily- a full 20-minute commentary on the importance of being obedient and servant to God. No talk of peace, love, acceptance or compassion for our fellow beings. Just obedience.

When I could no longer stomach the call for faith, and after watching an aisle full of folks miming the placement of cash into the overflowing collection baskets, I left.

Now, before you get all "you're going straight to hell and don't you even dare look over your shoulder" on me, let me explain my thoughts.

I believe in love, peace, acceptance and equality, and I believe in Jesus. I believe he was a controversial philosopher, a man who brought about a new way of thinking in a time of violence and opression. He was a Ghandi, a Mother Teresa, a Saint. He walked the Earth as a man of incredible wisdom and light. But he did not walk on water.

I accept your beliefs. If you want to go with the whole Jesus Christ, son of God, born of immaculate conception in a stable surrounded by glowing angels and goats, that's fine with me. But Holy Crap. This spectacle we call religion is insane.

If you follow this blog, you can probably guess the political connections I'm making in my head here. This is the part where names like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly start popping out of my mouth along with words like "evil" and "imaginary friend for adults." I'm not going there today.

Today I'm sharing my TwitPics.

You Must Be Joking.

So...that whole thing about the Russian government controlling the weather? Umm...it's true.

No. Really.

In Russia, nobody rains on the parade -- because the Russian government doesn't allow it.

"Victory Day is the most sacred holiday for us," says Bagrat Danilian, deputy chief of cloud seeding at the observatory. "When veterans go out to celebrate in Moscow, we create good weather for them."

All it takes, he says, is sacks of cement -- 500-grade, to be precise. Drop the powder down into the clouds, and they vanish.

So apparently now the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, has decided that clearing snow costs too much money. Instead of shelling out the big bucks to city employees, he'd rather it just didn't snow at all. So he's proposing "a plan to seed the clouds with liquid nitrogen or dry ice to keep heavy snow from falling inside the city limits."

Am I the last person to find out about this? Somehow this seems like it should be a much bigger deal than an article on the L.A. Times website. Haven't we already destroyed our global climate?

Tad creepy, people. Just a tad.


http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-moscow-snow8-2009dec08,0,2120312.story

Just Calm Down

In September, 2001, I was 17. That's the year Osama bin Laden and the Afghan terrorist group, the Taliban, attacked the United States.

In March, 2003, I was 19 years old. That's the year President Bush took us to war in Afghanistan Iraq.

The day we went to war, I sat on my couch glued to MSNBC. I watched infrared videos of never-ending explosions. I tried to understand why we were blowing the shit out of Iraq, when I had been under the impression that those who had hurt us were from a totally different country. I tried to figure out why we were going to war with an entire country for the selfish acts of a few. I couldn't understand why we fought terrorism with terrorism. I was incredibly sad. Then I was incredibly outraged.

At some point, Bush decided we'd "accomplished" whatever our "mission" was. There was a whole banner-on-an-aircraft-carrier-moment. We all remember it.

Then he kept fighting. He kept killing. He kept invading. He found more and more reasons to prolong this "mission." We found Saddam, killed him, and still we stayed.

In November, 2008, I was 24 years old. That's the year we elected Barack Obama. We had listened to his campaign promises. We believed in his ability to lead. We trusted him wholly, and we held each other and cried and celebrated the night he took office as Commander in Chief.

It's December, 2009. I'm 25 years old. After inheriting an unjust, misdirected, near decade-long, greed-based war, and after spending nine months gathering advice from all sides of the strategic spectrum, President Obama just announced his decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

When he was on the campaign trail, and since his election, Obama has promised to find a resolution to the fight in Afghanistan. He has kept his word. With Afghanistan in it's current state, we can not pick up and leave. Our President did not take us into Afghanistan, but he is decent enough, and smart enough, to pick up the pieces of the mess we helped make.

And for once, and for the very first time, I trust that our President knows exactly what he's doing.

"As Obama removes our combat brigades from Iraq, he will send at least two additional brigades to Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent. He will also provide our armed forces with the reset capability that they need. He will replace essential equipment, and he will ensure that our men and women in uniform get the care and support they have earned."
-Barack Obama's Campaign Defense Fact Sheet (2007)

H1N1 's Got Nothin on Accidentally Shooting Yourself

I will not be getting the H1N1 vaccine.

I don't consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but I get the feeling some pharmaceutical company is making a killing off of the 250 million doses the U.S. Government just snapped up (if you're interested, the manufacturers of the H1N1 vaccine are Sanofi Pasteur, Novartis, MedImmune and CSL Limited).

Despite a giant lapse in vaccination upkeep in my lifetime, I've never contracted SARS, Mad Cow, or the Avian Flu. I have never been poisoned by Anthrax or accidentally eaten a stray chicken tumor at Jack-in-the-Box. In fact, I've never had food poisoning (but I also refuse to eat at restaurants sporting "B" grades in the windows).

I did have the Chicken Pox once. I've had Strep a couple times. I somehow developed Scarlitinia and mild Scarlet Fever at the same time. I even had Pityriasis once, which was totally strange. So it's not as if my immune system is superhuman. I just never bought into the Scary Disease of the Year hype.

Government health officials say the Swine Flu has killed some 4,000 people in the United States since April, including 540 kids.

Yes, that's a lot of people, and please don't think I'm making light of the matter. But for comparison's sake, here are some other fun facts to consider before going postal on your local CVS for running out of The Shot:

In the same 7 months...

16,916 people in the United States were killed in accidents involving firearms.
19,843 people in the United States were killed in car accidents.
21,000 people in the United States were killed by the Influenza virus (the regular one).
42,261 people in the United States were killed by Diabetes.
253,750 people in the United States were killed by tobbacco.
326,601 people in the United States were killed by Cancer.
368,454 people in the United States were killed by Heart Disease.

Sources: http://drugwarfacts.org/cms/?q=node/30
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/FASTATS/deaths.htm