You know those phone calls you get, where there’s an awkward silence at first and then you hear a click and a call-center person says “Hello, make I speak to [mangled version of your name]”? That’s a call from a predictive dialing system.
I spent a big chunk of the 1980s and 1990s in the San Fernando Valley. I didn’t have a car at the time, so I had to hump it over the hill on the RTD from West L.A. to North Hollywood..
My friend Mack and I used to work at a dot-com disaster in Hollywood. Sometimes we’d eat at a restaurant on Franklin Avenue we liked. It was a chicken restaurant with a Hitchcock theme called “Birds”. The food was good, the joke was better, and there was lots of cool Hitchcock decor, especially from the […]
The best thing about college for me was the radio station. Not just for the usual reasons people enjoy college radio (shared coolness, access to free stuff, the magic of radio itself), but because it was a place to hang. Ever since then I’ve needed a hangout.
Early mornings here in coastal Southern California arrive with the sound of mourning doves. Sometimes they call out at other times, but always in the very early morning, when the dew is still heavy and the sun is bright but not warm. From early childhood I associate their quiet “hoo.. hoo..” with the feeling […]
Years ago I worked for a free weekly newspaper. I wrote about music, churned out features, and edited the entertainment section among other tasks. Occasionally I helped out with classified ads, since I used that system for some of my listings tasks and knew its quirks. Our paper had a tradition of weirdness in the […]
Driving up Dover from Coast Highway today, I saw a bicyclist coming down the other way. He was coasting down the hill, leaning over the handlebars and relaxing a bit. The rider was a man in his late sixties, hard and bony with shoulderblades sticking out and a big floppy hat covering most of […]
Sometimes I’ll hear someone, either a friend or just someone in earshot, talking along about political and social issues, say this:
“I’m not one of those feminists.” Or, “I can’t stand those feminists.”
If queried on this, I’ll hear something like “I wouldn’t put myself in that category” or “I’m just not like that, I couldn’t be […]