Los Angeles

5.4! What’s crazy is that I was on an elevator when it hit. The elevator in my building is constantly closed for repairs and people are getting stuck on it all the time, so I just assumed that it was the damn thing broken again. Then I stepped out of the elevator onto my floor and realized that it wasn’t the elevator, it was the whole building shaking.

Across the street from the Groundlings on Melrose in West Hollywood is an adult toy shop with a nausea-inducing sign. (Click the photo for a larger shot, including my innocent Tacoma parked in front of the place. Note: I was not visiting the place!)
This is a store that sells … ahem … “adult toys” … and their sign proudly exclaims Sell - Exchange - Rent DVD’s.
No, it’s not the incorrect apostrophe that frightens me. It’s the idea that someone might exchange a used sex toy.

My friends Bob and Gretchen were in town last night for the X-Files premiere at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood. I met them afterwards and we went to Citizen Smith for a late dinner. (It took me just under an hour to get to the restaurant from my house, even though it’s only about eight miles away, because a single block of Hollywood Boulevard was closed for the movie.) Just like every time I’ve been there, the food was delicious and the service was atrocious. We had a great time, though.

I dragged myself out of bed at 5:00am today and played 18 with Andy at Hillcrest Country Club. I shot an embarrassing 63 on the front 9, but an at-least-average 55 on the back 9. (My father-in-law gave me a round of golf lessons with the club pro at Lakeside Country Club as a gift for my 35th birthday. The goal is to break 100 before Christmas.) We were done by 9:30, so I grabbed a copy of Wired and drove to the Apple store in the Westfield Century City Mall.

I got in line at 10:05am and was (surprisingly) the 18th person. The store website said that they would open at 11, and I figured if I read every single article and advertisement in the magazine, I’d only have about an hour to stare into the sun waiting. My plan did not work. By 10:25 I had finished reading. But that’s okay. That’s when the fun began.

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On May 1, 2008 I received a traffic citation while driving approximately 5mph in the middle of a bottleneck on Sunset Boulevard. A motorcycle cop driving between the lanes was stuck next to me because the guy in the other lane had drifted too close to my lane. He looked at me and nodded. I looked at him and nodded. We inched forward in the congestion. He looked at me again. I smiled and he motioned for me to pull over. “I can’t possibly have broken the law,” I thought, “I’m not even going 10mph!”

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Another awesome night in Los Angeles: After work on Friday, Tricia and I had dinner on the West side and then headed to the East side to catch a secret, surprise performance by James. The band played an excellent set to a sold-out crowd at Silver Lake’s über-chic Club Spaceland. The show lasted a little over an hour and a half and we got Laid at the end.

Tricia and I went to see The Cure on Sunday night at The Shrine. We had dinner at The Foundry on Melrose first and got to the show at nine, about an hour late but just in time to catch most of our favorite songs. Just Like Heaven was first, which was the song I played non-stop through most of high school and my absolute favorite Cure track, so that was awesome. I assume that the show started with mostly songs from the new album, because we got to hear almost all the classics. They played four two-song encores, including Tricia’s favorite song, the heartbreaker Plainsong, and the rocker Killing an Arab. I managed to get a few great photos, too.

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More proof that Los Angeles is the world headquarters for Club Awesome™: In how many other cities can you get to the office one day to find you’re now working in Madonna’s crotch?

Last night I finally finished reading Among the Mansions of Eden: Tales of Love, Lust, and Land in Beverly Hills, a book I bought for Tricia about five years ago. I sailed through the first few hundred pages of David Weddle’s tome a couple of weeks ago and was entranced by the marvelous stories of early 20th century Beverly Hills. But then somewhere about 3/5 of the way into it, the author seemed to lose focus and so did I. He shifted from all these awesome anecdotes about architecture and amour in the first half of the 1900s to depressing essays about drugs and crime and porn and immigration in the second half. It’s really a fascinating book, and Weddle obviously spent a tremendous amount of time on research and documentation, but I’d only rate it about 3 1/2 stars.

For lunch today a few of us walked next door to the new Brazilian restaurant that opened this week. It is literally in the building next to my office, so the bar at The Sampa Grill was the absolute closest place we could go to watch the second round of the Masters. The style is Churrasco, which basically means a tremendous amount of fire-cooked meat. I had pork, chicken, some sausage, and three different flavors of beer beef (typo!). I also had a salad and a bowl of soup. Even though the food was fantastic and all-you-can-eat, at $22 (including a Coke and the tip) it’s a bit pricey to become a lunch-hour standard for us. But it was definitely a nice Friday afternoon treat. Too bad Tiger didn’t seem to be doing so well.

On Saturday night Kelly and I played in a “Nite Lite” golf tournament at Porter Valley. One word: Awesomeness. The format was a Texas Scramble, which basically means everyone hits a ball and then decides who had the best shot. Then everyone hits from there as if that was his shot. We got to use two or three of my drives and several of my other shots, so that was heartening. The sun was gone from the sky by the time we started the back nine and it was just about pitch black, so we had glow-in-the-dark balls and neon necklaces and little glowing ropes on the carts. It’s quite amazing that nobody was killed.

Because there were so many groups we started on the 5th tee. Every fourth or fifth hole had a theme. The first tee was margaritas and fajitas and tacos. The fifth was ribs, chicken, and rum drinks, etc. The best was probably the 10th hole, with chocolate brownies, scotch, and cigars and coffee. One of the holes was cheese and crackers and wine. Our last hole was, if I remember correctly, fourteen; we finished the night with Italian sausages and beer. This was not an evening for the intestinally weak. Lots of photos, of course, posted to Flickr.

I played Porter Valley Country Club with Kelly on Sunday. I shot a 55 on the front nine and a 54 on the back nine for a 109, tied for my best round ever. As usual it took me nine or ten holes to get to the point where I could put all the pieces of my swing together and really feel like I was hitting the ball well. (Kelly promises that will only last for about ten or eleven years.) We played the back nine with a nice couple, Dennis and Linda. (Dennis does “flutter testing” for a living, which means he takes airplanes on test flights to make sure the wings stay attached.) Next weekend I’m going to play in a “night golf” tournament at PVCC, so I’ll have to bring my camera and let you know how that goes …

Last week my wife called me to say that her laptop — my old Dell Latitude D610 — wouldn’t boot. Of course her whole life is on this machine and she had a paper due that evening and, no, she didn’t have any backups. So I left the office around 3pm to try to save the day. Alas, after about five hours troubleshooting and researching and on the phone with Microsoft and Dell customer support, I was forced to admit that the hard drive was toast. Three different Dell technicians all gave me the same advice: Reformat the hard drive and reinstall WindowsXP.

Doing that would have deleted all of her data — including her 3000+ iTunes library. This was clearly not a good solution.
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If you’re looking for the best fish and chips in Los Angeles, head to The Gardens on Glendon. Tricia and I had dinner last night at this little place in Westwood — basically on the UCLA campus — and the simple fried cod and shoestring potatoes dish once again shocked me with its awesomosity. Yes, it’s a $24 entree and yes, everything at the restaurant is magnificently overpriced, but I’ve had fish and chips from one side of America to the other (and in London, too) and theirs is the best. (You can get the exact same dish at their sister restaurant, Kate Mantilini’s.)
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