Lord of the Flies Inspired Bike Rack

...me from the Central Library, where I had checked out some books on Belgian beer for a project I’m working on. I walked up Broadway to catch the bus home, stopping at Grand Central Market on the way. But outside the market I saw this truly strange sculpture with many bikes locked to it. Obviously it was designed to celebrate the market, where meat, produce, spices, nuts and almost any imaginable type of ethnic food can be found. The top is adorned...

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Happy Holiday Weekend!

...It’s a holiday weekend in the US, meaning that, with the exception of our international readers, few people are checking the blog. You’re either gardening, brewing beer, burning a large effigy in the desert or constructing a giant wall around San Francisco. Down in LA? We’re sleeping with the cats....

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Toilet paper in the woods: a rant and some advice

...I clean it up when I can, just like I pick up the empty water bottles and beer cans and pint bottles of booze and cigarette butts and those damn plastic flossing devices and everything else people see fit to leave behind whenever they visit nature. I suppose we all have our different priorities and beliefs, but to me, the wilderness is sacred, all of it. Not just pristine wilderness, but parks and roadsides and beaches. I’d no more throw toilet p...

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Camping on Halloween Night

...on the street with a bucket of candy, holed up in the house with a pumpkin beer or out in the woods. It’s said that the veil between the worlds is thinnest on Halloween night, and I’m willing to buy that, because somehow the air always feels full of potential. This Halloween night, I was camping at 6,300 feet in the Angeles National Forest. The weather in Los Angeles has continued depressingly hot and clear and dry, despite the arrival of autumn....

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