Retro(ish) Friday Photo

From the Flickr archives:

What’s the best way to drip fake blood (corn syrup and food coloring) over a set? Why, with a repurposed ‘maple’ syrup dispenser which once held a product also made from corn syrup and food coloring.

The fake blood is harmless, but very, very sticky. And nearly impossible to get out of your hair.

How do I know this?

Please enjoy a bonus photo from back in the days before digital, when we used Polaroids:

Bloody!

That, my friends, is a largish puddle of fake blood from a low-budget horror movie which, to the best of my knowledge, was never released.

There was so much blood that we had to clean the cable before we sent it back to the lamp dock – since production wouldn’t pay for a pressure washer, we had to use a kiddie pool. We wrapped the syrup covered cable, then dropped the coils into the kiddie pool and scrubbed.

By the end of the day I looked like a serial killer, my hair was sticky and matted with fake blood and although I had no groceries I was afraid to stop anywhere on the way home.

The place in the back of the car where I dumped the wet clothes for the drive home was stained red until I got rid of the car.

Filed under: humor, Photos, Work, aunt jemima, blood, corn, fake, movies, polaroid, special effects

You can never find one when you want one

My garden, while only about a mile from where I used to live, is currently 8 miles away.

Interestingly, it takes the exact same amount of time to drive as it does to bike, and since the bike doesn’t burn $4 a gallon gas I usually prefer to ride than drive.

But lately I’ve had this shoulder issue, and it seems to cycle (no pun intended) between ‘getting better’ and  ‘won’t this thing ever stop fucking hurting’.

Today’s physical therapy appointment wasn’t until noon, and since I’ve been in a ‘getting better’ phase, I decided to bike instead of drive. Hey, I’m unemployed and gas is expensive (for the US).

So I hopped on the bike and headed out. I swear I behaved – I didn’t lean on the handlebars and I stayed off of the drops. I got to the garden fine – no pain and I felt really good. I dumped my veggie scraps into my compost bin, watered the seedlings (leeks, rutabegas, parsnips, beets and celery that looks like it’s not going to come up), admired the out-of-control fava beans (looks like I’m in for another 50 lb harvest from my tiny plot), and weeded for a few minutes.

I then headed out as I needed to be at the PT place.

About a mile into the return trip, I started hurting. Bad.

I then, for the first time in my life, decided to do the sensible thing and catch a bus back home.

I found a bus stop and sat. And sat, and sat and sat.

With the clock ticking (can’t be late, don’t want to anger tiny Asian woman who is torturing me), I decided that I couldn’t wait any longer and started riding, figuring eventually a bus would catch up to me and then I could give my poor shoulder some rest.

Except no bus came. I kept looking over my shoulder, hoping I’d see something – anything. Any bus would do.

Nope. Nothing.

Normally, when I’m biking, I have to avoid being flattened by a bus approximately every five minutes, so the complete lack of buses just when I really needed one was maddening.

Every time I looked back and didn’t see a bus, I’d let loose with a torrent of language that would likely shock a sailor. At one traffic light, a police car pulled up beside me, and the nice officer asked me what the problem was.

“I’m hurting and need to catch a bus, but now I can’t find one.”

“So.. they’re just like cops, then?”

Yes, indeed. Just like cops. Only not on a frantic manhunt which involves several innocent drivers getting shot up.

I finally saw a bus two block from my apartment.

Bastards.

Filed under: Non-Work, life in LA, Los Angeles, mishaps, cranky, humor, Los Angeles, cars, bike, police, transportation, transit, buses, crime, manhunt, gardening, compost bin

A Man Explains Things to Me

As much as I’d like to panic about the lack of work, it’s pretty normal for January (ish), so I’ve been doing some physical therapy on my shoulder while I have the down time (I’m determined to be positive about the work prospects for this year).

Said physical therapy has me doing some strange-looking (and painful) exercises with one of those resistance bands.

I usually opt to do my exercises at the gym, mainly because I’m more likely to do them if I make myself get up and go somewhere that’s not my apartment. Also, while I’m there I can swim (sort of – mostly kick sets for now) and sit in the steam room.

My gym used to have resistance bands available for use, but they were removed a couple of years ago, presumably due to concerns about members using them to strangle the sweaty bastard who refuses to wipe down the equipment after use.

So I bring the bands that the physical therapist gave me, and work through my exercises, usually with no issues other than failure to keep the obscenities to a discreet volume.

Except today, when I got mansplained.

The phenomenon is recounted in this article* by the utterly brilliant Rebecca Solnit  (to whom I humbly offer hommage with the title of this post).

As I was doing the exercise that I like to call the Sieg Heil (exactly what you’d imagine, only with a resistance band), a man swathed in overpriced brand-name tech fabric offered some unsolicited advice after staring at me for a full five minutes.

“You really shouldn’t do that,” he began (whatever happened to ‘hello’) in that tone. “You could hurt yourself. If you like, I can show you how to work out.”

“It’s a physical therapy exercise. I’m pretty sure she told me to do it this way for a reason.”

“You see,” he continued “your shoulder is a very complicated joint and you have to be very  careful, especially with those dangerous bands. You know the gym got rid of them.”

“The physical therapist told me to do this. I think she might have gone to college.”

“Maybe you could start with the easy pushups. You know, the ones on your knees.”

It became clear he wasn’t going to listen to me. As I tried to decide if I wanted to fart loudly, belch, or resume swearing (if you can’t reason with them, scare them off), I was saved by the swim coach, who ran up and jokingly yelled “Five more! Your butterfly sucks!” while holding her hand at a height that I wasn’t going to be able to reach without dropping the band (or maybe even if I did).

At the sight of my exercise being legitimized by  an actual staff member, he slunk off… somewhere. I was laughing too hard to really pay much attention.

*I highly recommend River of Shadows, the book referenced in the article.

Filed under: Non-Work, life in LA, rants, Off-Topic, humor, physical therapy, health, exercise, medicine, Rebecca Solnit, men, resistance band

I’m not sick, I’m just full of pool water

There must be something going around.

I can assume this because all of a sudden everyone around me is completely paranoid about anyone being sick, even slightly.

Today, I spent an hour in the pool attempting to correct my piss-poor upper body position, which meant keeping my head down much further than I’m really used to, which resulted in an unfortunate amount of pool water filling my sinus cavity.

So much water got up there that I’m reasonably certain even my parietal lobe got some swimmies.

So, after sitting in the steam room and showering, I meandered back to my locker and began to get dressed and pack up my stuff.

Since I still had some water sloshing around in my skull, I was sniffling periodically, and the lady three lockers down would glare menacingly at me each time I did.

Finally, she turned to me and hissed “Stay home if you’re sick! What about the rest of us?”

I tried to assure her that it was just a sinus meets pool water issue, but since she hurriedly grabbed her stuff and moved across the locker room, glaring at me all the time, I’m guessing she didn’t believe me.

In other news, I’ve got two days of work this week due to a very good friend being a mensch and helping me out.

I love everyone right now. Even the angry lady.

Filed under: Non-Work, life in LA, mishaps, humor, vacation, health, medicine

Aquapolypse!

Here in Los Angeles, we take all sorts of natural disasters in stride. Earthquakes, tsunamis, out-of-control wind-driven fires, killer bees, Brett Ratner… none of them even make us drop our lattes.

Until the unthinkable happens and water begins to fall from the sky.

Then, we panic uncontrollably, run screaming to the grocery stores for supplies (can’t run out of Pinot Grigio, now can we? Oh, wait.. Are you supposed to drink white wine or red in a raging storm that will be the death of us all? Somebody help me before my head explodes), drive recklessly through the damp streets, crash our cars and then swear never, ever to leave the house ever again if there’s even a hint of that evil sky water on the horizon.

So with the news predicting an all-out onslaught of scattered showers throughout the weekend, my lack of work was not such a terrible thing, since I get very, very nervous even attempting to drive (or bike, or walk) around panicky Angelenos who are trying to clean the local grocer out of anything even remotely edible while fighting the onslaught of frizzy hair.

Although I did venture out to visit  the gym, I  avoided all grocery stores and, just to be safe, hardware stores and booksellers.

As predicted, it’s been drizzling intermittently all afternoon and I’m now home,  watching the news coverage of the colossal traffic jam.

Oh, the humanity.

Filed under: Non-Work, life in LA, Photos, Los Angeles, camera, humor, rain, Los Angeles, clouds, winter, storm, Dear God we're all going to die

The four wheels of the apocalypse

Here in Los Angeles, we love our cars. Really, really love them. We do anything we can to avoid using our feet, our legs, or any form of public transit. Should we need to reach some far (or near) destination, we travel via our network of free highways (“freeways” for those of you not familiar with Southern California automotive nomenclature).  They’re clogged with traffic, marred with graffiti, strewn with trash and king-sized potholes, but eventually they get us where we want to go.

It’s a love/hate relationship, and although they make us miserable at times, we just can’t imagine life without them.

Until this coming weekend, when CalTrans will close – that’s close as in completely shut down – a 10 mile section of the 405, one of the busiest stretches of road in the country, if not the world.

To our car-centric culture, this is nothing short of a Biblical-sized catastrophe.

Carmageddon. The Sepulcalypse*.  We collectively flap our hands and hyper-ventilate as we contemplate the idea of not being able to drive.

The newsbots have been raising the alarm about this for weeks, and now the city of LA has resorted to the awesome power of faded television stars to try to calm the masses:

Said masses obstinately refuse to be calm and now hysterical panic is sweeping the city.

Many people are planning, like rats fleeing a sinking ship, to leave town.

“Yeah, we’re just going to drive up the coast Friday, get a hotel for the weekend and just chill out.”

“Wait. You’re driving to a hotel where you’re just going to sit around all weekend? Why not just stay home?”

“Stay home? What if we have to drive somewhere?”

And so it goes.

Unfortunately for me,  I now live west of the 405, and some surface streets in my neighborhood will be closed, making any sort of vehicular egress on my part impossible.

I won’t be able to make the union meeting (on the other side of town, of course) on Saturday or to the three parties downtown, so I plan to do my commuting to the beach on my bicycle.

And take photos of what will be either hilarious chaos or  eerily empty streets.

*The surface street alternative to the 405 is Sepulveda Blvd, which will not be closed, but might as well be, since no one has any illusions about traffic moving at anything faster than a painfully slow crawl.

Filed under: Non-Work, life in LA, Los Angeles, mishaps, humor, traffic, carmageddon, fucked, we're all going to die

Weekend report

This past Sunday, Los Angeles hosted our second CicLAvia.  A nice, fairly flat route through downtown  (the fun part, not the scary part) closed to cars and open to cyclists, joggers, skaters, etc..

This event was much more crowded than the last one (in October of last year) – so crowded that although I really wanted to have a picnic in the middle of an otherwise busy downtown intersection, there was so much bike traffic that I didn’t feel it would have been safe. I guess that’s more of a good thing than a bad thing.

In addition to damn near every food truck in the city, this year there were swag booths, so of course at the halfway point I swaggered over to the SoyJoy booth and tried one, as I’d left my sandwich at home and was pretty hungry after having ridden my bike from the Westside (no, you may not call me crazy. It’s not that far).

Wow. What an experience.  I imagine a SoyJoy bar is what sawdust, rotten fruit,  sugar and pure evil baked into the texture of shoe leather would taste like. It took everything I had not to spit it out in front of the nice folks running the booth.

I don’t even remember which flavor I ate, but after perusing the ingredients list and watching other people’s reactions I suspect they’re all equally horrible.

In a valiant effort to get the taste out of my mouth, I stopped at Cole’s and had a sandwich and a martini (hey, it’s 5 pm somewhere, right?).

Although they were initially resistant to the event, the local businesses have figured out that 150,000 cyclists on a warm day is a blessing from the ‘captive audience’ gods – the streets in front of some of the eateries sprouted bike racks, and in Little Tokyo there was even a bike valet.

A good time was had by all. If you’re in the Los Angeles area, I highly recommend attending the next event.

Today was spent doing laundry, tomorrow I’ll work in the garden, and then there’s a wild rumor that I’ll have work for the rest of the week and possibly into the weekend.

Yay, work!

Filed under: humor, life in LA, Los Angeles, mishaps, Non-Work, Off-Topic, Photos

Down time

Long days with not much work happening are more emotionally draining than short ones – you’re still there for 12 hours, but doing less, so the boredom hits. At least when the day’s busy everyone’s running around and the next thing you know it, they’ve called wrap.

But when it’s a slow director or something that’s time intensive (like stunts), the day just drags, so we try to find ways to pass the time.

Part of what happens when crews have too much time on their hands is pranks.

Today’s prank was the effects people putting fake decayed body parts on the crafty table, which was a failure in that no one really cared about it, and some folks even made jokes about the bottled hot sauce going well with mummified leg in the event that lunch was late.

Guess they should have waited until some of the suits came on set if they wanted a reaction.

We also did a lot of talking after we finished our respective newspapers, and in light of the body parts at crafty, we started trading prank stories.

Which got me thinking. Of course I like to paint myself as a wonderful person who loves everyone and would never, ever do anything like dropping a live squirrel into the open sunroof of a camera operator’s BMW, but the truth is that I succumb to the lure of the cheap laugh just as readily as anyone else.

In addition to the squirrel incident (which didn’t really happen and wasn’t me especially if it was your BMW), I have been involved in some way, shape or form, with the following pranks:

Nail-gunning a director’s shoes to the stage floor (not while he was wearing them, of course).

Various tomfoolery involving clothespins (you sneak up behind someone and ‘tag’ them by attaching  clothespins to their person. It’s harder than you’d expect).

Soldering a pink girly bike basket to a guy’s (very macho) lot bike.

Hoisting said bike up to the stage perms, dead-hanging* it and then making sure there were no lifts around to retrieve it.

Various tomfoolery involving cell phones (Facebook mobile with saved log-in information has added a whole new realm of possibilities to this).

Actually, reviewing this list I’m not all that much of a prankster. Some of the stories that I heard today put me to shame. And gave me ideas.

Next show. There will always be a next show.

* Dead-hanging means that instead of running a rope out from the catwalks (where it can be easily retrieved), one secures an item directly to the perms out in the ‘o-zone’ off the walks. The only people who are allowed to go off the walks are the grips, so this prank doesn’t work on them.

Filed under: humor, Uncategorized, Work

Caucapolis

One of the things about the new neighborhood is the preponderance of white people.

I’m not used to the pale masses. I’ve spent the past couple of decades in a very ethnically diverse neighborhood,  so I’ve come to think of Los Angeles as not a very white place, which isn’t a bad thing.  “Not very white” meant dusty markets with interesting stuff on the shelves, good Thai food, seemingly random street festivals, and the neighbor’s barbacoa fests to which the entire city was invited.

But now?  Whitey’s everywhere in droves, and they really do all look similar. Same haircut, same clothing brands, same nasal laugh. It’s making me kind of nervous – had I a stock portfolio, I’d feel a strong urge to keep my hand on it at all times.

I suppose I’ll get used to the beige horde, but right now it’s just fucking weird.

Also, what the hell is up with the frozen yogurt? There are two ‘fro-yo’ places within a block of my apartment and it seems like every time I turn my head I see another.  That, and art supply stores.

I feel like I should carry a small notebook and keep notes about what it is that white people really like.

Oh, wait. It’s already been done. Nevermind.

Filed under: humor, life in LA, Los Angeles, Non-Work

Open Letter to America*

*With all due apologies to R. Lee Ermey

It has come to my attention that some of you among this great nation are paying inflated prices for canned pumpkin due to some commie shortage or something.

I’m disappointed in you worthless pukes. Are you not the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the people who flipped the finger to the Great Depression and continued to live and thrive?

I think not. Seems to me the hardy stock of America has been replaced by crybabies from planet Piss-ant.

Pay attention, maggots:

First off, harden the fuck up.

Then, go buy a damned pumpkin. Most chi-chi ‘gourmet’ grocery stores will carry small pumpkins called ‘sugar pie’. You’ll need two of them.

If you can’t find those, go out to one of those insipid pretend pumpkin patches that I know you have in your city.

Go the day after Halloween, get an ugly one and haggle the dude down. Don’t tell me you can’t. My deaf crippled mother can haggle. Yes, the pumpkin will last three weeks if the rind is intact.

Take your ugly fucking pumpkin and go home.

Get a knife. Cut the pumpkin into bits.

Scrape out the seeds. Put your back into it, weakling.

Cut off the rind. Cook the chunks until they’re tender.

Put the cut-up pumpkin chunks into a blender.

I know you have a blender. My blind grandmother who’s been dead for twenty years has a goddamn blender.

Blend until smooth.

Follow the same recipe you’d use for your shitty canned pumpkin.

Enjoy.

That’s not good enough for you?

Go to this site.

Or use this recipe, which is the one yours truly makes.

Absolutely can’t find any sort of pumpkin at all?  Make a sweet potato pie and tell your family they should be grateful they get anything at all because when you were a kid, you were so poor that all you got for Thanksgiving was a tin plate full of sand and you felt lucky to have that.

What? You weren’t poor as a kid? Who cares if it’s true. A generation of great Americans were raised listening to the exaggerations of how hard life was when our parents were young. Most of those stories weren’t true, either.

If they still complain, make them do push ups outside while you eat their piece of pie.  That’ll teach ‘em.

You’re welcome, maggots.

Filed under: humor, Non-Work, Off-Topic, rants