Caltech physicist Richard Feynman famously developed an obsession with the tiny northern Asia country sometimes known as Tannu Tuva. Though he continued to try to travel there late in his life, his quest to actually get to the remote place was cut short by a series of illnesses. He settled for getting to know some [...]
Actually, Dick Feynman is sadly no longer with us. But some who maintain his living memory around Pasadena have bumper stickers on their cars — “Feynman lives!” and “Tuva or bust!” My mom had the former on her own car until she died a year ago. And Dick’s great friend and literary and musical collaborator [...]
This morning at tree-sitting central the two protesters who were “allowed” up against this gate at the oak woodlands in northern Arcadia were directly into the sun from my lens, so I shot this guy off to the side. By the time I got there, there were way more media types and sheriff’s deputies than [...]
Do the two golf courses of Brookside count as open space for the city of Pasadena? You have to pay to be out there, after all. I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about open space lately, and this shot makes the courses look like parkland, anyway. This egret was on the 14th fairway of [...]
A Pasadena friend who is a longtime (inactive) member of the Tournament of Roses just wrote me: “Larry, I was really appalled to see that the Rose Parade was sponsored by the Church of Scientology! This implies validity to the cult and at the same time defames the City of Pasadena as a naive and [...]
In the late 1970s, there was a brief craze for generic brands. This lite beer was cooked up by General Brewing in downtown L.A. and marketed at Ralphs supermarkets. I remember hoisting a few of the $1.99-a-six-pack specials. Let’s just say the price was right. It was at least as good as Billy Beer, named [...]
Actress Jessica Alba may regularly rank No. 1 on such as AskMen.com’s list of 99 Most Desirable Women in the Galaxy, but when it comes to punctuation, she’s no English major. I can forgive a lot in a girl, but introducing apostrophes in this capricious manner on a poster she signed for Chuck Jones at [...]
Wednesday morning, with the rain still coming down, they — “they” being county flood control — hadn’t fully released the water coming down from Devil’s Gate Dam in the Arroyo Seco concrete channel. This morning — Christmas eve eve, with the six days straight of rain behind us — they have, and it’s as brown [...]
Twenty … five, I guess it is, years ago, I did a cover story for the old Pasadena Weekly about the Arroyo Seco that my editor Pam Fisher headlined The Big Ditch. This morning, in these record rains, with no golfers on the course and me in a watertight rainsuit, I took Charlie for a [...]
The Big Ditch in the middle of Pasadena’s Arroyo Seco is of course running knee-deep and very fast from Devil’s Gate to the L.A. River in a days-long downpour like this. But there’s some water in it almost every day of the year. By Saturday, though, this ordinarily bone-dry seasonal tributary was roaring like the [...]
