Angry Badger

At the end of my run I was greeted with this; the beginnings of a sea of Wisco Badger fans at Santa Monica Pier.  Now I know how minorities feel -- when every average looking white dude puts on the same red t-shirt they really do all look the same.  Tough to make out, sorry, but enough to make a guy want to buy a TCU T-shirt.

There is a three story tall inflatable badger down there.  No joke.  Subtle.

Of all days universe, really?  I sure hope there's a point to all of this.  Wish I could e-mail this to Boondock so we could have a laugh.

Turtle Time,

-I Heart Palindromes

It Gonna Rain!

The reports of my death were only moderately exaggerated.  I have returned to the annals (stop laughing The Hammer) of the inter-web to share some incredibly important information:  It is raining in Los Angeles?!?!

Are you scared-to-death?  Flabbergasted?  Bamboozled (yes, Bamboozled, as in the slang term, not the terrible Spike Lee movie)?  No?  You're not?  Well that makes exactly one person in the entire world.  It has been raining, rather literally non-stop, for the past six days.  Houses are falling off of mountains, beaches are empty, roadways are flooded.  The Governator has declared this a State of Emergency, dude.  The only frequently cited upside to these events?  Lots of snow in the mountains (think 12-25 feet, yes, that much).  That's so LA of you Los Angeles; you're rewarding yourself for surviving such a perilous bout with moderately inconvenient weather with a ski trip to Tahoe.  You go right ahead LA, it's the holidays and you deserve it, don't forget to leave the Prius at home and take the Escalade -- the roads are flooded after all.

Now, I want everyone here to keep in mind that when people in Southern California freak out about rain, it isn't the kind of rain that you think of when you think about freaking out about rain.  The evening news dedicated five minutes yesterday to attempting to define a "thunderstorm", meaning what makes it different than a "rain shower".  No joke.  These people have never even seen a thunderstorm this side of a Marky Mark film.  The best part?  The weatherman implored people to stay inside if there was thunder and lightning lest they tempt fate and be struck by it.  I. Can't. Make. That. Up.  Clearly he's wrapping up his Ph.D. in math at USC with a thesis on conditional probabilities of things that will absolutely never happen to you!

Deep Breaths.  In good news, this set of events has allowed me to learn all new things about the city in which I live:

1) Despite a massive budget deficit and untold billions of dollars of Federal funding for make-work infrastructure projects, only seventeen dollars and twenty-eight cents were spent on engineers.  That's right, there are almost zero drainage spouts on any of the major expressways here.  Even if there were, unlike every major city outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the six-lane roadways here aren't even graded in order to run water off the roadway.  Instead, they opted for the "put in bowl-shaped low spots that create lakes" method of concrete'ing.  Hydroplaning is tremendous, especially at 75 miles an hour in a city where you know damn well that the car you hit/the one that hits you is not going to have insurance.  Golden.

2) Operating an umbrella is evidently not an innate skill for some adults.  I have seen people hit other people in the face as they pass by on the sidewalk.

3) It doesn't stop at umbrellas, women here don't seem to understand the concept of rain-appropriate shoes.  Six inch heels probably aren't the best.  Though you're dramatic fall was very entertaining, I should probably cut you some slack.  Oh no, don't cry, please?

In any event, the weather is supposed to revert to normal today and through the weekend (i.e. 72.138 degrees and sunny).  We'll have to go back to having the weatherman talk about Lindsay Lohan then.  Or Lindsay's mom, who gets a surprising amount of press attention for someone who has never done anything that is even remotely interesting.  At least I'll be in Chicago by then, now where did I put those gloves that I moved out here with?  Word.

Ducktales Woohoo (h.t. Boondock)

-I Heart Palindromes