necessity's children

i see a lot of baby/kid shoes on the train.  they're not always attached to the child they belong to, babies being prone to kicking and screaming and all, but usually they're not too far away.  so when i see the kids' shoe below and no associated child, i look a little longer.

you might not be able to tell from this picture, but the woman is looking into a mirror, doing her makeup.  what's this got to do with the shoe?  that's her makeup bag.  i'm gonna guess all her kids outgrew that size.

who needs a blue bin for recycling?

safety

i'm often baffled at the work credentials i see displayed on the train.  it's not very often i want complete strangers knowing where i work and my full name.  while the likelihood of any negative consequences from displaying such information is remarkably small, it's remarkably smaller when not displayed.  but, more importantly, lanyards and belt clips make an otherwise professional looking person look sloppy (though, admittedly, "otherwise professional" isn't always applicable).

whatever the safety and fashion implications of work credentials are, i don't think i'd be alone in thinking they are magnified many-fold when you hold up a big, fully-addressed envelope address-side out.

who knows?  maybe she's just delivering this to the post for someone else.  maybe she's part of a criminology research project to see just how dangerous flashing your full-name and address together in public is.  maybe she just don't care.  and maybe she's even trying to be discovered and wants to be stalked.  any of these might be true for her.  but unless they're true for you, please PUT YOUR CREDENTIALS AWAY and protect your pii (that's a census term, google it).

coffee mate is not ouzo

i came across this ad in the train station.

the guy reminded me of another guy in another ad i saw once.  a friend of mine was telling me about ouzo and sent me this picture about how it should be enjoyed.

no matter how similar the happy expressions of these two ads are, coffee mate can not possibly make you as happy as ouzo.  though, to be fair, i've only tried one.

trash porn, pt 7

some people may recognize the house below as "where strawberry lives."  some may ask "who's strawberry?"  strawberry was a vietnam veteran.  strawberry was a cool uncle who threw cool parties.  but most notably, strawberry was a fictional character in cheech & chong's first movie "up in smoke," who had a distracting birthmark and flashbacks while operating a motorcycle with cheech in the sidecar.

these pictures feature in trash porn because for many reasons, this house should be worth a fair amount and, by extension, well kept.  it's centrally located, close to a train station, in an historic zone, on a corner lot, has very unique features (sculptures and a frickin turret with frickin cannons*) and is a symbol of the pride the neighborhood takes in having been featured in a groundbreaking, seminal movie that still influences how people dress, talk and, well, not be sober.  as you can see though, the yard and the sidewalk around it mostly collect trash.

it should be noted that the view in the second picture is usually obscured by parked cars so i had to wait til street-sweeping day to get a clear picture.  naturally, much of the trash got swept away.

* -- well, things made to look like cannons anyway

spouting water

i can't help but think the natural version of the waterfall below would be much more appealing, but this one's pretty cool too.

i'm a little surprised the city didn't think a giant column of water right over a parking lot was a problem when they built this overpass; but given the spread of the downward plume, perhaps the city's fluid dynamics folks know more than i do.  we won't see who has the last laugh until it rains hard without any wind though.  my money's on a nice little complaint, possibly followed by a lawsuit, from whoever's parked beneath this little spout.

in case you're wondering what this has to do with mass transit, it's just one of those things that i wouldn't have passed by if i were driving, much like the most awesome dmv ever.

also, as a completely arbitrary aside, connected to this post only through the single word "plume," nasa's cassini spacecraft is orbiting saturn and just yesterday completed a flyby of the moon enceladus, one that has ice volcanoes such as the many below.  from my very amateur estimates, the combined plume pictured reaches out about 180 miles, greater than the mean radius of the moon itself.

check the cassini mission in the coming days for the new images.  currently, the images from a fly-by of enceladus from a couple weeks ago are on the front page.

helicopter

i was trying to figure out which of the names on the sign above went to the trouble of renting the helicopter parked in their shared lot, shown below.

my money's on hooters.

i see moose

the fall temperatures must have dropped below 70°F (21°C for the "civilized" world).  that's what angelenos refer to as the "moose hat point."