The Old Days
Topic: Color Studies
Los Angeles used to be a far different place. Three color studies from the Travel Town Museum, an outdoor transportation museum on the other side of Griffith Park, beside Forest Lawn, and across the bone-dry Los Angeles River from Warner Brothers and Disney studios - the Burbank side of the park. The focus here is the history of railroad transportation in the western United States from 1880 to the 1930s, with fourteen steam locomotives and twenty-six other pieces of rolling stock. But they have a hall of old Los Angeles vehicles, like these three. It's hard to imagine those days. Everything was in black and white, wasn't it?
The Travel Town website is here, with history of the museum here. The photos are from May 29, 2006.
Alternatives
Topic: South of Hollywood
The Situation, Monday, July 24, 2006 - The heat wave weakened only slightly today but temperatures and humidity levels remained above average. Today, the high in Santa Clarita was 107; it was 100 in Burbank and 98 in downtown Los Angeles.
… By midmorning, Cal-ISO had already declared a Stage 1 emergency, asking consumers to voluntarily conserve power usage. The Stage 2 emergency, ordering businesses under special contracts to curtail power, was issued about 1 p.m.
If the power demand had sapped the energy supply, a Stage 3 emergency, setting off rolling blackouts, would have been called, said Cal-ISO Chief Executive Officer Yakout Mansour at a morning briefing at the state Capitol.
The heat wave gripping the state, the worst since 1998, has been so intense it's driven up demand for electricity by 40% since the state's energy crisis of 2001, Mansour said.
… Heat is at levels expected only once every 50 years in some parts of the state and once every 100 years in others, said Joseph Desmond, deputy secretary for energy at the California Resources Agency.
… Sunday was the 18th consecutive day that temperatures reached triple digits in parts of the Los Angeles Basin.
The solution might be tidal pools (Malaga Cove, a few miles south of Los Angeles International Airport) -
Palm tree at rock beach at the end of Barbara Avenue, San Pedro, down in the harbor area -
One could just go fishing -
Colors
Topic: Color Studies
Boats, Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, California (information and live web cam). The boats are at the Cabrillo Beach Youth Waterfront Sports Center, Friday July 21, at noon.
To the immediate right - no color -
One Bee
Topic: Nature and Botanicals
"He said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamily about among the bloom, and the larks singing high up overhead, and the blue sky and bright sun shining steadily and cloudlessly." - Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Saturday morning, July 22, a side street in Hollywood -
Bird Studies
Topic: Light and Shadow
Nothing fancy here, just common gulls down by Los Angeles harbor - at the Cabrillo yacht basin and Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro, just behind Fort MacArthur. And here's the thing - Fort MacArthur is an old facility from World War I, named for Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur, father of Douglas MacArthur, the man who commanded American forces in the Pacific during World War II and was dismissed by Harry Truman during the Korean War. Now Fort MacArthur is a "residential community" for personnel of the Air Force Space Division up in El Segundo - housing for spy and communications satellite gurus, the "full bird" colonels who make sure things get done right up at TRW and places like that. In their off hours they can sip scotch and consider old fashioned natural flight.
These, of course, are studies in framing, natural patterns and color. Noon, Friday, July 21, 2006, full sun, in the high eighties, moderated by a good onshore breeze off the Pacific -
