GARGOZO MANUSCRIPT

The cell phones I get at Walmart don't last long but getting them replaced is always a treat.  Another one gave out on me last week so I drove over to  visit Bogdan, the phone guy at the Walmart in Simi Valley.  He works in the electronics department from 11 am to 7 pm and is a dead ringer for the Romanian-born poet Andrei Codrescu.  His English is perfectly fine but it's delivered with that truncated baltic meter that omits nonessential words and puts some of the remaining words in surprising places.   When I showed up and found him busy with a customer, although there were other people working there, I waited until he was freed up.  When he finished with the other customer, I walked up to him, handed him the phone and said, "It won't hold a charge." Bogdan calmly looked it over, pressed a few buttons and then handed it back to me. He asked, "How long have you had phone?" I said, "A year......maybe less." He said, "Probably battery."...

  An hour from Seattle the ferry entered a maze of densely forested islands  that soon blocked out the horizon.  The islands made for nice scenery but you couldn't avoid feeling disoriented while weaving among them.  When the ferry started out across open water, we had our destination British Columbia as a distant flat strip in front of us and a familiar cityscape to our back.  Now that we were meandering around and about these islands, the direction where we were headed or where we'd come from was anybody's guess.  In addition to there being no landmarks, there was  no way to distinguish between the islands themselves.   We did pass by one island that stood out from the rest.  It was made up of two parallel long narrow islands, both similar in height and dense woods as the rest of the islands.  However, these two were joined at the hip by an isthmus - a flat, barren, low-level land bridge.  It ended up looking like a very larg...

  Construction on the long awaited Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing is now under way.  The fully landscaped passage will be 165 feet wide and stretch 210 feet over 10 freeway lanes.  Enthusiasts for the crossing state that "big cats, coyotes, deer, lizards, snakes and other creatures" now tragically marooned in the hills of Agoura will have a safe route to the Santa Monica Mountains and better access to food and potential mates. Might it be that the potential boon to the animal kingdom provided by the crossing has been overstated?  Google Maps says if you travel by way of Kannan Road, it is 17.5 miles from Agoura Hills to the center of the Santa Monica Mountains.  One hopes the snakes and lizards know a shortcut.  As for mountain lions, five have been killed this year trying to cross Southern California freeways. "This wildlife crossing could not have come at a better time," said Jeff Sikich, a wildlife biologist with the National Park Service.  Forg...

George C. Ballas - inventor of the weed eater  (Houston Chronicle) On a blistering hot day in 1971, a ballroom dance instructor named George Ballas sat in his car as it was pulled through a Texas car wash.  The spinning brushes that were battering the windshield wipers caught his attention.  He later claimed this was the inspiration that led to his inventing the weed eater.  His first prototype had fishing line poking through holes of a tin can attached to a lawn edger. The 28 inches of rain that fell on Michael's 4,500 square-foot backyard last winter completely ruled out using George's weed eater.  By late April, the  40-degree slope that rises up behind the house was blanketed with a six-foot high impenetrable thatch  of shrub-like weeds with stalks the size of a baseball bat.   In early May, the annual weed abatement proclamation arrived in Michael's snail mail.  The Los Angeles Fire Department demanded that nothing alive or dead, ex...

Don't make the mistake of thinking that providing a viewing  guide to this series implies that I recommend it.  Rather, consider it a public service intended to mitigate the overwhelming despair that awaits the casual viewer.  Hidden is a BBC production set in Wales featuring a Welsh-speaking cast available on various streaming outlets.  The 20-episode series follows small town, crime-fighting cops Cadi John and Owen Vaughn  (pictured above) in what begins as a who done it? but soon becomes a why am I watching this?     Excepting sadomasochists, there's little chance anyone who settles in to view this will make it past the first 10 minutes.  For those that had the good sense to call it quits, here's what you missed. It turns out Wales is a country attached to the lower left-hand flank of England and small enough to fit inside Cher's basement.  Hidden depicts the land, the weather and the people that live there as catastrophically morose an...

The other day I noticed that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences issued an official apology to Sacheen Littlefeather for having done damage to her show business career.  Fifty years ago, Miss Littlefeather appeared on stage at the Academy Awards having been sent there by Marlon Brando to share his reasons for declining the Oscar.  When Brando's name was read off, Sacheen made her way on to the stage where the perplexed presenters, Roger Moore and  Liv Ullman, produced a more genuine reaction than  either had ever managed on the  screen.  In her non-acceptance speech, Sacheen e xplained that Marlon was going to pass on the Oscar to call attention to the way Native Americans had been portrayed by Hollywood. Today's Oscar ceremonies rarely conclude without a pitch for some cause but it hadn't been done prior to Sacheen and her words prompted  grumbling and boos from the audience.  It's no surprise that her future as an aspiring actress en...

I have discovered when freeway traffic is unbearably jammed,  pulling into the car pool lane  despite having no passengers,  can really lifts one's spirits.  Once there, zipping past hordes of irate commuters, I entertain myself with the challenge of coming up with a credible defense if stopped by the highway patrol.   Earlier this week during one of these creative sessions I was distracted by Larry Mantle's voice on the radio.  It was a teaser promoting an upcoming segment he would be doing on the egg shortage.   I gave up listening to Larry Mantle more than a decade ago.  His insistence on compiling several thousand words into a single question drove me off.  It is especially bad when he rolls out the first question for the poor bastard being interviewed.  Larry inserts every possible bit of information and nuance that he can conger up, until the question is a paragraph short of War and Peace .  I don't know if there was...

I was watching Wonder Boys on Hulu the other day and came to the part where the talented but troubled character James Leer reels off in alphabetical order the names, dates and methods employed by 15 Hollywood stars that took their own lives.  In with Pier Angeli, Charles Boyer, George Reeves (Superman), George Sanders, Jean Seberg and Gig Young was Dorothy Dandridge which for some unknown reason sparked my curiosity.  Googling revealed that she had starred in Carmen a 1954 film that I saw at the Eagle Theater when I was 9 years old.  I suppose it's possible that some part of my brain had stored away Dorothy's name for 70 years and was the reason it piqued my interest. How else could one explain my chasing her down instead of Albert Dekker who hung himself with his suicide note written in lipstick on his stomach? Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte Dorothy's single mom was an entertainer and started Dorothy and her sister in the business performing a song and dance act...

The Boards Across Hermosa organizers had received 70 surfboards as donations for artists to paint.  The same email that told me that I was one of the participants indicated the boards were "first-come, first-serve".  I immediately drove to Hermosa in a panic hoping there would still be a board small enough to fit in my Honda Civic and proceeded due to my ignorance, to select one based on size rather than condition.  I didn't see the damage until I set it up in the backyard.  I soon  returned to YouTube videos, this time for tutorials on repairing surfboards.   This latest development was quite disturbing.  Had I any inkling that the board might need to be repaired as well as painted, I would never have tried to wiggle my way into this.  The most depressing thought was that this was surely just the first of many unexpected pitfalls that lay ahead.  I struggled with the obvious question - press on or quit?   Normally, I find grea...