Kenter all the way down 11/29

Not only did the VW tailgate the Jaguar all the way down, but he ran the stop signs at Tuallitan and Bonhill.

Sunset at Church 11/26

This is not a perfect zipper merge.

Sunset at Beverly 11/26

Keep clear!

Entitlement, California 11/26

Totally blinged out license plate. Her phone, too. And the peace sign dangling from the rear view mirror of her Lincoln Stomper.

San Vicente at 26th 11/25

Both the silver Mazda and the red Ford Ridickulous tailgated me for blocks before blowing past me in a cloud of exhaust. And here we all are at the same light.

San Vicente at 26th 11/25

Gridlock. I have the sense that the white car would have smashed the black one were it not for the legal ramifications.

Sunset at Allenford 11/24

Buncha middle schoolers trying to hitchhike somewhere. No one is stopping for them.

Kenter at Sunset 11/24

Not only is she parked on the Keep Clear lettering, but when I paused to keep clear she pulled around to my right so she could pull into that space.

Bundy at I-10 11/24

This guy is turning left, on red, against cross traffic with a perpetual green light, from a nonexistant left turn lane, into a driveway. And there's a motorcycle cop right there.

Ocean Park at 18th 11/24

Another day another crosswalk violation.

Kenter at Sunset 11/21

There's police activity blocking the right lane of Sunset just past Kenter so folks who don't think while they drive are left in the middle of the intersection when the light changes.

Kenter in front of the school 11/21

Parked in the red zone.

Kenter at the school 11/21

Parked in both the red zone AND the blue zone. No disabled placard of course. The truly Entitled need no such dispensations.

Kenter at the school 11/21

Parked in the red zone.

26th at Rockingham 11/21

This Audi driver threw her car in front of me, putting a lot of faith in my reflexes and brakes.

Sunset at Beverly 11/19

Keep clear!

Kenter at the school 11/18

Hummer. Parked in the red zone. A different hummer than the one involved in last week's fracas. A different red zone too.

Sunset at I-405 11/17

No tail or brake lights on this huge truck towing a mulcher.

Sunset at Barrington 11/16

The Ford Stomper just had to be in front of me so he tailgated the hummer until there was just the tiniest gap and then lunged into the space. I had to brake and wouldn't have caught the photo had not my camera already been out and loaded.

Sunset at Barrington 11/16

Hummer. I'm seeing more and more of these and they're being driven more and more aggressively.

Ocean Park near 18th 11/15

That car that looks like it's parking? You'd be wrong. It's parked. In the street. Driver nowhere in sight.

Ocean Park at 18th 11/15

Crosswalk violation!

Kenter in front of the school 11/14

This is the driver of the hummer. She asked why I took her picture. I said it was because she parked illegally and because she drives a hummer. She said she had to bring her son's shoes because he forgot them this morning (who sends their kid to school without shoes?) I pointed out that the rest of us had all chosen to park legally, instead of in the red zone. This got me an impassioned lecture on freedom in this country and an exhortation to work harder so I had more money and didn't have to drive a car that was shit. I tried to talk to her but then she did that thing my five-year old does where he puts his fingers in his ears and says, "I can't hear you I can't hear you." So I know that she knows it's wrong.


She seemed to think that I was envious of her wealth. I'm not. What I am envious of is her blithe indifference to the environmental ills that her expression of wealth are doing to us all.


I'm afraid I harshed her mellow.

Kenter at the school 11/14

Hummer count this morning is 4. This one is parked in the red zone.

Blockbuster parking lot 11/7

A veritable rogue's gallery this morning. Hopefully the new regime will put an end to tax breaks for the drivers of hummers.

San Vicente at Anita 11/7

Hummer gaining on me.

Pandemonium - Obama takes all 11/5

Oh man.



From the New York Times: "Dateline: GAZA — From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens."

I think I worked 80 hours for the campaign since Thursday. But all week I've been playing 'Chocolate City' in my head and on my computer. When I decided to only look at Vegas book to see how the campaign was going, I began to understand that we had a lock on it. That was Monday, and I cried all day. Then yesterday it was giddy energetic fearful glee, the kind of thing my friend Snowden said that the Germans are sure to have a word for, all day. I worked all day at the 2nd Street phone bank (Morgan Freeman had given us run of his front office and wireless network--the campaign crowdsourced the infrastructure and centralized the data, which drove the strategy) with the same old crowd and while we were completely exasperated and exhausted, we just kept at it all day. At 3pm we'd made 20,000 calls to North Carolina, Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. At 5pm we were calling Colorado. At 6pm we were calling Alaska. Then they opened the liquor and lit up the four big screen TVs. There were probably 200 people there. Jim showed up with the kids. Terri and I set up my laptop on the table in front of the TV, and we loaded (and reloaded and reloaded) Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, CNN, fivethirtyeight, and Twitter. The fastest, bestest, most reliable information came across Twitter, with TPM a close second (plus they had a cool interactive map you could roll over). I was shouting out information as fast as it came across the wire and then the TV would confirm it in a few seconds. It was astounding.

So Ohio fell blue and then Pennsylvania went, and then Twitter and then TPM and then CNN called it for Obama, toro toro toro, and cut to the countdown clock for the polls closing on the west coast. We counted down the last 20 seconds like it was new year's eve and then the entire room exploded into pandemonium. And then Virginia tipped blue on the interactive map and I hollered that out, and then Fox called Florida blue, and I hollered THAT out and then we were all just crying and laughing and screaming and hugging. And Jim cried. And Jesse Jackson cried. And then John came on and said thanks for the race Barack and then Barack came on and told us all about that 106 year old lady in Atlanta.

Who Trixie and Elise were talking about in the car this morning. And they didn't understand, really, why it was so important that she was so old and voting. So we talked about how old she was when the women were finally able to vote, and how old she was when the blacks were finally able to vote, and how her grandma lived in a time when most black people in America were slaves. And how she's lived such a long time, and how the kind of change she has seen in her long long life is the kind of change Obama's talking about. Good change. Big change.

And then, tonight, talking with Joe about the race, he asked about the score, so we went back to the maps and got the score (349-144). And then he asked me about the White House, and I found this: http://www.whitehouse.gov/history/life/video/index.html. The video starts automatically. Bear with it until about 2:44, when it gets interesting. I think it's a single take.

I LOVE the internet. Didn't Al Gore invent that just before he invented global warming?

We are delirious with joy, I tell you. Thanks for keeping the faith in us for the last eight years.