Animals Come In All Shapes & Colors

        My friends in Denver watch over my friends in San Diego, even though San Diego has no idea.

        An octopus may have eight arms and an anaconda might stretch from a third floor window to the ground, but Denver holds them both in the palm of his hand.  Denver was able to cure cancer in China, providing love, joy and happiness to 278 souls that had previously known only fear and evil.  Had I accompanied Denver on that Celestial journey that number would have been elevated to 428.  I just found this out.  I have just now been made aware of those actual numbers.

        Oh what a difference a day makes.

Kill Or Bee Killed

        My friends in San Diego are more powerful than Denver, but without any sort of direction, will never change the world.  It’s taken almost five years for me to realize that I can enable San Diego to change the world, and that San Diego can enable me to do the same.

One Day I’m Going To Change The World

        One day, everyone will know who I am.  One day my life story will be required reading in American history and with any luck it will be a part of the curriculum that students will look forward to learning.

Can You Guess Which One Is Me?

        I love the Celestial Calendar and every other bit of bullshit that has to do with the stars.  I also leave bullshit on the ground whenever I see see it.  I don’t like bullshit because it smells like shit and if I handle it my hands will smell like shit.  That is why “water off a duck” is so apt for me.  Bullshit does not hinder me because I walk right past it, without breaking stride. Bullshit rolls off me, just like water off a duck.  My fresh smelling hands are my proof.

The Celestial Zodiac Has Nothing On A Tiger

        Until San Diego learns to walk past bullshit, instead of smearing it all over it’s body and flinging it about the room, Denver will remain at an appropriate remove so as not to have to see or smell beautiful women wallowing in shit.

Beauty & Danger At Technomania Circus

Technomania Circus is also host to music acts that range from normal guys with guitars to to men in full-on welding rigs that use fire and brimstone as their instruments. The video at the top as one of those, the video below is somewhat more traditional.

          It would seem that San Diego Trolley Police need a few lessons in local law. The man on the ground, was smoking in the 12th & Imperial Transit Center in San Diego, CA. This happened on September 5th, 2009 at 8:20pm. Assuming that what you see the San Diego Trolley Transit Police doing is legal and assuming the transit police are keeping other public commuters safe, there should be no issue with photography taking place. If a protector of the public, whose salary is drawn from the taxes of the public is also prohibiting the public from LEGAL activities, then San Diego trolley police are breaking the law. Heritage Security has a 5 year, $25 million with San Diego which was signed in January, 2006. The hierarchy seems to be: Unarmed trolley officer, armed trolley officer, armed supervisor, armed lieutenant and armed captain. If I read the contract correctly, unarmed San Diego trolley police officers receive a 2.5% annual pay increase, while armed trolley police officers receive a 3.5% annual pay increase. There are also small pay increases every 6 months, assuming performance is satisfactory. As San Diego trolley police have constant interaction with the public, why do they prohibit photography of themselves if they are performing their job in a satisfactory manner? The contract makes no mention of a photography ban nor does it state what qualifies satisfactory performance versus unsatisfactory performance.

Some highlights from the video above are:

1) For the first 40 seconds or so, the man on the ground makes numerous requests for the officer closest to me to get his knee off of his head, and specifically, his scar which was obtained during a recent surgery to remove cancer.
2) At the 15 second mark, a female officer crosses the Trolley tracks and says, “Get away with that camera!” I can be heard to ask, “How far?” The San Diego Trolley Police Officer says, “You’re not allowed to take pictures.”
3) At the two minute mark, right after a bus passes between me and the officers and their handcuffed smoker, the same female officer from before (now on the left side of the screen) looks at me, walks to her colleagues as says something. A second later three officers turn around and look right at me. The female officer points at me, which causes a one of her own to approach me for the ensuing challenge.

        UPDATE! Read my follow-up post here. My video is featured on NBC 7/39 San Diego News. Watch my interview and read a statement made by Heritage Security regarding the situation. Suffice to say that photography at San Diego Trolley Stations is in fact 100% LEGAL!

Trolley Stations Are Public Property

          Photography is not illegal. You’ll hear me say that a half dozen times or so in the video, as well as asking if I am in violation of any law. Two of the San Diego Trolley Cops told me I was not allowed to take pictures. Interesting. We public commuters can look at them, show them our tickets, obey orders given by them, be tackled to the ground by them and placed, in handcuffs inside SUV’s with dark tinted windows, BUT WE CAN NOT PHOTOGRAPH THEM DOING ANY OF IT! Or so they say, at least in this video.

          San Diego trolley police officers that don’t want pictures taken of them while they do their job are out of luck. If they are captured on film while tackling some one to the ground, why would photography be prohibited unless they were doing something illegal? I have emailed Heritage Security asking this question but got no reply. I would appeal to visit the contact page of Heritage Security and ask them. On that page you will find and email link with text that says hr@heritagesecurity.com, but when you hover over the link it says the email is jsullins@heritagesecurity.com. I hope their trolley police officer selection process is not as disorganized as their website.

A Transit Station At Night Can Be Scary Enough on It’s Own

Even If You Always Trade, This Means Nothing To You

About 15 minutes before the Dot-Com bubble was going to burst, just before the turn of the millennium, I decided to begin investing in the equities market.  About 15 minutes AFTER the bubble had burst I realized that I did not have enough education to be an effective investor.  It was time to listen.  It was not time to talk or think or to or to play point & counterpoint with investors smarter AND more successful than me.  It was time to LISTEN!  The talking, thinking and hypothesizing were to come AFTER those more successful than me were finished talking.

Common courtesy aside, if I didn’t hear everything they said, I would not be able to do what they did.

Some Americans feel so entitled that they would rather start talking, just because they want to say what they know, instead of patiently waiting to find out if an entitlement is even necessary.  Those that are about the same age as the internet seem to think that just because the world wide web can produce instant analysis in a consequence-free environment that they can stand face with another human being and do the same thing.  They like to roll their eyes, exhale loudly, drum their fingers and irritably tap their feet.

Ask them what their problem is and they’ll say, “Nothing.”

When you read their blog later that night though, it will be an entire scenario of what they WISH would have happened.

An Incomplete Sentence Is Like Incomplete Data

Only a fool would think he or she has the prophetic ability to not only guess the final half of someone else’s statement, but also to assimilate it, formulate something in their head and then express it vocally before the original statement has been completely uttered.  If one had the ability to do that, they should also have the ability to foresee elections, horse races and winning lottery numbers.  Interrupting Cows do not have those extra abilities, they only have the ability to guess the final handful of words in a sentence spoken to them.  They do not have the ability to LISTEN to the last handful of words spoken to them.  I have tried to ask them why they don’t wait for a statement to be completed before speaking themselves, but I only got as far as, “Why don’t you…”

If you want to see an Interrupting Cow jump, talk to them about something they know next to nothing about, while they are sitting in front of a computer connected to the internet.  They will do ANYTHING to show you that ten seconds of internet reading equals ten years of actual lifetime experience.  For an even bigger laugh, try to say this sentence to the Interrupting Cow, “You can’t read something on the internet for ten seconds and hold a conversation with me on a level of my ten years of experience.” You will only get as far as, “You can’t read something on the internet…”  At that point the interrupting cow will interrupt you to tell you that they are offended that you have implied they don’t know how to read.  Since they interrupted, they’ll never realize that what you had to say has nothing to do with literacy, but lifetime experience in the real world.  So you end the conversation, attempting to explain that you were not done speaking so they have a skewed idea of what you were TRYING to say.  But an Interrupting Cow is never wrong, and has COMPLETE BLIND FAITH in their prophetic abilities, so you get interrupted again, while trying to explain that they should just listen, rather than interrupting.

The Interrupting Cow can not accept this and will say that you are trying to hold a conversation on YOUR terms!  There is nothing funnier than watching an Interrupting Cow pout, stomp and sputter around because by ending a conversation, you will have taken away their power of interruption.  What is an Interrupting Cow to do if it is not allowed to interrupt?

A Vicious Circle Of Incomplete Information Is An Interrupting Cow

The Grit Of The Race Transfers To The Grain Of The Film

        Old Town was the target, but without looking I shot Qualcomm Stadium right in the face.  The general atmosphere around San Diego was 101F, so all the earlier predictions of snowball fights by dinner had been handily dismissed.  These men, members of SDKA battled over scorching pavement and even hotter internal combustion engines.

A Wasp Displaying Full Mating Colors

        These creatures, boldly painted in colors of BAM and WOW grabbed pavement like American Congressmen grab ass. The San Diego Karting Assossiation (SDKA) do what they do because they love to do it, and they do it for free. They dared any mortal man to stop them, but the only mortal man present was me, and I was busy doing other things.  These 2-stroke warriors were definitely in charge.

Who Do You Think Will Win?

        Kart racing is a cross between racing a real car and pushing a grocery cart, with the obvious exclusion of the groceries.  With a gap between them slimmer than Sunday coupons these two racers tied at the Finnish border, only to remember later that the end of the race was in America, at the FINISH LINE.  They hurried back from Northern Europe and still claimed first & second place. SDKA racers know what they are doing!

Go Speed Racer, Go Speed Racer, Go Speed Racer GO!

        This is not Speed Racer, and I have no idea if this guy won or not.  Seeing them do what they do in the heat that they do it in makes it very easy to watch their cartoons, but impossible to emulate them. SDKA is very special because it bring Kart Racers from all over San Diego together.

And The Winner Is!

I think this SDKA racer either won the race or was heading toward an area that was significantly cooler that his present location.

Film Grain Makes The Spider Purr

The first thing that happened was a spider, and it happened on film instead of a digital sensor.  Shut up!  All of you!  The grain of this photo has grit and depth.  The sacrificed detail that digital promises is cast aside by the the infinite mass that film provides.

The grain from the spider above reminded me of a photograph I took back in 1972, almost two full years before I was born.

The thing was that despite being within a few feet of the chain link fence that kept a Tyrannosaurus Rex out of the populated areas of South Bay, California, my boldly colored friend here cared ONLY about his iPhone.

Really?  In 1972 after purchasing a hat with colors like this and personally selecting bracelets for BOTH wrists, the only thing of interest is what you can find on your iPhone?

After such a realization as that, you can understand I would almost miss what happened after that.  A meal on the GFG that resulted in a rare photo-op of a food and a continent.

I swear the chicken sandwich below is real.

Australia Was Consumed In California

        The spicy chicken sandwich is the best sandwich and use of chicken ever developed by humans on this planet. It was so random that I cooked an Australian chicken sandwich on my Foreman Grill, but I would have cooked this criminal populated continent in the oven too.

The Green Lynx Spider

        Of the many things that happened while I was down there, eating was one of them.  I bring this up because I am assuming that it was something I ate while down in the rabbit hole that shrank me down to the size of an ambush spider’s prey.  The abundance of honey bees, distracted this spider just long enough for me to slide down the stem of the flower and run into the underbrush of the nearby shrubbery and flower ecosystem .

Full Spectrum Lizard

        Due to my small size, I cannot judge distance for this story at all so it it should suffice to say that to open space of coarse white cement may have been a bike path or a jumbo-jet runway, and this lizard was right in the middle of it.  My physical being was so small that the pebbles next to the lizard seemed to be the size of automobiles to me.

The Thirsty Worm Gets The Burn

        I was able to hide behind the carcass  of this earthworm, which for some reason, was not in the earth because it was dead, on top of the earth.  This irony was lost on me as I sought cover behind it, while waiting for the giant chameleon death lizard to lumber away from my present location.

I managed to make my way to a cut   lumber pile that was teeming with flight capable life forms.

This fly, with a bright iridescent racing green skin gave me a ride to a witch doctor that said she would make me regular size.

I suppose that’s all I ever wanted.

Agfa Optima 400 Film Grain

When you have an inferno sunset boiling the Pacific Ocean before your very eyes, metal, plastic and glass are pointed, a shutter is released and photons from the sun strike your film.

Colored But Not Forgotten

This tidal pool crab, brightly colored and lit on his face, but with hind-quarters drenched in shadows, demonstrates one of the many quagmires of photography;  Whether or not to push the pixels in the digital darkroom.  You know the darkened, rear parts of this crustacean’s body are there, but you just can’t quite see them.  Do I make this a perfect image by pulling out those details?  Nope, not this time.  Just look at the colors on the face and claws of this sea creature! Who cares about these particular shadows anyway?

Simple Bold Colors

        Near the dinosaur cage, is the Southern end of San Diego’s Bay, the proverbial end of the line. The water goes no further than this point here. In the photo above, you are looking due South, seeing light reflected from the Southern most bit of water contained by the land of the bay. To your right is the relentless Pacific Ocean and to your left is Imperial Beach.