The Bus Bench

Lost pet collection...

. . . but it the day after the Day of The Dead, so what do you expect?

To honour the lost of Los Feliz, Silver lake and the surrounding area, I had the Busbenchers surrender their favourite "Lost. . . " flyers lest they were to have spent today posting their own "Lost: left limb and two toes" flyers. (There is nothing like a bottle of scotch in one hand and a machete in the other, to illustrate the advantage of two well-connected hands!)

Have a gander at our best bits of the collection collected over the last 15 months.

The well-known, first in a series of three:

One wonders about this bird. . .

. . . and why there is no photo for the cat, the flyer of which were found on the other side of the post:

There is the muppet-dog whose mug is done via a colour inkjet even as his naughty bits are no longer so colourful:

Only a Cat lover could love this bastard:

What in any hell could be in this case, that curries so much cause for alarm? (Seeing as it is eLAy, perhaps it is the soul of some lost Tarrantino fan whose own neck bears a strange Band-Aid?)

And just in case one is looking to be economical in the pursuit of photography work, there is this poor lost pup whose truancy might well pave they way for a new puppy:

But back to the drawing board. We are sure this is a schoolteacher, owing to the bottom right-hand date:

There is that which will be sent up the river:

and the same possible loss, albeit in spanish:

The simply lost:

and the largest of all (with a scale provided by my own bigfoot big-assed foot, which means the poster is nearly three feet in height), is this odd bit, which was no doubt done by a teacher: it were mounted on Foamcore, made ready by a strap from a biycllce helmet, and found in droves throughout the area immediately south of Los Feliz between Vermont and Hillhurst:

An inadvertent rehearsal for Dia De Los Muertas

'Nuff stated:


Osk2007
Video sent by shametrainla

Smart Cards are Not Stacked in THIS Deck!

I wish I could bitch about New York possessing the ability to best Los Angeles with respect to bus tokens and dollars bills that cost more time to be shoved into token boxes that work no more than most of the time. Unfortunately, Culver City, Montebello and Santa Monica municipal bus lines run regularly through the otherwise congested colon of downtown and all its sixty, seventy, shitty, et al, suburbs in search of a city, by way of a magnetically enhanced paper card that puts anything that Tony V., Roger Snoble, Pam O’Connor, Tome Horne, Wendy Greuel and all the other city schmucks could manage outside of tax schemes by way of the DWP, to nothing but shame.
“Less filling!” yell some. And that is about it.

If the massive transit systems of New York and New Jersey—as well as PATH; for those of you overwhelming hordes of idiots stuck in southern California, lemme state one thing: you are on-line looking this up, so shaddup and look up PATH, ya morons!—can function in the midst of floods, huddling of masses and the aftermath of mere days after mass attacks that no one wanting to waste his (or her) time bombing this shallow, shiny, shitty “capitol” of California would dare waste, why not can the Los Angeles Metro adopt the smart card fare box? Was all the money wasted with that giant Italian marble building at One Gateway Plaza? Did Dick Riordan drink it away or pay off his third DUI? Did Gil Garcetti fund all his photography books with it? How many hookers might Tony V have spent with what should have been slits into which we little people were stuffing $1 bills?

And now we have to wonder just how much money was wasted studying how much money was wasted.

Well, like italian shoes done in a british fashion, we here at the island named BusBench are offering a Brooklyn-flavoured bit of boot-leather in response to all the Los Angeles crap about overpaid bureaucrats’ as well as other “elected” cretins’ whingeing of lost fares.

Here are our suggestions to make sure the overpaid dolts that run your shitty system of so-called public transportation get well paid, and that they are not eventually forced to suck the green-tea and single-malt scotch-flavoured shit out of my ass:

1)    Do not enter the subways and walk past the “No entry without a ticket past this point” with the intent of walking topside after receiving that rare citation, to spend $4.00 in tokens to get a day pass and claim one were not given time to produce one’s day pass, that one might proclaim possession of valid fare upon showing up in court to contest the "violation";

2)    Do not watch for the LA sheriffs nor the silly little white-shirted youths what wander in groups reminiscent in number of The Three Stooges, that one might avoid a citation by exiting the car as the citation-writers board, or switch cars as the sheriffs come aboard, or ride to the next stop to avoid those proclaiming to protect you, or to get on a train opposite the platform as whatever diverse-coloured approaches.

3)    Do not listen at key points such as Wilshire/Western, Wilshire/Vermont, Westlake, 7th/Fig, Hollywood/Vine, 103rd or anywhere else the Gold Line does not go, for sheriffs handing out $250.00 citations, that one might retreat to a hard marble seat to await the next train on an empty platform bereft of a bodega and long-awaiting a train.

4)    Do not be black. The vast majority of sheriffs are on the Blue Line as well as on the pertinent (read: nigger-infested) parts of the Red Line. (This might seem outrageous, but a 30-year veteran and consultant of the MTA is on the record about this. Where? one might ask. Just wait: TheBusBench.com will be releasing it in time for Thanksgiving, and the conversation will be thoroughly sourced.)

5) Be sure to trust that the "honor system" of the MTA. It is for your good no matter how frequently the very people who mouth such empty words state it is good for you. From current mayor Tony V (is "V" for Vapid?), who has never fucked anyone other than his wife; to Dick Alarcon, who has never lied about possibly personally granting his Shadow Hills-based girlfriend a great deal in housing; from Tom LaBonge, who god had hoped would have burned alive in the very Griffith Park he purports to love; to Eric Garcetti, who has yet to reap the rewards of secrets certain Los Feliz folk know; to Wendy Greuel, who heads up a municipal transportation board even as she is in the district of the two worst buses within a truly dreadful public transportation system (Is this India?! Oh, no—it's just fuckin' Tujunga. . . ); to, well, my asshole.

I believe that the company is all the same.

Happy Halloween.

-BusTard

Nostalgia for Fucking. Los Feliz. 10/29

I was reading a review of the movie Saw IV (10/25 Hollywood Independent, Arin Mikailian) and in it they referred to the dead as living impaired. We at Shametrain no longer go to the movies anymore. The movie studios have proven that they think we’re all morons, that’s why we do blind movie reviews. We don't need to see a movie in order to review it. What’s the point of spending ten to twelve dollars for some rehash bullshit? There hasn’t been a decent movie made since 1995 and if I took out the nostalgic aspect of my teen years and was completely honest probably it would be more like 1978.

Now I understand that Arin was trying to be funny in referring to the dead as living impaired, but as of late I notice everyone has gotten awfully tenderhearted.  Are we such delicate flowers can we not say dead anymore? Passed away was bad enough, but now we’ve moved on to living impaired.

It seems that the whole point of political correctness was to make Stepford Wives from the 1950s happy, because PC didn’t seem to stop racist comments on the web which are rampant or even sexist comments, but PC does seemed to have stopped any critical thought at all.

Personally I’d be ok with America bringing back racial slurs if everyone would be allowed to think again, if people were allowed to be negative,  if people were allowed to be upset, if people were allowed to tell someone to fuck off if they are being a fuck wit.

Why do we have to politely say that someone’s a dick or incompetent or artless? Is everyone five years old now? Do words hurt that badly and should we be shielding uptight 30 and 40 year olds from those words?

There used to be a resistance. There used to be people who said, “That’s a bad idea and that shit is dumb.” And those people used to be respected and not viewed as wackos. I miss people with non-atrophied brains that have something to do other than sell a product.

I miss real life. I miss anger and people getting pissed at the wrong time. I miss bars where people with no money came in and drank the empties. I’m sick of the false politeness that is coating the media, Los Angeles and America and turning us all into five years olds who want our butts to be wiped by mommy.

It’s offensive to say dead, fuck, shit, bitch, shut up or for two adults to perform sexual acts on camera, but not offensive to walk right over a homeless guy dying in the street?

What kind of fucked up place do we live in?

How can we fight anything if we start crying when someone forgets to the use the proper euphemism for dead and we deal with our social problems by just crossing to the other side of the street?

Browne

The painting is courtesy of Egon Schiele it is entitled Semi-Nude Girl, Reclining 1911

The Fishing Fish

Cannibalism is not just for humans, y'know!


FishingFish
Video sent by shametrainla

Lofties Complain about Alcohol at Art Walk

OK, so it is not so much the alcohol at the downtown Art Walks about which the lofties are bitching, but that they are no longer safe in wandering from gallery to "gallery" with wine in hand.

It was not so long that I recall people at the Poet's Walk—which usta to be in conjunction with the downtown Art Walks—talking about how LAPD would roust the undesirables (i.e., non-Art Walk-looking walkers) even as less-scruffy looking folk, with plastic cups of wine openly in hand, watched from a close proximity. There was one incident in particular, whereby a sidewalk hair cutter did so while a crowd of alcohol-imbibing art walkers watched, and not ten feet away, the LAPD rolled up on some guy who was drinking from a brown bag. For some reason, no one seemed to care of the hypocrisy.

Too few seemed to understand that, once the undesirables were all gone, the LAPD would look elsewhere to justify their existence. (Surely one does not believe that ANY police force will do their job so well as to eliminate the need for a constabulary presence, hm?) Now, sure as shit, the inevitable has occurred.

In the 26 Oct-01 Nov edition of Los Angeles Garment and Citizen, Richard Coulter complains of a recent vice sting:

Overwrought About Undercover Cops at Art Walk

I watched in disgust as undercover Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers entrapped people holding cups of wine in front of galleries during [the recent Downtown Artwalk]. Having a glass of wine and going from gallery to gallery has been the way for years. Now, like mercenaries on a bug hunt, these guys infiltrate and sting.

They should walk through the crowd in uniform and tell people to go inside or they'll be ticketed. That would be the fair way to change the situation.

They're going to kill the goose before the city gets its golden egg. If I were a developer I'd be getting very nervous about how I was going to fill the glut of over- priced soft lofts that are supposed to feed the new entertainment district Downtown.

If anybody is considering buying into these places because they think there's a new burgeoning scene of fun developing, they might want to think again.

These lap dogs chasing somebody with a cup of wine and a stick of brie should think about the bigger picture.

The city should cancel all those tickets, and apologize for these over-zealous tactics.

Richard Coulter
Downtown

Well, Richard—and everyone else who thought that this new development would never occur, let us cite the following bit of poesy:

First they came for the Communists,
  and I didn’t speak up,
    because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
  and I didn’t speak up,
    because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
  and I didn’t speak up,
    because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
  and by that time there was no one
    left to speak up for me.

-Rev. Martin Niemöller, 1945

Granted, I am sure there will be complaints over the analogy. But I contend that a Zen fashion should be applied: the attitude of those who desire control over others will do so by any and all means.

-BusTard