The Bus Bench

L.A. Unplugged

It is everywhere, but like a snake it is nowhere: copper. Most folk in Los Angeles drive, and to you I state: look at the berm of the bridge the next time you are on a Freeway. The iron grates that allow DWP to enter the circuit have most likely been breached, and there is a damn good chance that the cut copper wires are sticking out from the respective cement hole. Moreover, in some places the wire is jutting out in fashion that suggests that the perpetrator merely leaned over the cement divider and cut the wire as far down as possible after quickly tearing off one side of the plate.

 

Any engineer can divulge the immense municipal cost of such widespread theft. It is within feet—in many instance, INCHES—to thousands of Angelinos daily, yet the Los Angeles City Council is whinging about deficits and all manor of crap that is obvious. I could make a living documenting the daily copper transgressions—I walk most everywhere, and I walk A LOT, what with my one-metre, New York-driven stride, and one of my guns is a camera. 

The following video—shot but a few feet from the government building on Los Angeles and 5th Street—exhibits evidence that government officials have apparently visited this site (unless there is a band of transit vandals with spare rolls of yellow "caution" tape) yet done nothing more than mitigate potential liability. I cannot state that, despite the dramatic loss obvious from Freeway street lighting copper theft, nearly as much has been done.

-BusTard

Easter Egg Hunt for New Transit Ways

Last Wednesday, Pam from Santa Monica wasted our hump-day lunchtimes with pleas to give unpaid ideas about transit funding (while those wasting the money in the first place were content to sit back and plan for more ways to waste public monies, eh, Roger Snoble?) even as she granted we little people naught but canned answers and ludicrous excuses. Thanks, Pam; feel free to stay in Santa Monica next time, seeing as you have too little time to offer Metro between your SM city council agenda and the occasional month in Australia.

Anyhow, this weekend I were invited to pop over and help hunt Easter Eggs. being a person of considerable impatience, I elected to accept the invitation as well as introduce a scheme to just get through with it. (I found out that the kids—and especially their parents!—did not shar emy appreciation for using a backhoe to find easter Eggs.) Along the way, I realised that, just as it will be an emergency thoroughfare for military ground forces should a county-wide crisis occur that renders inoperable the infrastructure, the L.A. River is a viable alternative to the Freeways as well as where the trains do not run and the buses no longer run.

 

(Cheers to Browne for being on-hand with the little cam!)

Nature Trumps: Jay Babcock fondles FoLAR

The blog Nature Trumps, owned by Jay Babcock (and frequently stated) who also publishes the typographical nightmare of a music magazine Arthur, is one that that hypocritically states, "Informed discussion is the only discussion that matters." Yet Jay appears to believe his readers too stupid to comprehend for themselves whether an opposing point of view is worthy of being informative. Any comments he considers not agreeable with his blinkered point of view is almost instantly deleted. The resultant gaps should prompt folk to wonder why other comments refer to statements that no longer exist; yet there are no such queries. Perhaps Mr. Babcock is correct in assuming the double-digit IQ of his readers.

One will find that we at The Bus Bench have the ability to withstand most any attack, a fact made obvious by the numerous comments of one of Mr. Babcocks most tireless cheerleaders, Laurie Avocado. A cursory glance on the Bus Bench and Nature Trumps blogs will reveal many comments by Ms. Avocado.

Having been intimately involved with FoLAR (owing to my fifteen years of publishing an internationally distributed underground music magazine for fifteen years), I am privy to what is going on with the Meeting of Styles fiasco that has since pitted Gloria Molina against Lewis MacAdams. Yet my uniquely informative comments—I have recently talked to Mr. MacAdams personally—are deleted. Mr. Babcock apparently has neither the brains nor backbone to answer my questions, and he keeps spouting all manner of melodramatic crap about the murals that Molina righteously painted over.

So let me be brief in stating that the argument about authority granted to perform the Meeting of Styles was apparently not the correct one. (This seems to be a big deal to those whose entire existence is based on seeking permission.) If Molina has the DWP and the courts to back her, well, that should make it clear that going over her head to federal levels (such as the Corp of Engineers) was the first of two strikes.

The second strike was the cultural ignorance and hypocrisy. Apparently Molina is tired of seeing women as just another collective fucking hole, especially done up by people who can afford to waste $700.00 on painting hippie-flavoured, semi-nude women on the side of a god-damned glorified ditch.

So, Jay, why not you and your friends gather up some spray paint from Crewest, get permission from Eric Garcetti or Tom LaBonge, and then come over to my Boyle Heights building and try painting some crap on it. Permission or no, I will help you understand the definition of Darwinism that your little blog implies. It was not so many years ago that I had to deal with my many readers and detractors in person; that was before the Internet allowed folk to say big shit behind while hiding behind their little screens.

Here are two of the three deleted comments. (I was naive to not make a PDF of the first one, as I imagined Mr. Babcock to not be such a duplicitous jerk. Once it happened to me—as well as my colleague, Ms. Browne—I started documenting the inevitable.)

1-A Download shame_on_gloria_molina_for_attacking_folar_over_legal_murals_in_the_river_nature_trumps__an_l.A. River Blog compiled by Jay Babcock.pdf (see page 4)
1-B How this page appears now.

2-A Download shame_on_antiart_bullies_molina_and_knabe_nature_trumps__an_l.A. River Blog compiled by Jay Babcock.pdf (see page 4)
2-B How this page appears now.

Whitewash and censorship, indeed.

-BusTard