January 2007 Archives

Movable Type ate my homework, so my paen to Mack Reed, creator and moving force of L.A. Voice, is over at 2,000 Days.

On L.A. Voice, Mack announces that he's leaving the day-to-day world of keeping a busy public L.A. blog for his other work, which pays considerably better. I can't begrudge him that. Even popular blogs have trouble turning a buck, and it's not the gold mine that some imagine it to be. But Mack has thrown himself into what has been, from my perspective, a most worthwhile project over these past years, and I both wish him the best as well as hope that somebody takes up his offer to keep L.A. Voice going.

I can think of a few people who might be right for the task.

At this point, I want to thank Mack for keeping me in his blogroll for so long and for linking to me on occasion. But most of all, thanks for your eagerness, passion and commitment to telling L.A.'s story.

It's been either freezing (as in 32 degrees or under) the past few mornings. On Sunday the puddles that remain from the dry weather on our pockmarked street were frozen solid. That's novel.

I had moved all the impatiens to the front porch the night before, and they still look pretty bad. All the vinca went, too. I had no reason to expect tomato plants to last this long, but I had two left, and they're history now. A few freaky succulents are also pretty droopy -- I don't know if they'll make it, but they were free, so easy come, easy go.

The pansies are hanging in there -- not looking great, but maybe they'll rally. I haven't exactly been keeping up with the watering, either. My fruitless-avocado tree looks like hell. Same for the Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow plants (I'm sure they have a real name, but damned if I know what it is).

It's been cold just about every morning. At least my car starts. Thanks, Ford, for my new fuel pump, a recall repair on the Focus.

(Apologies to "30 Rock," from which I stole this title)

My gripping tale of jury duty is coming out in small, bite-sized chunks, and it's back-dated so as to appear in the proper order, so head on over to Come on Feel the Nuys for the minute-by-minute account of what it's like to be in the pool ... the ... jury ... pool.

8:50 a.m.

The Santa Monica jury room has a separate TV room (no snoring in there, says jury-room doyenne Kelly -- you will be removed).

There's a TV room with a DVD player. There's a list of five approved movies. No movies, just a list of "approved" movies. You can bring your own DVD in. As long as it's on the list of approved movies. I didn't ask.

At noon, the soaps start, and the channel is chosen by a vote, Kelly says.

There are magazines.

"We have some classics from the 1980s -- National Geographic," Kelly says.

They tried to expunge all issues featuring ... I'll say it: bare boobies.

"If you see any nudity, please inform me," she says.

8:48 a.m.

Everybody knows there's a movie during "juror orientation." The lights were dimmed, the movie -- titled "Ideals Made Real: The Jury" -- was shown. I heard only these words:

"The coffee will be ready after the movie."

After the closing credits rolled, I woke up. Kelly told us she broke her foot recently and said not to "give her any sass" over how she was walking in heels. I have to assume she was talking to the women in the room.

"Beauty is pain, right?" she adds.

Other things we learned about Kelly: She wasn't familiar with Santa Monica when she was initially assigned to the court and spent the first week lunching at Jack in the Box. Thereafter, she had a thing with compulsive shopping. Since then, she's expanded her lunching horizons and cut back on the shopping.

Then it was time for some jury business:

"If you borrowed a pen (to fill out the juror forms), we would like it back. Yesterday we had 14 pens. We got two back.

"I'd like to say the pens buzz when you leave the room, but they do not."

Somebody's going to make a fortune when they invent the Security Pen. Actually, all you'd have to do is put one of those magnetized security tags they use in library books into the pen -- and then lock up the perps. If you're reading this post, please forget about this killer idea, as I'm going to use it myself and rake in the cash.

8:20 a.m.

Jury-room doyenne Lilly Yu walks up to the podium. THE PODIUM, I say.

She tells us that Judge Conner of Dept. I will be speaking to us at 8:45.

Judge Connor does just that. She is an attractive, blond, 50-ish woman. She tells us she has a 23-year-old son. In an effort to placate us, she says Ken Starr was in the jury pool last week. Was he a special prosecutor? Whatever his title was, he had Clinton's ass in a sling over the Monica Lewinsky affair. He didn't get on a jury. Big surprise.

Judge Connor has been on the bench for 20 years. She says that the goal of the new "one day, one trial" jury duty system is to call each person once every four years. Currently they hit up every person once every two. Seems about right to me. And you could get a blizzard of summonses, since the county dips into both the voter registration and DMV records.

She puts in this plug for serving on a jury:

"The human drama is better than anything you'll see on TV."

Does that include "Grey's Anatomy"? I didn't ask, because she could probably order my arrest right there.

She then went into a long story about a carjacking trial in which the jurors themselves "cracked" the case. I wonder if Dick Wolf has optioned that one for "Law & Order."

8:10 a.m.

Don't bring your board. Your motherboard, I mean.

I don't know if I should expect free Internet from the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. I do know they don't have it.

You can request a special cable (to connect to a multi-line phone jack that looks like Ethernet but most assuredly is not. It's dialup.

There are a few computers there that supposedly have a broadband connection. But it costs. $5 per hour, or $12 for the whole day. Wi-Fi? They're working on it, says jury-room doyenne Lilly Yu. (I'm sure she has an official title, but I prefer doyenne, and I think she would, too.) Lilly says it's possible to pick up free Wi-Fi from the nearby Doubletree Hotel, and some in the pool are doing just that, intermittent though it is.

But there is free coffee. Ms. Yu informs us that the pot was purchased during Juror Appreciation Week and has been kept since then for juror use. The judges and other court employees kick in for the coffee. Guess they want us to be awake.

8:05 a.m
It's quiet in the third-floor jury assembly room at the Santa Monica courthouse. The panoramic window to the west used to offer an ocean view to die for, we're told by the jury-room clerk. The Rand Corp's new multi-story office building took care of most of it, but there are still snatches of deep blue on either side.

I sit at a table with a 20-something, business-ready guy. His copy of the newly redesigned Wall Street Journal gave him away. Later we learn he's a new UCLA graduate starting an investment-banking job in July. He's got six months to do nothing but look businesslike and read the Journal. Think he gets on the jury?

A 40-ish, put-together woman, and by "put together," I mean black pantsuit and $100 haircut tries to get Internet into her 12-inch Titanium Powerbook. Somebody else has a 14-inch Titanium Powerbook, but there’s something so right about the smaller one. Again I digress. I learn later that black-pantsuit woman is a free-lance producer of some sort. Many of the potential jurors are freelancers of one kind or another. Many are from the Santa Monica/Pacific Palisades/Marina Del Ray/West Los Angeles area, but not all. How do I know? Once our names were called and we all went to court for the jury-selection process known as voir dire, the judge made all say their names, city of residence, occupation and then some. I heard a Calabasas, but nothing as far afield as Van Nuys. Guess I’m one lucky bastard.

It was easier to traverse the Delaware:

7:05 a.m.
On my way out, I see a line at the southeast Van Nuys Starbucks.

Mental note: Buy Starbucks stock.

Second mental note: Get basket with which to catch money falling from sky with which to buy Starbucks stock.

7:35 a.m.
It takes a half-hour just to get from Van Nuys and Burbank boulevards to Sepulveda and Ventura boulevards. Now I remember what I hated most about working over the hill at then TV-trade magazine Electronic Media. Just getting across Ventura remains one hard slog.

I stop in front of the Sherman Oaks Galleria. I already knew the earthquake-damaged office building just south of the 101 has finally been leveled. Only took almost 13 years.

But at the Galleria itself, workers were already busy redoing the interior of what used to be Tower Records. Must mean there's a new tenant. Wonder who it is. Mr. Sherman Oaks will know.

I took Sepulveda the whole way. The 405 was OK, but I didn't want to risk it. I had "Morning Edition" to prep me on Bush's Iraq-surge speech. Bad timing for him, what with the new Congress flexing its voter-mandated muscle.

I meant to turn on Sunset for my customary traffic-avoiding route to Santa Monica. I missed it. Wilshire was OK, and I made it in just about an hour.

(The next day, I learn that to go from Sepulveda to Sunset, you need to somehow take Church Lane.)

The alarm rang at 6. That's a.m., people. None of us had slept much. My 2-month cold seems about 98 percent over. Our little girl has been coughing in her sleep -- IN HER SLEEP.

I got my clothes in the dark. Everything goes with jeans. I spent a lot of time in the bathroom. I'll spare you the details.

I packed breakfast and what could've passed for lunch. A healthy lunch. The body begs no cravings at 6:45 a.m.

With the housepainting odyssey continuing, Ilene put the final coat on the front door the day before. A deep, dark green. (Ever see a shallow, dark green? Me neither.) It's a nice contrast with the deep, bright yellow we're doing the rest of the house in. Slowly. Ever paint an old house yourself? I digress.

I'm due at 8 a.m. tomorrow in Santa Monica for my first day of jury duty. They said something on the recording about there being Internet and computers there. I will blog when I can. Among the instructions for jurors: no swimwear.

Guess I'll have to rethink my wardrobe.

Eight o'clock in the morning. Over the hill. Yep, that's me, all right. Over the hill.

Parking is at the Santa Monica Civic. Let's go over all the concerts I remember seeing at the Santa Monica Civic.

Marilyn Manson. L7 opened.

That's all I can remember.

The last time I was on jury duty, it was in Burbank. I went in at 8:30 a.m., I was out by 10. It was a civil case about a fallen tree. I lived under just such a tree. That was enough to get me excused.

Before that, I "served" in good ol' Van Nuys. That was before one day/one trial, and I sat in the jury room for four days before getting on the jury. The case took the whole next week. For a civil case. The plaintiff should've laid a cool $100 on each of us for every day we were there. The defense could've matched it. In that case, the plaintiff "won," in that we ruled for him, but we thought his injury claims were, shall we say, a tad overblown. We didn't award much money. He would've been better off settling.

Here that, people? We jurors are pissed off. If your case ain't a good one, you're wasting our time. Your lawyer stands to make big money. We don't. There probably isn't even free coffee.

Still, I do understand and agree with the "civic duty" argument, and the one-day/one trial policy makes it palatable, even understandable to get called -- even every year. If you can be in and out in a day, for the most part, it's worth spreading the pain around.

In other matters, I haven't decided ... This Old Mac, or Palm Tungsten E? One weighs 9 pounds. The other 6 ounces. One has WiFi, the other ... doesn't. Just the ability to hot-sync at a time to be named later.

Anyway, I've got CES: Woodland Hills to blog about. It's my own personal Consumer Electronics Show, except that it took place entirely within the confines of Woodland Hills. With ... an ... audience ... of ... ONE.

And was it pretty. No. It was not pretty.

On the second day of jury duty, the county said to me ... call again tomorrow.

I'm beginning to think jury duty's all right.

So far, both days I've called before 5 p.m. (instead of 6) and gotten the word that I was not needed until the following day.

It's the Friday before my first day of jury duty. I called the automated number. Call back Monday. One day down, four to go. Will I be heading out to Main Street in Santa Monica to be a potential juror? I won't know until Monday evening.

I will be blogging the experience, using the Palm handheld as my notebook. (I've been brushing up on my Graffiti 2 stylus-on-screen writing in anticipation.)