Recently in Irony Category

It's official — that square of Van Nuys targeted by the Part of Sherman Oaks (big P, big S, big 0) movement for inclusion within the community boundaries of Sherman Oaks is now just that: part of Sherman Oaks (small p, big S, big O).

Read about it at Dailynews.com, and don't miss the report by Zach Behrens of LAist (and not-un-conflictedly of the Sherman Oaks Neighborhood Council) for the play-by-play.

Most importantly, do I rename this blog? Do I archive it and start anew?

I welcome your suggestions.

After years of living on what by all appearances is one of the most pothole-pocked streets in the city of Los Angeles (those Mars lander photos look a bit too familiar), the L.A. street repair crew is rolling the heavy equipment up and down our little country road in Van Nuys.

Sure the entire house feels as if it's going to be shaken into a little pile of 1940s wood and plaster, but it's totally worth it.

I had a long, rambling stream-of-consciousness post that I'm sure you all would've loved, but just as I was uploading the art (thanks for the pictures, Ilene, who blogs about it here), the $0 Laptop gave up on me, Movable Type didn't autosave more than three lines, and I basically got sent back to the first square in Shoots and Ladders.

But the long and short of it is that our bombed-out-looking excuse for a residential street is getting the once over twice from the City of Los Angeles.

And while I'm in the mood, I'd like to thank, in Precise Modern Lovers Order, our neighbor Laura for keeping all the relevant feet to the fire these past many years, Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, whose tootsies must be pretty damn toasty by now, and my pothole-filling buddy A-Dog, aka Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, frequent visitor to the Daily News newsroom, who, whether he did anything or not, get his due because he's, by all appearances, a complicated man who will risk his neck for his brother man and all that.

For the foreseeable future, Van Nuys loves you all, baby.

I'm not expecting Barack Obama to return to Van Nuys anytime soon, but if he wants to help me rewire my automatic sprinklers after the rain stops, I won't turn him away. Same offer goes to Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, too. Since I'm registered as nonpartisan, I can vote in the Democratic presidential primary but not the Republican one, so the various Republicans have nothing to gain by helping me.

I've only got two sprinkler valves on the controller, and I thought the controller itself is dead. Turns out it's putting out voltage, but said voltage is only getting to one of the two automatic valves (I've got the metal ones -- no wimpy plastic for my front yard). The controller is in the back of the house -- sandwiched between two upside-down plastic buckets to keep it out of the rain (real high-tech), and the wires run under the house to the front yard.

But now, with the deluge of rain slated to continue, I might not have to use the sprinklers for months ... so maybe we'll just go to Starbucks and pound double espressos ...

Or so says the NY Times Magazine (if you don't have a NY Times sign-on, just go get one already -- it's worth it).

Yep, volumes 1 and 2 of "Sesame Street: Old School" are out, and it turns out that the Street was a much more gritty place back in the last year of the '60s and the early '70s:

The show rolled, and the sweet trauma came flooding back. What they did to us was hard-core. Man, was that scene rough. The masonry on the dingy brownstone at 123 Sesame Street, where the closeted Ernie and Bert shared a dismal basement apartment, was deteriorating. Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist.

Nothing in the children’s entertainment of today, candy-colored animation hopped up on computer tricks, can prepare young or old for this frightening glimpse of simpler times. Back then — as on the very first episode, which aired on PBS Nov. 10, 1969 — a pretty, lonely girl like Sally might find herself befriended by an older male stranger who held her hand and took her home. Granted, Gordon just wanted Sally to meet his wife and have some milk and cookies, but . . . well, he could have wanted anything. As it was, he fed her milk and cookies. The milk looks dangerously whole.

Yeah, those were the days, eh? Our Lulu (she's 4) gets freaked out at the cyclone that knocks on Elmo's door at the end of the red furball's "Weather" episode, so go figure. She might like this, though:

The biggest surprise of the early episodes is the rural — agrarian, even — sequences. Episode 1 spends a stoned time warp in the company of backlighted cows, while they mill around and chew cud. This pastoral scene rolls to an industrial voiceover explaining dairy farms, and the sleepy chords of Joe Raposo’s aimless masterpiece, “Hey Cow, I See You Now.” Chewing the grass so green/Making the milk/Waiting for milking time/Waiting for giving time/Mmmmm.