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Photos from my family's visit to the Watts Towers:

This took 33 years for one person, Simon Rodia, to build all by himself.

At a distance both my brother and I thought it was far less colorful than we had expected. But up close we realized it was made up of many pieces of shell, colored tiles, broken bottles, etc. Beautiful!

Really VERY amazing artwork by someone obsessed with doing something to be remembered. And here is the obsessed gentleman (an immigrant, something too often reviled these days) who contributed to the cultural scene of a poor area of Los Angeles:
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My family just got back from our annual vacation in Los Angeles where I have both family and friends...and every other year (including 2009) a conference at UCLA.

This year traveling was marginally better because we flew into Burbank airport, which is considerably better than LAX. And flying Jet Blue meant there were no stopovers. In general I have not found Jet Blue's prices competitive, but this year they were, so we tried them out.

This time we rented a Nissan Altima hybrid. It got us about 32 mpg in the city...not as good as we once got in a Prius, but a tad better than we once got in a Honda Civic hybrid. My wife liked to drive both the Prius and the Altima...but not so much the Civic in comparison.

As usual, one of the best things for me was hanging out at UCLA, a place I have hung out around since I was a young boy when my mother had an office in Bunche Hall (which we always called "The Waffle"). Bunche Hall and the sculpture garden are part of my childhood memories. South campus and the medical center are part of my grad school memories. And the whole campus is, to me, kind of the Platonic form of a university campus. But I wrote about that last time we had a conference at UCLA.
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My blogging will be at a minimum for at least two weeks. My family is going off to visit my family in California! My son has been counting the days til we leave since August 1st. We are half packed and ready to leave tomorrow. Tomorrow will be airline hell, but by Tuesday I will be happily settling into my California relaxation mode.

I used to love flying. Now, if it wasn't for my family living across the country, I'd avoid flying like the plague. Between Homeland Security's ineffectual but degradingly insulting measures and the airline's incresasingly petty fees and service cuts, the fun has been totally sucked out of air travel, leaving nothing but a husk of misery, anger and bitterness. I used to travel with a smile and just enjoy the ride. Now I fly with a tight lipped sense of dread. Thank you very much airlines. You suck and your suckiness gets worse year after year.
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ZOOOOOOOOOOOMG!

I have been waiting for this documentary since I saw Morgan Spurlock at SXSW last year, when he was there presenting What Would Jesus Buy?, a documentary about Reverend Billy & The Church of Stop Shopping's crusade against conspicuous consumption.

This from Apple.com's trailer park :

If Morgan Spurlock has learned anything from over 30 years of movie-watching, it’s that if the world needs saving, it’s best done by one lone man willing to face danger head on to take it down, action hero style. So, with no military experience, knowledge or expertise, he sets off to do what the CIA, FBI and countless bounty hunters have failed to do: find the world’s most wanted man. Why take on such a seemingly impossible mission? Simple-he wants to make the world safe for his soon to be born child. But before he finds Osama bin Laden, he first needs to learn where he came from, what makes him tick, and most importantly, what exactly created bin Laden to begin with.
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Usually when my family travels to California we stay with my friends and family. But over the last winter break, my wife, son and I took an unexpected trip to California due to an illness in my family. Due to the short notice, we stayed in a motel rather than with friends. Which allows me to do a review for my readers who might travel to Los Angeles.

We flew in on Christmas day. Late. We got our luggage and rented our biodiesel Jetta and drove to our hotel.

I picked out hotel based only on proximity to my mother (who lives near the LA County Museum of Art and La Brea Tar Pits) and low cost. Looking through a bunch of hotels, mostly too expensive or too far from my mother (we could have gotten a GREAT deal on a room in Little Tokyo in a NICE hotel, but it was too far). But one was a perfect balance of cheap and close to where we needed to be in the Mid-Wlishire district: The Beverly-Laurel Moter Hotel on the corner of Beverly Blvd and Laurel.

When my wife looked into it, we got worried. It was billed as a "hipster" place where young, cool people stay and party all night. Well...we are not so young, not hipsters and have a three year old. I was worried that we would have trouble sleeping and would spoil the hipster image of the hotel. I mean a nerdy family with a three year old doesn't exactly make for "cool."
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