Film Signs:

So, if you're in LA, it's not long before you'll see a yellow sign with some cryptic-looking words or letters and an arrow, or occasionally less cryptic ones that say things like "Trucks" or "Base Camp." These are signs for film sets, and here's some codes I've seen around:

APT 23 - "Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23" (Pilot)
B & B - ??
CASTLE - Castle. They aren't very subtle.
CM - Criminal Minds
CM SSP - Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior
CSI:NY* - They go one further than Castle and slap their logo on it.
J EDGAR*- "J. Edgar" (movie w/ Leonardo DiCaprio)
LOLA* Law & Order: LA
N-LA - NCIS: LA
NT - ??
RABBIT - ??
TRUE* - True Blood
TW* (Red on white) - Torchwood: Miracle Day
VOICE* - The Voice




A few more that I've heard of:
BAD WOLF - Rumor has it, this was the former name on the signs for Torchwood. However, since I can't imagine a better way to get every Whovian in a 10-mile radius to investigate something than slapping up signs that say "Bad Wolf" with an arrow on them all over the place, it's understandable why they may have changed this.
ARTEMIS - The Hunger Games, in a much better naming decision.
GROUP HUG - The Avengers movie.

*Confirmed through various interesting incidents.

Always carry your camera in LA.

As luck would have it, my final exams all fell on the first two days of finals week, leaving me with nearly two weeks of lovely 70+ degree weather and sunshine and nothing to do but explore LA.

The first day was Wednesday. This was the day that my brother had convinced me to download Minecraft, since I had recently needed to replace my laptop and the wonderful person at the Apple store forgot to tell me that Civilization V wouldn't run on their laptops when I bought it, so I needed a game, and Minecraft was only $20...

Let me say, it's some of the best $20 I've ever spent. That game is addicting. You've got a world made out of blocks of various types - ie, wood, dirt, store, various ores, trees, and a few animals - and you can take these blocks and build anything your heart desires. It got even better when I started playing on my brother's server, which had the misfortune of having snow and ice everywhere, and he eventually gave me "op privileges", which means I can give myself anything I want instead of having to go out and spend days collecting it. I didn't get anything spectacular done this first week, but here's one of my recent endeavours:



Yes, that's the TARDIS. I'm not going to bore you with the game details (unless you want them) but yes, it does contain a swimming pool and a library inside. For a sense of scale, a single minecraft "block" is the equivalent of 1 cubic meter in the game world.

The next day, it was St. Patrick's Day, which meant that the Young Dubliners were having a free concert in Pershing Square. I invited my friend Alex and his girlfriend Laura, who were visiting in town, and we sat on a blanket and drank Coke from glass bottles and generally enjoyed ourselves.

Oh, and the stage was made of palm trees.



Afterwards, there was a free exhibition of costumes from the "oustanding filsm of 2010" at FIDM, which was only blocks away. Since we were all movie fans, we headed there, and got to see costumes from films including Clash of the Titans, Alice in Wonderland, Inception, Burlesque, The Young Victoria, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and more. Unfortunately, photography wasn't allowed, so I have no amazing photos to illustrate this with.

Then, that weekend, I went to Long Beach to whale watch and visit The Aquarium of the Pacific. Whale-watching was a resounding success, as we saw at least six whales, including a mother and a calf, and a pair that was apparently mating, not to mention hundreds of dolphins, some seals, and a bunch of sea lions, all with adorable babies.

Here are some sea lions sitting on a bouy:



There were many interesting things in the aquarium, which I couldn't all mention here so I will put them on Facebook instead, but among them was a giant fish, the ironically named "BP Sea Otter Habitat", some truly unusual-looking sharks, a tank full of clownfish and blue tang that was being monopolized by some asshole couple who had no idea of the difference between "professional studio for baby pictures" and "public aquarium on a Saturday afternoon", and many tanks full of brightly colored fish. I didn't look at the photos until now, and am quite surprised at how well they came out, given I basically own a glorified point-and-shoot digital camera.



At some point after that, I was just around the corner from my house when I saw some people filming a driving scene. Fortunately, I had my camera in my backpack, so if you've ever wondered about this but were too lazy to watch the DVD extras, here it is:



Later that week, I went to the natural history museum, saw a lama which I photographed for Jocelyn and tried to guess if the bones in the anthropology section were real or replicas before looking at the placards, went to the science center (the air and space part was disappointingly closed down for their not-so-disappointing arrival of the space shuttle Endeavour at some time in the future!), I saw a memorial to Liz Taylor on her star on Hollywood blvd, saw a huge pro-union (mostly, there were also people demonstrating for education reform, immigrant's rights, for both sides of action or inaction in Libya, and even protesting against SB 1070 from Arizona) that included a group of Native Americans dancing at the back - and it was awesome to see how different they were from the Iroquois where I grew up.

Then it was the weekend again. I went looking for showtimes for Sucker Punch on Google, and saw that Star Trek IV, more popularly known as "the one with the whales" or "The one where Spock tries to blend in in the 80's", was playing at a theater in Hollywood, and decided that I'd go since a student ticket was only $9.

Then, as the lights were about to go down, people were talking and it was all "blah blah blah thank this person and that organization and this person and Walter Koenig who will be joining us..." and at that point it was all I could to do not scream "WHAT?!?!" in the theater. Sure enough, Walter Koenig, aka Mr. Pavel Chekov, was there, taking audience questions and telling us funny stories. Things we learned include:

-He's actually got a perfect American accent, and "Nuclear Wessels" was from his father's Russian accent.
-There was supposed to be a scene in that movie where Sulu meets his great-great-grandfather as a child, but the child actor refused to cooperate.
-That he approves of the 2009 reboot.
-The casting directors weren't satisfied with his original, intense serious audition, but loved the more surprised, puzzled/clueless persona he did on his final attempt.
-That Leonard Nimoy does not give good feedback as a director
-On TV and film sets, actors are given a point to look at, so they're all delivering their lines in the same direction, ie, to the viewer (especially in TV). He holds that his best acting moment came when someone had taped a Playboy centerfold there, and his line was "Captain, I have no idea what that is!"
-The character of Chekov was not intended to foster Russian-American unity, but to attract viewers ages 8-14 with the Beatles haircut.

Also, he's really old now. Unfortunately, my photos didn't come out too well, but I had my camera with me at least.

And that was my spring break, and that's also why you should always carry a camera in this town.

The Hyperion Hotel.

Inspired by Allison's post on her apartment building, I decided to write a post on my apartment building, too. Since my building is a former hotel, I will henceforth refer to it as The Hyperion Hotel.

First off, I ended up with less than a day and a half to find an apartment somewhere in LA. Surprisingly, I did so, and with not a small amount of luck - it was the only building that was both priced as advertised and that didn't have, say, hordes of dead roaches in the kitchen when it was shown to me. I turned in a rental application only for this place, then left, not having the foggiest clue what I'd do if I didn't get accepted. Fortunately, I did, because as one will soon discover, The Hyperion is not very selective about their tenants.

So the Hyperion is old. 1920's old, and every once in a while, if the lighting is just right and you're at the perfect angle, you can almost get a glimpse of how awesome it must have been 80+ years ago. The rest of the time, however, the best way to describe it quite frankly is "falling apart." The first clue I had that it was in such a poor state came less than a week after I moved in, at which point the electricity went out. No big deal, right? It happened again, less than a week later, only this time it was only my apartment so I had to call the LA department of water and power and wait while they sent a repairman out to basically hit the electric meter until I got power back. (Literally. I had to show him where the meters were out back, so I watched him do it.) Not two weeks later, the hot water went out, just as I was about to dye my hair, as a previous blog post details.

Then there was the time a housing authority official had to inspect the apartments to make sure that we had working heat, working cold and hot water, and no overcrowding or other "unsuitable living conditions". Fortunately, my apartment seemed to be overlooked, probably because the management could assure her that it was only me in the apartment and I was mechanically inclined enough to not need a government official to help me determine if everything was in working order. However, the upside of someone having apparently reported our building for "unsuitable living conditions" (because I later discovered it's actually not routine for housing inspectors to randomly inspect apartment buildings) was that everything got fixed, fast. Even if it was only the blinds that had broken, I don't think it ever took more than 24 hours for something to get repaired. The downside is that there is near constant construction noise starting promptly at 8 AM, when quiet hours end, but no discernible improvement to the state of the building.

More recently, I found yellow liquid in the bathtub, and assumed my cat had decided to be either very dumb or very smart and decided to pee in there. Upon going to clean it up, however, I discovered that it was not cat urine, but water, tinted yellow from mold, that had somehow dripped into the bathtub. EW. Since then, I have regularly lysoled my bathroom nearly to death.

The Hyperion also has lots of insects. In fact, when Allison visited, she informed me that one particular species of insect was actually a cockroach. Icky. All this time I had thought they were beetles or Junebugs... fortunately, Orion likes to show off his hunting prowess by diligently stalking and killing upwards of 95% of all scurrying insects that venture into my apartment. Cats are good for more than just rodent control! (and I don't doubt for a second that adventurous rodents might have crawled into this place had they not smelled a cat and thought better of it) However, I've had a recent fruitfly infestation - after spending the last two days inexplicably crowding around my bathroom mirror, they've moved to Orion's food and water dishes. I guess they like shiny things?

Last, but most definitely not least, are the tenants. Some of them are OK, like the quiet middle-aged lady with the even quieter 15-year-old German Shepherd rescue, or "Cloud", who literally looks like he walked straight out of the Final Fantasy video games, or The Hipster Couple that lives upstairs on the other side. Others are not so OK. The tenants upstairs seem to entertain themselves by dropping bricks on the ceiling, which cause some of the lightbulbs in my light fixture to flick on and off. Some other tenants seem to be dealing marijuana. Still others have children whom they allow to play with recorders, vuvuzelas, whistles, kazoos, or other such noisemakers after quiet hours. Another constantly leaves things in the hallway.

Then there are the tenants across the hallway-ish. They're the awful ones. They frequently display a blatant disregard for quiet hours, sometimes by blasting obscene music so loudly I can hear it clearly in my room at 3 AM on a weeknight, and other times by having screaming domestic disputes, which are only not reported to the LAPD because the angry person always gets locked out of the apartment until he, or perhaps she, goes and finds a place to sober up and cool down. On top of all that, they got a pit bull puppy that has pooped all over the lobby, and tends to squeak loudly and pathetically at various times. They leave their trash to rot in the recycle bin in the lobby all week, and in general are some of the most abhorrent, awful people that I have ever had the misfortune of sharing a building with.

The worst experience ever living in this building, and the one that made me decide I had to move when my lease was up, was The Gun Incident. One night, as I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep, I heard another loud argument - apparently upstairs or maybe in the lobby? Fortunately, more distant than the hallway outside my room at any rate - and I was tuning it out as normal, when there was running and someone screaming "He's got it!" Within seconds, two shots rang out (from a .22 handgun if I had to guess) and there was more screaming and running. Someone else was actually alarmed enough to call the police to our building, but when they came to investigate, nobody answered their doors. I slept in the bathtub that night, as there was only a thin wooden door between my head and whatever was going on in the hallways outside, and I didn't trust the walls much more. The police ended up in our building at least once more in the following week, further confirming my decision that this was not a good place to live.

The strangest experience, however, happened just last night. I came home from class to find one of my belts hanging from my doorknob. Now, nobody in my building knows me very well, and I don't know if I've ever worn that belt in public, and I didn't think I'd even brought it to LA, and had definitely never possibly left it in the laundry room or anything like that, so I don't have the slightest clue how it escaped my apartment. Nevertheless, it does indeed appear to be the exact same belt that had come with the black skirt that I had bought to wear to my grandfather's funeral. Maybe there are some supernatural tenants living here, after all...