Tell me you don’t want to read the rest of the article that opens with this paragraph:

An ice-cream truck rolls up to the south entrance of Plummer Park on Saturday, its hi-fi speakers blasting an ethereal, toy-piano version of Beck’s “Loser.” It’s 100 degrees, but out pops a woman in a geometric, fiberglass squirrel suit. She skips over to a picnic table and joins a group of Russian men playing cards. One of the men turns and asks gruffly, in heavily accented English, “Who is this squirrel?”

(Hint: You really do.)

***

You’ve probably already seen this picture of a monkey and a pigeon. You won’t mind looking at it again, will you?

***

We went to see Joe Henry at Largo the other night, and it was utterly transcendent. I wanted to find a video that would convey the amazingness of this exact evening, this brilliant songwriter backed by a flawless band playing his new songs, some of which were so stunning you (read: I) couldn’t breathe for a minute. I didn’t find that. I did find this on YouTube, though: Henry with Billy Bragg, performing Bob Dylan and Van Morrison, and that is not too shabby either.

You should really go buy Civilians right now.

***

I usually keep my politics inside my own head, but Nerissa Nields’s long essay on the politics of food really struck a chord with me, particularly:

As I am writing this, I have the same strange mixture of anger, shame and hope that I always have when I write about the places where my desire to be a good citizen of the planet collides with my desire to be accepted as one among many fallen humans, normal people who just want to live a good life, who want to enjoy the occasional chicken McNugget and not have that moment ruined for them by a Climate Change Cassandra campaigning against junk food.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone sum up so neatly what it is that often keeps me from fully taking sides on issues I actually feel rather strongly about. So I thought I’d pass it along just in case it gives anyone else a lightning-bolt moment.

Yeah, that whole we’re-moving-to-Altadena thing? Did not so much happen. We’re in Alhambra instead – bright side, it’s a much nicer (read cleaner) apartment, and it’s got some groovy midcentury fixtures I’m quite fond of. It shares a lot of the qualities that had me so smitten with Altadena (many of which I believe are completely attributable to both towns’ Route-66-adjacent location), and it’s closer to the 10 than the 210, which puts us closer to many of our favorite people and places. Hey, that’s a lot of bright side – what’s my problem? Oh. Right. We don’t know if we’ll get any of our first month’s rent back on the other place.

Anyway, we are not even remotely unpacked, and I’ve had some rather surprising/time-consuming events in my usually low-key part-time web design gig, and W. went through an extremely unpleasant phase that I blame on his being almost 3 in general, his making some major developmental leaps, and then that whole moving for the second time in six months issue. But today he was back to his charming self, and even allowed several boxes to be unpacked without ugly incident, lovely child.

I realize this is the least entertaining entry ever, and I do apologize – this one’s just for the people who check in for the facts. More soon!

To the five people who read here even though I haven’t really told people about this yet:

Hi!

I’ve been gone for a while because (a) my computer died, but as they didn’t recognize that fact for some time at the repair shop, I was without a computer for three weeks; (b) even when I am with computer, I am also with useless hotel internet connection, so my online time is let’s just say abridged; (c) I lost all my bookmarks, including the one that allowed me to post to this blog; (d) oh yeah, and I’ve been slowly working my way through the 1700 unfiltered emails that accumulated in my absence.

But now I have a nifty new MacBook thanks to my mommy, and a week from now we will be living in an apartment and not having to deal with hotel anything. Yes, we finally got a place – it’s in Altadena, which I’m kind of excited about. It’s kind of cool historically, and it’s just a crazy mix of people and stuff – for example, one street features a punching-bag store and a pastrami restaurant facing each other. If we didn’t have to take things like commutes into consideration, we’d definitely want to live more toward LA proper, but this place could be fun.

Anyway, I have a lot more to tell you, but I need to work on moving for the next few days. I’ll probably be back next week. Maybe I’ll even have time to work on the layout here – I swear I never intended to have two duplicate columns down the right and the left for more than a day or two!