But, not as hot as the rest of the country has been.............yet our news in Los Angeles is acting like this is over the top weather...why? It's SUMMER IN L.A....it DOES GET HOT! I've seen headlines this last week that are SO grossly over exaggerating the HEAT!! Is it GLOBAL WARMING propaganda or did somebody from the Arctic regions just get the weather job here ? :-)
As far as I'm concerned, this one was for you, Mr. Z.......Way to, Lakers!
I like to vote Absentee Ballot for two reasons: One, it's easier to just pop it in the mailbox and, two, it's an Arid Extra Dry commercial for a Republican to vote in Los Angeles. You spritz because you know you're going to get THE LOOKS as they figure out you're walking to the far fewer REPUBLICAN stands than the DEMOCRAT stands. As you get older, it doesn't bother you that much, but it shouldn't bother anybody, it shouldn't happen that you get precinct workers who grimace or give each other 'the eye' or don't kibbutz with you as they did the hippie before you. I don't anymore, not quite as much, but something about it bothers me, I have to admit. Maybe it's just the idea that people will treat you differently for not agreeing with them? The problem is, we're being warned against voting absentee this year...too many shenanigans, so I didn't. 
......just what you'd expect, considering I get the impression that most of you look on California as a pit of politically correct, illegal-loving, over spending fruits and nuts?
Armenians, the last 100 years or so, came mostly from Turkey. The largest influx was soon after the massacres. The nightmare some call 'the Armenian genocide' in Turkey lasted through and just after World War I. (There are still Turks who deny the murder of 1.5 million Armenians. Just for your interest, I link this also and add that I'm not fighting that war here at my blog. You must draw your own conclusions about whether the death of hundreds of thousands of Armenian mothers and children was just or deserved.)
ssian Armenians. What is Turkey now was largely Armenia at one time, many, many years ago. So, those families still in Turkey when borders were moved were known as Turkish Armenians. My mother's family was from Istanbul but, for various reasons, she was raised in Cairo, Egypt. It was during the forties that Armenians in Cairo were encouraged to "Go to Armenia, the land of milk and honey! Go back to your roots!" Many did....only to be stuck there as soon as the Iron Curtain slammed down, with Armenia on the wrong side of it. If it weren't for my mother's brother, our whole family's history would have been rewritten for the worst. He felt something funny was happening and, him being the man of the house after their father had died, he convinced my grandmother not to go there. Many weren't that lucky. They went and joined their fellow Armenians in the Homeland, that land whose capital is Yerevan and which had been the first nation in the world to name Christianity its religion. Mount Ararat, where Noah's Ark landed, was once in the area of Armenia. Those Armenians were stuck there for years, two generations were raised under Communism. (I should say that Armenia hasn't been part of the USSR for about 15 years now, it's its own independent country, so I use the term "Russian Armenians" to classify those who were stuck in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia those years back and even who are there now only to contrast with Turkish Armenians; they are technically not Russian Armenians anymore.)
who see what's happening cringe and bemoan the fact that this is happening to our city. We see first hand how much the people must have suffered in Armenia to have adapted to this kind of entitlement mentality.
Mr. Obama has a letter published in the Los Angeles Times today, the title of which is my headline above.
The piece below the LA Times article below was just written by my friend, Orson Bean. He is the father-in-law of Andrew Breitbart and Andrew published this Saturday on the Big Hollywood part of his blog. You will want to check out Big Hollywood if you haven't already done so, he has some great articles there.Sgt Curtis Massey was 41
From the Los Angeles Times, Thursday January 29th, 2009:
2 DIE IN HEAD-ON COLLISION
A Culver City police officer and a Van Nuys man were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision that closed several lanes of the 10 freeway for hours during the morning commute.
Sgt. Curtis Massey, 41, was driving east on his way to work when he was struck about 5 a.m. just west of National Boulevard by a silver Toyota Camry traveling the wrong way, said Officer Miguel Luevano of the California Highway Patrol. Massey’s unmarked police car, a four-door Dodge Charger, was engulfed in flames.
No one else was hurt and the CHP is investigating. Pete Demetriou, a radio reporter for KFWB-AM (980) was driving to work around 4:55 a.m. on the eastbound 10, when he saw a car, driven by the Van Nuys man, coming toward him.
“You’re used to seeing headlights coming at you, but you assume they’re on the other side,” he said. “At about 200 yards I realized he was coming in my lane.” Demetroiu said he called police after the car passed him traveling about 65 mph. All eastbound lanes and two westbound lanes of the 10 were closed at the 405 freeway until about 1 p.m.
Massey, who is survived by a wife and three young children, was a 17-year veteran of the police department and was most recently assigned to the juvenile detective bureau.
Police Chief Don Pedersen told reporters that Massey dedicated much of his free time to working with at risk-teens and every year volunteered for the Santa sleigh, a holiday event in which officers escort Santa Claus around the city and distribute presents to children.
“He was a friend and trusted colleague who could always be counted on to be the first one to volunteer for an assignment,” Pedersen said of Massey, who was a Medal of Valor recipient. “The community today has lost a dedicated police sergeant.”
Megan Gallagher, 28, a former community service officer who worked with the department for five years, was shocked when she heard the news about Massey, a colleague who had served as her mentor.
“He was someone I looked up to and someone I trusted at the station. Being one of the few females there, it’s kind of hard to talk to everybody,” she said. “When I started there, we have to get our uniforms and he offered up his jacket so I didn’t have to spend the money. He made my first days there comfortable. He was an automatic friend from Day One.”
On behalf of Massey’s family, the department has set up the Sgt. Curtis Massey Memorial Fund. Donations can be sent to Culver City Employees Federal Credit Union, 9770 Culver Blvd. Culver City CA 90232.
On the morning of the accident, I had a ten a.m. audition at Culver Studios at the junction of Washington Blvd. and Culver Blvd. for a chance to play Meryl Streep’s psychiatrist in a Nancy Meyers movie. My wife, the actress Alley Mills, had a ten a.m. rehearsal call at her soap opera, “The Bold and the Beautiful,” at CBS Television City, Fairfax and Beverly in Hollywood. We live on the west side in Venice.
At 8:45, I turned on 1070 News Radio to hear the traffic report. All lanes closed on the 10, it said, and as a result, eastbound traffic on Venice Blvd. and Washington Blvd. was virtually at a stand-still. Both of us panicked. “Damn it,” I muttered, reminding myself of Jack Bauer on “24.” “One more inconvenience in Los Angeles.”
We both flew out of the house. I shark-drove side streets and managed to get to my audition only ten minutes late. Alley was tardy by three quarters of an hour. So was everyone else in the cast. And as the day went on, we heard stories of actors, directors and crew people in the same fix all over the city. I remember thinking, “It’s like a movie, like ‘Crash,’ or something. One incident happens and dozens of lives are affected.”
The next day, I looked in the paper to find out what had occurred that had driven me so nuts. The small piece on the inside of the California section I’ve re-printed above was what I found. When I read it I remembered that Alley, when she’d heard that the cops were distributing toys for kids, had gone to the toy store run by a Vietnamese couple next to the old Venice Fox Theater and bought three brand new bicycles. She’d loaded them into our Ford van and driven them over to the station on Culver Blvd. It was a nice black cop who thanked her for them, she said, so I guess it wasn’t Curtis Massey.
Later that morning I got a call from my daughter Susie Breitbart, Andrew’s wife and the mother of their four young kids. “Dad,” she asked me, “do you remember years ago a police officer stopped you for speeding and recognized you from TV and said, ‘You’re Susie Bean’s father; I went to Pali High with her. I can’t give you a ticket,’ and he let you go?”
“Sure I do,” I said.
“Well, that was my friend Curt from Pali. He’s the officer who was killed in that terrible accident on the 10 yesterday. He was a really good guy,” she said.
Later on that Thursday, Alley got a call from a friend of hers from Bible study. The cop’s wife’s best friend, it turns out, is in her class. Six degrees…
An extraordinary human being is wiped off the face of the earth in a split second and all over town we experience it as just one more annoyance in L.A.
I just sent off a good sized check. Perhaps you’ll do the same
Z: Orson asked me to publish this and ask for financial help for the family, at the address above in bold. Thanks, if you can help this family.
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