Souther California Random Research -- Random People Connections

What's amazing to me is how so many people are connected. I was reading up on Malibu and came across Santa Monica Daily Press. GREAT magazine. And there was an article on Roman Polanski and learned that his wife Sharon Tate was murdered by Charles Manson, which is really fucked up. And Owen Wilson lives in Malibu and has been declared part of the "frat pack" the zoolander cast of comedy actors. All of this research stemmed from reading up on Australian History earlier to day and getting 5/5 100% on teh Australian citizen test. And then learning about how Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez are brothers is another weird Coincidence. It's just weird how all these people in california in the sub-zones are related in backstory or something.

The Manson thing was really fucked up and disturbing. Apparently the guy got a bunch of drugged up hippies and disgusting losers to have Beatle album names to plans kind of like Fight Club actually but to murder people out of some distorted view of a racial war. Just a sick disturbed, loser pathetic, vile freak.

It was disgusting reading about that, but I realized that I do a lot of things to avoid being bad or fucked up. It's GREAT not to be vile or fucked up, but I should be focusing on thing that I want, not what I don't want. A LOT of my past emails and communications with people have a construct of being polite and cordial for the purpose of not wanting to appear disorganized. It doesn't work when you put effort into NOT being like something, gotta move towards something. Be something.

The GREAT article was the one about civil rights having shown its face, as Santa Monica Daily Press put it, at 1600 Pennsylvania. haha. Another wild thing I noticed was how the white house map looked like a raid instance!! haha.

Also the RHCP singer Frusciante used to live in Venice along with nicholas cage. Realized that there's "stars" in EVERY profession -- physics, dentistry, law, acting, biology, teaching etc. Just people doing a job.

FUA -- Full Universal Address

I've come to realize how truly insignificant -- because of their instability, tendency to produce conflict, and mercurial nature -- most of the religious, political, and social ballyhoo is, compared to the science of our planet, solar system, and galaxy. Squabbling over borders and domains truly is rubbish, when we glance at our global "home". And considering what "Wired" concluded, only about 24 humans have actually seen the entire earth from space with their own eyes, we could grow a lot by attuning ourselves to our spatial placement.

It's especially easy to be keen on global awareness on "earth day", but we should develop not just a year-long reverence for our planet, but a perpetual fascination with our entire placement in galactic space.

Let's examine our FUA.

If, say, you want to give the "Full Universal Address" (the FUA ;) of yourself and you, for example, are located in Santa Monica, you really shouldn't stop after the "Country". After all, what if there's another Santa Monica, CA, United States located on some other planet in a totally different and distinct solar system, in a completely different galaxy, and galaxy cluster! So, really, you should say this:

City -- Santa Monica
State -- CA
Zip - 90401
Country - United States
Hemisphere - Western Hemisphere, Northern Hemisphere
Planet - Earth
Solar System - 'Our Solar System'
Galactic Vicinity Within Our Galaxy -- Orion's Arm
Galaxy -Milky Way (Nearest neighboring galaxy = Messier 31, Andromeda)
Mini (dozens) Galaxy Cluster -- Local Group
Larger (thousands) Galaxy Cluster -- Virgo Supercluster
The Universe

Questions.
1. Does "our solar system" have any more of a scientific name than "our solar sytem"?

It really sounds lame, but "no".

2. What is the name (if any ) of our globular cluster and distance from galactic center within the Milky Way?

We are located not in a surrounding satellite globular cluster but actual within the MilkWay disk, 28,000 light years away from the galactic center. Considering that we are located 2.3 ly away from Andromeda galaxy, the nearest galaxy hovers 27,997.7 ly closer (or 12,173.9 times closer) than our own MilkayWay galactic center!

Here's a great site on galactic centers, nearby galaxies and the like.

3. Finally, I've been doing research to make this more complete and ran into Messier objects (to advanced astronomers I'm sure they're familiar, but they were fairly new to me). Does the Local Group and/or Virgo Cluster have some more scientific-sounding Messier Group name? "local group" and "virgo cluser" (not unlike "our solar system")?

Again, it sounds incredibly lame and informal, but our galaxy cluster is the Local Group and the super galaxy cluster is the Virgo Supercluster.

4. Finally, can this be expanded out any more? Are their "quadrants" of the universe or something in which the Virgo Cluster would be located?

It seems like there should be universal quadrants but superclusters is about all we have now. See an awesome image of the spatial rending of the entire visible universe at THE site for spatial universe zooming (at increments of x10), Atlas-of-the-Universe.

Hawaii and Punta Laguna, Mexico

The 2007 Hawaii journal is from February, 2007. It consists of the adventure experience visiting Waikiki, Waimea Bay, and the North Shore of Oahu, the surf heaven. While it was short and you always can "catch just one more wave", it was certainly exciting.

The Punta Laguna, Mexico journal is from Summer of 2002. This was a tropical conservation project in the Yucatan jungle. The group I was with studied spider monkeys with 2 PHd scientists, lived and played soccer with the local Mayans, visted archaeological sites, and studied the botany and ecology of the local Punta Laguna rainforest. There was also an anthropological, linguistic, and cultural exchagne in this amazing adventure as well.

A Traveling Graduation of Sorts : 48 Hours of non-stopTravel, 5 Hours of Sleep

There's only one bottom line here: this trip was NUTS (but highly productively itinerant)!

This is the photo album, journalized, recorded anthology of my most recent (and quite scintillating, expansive, and gloriously beautiful, I might add) trip up north from Santa Barbara, CA to Stayton, OR. This illustrates the visual (via photographs) and written (via journals) component. I couldn't find anyone to travel with so when I wasn't calling friends or kin, I recorded most of the new mental territory covered. Those recordings can be accessed soon.

Considering that it was my first road trip, I (without speeding) moved at an extremely fast pace, making excellent time, covering 2.045 miles in 48 hours (3pm November 14 - 3pm November 16, 2006) from Santa Barbara, CA to Stayton, OR. Covering major ground and visiting the Google Campus, San Franisco, Pacific Heights Health Club, Redwood National Forest, (outlying towns of Humboldt, Eureka, and Miranda, as well) The NW/SW Coastline, Coos Bay, Eugene, and finally Stayton.

This whole travel album, mind you was in 48 hours! I had tremendous gratitude for being able to call and be in touch with friends and family via phone, but if I actually had passengers along for the ride, I think they would have hurled (if not, give me a call for the next road trip!). I just like to cover a lot of ground, with comprehensive expediency.

Staying at my grandmother's has been a very different culture shock with the three meals a day, constant temperature control, and all the cards, scrabble, and talks! I actually can't wait to go back to Stayton!

Mode of Transportation
Whole lot of driving. Awesome 2005 Chevy Equniox:


Mental Map Navigation (along with some maps and GPS)

A whole lot of traversing on foot (especially in San Francisco) when not driving:

Google Campus

Pretty frickin’ bland compared to the rest of the trip, but still dandy to see this gem of a campus. Wasn’t exactly the flolicking campus of brilliant einsteins playing volleyball and skateboarding everywhere. Funny how the mind elaborates fantasies so that when reality hits, it can be quite different!

Here’s some construction that was going on.


Here’s some conference rooms – a lot of these around the “campus” (didn’t seem erudite/academic more than business-like, but still root for, utilize, and can appreciate their products sometimes)


Finally a blurry shot of some chem. Labs. Distinguishing feature so you can tell it’s not just a business, possibly. Hopefully

Juxtaposed to the Google Campus was the Intuit HQ. Here's a shot from the fountain, main area of Intuit:



San Francisco
Pacific Heights Health Club
Here’s me before the yoga, treadmill, lifting, shower workout.


Here’s me after all that workout.

Car Search
I then proceeded to look for my car for the next 4 hours (a little bit of my father's blood taking the wheel, no doubt!), about. Yoga class ended at 7:30am (I took a four hour nap at a rest stop the night before), lifted a LOT quickly which felt AWESOME, then got out of there probably 8:30 and found my car after loops and loops around Pine, Bush, Buchanen, California, Sacramento, Webster, and other streets. It was outside the hospital on Sacramento between Webster and Filmore.

A little reminder keepsake of the auto-search:


This massacres any of my dad’s often ridiculous (like leaving a car at the airport because he couldn’t find it and having to pay someone to take a cab there and look for it for him, well, it probably contends, maybe beats that) lost car stories.

A modernized version somewhat of Public Transportation that could pass, in part, as the "Rice-a-Roni" train:


Some of the omnipresent, classical Victorian San Francisco architecture:



Golden Gate
The famous bridge. Here it is:



Here it is with me infront of it. Pretty cool going across. No tolls, which rocked and it has epic references in movies and whatnot, but other than that, “no biggie”. Cool experience that I am incredibly grateful, though, is this Redwood-like countryside-like drive, baby!

Redwood
Redwood National Park

Here’s the shot of the famous tree trunks. Again “no biggie”. A little dark saturation in this nocturnal shot, sorry about that:


And some odd stump conglomerations:
Pic

The Confusion Tunnel

Apparently you throw golf balls out windows and they come back and you look tall or short in some places. So, an elaborated land-locked Redwood Bermuda-triangle type o’ place with that fun house twist most likely. Definitely has that mythology, legnendary “is-it-real” hoax or reality gimmick or natural creation backstory with it.



I needed a stretch so I did some FAST, and quality sprints in the parking lot area, and some across a panda (probably not the “Sexual Harassment Panda”, but who knows) outside the Confusion Tunnel.


And a totem pole in the same area.


Miranda
This city was fun. It’s so small, but so complete! 6 miles from Redwood National Park they had a gardenshop, market, inn, pizza parlor, and library. The elevation almost beat the population!!! And this is sea level, people!

Here’s there Garden store:

I was a wee bit freakishly serrindipitiously jolted because I had just talked with Miranda about 2 hours ealier at length and then was “in Miranda” just about 2 hours I spoke with her! Definitely funny stuff. Great rides. At the very least…a LOT of flavor of fairly big in population (San Fran) big in space (Redwood and preceding cow-grazing rural land) and small in population (Miranda) in the past few hours of this action-packed awesome day!

Redwood Reststop
I stopped at reststop at about 3am but was too charged and excited, having hit all the milestones I needed to, to sleep, so I walked around in the rain, drank some water from the drinking fountain, found out it tasted almost metallic (like it had lead in it), puked a bit because I felt nauseas, then went for a run directly on the 101 in pitch dark. Afterwards, I stretched at this table that said "Huckleberry". Very cool reference to the Twain tale, and got in this awesome conversation with a man who was enjoying the early early (4:30am) hours. We covered everything from how most Afghanis were not Kamikazees, the uniformity of all religions, the grace and ancient beauty of the 400 million year old shark (even though he thought they were "buzzards" of the sea, which I stronlgy disagreed with -- they're living dinosaurs!), the local towns of Miranda, Eureka, and Victorian San Fran, of which I had all visited. Also touched on fat-conscious habits of long-distance runners, how perfect the rain was for running, and some crazy story about some friend of his shooting his brother, and all in all it was covered massive ground and was a cool conversation. He reminded me of the psychologist, Bill Dove, I saw at Colorado College.

Northwest CA Coast/Southwest OR Coast

This coast was magnificent. It had been a LONG time since I've seen real ocean coastline. The stuff I'd been seeing in Santa Barbara was blocked by the channel islands. This was the "real" stuff. Undiluted, salty as heck, and rolling, raging sets! I probably would have gotten hypothermia, but having my board is a definite must next time I travel up along the coast!

Here's a beautiful fog photo in the early morning hours, Thursday.

Here's a sequence of this beautiful nook I found that had some amazing surging breakers against massive boulder-rock mini-islands:


This is a sandbar duneI pulled over on the side of the road for. Massive waves are crashing way in the background. Amazingly beautiful. Thank Tao I drove this instead of via plane.


Oregon

Prehistoric Garden

I think this was in the movie Tommy Boy". Nevertheless, the gigantic dinosaur sculpture displays make a great idea.

Here's some of the Prehistoric Garden photos.



Coos Bay

The legendary home of Prefontaine! I tried to observe most of these little towns I went through and got a glance at Coos Bay, but didn't stay long. I had just gotten that bloody ticket (my first and most likely, only).

Here are some Coos-bay elk I saw there:


Eugene

The even more legendary Hayword Field track of Prefontaine! He was a major inspiration so I did a tributory couple of miles on the track here. Got a few shots of....

The "cruise boat" track (reminded me of tracks I run on during cruises):


The locked off main track:
PICS

The entrance way to Hayword field:

A map of the track and field area:


Looking at the field, the main entrance had coaching history, bios, and profiles on the left (kind of like the directors) and the prefontaine, athlete history, bios, and profiles were on the left (kind of like the actors).

Here's the coaching half:

And the athlete half:


The rest of the photos can be accessed here.

On the nature of Roadtrips
I did a journalized photo-album very similar to this one almost exactly a year ago. Last year, December of 2005, it was friends, family, and relatives in chicago for a graduation party. This year it was me calling those friends, family, and relatives while traveling through some of the paramount sites of The Great American west countryside. Both experiences covered a lot of ground and involved a lot of great intellectual travel. I'm certain these "exploratory journeys" will get better and better, infusing more intellectual territory and gorgeous sights, every time.