What A Fool Believes

If you had the chance to meet the man who recreated one of the world's most baffling illusions, would you demand to know the secret behind it—one that took him three decades to discover?



Would you try to beat the chess master automaton, a "thinking machine" known as "The Turk," even though you knew the odds were so stacked against you that the Turk never loses?



Would you crawl inside the cabinet below to inspect its mechanisms, looking for false bottoms and collapsible hinges? Would you want to find out that it's not just an automaton, but a false automaton—with an adult, full-sized human operator hiding inside of it?



Or, would you rather think of it as something mystical, magical, spiritual, supernatural or evil?



You may watch incredibly closely, but do you really want to catch a ventriloquist moving his lips?



If you could ask Houdini for his autograph...



...would you investigate how the inert could possibly come alive long enough to sign a piece of paper for you?



This is the dilemma I faced the other night.



I couldn't help becoming a detective when faced with department store amusements that could make a red ball disappear and reappear...



...even though I'd rather it remain a mystery.



But this is a lesson about myself I've only learned recently.



One night when I was at The Magic Castle with a magician friend of mine, he gave me a sealed envelope to take home. The choice of whether or not to ever open it was mine, as long as I waited until I got home.



Inside were the instructions of how to perform a classic sleight of hand magic trick, the kind that so convincingly bewitches audiences, they can't figure out the secret—even if they never take their eyes off the magician, and even if they're sitting directly across from him.



After all, when a skull is talking to you, it's hard to figure out how it could not be talking to you if you can see it plain as day—as implausible as it may seem.



In the case of the secrets of the card trick that my friend had given, I tore the envelope open and began to read its contents as soon as I got home. And before I could finish it, I shoved it back into its envelope, which I hid from my view and got rid of the next day.



I'm not an aspiring magician. I have no plans to perform this or any bit of close-up magic.



And, as it turns out, I have no business knowing how to fool other people—because I want to be fooled.

I don't want to know how I'm being tricked. I don't even want to know that I'm being tricked. I want to believe that there are some things in this life that can't be explained and I'll just never fully grasp.

If there's a God, I don't want to meet him. If there's a Heaven, I don't want to go there.

If I ever find out that true love is just a ruse to get us to ensure the survival of the species, I'll clamp my legs shut and rue the day I ever posed the question.

If I've been fooled, let me never find out.

Related Posts:
Photo Essay: The Mysteries of the Pasadena Magic House & Museum
A Magical Night Out in Hollywood
This Kind of Fool

Be Like the Bamboo

Of the garden she funded in memory of her late husband, civil engineer Earl Burns Miller, Loraine Miller Collins said...



..."When a person is tired, or anxious, or in a quest of beauty"...



..."may they enter and come forth refreshed to meet the problems of the day."



She planned every detail of it carefully, with the help of Edward R. Lovell, the Master Landscape Planner of the Long Beach State (now known as Cal State Long Beach) campus where the garden is located.



(The "Blue Brick" guide to architecture calls Lowell's landscape architecture "the best element of the campus.")



Upon its April 1981 dedication, Loraine declared her dream for the 1.3-acre garden: "There will be music of the wind through the pines, music from the waterfalls and the birds," she said.



"There will be serenity as you walk around the lake, and joy, I hope, in the beauty of the reflections in that lake."



"There will be strength and solidity in the rocks and the wooden bridges."



"And, of course, there will be bamboo, a favorite wood of the Japanese because it is so useful and beautiful."



But visual authenticity wasn't necessarily her top priority in terms of the design of what was to become the Earl Burns Miller Japanese Garden (though its Pacific Northwest-born landscape architect did travel to Japan in his research and was reportedly inspired by the Imperial Gardens of Tokyo).



It was more the symbolism behind bamboo, and the zen philosophy to sway in the wind—and even bend—but never to break.



And this "hill and pond"-style garden, with its island and bridges and "hide and reveal" design aesthetic (known as Miegakure), was meant to last, too...



...though the koi fish may come and go, and the mallards may fly away.



By design, it was meant to not just persist, but also evolve. In fact, when it opened, it was actually rather sparse—a source of some criticism at the time.



But Lovell—like all gardeners—knew that it would take time to grow. In fact, he said, it takes 30 years for a garden to mature. So, he and Loraine were creating "a garden for people we would never know."



Loraine Miller Collins died 10 years after the garden's dedication, and Lovell passed away in 2008. He'd already been gone for nearly eight years by the time I finally made my way to his garden.



So, I'm one of those people that they'd never get to meet. Yet somehow, it feels like this garden was built for me.



It's a place where, if you're feeling stressed, you can just sit awhile, soaking in the garden's "quiet" design, and shed the cares of the world.

And here, you can learn how to be like the bamboo. As the proverb says, the bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists.

Related Posts:
Photo Essay: A Sanctuary Among Sewage
Photo Essay: The Japanese Garden That Almost Became a Freeway

Welcome to The Shrine of Friendship

It all started last October when I stumbled across something online about a group of people who were very serious about breakfast—so serious, in fact, that they would even have breakfast for dinner. Now that's an obsession I can understand, I thought to myself.


Photo: California Governor Ronald Reagan, blindfolded during initiation into the Los Angeles Breakfast Club, 1967 (Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive. Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA)

And so it didn't take me long after seeing a photo of a blindfolded Ronald Reagan sitting on a sawhorse with his hand in a plate of eggs to know that I wanted to recreate that scene for myself.

So, I grabbed a friend, and then another friend, and we started to meet up with the Los Angeles Breakfast Club nearly every Wednesday morning for some ham 'n' eggs and sing-alongs and secret handshakes and recitations of encrypted text. I knew from that first breakfast that I wanted to become a member.



So, a couple of weeks ago I finally found myself sitting on that sawhorse who's appropriately named "Ham," his woven tail in my hand, I blindfolded and pledging my allegiance to The Shrine of Friendship.



With palm pressed into a fresh-off-the-skillet fried egg, I promised to get up early Wednesday mornings and to do the wiggle-waggle.



Even better, my two friends who I'd commandeered as my breakfast co-conspirators also became members—and that meant that the three of us got to be initiated together. Runny yolk slime and all.



You know, I've joined lots of historical societies and preservation groups, but I've never really felt like a real member of anything. Until now.



I've spent a lot of time in the six years since moving to LA feeling alone and like I don't belong anywhere. To be honest, I've spent most of my life feeling that way—regardless of where I've lived.

But when it comes to the Islands of Misfit Toys that I've tried to inhabit, I don't feel like such a misfit at this one.

Related Posts:
The Democracy of Ham and Eggs
The Island of Misfit Toy

Photo Essay: The Inner Workings of LA's Public Transit

I may love driving in California, but I can't resist the opportunity to ride a train every now and then—especially if it takes me to some off-limits place.



That's why I met up with the Los Angeles Railroad Heritage Foundation at Union Station last month for a day-long journey behind the scenes of LA's public transit system.



We picked up a private subway shuttle on the Red Line that took us out from underground and onto the tracks along the LA River...



...giving us a view of LA few of us have ever seen.



And since I managed to get to the back of the cab, I saw LA as usually only Metro workers get to see it.



We passed under the 1st Street Bridge...



...and arrived at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Division 20 Rail Yard (a.k.a. the Santa Fe Yard)...



...where trains from the Metro Red and Purple Lines come for a hose down, other cleaning and routine maintenance...



...as well as heavy-duty repairs.



When the rolling stock have to be lifted, it's done by a 10-ton crane...



...but mostly, the repair guys climb underneath them to work on their undercarriages.



At any given time, pretty much all the tracks in the shop are full of trains in various stages of repair.



If you've ever wondered where the trains go when they're taken "Out of Service," it's probably someplace that looks like this.



They're rolled in on the rails and then turned around on giant turntables installed into the floor.



The most common service necessary on the trains is on their wheels.



All that mileage (and the screeching against the rails) really wears them down, so they need to be periodically replaced.



The Red Line maintenance facility also houses a control tower...



...where trains going in and out of service can be monitored...



...and train operators can learn how to address the public in various situations (including service interruptions, medical emergencies, police activity, active shooters, etc.).



But it's at the Metro LA Rail Operations Center (ROC) in South LA (by the Willowbrook-Rosa Parks Station on the Blue Line) where you can see some of those public addresses made—without being a victim of a delay yourself.



This is some Big Brother / God's Eye / Sliver-type surveillance. Passengers probably have no idea that their every move is being watched.



But that way, when a call comes in from one of those emergency phones on the platform, the staff at the ROC can see not only the caller via closed-circuit TV, but they can also see whatever's happening around them. (Of course, sometimes people call just to complain about a train being late or to ask a question about their TAP card.)



And even aside from those incoming calls, the CCTV "observers" can monitor everything that's happening in the stations—something the conductors can't do while they're driving the trains.



Having opened alongside the Blue Line in 1990, this is the nerve center of all the current Metro lines in service—the Red and Purple Line subways and the Blue, Green, Gold, and Expo Line Light Rails. (The Silver Line is actually a bus.)



The dispatchers at this facility—which is kind of like a combination of Air Traffic Control and Mission Control—are responsible not only for making rue everyone's daily commute runs (relatively) smoothly, but also ensuring passenger safety and making high-level decisions about major problems that may occur.

This is how train operators are alerted to any recent seismic activity (at which point the trains' speeds are restricted so the safety of the tunnels can be investigated). Though perhaps less critical of a function, this is also where social media managers tweet out service advisories.

And they all started by driving a Metro bus—a mandatory prerequisite to work at the ROC (as well as to drive a train).

Even though the Metro doesn't technically run 24 hours (yet), working the ROC is a 24/7 job.  Light Rail stations are outside and accessible, so they need to be surveilled all night long and potential passengers who show up expecting a train need to be told to come back in the morning.

And apparently it takes longer than you'd think to lock station elevators by remote command and shut down train service at night and unlock everything and put trains back into service in the early morning.

There's really not much down time in between.

Related Posts:
Photo Essay: A Taste of Orange Empire Railway Museum
Riding the Red Line to Haunted Hollywood
Photo Essay: Union Station, Open to the Public
Underground History