Kasha Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument

There is a reason why New Mexico is called the Land of Enchantment and clearly it is places like this. Just take a little extra time to get out here and hike up to the top of the Slot Canyon Trail to check out one of the best views I have ever seen in my life. The canyon itself is pretty narrow, and when we came up was completely filled with snow. The scenery, as you can see from the pictures is unforgettable. When you get to the top, the reward becomes quickly evident when you catch your first panoramic glimpse of the valley. Spectacular!

Crystal Cove State Park

I have never felt welcome in Orange County. Not for one moment. OC is the birthplace of punk rock music, and there are some great Vietnamese restaurants, but I'll voluntarily stay on my side of the curtain. I do like Crystal Cove, however. One cannot wonder what this place must have looked like before someone got the bright idea to litter the landscape with a golf course and faux-talian mansion monstrosities. Fortunately this little strip of the Orange Coast and a few thousand acres of behind the beach are protected and a great campground with million dollar sunset views is available to the general public. There are sites with all of the amenities (showers, water, tables) down by the beach, and a couple of dozen sites with fewer features if you are willing to hike 3 to four miles into the backcountry with all of your gear, water and food. There will be nobody camping in the backcountry, so if you are looking for solitary experience you are going to find it here at this time of the year at night (during the day the trails are swarming with people). Several trails go into the backcountry and if you decide to walk along the park boundaries it is about 11 miles. It took us a little over two hours to make the loop, and was stunning. It is not really a trail, it is more like a fire road. It is evident that they maintain this place very well. There is a lot of costal sage, and oaks at the bottom of the canyon. Red tailed hawks, turkey vultures, robins, and beautiful black ravens are abundant in the park. This time of the year, the canyons were green and lush and there were plenty of wildflowers. The rodent population seemed pretty healthy as well. You cannot access the beach from the campground. It requires a short walk up PCH. There are no campfires or bbqs allowed anywhere in the park. A Trader Joes is located less than a mile away and there are plenty of dining options in the area. This park is one of Orange County's crown jewels.

Mt. Lowe

Before the Station Fire, Mt. Lowe was one of the most beautiful areas in the local mountains. Those were the days. It was like a little corner of the Sierras about a half hour from Downtown Los Angeles. There are a number of trails leading to the top of Mt. Lowe. If you are interested in the scenic route, begin at the Cobb Estate/Lower Sam Merrill, continue on the Castle Canyon trail to Inspiration Point, then to the Campground and finally the summit. In the alternative, go up Angeles Crest Highway, turn right on Mt. Wilson Road and park your car at Mt. Lowe Saddle 2.1 miles up. This is the way to go if you are not an avid hiker or are with small children. From the saddle, walk through the beautiful CCC Era Stone Tunnel and take the East Trail to the Mt. Lowe summit. It is a suitable trail for children and dogs are permitted. The area used to be home to some nice oaks but since they burned, a bunch of Poodle Dog Brush and chaparral have popped up. The rock formations with the burned trees sticking out and the backdrop of the blue sky and the green meadow below are sublime. Wildflowers with beautiful shades of red are abundant at this time of the year. From the top of Mt. Lowe, there are some nice views of the Los Angeles Basin and Mt. San Antonio and San Gorgonio to the east. You will probably see Raven or Red-Tailed Hawk.

Harold And Belle's: A perfect restaurant if you like to eat big portions

You woke up one day and decided to throw in the towel. This is a great place to help you send your diet into the crapper. Face it, it takes a great deal of effort to exercise on a daily basis and even more effort to eat healthy. Don't worry, you are a real go-getter. You need grease for your brain and need to eat thousands of calories to maintain your girth. You need comfort food because it tastes so good and Harold and Belle's is like Paula Deen's country kitchen without the n-word. You need poor nutrition, and at least something from the fried group in each course. What a fine restaurant this place can be when you are ignoring your diet and trying to stop your heart. When the chef is in high gear, some of the best (and only) Creole dishes in Los Angeles will arrive on your table. On other days, when he is not doing so well, you might end up with an over-sized pile of fried shit that tastes like the fish dicks that they gave us in elementary school. I am fond of the red beans, jambalaya, and fried chicken wings. I usually get the perfect salad with fresh blue cheese dressing. My brother gets the clam chowder and swears by it. I have tasted it and can attest to its goodness. I find this to be a bargain at 23.00 because the portions are so enormous that it can feed a normal sized family of four for an entire year. I love the Etoufee with either shrimp or crawfish, and the fish Souzette is usually most enjoyable. The fried chicken here is deep fried to order and has a good amount of pepper in the flour and on the bird. If you were lucky enough to come here when the chef is doing well, you will be licking your fingers and cursing the Colonel. It can be as good as Dookie Chase in New Orleans when it shines, or it can also be just fair at times. One order of fried chicken is an entire bird or eight pieces. Eight fucking pieces of fried chicken. Fried oysters are really good, and the fried shrimp can be great, but can arrive cold sometimes. On the bright side, they give you a dozen oysters and maybe 8 fat shrimp. It would be difficult for a person of normal girth and width to finish the plate. Also, I once ordered a Sazerac Cocktail, and everyone looked at me like what the fuck did he say? Okay- if you are a bartender at a Creole restaurant you should know how to make a Sazerac Cocktail. At last, when you get here, take a look at the reinforced iron seating chairs with extra wide carriage. They have a capacity of 1/4 ton. You are going to need one of these if you become a regular here.

La Casita Mexicana is pretty good, but not the best by a motherfucking longshot!

Don't get me wrong, this place is wonderful, but not exactly the holy grail, especially if: 1) You happen to be Mexican and someone in your family is a good cook. 2) You are married to a Mexican whose family cooks well. 3) You know someone who is Mexican and is a good home cook and they had you over 4) You have traveled in Mexico and eaten a lot of good food (both street and restaurant food). The ingredients and the overall quality of this place are much higher than let's say 90% of Mexican places in the county, but it is by no means the #1 best. I read some article in LA Magazine, I think it was, that rated this place #1 in LA. No way, cocksuckers. (I use the term "cocksuckers" affectionately) I had the cecina, chorizo, and asada combination plate with beans, rice, and a bit of cactus salad. I enjoyed it, but the meat was a little cold. The melted queso appetizer was good, but consisted of queso de Oaxaca with a bit of chorizo in there. Nice for folding up into a tortilla, but you can put something like this together for a couple of bucks at home. Homemade tortillas here rock but they would rock if you ate them on the moon. The salsa? Competent and hot. The chips with moles served to you at the outset were my favorite part of the entire meal. My wife got the mole combination. Nice depth in all of the moles, but Guelaguetza is a couple of blocks from me and significantly better in the mole department. I bet that fat ass Rizzo and all of his cronies used to eat here before they were humbled by scandal. I could just imagine him stuffing chips topped with mole in his greedy mouth and paying for it with a city credit card while the owners preen around. The place serves good but not great homemade Mexican food but there is no way in the Wide World of Sports that I would go out of my way to eat here again. Even at the risk of tooting her goddamn horn, my wife cooks way better food than the people in this kitchen.

University Credit Union's Tellers could possibly be the biggest cunts in West Los Angeles

If you are looking for an alternative to those criminal banks that dealt in credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages, University Credit Union may seem like a nice alternative especially if you attended UCLA. Unfortunately, while this may not be Chase or Bank of America, by the time you finish doing business with these incompetent people, you will wish you went there instead. The manner in which I was treated here made my physically ill. The person that helped me here was named Emerald. What a total cunt she was. I could not believe how stupid this woman was. I talk to tons of people all day, every day and trust me when I tell you that this lady was a stupid cunt. When I walked into a small Korean bank around the corner from my house and gave them an initial deposit of several thousand dollars, I was happy to find a financial institution that did not write sub-prime mortgages and that was happy to accept my green money without a horrid attitude and the terrible service that I experienced at University Credit Union.

Tacos Baja Ensenada Sells the Best Fish Tacos in Southern California

Looking for a place to feed your starving family for around ten bucks a head after you run trails all morning? The Baja Burrito is an outstanding buy at $6.50 and you would have to be quite a trencherman to finish it. It is stuffed with crispy batter fried fish and shrimp, beans made with lard, rice, cabbage, crema and salsa. With the roasted yellow chilies, this is a formidable burrito. The tacos are equally fantastic, whether they are fish, shrimp or Baja's (fish AND shrimp in a flour tortilla). The shrimp ceviche is well seasoned and delicious and only $2.99. The Campechana, while some of the seafood is from a can, is tasty nonetheless. The only item that I have not found to be top notch is the shrimp quesadilla. The fish tacos in Ensenada that you probably grew up on if you are from Southern California are better, but if this place had access to the same fresh fish right from the bay, they would give those street vendors down there a run for their money. The place can get crowded but they keep the line moving pretty quick.

Dan Tana's Restaurant

A friend of mine worked as a bodyguard for Phil Spector a few years back, and told me about how he would come into this place and approach a woman. He would walk up to their table, introduce himself and ask how much money it would take to go home with him. He would start piling up the hundred dollar bills in front of their faces until it exceeded ten thousand dollars and she could not say no. Being a raging ass munch with a chip on his shoulder, he would frequently start a fight and leave my friend to clean up the mess. Phil was right at home at Dan Tana's. But it is not entirely without merit. You can get Italian American dishes with a Croatian accent and if you are a toad like Spector, you could whip out a pile of cash to get someone to come home with you old school Hollywood style. It is similar to Musso and Franks but less of a tourist trap. The chicken vesuvius with a side of spaghetti is not bad, the scampi is better, but watching the dynamics of the room is the best.

Pacific Dining Car

If I were reviewing the breakfast exclusively, I would have given them a perfect rating. The banana and pecan pancakes, Eggs Blackstone, fried potatoes, and the muffins are spectacular. The breakfast cooks know how to cook your eggs a perfect over medium or however you desire them and the coffee is first rate. The steaks are just plain hunks of dead, unseasoned cow flesh and that $55.00 price on the menu makes you think surely they must jest. On a brighter note, the creamed spinach is one of my favorite sides anywhere and the fried potatoes are similar but not identical to the ones that come from my own kitchen. If you are alcoholic, you can get a proper but expensive fix here. If you puke on your shirt in the bathroom, nod off on dilaudid, if the prostitute you came in here with starts to become belligerent and disputes her fee, or you and your friends are coming down slowly from acid, they aren't going to mind. Your money is still green here. Lots of high powered attorneys, judges and other assorted assholes routinely clog their arteries with Hollandaise Sauce in this dining room. If you were a fly on the wall, you would find this place very entertaining.

Daniel Marquez- Asskicking Tenant's Rights Attorney

Dan is without a doubt THE best tenant's rights attorney in Los Angeles. When the owner of my rent controlled apartment passed away, her evil daughter inherited the complex. I had been living there since the 1986, and the rent had never been increased. Immediately, they tried everything they could to get me out of the place. This included having the unmitigated audacity to file three frivolous bad faith eviction cases against me in a one year time span. Dan represented me in the last two cases, and won both of them at trial. He did not overcharge me, make false promises and representations, or even charge me extra for things like phone calls and copies like most attorneys I have used in the past. Furthermore, I found Dan not only to be a wonderful attorney but a really cool guy. He used to be the director of the eviction project at Los Angeles Legal Aid Foundation in the early 1980's, and because of his vast experience with eviction cases at the Central District and the Los Angeles City RSO he was able to beat the fucking snot out of the lawyers that the owner used to file those bogus evictions. Because of Dan's great work, I was able to keep my place, save face, and recover my costs. Winning these cases was of the utmost importance to me. I suggest that if your landlord begins acting un-ethically and starts pushing you around that you give Dan a call.

Fuck The Miller Brewing Company and their Tools for Success Program

Miller Brewing Company Miller, the embalming fluid of beers, ought to be ashamed of themselves for sponsoring the Tools For Success Graduation award in our local community college automobile programs for several reasons. Firstly, the Miller Brewing Company produces dangerous, sub-standard products that contribute to numerous automobile accidents on a daily basis. Miller Beer is involved in hundreds if not thousands of automobile collisions every year and many of them are fatal. Alcohol manufacturers and automobile technology and repair should be mutually exclusive. Instead, we should force the alcoholic beverage industry to retrofit every existing automobile with an ignition interlock device and force the automotive industry to make this a standard feature on all new cars. In this day and age, a super-duper sensitive ignition interlock device could be manufactured and installed into any car for less than a hundred bucks. Unfortunately, these things are bad for business so they will never be used on a mass scale. Secondly, Miller targets the Tools for Success program at Latinos. The last thing Latinos need is another drink, especially a fucking bottle of Miller. Alcohol is simply a poison for people who are mestizo or indigenous with almost no exceptions, instantly addicting and frequently fatal. It is a terrible idea to drink any alcohol whatsoever if you are of Mexican descent. It is clearly a genetic condition that does not allow us to drink alcohol in moderation and without horrible consequences like other people. Miller should be ashamed of giving free tools away, and the winners should be ashamed of taking them. What if Watson Pharmaceuticals decided to sponsor a tool giveaway in West Virginia? Or how about if Kentucky Fried Chicken sponsored a culinary tool giveaway and blatantly targeted people who were strung out on fried chicken and processed foods? Finally, community colleges are not an appropriate advertising platform for alcoholic beverages or other mind altering drugs. If anything, it should be a platform for educating people about the dangers of alcohol. Public schools should not participate in the program or allow Miller to distribute applications and paraphernalia with the Miller logo to its students or set up displays on campus. I know that it may seem like a big great philanthropic deal to have an alcohol manufacturer award a full cabinet of tools to an outstanding graduate of an automotive technology program, but if you consider it for a while, I am sure you can see how deceptive Miller truly is.

Griffith Park 7/1/13

This morning, Griffith Park was pretty hot and sticky. My daughter and I headed up the West trail, and then up the ridgeline to the top of the mountain. Running down, it dawned on me that so far, this was the hottest morning of the year, and that the end of the Summer is going to be a scorcher. As the temperature increases, I usually head to higher ground such as the Greater Mt. Baldy area or in the alternative, Topanga State Park is normally 10-15 degrees cooler than Griffith Park during peak summer hours. When I began hiking in Griffith Park a couple of years ago, it took me a couple of hours to reach the top from Los Feliz Blvd. These days, my average times hover around 45 minutes round-trip. If you are just beginning an exercise regimen, take it easy and climb these hills at your own pace. It is not a race, and you are not going to get results if you push yourself so hard that you injure yourself. Happy Trails.

Santa Monica College

Santa Monica College was literaly an extension of my high school. Nearly all of my friends began thier college careers by attending SMC and most transferred to a four year university. I attended in the 1980's on a part-time basis. My brothers and sister also went to school here. Although I also attended Trade Tech, Mt. San Antonio, and LACC, Sata Monica College was my very favorite. Only Mt. Sac could hold a candle to it. Santa Monica College and the California Community College system in general are a land of second chances. In many countries, you are what you is and it is nearly impossible to continue anything other than trade school once you have flunked certain exams. I applaud their liberal and compassionate admissions policies. The faculty here are the most qualified that I have seen at any two year college. Many of them were also teaching at UCLA. The level of coursework is more challenging than Trade-Tech and some other colleges. Essentially, the workload for the classes that I took at SMC were similar to my undergrad classes at Cal Poly Pomona. You will need to pay attention, study, and if you do not, they will not hesitate to fail you. Some of my teachers went above and beyond the call of their job descriptions and really pointed me in the right direction. Socially, SMC was a lifesaver for me. Immediately after enroling, I made a ton of friends here. People were far more approachable and exhibited less gang behavior than the kids in high school. It made for a lot of good times. I saw Courtney Love's bush when Hole played here in the late 1980's. I also saw MDC and the Adolescents play on campus. I still know people from my Speech 101 class and that was a long time ago. The price is right! Why anyone would attend a private vocational school when they can attend SMC for peanuts is beyond me. When I read that some yellow-bellied, lilly-livered, chickenshit coward stormed in here and ruined so many lives, I was devastated. The fact that it took place at SMC where people are trying to improve themselves and stay out of trouble makes it exponentially more disturbing. While there is no emperical model that can predict who goes on a shooting rampage, you can't tell me that someone did not know how dangerous that little piece of shit was. I am mortified that person did nothing.

Merrell Shoes

The jury was out for a little while, but they have reached a verdict on the Trail Glove Grizzle. Guilty of sucking shit on all counts. Guilty of smelling like a durian. Guilty of pounding the fuck out of my poor feet. Guilty of making me feel like I got beaten on the soles with a two by four. Penalty enhancement for aggravated stench causing great bodily injury. If John Wayne were still alive, he would kill these shoes in one minute, or see them hang in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience.

Roma Italian Deli and Grocery

This place had been on my radar for quite some time but whenever I am in Altadena, the place is either closed or I am with my wife who professes to be a vegan. I walked up to the counter and asked for a sandwich. The kind man slicing the cheese pointed to a pile of freshly made sandwiches in butcher paper and said "these ones here, I make 400 of them a day." When I asked what kind they were, he said they have everything. I was sold from the moment I saw the pink butcher paper dripping with olive oil. I ate both magnificent sandwiches in the car in the parking lot. They were subtly delicious. Not drowned in mayo or some other foul-tasting sauce, not covered with vegetables, no pickles or peppers. Just a wonderful piece of bread, delicious salami, mortadella, and a little sharp provolone. The bread was a perfect showcase for these perfect slices of cured pork. I thought how sad it is that many people actually believe that Subway is what a sandwich is supposed to taste like. Better give them a real sandwich from this place for Christmas!