July 2

The La Brea Tar Pits:


I saw this on the way. I like it.


Also this. The pigeons of Park La Brea.


This used to upset me a lot when I was a little kid. I imagined that the elephants on the bank were the dad and the baby elephant, and the mom elephant was getting pulled into the tar, much to her family's distress. I was a morbid kid.


Okay. The woolly mammoth was always my favorite thing here as a kid. I would stand and watch it as it tilted and swung its head side to side and then with a pensive pause, reared its head up and made the trumpeting sound of an agitated pachyderm. I would stand and watch that thing in all its animatronic glory, and I loved the hydraulic clicks and gear grindings that would come with the show, and when I would first walk into the museum, I would pretend that I didn't want to just run right over to it and stare at it, and I politely looked at the exhibits that came before it, but I really just wanted to watch the woolly mammoth and get a little scared every time the trumpeting cry went off.

Wouldn't you know. IT DOESN'T MOVE ANYMORE. It still makes the trumpet noise, but the actual animal itself is perfectly stationary. That was a sad moment.


I also like the Imperial Mammoth skeleton because it looks like a giant grinning thing.


This is probably one of the coolest things in the museum too: a wall of dire wolf skulls. They found something like 1200 full skeletons, and this is a wall of 404 of them. This is only half of one of three or four cases of skulls.


Pretty funny pair of "scissors." I like that saber-tooth tigers are called "smilodons."


The afternoon light making all sorts of shadows on the ground.

The permanent farmer's market on Fairfax and Third st. is always a nifty place to find nifty things.


Crystallized violets, whose use I cannot fathom, but they look very pretty.


I would buy this for my dad.

Then the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, where we hung out and saw some sea life.


Biggest lobster I've ever seen.


My favorite animal.


Urchin.


Sea slug!


Moon jellies in all their cnidarian glory. Watching a moon jelly tank is so soothing. I recommend it.


Sea pen!

We actually went to the aquarium to see the grunions do the mating dance, but because it was not peak season, and therefore it was open season, there weren't that many fish, and there were about a million kids who just grabbed the fish and threw them around and took them to the scientists' booth where they removed the eggs and milt to breed them themselves. Consequently, this is as close to a grunion as I got:


THIS KID. He was running around in nothing but those swimming trunks and an iPod, plugged into his ears and playing music. He had picked up one of the fish and was yelling "ew! gross!" kind of things to his friends, and just at the moment that I snapped his photo, incognito, he was pretending to eat it. So now I can look back at this kid with nothing but contempt AND disgust.