Honoring Los Angeles' Sixth Street Bridge

Among Los Angeles' least-celebrated treasures are her bridges. Not that they don't have their admirers, but the glorious concrete and steel spans that cross the Los Angeles River, as well as her tributary the Arroyo Seco, just don't tend to get a lot of attention. They seem to do a lot of filming down at the bridges and along the river, but nobody talks about the bridges much. There has been an exception lately, which is the Sixth Street Bridge, only the attention it has been receiving isn't exactly the good kind.

Apparently, the concrete of the Sixth Street Bridge has been diagnosed as having Alkali-Silica Reaction, or
ASR. This is a chemical reaction among the concrete's ingredients that eventually causes the concrete to expand. This expansion creates internal pressures inside the concrete, which increase until the concrete starts breaking apart. (Mind you, not breaking apart as in exploding, but more like crumbling.)

About a year ago, the L.A. City Council voted to replace the bridge, and earlier this week they announced the winning entry from among 3 teams that participated in the competition. There is a YouTube channel at this link, where you can see short videos of all 3 competition entries.  The 3 teams were Parsons Brinckerhoff, AECOM, and HNTB with Michael Maltzan. HNTB/Maltzan won, and you can read more about the new bridge over at CurbedLA.

Back when I worked at Studio Works, we were just a stones throw from the 6th St. Bridge. I made many a trip across it at lunch time, for the excellent tacos at Carnitas Michoacan. It's just across the river, about a block or two beyond the end of the bridge on the left side, corner of Whittier and Soto. Those have to be some of the best tacos in L.A.  If you look closely at the taco stand, you can see that the place used to be a filling station. Look up above the counters where you order, and you can see the garage doors still up there in the ceiling. But I digress (and I'm making myself hungry!)

Since we've been having some pretty outrageously bright and clear mornings of late, and you never know when the next 7.0 is going to come rumbling through and reduce our beloved viaduct to a pile of steel and rubble, I went out and spent some time around, under, and on the bridge. I was reminiscing, and studying, as well as just enjoying. I'm not quite ready to mourn, but I will when the time comes for that.

I started off by checking out the bridge from the east side, and eventually made my way across the 7th Street Bridge, which is the next one to the south. I got out and walked back out on the 7th St. Bridge and took some pictures looking north. Click to embiggen.

The distinguishing feature of the Sixth Street Bridge is its mirrored pair of eccentric steel arches that carry the roadway across the L.A. River. The vast majority of the bridge is concrete, and just that center portion employs steel as the primary structural element. It is this hybrid combination of materials that makes the bridge so unique. There are a lot of concrete bridges out there, and a lot of steel ones. It's not uncommon to see a steel bridge with concrete abutments or piers, but you rarely see the two materials integrated so artfully into one structure.

In plan, the bridge isn't a straight line. It bends in the middle, so that the western flank is nearly straight east-west, but the eastern flank aims slightly south-easterly. This heightens the visibility of the steel arches as you approach from the west, since they are not in a straight line with your direction of travel.

You can see this in the image below, taken from alongside the western approach:

Welcoming Endeavour to the City of Angels

Every New Year's Day I enjoy getting up early and watching the B2 Stealth Bomber do its annual Rose Parade flyover, to kick off the New Year. Today I looked to the skies over Northeast L.A. and the San Gabriel Valley for an even more dramatic spectacle. Space Shuttle Endeavour, flying piggyback on a Boeing 747, did an extended tour all around L.A.'s far-flung airspace, paying tribute to places and institutions that were instrumental in its development and missions over the years, and greeting the city that will be its new permanent home.

There had been considerable buzz about it all week, and many people made plans to go watch it from various vantage points around L.A. My sister Allison, who lives over on the West Side, considered going up to the Getty Center to watch for it from there, but ended up finding a parking structure rooftop right in her neighborhood with clear views of the area. I had a meeting with a consultant here at the home office (I have a great dining room table that doubles as a conference table at the drop of a hat) and couldn't get away to go sky-watching at any of the announced flyover locations. Furthermore, I recently ordered a new plasma cutter for my shop and was expecting it to be delivered today, with signature required. Being pretty much stuck here at the house, the best I could do was head up to the roof after my meeting ended.  Little did I know, I would have one of the best seats in town!

As my meeting was wrapping up, Allison texted me. The timestamp was 11:53 and she wrote "On its way. Spotted over Malibu." I was searching for my camera, scrambling to change my shoes to something more pitched-shingle-roof friendly, and unhooking the screen off of my bedroom window, when I heard a loud aircraft in the sky. As I scrambled up from the lower roof to the upper one (going where I had never gone before - kind of thrilling and terrifying at the same time) I saw that my neighbor was up on his roof too. He said that he had glimpsed it just then, in the western sky, but it had banked and flown back away again. It was probably passing by Griffith Park and the Hollywood Sign at that point, but we weren't sure where it went after that.

The reports were that it was supposed to do a flyover up at JPL, which is just northeast of us, so we continued to watch and wait. Several minutes passed. Then we heard it again. Suddenly they emerged in the western sky, coming right towards us.

RIGHT TOWARDS US!!!!

I took about a zillion pictures, and tried to shoot some video too, but I just wasn't any good, stability-wise, and I'm afraid the video isn't blog-quality (unless one's goal is to spread nausea among your readership, which mine is not).

Pretty soon they were right over us.  I heard on the news that one of the fighter jets was filming it and the other was the security detail.

They went pretty far to the east, and I'm guessing they may have passed over CalTech before making a hard left, hooking back around and up towards JPL.

Then she flew back towards the west again. The 747 and Endeavour looked great framed against the mountain range.

Then she lifted and banked, and came back our direction, heading towards the southeast.

We got an awesome profile view as she departed for points south, possibly Disneyland, which I heard was on the list of flyover locations.

I love that you can make out the NASA logo on the tail fin of the 747.

Welcome to Los Angeles, Endeavour!  I'll be in the crowd cheering you on next month when you make your way to the California Science Center!

John Lautner Tour: Schwimmer House, 1982

Note: Nearly a year ago, there was a big to-do for John Lautner's 100th Birthday (and deservedly so, I must say). I toured 4 of his houses in L.A. and intended to blog about them all, but only 2 posts got finished.  The third post was started but never completed; now I have finished it.

I didn't want to completely re-write the beginning, so I am just appending this note at the top.

To see all my posts on Lautner, click here.

2012 Rose Parade B2 Stealth Flyover

Sunday was New Year's Day, as everybody knows, but didn't really register as such with me, since there was no Rose Parade, and consequently no B2 Stealth Bomber flyover to watch from my front yard, slightly groggy-eyed, at 8:00 a.m. sharp.  I've come to rely on it for the past several years, as my marker for the start of the New Year.  It's a much more exciting way to 'ring in' the new year than staying up until midnight on New Year's Eve. *yawn*

Monday morning I finally got my flyover.

Here's how it goes down: First, the Goodyear Blimp appears on the scene.  Last year it motored right over my house en route to the parade; this year it flew in from the southeast and I spied it over my neighbors roofs across the street:

The blimp usually appears 10-15 minutes before 8.  Then you just watch the northern sky and wait.  This year I was getting a little antsy when, according to my iPhone, it was a couple minutes past 8, with nothing happening. I was about to tweet my frustration when I heard the roar approaching from the west.  It's tricky, because the sound somehow seems to precede the plane in a weird way. It's hard to describe.

Then it got very still, almost like you're in the eye of the storm.  I almost thought I'd missed it, when I spotted the B2.

Again, the whole thing is a little hard to describe.  It just appears to glide without any effort whatsoever, and makes very little sound at all at this point. It gradually descends, on a perfectly controlled trajectory, as it approaches the parade route.

Once it goes below the edge of the mountaintops, it becomes extremely hard to see.  Then I run inside and watch it swoosh over the Rose Parade on TV.

On a lark, I just did a quick YouTube search, which turned up this really great video (not by me) of the Stealth on approach; you can see it banking and everything, and it's extremely cool:

Happy New Year from Creatures of Prometheus!

New Community Group: SoCal Obejctivists

I just got back from Chicago where I had an awesome weekend courtesy of the Chicago Objectivist Society, at their MINICON.  Over the past year and a half, I've made many good objectivist friends in Atlanta, Denver and now Chicago (among other places). All those cities have vibrant objectivist community clubs, run by and for people with an enthusiasm for Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism.

Once I realized how much fun was being had by these folks, with their monthly socials, dinner lecture events, and conferences, I started thinking how much fun it would be to start such a group here in the L.A. area.  One would think that with the Ayn Rand Institute right here in our backyard, such a club would be thriving, but there isn't really one. (I guess that would make Irvine the backyard of L.A. Well maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but stay with me.)

Meanwhile, I was going back and forth to Tennessee, and even living there for a while, for a house I designed and helped build. Then the new year rolled around and I thought it was a great time to start up the club.  Then I had a freak accident requiring hand surgery, and all that stuff that completely derailed the first half of the year.  My summer was spent getting caught up, and now I'm finally moving forward again.

Which means:

ITS TIME TO START THE CLUB ALREADY!

It also helps that I've become friends with Objectivist sex blogger Jason Stotts over the past several months, and he wants a local club here in SoCal too.  So, without any further ado, we are proud to announce the formation of the SoCal Objectivists.

From the 'About' page on our Google Group:

This announcement list is for Objectivists and others in Southern California seriously interested in Ayn Rand's ideas. It's purpose is to announce our periodic, informal social events, and distribute info about other events of interest, such as Objectivist campus clubs and Ayn Rand Institute Events.

We're planning our first social event for the evening of Saturday, September 17th, probably in the Long Beach area. Meeting locations will alternate monthly between Los Angeles and Inland Empire/Orange County. Our goal is to create simultaneous L.A. and I.E./O.C. chapters under one larger organization.


For now we're running things from the Google Group, but we will have a regular web page up and running soon. You can follow us on Twitter @SoCalOists, or like us on Facebook, or just sign up to get our announcements at our Google Group.  We will also be disseminating information about other local events of interest via the Google Group, such as objectivist campus club events and Ayn Rand Institute events.

John Lautner Tour: Harpel House, 1956

The next house I bring you from last weekend's Lautner Tour is the Harpel House.  Nine years after the Jacobsen House, we can see that structure is clearly a major theme in John Lautner's work. Harpel displays his ongoing interest in developing a fully integrated and expressed structural system, for each project, as an important architectural value.

Harpel is located a few miles west of the Jacobsen House, just down Mulholland and on the opposite side about a block. From the road, there is a long driveway that goes uphill to a level pad where the house sits. You can get a pretty clear picture of the siting of the house from the Google Satellite view:

The Harpel House is the white bar at the lower right.  The octagon to the left is Lautner's famous Chemosphere, aka the Malin House. The small white circle just below the Harpel House is a Futuro which is apparently being restored by the Harpel's owner.

We weren't allowed to photograph inside the house, so I'll give an exterior tour and describe a few things I liked about the inside, using the floor plan for visuals.

John Lautner Tour: Jacobsen House, 1947

Last weekend I had the wonderful treat of participating in the special tour of John Lautner-designed homes that was jointly put on by the MAK Center and the John Lautner Foundation.  The whole thing was done in celebration of what would have been Lautner's 100th birthday on July 16th of this year.

I present them here in the reverse of the order in which I saw them on the tour, for a couple of reasons. First, by reversing the order, I will roughly present them in a chronological sequence from earlier career to later, which I think makes sense with this particular group of projects. Second, it makes little sense to lead with Sheats/Goldstein, since everything is pretty much anticlimactic after that.

One more introductory note: the MAK and Lautner folks who organized the tour did a great job, and produced a booklet for the tour with information about the houses. In my blog posts in this series, all the images are my own photographs, with the exception of one or two archival photos from the booklet, and the Lautner drawings which I scanned from the tour booklet.

The Jacobsen is on Multiview Drive, just below Mulholland Drive, overlooking the San Fernando Valley above Studio City and Universal City.  Multiview is a pretty good street for architecture; Schindler's wonderful Kallis House, with its butterfly roof and quirky stone fireplaces, is nearby on the same side of the street.

This is an early-career project for Lautner, dating from 1947.  According to Wikipedia, he had left Frank Lloyd Wright's employment and gone off on his own by that time, although he did not finally obtain his own architecture license until 1952.

So, this house is the work of an unlicensed individual who would have found himself in violation of California law had he have claimed to have been an architect. Ahem. Don't get me started.

The other houses on the tour were better concealed from the road; this house reveals itself pretty directly to you as you walk up the driveway:

Celebrating John Lautner's 100th Birthday

Periodically, I sit down and avail myself of the Googles and Wikipedia to find birthdays of great architects and designers I admire.  I add them to my calendar, with the intent to blog my own little celebrations of them as they roll around throughout the year.

If you have any suggestions for me to add to the list, please feel free to chime in, in the comments.

There haven't been any for a few weeks now (of the ones I've added to my list thus far). Today we have a big one to celebrate.  Today marks the Centennial of John Lautner's birth.

Lautner was one of Frank Lloyd Wright's more illustrious proteges, and has a special place in my personal Pantheon. Lautner wasn't just another good architect.  He was an incredible visionary and innovator.

Rather than go on at length about Lautner's career, as the Wikipedia article linked above does, I'm keeping it short today, but don't worry, there's much more to come.

This summer, the John Lautner Foundation is holding a whole series of events to celebrate, including a tour next weekend of private Lautner homes in the L.A. area.  I bought my ticket this morning, and couldn't be more excited.  The tour is a little pricey at $100 but worth every penny, IMO.  You can get yours here.  Join me for the tour!  I'll have my camera with me and expect to take lots, and lots, and lots of pictures.

I plan to do a separate post for each house on the tour.  The tour includes (links are to Google image searches for each house) the Harpel House (1956), Jacobsen House (1956), Schwimmer House (1982) and Sheats/Goldstein House (1963/1989).

Stay tuned!  And raise a glass to the genius of John Lautner today!

Night Blooming Cactopodes!

I'm quite pleased about the fact that just earlier today I was writing about last year's spectacular crocosmia bloom; and then, this evening, I went outside and saw the first blossoms of the summer on one of my giant night-blooming cactopodes in the front yard!

Witness:

Each blossom opens at dusk, blooms for only one night, and then withers as the sun rises.  They generally produce enough blossoms to go night by night for most of the summer, well into late August.  When properly pollinated, they produce bright red fruit, somewhere in size between a golf and a tennis ball.

Witness: fruit from a previous year.

As I stood there admiring the cool evening ambiance and lovely scenery of my garden, my neighbor Mercedes appeared at her front gate and we chatted.  Well, we sort of chatted.  Our conversations are generally along the lines of making benevolent statements to one another and smiling a lot.  Her English is about equivalent to my Spanish.  She is the matriarch of their household, which includes everything from a relatively small, cute baby (her granddaughter), to a handsome Marine (her son) who is now attending the Police Academy.  On more than one occasion, she has shown up at my doorstep, smiling, with a plate full of carne asada or chile rellenos for me. 

I picked a flower and gave it to her, and then there was one left.

Crocosmia Part I

Last year the crocosmia in my front yard bloomed and bloomed and bloomed.  They were gorgeous.  This year we had a lot of rain, which beat them down, and they just didn't look as good.

Fortunately, however, last year I got great pictures.  Somehow they never made it onto the blog.  Today we'll look at some of those.  I'm planning to follow up with a couple more posts on crocosmia, because they're my favorite flower, and I like to talk (and write) about things that merit that distinction.

So, without further ado, here's a quick tour around my little front yard.

Welcome to Los Angeles. Prepare to stop.

That is all.

Los Angeles Department of Water and Power

Los Angeles is a city in a desert.  It's easy to lose sight of that fact.  Given the context, however, it's pretty easy to see that, in such a place, Water and Power are pretty much synonymous.  Years ago I thoroughly enjoyed a book called Rivers in the Desert, which is an historical account of the land-and-water-rights grab perpetrated on the people of the Owens Valley, and subsequent development of the aqueducts by William Mulholland.

I am rather sympathetic to Mulholland, inasmuch as he was a self-trained, uneducated man, who eventually achieved tremendous feats in the area of hydraulic engineering and civic infrastructure.  Of course, the above mentioned land grab was an abhorrent violation of the property rights of the people of the Owens Valley, and I don't mean to diminish that.  But I digress.

Sometime in the '50s and/or '60's the LADWP built a lot of really nice looking modernist facilities all around town.  The iconic DWP Headquarters was built around this time, but there were also a number of substations and the like constructed, that have a coherent visual identity all their own.  Said identity includes smooth concrete walls, thin stacked modern brickwork, and bronze lettering set off of the face of the building on posts.  If you do a google image search under DWP station, or DWP substation, or DWP distributing station, you can see a few examples (although I was disappointed that there weren't more.  I should get out there and take more snaps of these).  Some are more modern, some are more neo-traditional, but almost all of them share the bronze lettering in common.

If you pass by just at the right time of day, you get this:

or this:

or even this:

One of the lovely things about Los Angeles is that, even for all the smog, we do have fabulous light.  *sigh*

Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels: Quick Post

A couple months ago I took my students on a field trip, to the L.A. Cathedral, officially known as the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.  At some point, I would like to write a longer post on that building, as it is one of my local faves, and I have a lot to say about it. Today, however, we're just going to have a quick look at the way the sunlight and shadows move and play across the facade over the course of the day.

These were taken in early April, so the times given in my descriptions are PST.

Here is the Cathedral as it looked when I arrived, at 9:25 a.m.  It's not first thing as the sun rises, but the sun is still relatively low in the eastern sky, and the building is getting a more or less straight-on blast of sunlight.   You can see that the adobe-colored concrete is treated in 2 different ways: it has smooth, flat surfaces and horizontally banded surfaces.

Here is the horizontal banding up close, with a flat section also, so you can get a better idea about what it's like:

The portion of the building I am interested in for this discussion is this area above the main entrance.  The right section is flat concrete, and has a recessed window very high up.  The center section is horizontally banded and has a less-deeply recessed, larger window; the left section is also horizontally banded.  Note also that none of these surfaces are related to one another by right angles.  This affects the way the sunlight and shadows react with the building, as we shall see.  The photo below was taken at 9:31, and the shadows are pretty much the same as the one above

Here it is about 30 minutes later, at 9:58.  Notice how the flat surface is still in the shade, but it is no longer casting any shadow on the adjacent surface; the shadow line between the two surfaces has receded right into the corner.  Notice also how the next surface over, with the larger window, is just barely being grazed by sunlight, so that the lower edges of the horizontal bands are subtly dabbed in light.

Now (below) it is a bit later, 12:21 p.m.  Look at the fantastic play of light on the surface to the left!  The sun is high in the sky, causing long shadows on the horizontal panels, and the glass of the window is reflecting sunlight back onto the wall as well.  The flat surface to the right, by contrast, is getting a direct blast.

Here is a closeup, just a moment later, at 12:30.  Another nuance you can see, if you click to embiggen, is the way the small concrete wall segment above the large window is also reflecting a small but noticeable amount of light onto the adjacent darker surface, at the corner.

And finally, about an hour and a half later, here is how it looks at 2:07 p.m.  The surface to the left is in complete shadow, and the window reflection isn't doing its thing any more.  The surface in the middle is just getting enough sunlight to make little triangular tips on the edge.  One of the things I like about this building is that there are no right angles at all in the floor plan, and how that leads to this kind of richness and variety in the way the surfaces interact with the sunlight throughout the day.

It also leads to some really interesting things on the inside, but I'll have to leave that discussion for another day.  Have you been to the Cathedral?  Did you like it?  Hate it?  Let me know in the comments!

"The Event" Filmed in my Neighborhood

Last night, as I was walking P + T around our neighborhood, I noticed some of those temporary NO PARKING signs posted about, with the forbidden day written in as Thursday.  "Something's afoot," I thought to myself.  Then I spotted some of those rent-a-cop-type security guards hanging around on some of the street corners, and a weird looking line of porta-potties all lined up on a trailer.

I had a very strong suspicion about what was afoot and tweeted:

They're setting up to do some filming on Aldama Ter., between Raphael St + Aldama St. I'll investigate further tomorrow. #90042

Today was a fairly busy day, and I was either engrossed in work or out running around for a lot of it, and completely forgot all about my special assignment until about 4:30.  All at once, I remembered.

Paul and Todd were napping.  "Quick, get your leashes!  We've important investigative work to do!  Something was afoot today, and we may have already missed it!"   They scampered to get their leashes hooked onto their collars and assemble themselves at the front gate, while I stumbled around frantically looking for my keys.

"Look on the kitchen counter under the dish towel!" called Paul to me from the front yard.  "HURRY!"

Israel Rally Update

Last Sunday afternoon I went down to the Pro-Israel Rally in front of the Israeli Consulate in Los Angeles.  You can read the whole essay I wrote on why I was attending here.

The Consulate is located on Wilshire Blvd just east of San Vicente Blvd, and near the line between Beverly Hills and L.A.  Here is my overview of how the whole thing was set up, in the form of a marked-up satellite view:

They had closed Wilshire Blvd all the way from San Vicente on the west to Crescent Heights on the east.  I parked a few blocks north of Wilshire on San Vicente.  When I walked back, I learned that they had not just closed Wilshire to car traffic at San Vicente, but were not letting pedestrians through either.  They were diverting all pedestrians through the residential neighborhood to the north, and making them enter the rally area off of La Jolla.  I'm not sure why they did this.  Let's just say I'm sure they had their reasons, as the police presence was very heavy, and security looked extremely well coordinated.  There were LAPD, as well as Beverly Hills PD, and also lots of other private security peopleguys.

Here is a closeup of the rally area, with the area outlined in red where the crowd was the densest:

This map must be a little old because the 2 buildings on the northwest corner of the intersection weren't even there anymore.  That's where there were paramedics and TV news trucks were set up.

Here's how it looked when I arrived, taken from that northwest corner and looking southeast towards the consulate:

And another view in the crowd:

Some of the signs people were holding:

This makes a good point.  The people living in Gaza are not free,

they are living under dictatorship.  Hamas doesn't exactly 

recognize freedom of speech, for example.

'Peace Activists Don't Use Knives and Clubs'

Apparently other boats in the flotilla were boarded and

searched, without incident.  See www.FlotillaFacts.com

This is the main reason it is important to support Israel,

and this is why I was at this event. Read my previous post

for a more complete explanation.

This one is pretty self-explanatory.

Israel's enemies seek to undermine her moral right to exist and to defend herself.

This is called 'delegitimization' and is also one of the central issues of this incident.

Here is the crowd a little later, around 3pm:

Fliers & Handouts

In addition to the signs, a number of people were handing out fliers.  One very good one was from an organization called Stand With Us.  They were promoting these websites:

• www.FlotillaFacts.com: This appears to be a good source of facts regarding the flotilla that have been ignored in the anti-Israel reporting that has dominated the issue.  For example, there were other boats in the flotilla that were boarded and searched peacefully, and without incident.
• www.ShameOnTurkey.com: More info on Turkey's relationship to the whole incident;
• www.StandWithUs.com: Seems to be a general Pro-Israel information clearinghouse, specific to this organization, with info on other events and updates.

There was also an organization called the Israeli Leadership Council, promoting a project called Tzav8.org which lets you register for rallies and counter-protests that come up on short notice.  Their whole mission statement is too long to reproduce here, but I found it pretty interesting and encourage you to check them out and read it for yourself.  I plan to sign up for their emails, even if just to know what's going on in the world of protests and counter protests.  They also have a facebook page at facebook.com/tzav8.

Another leaflet I came home with was from the Simon Wiesenthal Center, titled "2010 Top Ten Anti-Israel LIES".  This one is pretty eye-opening as well, and you can read it online at www.wiesenthal.com/toptenlies

I was looking in the crowd for Gideon Reich, who I knew from the OActivists List would be there and possibly distributing some leaflets as well, but we missed each other. (It was a pretty big crowd!) He wrote up a nice blog post about his experiences at the rally, which you can read here.

The Crowd and My Overall Experience

I have to say, the overall mood was really much more of a rally or festival or celebration, than one of protest or counter-protest.  Everyone was smiling and friendly, and it was easy to approach and talk to just about anyone.

The speakers were really hard to hear, unfortunately.  That's really my only complaint.  I also found myself wishing there were a beer tent, but then I would remind myself that this wasn't really a festival, even though it seemed like one in some ways, and I could go to the bar later.

I was tweeting the whole time too, and I just found this cool app where you can revisit your old tweets, called TwimeMachine.  Through the magic (not really) of TwimeMachine, you can revisit your old tweets.  Here is a log of my tweets that day, courtesy of Twime Machine.  To read them chronologically, start at the bottom:

Crowd Size Estimate

One report I read indicated that LAPD estimated the crowd at 2,200.  At the time, I estimated the crowd as closer to 8-10,000. I thought I had tweeted that, but a quick check of my tweet log above shows that I must have been distracted or something and decided not to tweet it.  I wish I had, because my quick math shows that I was probably pretty close without going over, and would have likely won the Showcase Showdown if this were The Price is Right.

Here's how I defend my number:

I took the satellite image from above, imported it into AutoCad, and scaled it appropriately to the graphic scale shown on the map (omitted from the cropped image above.)  Then I traced a polyline around the red outline I drew.  According to ACad, the area encompassed by that line is around 50,000 square feet.

When designing a lobby or other closely packed standing space, the building code calls for 5 square feet per occupant.  50,000/5 = 10,000 occupants.

From my pictures, you can see that the crowd isn't exactly packed in shoulder-to-shoulder for that whole area, but they are that dense in some places.  Also, there were lots of people milling around outside the red-outlined area.  Plus, there were people coming and going the whole time.  So, if you took everyone who attended at some point during the afternoon, and packed them into that space, I think you would at least fill the red outlined area, if not exceed it.

So, perhaps the more accurate figure is 10-12,000 people.

The Helen Thomas Incident

There were several signs, of the homemade variety (as opposed to all those pre-printed ones I showed you above) declaring "Helen Thomas is a Nazi" and that sort of thing.  I was completely unaware of the incident of the previous Friday, and didn't really know what was up with this.  I got some info from one of the other protesters at the same time the tweet came through from my twitter friend @shlevy : "Affiliated with White House press, made a statement that the Jews should leave "Palestine" or some such."  Then I realized that I had, in fact, heard of Helen Thomas, the old lady that sat in the front row of the White House Press Corps, mainly out of tradition, but I had no idea she was such a fearless bigot.

You can always count on your tweeps to help fill in the blanks and connect the dots!

It wasn't until I got home and read the news that I realized the incident was relatively fresh, and I then didn't feel like I was out of the loop for not knowing.  I usually spend Friday and Saturday out in the workshop welding furniture, and miss out on the news those days.  If I were to sit down in front of the computer on a Friday or Saturday morning, I could blow an hour or two very easily, just indulging my inner news junkie.

Then came Monday morning's news of her retirement. I found this pretty interesting in the big-picture context.

On the one hand, Israel's government is left alone in the world, to defend her actions regarding the flotilla.  Many ships were boarded, in international waters,  to be searched for weapons and contraband.  All but one of these searches were conducted peacefully.  One erupted into the ugly spectacle we have all read about and seen video of, and for which Israel is universally condemned.  Israel has every right to conduct these searches, in the interest of her own self-defense against Hamas, and their never ending volley of thousands of rockets into Israel.  Note that these rockets have been launched after the Israeli pull out from Gaza in 2005.

Yet, on the other hand, the kind of speech delivered by Helen Thomas is resoundingly condemned and vilified, and her immediate retirement is the result.  Her speaking engagements are canceled, and she is put out of the Press Corps.

I'm sure that in the Arab world, Ms. Thomas is being celebrated.  Many accounts have surfaced that she was always known to be anti-Semitic, only that her timing and choice of words were extremely poor in this case, and they got the better of her.

Summary

Somehow, Hamas is seen by most as a legitimate body which is to be taken seriously and negotiated with in good faith.  Yet, Helen Thomas is instantly delegitimized by her own remarks, which are essentially the same thing Hamas is saying.

If only the world would wake up to the fact that Hamas and their brethren march in lockstep with Thomas and her ilk, and they mean it.  America needs to wake up to the fact that Israel's enemies are America's enemies;  that Gaza needs to be freed from Hamas; that, in fact, peace activists don't use knives and clubs; and that the delegitimization of Israel is wrong.

Only then can there be the real possibility of peace in the Middle East.


6/10/2010 Update to the Update

It has been pointed out to me that I did in fact tweet my crowd estimate, just before leaving the rally.  I somehow managed to crop my screenshot of the Twime Machine search at the wrong spot.  Here is the full tweet log, with my crowd estimate at the top: