Spotted at a bus stop a few weeks ago. Not related to the actual Rent is Too Damn High Party as far as I can tell.
Meanwhile people wonder why there’s such a problem with homelessness.
Spotted at a bus stop a few weeks ago. Not related to the actual Rent is Too Damn High Party as far as I can tell.
Meanwhile people wonder why there’s such a problem with homelessness.
I recently found myself in Culver City and spotted a familiar-looking wall. Not because I’d been there often, but because I remember seeing it from the passenger seat of a co-worker’s car over a decade ago as we drove past on the way to…lunch? A bakery? I can’t quite remember. But I do remember Spider-Man climbing out of the upper window, and Superman changing in a painted phone booth. And I remembered having seen other signs of a comic shop in the building at the time, and the sense that I’d snapped a photo with my phone.
As it happens, I’m enough of a digital pack rat that I was able to find the older photo in less than 15 minutes! The photo itself didn’t reveal anything new, but I’d named the file “Dreamworld Comics.jpg,” which gave me somewhere to start.
Weirdly enough, when I found the current website and Yelp entry, the address looked the same as the one visible on the door…but it was definitely a different building.
It turns out they moved down the street several years back. From 12402 Washington Boulevard to 12402 Washington Place. If I’d gone one block north I would have seen the current store!
Google Street View shows them in the corner storefront back in 2008 and 2012, so when I snapped the photo in 2011, I would have seen the name a few seconds later.
“Here’s a metaphor to help you get a sense for how this complicated thing functions.”
“But it’s not really doing that!”
“That’s why it’s a metaphor, not a description.”
…
“Here’s an explanation in layman’s terms.”
“No, that’s wrong, that term only means this specific thing when used in the relevant technical jargon.”
“I’m not speaking to people who use the jargon, I’m speaking to the general public, who use the term in a much broader sense than you do.”
…
And then there’s the flip side:
“I learned this thing was simple. These edge cases can’t possibly exist.”
“You learned the simplified version. The real thing is more complicated.”
…
As the saying goes, The map is not the territory. The map isn’t complete, but that doesn’t make it wrong either, as long as you don’t insist that the real things that aren’t on your map must not be there.
It’s interesting how well earth, water, air and fire map to solid, liquid, gas and plasma. People recognized the four states of matter, but for ages they interpreted them as ingredients instead of structure.
When I took this photo back in 2016, it was a combination coffee/Chinese food restaurant: they sold coffee in the mornings and Chinese food for lunch and dinner. The owner had previously run a separate coffee shop (The Bean Counter, IIRC) in the same shopping center, then combined the two businesses to save on rent. It was one of our go-to Chinese takeout sources, and I’d sometimes grab coffee in the mornings if I was in the area or on my way somewhere in that direction.
The old coffee location sat vacant for a few years until a bakery (with coffee on the side) moved in. Amusingly, the bakery — with is still there today — also chose a pun-based name: Redondough (as in Redondo Beach).
In early 2020 — and I mean early, either January or February — they were offered a really nice buyout price by someone who wanted to turn-key convert it overnight to a Hawaiian restaurant. I imagine when mid-March rolled around and the initial Covid lockdown started, they were extremely relieved to have accepted it!
I never did get around to trying the Hawaiian place, even for takeout. Eventually it was taken over by a Hawaiian-style fast food chain.
Photo taken February 27, 2016 and originally posted on my Instagram account a few days later with this title, but no commentary.