10. Bigfoot

You make think Bigfoots are only a Northwoods beast, but Los Angeles has 3 distinct breeds of city ape. The first is your standard bigfoot, 6-11 ft tall shaggy gigantopithecus. The first sighting came in 1973 when a full sized Macho Sasquatcho chased down a pick up truck out in San Fernando Valley. The beast got close enough to the vehicle that they could smell its breath, which they later told reporters was "stinky." In 1974 a bigfoot was actually seen in the city, between 45th st and 47th st on Quartz Hill.

Best places to go bigfoot hunting: Big Rock Canyon in San Fernando Valley, Quartz Hill in the San Gabriel Mountains, Azusa at the San Gabriel Mountain Foothills, Campgrounds in Santa Clarita, Elizabeth Lake, Lancaster.

9. Skunk Ape

Bigfoots little brother is most commonly sighted in Florida, but he's also been seen in Palos Verdes and Redondo Beach, moving in and out of the suburbs via the sewers and knocking over trash cans for food. Skunk ape stands about 4 to 5 feet tall and reeks.

Best Place to go Skunk Ape hunting: Palos Verdes near the Dominator shipwreck. Redondo beach fields and suburbs at night.



8. The Beast of Billiwhack

The third kind of LA bigfoot might not be an ape at all. Seen once in Santa Paula and once in nearby Ojai, the Billiwhack beast has an shaggy, grey-black ape-like body, but an extended muzzle and goat like horns. It may be related to the Krampus or Wampa. Known to raid farms for chicken, corn, and dairy products.

Best places to go Billiwhack hunting: The Billiwhack Dairy in Aliso Canyon, Santa Paula, farms and forests in the San Rafael mountains and Ojai.

http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2008-07/002.html

Tasker is a CGI-based very simple to-do list manager that I wrote some time back when I realized I needed a more structured way of keeping track of what I was working on. I outgrew it some time back, and switched to Roundup with some custom templates to implement a version of Getting Things Done and mostly forgot about it. However, then a co-worker discovered a similar need and, as when I started, didn't need anything as complex as my Roundup environment, so I helped him install Tasker and he's been quite happy with it.

Of course, that meant a few tweaks. This is the first release in four years and adds support for adding the completion date to subtasks when finished and changes the file naming for completed tasks to use an ISO date format instead of seconds since epoch. This allows one to look at a directory listing and see when tasks were completed (very useful for writing status reports).

Since I was doing a new release anyway, I also moved Tasker into Git from my old CVS repository.

You can get the latest version from the Tasker distribution page.

http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2008-07/001.html

This release was primarily to address the test suite failure with the current version of Pod::Simple. It finally fixed a whitespace parsing bug in S<>, which meant that a podlators test became active and it turned out I wrote the test incorrectly.

Since I was doing a release anyway, Pod::Man now suppresses the long accent definition section of the preamble if run with --utf8 and there's a bit more testing of Pod::Man options.

You can get the latest release from the podlators distribution page.

• 09:31 Home again, awake, battling waves of kitteh enthusiasm.... #
• 10:50 Ok, catching up on email only took 45 minutes longer than I'd hoped it would. I suspect I'm going to find something I missed, though. #
• 11:26 Damn, where the heck did the morning go!? #
• 14:31 @mightymur I have been kicking myself about dragging my guitar out of the closet again & getting a practice amp .... #
• 15:32 Drawing balloon tails in InDesign. Working is hard with Rudie, the amazing face-rubbing kitten, on my lap. #
• 17:30 Ok. Enough work schmurk. Time to remember that there's some sort of holiday going on.... #
• 00:40 Party has been had. Did not get buzzed, but got terribly tired around 9:30pm. Took in some coffee, now I pay the price. What to do... #

The Overlooked Manga Festival Parade of Manga Presidents

• 02:57 3 am. And I'm still working. I am not bright. #

http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-345-32138-3.html

Review: Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart

"My surname is Li and my personal name is Kao, and there is a slight flaw in my character," said Master Li with a polite bow. "This is my esteemed client, Number Ten Ox."

Number Ten Ox is the tenth of his father's sons and is quite strong, hence his nickname. He lives in a village devoted primarily to silk-making. When a mysterious illness strikes down all of the children of the village between a particular age and destroys the silk production for the year, he travels to Peking to find a wise man to explain how a plague can count. The wise men on the Street of Eyes are far beyond his means, but finally a sign with a half-closed eye instead of the fully-open eyes of the wise men catches his gaze. Inside, he discovers Master Li in a drunken stupor, and a great partnership is formed, one that will take them through mythology, courts of power, and strange labyrinths in pursuit of a cure.

Bridge of Birds, subtitled "a Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was," is a deft blend of real Chinese mythology, exaggerated Oriental settings and phrasings from Western fascination and misunderstanding of China, a playful sense of humor, some tropes of detective fiction, and some Indiana-Jones-style adventure in magical treasure vaults. It's as compelling as it is difficult to describe. The closest comparison I have is to Ernest Bramah's Kai Lung stories; Bridge of Birds doesn't maintain a faux-Oriental style as consistently, but Hughart uses it in places to great effect. However, Bridge of Birds owes as much to detective novels, particularly the wise detective and active assistant tradition of Sherlock Holms or Nero Wolfe.

The mystery in this case is the cause and cure of the plague, and Master Li approaches it with a step-by-step deduction and occasional leap of insight that will be familiar to any mystery reader. The logic, though, is frequently a fantasy or medieval logic that adds in ghosts, elaborate spells, poisons, and magical plants (particularly the mandrake), and the mystery is crossed with an adventure-filled quest and blended with Chinese mythology, both true and manufactured.

Bridge of Birds doesn't have quite the density of faux-Chinese aphorisms as Kai Lung, but Hughart occasionally inserts an excellent one.

"'Take a large bowl,' I said. 'Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic, and lunacy. Darken the mixture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow kan pei — which means "dry cup" — and drink to the dregs.' Procopius stared at me. 'And I will be wise?' he asked. 'Better,' I said. 'You will be Chinese.'"

Humor is present throughout, but the most effective bits (for me at least) were the ruses and schemes that Master Li uses to either get money or get access to the next step of their quest. The setup for each scheme is funny in itself, but it's the wonderfully dead-pan narrative style and execution that made the book for me. Hughart uses the mannered and somewhat round-about narrative style to great effect for comedic timing and understatement. I always prefer humor where the reader can laugh without being pointedly told by the story that they're reading a joke, where the narrator doesn't obviously point out the humor but one can detect a twinkle in his eye. Hughart does this exceptionally well.

Like a lot of humor, I found it best in shorter doses. There's some repetitiveness to the structure and adventures; bits that might become tiresome when read in one sitting are fresher and more enjoyable spread across several.

Not every idea worked for me — I got a bit tired of Lotus Cloud and Number Ten Ox's obsession, for example, and there was rather a lot of angst over the children — but Hughart's writing has a rhythm and pacing that makes it a delight to read even through parts of the plot that didn't interest me. I highly recommend Bridge of Birds to anyone who likes humorous fantasy and protagonists who excel in adroit manipulation of any situation. It's an often-overlooked but well-deserved classic.

Followed by The Story of the Stone.

Rating: 9 out of 10