Duke Snider ~ 1924-2011

In the 1950s New York City had three baseball teams, and those teams had centerfielders named Mays, Mantle, and Snider. Edwin “Duke” Snider, the Duke of Flatbush, patrolled the yard at Ebbets Field for the Dodgers from 1947 (debuting two games after Jackie Robinson) until the team decamped for Los Angeles in 1958, 11 charmed seasons that included the team’s only World Series Championship in Brooklyn, a heroic defeat of the Yankees in ’55 in which the Duke blasted 4 home runs.

Playing in an outer borough for a team of perennial bridesmaids, Snider never quite achieved the broad, iconic acclaim of his rival centerfielders. But not only did he out-slug Mantle and Mays while they all played in New York, he boasted the gaudiest numbers of anyone in the game in the ’50s — his home run (326), RBI (1,031), and slugging (.569) numbers in that golden decade were unsurpassed.

In 1958 he followed the team to Los Angeles, but the dimensions of the Dodgers’ temporary home at the L.A. Coliseum (490 down the right-field line, compared to a cozy 297 at Ebbets) contributed to sagging offensive production for the left-hand-hitting slugger. In 1963 he was traded to the Mets and the following year, in one of the saddest demises in the history of the game, he was signed by the San Francisco Giants, where he played his final year. To this day he remains one of only a handful of ballplayers to have passed through that organization unbesmirched by its vile stank.

So today we salute you, Duke. You were a hero among legends, and now a legend among the immortals.

Bonus Question: What do Duke Snider, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre and Eazy-E have in common? A: They’re all straight outta Compton. Snider was Compton High class of ’44.

Did somebody dare Frank and Jamie McCourt to appear as publicly ridiculous as possible? As if the beleaguered ownership duo couldn’t have come off any creepier, Bill Shaikin reports in the L.A. Times this morning that for the entirety of their ownership the daffy pair have employed a reclusive Russian mystic to will the team to victory. That is correct — the estranged Tsar and Tsarina of Dodgertown have their very own Rasputin on the payroll.

Reportedly earning bonuses well into the six-figures depending on Dodger playoff performance (and presumably exiled to Siberia following the team’s dreadful 91-loss 2005 campaign), Vladimir Shpunt, a mysterious 71-year-old Russian émigré physicist and faith healer, is paid by the Dodgers brain trust to sit in a room in (ugh!) BOSTON and meditate the team to victory. Well, hats off to the two for developing a winning strategy in the absence of actually spending money on team payroll, as I understand there was a much more expensive Vladimir that some unenlightened fans hoped the team would pursue.
Shaikin’s full story can be found here.

While the average Angeleno may be more familiar with a different New Year’s parade celebrating an entirely different New Year, the Chinese version is no shabby affair. The 111th annual Golden Dragon Parade and Festival was held in Chinatown this past Saturday, a splendid procession featuring ferocious pantomime tigers, smoke-puffing magic dragons, urban Tai Chi masters, freelance contortionists, martial arts enthusiasts of all stripes, a maybe-maybe-not-Scientologist sheriff (Lee Baca), and at least one lonely jobs-slashin’ mayor (you-know-who). Firecrackers blasted, the air flowed heavy with smoke and confetti, passing strangers threw wild karate chops at each other, and everyone had a decidedly good time.

Watch out, Tomás, Ricardo and Enrique! Japanese taco scientists in Little Tokyo have recently developed a chicken taco with a taste so luxurious it could only be compared to one thing….

Industry analysts expect our hometown taco engineers to counter with a deluxe carne asada featuring factory-installed hydraulics and Virgin of Guadalupe paneling.

La Chicken
228 E. 1st St.
Los Angeles
www.lachicken.com

Despite rumors to the contrary, it is no great secret that this country’s economy is still hanging low around our ankles, while the great, greasy bankers who face-fucked us into this mess have gleefully returned to sipping hundred-dollar single malts while lovingly smacking their secretaries’ asses with appalling impunity. Feeling a little pissed off? Well you should be, and while your personal ability to enact meaningful financial reform or to frog-march these crooks straight into the Sodomite Wing of the nearest federal penitentiary may be nil, you can vote with your feet. The lovely Ariana Huffington and a few of her cocktail buddies from the Huffington Post have started a Move Your Money movement, urging concerned citizens of all stripes to pull their money out of these usurious, faceless and ultimately destructive mega-institutions and open accounts in smaller, friendlier and decidedly less evil community banks. The website has a zip-code calculator that lists secure, FDIC-insured operations in your area as well as a fun little It’s a Wonderful Life mash-up video that puts a Mr. Potter face on the devils of Wall Street while reminding us that George Baileys do still exist. So what do you say, Taqueños? We don’t chow our carnitas at Taco Bell, why would we bank with its moral equivalents?

It was 1904 that wealthy, Chicago-born astronomer George Ellery Hale, with nothing more than a 1900-pound, 60-inch reflecting lens—a gift from his father that had been gathering dust since 1896—and a generous grant from the Carnegie Institute, set out to build an observatory in the mountains above Los Angeles. Dr. Hale, by all accounts not only a genius but a functional schizophrenic who co-authored many of his most enduring theories with an elf, chose a location, 5,715-foot Mt. Wilson, that was as astronomically advantageous for its steady atmospheric conditions as it was a huge pain in the ass for construction. The entire observatory was hauled up the mountain piece by piece on muleback, but when completed in 1908 the Mt. Wilson Observatory was the premier astronomic research facility in the western hemisphere, a virtual clubhouse for the greatest minds in the field.

It was here that on a starry night in 1929 famed astronomer Edwin Hubble peered through the 100-inch Hooker Telescope—at the time the largest and most powerful in the world—and gazing further into the great, seething, primordial Mother-Taco than any man before him, gasped in discovery and was heard to proclaim, “Holy shit! There was a Big Bang!” It was the greatest scientific achievement of its day, unifying Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity with observable phenomena of an expanding universe while subtly implying we are not merely these rude physical beings born of woman, ploddingly propagating our generations from the odds and ends of one another, but great, luminous, aromatic creatures of smoke and fire, sparked to life by a masterful hand on the seasoned griddle of infinity, descendents of tacos all….

As we speak the Mt. Wilson Observatory is besieged by the rampaging Station fire as it sweeps through the Angeles National Forest. The press at the moment seems more concerned with the possible loss of the radio and television transmission towers that defile that mountain’s peak, but you and I, who understand the secret history of the Birthplace of the Taco Cosmogony, know what the real tragedy would be.

At any rate, one actress on the route, the self-proclaimed “Queen of the D-Listers” and the my-proclaimed “Empress of the ‘Just Slip it Under the Door’ crowd,” lived pretty deep into a Hollywood canyon I’d never explored before. After a couple visits to this enchanted little dell curiosity got the best of me and, scrapping my delivery schedule, I set off to find where that road went. Sometimes those sparks of curiosity pay off in the sorts of treasures that make even a loveless life of sweat and toil impossibly rich, and this was one of those times. After a mile or so of increasingly tortuous, rustic and broken road I popped out of the canyon, ascended a ridge, parked on a rutted shoulder and was faced with the unimaginable….

That’s right, a pine-rimmed, Art-Deco-dammed, great-blue-heron-infested freakin’ Alpine lake, nestled in the hills virtually directly below the Hollywood sign. Look! A flock of mallards! Over there! A mule deer doe and her fawn! ¡Mira! The Capitol Building!

Now, undoubtedly some of you are well aware of this little civic gem hiding out in the hills, but I can’t imagine many—in a town were every day is beautiful, nobody works and everyone is compulsively searching for something to jog around, I think I’ve ever seen one soul up there, and I believe he was a hobo.

Now to allow you some measure of self-reward I won’t tell you exactly were this place is, but there’s enough here for you to find it on your own, so grab a map, do some Googling and get out there! And to recount, the Taco lifestyle isn’t about snubbing the hired help, it’s about asking yourself where does this road go, and sniffing out the hidden treasures of this beautiful city.

I found these guys caught in mortal coils on a mountain trail high above Arcadia. The smallest one, the one being bitten but not biting, was dead and had been for some time. His limbs were curled up and the color had faded from his body. They were roiling and boiling all around the place, tumbling down the trail in a rolling, reptilian ball of concentrated aggression. From the looks of it, they had been at it for days and showed no signs of letting up. It was without a doubt the strangest thing I’ve seen in all my tramps through the forest.

Or was it really so strange? I invite you to disregard your intricate mammalian brain, with its gaudy pleats and involutions! Recede with me past years of evolution innumerable and into the throbbing medulla oblongata of your own reptilian core–do you see here perhaps a metaphor for your day? Kinda reminds me of a fistfight I saw late one night last week, beside a taco truck on San Fernando Road.