Carmageddon is Coming!

Here in Los Angeles you can't turn on the radio or television, read the newspaper, or even drive on any freeway in the region (including the San Joaquin Valley!) and not know about the upcoming closure of a 10 mile stretch of the San Diego Freeway for the entire weekend of July 16 (including late Friday night and early Monday morning). And it's not any 10 mile stretch of the I-405--it's the stretch between the Santa Monica Freeway and the Ventura Freeway, which practically speaking is the only route that connects the San Fernando Valley and West Los Angeles.

Given the car culture of Los Angeles where people will drive two blocks to go to the gym, this portends a traffic jam of massive, if not biblical proportions. I remember maybe 10 years ago when a traffic accident closed the Hollywood Freeway for several hours on the portion that connected Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley. That created the worst single point traffic jam that Los Angeles has ever seen (the overall congestion for the 1992 riots was worse). Since the accident blocked traffic from going from Hollywood to the Valley, when I left my office in West Los Angeles and headed home to the Hollywood Hills, I didn't think I'd be affected since I was going completely in the opposite direction, and nowhere near the San Fernando Valley. Wrong. Cars looking for a way, any way to go west and north into the Valley clogged the streets in my eastbound direction, as they drove round and round in vain for a clear path home.

Now the San Diego Freeway is not literally the only way to get from West Los Angeles to the Valley. There's Sepulveda Blvd., which largely parallels the freeway. But wait, Sepulveda will be restricted, too. Presumably those working on the freeway construction need that street for their own access, as well as local access for neighborhood residents. Also, there are the canyon roads like Beverly Glen, Coldwater Canyon and Laurel Canyon that connect the Valley to the Westside. Plus there are those secret residential shortcuts that can get you from here to there if you know where to make the correct turns. But no way can they handle more than a small portion of the traffic between the Valley and the Westside.

Optimistically our city fathers point to the 1984 Olympics as demonstrating that advance warning as to potential traffic gridlock will lead to smooth flowing traffic as people avoid the trouble spots in droves. Actually, I think a better precedent is in the Bay Area, when the Bay Bridge between San Francisco and Oakland was closed for Labor Day a couple of years ago, and traffic turned out to be fine. Theoretically that should have been worse since there are fewer ways to cross San Francisco Bay than to get between West L.A. and the San Fernando Valley. Hopefully that will be the best portent of what will actually happen.

E3 Entertainment Expo May Be The Noisiest Place on Earth

If Disneyland is indeed the happiest place on earth, the annual E3 Entertainment Expo held at the Los Angeles Convention Center may well be the noisiest place on earth. With theater sized screens showing highlights of recent and coming video game titles at a high decibel level, it's certainly one of the noisiest places I've ever been.

Of course, while I am an annual visitor to this signature trade event of the video game industry, don't mistake me for a gamer. Indeed, I haven't played a video game since 1989, when I finally defeated the dragon at the end of Super Mario 1, after several months of trying. At that point I decided to retire undefeated from video gamedom, having nothing else to accomplish.

So why do I go to E3 every year, or for that matter, how do I even get into this event which is not open to the public? Well, it goes back over a decade ago when I received an unsolicited free pass to the event (presumably as a finance professional), which had just relocated from Atlanta. It was a Friday afternoon and things were a little slow in the office with the April 15 tax deadline having passed. The name "E3" is short hand for electronic entertainment exposition, and I really thought I was driving downtown to see the latest in home theater equipment and stuff like that. Obviously, I was mistaken.

But that still doesn't answer why I continue to attend the event every year. Well, first is the spectacle of it. Tens of thousands of industry professionals swarming inside the convention center, with hundreds if not thousands of video game consoles for people to play with. Many attendees are armed with video cameras to capture the details of the newest video games--perhaps an unparalleled opportunity to check out the competition, while others settle to capture the event with still cameras. Another interesting element to the crowd is the high proportion of nerdy looking Asian attendees, particularly nerdy looking Asian women, who I take to be game designers and engineers, as they certainly don't look like gamers. Also the appearance of celebrities adds excitement to E3, though all I ever got to see was the top of Paris Hilton's head.

Then there are some of the over-the-top promotions that some of the vendors will engage with, like the video game Homefront, involving an invasion of the United States by the North Korean army. The makers of that game requisitioned the parking lot across the street from the convention center, tied small North Korean flags to all the cars parked there, and hired dozens of actors dressed like North Korean soldiers. And oh, the entrance to the parking lot was rechristened as a military checkpoint.

But perhaps the main thing is the exclusivity of it. E3 garners heavy coverage both in the press and on the TV news, and is always caveated as an industry only event that is not open to the public. Millions of gamers across the United States, and indeed the world, would give their right arm to gain admission to the event. But I can get in and they can't.

An Unexpected Reminder of a Past Trip--and Meal

In the fall of 1994 I attended what turned out to be my final training session for Kenneth Leventhal & Company before its merger the next spring with Ernst & Young. The training was held in Glen Cove on Long Island, and because we had been to Manhattan on vacation just a few weeks earlier, I had no intent of visiting Manhattan on this trip. There were just a couple of us from Los Angeles at the training, and the session ended too late to catch a flight back home the same day. At dinner in Flushing, Rick Schneider mentioned that he had never been to Manhattan, so I offered to drive him straight to Manhattan after dinner. In probably no more than an hour's time, we drove to Manhattan, saw the sights such as Central Park, Radio City, Times Square, and the World Trade Center, and drove back across the East River. I think Rick was especially impressed by my ability to drive the streets of Manhattan like a cab driver. While normally a laid back and courteous drive, I had learned that my old driving habits would have left me stationery as all of the other cars maneuvered by. My only driving slip up was when we drove into Brooklyn and somehow I got off the freeway into a suspcious looking part of town. Furthermore we had to pull into a gas station because Rick had to use the bathroom. It was much later that I discovered we had been cruising the streets of Bedford Stuyvesant, indeed not a particularly good neighborhood at the time. But Rick was impressed with my abilities as a tour guide and told everybody in the office about our adventure when we got back in L.A.

Having enjoyed my unplanned jaunt into Manhattan and not flying out until afternoon, I decided to drive back into Manhattan early the next morning to explore the expanded part of Chinatown that I had visited a few weeks previously. I can't say I remember much about that journey over 16 years ago, though since I do keep an Excel schedule of Chinese restaurants I have eaten at, I do have the names and addresses of every restaurant on this and other visits. All this leads up to a posting on the Chowhound New York message board where somebody asked for the name of the restaurant that was at 237 Grand St. in Chinatown in the early 1990s, and whether they served Chiu Chow style noodle soup. That location is currently occupied by Quikly Shabu Shabu, and since I make special note of addresses where I have eaten at multiple Chinese restaurants, I knew the restaurant that I had gone to that morning at that address was called Golden Statue. I didn't remember anything about my meal there, but I did find the business card I took from there, which described the restaurant as a bakery and restaurant. That led me to believe that it was one of those dim sum bakeries that are common on Grand St. and throughout New York Chinatown, and therefore had not been a Chiu Chow noodle house. But then, out of curiosity I did a Google search for Golden Statue on Grand, and voila. There was a New York Times article from 1997, 12 pages long, giving a detailed tour of a long stretch of Grand St. And included in the story was a short paragraph describing Golden Statue as a Southeast Asian and Chinese noodle restaurant. All of a sudden it came back. I had ordered the fish ball soup to go from Golden Statue, for something like $2. There were five large fish balls in the soup. I walked over a block and a half to Sara Roosevelt Park, sat at one of the park benches, and consumed my soup. Since then I've used that park many times as a dining area during my food crawls through Manhattan Chinatown, but until just now I had forgotten that fact.

Don't Blame Pat Haden

USC fans are going crazy over the NCAA refusing to reverse its prior decision to impose a two year bowl ban and a loss of 30 football scholarships over three years. However, there seems to be a bit of misdirection in their rage. As much of their ire is directed at Pat Haden, recently appointed Athletic Director, as at the NCAA. Indeed, Haden is being portrayed as a traitor and even a tool of Notre Dame, the school for which he was football telecast color commentator. The thinking is that Haden's strategy of co-operation with the NCAA during the appeal process, as opposed to the arrogant opposition shown by the prior athletic administration was completely inappropriate.

What these fans fail to recognize is that stonewalling the NCAA at the investigation stage is what made the NCAA penalties so severe in the first place. As reformed USC honk Petros Papadakis points out, this is why Ohio State and Auburn have self-reported potentially major violations and is what distinguishes those cases from USC. All Haden was doing was trying to undo the damage done by his predecessor athletic director, Mike Garrett. Garrett was a person so devoid of interpersonal skills that one highly placed USC source once said to me out of the blue, in a conversation that had nothing to do with USC or sports, that USC athletic director was an "a**hole". There is an irony in that USC fans themselves have been highly critical over the years of Mike Garrett's tenure as atheltic director, and now they are suffering from his actions to boot.

It is also ludicrous to think of Haden as a traitor to USC by virtue of his working on telecasts of Notre Dame football. Sports announcing, just like coaching, is just a job, and one where there are a limited number of openings. So if you're a USC diehard, but you get an opportunity to broadcast Notre Dame games, do you turn it down? I doubt it. And how many SC gripers heard Haden's answer to the hypothetical question to what he would do if he received a multi-million dollar windfall? He said he would give a good portion of it to his alma mater.

The other thing is that a large majority of USC fans want to sue the NCAA, perhaps even a class action suit by the fans, since the school has stated it will not sue. But what would be the grounds for a suit? You can't sue a voluntary membership organization like the NCAA merely for not playing fair with you. The NCAA is not a government organization. There is no racial or other impermissible discrimination charged. I would think any cause of action would arise out of contract law, and USC's team of lawyers have undoubtedly checked out every angle.

Supreme Court Holds California Prisons Are Too Overcrowded--Good News For California

The U.S. Supreme Court just upheld lower court rulings that California prisons are impermissibly overcrowded. This leaves California with a difficult choice--spend billions of dollars it doesn't have to expand facilities or release thousands of dangerous criminals onto the streets. So why is this good news for California? Because it may well eliminate billions of dollars in unnecessary government spending and reduce the influence of one of the more nefarious political interest groups in California.

In California, the prison guards' union is one of the formidable and influential players in California politics. California prison guards earn six figure salaries, have fat pensions, and are perhaps the single most powerful special interest group on the political scene. Political candidates backed by the union have an almost 100 percent certainty of being elected, and politicians of all stripes vie for the favor of the prison guards. Now being a prison guard is one of the worst jobs imaginable, and you couldn't pay me enough to take that job for even one day. On the other hand, you don't see prison guards making this kind of money and having this kind of influence in other states.

So how did we get where we are? The answer is that California keeps more people in jail than the other states. The prison population is artificially swelled by a number of factors. The three strikes law, can send a felon to prison for a mandatory 25 year sentence for something like stealing a pizza. California parolees are returned at a rate much higher than other states because very minor violations are cause for being sent back to prison. With this bulging prison population there is a bigger demand for prison guards, which gives them that much more influence.

The wasteful spending caused by this overincarceration is legendary. California prisoners are entitled to medical care, including expensive procedures such as heart transplants, that many of us would be jealous to have, though day to day health care may fall short. A recent Los Angeles Times story details how critically ill prisoners are tended to at off prison sites, under round the clock guard by two or three prison guards, at the cost of $800,000 per prisoner per year. Such critically ill prisoners could easily be released into the civilian health system without danger to society, but since this would result in the elimination of cushy prison guard jobs, it hasn't been done, with the cry of "public safety" being used as a shield to justify this waste.

But wouldn't the wholesale release of thousands of prisoners in fact be a threat to public safety. Of course it will, though it can be mitigated by releasing those who pose a lesser danger. But the fact is that public safety is not something that has to be maximized to the exclusion of everything else. As my criminal law professor said, if you threw everybody in jail the streets would be completely safe. So really, public safety is a balancing factor. And with proportionately more people in California prisons than in other states, is California a noticeably safer place to be? I don't think so.

The Interesting and Intriguing Saga of Little Sheep Restaurant

At first glance, the Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot restaurant which opened up a few months ago on Azusa Ave. in Hacienda Heights is just one of a few hundred authentic Chinese restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley. Yes, Mongolian Hot Pots are not as common as Hong Kong style cafes, but in the past decade there's been a healthy choice of restaurants of this genre that diners could patronize. But few restaurants have the intriguing past, as well the interesting future, associated with Little Sheep.

Little Sheep first came to my attention in 2003, when suddenly Dragon Regency Restaurant, a stalwart of Hong Kong style food for roughly two decades, was replaced by a new restaurant whose interior decor was a gigantic mural of the Chinese countryside with sheep roaming all over the landscape. This brand new Little Sheep restaurant, which introduced the Mongolian style hot pot to Los Angeles, was allegedly a branch of a famous restaurant chain in China. It proved to be a big hit, so much so that additional branches opened up in San Gabriel and on Azusa Ave. in Hacienda Heights.

Moving forward to 2007, a couple of interesting things happened. First, a poster on one of the Chowhound message boards noted that the main Little Sheep website in China did not mention any Los Angeles area branches, even though they did have a listing of their branches in North America. Subsequently, the Little Sheep locations in Monterey Park and San Gabriel both changed their names--the Monterey Park restaurant changed first to Little Fat Sheep and then Hot Pot! Hot Pot!, while San Gabriel became Sheep Young Young. The Hacienda Heights location closed down altogether. As it turns out, we had been punked. These were not really branches of the Chinese chain, but clever imposters.

Now this isn't the only time that locals have purportedly opened branches of famous Chinese restaurant chains. The Hui Lau Shan dessert restaurants in San Gabriel and New York not only stole the menu from the real chain, but they replicated the furniture from the real stores. A fake 85°C Tea House operated in San Gabriel until the real Chinese chain opened up in Irvine, and a fake Din Tai Fung has successfully operated in Toronto for many years. However, Little Sheep was an elaborate deception, which even fooled restaurant critics who routinely described the ersatz restaurants as being part of the Chinese chain.

But all that is in the past and now there is a real Little Sheep in Hacienda Heights, in the same shopping center but not the same exact space as the imposter from several years ago. But in the future, will there now be a Little Sheep on every corner? I just read in the New York Times that Little Sheep is going to be acquired by Yum Brands, parent company of Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. Now this isn't totally off the wall, as the Little Sheep chain is hundreds strong in China. But as you know, besides independent freestanding locations, Yum Brands also operates mini-food courts having a KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut sharing space with each other. Do you think we'll be seeing Little Sheep Mongolian Hot Pot operations being added to these courts?

Ding Dong The Wicked Witch Is Dead

At times I actually felt sorry for Osama Bin Laden. Poor guy was constantly on the run in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan, never staying in the same place two days in a row lest the hounds catch up to him. What a life! However, as things turned out, it was more like the situation jokingly suggested by one wag that maybe Obama had gotten a shave and was living somewhere in the U.S. Finding him in an urban villa is certainly closer to that scenario than life on the run in the wilds. Of course, now the question is what did the Pakistani government know and when did they know it? While there is tremendous suspicion in that regard, I'm guessing they really didn't know either. With the $25 million bounty on UBL's head, if his true whereabouts were known to government officials, I gotta think somebody would have turned him in for the reward.