They pulled letters out of a hat.
“C, eh.”
“N, eh.”
“D, eh.”
“Need any more, eh?”
“Naw, I think that’s enough, eh”
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Yeah, I don’t know why anything around us is called El Camino Real. There must be a reason. Maps I’m googling make more sense where it goes more directly from San Juan Capistrano and then inlandish to San Gabriel and then to San Fernando.
Yeah exactly. But it’s definitely an old road - same for Sepulveda and Lomita blvd - which interesting all converge at almost the same point by my house.
You can see where Lomita used to go through but on an angle but they took out that one section to build a subdivision.
And it does have a bell marker right by my house - the same one that’s all up and down the 101 Fwy and other places.
Unstuckers: before you chase Suzzer down based on the picture you should know he lives in a condo complex and you’ll have to do some door knocking or stalking.
380 units.
[x] Lives near the Seaside Dollar Tree
[x] Condo
[x] 380 units
[x] Mammoth off-roading vehicle, likely with lots of decals from non-Murica
[x] Can’t spell Isaiah
Narrowing it down
Canadian anthem was coopted for my high school’s song. Literally just jacked the music and changed the lyrics a bit.
Rugby pre-game ceremonies are so great, they really put the American tradition of singing the Star Spangled Banner to shame. Love to watch the celtic meatheads belt out their national anthems with real pride. But the Pacific island war dances put everyone to shame. You can’t not get hyped for battle when you watch that shizz. I’m goddamn ready to stab someone right now.
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My boi here is clearly wearing his hachimaki upside down, but everyone he’s encountered on his trip to the game has been too embarrassed to point it out. There’s something refreshing about a culture that’s this polite.
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The Australian version of the tracing app has the same issue but only on Apple. Heard it had something to do with 3rd party apps not being able to use bluetooth the way it does in the background as well as battery management killing it. Apple needs to release a fix and then the app will get updated. On Android you can grant permissions to the app to prevent it from getting killed. The Oz app doesn’t track location though, it just checks all bluetooth connections near you every minute and if the same connection shows up 10 times in a row then its ID gets stored. If you test positive then all stored IDs in your phone go to a central database that links the IDs to people and those people get notified that they were near a positive case for 10 minutes or more and should self isolate and get tested.
I figured he was just describing a Walmart parking lot.
Tonga Samoa is almost as intense as Chardee Macdennis.
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My understanding between the joint Apple and google product was the initial version would sit on top, as you describe but then a future version would be embedded in the os so it can work at the lowest system level.
I feel like they talked about may for first version and then a couple of months for the other version. I do not know how this ties in with what is happening in other places.
https://mobile.twitter.com/RedHourBen/status/1259759084309446657
Rest In Peace Jerry Stiller
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Serenity now
These new anti smoking ads are so weak. Zoomer kids doing Youtube videos of getting rid of their Juuls? Come on bring on the body bags. Those Truth commercials were the real deal
Things you see with no context that make you go: “Hmmm…”
https://twitter.com/khloekardashian/status/1260624337658277889
Hostel anyone…
Bald and bankrupt’s scary story of his 1st visits to Moscow in the early 1990’s…Enjoy.
The Hotel Sever Incident
Back in the early 1990s I found myself developing a fascination with Russia and the former Soviet Union. When I turned 18 and thanks to a generous gift from my grandfather I was finally able to make my first trip to Moscow to see it for myself. It was 1993 a time when Boris Yeltsin was in power and there was lawlessness on the streets of Russia’s cities and deathly ethnic violence along its southern borders. In Nagorno Karabakh, Abkhazia, Ingushetia to name just a few, long simmering rivalries that had been kept under the lid of Soviet control were now bubbling up to the surface and old scores were being settled causing people to flee for their lives. I was however blissfully naive to all this as I flew into Moscow on a warm April evening to begin what would be a month long homestay with a Russian family.
I flew out from Heathrow heading to Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport onboard an old Aeroflot plane that seemed to have been flying since the days of Stalin. Table trays din’t lock properly and an oxygen mask fell down from it’s little compartment above a lady in the row next to me. Nothing else stands out from that flight except one thing. I had struck up a conversation with an intelligent elderly Russian woman sitting next to me who spoke impeccable English. When after my meal of rubbery chicken and an old cucumber I handed my tray back to the stewardess the elderly woman took the sachet of unused Aeroflot sugar from my tray and said ‘don’t throw this away, give it as a present to the family you will be staying with.’ That really hit home. How poor were the Russians after the collapse if even a small inconsequential packet of aeroplane sugar could be of importance to someone. What exactly was I flying into? To this day I still don’t know why my mum ‘let’ me go. The newspapers back home were full of grim daily stories of pensioners being murdered for a jar of jam and shoot outs between rival city gangs named after towns and factories they controlled; The Tambov gang, Uralmash gang, The Schuka boxing boys. I was just out of school and was young, dumb and completely lacking the maturity required to navigate such a place that was teetering on the edge of a very real anarchy. But that was all ahead of me…
After being stamped into the country ( it was so soon after the collapse that the stamp squashed onto the back page of my passport was still an old CCCP one ). I was met by a dodgy looking guy in a leather jacket who was a representative of the homestay company whose number I had found in the back of a magazine I’d read in the UK just 6 weeks before. He took my bag and headed off into the tangled cluster of old Soviet cars parked up haphazardly in every available space outside the terminal building. I had read about the mafia robbing travellers at the airport in the British press and now I’d just handed my bag and all my belongings to a random dude who looked dodgy as fuck within 5 minutes of getting into the country. I jogged to keep up until we arrived at an old Lada in which another dodgy looking guy sat smoking silently. They were definitely mafia I thought to myself but at least I still had my bag.
We sped out of the car park after paying some tracksuit musclebound goon to lower a chain to the car park and off sped towards Moscow on a warm summer’s evening. The guys said nothing to me the whole way as we sped first past the mark where the Germans had come closest to Moscow on their advance across the Soviet Union, now marked by huge tank tracks and then past the grey Soviet apartment blocks that encircled the city in a palisade of decrepitude. I sat in the back seat looking out of the window wondering what the hell I was doing being in Moscow. Sure whilst I was in the safety of the UK it had all seen like an intriguing adventure but now that I was actually in Russia speeding through depressing commie-blocks, not knowing where I was going or who I was with, I started to feel like I may be in over my head. The world passing my window just seemed so different from the one I knew. I had expected that, having seen endless news reports about Russia but still it was disorientating and intimidating to see it with my own eyes without the comfort of distance.
Eventually we turned off a wide Soviet avenue lined with grand buildings and Soviet shops called simply ‘Products’ or ’Shoes’ before pulling up into a courtyard surrounded on all sides by grey multi storied Soviet blocks. Mafia guy number 1 got out and took my bag from the boot of the car.
‘Floor 6, flat 32,’ he said nodding at the entrance doorway before getting back into the passenger seat of the car and driving off with mafia guy number 2. I went over to the metal entrance door and not knowing what to do typed 32 into the key pad. Nothing happened. I tried it again but with extra symbols and letters on the keypad I didn’t know what exactly I was supposed to be typing.
Now you may be reading this and thinking ‘why didn’t you just call the company up who organised your stay and get it sorted.’ Well this was 1993 and the only phone I could use was going to be inside the building I was locked out of. I sat on the old wooden bench outside the apartment building unsure what to do. And I waited. Then I heard a strange metallic beep, the metal door swung open and an elderly man walked out. I held the door before it closed and with my British politeness started to try to explain that I needed to go inside to get up to my homestay family, ‘you see I have been locked out…’ The old guy looked at me with a look that said ‘why the fuck do you think I care?’ before walking off. I slipped inside the dark entrance lobby which had a cabin where once no doubt someone had been paid to sit and keep an eye on the inhabitants but now sat empty. I climbed into the cramped lift with my bag and shuddered up to the sixth floor.
Flat 32 was at the end of a dimly lit corridor that smelt of boiled cabbage and was guarded over by spyglasses set into the middle of unwelcoming leather padded apartment doors. I rang the bell and waited. And waited. Nothing happened. This was not going as I had expected. Probably my host had just popped out for some groceries I consoled myself and so I made a comfortable space on the floor and sat down in the dimly lit corridor for someone to return home. But nobody came. After a while a bolt slid behind a door and an elderly man in old slippers appeared clutching some rubbish. He shuffled out along the corridor before throwing the waste down the chute. On his way back to his sanctum he saw me on the floor. “They’ve gone to the dacha for the weekend, back tomorrow”, he told me when I explained what I was doing sitting outside the apartment.
The old man must have taken pity on the strange apparition of the foreigner in his corridor and invited me in. His apartment was cramped, not because it was small, it wasn’t, but because he had filled it with detritus seemingly collected over a lifetime. Bundles of yellowed newspapers sat in stacks everywhere, large jars were stacked in one corner, piles of dusty hardcover books rose almost to the ceiling; Chekov on top of Pushkin, Pushkin on top of Lermontov, Lermontov on top of a scientific book, all the way up in unstable towers. The small patches of wall which were visible through the junk were covered in faded rugs. His bed was a sofa with bedding so old Lenin could have slept on them. As lost as I was in Moscow, I hoped he wouldn’t invite me to stay the night in his place. This was my first time away from home and I was already out of my depth in terms of culture shock. Fortunately he offered to take me to a hotel nearby called the Cosmos but I’d heard of that and knew it would be beyond my budget. After some thinking he said he thought he knew a place. The Hotel Sever, or in English ‘Hotel North’.
The old man got dressed and we set off towards the hotel with me lugging my bag behind me. This was the first time I saw the small metal kiosks that were now placed on every street corner across the country. With the start of the free market people rented these kiosks from the local mafia gang and sold various assortments of products through the small grilled windows to anyone who had a few spare rubles. Chocolate, alcohol, porn, guns…you could get anything from kiosks if you knew which one to go to. Inside were usually pretty young women sitting reading on a stool waiting for a customer. This was the first time I had really seen a Russian woman in the flesh and I realised that I’d been lied to all my life.
You see nowadays Slavic women are known for their beauty but back in the days of the USSR we only really saw Soviet women at the Olympic Games or mass athletic demonstrations and marches on television and so the stereotype was that they were all built like the steroid enhanced shot putters we had seen in the Munich or Moscow games. People in the West literally thought that was the case. And then the Wall came down and we looked into the abyss and suddenly realised that it wasn’t quite like that. In fact they were nothing like that. But I digress…
We walked past grey buildings which were still topped by slogans glorifying the Party and the Workers. The empire had fallen but iconography remained unnoticed anymore by the people passing by below. The new heroes the people craved were BMWs, VHS recorders and American dollars.
Eventually we left the pavement and came to an open courtyard of broken paving slabs that was overlooked by a squat nondescript Soviet built building with large dusty windows on the ground floor. The Hotel Sever. As I sit writing this now some 25 years later, and the memories of the place return, I can feel a strange sense of unease pass through me.
The old neighbour led me through the heavy wooden doors of the hotel and into an empty lobby that was a wide expanse of grey concrete floor, green walls and a metal barred reception area behind which was a jungle, overflowing as it was with potted ferns. It was not quite like a hotel lobby I had been in, nothing welcoming, no chairs on which to sit, no welcoming literature of tours and excursions. In fact nothing about the place indicated it was a hotel. It was more like the lobby to a police station.
Behind the counter sat a woman knitting a blue scarf which matched the cardigan she was wearing. The old man explained that I needed a room for the night and that should of been that except the receptionist wasn’t keen on the idea of me staying. At first she said foreigners were prohibited from staying there, then that there were no rooms available and finally when it was explained that I had nowhere else to go she changed tack and tried persuading me that the place really would not be up to the kind of standard I would find acceptable. But I didn’t care about that I told her, I just needed a bed for one night. I’d leave early in the morning I promised. Eventually the old man who no doubt wanted to wash his hands of me and to get home before darkness hinted I would have to bribe my way in. I pulled out a $10 note and lay it on the counter. The receptionist took it and reluctantly agreed to let me stay the night. I thanked the old man and watched him through the dusty windows as he crossed the broken courtyard and back out onto the road of kiosks and bandits. I felt quite alone.
Now then, my Russian at that time was not perfect but after six months of evening classes in the UK it was good enough to understand basic conversation. And so it was with growing bewilderment that I understood the receptionist as she gave me a concerned look and explained that it really wasn’t wise for me to stay the night. But non the less she unlocked herself from the cage and came out to lead me up to my room. We climbed the staircase to the second floor and walked along a threadbare carpeted corridor which creaked with every step. The corridor was silent and I presumed I was the only guest in the place. Half way down we came to a wooden door which was thickly painted with a yellowing paint the colour of nicotine stained fingers. She opened I entered into a room that had the bare essentials a not a thing more; a single bed, a sink and mirror and a window which looked out onto a backyard below.
The receptionist then proceeded to explain something that you don’t get told in Hiltons. ‘Listen, do not open the door to anybody, no matter what they say. Take this key and lock yourself in the room after me and leave the key in the lock turned on its side so that it cannot be pushed out. Do you understand me?’ She said gravely with a genuine look of concern on her face. To make sure I did understand she made me close the door and demonstrate the process before repeating the warning with a maternal look that said ‘how the fuck did you end up here?’ Satisfied that I understood the situation she let herself out and headed back to the safety of her cage. I immediately locked the door, turned the key to its side and sat on the bed.
I lay down with a strange sense of unease rising inside me but I reassured myself that the receptionist had just been worried about nothing, that she just didn’t know how to deal with foreigners or had an overly maternal attitude to the fresh faced teenager from the West. As night came I fell asleep…
Sometime later I was woken in the darkness. A male voice was talking to me from the other side of the door.
“Hey have you got any matches brother?” It asked.
I lay there silently not making a sound.
Suddenly I heard a scratching sound in the keyhole and my key jangle a little.
I lay there frozen, my heart pounding so loud that I felt sure they would hear it.
“Open up brother, let’s talk”, another voice said.
I did not move.
Again the key in the door wobbled in the lock. Whoever was on the other side was trying to push it out. I prayed that it would stay in place but I did not want to get out of bed to hold it there because it would alert them that I was in the room and awake although that was no doubt obvious to them. Instead I lay there paralysed.
They continued to try cajoling me to open up as more male voices came to the door to attempt to push out the key. Fearing it would fall and they would enter I eventually rallied myself before silently climbing out of the bed and taking my bag to the window. It opened silently. I looked down at what was a certain leg smashing height. Probably spine too. If the door was breached however I would just take my chances with the concrete. If it had been the daytime I may have been more inclined to engage the voices in conversation and ask them what they wanted, but alone in the black of night, with my mind full of mafia horror stories I felt that flight was wiser than fight.
The voices became more frustrated with my lack of response and began kicking the door, not necessarily to smash it open but more to knock the key out in what seemed to be a tried and tested technique. As my eyes adjusted to the light I could see the key jump in the lock with each blow the heavy wooden door took. But it stayed in place. By some miracle it stayed in place.
Eventually, no doubt frustrated, the blows stopped and the male voices disappeared along the corridor. I sat on the window sill, my heart still pounding. Had they given up or had they just gone to get reinforcements? I sat perfectly still on the ledge with my bag for what must have been an hour before my adrenalin dissipated and instead I was overcome by a deep tiredness instead. I crept to my bed fully clothed and with my shoes still on eventually fell asleep.
I woke early with sunshine flowing into the room through the thin nylon curtains. I had survived the night. I grabbed my bag from the window sill where I had left it and as quietly as possible I turned the key in the lock and opened the door which had saved me from god only knew what. Stepping out onto the corridor I found it full of women with dark features all wearing bright headscarves sitting around on the floor. The women all smiled at me with some kind of warmth as I walked past them silently back towards the staircase. It was surreal. The reception-cage was empty. I left the key on the top and left the Hotel Sever through the thick doors, never to return.
It was only years later it made sense to me. The hotel was no doubt being used as a hostel for a group of people who had been displaced from one of the wars in the Caucasus. I don’t know which one exactly, but the bright headscarves and dark features of the women I saw that evening make me think that they were Ingush who had recently been cleansed from parts of Ossetia. What would have happened had my door been breached? I don’t know, maybe nothing except a shakedown. I looked for the hotel on Google recently but it seems to have disappeared since there is no mention of it online but Moscow is a different city today from the early 90s and dodgy land deals swallowed up much of the past. I did find an old black and white photo of it online once which confirmed to me that I did not imagine the whole thing but even that has gone from the web now.
Now you know the most scary moment of my Soviet travels.
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