This has been another busy busy week, both at work (where there is always something on the review stack or a control to analyze) and at home (where the week was filled with concerts, headaches, and MoTAS). But a few articles have caught my eye, so let me come up for air and share them with you:
- Puppets and Theatre. When you think of theatre and puppets, what comes to mind? Bob Baker? Flahooley? Carnival? Avenue Q? Indonesian Puppets? Here’s another one for you: Team Land. A noted marionette artist, Bill Land, has moved to Las Vegas and was profiled in the Las Vegas weekly.
- Disneyfied Sondheim. If you didn’t know, Disney is working on a movie version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods“. Alas, they have insisted on changes. Stephen Sondheim talks about them in this article. Let’s put it this way: Disney does not recognize infidelity, and wolves do not have sexual appetites.
- Wax On Wax Off. Disney is the in San Fernando Valley (Burbank and Glendale), so an article about the Valley is in order. Here’s a look back at The Karate Kid, which was mostly filmed in the valley. The article includes some current-day pictures of movie locations.
- The Backlot. Let’s move a little bit south to another studio: 20th Century Fox. In the early 1960s, they needed lots of money, so they sold off their backlot to pay for Cleopatra. What resulted was Century City. Century City was a planned “downtown” of high-rises, residences, shopping and entertainment, all fed by the convenient Beverly Hills Freeway, Route 2. What’s that you say? The BH Freeway was never built. Alas, Century City was, and in fact it is almost built out. So where is the traffic to go?
- A Moving Thought. Talking about bad planning and traffic, how about building light rail to near an airport… but not in. That’s LA’s problem: The Metro doesn’t go to the airport. But there are now plans to change that, connecting the new Crenshaw Line and the Green Line with an LAX station, which will connect to a train that will feed the rental car lots, and integrated transportation hub, and some terminals. By the way, as we’re speaking of Airport transportation, FlyAway is expanding again, this time to Santa Monica and Hollywood. The latter is good — it is near a Red Line stop and much more convenient than Union Station.
- Old Streets. Before we leave LA Streets entirely, here are some famous LA streets when they were just dirt roads.
- Belly Up To The Bar. Since we’re at the airport, let’s talk about hotels. Specifically, what do hotels do with the partially used soap you leave behind. In Las Vegas, they are recycling it.
- Such a Pill. OK, I can’t connect this one it: They are working on a pill to help those with Celiac. It won’t allow you to eat gluten, but it can help with the accidental exposure.
- That’s Disgusting. Lastly, an article from Politico about Hobby Lobby and their plans. Hobby Lobby’s owners just don’t want to win their Obamacare case; they want a Christian Nation. They are building a huge museum dedicated to the Bible a few blocks from the Mall in Washington , with as much public space as the National Museum of American History. They’ve financed a lavish traveling exhibit as well, complete with a re-created Holy Land cave, a “Noah’s Ark experience” for kids and animatronic characters such as William Tyndale, who was burned at the stake for daring to translate the New Testament into English. The Greens are sponsoring scholarly study of the Bible and hosting forums such as a recent panel on faith’s role in shaping early America, which they hope to package for national broadcast. Most provocatively, they’ve funded a multimillion-dollar effort to write a Bible curriculum they hope to place in public schools nationwide. It will debut next fall as an elective in Mustang High School, a few miles from Hobby Lobby’s Oklahoma City headquarters. A draft of the textbook for the first of four planned yearlong courses presents Adam and Eve as historical figures.
