I'm testing the email feature of Blogger Pro. You're supposed to be able to post by emailing. If this function works, this means I can post to my blog while traveling and using pocket explorer.

These past two nights I've woken up dreaming that I was at some Hollywood party. God, what a frightening dream. I have no interest in achieving that kind of lifestyle. My sister loves partying with the Hollywood people. I think the only reason she married that record company guy, who she's now separated from, was because he lived in LA and he went to parties with Hollywood types like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not me. Maybe I've been dreaming about being a Hollywood party because I was in LA last weekend.

Flying to LA was fine. It only takes an hour to get there. To get to my hotel, I got in line for the Super Shuttle and it only cost me $15 with tip. The hotel I booked, the Wyndham Checkers, was reasonable at $129/night. It's not the best hotel in the downtown area but for the price I paid, I got a great deal. My room was little small, but there was a small pool and a Jacuzzi on the roof. The rooms were also richly furnished and I even had a flat screen TV with speakers, a separate modem and desk in my room. The only major drawback was the workout facility which was pitifully small for a hotel in downtown LA. I did manage to workout in gym on Friday night and even hung out in the Jacuzzi in the morning, only because the workout room was packed.

The Wyndham Checkers even had a top 20 restaurant downstairs, which served excellent food although a tad expensive. Dinner for one set me back $60 with tip, but the food was great. My salad had flower petals mixed in. Gotta love a restaurant that serves flower petals on their salad. The halibut I ordered was cooked well and sat on a bed of garlic mash potatoes surrounded by a dressing of scallops, corn and red and green bell peppers and was very very yummy. Paying $9 for a glass of okay pinot noir was the only low point to the meal.

Since the Checkers is the middle of everything, I wasn't that far away from the MOCA, lots of restaurants, a Rite Aid, and even a downtown shopping mall with a Macys. I walked to Rite Aid to buy a bottle of water for $1.50, instead of paying the $6 they would charged me in the room for same amount of water. The only bad thing about my trip was walking around with my backpack all day. I had to check out of the hotel at 12 noon so I carried by backpack with me everywhere after that. Next time I will pack more carefully because after a couple of hours, I felt like I was carrying at least 50 pounds on my back. I'm sure my pack wasn't that heavy, but it sure as hell felt like it.

The great thing about my trip, other than seeing the Andy Warhol exhibit, was how I got back to the airport. I took the LA Metro. LA has their own transit rail system and you can take the Metro to a station and shuttle takes you to the airport.

LA's Metro is strange. You buy a ticket but then you don?t have to show it to anybody or put it through a machine. There are signs everywhere which say that every person must have a ticket to ride the train, but there is no enforcement. The fare to the airport was fantastic at $1.65 for a one way trip with transfer. I had to transfer to another train to get the LAX stop. And like the Metro in London, the trains are color coded, so it's hard to get lost on the system.

The only problem with the Metro if you're not using to being in a big city, it might scare you. Riding the Metro in LA isn't the pleasant experience that it is here in SF and the Bay Area or in London. Riding the Metro in LA was more like riding public transportation in a not so great part of NYC or in downtown DC. There were people riding the train that I would be deathly
afraid to run into late at night and maybe just a little less so during the day. I think the LA Metro went through some of the bad parts of LA like Compton and Watts, where the racial riots took place a number of years ago. Not that I would know because I don't know LA that well, but I thought I saw signs outside of the train for those neighbourhoods.

I mean, I don't really care. I've lived in DC and spent a lot of time in NYC and I had to get around on public transportation so I was used to less than ideal public transportation situations, but if you're not, I think taking the Metro to LAX would be a very scary experience. To me, it was just interesting to rid the Metro only because I started thinking about my favorite stops on the DC metro system like the Dupont Circle stop.

Once I got to the airport drop off stop, which is called Aviation, taking the shuttle to LA was fine because it was full of airport employees. I guess there aren't very many people who have discovered the joys of taking The Metro to LAX.

And Saturday night is great night to fly because it's a slow time. My flight back to Oakland wasn't crowded and neither were the airports. This was so different from my experience the day before when I flew to LA at 11:00 am on Friday morning and the flight was completely full and airports were overflowing with travelers.

I definitely plan to go back to LA, now that I know it's easy, actually quite convenient and I had such a great time. I just have to figure out the backpack thing.

I’m listening to the Ronn Owens program on the radio and he has a guest on who is an expert on the real estate market. I feel like I’m listening to the same type of programs I heard about the stock markets during the dot com boom. It’s scary. I don’t believe all the hype anymore. Who is buying all these houses when unemployment is so high in the area? Did people not learn anything from the tech boom and bust? Do people believe all the hype about anything anymore, especially when it comes to the stock market and the real estate market? I can remember those pundits on CNBC saying how the Nasdaq was going to go higher, how the tech stocks and specifically the dot come stocks were the stocks of the future. Where are those pundits and those tech and dot com stocksn now.

People are putting their houses on the market because they’ve lost their jobs and they probably can’t make their mortgage payment. There are so many rental signs in the city right now, even in my neighborhood where I haven't seen For Rent signs in about 4 years. If people can't rent, how are they going to buy? And I don't think the people who have vacated their apartments, are buying real estate. At least not from the people loading their stuff into Uhauls that clog the city streets every weeeknd. Where are these people going? Don't the real estate agents and journalists see these for rents signs and the uhauls too? Don't they read the headlines in the paper or the news websites?

Why do people ignore reality and simple common sense when it comes to money? Is it greed? It’s like maybe just the thought of having all that money puts a spell on you and all your good common sense and your ability to see reality goes out the window. I think the real estate industry is pushing the hype about the market because they make tons of money when houses here sell for big prices. They have no vested interest in seeing home prices drop. They don't care if a homebuyer gets negative amortization on their home loan when the real estate market tanks. They've already made their commission. I'm sure the Wall Street pundits and the CEOs of all those failed companies had these same thoughts. Why should they care? They've got their bonuses, their stock options which they sold while the company stock was high.

I don’t get it. But then again, I haven’t lost any money in stock market since 1998 and my 401(k) and IRA are fine. Now as for the rest of my accounts, that’s another story. I have that annoying knack of walking into a store and only liking the most expensive item in the store. Where I got this skill from is unknown to me, but it’s wrecking havoc with the amounts in my checking account and my credit cards, not to mention my savings.

I went to Stonestown to write. Why I can write in the middle of a mall in food court, where people are talking and eating and they're blaring god awful music and not in the quiet of my own place where I can play my own music, is a mystery to me right now. But writing in very public loud places seems to be the only way I can write this month.

I interviewed the brother character Michael in my screenplay. After finishing up the interview, I decided to change the title of my screenplay to "Going Home Again". I looked up the word "going" in imdb.com and I couldn't find this title in their movie list.

My reviewers told me that I needed my title and I was opposed to it, but now I think they were right. My story is about a a guy going home again and I have him say "some people say the hardest part of leaving home is actually leaving. I think the hardest part of leaving home is going back home again."

On the way home, I also realized that this is my second story about failure. Art is Scary was about the fear of failure, or so says my acting director. I disagreed with him at the time, but maybe he was right. I had a fantasy of Roger Ebert talking about my screenplay and saying that "it was filled with pathos and a sense of failure, failure of parenting, failure of finding your dreams, failure of a father, failure of a son, failure of the american family and finally failure of american society."

And what do I have my movie family saved by? Baseball. How ironic since there may well be a baseball strike this year. I'm not sure what I am trying to say about society and baseball, but I guess I must be saying something.

I hate that I seem to only write about failure. I hate failure. I used to think that failure was not an option in my life, but I have had so many failures that I have proved myself wrong over the years. I love all the many ways people fail and that I've failed. And failure is sometimes accidental, sometimes driven by fate, and sometimes completely voluntary. Is it any wonder I am obsessed with failure as a theme in my writing?

God, I’m really lucky. I signed up to comments yesterday and today the commenting software place is no longer accepting signups. I wonder what happened. Oh well. Commenting seems to work though.

And what a miracle. The baseball players unions has decided not to strike. Doesn't it make you think that they were just testing the waters to see what a strike would do the sport. Guess the reaction wasn't very good. Even that freak Paul Harvey made a comment called millionaire baseball players "bums". It's like you know if you see a report saying that something is fashionable on CNN Headlines News, the item is so no longer fashionable. This is how people become fashion victims; BEWARE!