What's the 311? isn't dead, it just smells funny

So guess what, everybody? Less than a week after my wife and I started our new site - a site that relies heavily on photographs - our digital camera broke. The good news? We're on vacation this week, which means we're prone to making irresponsible purchases. Expect the site to be back up and running again soon, and we apologize for the cockteaseyness. Cockteasisness? Not sure.

10 12 09, Queen-sized mattress, Franklin/Cherokee

Item: Queen-sized mattress
Found: 10.12.2009
Location: SE corner of Franklin and Cherokee

Stained and sagging, leaning up against a brick wall as though on a cigarette break, this mattress is obviously rather worn out, well past its prime. Replaced by a presumably nicer model, this once proud “Spinal-Pedic” mattress was riding high atop a box spring in one of the many apartments on this block before it was thrown out in the cold by its heartless hipster overlord.

It may seem that its best days are behind it, but you can't keep a good mattress down. In this neighborhood, prospects are good that a still intact queen-size mattress will find a new life. Perhaps not as a resting place, but maybe as a wall for a lean-to, buttressed by a wooden shipping pallet, with a cardboard box for a roof. With the help of a few other cast-offs and a little elbow grease, this mattress could potentially be part of a cozy home. Or perhaps it could find a more exciting fate: this mattress is certainly large enough to conceal a dead body, and even though it would probably be set on fire, it would get to experience a few final, action-packed hours.

Sadly, even though economic times may seem as bleak now as they were during the Great Depression, the days of the Hooverville are long gone, and murderers tend to prefer to use mattresses that they are already acquainted with. The fact of the matter is that this mattress is most probably looking at a short stay out on the curb, followed by a long stay at the closest landfill. At least the mattress can take comfort in the fact that it has much greater utility than its old friend the box spring, whose kind is discarded far more frequently, and with much smaller appeal to the local transients.

Raising awareness

Hollywood.

It's where the celebrities live. Or at least hang out.

And if there is one thing celebrities love to do, it is raise awareness. Over the years, celebrities have toiled to make sure that our country is aware of things like AIDS, tsunamis, genocide, and many other atrocities that we might never have realized were bad, if we hadn't had someone famous there to let us know.

Once celebrities raise awareness, it's up to the rest of us to care, and hope that somebody else will take action.

But right here in Hollywood, the celebrities' backyard, is a problem that nobody famous seems to be aware of: Hollywood is in the throes of an abandoned furniture epidemic. They are doing their best to hide it, to keep the tourists attractions sparkly and cheap-looking, but it is impossible to walk even a block away from any major street without seeing it. An abandoned couch here, an unwanted desk there--are they the victims, or the threat? It is impossible to say, but they are waiting. Waiting for what, we can only guess.

We are not celebrities. We aren't going to get three dozen of our friends to record a mediocre song that everyone will have to pretend to care about. We don't have the money to produce a big movie that nobody will really see because it's sad, but that would win awards for being so brave. We actually kind of wish we didn't live in Hollywood.

But we do. So we've decided to raise awareness.