McElfresh

On the Russian River

On our recent car trip up north to the Russian River (that’s “Russian,” not “rushin’,” we discovered when we found the stream checked (not Czech’ed) by summer dams), we decided to rent a couple of kayaks and see what we could see. The water hardly moved through the dams, and we soon discovered that, though we were going downriver, we could hardly make any headway against the wind. Once we got into the lee of the bank, however, we started making progress and soon found ourself at a fork in the river just above the Bohemian Grove.

And there we saw it: a giant, epic rope swing.

While I have never participated in the Iron John movement, like most men I consider myself ready to take on the elements, ford a stream, survive in the wild. More importantly, ever since I was a child and saw my first Steve McQueen movie, I have always held that I was ready to survive the Towering Inferno, and even get Fred Astaire out with his case of champagne, which is more than Paul Newman could ever do.

Don’t be confused: ready for action does not necessarily mean you have the skill set for the Inferno. You might be able to get to the bottom of the hull on the SS Poseidon, you might even be able to land a 747 with Charlton Heston calling you “honey” the whole time over the radio, but if you want to keep alive in the Tower, you’re going to need one more thing:

You’re going to have to swing from a rope.

Come on, you say, anyone can swing from a rope. But you’re forgetting that, the higher you swing, the heavier you get at the bottom of the rope’s arc.

Looking at the spry, 20-somethings climbing that bank say, 25 feet on slippery mud, launching from at 35-foot rope with about 17-foot arc, I guessed that they were pulling about 3 g’s at the bottom (over rocks) before swinging upward, over the river, and letting go at a height of about six meters. Using that rough factor of 3 times the force of gravity, I tripled my weight, and wondered whether I could hold it.

I handed my wife the camera, kissed the kids, and jumped into the water. I figured if I got killed, at least I wouldn’t have to look for a job next year. The whole trick here is not to get maimed. Once I negotiated the muddy bank, I thought I was in the clear. Then, as I tested my grip on a knot, one of the 20-somethings called up, “…and watch out for the log.”

You can see the results here. The impact was uncomfortable, driving water up an otherwise one-way street, if you catch my meaning. But I had been in enough waterskiing accidents as a child to shrug this one off. I was about to go up again, when I heard my daughter say, “We can go now, Dad,” and I swam back to the boats.

Along the way, my arms shaking as I swam, I knew that I still had it. Me and Steve McQueen. The image soon faded as I spent a couple of minutes trying to haul myself onto the kayak.

It’s a whole new nerd game

Somehow, through no fault of my own, I had to go to the San Diego ComicCon again. I had thought I had been filled with dread about going before, but this year I found out it was sold out and was able to dread it even more, thereby implying that, while I dreaded going, I was not absolutely FULL of dread.

As usual, the convention rose to meet my dread quotient, and then some.

You have to realize, it is the biggest comics convention ever. Period. Remember that Iron Man, The Dark Knight, Hellboy II, Hulk whatever, and some other superhero movies I’m forgetting have all come out – making the comic book business the biggest it has ever been.

And the world is getting to be more like a comic book as things wear on. Used to be, criminals were just criminals. They sold drugs, shot people, committed white collar crimes. Nowadays, criminals are terrorists. They poison water supplies, bring down buildings, send out video statements declaring war on goodness and wholesomeness – in other words, we have arch villains. It’s like free advertising for Marvel.

But the convention itself – man, it’s tough. Just think about it: a gathering spot for loners, an actual physical spot that allows you to celebrate your fantasy world, together with other wizards and elves and robots and time travelers. And don’t get me started on the Klingons – they wouldn’t even talk to us, because some Klingon had appeared in a sketch on the show eight years ago, and had used the wrong syntax, thus mangling “Die, Human,” and turning it into, “I’ll have the fried Denebian Slime Lizard, please.”

They are there for validation. Some people we met spent 8 months making their costumes. Others spent more than 20 grand. There was a family from Chino Hills dressed as characters from “Planet of the Apes,” where Dad was the ape and Mom and Daughter were human slaves, where were not allowed to speak even when the camera wasn’t rolling.

Hey, whatever you’re into, I say. But nobody would break character. It’s only so interesting to have someone declare they are Valdar of the Lizard Clan five or six times before you want to take his Ragnaroc spear and jam it through his neck. So it’s not the Tonight Show bit you might be expecting. Worst of all, I got the sense that these people felt they were pretending in the rest of their lives, and here, they could be their true selves.

But their true selves are also being celebrated, albeit not in the real world. Take a look at the new A-list of nerdy movie stars. I have a feeling Seth Rogen has spent at least a few of his megabucks on some action figures.

Luckily, I had young director Brian Herzlinger as my host. He has the kind of affable charm that’s tough to come by. And he’s able to enjoy the scene, while poking mild fun at it (as a matter of fact, Brian had a ticket to the convention on Saturday, and I shanghaied him for my piece). I was reminded of a young Kevin Smith from back in my early days of Tonight Show Correspondents. (We had an interview set up with Kevin, but he cancelled in a text message to one of the crew at the last minute).

If they’re here, who’s playing The Sims?

I saved the strangest bit for last. Turns out, hundreds of nerdy women, who are teachers and computer programmers and moms for the rest of the year, come here to walk around half-naked and let the shut-ins take pictures. It’s like a 4-day, nerdy brain/hot body contest, and every self-abusing guy with a digital camera in the Southland is the winner. You know the old movie moment, where the nerdy secretary takes her glasses off and the boss says, “Why, Miss Johnson, you’re BEAUTIFUL?” This is like the atomic-powered version of that.

You would think that the Tonight Show coming to an end would be a total bummer, but there’s a bright side. No more ComiCon! Now I can get on with the business of dreading everything else.

Just a sample of the more than 90 comedians I spoke with in Montreal

I have often thought of going back to the raw footage of every piece I’ve shot over the past few years, and taking a still of each and every person I’ve met and interviewed. So, after wrapping up Tuesday night’s piece from the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal, I thought I’d try it with just one, to see how it went.

I gave up after 70.

Maybe I was tired from the long hours we pulled shooting the bit: the best place to bag a Comedian in his native habitat is in the hotel bar after the shows are over. After shooting for a few hours in the day, we would get to the bar at the Hyatt at around 11, stake our claim near the elevators, and try to catch every comedian, publicist, manager, agent (and waitress) that we could. This would go on until about 3:30am, when the lights would come on and, blinking, drunk and unable to buy more booze, the aforementioned group would slink back to their hotel rooms, shades pulled tight.

More likely, I was tired of the comedians. I’m so used to shooting civilians in bits like “Pitch to America,” that doing a total immersion with professional funny people was akin to being embedded with a manic-depressive platoon on a sixty mile hike. And they’re not even our troops: as a writer for the most mainstream, number one show on TV, I’m considered to be Establishment. And the same rule applies now as it did in the ‘60s: Establishment = Enemy.

But I’m not your enemy, oh brothers and sisters of chuckledom. I’m just the guy who wants to put you on TV. Come on over, grab this here microphone, and tell my little camera a joke. You do this for a living, right? What better place to be anti-establishment than in front of 8 million viewers?

But I have to be fair. Turns out that many comedians don’t do jokes. They don’t even do anything that could be both humorous and under 45 seconds long. It’s just impossible. Jokes are for squares, there’s no street cred in jokes, there’s no momentum in joke telling. The real thrill, the thing that elevates your status among your peers is the premise. Like a real, ballsy premise that makes everybody go, like, “WHAAAT? Did he SAY that? You gotta be SHITTING me!”

I can’t be critical. It’s a job I could never do. I’m terrified of speaking in public. When there’re more than three people at the In-N-Out drive-thru window I just keep moving. I write for comics but could never perform the jokes. Doing a bit on the Tonight Show is out of the question. I can’t knock these guys, and if they have something to say, but choose not to phrase it in the form of a standard setup/punchline with a possible flip, they still have something to say.

And some of them really delivered. Shocking, odd, nostalgic, silly – I got more than enough to divert the viewing public for five minutes, and it was damned funny. It takes guts to do something as reckless as being the only thing on NBC for thirty seconds, and the reward? Everybody repeats your material the next day. You defined yourself with a joke, then gave it away.

And with the May 29, 2009 end date announced on Monday, that closes the book on the “Pass the Mic” bit. The first of a long list of my own routines that I will be crossing off in the coming months. So goodnight, Montreal, and thanks. You’ve been a great audience.

What you’ll see on the show

In addition to my writing and shooting duties on the show, I also do the occasional graphic. Most of the time, that means an animated title for one of the bits, as you may know from past blog entries. But once in a while, I do special effects.

These effects can be planned ahead, like the blowdarts I used on children in my “Blownadril” antihistamine commercial parody. There’s just no way we’re going to dart a kid in real life, so a computer-generated dart is the only way to make the joke happen.

Sometimes, I create effects to fix mistakes, or to more clearly demonstrate where the joke is in a bit. Like today. In the above photo, the joke is that it’s been so hot, the illegal immigrants are using a Slip ‘n Slide to come through the border. However, the way it was shot, the time of day, the color of the fence – all of these factors made it hard to see that there was a fence there at all.

Here’s the original shot:

The chain link fence is too dark. While it might do, it could also be confusing to viewers. The idea of sliding under the fence needs to be more obvious.

I took a reference shot and put it on my digital camera. It’s just a Nikon Coolpix, but when the zoom is all the way out, it has nearly the same distortion characteristics as the lens we shoot with on the show’s ENG camera. Also, the color depth is good, so I can dial up the contrast and hue to really come close to our video.

Then I went across the street to the construction site, parked the Vespa on the sidewalk and stood on the seat. I took this photo of the construction fence there:

You can see it’s pretty close in angle to the reference shot, and the shadows are all going in the right direction. I took it back to my office.

In Photoshop, I did an overlay, copying the new fence shot over the reference shot. After a little scaling and positioning, I created a mask and painted out all the areas that I wanted to see through. This included the hole in the fence, but not the fence on the left and the bush on the lower left.

I had to make the pavement look like dirt, so I sampled the color of the leaves in the original, and using another overlay layer, colorized it to match. I didn’t try to make it perfect, instead choosing to make it look like a shadow.

Next, I made a fake border sign and distorted it to look like it was hanging on the fence. I painted on a few shadows, and blurred it to look like the video, which has a lot of pixels, but the resolution isn’t quite HDTV.

Here’s the new overlay, ready to composite onto the video:

I saved the file and opened it in After Effects, along with the original video shot. Since the camera was handheld (extremely well, by the way – there was very little movement) the background video needed to be tracked so the overlay would move with it. Easy enough with all those crossing wires on the fence.

I applied the motion of the camera to the overlay and made a few positioning adjustments. Since the fence is backlit, I made it just a tiny bit transparent, which also allows you to see the action before the Mexicans make it through the fence.

When you’re doing a visual payoff like this one, the idea is not to be seen. It should look real, but be obvious enough so the audience gets it. The last thing you want viewers to do is math — connecting the dots from the premise to the punchline.

We do the math, so you don’t have to.

Click here to see the video clip.

Lighted green warehouse windows attract and repel

You know how your brain brings up the same stuff, over and over? Maybe you don’t, but mine does, and there’s no way to control it.

My mother calls these little memory flashes “my old routines,” and many of them are. For example, I can’t drive down certain streets without hearing in my head the song that was on the radio the first time I drove it. It’s irritating. Or, the tiniest jokes that get repeated forever and ever when the situation arises:

(Driving past Madison Square Garden) “Hey, I lost my glasses in there once. You know how I found them? I Felt Forum.”

See, these things are little demons in my head, and I hope to exorcise them by writing about them, but I’m not hopeful. Nothing helps.

But to finally get to the point, a more significant, recurring thought dates back to 11th grade English class with Dr. Dewsnap. A slight woman, she was famous for being a tough grader, and for unconsciously fondling a small purple statue of a panther when she was lecturing us on American Literature. Most boys could forgive her grading policy, just to watch her work that panther over. Whew!

Anyhow, she was the one who taught me Fitzgerald, including “The Great Gatsby.” This was not a book to be enjoyed, God forbid, this was a book to be examined, worshipped, even envied if you had the idiotic desire to become a writer. And on the last day of Gatsby, as we slouched our ache-free teenage bodies into the classroom, she stood writing on the blackboard.

Since the blackboard was so far from the purple panther, the guys couldn’t care less what she was writing, and the usual harrumph of a murmur went around the room. Then, quietly and intensely, she spoke.

“The Green Light. What does it mean?”

The room murmured on. She turned on us, furious. We shouldn’t be talking about our own little lives, we should be talking about how our lives were changed sometime last night, when we read that last chapter, in which Gatsby stands on his lawn and looks across the water at the green light in the distance.

“The Green Light! THE GREEN LIGHT! IT’S EVERYTHING!” she exploded, clawing upward with pipecleaner fingers, circling the room in long strides like a Barrymore laying down some Bard.

This got our attention. Frantically, I scanned back to the night before, sometime after swim practice, “Wonder Woman” and a couple of Who album sides, but it wasn’t coming to me.

“It’s the central image! It’s the future! It’s Daisy and hope and… everything!”

We sat there, ashamed that we had missed it. All except for Joel Myers, who knew everything and therefore was a pain in the balls. He just nodded smugly, and looked like he might join her up there at the board any minute.

So now whenever I see a green light, it all comes back. Usually I can banish it by whispering a quick “green light,” as if I’m playing a private game of “red light, green light.” But last week in New York, as we returned to the hotel on our last night of eating and drinking and walking and visiting old friends, I looked up at a renovated warehouse and saw the wall of green lights, shown in the photo above.

My mental GPS froze me to the spot for a second, putting that view/memory/location permanently into the archives. And it made me think about the green light, and New York, and everything that has happened since then, and my own Daisy, and Dash, and life out west. Maybe this is the future, back in a New York that’s changed so much. Could we really go back?

And looking at those green windows, formerly a squatter’s warehouse and now the worldwide headquarters of some absurd designer or something, I found myself drawing a profound conclusion to the entire trip:

Maybe L.A. doesn’t suck so much after all! Yippee!

A welcome sign

On my last day of hiatus, I can finally say that I have finished my CNC router mill. Why the hell I would WANT to say that, well, that’s another story.

First, what it is. “CNC” stands for “Computer Numeric Control,” which at this point is an old-fashioned way of saying that it’s a machine that your computer controls.

Another word for this would be “robot.”

While it doesn’t wave its arms around and warn Will Robinson that Dr. Smith is feeling frisky, it still qualifies. There are special motors called “stepper motors,” one for each of the x, y, and z axes. Once you calibrate the table and tell the software just where everything is and how thick it is, you can convert your drawings and designs and the thing makes them for you. As far as I could tell, all the robot on “Lost in Space” ever did for the Robinson family was Jack and Shit, so I consider my robotic mill to be vastly superior.

There are other robotic similarities. When the stepper motors go to work, they move in very small, very precise increments, so it’s not a smooth motor action but a vibratory one. Thus, as the router is whirring at 3,000 RPM, the motors give out with an eerie, atonal song. As the thing cuts a circle and the speeds on both motors continue to change, they make a song not unlike the music from “Forbidden Planet.” Get it? Robby the Robot?

Okay, that was a stretch, but you have to admit this thing is pretty cool. I can download a Google Sketchup drawing of a desk, decompose it in EasyCad, turn it into g-code and the mill will make all the parts for me. It’s like an earsplitting, 10-hour-long, dusty trip to IKEA, all within the confines of my garage workshop.

There are still refinements to be made to the mill. First, I have to make a dustcatcher to which I can hook my shop vac. Next, I’m going to drill holes in the stage and attach another vacuum to that, to keep the stock lumber in place while it’s being cut. Think of it as a reverse air hockey table. That works at 140 decibels.

And finally, after I have used my precision machine to make built-in shelves for my wife’s home office, I will start learning the carving software, that will allow me to make 3-d representations of stuff I’ve designed on the computer.

But for now, I’ve basically worked my way up to cutting out complex letters. And while that puts me on a technological par with a sign making shop circa 1978, back in 1978 I used to think that sign making shops were awesome. Or maybe groovy, I don’t know, I don’t retain contextualized adjectives well.

So here it is, the debut project:

Sign Pro of Media, Pennsylvania, eat your heart out

I like beautiful design. I like whimsy. I like it when someone comes in and cleans my room every day. So why don’t I love the Hotel Gansevoort?

First up, it’s got that whole Sanitized Manhattan thing going on. It’s in the center of the meat packing district, which used to be a desolate no-man’s-land with nothing but Florent and puddles of meat runoff. Now Florent is going out of business because they raised the rent.

And the neighborhood is populated with extremely high-end designer shops, like Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney, and places with names like this:

Did “Sex and the City” destroy the world?

Next, there’s a view of the Empire State Building (which I love), but it’s only from the roof and this is all you get:

The view, such as there is, of the Empire State Building

Okay, so, there’s plenty of other stuff to see. It’s right by the river, so the sunset must be fantastic. Guess what: there’s another building, right in the way:

Excuse me, would you mind removing your top 11 floors?

Now we get into the really annoying details. The purple elevator buttons:

Somebody made this decision

And the incredibly annoying video monitors in the elevators, depicting nerdy guys performing comical dances:

Damn, have some self respect, man!

This gets us to our final criticism, one that will not be true for everyone, but this is my own personal blog, after all. There is a rooftop pool, and in it, there are hotel guests. And those guests underline what I could never love about this place: it attracts mostly people who are much more attractive than me.

I ain’t getting my suit on, that’s for damned sure

I mean, come on! I work in an airless, windowless office all day! When I come to New York, I want to spend my time with pale, unattractive people! It’s bad enough going out to dinner in Los Angeles! Even my wife is taller than me! I work with the Wayans Brothers, and nothing makes you feel shorter, fatter, or whiter than working with the Wayans Brothers! So for God’s sakes, couldn’t there be just one Ernest Borgnine-looking jerkoff checked into this place?

Plus, those dancing guys in the elevators. I mean, really.

One of the manmade waterfalls in New York Harbor

My wife and I are visiting New York for a few days, and are lucky enough to be here when the waterfall art project by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson in New York Harbor. It consists of four, 8- to 10-story scaffolds with high-powered pumps that take their water from the East River, raise it, only to drop it from thundering heights.

For an Icelandic artist named Olafur, I thought the installation was surprisingly accessible. After all, Bjork is Icelandic, and she’s ready to throw on a dead swan wherever people are handing out statues.

The artist’s motivation was this: The harbor used to be busy; it’s not busy anymore; the waterfalls are meant to make the harbor look busy. And isn’t it every artist’s secret motto, whenever the people with the grant money are watching, to “look busy?”

It’s not the easiest exhibit to figure out how to see. The Circle Line is having a mini-boom over it (note the crowd of boats in the above photo), but their twist is to give you a rain slicker and actually get you drenched by that art, a sort-of homage to the “Maid of the Mist” in Niagara Falls. I carry way too many bits of electronics on my person for that to be a possibility.

Another way would be to take a taxi to Brooklyn so you could see all four falls (the prominent one is located under the Brooklyn Bridge, and can only otherwise be seen from about forty blocks north on the Manhattan side). But come on, this is the Brooklyn Bridge here, you just gotta walk it.

And so we did. One of the members of our party decided to wear flip-flops for the trip, which wasn’t a great idea. She was also immensely satisfied when we came to the spot where Miranda gets together with some guy in the “Sex and the City” movie. So there wasn’t a lot motivating all of us to the other side. We would settle for seeing three of the four waterfalls.

Then, on the way back, the Band-Aid fell off her chafed, poorly-clad feet, and when she bent down to fix it, she spotted the last scaffold directly beneath us. I managed to reach my camera under the walkway and snap this photo through the bridge infrastructure:

Waterfall #4

And so we did it. Like the waterfalls themselves, I felt that the level of artistic accomplishment was fleeting. But it was cool and big and made a lovely roar to drown out the taxis on the bridge.

And it gave us an excuse to walk the Brooklyn Bridge, an artistic achievement of a somewhat greater permanence.

It’s easy to get a picture when they hover over your house

Were I to write an essay entitled “How I Spent My June Hiatus,” I would definitely have to put “Didn’t Get Killed In My Own Home” on the checklist.

“But,” you ask, “couldn’t most people who were able to write the essay also be able to say that?”

That’s true, but the difference here is that, yesterday, I had such a wonderful opportunity to be killed and I missed it.

I have been working on a router table in the garage for a few days, a very noisy pastime, and when I shut the machine down at around 11:30, I noticed that there was a helicopter circling overhead. And by overhead, I mean just overhead, while a half-dozen American-made cars raced around the block.

Being a Los Angelino these ten or more years, I decided to get my camera.

I shot some great video in HD – I’ve been looking for a shot of a helicopter to use in a graphic for work – and after about ten minutes, I realized I probably didn’t have to run to get it. The helicopter kept circling, and now there were squad cars blocking off all the streets. The helicopter began to announced that the police had the block surrounded and that, if I had any weapons, I should probably put them down.

I went inside. Locked the doors.

I was finding it hard to concentrate on the television with that chopper mercilessly beating the air overhead, making loose change dance across the counter and the screws start to work their way out of the hinges. So I went upstairs and peeked out the window at the cops on the corner: there were now about twenty, and every time one of them spoke into his or her walkie-talkie, you could hear it on everyone else’s, feeding back like the warmup guy at an outdoor concert.

Things seemed under control, and I couldn’t find anything on the radio or TV news about it, so I thought I’d pop out there and get the story.

I walked out of my front gate, and everybody put their hands on their pistol butts, squared their shoulders, and pointed their chins at me. When the closest guy, who was just a few feet from the gate, gave me a suspicious and surprisingly tenor “what can I do for you?” – from where I stood, “shoot me” was the only answer they could have acted on with any kind of speed.

“I live here,” I said, “just want to know what’s up.”

“Two suspects, both male, African-American, probably shirtless, fled through your next door neighbor’s driveway to the rear of his residence,” he replied, very fast. I thought, at that level of excitement, it showed great obedience to his training that he chose “African-American” over “black,” but who wants a lawsuit, I guess.

“Am I in any danger?” I asked (meaning from the suspects, not the fifteen young men and women with unsnapped holsters).

“Yes.”

Hmm.

“Go back into your house. Lock the doors and windows. If you see someone, do not attempt to alert the officers outside. Call 911 and report a prowler.”

You mean, after they put me on “hold.”

And so, with my trusty Louisville Slugger Junior Tee Ball Edition baseball bat in one hand, my house phone in the other and led by my stalwart miniature poodle, I checked out every nook and cranny of the house. I didn’t find any criminals, but I DID find my Blackberry charger I lost last week.

I ended up sitting on the edge of my bed, watching the cops out the window, listening to their walkie chatter and hoping they’d catch these guys as fast as possible. I must not have been that worried because I fell asleep, and when I woke up, the cops were gone and I didn’t have any bullet holes in me, so far as I could tell.

My neighbor came by and told me the suspects were caught. They had split up, and were hiding two blocks over. I went back into the workshop and started up the routing mill again.

And as I ran some test g-code to the stepper motors, I thought back on my day. I had spoken to a man who put his hand on his gun and asked me what he could do for me. Kind of a mixed message, if you asked me.

But then I thought, now what, that’s perfect. That’s the L.A. cops all over. Swat teams, Emergency Services, dozens of cars laying siege to a quiet neighborhood, ready to shoot the first chubby white guy in an Izod that makes a false move. They should make that their new recruitment poster. Forget the ethnically mixed, friendly faces fresh from the academy in the current poster: give me a nervous 30-year-old on Human Growth Hormone, twenty miles away from his sense of humor with a hand on his gun butt, and the caption, “What can I do for you.

All on a nice, breezy, carefree summertime day.

Big pod of Saddleback Dolphins, about a mile off Santa Monica Pier

I’ve been out in the Pacific in my little Boston Whaler dozens of times, and at every time of the year, but I’ve never seen it as deserted of boats as today.

It’s no surprise, since the average member of the Mosquito Fleet goes out in something at least 20 feet long, with twin whatevers that suck down the gas. Or diesel. Plus, gas in the marina costs almost 7 bucks a gallon (they pay all sorts of fees to be able to spill gas into the harbor) and you’ve got an industry suffering from the gas crunch.

I’m glad I bought the 4-stroke Mercury 60 for the Whaler. I did it for the environmentally friendly side first, but now that gas is so expensive, it’s cheap to run. Where my old 2-stroke Evinrude took down 18 gallons in about 3 hours, this thing can go at least 10 without getting down to a quarter tank. I took it to Catalina with Dash 2 years ago, we fished, then cruised around the whole island before returning to the Marina, and we hadn’t quite used a third of a tank.

There’s a drawback to not having any boaters out there: you can’t get in their chumline, look for bent poles, or otherwise cheat at finding the fish by finding the happy fishermen. Oh sure, there are the party boats, but they always go to the same spots, and the likelihood of being blown into their lines or getting crapped on by the army of seagulls (would that be “Airforce of Seagulls?”) is way too high. Plus, you get your own boat to get away from the party boats.

Today was my shakedown cruise for the start of the summer. The kids are at camp, the wife is visiting her girlfriends — what better time for a man to face off against the elements by going 40 miles per hour in the wide Pacific? I dropped the wife off at the airport, drove to the Marina, put the battery in the boat and backed it down the ramp.

Leave it to Mercury — everything started up and worked perfectly. I put up the canopy, raised the antenna, fired up the fishfinder (a gift from my pal Sam) and the ship-to-shore and steamed out through the no-wake zone. I just wanted to make sure everything was working before bringing kids and fishing poles and the like.

But once I got out to open water, I had to fire it up. It was pretty choppy this morning, and I got airborne more than once, but I won’t be feeling those injuries to my neck and spine for a few days. And as I was out there, all alone, I noticed a big commotion of birds, maybe two miles off the Santa Monica Pier.

So I went. I was hoping it wasn’t harbor seals gnawing at something under a kelp island. I used to love seeing them, but they are so brazen, and have eaten so many anchovies off my line, I don’t need to burn any gas just to get snorted at. Plus they’re always easy to find lolling on the buoys. The homeless people of the sea.

But I was in luck. The birds weren’t just dropping in from high up like they do with a few seals. They were hovering just above the water, picking up scrap after scrap. And there were thousands.

I raced around the big pack of birds to the head of the line, and there in the splashes I could see hundreds of saddleback dolphins, racing and hunting all in a north to northwest direction. At this point in the bay, the warmer water from inshore forms a line that washes out and south with the current — you can see it just as you take off from LAX, especially if there is any rain runoff — and the dolphins hunt in giant packs, pushing the baitfish in the warm water up against the colder current further out to sea.

The baitfish don’t like this — a small but sudden temperature change can shock them and cause temporary paralysis, so the first ones to hit that line double back against the feeding dolphins, making a hell of a mess. As I sat there idling, cursing the fact that I had lent my wife my camera and trying to figure out the zoom on my Blackberry, a huge school of anchovies boiled to the surface around my boat, and I was surrounded by furiously feeding dolphins, jumping, diving, snorting air, making impossible moves on their backs and going fast, fast, fast — I could feel a vibration under my feet like a rope singing in a stiff breeze — and I couldn’t help thinking of these little guys (the saddlebacks are about half the length of a bottle-nose) as lovable, friendly piranhas.

Then Crap Force One caught up, and I got out of there, taking the above photo as I went.

As I left, a number of dolphins escorted the boat, leaping out of the water and having a good look at me. I can’t help think that they are more curious than most people I’ve met in my work. Especially the Jaywalkers.