Albert Sabate

JR Lopez was excited about getting himself a Christmas present.  He was planning on building himself a "fixie," or a fixed-gear bicycle.  He estimated that it would cost him $1,000.

A fixie is a sort of minimalist road bike that forgoes many of the components one would typically expect to see on a bicycle.  They have one gear that is locked, or fixed (hence the name fixie), to the movement of the back tire.  Because there is only one gear, a bike doesn't need shifters or derailers.  Typically, fixies do not have brakes.  Consequently, the bicycles are lighter and more agile.

Many Los Angeles cyclists are embracing this trend that offers riders community and an opportunity for self-expression.  But what is unclear is whether this fad will just cycle by or is here to stay.

It may seem that one factor fueling this trend is the economic downturn. What can be a large initial investment can become a savvy economic decision.

"It's expensive," Lopez admitted.  "But, it gets me to work and back.  I don't have to spend gas or bus money."

LA Brakeless is a bike store that almost exclusively caters to the fix-gear market.

"We got lucky being in the little niche that we're in.  With gas prices, parking and traffic people are trying to avoid their cars and resorting back to their bikes," said Efrem Yohannes, an employee at LA Brakeless.

"A custom build may start at $850.  The sky is the limit from there.  We recently built one for $4,500," said Yohannes.

The many custom fix-gears have flashy colored themes or sometimes a mix.  One bike had purple rims, with matching spokes, a white back tire with a black front tire, and neon green handlebar grips with a matching green chain.

At night the streets come alive with hundreds of typically young cyclists riding in groups across Los Angeles.  They come to show off there bikes and see their friends.

"The rides are amazing," said Lopez enthusiastically.  "You feel good when you ride by yourself, but imagine when you're 150 deep.  It's just so incredible.  They run all night."

These rides provide an almost religious experience to the fixie riders.

Cyclists typically begin a ride at 9 p.m. and ride together till the late night.  Every night of the week there are a different rides in different neighborhoods and for different skill levels.  

In one recent "Taco Tuesday" ride, cyclist road from Culver City to Union Station, took the train to Pasadena and road back to the start in a six-hour loop.

Sometimes some riders have engaged in vandalism or theft during the rides.  But ride organizers push hard to keep riders in line.  They are determined not to let a few bad apples ruin the bunch.

"We're very organized now," said Lopez.  "We have rules and remind everyone to keep them.  It's having fun and we don't a bad image."

In addition to a leader, the rides have a designated rider who takes the rear.  This rider has spares, walkie-talkies, and other tools.

Although riders come prepared with spare parts and a concern for safety, almost no riders use helmets.

"I got hit just last night," said Lopez who didn't wear a helmet but suffered no injuries.  "I'm standing at a freakin' red light and she hits me.  You have to be really careful."

"A lot of people don't like to wear helmets," said Yohannes.  "I don't wear one.  When I ride my bike I like to be as light as possible on it."

 "I honestly think that for a lot of people they just don't feel they look cool enough," said Yohannes smirking.  "But than again, you look a lot cooler wearing a helmet than you do sitting in a wheel chair."

LA Fixie from treblalbert on Vimeo.

With a hat over his messy gray-white hair and his 4 day beard, Arnold Sachs, 56, addressed the Los Angeles City Council confidently. His hands held firmly to each side of the lectern.  He continued speaking until the time on the clock ran out.  There's no telling how much time it would take for the regular attendee to both the council and the County Board of Supervisors meetings to run out of thoughtful questions to the agenda items open for public comment.  He is loaded with newspaper articles that support his points and connects discussion items with past committee decisions.

And yet no matter how obviously an item begs a question or how inexplicable it may be, Sachs' voiced concerns to the council or board are consistently met with silence, then followed by a vote that contradict his condemnation.

"Everything is so bought and sold now, it's all about money," Sachs said.

"Aren't you discouraged?"

"It can be discouraging at times because it's so negative.  It sucks," he admitted.  But Sachs said he prefers to keep his eyes on the prize.

"I'm a perfectly mellow guy," Sachs said. "But the political situation makes my blood boil."

He believes everyone wants to live in peace and left alone to live their life.  But he can't stand by when "they're stealing money."  That is intolerable, he said.

 For him, the ultimate goal is to address corruption in local government.  He said that corruption is systemic in California politics.

The New Jersey native was greeted with genuine smiles from the staff at the county board of supervisors meeting and by the bailiff at the city council too.  They called each other by their first names.

Sachs said that the staff respect him for his sincerity and for often intellectually roughing up the politicians.

"I'm not afraid of dumbing myself down to ask stupid questions," he said.  "The staff who work for them can't say what I say to them."

Once in a while, Sachs said, people stop him on the street and praise him for his participation at the public meetings.  That's worth more than anything in the world for Sachs.

Initially, Sachs came to Los Angeles on vacation in 1983.  While here, he was let go from his job in Florida.  With the 1984 Olympics around the corner and nothing waiting for him back at home, he has since stayed.

His interest in politics arose from when he was let go from his job as a taxi driver through a suspicious turn of events.  Sachs felt he was set up through illegal drug testing and the backdating of company policies by his superiors.

He said that through this unfortunate process, which left him homeless, he learned about the corruption that he fights today.

Sachs stays in Redondo Beach, uses the gym to shower, is on food stamps and spends time at the library, he said.

Sachs main concern was that citizens have the opportunity to get the truth from government through the media.

"What I lament more than anything is that people don't get facts or the follow up questions," he said.  "People get entertained."

He charged the media with not holding politicians accountable.

"There's an old saying: 'Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies,'" Sachs said.  "When you don't do it, you're perpetuating a myth that everything is doing okay and positive."

Thousands of zombies around the world came forth to simultaneously dance to Michael Jackson's Thriller.

The event, Thrill The World, was an attempt to break the world record for the most people dancing to the 1982 hit. There were over 400 events organized across more than 45 different countries.  In Los Angeles alone, an estimated 6000 came to LA Live.  

"I had lots of fun.  I can say I was there," said Oshshanae Rose, 17.

"It was very important for me to be here," said Rose who came with her brother and mother from Victorville, Calif.  "I'm a big fan of Michael Jackson."

"I love Michael Jackson, and I wanted to support him," said Sharhon Tinslay, 38.  "I am very excited about being apart of breaking the world record."

The last record, about 13,000, was set two months ago in Mexico City on what would have been MJ's 51st birthday.

"It's about time he got this kind of recognition," said Michael Jackson impersonator Michael Kiss.

For Calder Greenwood, 30, Thrill the World was more about dressing up and having fun with friends.  

He had spent two hours preparing his tattered costume.

"I'm here for Halloween really," said Greenwood.  "I wasn't aware of the world record thing."

Fans arrived as early as 11 am to prepare for the 5:30 pm dance on Saturday.  They revised their dance moves and applied make up.

Some dance studios organized training sessions leading up to the event.

Thriller fan Chad Van Overbeke learned with some friends from a DVD tutorial and attended one of the formal practices.

Rose learned ahead of time by watching internet videos

"I was a little nervous at first," said Greenwood who attended three practices before the final performance. "

What started in 2006, with only 62 dancers has grown to thousands worldwide.  Creators of Thrill The World encouraged event organizers to use the occasion to raise funds for charity. They did not endorse any particular charity.

No official numbers have been released on this year's participation.




At one point, an event organizer started handing out tickets at L.A. Live's Nokia Plaza for the new Jackson film This Is It. 


The event organizer was overwhelmed by the anxious crowd and threw the tickets into the air leaving fans to sort things out themselves.  

Fans pounced on each other for the tickets.

Some crowd members had to pull the others apart so that they wouldn't injure anyone.

"Please!  There are minors here!" yelled one man as he pulled people off a boy who had been caught in the middle.

At the end of the evening, a handful of avid fans supplied boomboxes from home and continued performing the routine.

Repeatedly, fans stated their eagerness to come back next year and do it all over again.

The digital commons of Twitter provided college football followers a platform to express their joys and sorrows over the results of Saturday's games.  

The majority of those commenting in the afternoon expressed their delight in the fact that University of Southern California Trojans lost against the University of Washington Huskies.  In general, the tweets showed people's reactions came not because Washington won, but rather because USC lost.  In other words, the majority of people were USC haters instead of rejoicing Washington fans.

An interesting dynamic could be seen by what words different individuals chose.  The words they used often indicated what point of view they had.  For example, comparing queries of the word Trojan to the word USC, one could see the following trend:  Those comments containing Trojan were more likely to lament the USC's loss.  The comments containing USC rejoiced in Washington's win or more importantly USC's loss.  A similar dynamic came forth when comparing Huskies to Washington.  Fans of the teams were more likely to use the name of their mascots when referring to their teams.  No surprise. But it leads us to another important trend.

The top three words in Twitscoop's tag cloud Saturday afternoon were Huskies, Washington, and USC.  Trojan was not even in the tag cloud.  USC fans were quietly licking there wounds.

"Dang [wh]y all y'all usc fans so quiet?" asked one person through a tweet.

Some tweets lamented not the loss, but how this would influence those around them.  One person said that it had put her father in a bad mood for the rest of the weekend.  Another person said that his week would surely be bad because of how grumpy his boss would be.

As formal news stories were published, some of those sites posted links to their stories and some users linked their tweets to them as well.  This began to change the narrative within minutes.  Although an earlier common theme had been, "USC is overrated," now individuals had facts they found in the news stories to support their claims.  Tweets mentioned statistics about previous year's results, Washington's poor record this year, etc.

Then, it was interesting to see tweets moving towards making commentary on the big picture.

"*sigh* at least we (#USC) got our stupid loss out of the way early" mentioned one tweet.

"[...] yeah, I think everybody will take a loss this year... But USC still has to deal with UCLA, Oregon, Oregon state and Cal, too!" said another tweet.

What I found most notable in following the tweets was seeing how commentary was so influenced by official news reports.  It informed the discussion and changed it.  Simple expressions of glee (often with expletives used to illustrate the quality of glee), changed into a more thoughtful, enriching, and worthwhile user experience.

Obama's 45-minute address to the rare joint session of Congress called for immediate action to reform health care and an end to partisan politics on this issue; or so I thought.  Taking the resulting blog discussions (or rather fervent opinions) seriously would lead one to think that no matter what was said, it wouldn't make a difference to people's conclusions about the issue.

"I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road -- to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term," Obama said.  "But that is not what the moment calls for."

The health care reform has dominated so much of news and the political discussion in the past few weeks and now it remains to be seen how Obama's speech, which acknowledged left and right points of view and their contributions, will influence this discussion.

The Internet does what it does best by providing a platform for a plethora of ideas.

Two blogs from openleft.com caught my attention.

First, blogger David Sirota wrote that the speech was a disappointment.  Among other things, he claimed that Obama was critical of  "the Left" and "embraced the Right's most dishonest narrative."

From the same web domain, Mike Lux claimed that Obama hit the jackpot.  Obama properly makes his case, answers critics, and "fired up the people around the country who want to get this done to keep working to make it happen," he wrote.

In a post by Ed Morrissey on HotAir.com, Morrissey accompanies a video from Harry Reid's comments, with a witty theory about the seemingly continuously polarized discussion even following Obama's conciliatory speech.

"Obama must have given two speeches, one publicly, and then a later one in private after all 535 members snuck back into the chamber. The one we saw featured a President who got angry, called his opposition liars, and said he wouldn't listen to anyone who didn't want to overhaul the health-care system along the principles he's already espoused," he wrote.

Strong opinions on what Obama said, didn't say, emphasized, implied, or should have said, boldly exist in the blog-o-sphere.  Are we getting closer to any real conclusion in the discussion?

Oh wait, isn't democracy about agreeing to disagree?