Thursday, September 8, 2011

City Wants New Name For Troubled Rose Parade Float

From the City of Glendale:

 "The Community Services and Parks Department is requesting suggestions from the public for a new name for the 2012 Rose Float from the current name of 'Stepping Out in Style'. To be considered, names must be submitted to rosefloatname@ci.glendale.ca.us by Friday, September 16, 2011 at 5:00 PM. One name will be selected and submitted to the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Association for approval."

We've come up with quite a few naming suggestions for the troubled float at the Tropico Station Facebook page...feel free to add some more.  My current favorites are ‎"Dumbo's Revenge," "Monument to Poor Oversight," and "Follow Me To Zankou Chicken."
 
 

Friday, September 2, 2011

Glendale Drivers: Still Horrible

Allstate Insurance has just released their annual report ranking the relative traffic safety of the 200* largest cities in the country, and Glendale has maintained its ranking as the third most dangerous city in the country to in which to drive.  As a Glendale resident, you are 80.8 percent MORE likely to be involved in a collision than the average resident of the 200 largest cities in America.  In the 2011 report, the statistical average interval for a Glendale resident to be involved in a car accident was a mere 5.5 years - almost a year sooner than the Glendale's 2005 average of 6.3 years.

If you live in the safest city, Fort Collins, Colorado, you are 28.6% LESS likely to be in an accident than the average resident of the 200 largest cities, and the interval between accidents for the average resident is 14 years.  The only cities with worse statistics than Glendale are Baltimore and Washington D.C.

Here are Glendale's rankings for the last five years:
  • 2005 rank: 191/years between accidents: 6.3
  • 2006 rank: 192/years between accidents: 6.1
  • 2007 rank: 194/years between accidents: 6.0
  • 2008 rank: 192/years between accidents: 5.9
  • 2009 rank: 191/years between accidents: 5.7
  • 2010 rank: 191/years between accidents: 5.5
  • 2011 rank: 191/years between accidents: 5.5

*I wondered why Allstate claimed to survey 200 cities but only list rankings for 193. I called Allstate and they said that they did indeed survey 200 cities, but in some of them they had recently entered the local market and did not have enough Allstate customers to make up a statistically meaningful sample. So Glendale is ranked 191 out of 193, not 191 out of 200.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Forest Lawn: "Half In Love With Easeful Death"

Evelyn Waugh's brilliant 1947 piece "Half In Love With Easeful Death" imagines what scholars would make of the tombs and religious implications of Forest Lawn Glendale upon encountering it amongst the ruins of Southern California one thousand years in the future.  It is a highly entertaining and insightful read.  Read it read it read it.
"Nature will re-assert herself and the seasons gently obliterate the vast, deserted suburb. Its history will pass from memory to legend until, centuries later, as we have supposed, the archaeologists prick their ears at the cryptic references in the texts of the twentieth century to a cult which once flourished on this forgotten strand; of the idol Oscar - sexless image of infertility - of the great Star Goddesses who were once noisily worshipped there in a Holy Wood. 
...their steps will inevitably tend northward to what was once Glendale, and there they will encounter, on a gentle slope among embosoming hills, mellowed but still firm-rooted as the rocks, something to confound all the accepted generalizations, a necropolis of the age of the Pharaohs, created in the middle of the impious twentieth century, the vast structure of Forest Lawn Memorial Park."