Got home last night; here are words and pictures from my five days of going to Hollywood, hanging around with a bunch of newspaper types, then heading back home.

Day One

The point of this adventure is to attend the annual convention of the American
Copy Editor Society (ACES for short), which has chosen Hollywood in the
hope that some of its glamour will rub off on our ink-stained profession.

I’m riding along with Craig, sports editor at the place
where I work, who’s going to the convention to share tips on how to climb
the corporate ladder and earn the rich rewards of twice the workload, four times
the stress and and an extra $27.50 a week.

In his haste to prepare his presentation notes, he fails to intuit my preference
for a Lincoln Town Car for the 330-mile drive to Hollywood, and instead opts
to drive his Dodge pickup. I go along because it’s, well, either ride in the
cab with Craig or in the bed with the luggage, and it’s damn windy back there.
Upside is that Craig has brought along his awesome CD collection, so abundant
tunage makes up for lack of salon-length legroom. (Well, there is the small
matter of a free ride all the way there and back because the paper’s covering
his mileage tab, but this is California, where gratitude is strictly
optional.)

As a warm-up for Hollywood, we stop for lunch in the Santa Barbara wine country,
where the movie "Sideways"
was shot on location.

Lunch is in this Danish-themed village called Solvang
— a location so impossibly cute that the producers of "Sideways"
would’ve been obliged to create it if it hadn’t already been there.

This mannequin server guy is too disturbing to see up close.

Nice flowers — I guess they have those in Denmark for the three weeks of the
year when it’s above freezing.

The Hitching Post, where the protagonist of "Sideways" reveals the
movie is not really about his love for wine, but his weakness for the bottle.

Back on the road — we’re in Ventura County, where there’s no escaping that
annoying "Ventura Highway" song from the ’70s getting into one’s head
and not going away.

Hollywood’s so close we can smell it. Or maybe a cow has died nearby.

Somebody thought it’d be clever for this little sign to mimic the more famous
big one. An exciting career in newspaper page design awaits this deluded soul.

The famous sign is visible from my hotel room. That alone pretty much makes
the trip worthwhile. Hollywood teaches us to value things other than money,
because we’ll be spending all we have to stay fed, keep in out of the weather
and still have some left over for the panhandlers and street hustlers.

The hotel is standard business-conference fare, but it’s attached to a really,
really appalling "entertainment
complex" anchored by this entryway modeled on a set created for "Intolerance,"
the classic silent movie created by cinema pioneer D.W. Griffith.

I was told these things are scale models of the "Intolerance" sets,
which were actually much larger. When time travel is invented, the first priority
will be to revisit D.W. and beg him to reconsider.

Day Two

Eight hours that might’ve been constructively devoted to producing worthwhile
newspapers, magazines and news Web sites has been consumed with eight hours
of discussing how to produce worthwhile newspapers, magazines and news
Web sites. The joke is on us, though, because the seats in our offices are more
comfortable than the seats the conference hotel has provided. Our response to
such absurdity is to consume absurd quantities of beverages characterized by
flavors of distilled grains, fermented grapes and brewed barley malt.

Linda, a former copy chief of mine, reacts to an assertion of Mike, center,
who’s primary role in life is encouraging young minds to enter the news business.
Yes, he’s as crazy as he looks. Linda and I met Mike at last year’s ACES confab
in Houston, where the three of us (and a couple more brave souls) ran off to
see a stellar performance by an incomparable surf-rock combo called Southern
Culture on the Skids.

When I happened upon Mike he was next to his buddy Doug, another molder of
collegiate minds. Mike suggested three guys with glasses would look like
Russian nesting dolls; I had Linda take this picture to test his theory. I think
it holds, except that those dolls look funny and we, from the looks of this snapshot, merely illustrate the fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous.

Day Three

Today’s highlight is one of my favorite things in this world: a lunch somebody
else is paying for. The locale is Mel’s Diner, which is decorated with images
from "American Graffiti" because another Mel’s location was used in
the movie.

Brian, left, yet another former copy chief of mine, taking a break from answering
the most burning question on the mind of Josh, my current copy chief, which
is: "what the hell do I do about Mangan?" To which Brian no doubt
answered: "Move to Kentucky."

Tonight’s highlights are the banquet (cool, another meal I don’t have to pay
for!) and the silent auction, in which curios are auctioned off to help defray
the costs of providing meals at conferences like these.

This one depicts the earliest known act of copy editing. The guy on the right’s
saying "You Misspelled Thou."

Nicole of Capital Idea fame approves
of the beverage selection.

Courtney is ready for her close-up. She’s a former MercNews coconspirator who
now runs the copy desk up in Contra Costa County.

Mary Ellen is the one who recognized me before I recognized her (detailed in
my most recent posting). The guy with the flash bouncing off his head is Phil,
proprietor of the Testy Copy Editors
site.

This sign was a hot item.

As the auction is about to expire, two competitors for the sign scribble their
bids madly.

Will from Fresno, right, bought me a drink to say thanks for valuable career
tips like "keep your head down till the shit stops flying.&quot. Pete from Fort Wayne is the other guy.

Day Four

Last day of the conference. My presentation titled "Fitness for Rim Rats"
draws an audience of three, who clapped extra loud when I was finished. Thanks
gals; next time, call all your friends!

The post-conference bash is at a nightclub with a balcony looking down on Hollywood
Boulevard (the skyline of Los Angeles is in the background). Some us fled to
an old Hollywood restaurant a few blocks down the street, which was rumored
to be a celebrity hangout. One of our crew, a So-Cal denizen named Kate, told
of sitting next to Bob Dylan there. We saw nobody famous, though one bunch of
attractive twenty-somethings in a corner booth might’ve been professional understudies
who haven’t worked since "Melrose Place" got canceled.

It’s Hollywood, everybody needs a story, right?

Peter from Tampa and Jim from Albuquerque help me close the hotel bar, which
tightened the taps at the insanely early hour of 12:30. I’m not saying how many
drinks I had; all I’m sure of is there’s no way I could’ve spelled Albuquerque
on the first try.

Day Five

It’s Sunday morning, and I’m getting a few last photographs of nearby landmarks.
Certainly this town is hoping the revolution will be televised.

The world-famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is so big you have to photograph
it from across the street.

Back in the hotel lobby, I’m waiting for Craig to come down and take me home.
The sunglasses help me hide from my public.

Turns out Craig’s giving Nicole a ride to the airport, which is just down the
road from Manhattan Beach.

Nicole’s seeing the Pacific for the first time. I believe her only regret was
that it was hard to ogle the surfer guys when they were a hundred yards out
to sea.

Craig and I do strange hand salutes because we think it’s something cool surfer
guys might do. Nicole knows better but she takes the picture anyway, perhaps
hoping that photographic evidence might discourage such things in the future.

Look, it’s that wacky guy from the Jack in the Box ads, hanging out at his
beach house!

OK, beach visit over, now it’s off to find some lunch.

Craig takes us to a little place in Torrance called Wahoo’s Fish Tacos. I’m
down to my last six bucks but this place feeds me for four. My kinda taco joint.

From here it’s another few hours of highway, hills and tunes on the truck’s
CD player.

ACES got robbed yesterday.

Somebody grabbed the cashbox for the copy editor society’s book sale, ran off and disappeared into the streets of Hollywood.

Mike from Mizzou, a way-cool dude I met at last year’s convention in Houston, told me with unvarnished pride that he saw his first drug bust right along the Walk of Fame. His colleague, a fellow journalism professor, missed the whole thing — she was too busy checking out the stars.

Symbolic, I know.

After lunch I saw this guy dressed as some kind of African warrior — his attire was primarily a loin cloth. I looked closer after I walked past and noticed he had a huge snake wrapped up one side of his body and down the other. Can’t say how this street performance played with the tourists; I can see ’em being free w/their dimes and dollars for mimes and grimy guitar strummers, but the big-snake thing might’ve been a bit much for the folks from DuBuque.

Then again it could be the guy’s been hired by Hollywood’s tourism bureau to make sure there’s always somebody doing something strange to keep an Aura of Wonder about the place.

When I first got to the hotel Wednesday I got a “Hi Tom” from a young woman who — at that exact moment — I lost all memory of ever having seen before. She’d cut her hair and recolored it since last year’s convention, which gave me a bit of an excuse for the brain-blankage. Later though, it dawned on me where the blankage came from.

It’s that little voice that married guys carry with us. Our wives don’t have to say it for us to hear it, but it’s in there. And it’s telling us: “You know all those bright young single women you’re meeting at these conventions? Well, FORGET ABOUT ‘EM.”

I’m meeting bunches of people with connections to the Tampa Trib, whose doorways I last darkened in the summer of 1993. One guy told me we were there at the same time and he remembers me from back in the day (seems I’m forgetting the guys too) and I spent the next two hours trying to match his face with the one in my dusty database. I had to get my brain to do one of those FBI computer simulations you always see on the cop shows — the ones where they take somebody’s picture and add or subtract years by tapping on their keyboards. No wonder I didn’t remember him at first. Poor guy’s aged 12 years since I saw him last.

Tomorrow afternoon, I’ll give a talk advising my fellow newsies to avoid the wrong foods and refrain from overindulging on such things as imported beers and domestic gin and tonics. Then I’ll have to start following my own advice again. Conventions are hell on the ol’ fitness-and-diet regimen. Maybe that’ll be my topic for a future seminar: what to do next year to recover from the effects of this year.

I half-expected the spirit of Dashiell Hammet to visit me in my dreams last night. He didn’t, but if he had, I suspect I’d have written something like this:

Hollywood reeks of hope hanging by a thread.

I’m killing time in the hotel lobby, sitting in one of these wraparound chairs that could’ve come from Laura Petrie’s living room. A threadbare-but-good-looking black guy in his early 20s walks in, sits down next to me, says nothing for about two minutes. My first urge is immediately to find another seat. I know he’s a pan-handler and I’d just as soon avoid his pitch. But I don’t want to give the impression that I’m the kind of person who gets up when people of color sit next to me.

So the guy tells me he’s had a hard day of interviews and is fresh out of cash. I know he’s lying but part of me admires the moxie of somebody who can walk right up to a total stranger and ask for cash. He mentions “if you could just spare me 3 bucks I could go to McDonald’s.” Then he starts inflating the figure, then he admits, “well, actually I’m going to buy beer with it.” He’s charming and cunning; with all that faux frankness he no doubt has a bright future in the music business.

I say nothing till he starts to give up on me, and just as he’s getting up to leave I surprise him and give him the 3 bucks he asks for.

He’s gone into the twilight in seconds.

We’re staying in a garish new hotel around the corner from the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The stars’ names imbedded in the sidewalk have strange juxtapositions — grating TV cop Earl Holliman within 20 feet of beguiling screen legend Greta Garbo.

I’m here with a gathering of grammarians and headline writers. Most work for newspapers — an invisible, oppressed minority in our own newsrooms. We’re quiet people, prone to introspection and self-loathing. In the movie business we’d be the ones in charge of making sure all the names in the credits are spelled correctly, and that the gun introduced in the first reel shoots somebody in the third. But we’d get no credits ourselves.

We’re fish out of water in this town, for sure, but we’re safe here, in a way, because we’re not the kind of people who get mangled by the Hollywood machine. It’s easiest for us because we’ve abandoned all hope.

Well, not all hope, just the kind that keeps people hustling on these sidewalks. This town won’t give them a break, big or otherwise, but something keeps their engines running.

OK, time to stop this silliness before it catches on. It is kinda fun, though, to take on that hardboiled detective voice, contrived as it may be. But the whole town’s a contrivance, so it’s a kinda fitting.

I’m in Hollywood till Sunday to attend the annual American Copy Editor Society convention, which will include many important discussions regarding proper comma and colon usage. I hardly consider this an efficient use of a visit to Sin City, but some sacrifices must be made for the good of one’s craft.

I realized the minute I stepped into my room that I had forgotten to bring along the cable to connect my digicam to my laptop, so there’s no telling whether I’ll be able to post pictures. But I’ll see what I can do.

One bit of coolness: the famous Hollywood sign is visible from my hotel room.

More to come as events progress.

Rain? I got your rain.

Here’s the view out my office window.

It’s been like this most of the week, and it’s supposed to stay this way all
weekend. Swell.

We do have an interesting weather map, though:

As you know from watching the weather people on TV, those curved lines represent
weather fronts. Last week there was some concern all three of them would collide
and cause some kind of "perfect storm" that happens maybe three times
in a century. So far we’ve had no such excitement, just rain — drizzles, sprinkles,
downpours — that keeps on raining.

There probably won’t be any hiking pictures from this weekend … it’s just
too much work getting the mud out from between my teeth.

We had a hellacious storm last night. Horizontal rain and blasting winds that were making the whole house shake. There’s nothing quite like looking into your toilet bowl and seeing the water move to and fro. And the sensation of wondering why the floor feels like it’s moving despite the absence of tequila shooters in the day’s diet.

The wind was blowing so hard that as I lay in bed trying to get to sleep despite the roar, there was always the consoling thought that if the wind knocked the house down, it’d collapse on my car, breaking my fall by about six feet. I reminded myself that this place has endured 15 years of this stuff, so it must be built to last.

The weather forecasts call for rain for most of the next week. Gonna be muddy on the hiking trails this weekend … assuming I’m nutty enough to go hiking. I expect I will be.

We woke before dawn to open presents, like two kids who’d been waiting all
year for a Barbie Dream House or a Schwinn Orange Crate five-speed bike.

Melissa tends to take on the facial expressions of one whose gifts have been
bestowed by Jesus himself, which makes for fun photography.

Not sure what this was, but Melissa was happy with it.

Floyd’s tired of all the fuss.

Burt’s Bees lip balm from her best friend Beth in Indiana.

That’s a Black and Decker laser level — good for getting pictures to hang
straight. I saw it advertised on TV last month and knew Melissa had to have
one.

Melissa needed a watch, so I went to a Web site called Blue
Nile and found her one.

Some of my take: Bob Dylan’s "Chronicles Volume 1" and the soundtrack
to "Ray," the biopic about Ray Charles. I’ve decided his "Do
the Mess Around" is among the greatest rock ‘n’ roll songs ever made. The
Dylan book is vintage Bob: cryptic here, amazing there, maddening and enlightening.
It’s about three chapters of his life … can’t wait for him to fill in more
of the blanks. Melissa’s mom knitted the socks. The blue thing is a "hydration
bladder" to stow water in a backpack. Handy on the trail to no end.

The aftermath.

“My Mom and Dad can’t afford all this stuff.”

— What one of my co-workers’ daughter told a friend who was trying to convince her that Santa Claus was a myth.

A Chanticleer Christmas concert is on PBS. Those are all the gifts we’ll tear into in a couple days. This year two little Christmas trees are as good as one. And these are outside the cat’s reach — making us a bit of a grinch in the cat’s eyes, no doubt.

Mom’s in town for the day, so we’re showing her around the homestead.