PaulSkolnick.com

Looking at the pictures from my dad’s little 1940s photo album, my mom was able to identify two more than we’d previously had. (My mom and dad didn’t meet until 1950 and marry until July 1951, so it’s not unusual that she would not recognize my dad’s friends and acquaintances from a decade earlier.)

This, she’s sure, is a photo of my grandfather (my father’s father), Paul David Skolnik. (He died in 1947, so my mother didn’t know him.) I’ve never seen a photo of him when he wasn’t wearing wire-rim glasses, so I guess this one caught me off-guard.

And this one, my mother says, is Morty Gaffin, a friend of my dad’s since childhood. The back of the picture says “Italy,” from which I’m deducing that this is a photo of Morty from his WWII service in Italy.

I’ve also tried assembling the photos serially (one after another) rather than in a continuously moving slideshow. The serial display, which is static, is located in the Photos section of the blog. You can get there directly by clicking here.

I found myself up before dawn again today. So rather than toss and turn, I drove out to Malibu just in time to catch the sun breaking over the horizon. What a glorious way to start the day!

About 14 months ago, my mom presented me with an old binder bulging with photos. I looked through them, and figured out it was a photo album my dad had kept in the 1940s.

It wasn’t comprehensive—there were, for instance, photos of my dad from his military service that were not in this little album—but it certainly contained photos of him and by him that I’d never before seen.

Some of the pictures were starting to show signs of deteriorating. Why wouldn’t they? They were 60-70 years old!

I scanned every photo in the little album. I lightly retouched about a quarter of them, removing dust and scratches and some corrosion that had started to appear. And I thought the best thing for them, since they involve my dad and family and the events of his day, would be to post them.I captioned a handful of them.

I’m mindful of the fact that my dad never showed these photos, and the intent certainly isn’t to invade anybody’s privacy or circumvent their wishes. Rather, it’s to share with family and others to whom these photos might be significant memories of another century.

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I’m not sure who many of the people in these photos are. I’m also not sure where many of them were taken. My dad served in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1941-45. One of the photos indicates, in his handwriting, that he was in the 29th Bomb Squadron, which seems to be one of the units listed in a Latin American deployment that matches many of the places he’d occasionally talk about—like the Panama Canal Zone and the Galapagos Islands off of Ecuador. My father also spoke occasionally of having been hospitalized for at least several months in New Zealand for malaria during the war, but there are no pictures included of that.

I’ve wanted since August to give you a little more detail on how within a matter of days we were able to place Eitan Shimko’s family squarely into the Strauber-Strober-Struber family tree.

I’d like to say it was a snap for me, but a) it wasn’t a snap and b) it wasn’t me.

All of the credit for this one goes to Kristie Weiland Cohen, who has turned out to be the dogged researcher in the Jazlowiec genealogy group. All of us on the email list kept pressing Eitan for more and more details. Eitan would consult his grandmother and return to the list with what answers he could provide.

One difficulty was that the Yad Vashem records showed that Herzl Naftali Strauber had died in the Shoah. A woman identifying herself as a cousin filled out the form a decade later. Eitan could confirm with his grandmother that Herman had been born Herzl, but that his parents changed his name. But how to resolve the issue of a man “dying” in the Holocaust and then dying again in New York years later? Kristie was able to explain that to everyone’s satisfaction by saying the Yad Vashem report was in error. Perhaps it was another Herzl Strauber.

But where did Herman fit into the family tree? How was he related? That’s where Kristie came up with an incredible solution.

Kristie remembered a document we’d been given three and a half years earlier. It was a typescript of a man’s recollection of life in the shtetl of Piotrow, which was near Potok Zloty and Jazlowiec (the two primary villages in what is now the western part of Ukraine that we’ve been able to trace our ancestors to). The typescript remembrance was written by Benjamin Schweber for students at the Yeshiva of Hudson County. (I’m guessing it was Hudson County, New Jersey.)

The document came to us in 2008 from Stanley Strober, who lives in Tucson, Arizona. We don’t know how he got it, but he did say at the time that his ancestors were from Piotrow as well.

One of the first rules of genealogical research is to hold on to everything you get, because things that may not fit in now could very well come into clearer focus down the road.

Kristie remembered a reference—one line in a 37-page document. And it was a off-hand reference at that to a fire that had ravaged the town and how the sacred documents were taken to the home of a learned man for safe-keeping.

That learned man was named Berel Strauber in the document, was is, genealogically speaking, a direct hit for Berl Strauber on our family tree. And it said he had a grandson named Jacob Strauber. The Berl Strauber on our family tree had a grandson named Jacob.

There was a small leap of logic we still needed to make. Herman’s tombstone, in giving his Hebrew name and his father’s Hebrew name, indicated his father Shimon was a rabbi. The leap was in assuming that a known Strauber in Piotrow, which Schweber said had twenty Jewish families in it, would be related to another Strauber we believe to have been a rabbi.

So we took the leap and put Herman in the tree as a brother of the grandson Jacob, and another grandson of Berl.

I am linking Schweber’s entire 37-page remembrance of life in Piotrow, entitled Chanuka Gift to Yeshiva of Hudson County in Memory of My Parents and Grandparents. We know nothing about Schweber, have no idea when he wrote this, have no idea (other than a contextual one from things like mentions of a motor vehicle, something he had never seen before) of when he lived in Piotrow.

But Kristie certainly did exemplify (again) how to remember that every clue, no matter how seemingly extraneous at the time, may in the future come to center stage.

 

I had to be up anyhow. At least that was what I told myself. But given the clear weather, it seemed like a no-brainer to head up to Malibu for sunrise. I wasn’t disappointed.

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It turns out that this view was made possible by a quirk of the southern California coastline. Normally on the Left Coast, the sun sets over the ocean, which is to the west of the land. But at this particular spot, which is just “north” of the Malibu Pier on Pacific Coast Highway and just “south” of Malibu lagoon, the coast actually runs northeast to southwest. I know: it confused me as well.

So at the spot I picked that morning, because of the way the coast curves, I was able to watch the sun come up over the Pacific. It was quite a treat.

I passed a milestone this week. This site, its blog, and much of the ancillary information, has now been up for a year. (I posted the first blog entry and the first set of family trees on Halloween 2010.)

Overall, I’m quite satisfied with the results. My goals in starting the site were:

• to have a platform to post genealogical information
• to have a space to write some of the things that cross my mind
• to be able to post some of the photos I take

Each goal has been successful. And overall, I think the site does what I intended it to do. Here are the first year metrics:

• 2,391 visitors
• 3,805 visits
• 9,163 pageviews

Google, it ain’t. But then, it was never intended to be.

The single biggest traffic day was Sunday, May 29, when I tried to set down my thoughts on the passing two days earlier of my pal James Kang. Being able to write my feelings somewhere gave me a tiny bit of relief, and I hope the things I said gave some comfort to James’ many friends, online and off. So the blog that day fulfilled the second goal.

As for the first goal, it too has been amply met. Posting family trees got the names onto search engines. An astonishing number of people Google themselves or their ancestors, and they’ve happened on the family trees I’ve posted. Many have gotten in touch, enabling me to add names to the genealogical record, broaden the knowledge of the family, and in many cases to establish family relationships online and in person with people I didn’t know existed. The Strauber-Strober-Struber text tree got 577 pageviews in its first year, an average of slightly less than two a day. In some cases, the family ties we’ve been building and reestablishing had been ruptured in the late 19th Century, so overcoming so many of them after 110 or 120 years is significant.

As for the third goal, the photos, I’ve had some good bursts, which you can see from the home page by clicking on PHOTOS in the menu and picking an album from the drop-down list. There aren’t as many photo albums as I’d like to post, and the stuff I’ve put up isn’t as good in almost every case as I’d like it to be.

But those are worthy goals for the second year. So please, come back soon and let me know how you think it’s coming together.

With some excellent sleuth-work by cousin Kristie Weiland Cohen, turning up references to Shimon Strauber in the Yad Vashem Names database, here’s where we think Eitan’s ancestors fit into the big pictures.

Click on the graphic to see it in greater detail.

It will be interesting as we gather more information, and especially more people’s recollections, to see how the chart takes shape.

A large part of Herman Strauber’s family was killed during the Holocaust, though the dates of death aren’t clear. The Yad Vashem testimony seems to have been given by a cousin named Pnina Zandbank in 1953, more than a decade after the people died. It is possible, given the trauma on the survivors of horrors of the war and the decade that transpired that not every fact is accurate.

Also, the Yad Vashem testimony raises some questions. Did Yeta, Shimon’s wife, who may have been in her early 60s at the time of the German occupation, survive? She’s not listed in Yad Vashem. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that her records did not turn up on a search. Perhaps variants in the spelling of the name kept me from locating it. Or possibly, she had died of natural causes before the war. The testimony on Shimon’s death describes him as “married” at the time of his death in 1942, but perhaps there was not an option for “widowed.” It’s difficult to say much beyond what the Yad Vashem documents say.

A new genealogy mystery we’ve been trying to solve in the Strauber/Strober/Struber line: how do Eitan Shimko’s ancestors tie in?

Eitan contacted me a few weeks ago and said his grandmother’s maiden name is Strauber, and her father Herman Strauber was from the area around Buczacz and Jazlowiec, Galicia (now Ukraine).

Given the fact that the shtetl wasn’t all that big, we’re assuming they are related. But how?

This is what we know from Eitan about his lineage. His great-grandfather Herman was born in Jazlowiec, but later moved to Vienna, where Eitan’s grandmother Elfi was born in 1931. Herman’s wife, Elfi’s mother, was Sala or Susan “Suzanna.” The family emigrated during World War II, leaving Italy in 1944 for the Emergency Refugee Shelter in Fort Ontario in Oswego, NY. In 1946, the family was formally admitted to the United States and reunited with a relative, S. H. Strober, then living in Brooklyn, NY.

Eitan obtained some family photos from his grandmother and sent them along. Two are unidentified. They are presumably relatives.

There have been a number of theories about how Shimon Strauber may have been related, but none yet wins the day. It seems odd to me that no one in the Yoinaton Folic branch—which would include descendants of my great-grandmother Surah Henya, Groinem, Max, Schmeel Hirsch, or Sruel “Israel”—would have known of the plight of refugee relatives in Lake Oswego and not done something to help them resettle. Some of this would have been passed down to us, wouldn’t it?

Jim Ostroff suggests that Yoinaton Folic likely had siblings who survived into adulthood, and that Shimon may have been a son of one of his brothers. Yes, mathematically, it’s likely, but still not a shred of evidence to connect Shimon.

Perhaps Shimon was in the Berl Strober line, a branch of the family that includes many who stayed in Europe and died in the Holocaust. Maybe Herman was a lucky one in this line, who because he lived in Vienna was able to escape the horrors of the 1940s and ultimately make it into the tiny American relief project during the war.

All genealogical mysteries awaiting answers.

My travels have taken me to the Midwest a couple times over the last few months, and on one of the trips last month I got a couple hours to monkey around with my camera in the late-afternoon and early-evening hours. A photo friend suggested a spot where I’d have a great vista of the sun setting behind the Chicago skyline.

The “spot” was on the north side of Adler Planetarium, which is part of a civic complex that includes Soldier Field and the Shedd Aquarium on Northerly Island (which, I discovered, is neither northerly nor an island).

It looked like it was going to cost me at least $20 to park the rental car, and I’d have to wrestle my way through Chicago rush-hour traffic from the western suburbs to the lake front. The alternative was to take public transportation.

To a Californian, the idea that you can get somewhere without a car is a novelty. That pretty much decided it for me. It was going to take a train and two buses to get me from Point A to Point B. The time spent would be about 90 minutes in each direction, assuming I didn’t get completely disoriented (which is never a safe assumption). The cost, for train and bus fares, would probably get pretty close to the $20 they wanted for parking. But still, for adventure value alone, it struck me as being completely worth it.

So that’s how I came to be standing at the Naperville station, waiting for the BNSF Aurora line train to pull up and carry me into the heart of the city. It had been a warm day, and—as happens in places other than the one I call home—it was getting warmer. I’d guess the temperature somewhere in the mid-90s. While there was considerably more humidity in the air than I’m used to, it probably hadn’t cracked 90 per cent. To my skewed way of thinking, that made it okay somehow.

The train was air-conditioned, and over the course of the hour-long ride, I managed to stop perspiring. Before I knew it, the PA system blurted out something about Union Station.

I wandered in about three wrong directions before I found the street and figured out the code for the bus signs. It was only a few minutes before the right one came along. I told the driver I was a tourist—one of those cases of choosing not to remain silent and be thought a fool, but rather of speaking and removing all doubt—and got some extra attention in being alerted to get off at the right place and in position for the next bus. And then, in what in retrospect seems to be the blink of an eye, I was hopping off at the end of the line, Adler Planetarium.

It was at least 30 degrees cooler on the lake front, and as the wind kicked up, the temperature dropped even further. I’d half-expected a thundershower, so I had my windbreaker with me. Good thing, because it came in very handy as I captured what I could of Chicago at sunset.

There were a lot of Strauber-Strober-Struber descendants when as many as could got together in Brooklyn seventy years ago, but there are even more today!

I’ve just finished updating the family trees, and there are now more than 1,250 names on the Strauber-Strober-Struber tree. That is an incredible number, and I suspect that when we figure out the names and descendants of Israeli branches of the family, and possibly a few others, we’ll be adding many more names.

Here’s a rundown by family component and most recent count (as of yesterday). (March 2011 count is in parentheses.) The links at the end of the line are to the various versions of the family tree, a graphical one and a text one.

• STROBER: 1,256 (1,236)     Graphical     Text
• TEPPER: 189 (140)     Graphical     Text
• SKOLNICK: 185 (187)     Graphical     Text

So how, you may ask, does this number grow? That’s pretty easy. People find it while searching online for some variant of their name, and then they get in touch. That’s been the most common way for people to find me, and thus, find us (because the family tree is merely a representation of how we’re all connected).

There have been several other people who have come from different directions. Word-of-mouth is a big one, where family members who’ve been actively involved in the tree tell their relatives, who then get in touch.

The important thing with genealogy is not how you get in touch, but that you just get in touch. With families, each of us holds a piece of the story in our hearts. It’s important to share it.

Getting into the Japanese Garden in Balboa Park in Van Nuys is a little confusing. The signs to the entrance are clear enough, but the guard demanding to see identification caught me off-guard. The security is high, I discovered when I asked, because the Garden is part of a water-reclamation plant which has special post 9/11 security.

Well, it certainly was different… but then different is normal for photo outings with the JLOP gang.

Somehow, this ad-hoc get-together came about the day before the Fourth of July when Bryan Frank got an email about a photo get-together another group was having. We figured we didn’t need to be part of the other group, but could take advantage of the opportunity to shoot whatever we wanted.

Erik Oginksi may have suggested the spot, since it’s not far from where he lives. And having Bryan’s wife Dellis and Erik’s wife Marybeth shooting with us certainly brought some new perspectives.

The Japanese Garden provided an incredible amount of diversity in its scenery, as you can see. And the dirty little secret behind it is that the D. C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant, which is the official name of the facility adjacent to the Garden, services more than three-quarters of a million San Fernando Valley residents. No need, I think, for more detail about what’s coming into the plant; what comes out of it seems to be some of the best scenery in that part of Los Angeles.

I could tell it was from overseas because of the long string of digits in the Caller ID box. I understand that technology has advanced greatly since my youth when an overseas phone call was less common than a man walking on the moon. Still, I don’t get many overseas calls.

The caller was a woman who identified herself as “Stavi.” It took me a couple seconds to figure it out. She was Zipora (Ehrlich) Stavi, a Strober relative I’d emailed early last month to see if we could share some genealogy information.

Stavi, as she prefers to be called, shared one gem right off the bat: that her great-grandfather, currently identified on our family tree as UNK Strober 1215, was actually named Elyakim Getzel Strober (after King Hezekiah’s emissary described in II Kings 18:18. If our other information is correct—and that’s a very big if—Elyakim Getzel would have been born sometime around 1820.

Her information is one more clue in figuring out how the two big branches of the Strober family, now numbering more than 1,200 names on the family tree, may be tied together. It’s one more clue, but it’s not yet the final one. The common progenitor of my side of the family was Abraham Aaron Strober, born (we think) between 1797 and 1808. We’re not sure who is the common progenitor of the other branch of the Strober family, but it comes down to whether that branch was descended from one of Abraham Aaron’s son, or the son of one of his brothers.

So the math works like this: if Abraham Aaron was born in 1797 and Elyakim Getzel was born in 1820, it’s possible they were father and son. If, on the other hand, Abraham Aaron was born in 1808 and Elyakim Getzel was born in 1820, it’s not likely they were father and son (Abraham Aaron would have been 12 when Elyakim Getzel was born). There’s something else here: there’s no Elyakim naming pattern in my branch of the family. If he was a patriarch, we can assume some children born after his death would have been given his name.

But we know from DNA testing of several people on both sides of the family tree that there’s a definite genetic link. We still can’t pinpoint the person who provides it.

Though I hadn’t spoken to Stavi before, I had read about her quite a bit. She provided an oral history some years ago to the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw that tells the harrowing tale of how most of her immediate family survived World War II through the kindness and faith of a Catholic farm family outside Buczacz in what is now Ukraine. She told me the story of wartime salvation continues to this very day and was documented in an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz.

I look forward to my next phone conversation with Stavi, and to the parcel she said she mailed me detailing much of the genealogy of her branch of the family.

These are the details on James Kang’s funeral, relayed by his family through Suraya Fadel:

Saturday, June 4th @ 10:30 am.
Dae Han Mortuary
1605 S. Catalina St. (cross street Venice Blvd- close to Normandie)
Los Angeles 90006
Per family request, No pictures are allowed to be taken whatsoever

 

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Not knowing quite how to deal with James Kang’s death on Friday, I figured one way to remember James would be to do one of the things he most enjoyed doing—shooting pictures. Several of the other JLOPers agreed.

Saturday afternoon, we went to Point Fermin, a beautiful park on the cliffs over the ocean near San Pedro. It was the first place this rag-tag band of lens slingers gathered to shoot pictures several years ago, and it seemed like a fitting spot to remember James.

 

It was Bryan Frank’s idea to gather at “golden hour,” the time just before the sun sets that its light is oblique and softened by the atmosphere, and it was a good one. I roamed the park, part of the time with the others and part of the time on my own, looking for the kinds of things that would have caught James’ eye.

The whole idea of JLOP is trying to push ourselves to new levels of creativity. It’s not a club. It’s not even a confederation. If anarchists designed an organizational chart, it would look much like JLOP. It’s just a bunch of people who like to walk around taking pictures of things, and then posting them so others can comment.

Until very recently, James was unique in the group in that he used a film camera and stuck to black and white. That’s a very different beast than the digital models all the rest of us were using. With film, you have to think through every shutter snap because it costs money. Instead of shooting hundreds of pictures in the hopes of getting a few good ones, you shoot tens of shots, spending a lot more time pondering the exposure and the framing. If you don’t, you’ll soon go broke from the film-processing and printing expenses. B&W shooting is all about texture and composition.

James posted a considerable number of his b&w shots on his Flickr stream, which are fascinating to look through. It’s interesting to see how he was so good at capturing the moment, something which I often told him, and how much personality his pictures show.

One other thing about James shooting b&w film. While everyone else would have pictures up within hours, it took James days. His film had to go to the lab to be processed. Thus, the instant gratification many of us got in the way of great feedback eluded James, at least until he switched to a digital camera.

I’m the last of the group to post my pictures from Saturday. Everybody probably thinks I’ve been procrastinating, but it’s really in honor of James and his b&w film.

It’s become an online tradition to post photos or make mention on Memorial Day of our loved ones who served in the armed forces. Today is also the ninth anniversary of my father’s death, so it’s doubly important to make mention of him here today.

My Dad did his time in the armed forces—close to five years—during World War II. He served in what was then the Army Air Forces and is now the U. S. Air Force. He worked in ordnance, which (among other things) involved loading bombs onto aircraft.

My father seldom spoke of his time in uniform. Occasionally, he let a reference slip to one place or another he was during the war (Newfoundland, central England, Panama, the Galapagos Islands of Ecuador, Peru, and New Zealand) but never that I heard of what he did.

He was honorably discharged some months after V-J Day in 1945, attended graduate school for a few years, and then set about teaching school, which was what he wanted to do.

At my dad’s funeral in 2002, my youngest brother Elliot told a story I’d like to repeat here, because it typifies my dad and his dedication to education.

As Elliot told it, my dad invited him in the 1990s to accompany him to coffee with “his guys,” a group of other retired men and women who met at a neighborhood coffee shop to chat about current events. Elliot was struck by how this group of older folks may have been drawn together by their free time, but how they used it to talk over the great issues of the day and keep their minds sharp. It seems there was also a lot of room for levity, which usually took the shape of teasing one member.

The day Elliot was there, it seems it was my Dad’s day to get hazed. Some of the other folks told him how he babysat other people’s kids in school, he he’d never really made any money because of his career choice, and how he’d never really accomplished anything.

My Dad pretty much chuckled along with the ribbing. As they all left the restaurant a few minutes later, a guy walked up to my Dad in the parking lot and asked, “Are you Mr. Skolnick?” My dad nodded. The guy said, “I want to shake your hand. I was in your class at Lynwood High School in 1954, and you really turned my life around and set me on the straight and narrow.”

With that, the guy—who definitely wasn’t a shill—shook my father’s hand and walked away. All the other retirees just watched silently.

It is incredible how many lives my father touched by standing at the front of a high school classroom every day for more than thirty years. I’m thinking a lot today about how he achieved such great stature through a series of tiny gestures.

I miss you, Dad.

I’ve been wrestling all weekend to make sense of James Kang’s death. James died Friday. He left work complaining of a headache and was found in his car in the KCBS/KCAL parking structure several hours later, maybe as late as 5:30 that afternoon.

I learned of this from a Facebook post Friday evening, and have spent every waking hour of the last 48 trying to understand what might have happened and what, if anything, I might have done to change the horrible outcome. We still don’t know how or why James died—that won’t come until the autopsy is completed and the results released—but the hours have given me some insight into why James was special to so many of us.

Others have written moving accounts of James’ life. The one on the KCBS/KCAL website is a touching tribute. Bryan Frank has also posted a powerful remembrance with some great photos on his beFrank blog. Former CBS2 morning anchor Suzanne Rico has written movingly about James on her blog, explaining the James Kang “like button” legacy and how he would encourage everyone (including my wife, my daughter, and my stepdaughter) by letting them know they’d posted well. An incredibly diverse group of people, some of whom knew James only from his forays into Facebook and Twitter, posted about how he touched their lives.

These were among James Kang’s many dimensions. James was a remarkably stalwart guy, and each of us was lucky enough to bask in that from a slightly different vantage point. I suspect my difficulty getting my feelings straight enough to set down in words is because I knew James from many vantage points—as a co-worker, a frequent dinner companion, a fellow photographer, and a friend.

James and I, along with a handful of co-workers, were assigned some new tasks in 2009. It was especially odious, time-consuming work that came to take up several hours a day, menial chores that had to get done but for which there would be no reward, no extra pay, and probably not even any notice from our bosses. And this new task was in addition to, rather than instead of, all of the other stuff we were supposed to be doing.

There were two ways to go about it. One was to complain and drag our feet, which is a common path in a newsroom and the one I was initially inclined to take. The other, I learned from James’ example, was to do the best we could at it and measure our progress by goals we set for ourselves and tried to achieve ahead of schedule. I started off setting what I thought were reasonable benchmarks. James and the other members of our team shattered those within a week. Together, we established new goals, and a week later, James and the others had left them in the dust. So we kept setting higher and higher goals, and James led all of us to achieving them faster and by wider margins than any of us thought possible. The odious chores never got any less odious, but we sure did have some fun challenging ourselves and our abilities to do them faster, better, and more efficiently.

Those of us involved also developed an intense sense of camaraderie. We may have felt put upon by the assignment, but we turned ourselves into a team, a half-dozen people who had to work together and help each other out if we were going to get it done at all, and who had to improvise if we were going to continue beating our benchmarks. All of us took great pride in that. We gave ourselves rewards—dinner at a deli around the corner from the station every couple of months—and celebrated our successes within our small circle. True to his eclectic tastes, James was a big fan of Art’s corned beef.

James was also a pioneer of social media. Years before the journalism blogs were crowing about the importance of Facebook and Twitter in building and maintaining a tv news audience, @kanger33 had established his beachhead online. He explored photography, food trucks, and many other subjects through his Facebook friends and Twitter follows. He also became a social-media beacon for many newsies taking their first stab at new platforms. He often engaged KCBS anchor Pat Harvey on Twitter, helping to draw out and add an online dimension to one of the great personalities in TV news today. As Suraya Fadel, a KCBS/KCAL reporter, found her social-media voice and became one of the great Los Angeles reporters to use Twitter, James gave her the nickname #TwitterPrincess, which is now widespread. Nobody in the newsroom instructed James to use his advanced knowledge of social media to ease the way for others onto the emerging platform. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure nobody in station management even knew James had developed that expertise.

James adhered to a Twitter tradition of saluting online friends on what’s known as #FF, for “Follow Friday,” and he was infallible at it. Even if I hadn’t tweeted in weeks, each Friday I’d get notified of a Twitter mention, James Kang including me on his #FF list. I awoke Friday morning to that mention.

Next Friday, it won’t be there. That will continue the great void I now feel for a great guy who was my co-worker, my teammate, but most of all, my friend.

I’m not exactly sure what got into me this morning. My eyes popped open about two hours earlier than they normally do, and it was apparent they wouldn’t be closing again anytime soon. The sun was already rising, and I figured I might as well drag myself from under the covers.

It seemed like the perfect chance to do a little photo play I’ve been thinking about for some time—trying to capture the dew on the back lawn. I don’t really have the lenses for that kind of close-up detail, but I figured if I could get the focus right, maybe the pixels would stand up to a little magnification.

I snapped six different shots, and this seemed to be the best candidate.

The amount of pixel-bending involved, I discovered, really beats the picture up. And then the amount of scrunching required to get the photo down to a size small enough to load into a browser beats it up again.

This picture looked fine, even after magnification at a hefty number of dots/inch, but it got a little fuzzy when I scrunched it to its web-weight.

Still, it was a fun experiment. And it gave me something to do for those two hours when I would have—and undoubtedly should have—been sleeping.

There’s a war going on in my neighborhood. Five Guys, a venerable hamburger chain that started in the Washington, DC suburbs, has opened in a mall in Culver City. It’s about a 10-minute drive from the hometown favorite in the just-burgers category, In-N-Out.

These two hamburger chains have a considerable amount in common:

• they rely on fresh ingredients
• they have very limited menus, honing in on the burger & fries
• both make it very fast, easy, and relatively inexpensive to get to a 1,000-calorie meal

There are also a substantial number of differences:

• Five Guys’ burgers are significantly meatier than In-N-Out’s, maybe twice as much meat by patty
• In-N-Out fries are slender, while Five Guys’ are substantially thicker and have the skins on. Five Guys’ portions also seem to be much larger
• Five Guys is much more expensive—the basic combo (single hamburger, fries, medium soft drink) is nearly twice the price of In-N-Out

I first found Five Guys on a trip to Florida several years ago. The chain’s expansion there was lightning-fast about five years ago, with storefronts popping up in strip malls toward the end of the boom. (All the Florida locations I’m familiar with have so far survived.)

I found In-N-Out in my adolescence—it’s a staple of Southern California life.

The ink about the rivalry between the two is running as thick as burger grease. Which is better? Which will win the burger war?

In my view—which focuses on burgers rather than businesses—there’s room for both. Every In-N-Out location I’ve visited between 11:30 am and 1:30 pm is packed every day of the week. My first visit to the Culver City Five Guys was a failure when I realized wending my way through the line that stretched into the mall would take at least an hour, and that was more time than I wanted to invest in lunch that day.

Perhaps the demand for what Jimmy Buffett called a “big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat” is greater than the analysts had predicted, that there really are enough people who like basic burgers to support more than one chain.

The marketplace will make that decision. What I’m discovering is that there are some wars it’s not half-bad being in the middle of.

I have to admit, I felt pretty good about debugging the video problem earlier today. And there were a few other small strokes of good luck into the early afternoon. I figured I may as well reward myself with an afternoon at the beach. There was that, and an advisory from the National Weather Service that the surf could kick up as high as eight feet before the sun set on south-facing beaches.

That meant I had a choice. I could skip lunch and make a mad dash for The Wedge at Newport Beach, or I could have lunch and make a much more leisurely drive to Malibu. The advantage of The Wedge is that the triangular tidal action against the jetty there would probably make for some spectacular waves. The advantage of Malibu was, as I may have mentioned, an assured lunch before I hit the road.

It probably won’t come as a surprise that I opted for the guaranteed lunch.

By the time I got to Zuma Beach, which is toward Malibu’s north end, it was already mid-afternoon. While I did see some surfers—and no parking spots—around Malibu State Beach and just north of Malibu Pier, I pushed northward to Zuma. I arrived in the nearly vacant parking lots about the time the stiff afternoon breeze picked up, blowing out most of the surf.

I’m thinking the waves never got to the threatened eight-foot stage. Maybe it was the 15-mile-an-hour wind or maybe the buildup was better than the reality, but I’m guessing the break I saw was five feet, tops.

Still, it was pleasant enough traipsing around in the sand, smelling the salt air, and enjoying the soft sunshine.

And I did get the opportunity to snap some pictures. There’s a value in that all to itself.

Perhaps the greatest sight of the afternoon was the pelicans moving around in formation. Or maybe they weren’t pelicans at all—their beaks seemed sharper and smaller, and their wingspan not nearly as large as the pictures I’m seeing online—but rather some other species.

I’ll have to leave it for another afternoon at the beach to figure out what they were and where they were going.