Preparations for Gay Pride Weekend

This weekend gets us here in Long Beach the second biggest annual event, the Gay Pride Parade. workers are hard at work getting stages set up near the intersection of Ocean and Shoreline:

I like the behind the scenes views...

It should be a loud and rowdy weekend, what with the sports stuff in downtown LA and the Pride Parade out here...

Nerd-Fest in Long Beach!

I'm just kidding! No I'm not! I'm a nerd as well!

This past weekend saw the Long Beach Comic Convention, a single-A or double-A event when compared to the majors, like the NY Comic Convention, or, the big bad grand-daddy of them all, now known by the simple title, Comic Con, the oldest convention, held in San Diego.

Comic Con has become about more popular culture and less about comics; about video games and movies and toys, while comics still have a place at the table (I'm speculating).

The Long Beach Comic Convention was held out our Convention Center (go figure), and before you even made it inside there were nerdly prizes.

The DeLorean from Back to the Future...

A working chatter-box Kitt Trans-Am...

Magnum's Ferrari...

And the A-Team van...

Inside there were creators who were signing things and stands set up as sellers from all over the Southland tried to unload their back issues at discounted prices.

For some reason there was a plethora of Silver Age comics there. Maybe because of the Avengers film interest in the Silver Age books has begun to surge...I mean, that's the only explanation I cab think of.

The Silver Age in comic books, for those who don't know and/or don't care took place, more or less, from late 1959 on until 1985 or 86, depending on your source. Pockets changed at different times as well, but the bulk would be the sixties and seventies, when he great Marvel titles were coming into their own and actually taking a bite out of the more staid DC market control. The great team-ups really grabbed a hold during this time, and that's why maybe the interest has been rekindled: the success of the Avengers film.

I'm not really interested in the Silver Age myself. In fact, I don't really collect comics like I used to. I was going to say that I don't collect them anymore, which is probably just as accurate as it sounds, but I'll still buy the random thing, or help out the random indie publisher, or one of my favorite artists has something new. Since I don't follow the business anymore, I couldn't tell you if my favorite guys are producing anything new, so, it's just when I enter a store after a few years years that I try to piece together the last few trends through what's there in the store.

It was kinda neat seeing vast arrays like this one, a table full of titles I've mostly heard of, but in guises too new for me to understand.

As in any Nerd-Fest like this one there will be your brave folks who get dressed up as characters. I took this picture only because these two were posing for a different photographer and I had my camera out. It looks like Daredevil (the Ben Affleck version) and Catwoman.

I appreciate those brave folks' dedication to the cause, and their love of whatever character they dress as. There were plenty of Storm Troopers, a few Vaders, a few well designed characters I didn't recognize, one Princess Leia from the Jabba the Hutt scene (a very brave young lass with a little junk in the trunk, but not that you'd have anything bad to say about), and one of the other three barely dressed young ladies was a version of Mila Jovovich from The Fifth Element.

The third young lady who wore the least amount of clothing was stationed at a booth that was selling Roller Derby gear. She had on tiny little satiny bottoms, a tight t-shirt, and skates. It was almost amusing how she was both ogled and given the silent treatment at the same time.

I did make some purchases at the convention, and they'll show up in other blogs I run.

Long Beach is gearing up for our second biggest annual event: the Gay Pride Festival.

Lambic Festival at Beachwood BBQ and Brewing

This past Sunday was Beachwood's Lambic Appreciation Festival. Located on East 3rd Street and the Promenade walk, Beachwood BBQ and Brewing is the second location of Seal Beach's original on Main Street.

Sunday was the lambic day. Lambic is a type of beer that is different than your average beer. Beer basically comes in three kinds, all based on the type of yeast used to ferment the sugars into alcohol. The first is ale, and this gives a wide variety of flavors and styles, from browns, to reds, to pales, to stouts. I'm an ale man, as far as that goes. Lager in the second type of yeast, and this probably accounts for the largest volume of global beer production. Uh, what I mean is, the majority of beer brewed on Earth is lager, by a wide margin.

In America you've got Budweiser and Bud Light, Coors and Coors Light, and Miller and Miller Lite, which account for something like 90 percent of American beer production: all lagers. In China, a country that produces more beer than America, it's all lager, and in the two biggest beer drinking countries in Europe--Germany and the Czech Republic--it's all lager.

Lager is a bottom fermenting yeast, while ale ferments on the top, if you're really interested in how that works.

Lambic, on the other hand, is brewed with wild yeast and is occasionally referred to as spontaneously fermenting. Lambics use fruits as well as grains to provide sugars to be fermented, and as a things to drink, taste like sour fruity beer. Sometimes they're less carbonated and mostly flat.

The style of brewing goes way back, when monks would leave large vats of the wort in the rafters of their monasteries and yeasts travelling along the winds would find them, make a home, eat a ton of sugar, and eventually make some fine beers. The process takes a long time still, and is decidedly old school.

The taste for sour beers and lambics is waning in Belgium, the main provider of these types of beer. It seems to be the market of beer connoisseurs in America is keeping this tradition alive.

That's a fact I learned at the Lambic Appreciation day during a talk from one of the speakers.

Now, I am a fan of beer. I love beer. I've brewed my own in my cabinet before. In my younger years I did keg stands and case races, all the while trying to appreciate the finer things about beer. I do enjoy a good lambic, but see, that's what you do, you enjoy it. Lambic isn't the kind of thing you drink to get your swerve on, and it was kinda nice being in an extremely crowded bar with everybody drinking and there not being any drunken asshats bumping you and spilling on you.

Which was unusual and nice.

Olympic Qualifier at Walter Pyramid

The US men's volleyball team has a chance to make the Olympics next week when the NORCECA tournament starts today in Long Beach, and then again on Monday with the international teams.

Today is the red/blue scrimmage between the bulging American squad at the Walter Pyramid.

The two pools have a much improved stable of teams: Pool A: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Canada, Dominican Republic; Pool B: Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Costa Rica, US.

Only a few years ago this could have been called the US-Cuba tournament, since they were the dominating powerhouses, but times change. The gold medal that us Yanks won in Beijing, a scratch and clawed for victory over a great Brazilian team, may prove actually elusive this time around.

Brazil is improved, Hungary and Serbia are quite good, and Russia has some of the most powerful hitters out there. Their teams may sometimes hitting the ball hard is what it means to play well, but be careful if they get on a tear.

And it all starts Monday at the Pyramid. Tickets are $8 I believe.

Lincoln Park

The former home of our own Occupy scene, Lincoln Park is usually the site of the homeless gatherings as well as the unlicensed compassionate providers.

Lincoln, see here with his back turned on us, is sporting the latest in shoulder pigeons.

The park can be fun and volatile, and one of the still occasionally gritty places left down here.