A Prospective Renter

Tiger, the dog, is howling in his sleep, and I have been seeing shapes for the past three hours. Well, "shapes" is perhaps the wrong word—shadows. First it was the mouse moving across the kitchen floor, seen from the other room. Then it was random arms, bent at the elbow, flitting around door-ways and corners. I wish I was making this up.

The cats outside have resumed their fight for the evening.

I have to write now or I won't be able to get to sleep. Thanks, obsessive-compulsion, but I haven't written in oh-god-I'm-not-going-to-check-the-date long. By the way, hi Mom, hi Dad, hi various people who really shouldn't be reading this.

Today, my landlady (we're not allowed to use names until we've moved out—something about "libel") showed the apartment to another prospective resident. Freddie has arranged for the sale of his keyboard on craigslist, and the buyer was supposed to pick it up today. As the illustrious F-Wong is in Seattle, I was acting as liaison for this transaction. The dude never showed. But as I was sitting on the couch, waiting for The Buyer to show up, there was a twisting sound, the grinding of a key against the pins of a lock. Or pair of locks. My heart leapt briefly, and I thought Kevin had returned for a while, so I would have someone to talk to. Wait, that sentence was totally gay. Maybe I should make something up about how he could handle the keyboard transaction and I could leave the apartment for a while. Anyway, the door ground open, followed by three short knocks. This being opposite the established order of events the world over, I offered up a tremulous "hello?"

It was the landlady, with prospective renter in tow. After some brief confusion (I thought the apartment had been shown already, but apparently this was a separate guy and she had put up another notice for this entry—possible, but not bloody likely, but I am as they say, "laid back" and decided not to press the issue) they ascended the stairs. The fellow looked around, and asked me if I was a "mushizican." After about four attempts, I managed to grasp that he was trying to say "musician," and with my poor ear and his thick accent, well, we just weren't going to be engaging in any sparkling conversation then, now we we? As the land lady led him through the three modest bedrooms, I made a list off all the things that would not sell this place—filthy commode, with unflushed toilet (there is a water shortage, dudes), clothes strewn on the floor of one room, and general disarray throughout the compartments. Still, a far cry from the pornography, bongs, and fortified wine bottles Kevin and I waded through when we first toured the place.

Sitting on the couch, I tried to focus on my gameboy while their conversation filtered through the house.

"Is an air conditioner?"
"There used to be, but it broke. We're thinking of getting it fixed as soon as possible."
"Why is no fix now??"
"…."

"Where is third bedroom?"
"That space with his desk was the room."
"That is not bedroom"
"You can do whatever you want with the space."
"That is not bedroom. Is not big enough."

And so on. When they were in the living room, the landlady attempted to point out the closet (which is full of junk). She tried to open it, as if the chair in front of the door did not exist. When the door did not swing easily open, I pointed out the existence of the chair, which she moved all of three inches, before trying to open the door again. Looking through the 3-inch gap she had managed to forge between door and frame, she saw the vacuum cleaner and numerous cleaning supplies, and opted not to show off the wonders space of the closet.

At which point, the renter asked: "Is this a bedroom?"

Much of the rest of the house was toured in silence.

After they descended the stairs, I heard some heated discussion, and it sounded as if the renter was pissed, as if he were calling the landlady on her bullshit. His unique mixture of Socratic irony, indecipherable foreign accent, and eventual belligerence may have just saved him a year in hell. The lucky git.

2 Incidents, Briefly Now

Saturday I was sitting on the couch when I heard what can only be described as "someone-is-murdering-me screaming". Blood curdling, high-pitched shrieks, in chorus of about 4 or 5 different timbres. Distracted from my reading, I decided to listen for a minute to determine if someone was being raped or actively murdered (in front of a live studio audience, no less), or if a group of people had merely stumbled in on the scene of a good-old-fashioned massacre. Instead what I heard was this:

"THERE IS A BIRD IN THE HOUSE!"
"A BIRD IS IN THE HOUSE!"
"IT'S A BIRD! IT'S A BIRD!"
"OH MY GOD!"
"THERE IS A BIRD IN THE HOUSE!"

Bonus points if you can repeat this chorus in five part round and sustained for 3-5 minutes.

The way I can see it, the incident can be read three ways:

1. We're in a dystopian Blade Runner style future, and the birds are supposed to be extinct, thus necessitating such an extreme reaction.
2. There really is no natural life in Los Angeles, and people have forgotten that the are the dominant factor in the local food-web
3. OMG! BIRD FLU IS HERE!

Additionally, with the return of warm weather, the bag-men have returned. Last night an elite strike team raided the garbage cans out in the street, in a process which took no less than 30 minutes and resulted in every piece of garbage without a CRV attached to it being scattered through out the street.

This afternoon, some dude freaking rolled up into our front yard, and proceeded to rifle through one of our recycling bins, carefully laying out everything of any value in a fan pattern behind him on the ground. Rather than raise a fuss and get my ass beat, I decided to watch him. After about 10 minutes of rummaging, he very carefully closed the recycling lid, and picked up all of the bottles and cans he had scattered with a yellow plastic bag. On leaving our yard, he even carefully replaced the gate chain. Truly, he is the sasquatch of the West Adams Neighborhood, a gentle giant who lives in harmony with both his ecology. I am surprised he has found a way to thrive off of the intrusion of mankind into his domain.

2 more months. 2 more months.

A Thuggin Future

At last, dear reader, the school year has officially ended. This can only mean one thing- we need to survive but one meager summer here at ThugzMansion. The next three months are all we have left. Think what you will of the brave Thugz residing at this humble abode, but it is my duty to sadly report that we will NOT be renewing our Thuggin lease- alas, we must relocate to Menlow behind Ralphs once our edjutainment at USC starts up again. Despite this arguably “pussy” move on our part, despite our seemingly apparent cowardice, despite the letters and cards I am SURE we shall receive berating us for our future domicile selection, all three of us thugz wait in apprehension by the mail slot, aware and prepared for the postal onslaught. I only ask, dear reader, that you not judge us by our residential selection, but by the quality of our character- as thuggin as that may be. And never forget- ThugzManse isn’t just a place, it isn’t where we live- it’s HOW we live, WHY we live, and you can NEVER take that away from us….. NEVER………..EVER!

Till next time, fellow Thugz-

PeaceOut.

This is a freaking urban environment

SOMEBODY owns a motherfuckin' ROOSTER.

That fucker crows ALL THE MOTHERFUCKIN' TIME

Oh Hell Yes

Need I say more?

Send Help

I am trapped in a hell where my neighbors are engaged in an audio duel. Will an endless tide of generic Ranchero music overcome the soulful strains of 50 Cent's "Disco Inferno" set on perpetual repeat??

Yesterday I was at a party and some idiot thought it would be cute to put on Daddy Yankee's "Gasolina." Drunk girls immediately began to get down to Reggaeton hip-hop as if it were the freshest thing they had ever heard. I nearly destroyed whoever's laptop was serving up the music, because the beat common to Reggaeton hip-hop has a way of embedding itself in your skull and never leaving. This is awesome when every car and house in a five mile radius is blasting a track off of Barrio Fino.

Next time this happens, I swear I will karate-chop through your iBook, Reggaeton Bandito.

QCIC?

Alright, I've had this idea for sometime now, and need some help making it go. The Orchargenesis of this idea came from two things:

1. The Google Maps API is free, ridiculously flexible, and totally bitchin'.


2. DPS sends out Crime Reports in order to comply with the "Timely Warning" provision of the Clery Act.

Combine these two things and I think students could have a powerful tool for watching and judging their the crime that occurs around the USC campus.

Thugz Manse has (thankfully) been spared any muggings or robberies thus far. I think Kevin getting his side-view mirror crushed off is perhaps the worst crime we've had to endure. And by we, I mean Kevin, and maybe Freddie who helped him glue the mirror back on. I was too busy failing Russian to help.

But I digress. The biggest thing DPS's crime alerts lack is a way to visually track and process the information they present. Yes, I know roughly where Walton Avenue is, but where officially is the 3400 block of Walton Avenue, where at 3:30 AM on February 5^th, this happened:

REPORTED OFFENSE: Two vehicles stopped long side the victim. Approximately 8 male suspects exited, struck him and demanded property. The complainant complied and all suspects fled the area in vehicles.

SUSPECT DESCRIPTION (provided by complainant):
Suspect 1- Described as male Hispanic, 5 feet 8 inches,170 pounds, 18-20 years, wearing over-size white-tee shirt, and baggy black pants.
Suspect 2- Described as a male White.
Suspect 3-8 Described as male Hispanics.

SUSPECT VEHICLE: 1 - 4 door black sedan.
SUSPECT VEHICLE: 2 - 4 door white sedan.

I'm sorry, but that's just kind of ridiculous. A two car job with a gang of 8 dudes robbing one student? That's not how you conduct a mugging, that's how you conduct a heist. The sheer ridiculosity of this event struck me, and I decided to look up exactly where this was, so I would never get caught there with my pants down at 3:30 AM when two cars start to creep up suspiciously. In case you're wondering what this looks like:


I hope pictures have proved my point-- being able to see how near to USC and in around what specific block of student housing this Mad Max-esque robbery happened is far more powerful than just reading a line of text and trying to add yet another pushpin in your mental map of where not to be around USC.

As they are, crime alerts aren't all that useful, but if you track them on a map, they become far more relevant. It's important that information be presented in a useful format, especially when it's something as easy to do as this.

Ideally, we should be able to take the google maps API and connect it to a database containing these crime alerts. Once we have all the crude locations plotted, we can start manipulating the information in other useful ways, such as:

• Sorting by type of crime: Are you more liable to be mugged or assaulted if you walk down this street?
• Sorting by number of suspects: just how many dudes should you be expecting?
• Sorting by time on the daily scale: Is it this road more dangerous at 11 PM or 3 AM?
• Sorting by time on a larger scale: Which days are the worst for crime? Which times of the month? Which months? Which years? Was this area dangerous 2 months ago, but not anymore?
• Physical Descriptions: will the attacker be tall or short? Stout or slim? What will they be wearing?
• Vehicles: Should I watch out for unmarked vans or a beat-up Honda Accord?

And if we're getting ridiculously specific:

• What sort of weapons do criminals carry around here?
• Pictures: Let students upload pictures of the area where it happened-- let people know what it looks like so it is recognizable as they are walking/cycling around it. It may prompt some lucky feelings of deja vu.

All of this would be fantastic for just logging at sorting the crimes-- in addition to the geographical display, a few regular charts may be useful as well. However, if we were to pimp this project all the way out, we could start creating different zones on the map and cataloging them by the crimes that occur. I'd love to test my hypothesis that it's actually more dangerous to live in the student housing immediately off campus where criminal know they can prey on students than to take your chances farther out at a location like Thugz Manse. Perhaps there is a preferred radius, or a few streets combine to form a Bermuda Triangle from which wallets, iPods, and cellphones never return? Is there someway we could get Batman involved? What if we let students plot routes (perhaps with pulldown menus of common off campus housing buildings and on campus locations) and then compute the risks of that route? It's not much but it may be the difference between someone calling campus cruiser and getting home safe, or losing their stuff. Could we make this service accessible through cellphones or other mobile technology? We could make it something people could actually use in their day to day lives as opposed to an internet oddity The safety tips DPS gives out are reasonable, but they seem more like snake oil than an actual cure. Perhaps they would be more useful if students had a better context to actualize them in?

Additionally, we must consider the interplay of the criminal element here: if students start acting smarter and safer, will the criminals move on, or will they become more aggressive? Will they fail to catch on, especially if they are driving in from out of the area?

There's always a mild buzz in the university presses about how USC is at odds with the surrounding community, but then, often it seems like the surrounding community is hatin' on us students instead of just the university. If this thing makes the whole area safer, perhaps more than students will benefit?

Could we export our back-end software and interface to other schools? I can think of a few other campuses where this may be welcomed.

Essentially, I'm just a curious bastard who wants to look at all the information contained in these crime alerts through a number of different lenses. I know the technology exists to do it, and it's only a matter of application, but I really just don't have the time or the expertise to do this all myself.

I don't really know how we could support this project-- perhaps advertisers would pay to sell pepper spray off of our site, or donations could keep us afloat. Maybe we'd get some sort of university backing or a grant, but I wouldn't count on it. Part of me thinks that organizing a website which catalogues just how dangerous the area around USC is might go over like a lead balloon with the university. But then again, they may welcome it as a resource which protects students and gives them a chance to show off how good campus policing is compared to other schools.

Anyway, it's a thought, I'd like to bounce it off of you, and if you have some skills, time, or input to contribute-- well, it's the internet man! You know what to do! Let's rock this, eh?