Santa Monica City Council 1:30 am Vote against Ponies

So, I was at the Santa Monica City Council meeting at 1:30 am and I must admit I was probably at my least articulate because I was SO pissed off.

You can read more about it here because I feel I'm getting stupider just thinking about this issue.

Seriously, who has a vote on someone's business at 1:30 IN THE MORNING.

As you might imagine, about the only people who stayed around for 8 HOURS to speak about pony rides were me and some people who gave testimony like this:

"We have gotten rid of human slavery, now let's get rid of animal slavery."

"I am an empath and I can feel those ponies are unhappy."

"We can't have a petting zoo because animals in cages are nervous."

"Ponies are meant to run free in the wild."

"Children can go to farms or animal sanctuaries to see animals."

In the end, the city council said that even though they found NO evidence of animal cruelty, no citations had been issued against the pony rides owner, all health documentation was on file, they were going to hold a Request for Proposals anyway because, in the words of one of the motion authors, Gleam Davis,

"We don't want controversy in our city."

So, basically, they are closing down a young woman's business because some people protested even though they found no validity in the accusations. As I said, I was not at my most articulate because I was just livid to see all of the worst stereotypes of Santa Monica being anti-business and local politics being  determined by a few extremists right in front of my eyes.

No, I'm not going to run for public office. In fact, the only reason this was wasn't a COMPLETE waste of time is that I was able to write most of a proposal while sitting there and I now know three people I will never vote for ever again (see below) and which campaigns to donate money to the opponent.

Even though it doesn't really affect me personally, seeing that the city council did not give a damn about this young woman running a business or the children who benefit was disheartening in the worst way.

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If you'd like to give them your opinion, feel free to email

council@smgov.net

Or maybe you can tweet #keeptheponies

Why one woman should have more say than the families of 400 children who ride the ponies every weekend, I don't know.

Just so you know, Ted Winterer and Gleam Davis are the two council members who put this item on the agenda.

Some self-proclaimed community activist named Marcy Winograd has got the city council to put an item on the agenda to get rid of the pony rides. She also said the ponies and trees have rights just like humans. She says she's an English teacher. Thank God she doesn't teach my child.

You can sign a petition to keep the ponies here.

Let the kids ride ponies for crying out loud!

I cannot believe that I have to go down to the Santa Monica city council meeting tonight to speak out against this idiocy!

See the happy little girl on the pony? That's my granddaughter. Some IDIOT of a so-called community activist named Marcy Winograd has got the city council to put an item on the agenda to get rid of the pony rides and replace them with "non-animal activities" because it is so hard on the poor little critters that they have to work six hours a week.

Hell, I wish I worked six hours a week! I am going to walk down to Main Street now and try to get on the agenda to counter the crazy people.

Here is the email I sent to the city council.

I have lived in Santa Monica for 18 years. My youngest daughter was born here and my oldest daughter recently moved back to Santa Monica, with her husband and two small children. So … I have had two generations of experience with the Farmers Market. I have also had my fill of this nonsense of people protesting the pony rides at the market and I’d like to voice my strong objection to replacing these with “non animal activities”.

First of all, the Farmers Market already has painting activities. Over the years, they have have had face/ hand painting, spin art and crafts tables. Thus, replacing animal activities with those would reduce the variety of experiences offered to young children.

Secondly, children have many options for painting and cooking, including in their own homes. The nearest zoo is in Griffith Park - hardly within walking or biking distance with small children.

Finally, the children really enjoy these animal activities and they benefit from them. With my own children, grandchildren and many others, I see week after week children who come up to the animals, and then shy away. Eventually, they’ll overcome their fears and ride a pony or pet a llama. Learning to overcome one's fears is a pretty significant factor in a successful life, in my opinion.

This motion strikes me as bullying of a small business on the part of the city council to fit into someone’s preconceived notion of the type of activities we ought to be engaging in. Much of my business takes me through rural America and I see the enjoyment children get from being able to interact with animals. Denying this to my grandchildren makes Santa Monica just that much less desirable of a city to raise a family.

I sincerely hope the council will deny this ill-conceived motion.


If you'd like to give them your opinion, feel free to email

council@smgov.net

Or maybe you can tweet #keeptheponies 

You can sign a petition to keep the ponies here.

Why one woman should have more say than the families of 400 children who ride the ponies every weekend, I don't know.

Just so you know, Ted Winterer and Gleam Davis are the two council members who put this item on the agenda.

What's it like having a famous daughter?

I get asked this so often, I decided to answer it here. The answer is ...

Mostly, I think it is wasted on me. The more well-known Ronda gets, the more people I happen to end up meeting who are very famous - sports figures, people in the media, people who are extremely wealthy. The reason I say it's wasted is that I rarely know who any of them are unless someone tells me.

Often, what I refer to as a group as "the Hollywood people" fill their conversations with who lives next door, who they worked with, who is their very best friend. Watch the movie All That Jazz, even though it's old, it's still good and there is a lot of truth to it.

Sometimes I tell them, "Shannon and Deborah Brock live next door to me," just so I can amuse myself watching them rack their brains trying to figure out which movies they produced or starred in or directed.

When Ronda has a party for something, I may show up for an hour or so, and usually one or two of her sisters will, too. We want to celebrate with her whatever she is celebrating and let her know we are happy for her. Then we all go home to our own lives.

I can't blame Hollywood, though. Lately, our company has gained more and more visibility, as our games continue to improve and we keep plugging away while so many start-ups fail. So, I end up in groups of the tech version of Hollywood people, telling me about that time they saw Elon and Mark and Reid.

Seriously, I don't care either way.

As far as I can tell, extremely successful people in entertainment, sports or business have pretty much the same variation as everyone else except that they tend to be harder working and are more likely to have some special talent. (On the other hand, some were just born rich, or lucky.) Other than that, there are going to be that small fraction of people you have common interests and hit it off with and the rest it goes kind of like this,

"Nice to meet you mega-famous person who I have no idea who you are."
"Your daughter is very talented/ bad ass/ amazing."
"Thank you. All my daughters are amazing. I'm very fortunate."
Random comments and on to the next person.

I don't see Ronda as often as I would if she worked as an accountant because she's often flying hither and yon or training. Her sisters also all have jobs (or finals and PLANS. I have PLANS, Mom. With my friends.), so it makes family get-togethers a little harder to organize.

We don't have to pay her car insurance/ parking tickets / car repair bills any more, so that is a plus. Also, when we go out to dinner at a nice restaurant, Ronda usually picks up the bill unless she forgot her wallet (which happens often). I feel bad having my daughter pay hundreds of dollars for dinner for the whole family, until I remember the car insurance/ parking tickets/ car repair bills - and then I don't.

For a while, it was a pain in the ass because there were all kinds of TV shows, documentaries and interviews people wanted to do and it took time away from my work and teaching judo. It's not a pain in the ass any more because I just quit doing them.

So, in answer to the question,

 What's it like to have a famous daughter?

It's actually very much like having a non-famous daughter.

It's just fine.

I probably should have learned something, but I didn't

An odd thing happened a few weeks ago. I hurt my back. I hurt it as in I jumped out of bed at 4:30 a.m. feeling as if someone stabbed me. I searched Dennis for knives but did not find any, and because he doesn't exactly wear pajamas to bed, there weren't many places for him to hide one. Also, he claimed he was innocent.

So ... as soon as the urgent care office opened at 8 a.m., I went in and got x-rayed, weighed, poked, prodded. The nice doctor basically told me that I was old, had arthritis in my back, probably a pinched nerve, and I should go home and not work so much and it would probably be better in 6 or 8 weeks.

So, for the next few weeks, between flying to Hawaii, attending a conference for game developers and finishing a grant, not to mention writing a couple of papers I presented this week and working on the game, I also was waking up after four hours sleep because my back hurt too bad. I would get up at work at 6 a.m. because I couldn't sleep, that's for sure.

I went to another doctor, and he gave me more pills, and told me not to sit at a computer 12 hours a day seven days a week.

I listened to him a little bit. I did watch a couple of movies while lying on my back (Monuments Men was good). I read three of Derek Landy's Skulduggery Pleasant books, also lying flat on my back.

I also had a couple of massages from a really terrific masseuse Ronda knew.

One thing I did learn is that being deprived of sleep really does make you stupider. I made some mistakes at work that I KNOW I would not have made normally.

I worked a little less - maybe 8 hours some days instead of 12.  A couple of times, I actually took a whole day off because we were watching my granddaughters or something. Gradually, I got better.

This morning, I was on a panel on Statistics and Data Analysis, then gave  one-hour talk on using SAS software to meet government reporting requirements, came up to the room and worked on the game for a few hours, went to a couple of sessions on using state open access data sets and calculating standardized incidence ratios, had a beer with someone, grabbed dinner at the volunteer party, worked with Jessica and Jose to book plane tickets and hotel rooms for six people to attend a judo tournament in Kansas City this month, worked on our next grant and now it is five minutes to midnight.

I've given some thought on giving a pass on this grant I'm working on now but it's for $100,000 that would go toward game development and we're a small company so that's not exactly chump change for us.

Being somewhat incapacitated for weeks should have taught me something profound about life, like that health is fragile and tomorrow you could be incapable of doing the things you love today - but I already knew that. Perhaps it should have taught me to spend more time with my family - but frankly, I think my family probably spends as much time with me as they want. They are all adults, except for Julia, who is a junior in high school, and I'm pretty sure none of them wake up thinking, "If only my mother would hang out with me more."

I mean, seriously, no matter how much you love your mom and enjoy having dinner with her now and then, you don't plan on making it a nightly occurrence.

I suppose the doctors (and the masseuse) would tell me I should have learned to work less, but it didn't. I like working.

I did not lie on my back and think, "If only I had not worked so much"  and I sure as hell didn't think, "If only I hadn't done judo so much."

Nope, in fact, exactly what I thought was, "This sucks and I can't wait until I get over this so I can go back to working more (effectively) and start teaching judo at Gompers again."

Oh, yeah, and writing this blog (-:

Ronda Knows, Fight Chix and Working things out

Celebrity has its costs and one of them is learning how many real creeps there are in the world. Just about every week, it seems, a new website pops up claiming to be "Ronda Rousey's official website" and selling merchandise with her name, autograph and/or picture.

In case you are wondering, here is her real website rondarousey.net .

One things that makes these people even bigger dirt bags is the fact that the only autographed stuff Ronda ever has for sale is auctioned off on ebay and the proceeds go to charity. Here are a few that benefited this year:

• St. John the Baptist Church
• Villanova Preparatory School
• Ojai AYSO  
• Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services
• Seven Stars Foundation
• Woodcraft Rangers (for Gompers Judo)
• World Food Programme

Ronda's lawyer contacts these fake sites whenever they pop-up and sends them a cease-and-desist letter that basically says if you don't cut it out we will sue you.

Here is where the nice Fight Chix people came in, who are definitely not dirt bags but were selling a shirt that said Ronda Knows

They had started selling this a while ago and they intended it to be a way to promote Ronda and women's MMA in general. They also more than once sent gifts to Gompers Judo which they funded from the sale of the shirts and were MUCH appreciated. Each one even had a handwritten note of encouragement, from Elizabeth, one of the co-owners, which was really sweet.

In the meeting where trademark violations were discussed (yes, we actually have business meetings). Ronda said,

"Be sure you send those people a nice letter."

They did not get a nice letter. They got the standard one that says cut it out or we'll sue your sorry asses (but in legalese). So, Elizabeth called me up to find out what was going on.

In short, Ronda gets paid by companies to use her name and image. If other companies are using it for free, it is reasonable that her sponsors like Xyience or Hatashita Sports or other future sponsors would demand to know why THEY have to pay. Just trust me that there are very good reasons for trademark enforcement.

Which leaves Fight Chix with 17 shirts left in inventory that they are not allowed to sell and supposed to destroy. Elizabeth and I talk it over and come up with this idea - she will send the last remaining shirts to me, Ronda will sign them and we will sell them off and give the money to Gompers Judo and St. John's church.

I do have a question for you, oh blog reader.  Elizabeth and I were thinking that it is too bad the stuff at auction often goes for more than the average fan can afford. We thought maybe put the shirts up at a fixed price, like $100 and limit one per person. I don't know what a reasonable price would be but I know the regular UFC shirts are $30 and that doesn't go to a charity and they aren't autographed and there are more than 17 of them left for sale in the world.

Opinions on that? Should we sell them off to the highest bidder, since it's for charity, or just do a fixed price thing? Or do you have any other ideas?

I'm Rationally Mean

Last night, I saw this video where my lovely daughter, Ronda, told the media that I made her get on the mat and do push-ups 6 days after her knee surgery, which is true. She said that after her last fight, she had both knee surgery and stitches in her hand, so I came over to her house, told her that her stomach was fine and made her do her ab workout in front of me. That is also true. In fact, I came over a few days and did that and did the workout with her. Days when I was out of town or too busy, I got her two older sisters go over and do her ab workout with her.

You might think I'm irrationally mean to have no sympathy for someone who has stitches in TWO parts of her body, who just had surgery and just won a fight in 16 seconds.

Well, I might be mean but I'm not irrationally mean.

Here are a few things I've noticed over the years:

• Elite athletes get accustomed to physical training and when they can't train, they get depressed. Being able to do even part of their regular workout, to break a sweat, makes them feel a little more their normal selves. I can guarantee you that Ronda felt better after she got out of bed and did her normal ab work out. I, on the other hand, did not, because I am old and my normal ab workout consists of sitting up and getting out of bed.
• If you are not planning on retiring after an injury, then you need to get back in shape. The fewer muscles you let atrophy, the easier getting back into shape will be. If you exercise any muscles that are not injured, you may even gain strength in those areas. At worst, you will have less of a hole to climb out of than if you had spent your recovery period sitting on the couch eating ice cream. The sooner you start working out, the better off you will be. If you have a body part that is injured, it only makes sense to work on that during physical therapy and work whatever else you can the rest of the time.
• Athletes who are in a sport that requires weight cutting never like cutting weight because no sane person likes cutting weight. When they are injured, it is very tempting to use that as an excuse to eat bon bons and sit on the couch, because everyone would like that lifestyle if it had no consequences, and hey, I'm injured. But guess what, it does have consequences because now you have 10 pounds more to cut and you are recovering from a knee injury so you shouldn't be running it off. 
• Injuries can lead to a vicious circle where the athlete does not train, is depressed, overeats, is depressed about being overweight and out-of-shape, so lays in bed and overeats more. 
• Sometimes, athletes get so frustrated that they are losing muscle mass and gaining weight that they start working out too soon, causing re-injury and the whole cycle starts over.
• An injury can be an excuse, "I can't work out because my knee is hurt."

Just in life in general, I've noticed people are often looking for an excuse not to win. It's hard to train. It's hard to run a business. It's hard to write a book. It's hard to raise a family. I can't because --

Just stop it!

I think it's best to live life without excuses, to focus on what you can do instead of what you can't. I apply that to everything. I was writing a paper for a software conference and there was an update to the software. When I looked in the documentation for my problem it said, "see usage guide" and when I looked at the link for usage guide it said, "coming soon". Now, if I could see into the future, I don't know what I'd be doing but I wouldn't be writing programs for statistical analysis, I'm pretty sure.

I pouted for about two seconds, and then I decided to write this post instead. You're welcome.

Speaking of books, Jim Pedro, Sr. & I wrote one on Winning on the Ground. You should buy it because it has good stuff in it about winning. On the ground.

Or, you can get our game, Spirit Lake, which teaches math and lets you shoot buffalo that go "Moo" (maturity is overrated).

We've had our next game, Fish Lake, in beta for a while. It should be ready for commercial release in a few weeks. I knew you were just dying to know what was going on in my life and why I haven't been blogging so much. Now you know.

P. S.  I have also noticed that the more successful people get, the more everyone else around them is inclined to tell them what they want to hear, "You're injured. You don't need to work out. You deserve to sit on the couch eating chocolate covered strawberries and playing Pokemon all day."

I have tried telling Ronda that those people are NOT her friends, that at best they are polite stalkers, but she will find out I'm right. Just like that one time I told her that she would be better off if she traded in that boyfriend for a monkey. She ended up wishing she had a monkey.

Happy Birthday to me - and then this happened

Today is my 56th birthday and we had plans to have the whole family go to Jiraffe's, a very nice French restaurant in Santa Monica, reservations, dressing for dinner and the whole nine yards.

I left at 2:20 to go pick up the lovely Julia De Mars at prep school 90 miles away. It took me about 2 1/2 hours in traffic and just as I turned off to the entrance to her school I got TWO flat tires.

I should point out that beautiful as the campus is, it is smack in the middle of nowhere. No tow trucks. No mechanics. No rental cars. The only good point is that I am literally in front of the entrance, so I can walk to her dorm and tell her the bad news.

So ... an hour later AAA manages to get a tow truck up there and drive us 17 miles to Ventura. Obviously, dinner reservations in Santa Monica are cancelled.

While standing by the road in the cold, I call Ronda who says,

"I'm on it."

I believe she also sang some things about saving the day but I was not in the best mood.

The very nice tow truck driver drops us in Ventura where all of the auto repair and rental car places are closed, but I leave my keys in the morning pick up slot, to have my car fixed in the morning.

We walk to Starbucks where my perfect Julia studies while I FINALLY get a nice latte. Shortly after, Ronda walks in, having driven like a bat out of hell from Venice.

Walking down the street looking for a place to eat dinner, since there is not a snowball's chance in hell of us making it to Santa Monica in time, we run into someone who says he is one of Ronda's fans, right in front of a terrific restaurant we'd been meaning to try (Watermark, in case you want to know).

We go up for dinner and this gentleman has paid for our drinks in advance. (Recommend the cucumber martinis, big time.)

The waitress, Casey, mentions that Victor Ortiz (world boxing champion and also in Expendables 3) is from Ventura and this is one of his favorite places. Ronda calls and invites Victor to have dinner with us but, ironically, it turns out he is on his way to meet someone in LA at that exact moment.

We had a great dinner  - filet mignon, cheesecake stuffed chocolate covered strawberries, the whole nine yards. When we ask for the bill, she tells us that Victor Ortiz has called her and said don't you dare charge them a thing, as soon as I get back in town, I will come pay the bill.

 So, my birthday which began with two flat tires 90 miles from home was rescued by a dinner with two lovely daughters at a nice restaurant paid for by a sweetheart boxer.