I realize that it is naive to continue to imagine that government would ever need to at least explain what happened when it makes an unforced error.
And media-cranky of me.
And I do celebrate the fact that — 10 years after it first said it was going to do so — the part of the government that operates out of Washington, D.C. last week brought the entire front range of the mountains that make a big wall between our San Gabriel Valley and the High Desert into the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument.
But it is apparently my (cranky) job and mine alone to at least make note of the fact that right up until the day that President Barack Obama coptered into the SGV and signed the monument into law on a fine fall morning in 2014, those 106,000 acres were in the monument.
Someone, somehow, removed that acreage with some kind of slash of a pen just before the signing. As I wrote at the time, placed outside the monument’s boundaries was literally all of the magnificent purple mountains’ majesty that you can see from the Crescenta Valley, La Canada Flintridge, Altadena, Pasadena, Sierra Madre — and from further down the hill into all the western SGV. All of it. Mt. Wilson, Mt. Lowe, the Upper Arroyo Seco, the Angeles Crest Highway — which forms many Angelenos’ entire impression of the mountain range, when they go out for a Sunday drive — was left out of the monument. As were all of the trails and roads blazed back in the Great Hiking Age at the turn of the last century, when nature lovers including the great John Muir flocked to Pasadena and environs for the quality of the amble.
It’s not at all clear if Obama knew about the last-minute subtraction. And the reason it’s not clear is that the federal government has declined to answer my questions about it for precisely a decade.
But we’re just supposed to forget that and applaud the “addition.” OK: Two cheers for democracy.
Longtime readers might recall that I took an investigatory — well, sight-seeing at least — drive up Highway 2 myself to see if I could figure out what the reason was for drawing the part of the mountains most people know out of the monument, After a look-see, I posited what may be the reason. At the time there was a huge Southern California Edison construction project in the mountains above Tujunga, involving big helicopters and large crews building towers for power lines heading down from the desert. It was unattractive to say the least — not befitting a National Monument. I guessed that some bigwig from the Forest Service, which operates the monument, came by for a tour and made the change at the last sec.
Guess was all I could do, because no bureaucrat would ever answer my simple question. Just another pesky taxpayer making a query that it turned out they didn’t have to respond to. And now they’ve done the right thing, 10 years after, in the fight to better protect our natural resources. Done it for no reason that they have to say.
Wednesday at random
In a timely visit, considering the news of the new $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers in California, Ryan Sinnet, co-founder of Miso Robotics, had members of Civitas, the Pasadena civic organization, into the company’s Green Street test kitchen last week for drinks and samples of French fries and hamburgers made by the machines that someday will be our masters. Flippy cooked the fries, BurgerBot by Cucina grilled the burgers, PopID was set to take orders. Fascinating. Cuisine not quite up to the level Mike serves up at Pie ‘n Burger, but what is? Sinnet, who was a Caltech undergrad and has a doctorate in robotics, told us about how amazingly complicated creating a robot to do kitchen tasks turns out to be. At first he and colleagues just thought, tears-wise, how cool it would be to create a machine that could just chop onions. Then they got more ambitious, and built more machines, and created the Caliburger chain. Now the company is focused on marketing to other burger joints, and has their equipment in 400 White Castles in the Midwest and in some Jack in the Box stores. Ryan shared the first message they got when the word first came out about Miso’s fast-food plans: “I like how the goal of robotics is to eliminate human interaction at every level. Sorry no one talked to you in high school, nerds!”
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com