A lifesaving moment at the Boston Marathon ... talking with Stephen Hawking ... Mazda unveils its first diesel racecar ... real racecar drivers talk about LA traffic pet peeves ... Stoltze and real people on the LA mayor's race ... bringing Rodney King back to life on stage ...
Ask Billy Ray Cyrus about his 'Hillbilly Heart'
Billy Ray Cyrus is stopping by the Mohn Broadcast Center next week to talk with me about his memoir "Hillbilly Heart," and I could use your help. If you have a burning question for him, please leave it below in the comments section.
Here's an excerpt from the book:
I know I'm painting a kind of idyllic picture of my childhood, but that's the way I remember it until the strains of my mom and dad fighting became more common than not. Looking back, I know these were the moves people who had married young had to go through as they realized they were different as adults than they were fresh out of high school. I hated hearing the fighting. It tore me up. I didn't understand what was going on. Nor did I understand why my parents seemed to want to hurt each other.
It didn't help that my dad was thought of as the Elvis of Southern Gospel. His chiseled good looks and angelic voice were catnip for gospel groupies. After one performance, my mom found lipstick on my dad's collar. Soon after, she recruited her best friend to help spy on my dad. She put Kebo and me in the backseat of her car, and the four of us parked outside a bar in Ironton, Ohio, called the Auger Inn. It had a hand-painted sign in front that read "AUGER IN ... STAGGER OUT." I don't recall what she saw, but it was something incriminating.
I remember some major blowouts. Nothing made me more upset than seeing my mom cry. One day, my brother and I came home from school and immediately sensed a dark cloud hovering above our house. Instead of asking me about the activities in my first grade class, my mom stood with her arms crossed and told Kebo to take me into our room and lock the door. She explained, “Your dad and I are going to have a fight.”
Indeed, my dad came home and the fighting stared. It was horrible. Kebo and I heard plates break, furniture overturned, and a fist go into the wall. Unable to take the screams and cries any longer, I bolted out of my bedroom and wedged myself between them. Everything stopped. In the stillness following the battle, my father glared at my mom and said he was going to leave. Hearing that, I jumped up and wrapped my arms around his chest and wrapped my legs around his waist, clinging like a little monkey.
Without saying anything, he walked past the living room, which was in total disarray, and outside, down the five green steps, and past the birdbath. Finally, he wiped his tears, kissed me on the forehead, and got in his car. Kebo stood nearby, and my mom watched from inside the door. My dad turned on the ignition, backed out of the driveway, and disappeared over the hill. He never returned, and we never again lived under that roof as a family.
From then on, there was no question that life was not fair.
If you want to see BRC in person, he's at Live Talks LA at the New Roads School Moss Theater (3131 Olympic Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90404) on Wednesday.
PHOTOS: Patt Morrison visits Caltech, dines with Stephen Hawking, talks religion and physics
Ah, Caltech. Its students are all about logarithms and light years, right? But the class that everyone wants to take is PA 16: Cooking Basics. And basic in this class doesn't stop at mac and cheese — students craft gourmet meals for up to 200 people at a time.
Tom Mannion has been teaching cooking basics for over 10 years, and just about every year he and his students get to cook dinner for Stephen Hawking.
We followed the scent of coriander and cilantro to the al fresco kitchen to talk to some of the student chefs... and got to pose a few questions to Hawking about the Indian meal they served him.
Patt Morrison: The big question that strikes me is about the idea of science and religion, whether they are at war and why there should be an intrinsic, maybe a zero-sum conflict between the two.
Stephen Hawking: I don’t think it’s a war, except in the mind of Richard Dawkins. Religion is dying out in the first world, but there will always be people who like fairy stories like afterlife.
PM: When you received the Milner prize for fundamental physics, $3 million, what were your first thoughts?
SH: I was very pleased and honored. I thought my work would never be recognized because it would be so difficult to confirm it experimentally.
PM: We did finish an Indian meal prepared and served by Caltech students, so if you were the Michelin Guide, how many Michelin stars would you give to this meal?
SH: One Michelin star is very good. I would give this meal two stars.
A few days later, he was the guest of honor at another dinner, this one with Caltech faculty and friends. On the menu: lamb chops and an ice cream dessert called "the solar system." Brain food — because afterwards, Hawking packed them in for his speech about the origin of the universe at Beckman Auditorium, where he got a rock star welcome.
The Boston Marathon runner from Studio City and the photo that may have saved her life
Studio City resident Renee Opell had come to Boston for her 40th marathon with friends Phil Kent and Jennifer Hartman. It was a "privilege and an honor" to run in the Boston Marathon, Opell says.
"Boston is very prestigious and all marathoners dream of coming to Boston. It's not something everybody gets to do and you work really hard to qualify and then when you get here, it's kind of like the victory lap to your running season to be able to participate in that event."
"We were having a glorious day, the weather was perfect and we were moving along at a pretty steady pace," Opell remembers. But then, at mile 25, Phil's wife Sharon pulled them over to take a picture. At first, Opell was too focused on finishing the marathon to stop. "Come on let's go, we're almost done," Opell told her friends. But she gave in and paused for a quick photo. That pause may have saved their lives.
After the photo, Opell and her friends continued on their way. They were in the home stretch, planning their finish line photo as they ran.
Then the first explosion went off -- just 30 yards from where they were. Opell and her friends knew they had to get out of there and, holding hands, they moved away from the blast and down a side street.
But what if they hadn't stopped for that one picture? It's a cosmic question that Opell and her friends can't avoid.
"It is the best picture of my life, no doubt about it, and I kind of chuckle when I think about telling them to hurry up. But honestly, it kept us away from a bad place."
Opell, like so many others, was never able to cross the finish line. Amidst the horrific death and destruction that occurred, there are also the crushed ambitions of marathon runners who were never able to finish. For them, the asterisk that will forever be attached to their race record may become a symbol of silent commemoration: an asterisk.
Opell says, "I was saying to a friend I'm going to have my first DNF, which is a Do Not Finish, and it's going to be in the Boston Marathon. And somebody said, 'Yeah, but it's an asterisk, and it's probably the best one you could ever have.' I said fair enough. I'll take that asterisk, absolutely."
PHOTOS: In time for Grand Prix weekend, Mazda unveils diesel race car
OK, it looks pretty much like next year’s top-of-the-line Mazda sedan. But there are obvious signs that it’s lots more than that. This 400hp metallic-maroon-red car, spotted with logos and numbers, is hunched way down, like a tomcat about to pounce on a field mouse, its front bumper so low you could barely stick your foot under it. There’s a distended air scoop and a low-projecting lip spoiler. There are low-slung silhouette side skirts, aerodynamic side-view mirrors and an adjustable rear wing and rear under-spoiler to push that high-slung tail down at race-track speeds.
But it’s the Mazda 6 Skyactive GX’s mechanical innards that make it one of the most radical “stock” racing cars on the track today. If not yet the most successful.
The car didn’t finish in its first big race this year—possibly, according to Road & Track magazine, because it had just been delivered the week before. It finished second in its next two races, so you could at least say it’s a very promising design. But this mixed showing also reflects its singular, developing technology—it’s probably the only diesel race car on the American auto racing scene today.
At its Mazda Racing press rollout in Irvine on Tuesday, Florida racing entrepreneur Sylvain Tremblay explained how, despite an incredibly detailed computer-generated design process that went into its development, the GX engine remains a work in progress as its racing career advances.
Mazda likes to stress that the car’s little 2-liter Four contains more than half stock Mazda engine components, but the engineering of the crankshaft, connecting rods and other moving parts remained a huge challenge because there just haven’t been very many diesel powered racing cars. So Mazda’s engineers had to pioneer an entirely new highly-stressed, high-speed diesel technology.
It’s not completely new, though. Giant U.S. truck-engine manufacturer Cummins fielded diesel-powered Indianapolis cars in the early 1950s. Six years ago, Audi won the Sebring 12-hour race with its 12-cylinder diesel R10, a custom super-racer that looked like a Batmobile designed by Klingons and cost a reported $15 million just to develop.
Mazda’s taken a far different approach, which is to be innovative, but also to stay closer technologically to its production cars that the consumer can relate to. Theirs, for instance, is the first diesel race car to have a double compound turbocharger, Tremblay notes, but it also runs with a stock-production engine block. Diesel’s power pulses are much stronger than a conventional engine’s, though, so the top half of the engine was subjected to a lot of redesign—much of which is still going on. Says Tremblay, “It’s a continuous development, we’ve changed to rigid valve lifters and have had to redevelop the fuel (injection) system.”
But, he notes, the problems the cars have experienced since their first run at the Rolex 24 in Daytona have generally not involved the engines. It’s hoped that in future competition, starting with the Road Atlanta this weekend, the Mazda GX racing diesel can show more of its strengths over the conventional gasoline engine, such as higher torque for faster acceleration, and much lower fuel consumption, meaning fewer fueling stops.
“It would have taken far longer to find the faults if we hadn’t raced these cars first,” Tremblay said.
(Listen to Marc Haefele and John Rabe's conversation about the new Mazda diesel race car with one of its drivers.)
Young Mazda racecar drivers on driving distracted, and your pet driving peeves
Apologies to all the responsible teens who may read this, but, it's true. The older you get, the smarter your parents get. Few teens believe their parents about much of anything, making it hard to get even the most important messages across, like: Don't text while you drive.
Hence, Project Yellow Light, a program that encourages young drivers to make videos to speak to other kids about the dangers of driving distracted, and offers scholarships for the best videos.
I spoke with three young Mazda drivers -- Elliott Skeer, 18; Joel Miller, 24; and Kenton Koch, 18 -- about their involvement in Project Yellow Light and how they deal with their peers who drive distracted. And since I had three smart racecar drivers in front of me, I asked them to solve some of the mysteries of driving in SoCal ... like why people tailgate, why they drive slow in the left lane, and why there's that one particular sign on the Arroyo Parkway.
Eagle Rock's Permanent Records celebrates Record Store Day
How many of you have a box of vinyl records in the garage? For some people, these black discs aren’t just a scratchy, nostalgic way of listening to their favorite music — they’re a way of life, and since 2007 the third Saturday of every April has been their holiday — Record Store Day.
The yearly event features in-store concerts, meet and greets, and hundreds of exclusive releases by artists ranging from garage bands to Bruce Springsteen.
Off Ramp contributor Joe Armstrong spoke with Chicago ex-pat Lance Barresi — co-owner of Permanent Records in Eagle Rock — about how they will celebrate Record Store Day 2013.
#DearMayor in the flight path
It was a great day in Westchester Tuesday when KPCC's Frank Stoltze and the whole crew held a #DearMayor session. I dropped by to chat with Frank at about 10am, by which time he'd had his 10th cup of coffee and was kind of slap-happy.