The Saint Patrick's day parade kicked things off Saturday, and the festivities spilled over onto the Pier and surrounding areas. Here's a short teaser. Lots of footage from the weekend, so it will take time to sort through. Come back later this week for the full scoop.

A few weeks ago, with featured our first pup, Max, with a photo shoot.  This time, we're stepping it up, with a video.  Check out Ken Fry's Bouvier de Flandres, Mika.

This is what was happening on 14th Street this past weekend: They came from all over to enjoy a nice, sunny weekend at the beach. If you want to learn more, go to Boomerangs.com and/or Boomerangs.org.  And thanks to all of you boomerangers(?) for demoing everything for me.  I hope you all had fun out here.  See you next year! p.s.  What do you call someone who throws boomerangs?

The warmup weekend for the St. Patrick's day parade weekend turned out great.  I got some cool footage of an event that took place on 14th Street.  Here's a clue, but I should have the video ready this week so you can get the full scoop:
14 Street Happenings
I also ran into Ken Fry, owner of the Ken Fry Gallery.  I couldn't find a website for the gallery, but he is having a display at Il Boccaccio beginning next Saturday and staying up for a month.  Also, he is the founder of the Our Veterans, Our Heroes Foundation, a non-profit designed to "address the needs of our military personnel and their families."  Last, he is the companion of Hermosa Pup Mika, seen below:

Mika
More on Mika, Ken, 14th Street and everything else later this week...see you next weekend at the parade!

The first day of March was beautiful in Hermosa!  And now, it's less than two short weeks until the Saint Patrick's day parade, the first big party of the year.  See you around then, and if you see some people in funny looking happenings shirts filming and handing out happenings cards, come say hello! Click on through for more pics...

It's already March!  Wow, the year is going by fast, as usual.  Springtime is near, but the warm weather is already here.  Here's a look back at February:

• Finance! We talked with Greg Schowe, a financial advisor, then followed up with a cool finance website.
• The Strand Cam debuts.  We put a couple of them up, hope you enjoy them.
• The government - I never paid much attention until just this past year.  The presidential election is over, but there's still a lot going on.
• Controversy!  A popular restaurant review site is mired in scandal!  (Okay, that's a little hyperbolic.)

Anyway - I'm looking forward to the rest of this year.  Good things will happen!

Not all the sunsets in hermosa are bright orange and red, but they can still look cool. More pictures after the click...

I ran this blog through Wordle and got the following:

Happenings Wordled
For a Hermosa Beach blog, there seems to be a lot of Laker posts!  It will be interesting to see how this wordles in a month or two. Check out the site if you can.  You can type in your own words, paste some text in or just give it a web address.  It automatically makes a chart like the one above and you can customize the fonts, colors and other stuff.  Let me know if you try it...

In case you were looking for the link to that restaurant review site in the sidebar, I deleted it.  Apparently, there are some allegations that Yelp is "extorting" advertisments from local restaurants in return for positive reviews on their site.

...six people told this newspaper that Yelp sales representatives promised to move or remove negative reviews if their business would advertise. In another six instances, positive reviews disappeared — or negative ones appeared — after owners declined to advertise.

You can read more about it on the East Bay Express, but until this matter is cleared up, I'll not send any readers to a possibly dishonest site.

Our state lawmakers passed the budget today and our governor praised them:

I am extremely proud of the members of the Legislature, both Republicans and Democrats, who had the courage to stand up and put the needs of Californians first,

I think it's great that they did it.  I just wonder why they needed "courage" to "put the needs of Californians first."  For some reason, I thought that was their job.  I should have paid more attention in civics class I guess.  I posted a list of the people you should thank for their courage if you see them walking down the street.