This week in Los Angeles...

• Jacarandas are blooming now.  They are such beautiful trees, when the flowers fall, the ground becomes a purple carpet.

Jacaranda tree, and purple carpet of flowers

• coyotes have attacked pets on a street round the corner from us
• First Lady Michelle Obama, her daughters, Sasha and Malia, and her Mother, Mrs Robinson, were on a “private family vacation” in Los Angeles earlier this week.  Even though Mrs Obama travels with a large convoy of black SUV’s, surrounded by California Highway Patrol cops in patrol cars and on motorcycles,  she managed to keep her visit “private” until late Tuesday afternoon, when Twitter users around the city broke the story.

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• The Indian spiritual leader, Mata Amritanandamayi, known as Amma, “the Hugging Saint“, has given darshan, or hugs to Angelenos all week in a windowless conference room at the airport Hilton Hotel.

Kurt Streeter of the the L.A. Times described the hug:

A bevy of assistants swirled around, one massaging her shoulder, another making sure I’d wiped my face, a third whispering in her ear. They lifted my shoulders and set me on my knees in front of her.

Suddenly, Amma’s hands clasped my neck. She planted my head into her upper chest and held so tight that no movement was possible. She clasped the back of my head, stroked my hair, laughed and began silently chanting words that were indecipherable. It was warm, comfortable, even sweet. She scattered flower petals atop my head and it was over.

“It felt nice, like a hug from my grandmother.”

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• Yesterday afternoon when Mexico beat France in their World Cup match, police had to disperse fans drinking in the streets and throwing rocks at cars
• Last night when the L.A. Lakers defeated the Boston Celtics in the  NBA Finals (National Basketball), the drunk crowd went wild, hurled bottles, jumped on vehicles, broke windows, lit fires. It took hundreds of Los Angeles police officers in patrol cars, on foot and on  horseback to clear the streets.

A police car burns during riots outside the Staples Center in Los Angeles after a victory celebration by Lakers fans turned violent. (Photo by Jason Kirk/Online USA)

On an average day, Twitter gets about 750 tweets per second for a total of about 65 million a day.
But the Lakers set a Twitter record Thursday night, generating 3,085 tweets per second as the game ended.

[Many streets will be closed in preparation for their victory parade Monday at 11 a.m. I can't imagine the rush-hour mess that morning.]

• The Mayor of L.A. and his cops must be glad that FIFA referee Koman Couilibaly disallowed Edu’s goal resulting in a 2-2 tie in America’s World Cup game against Slovenia today, so that the fans didn’t have another reason to go screaming down the streets.

The Museum this week:

• The summer tourists have arrived, and sorry to say, Americans are overweight.
• I’ve had laryngitis all week. It’s interesting how people react when they hear me croaking: most of them whisper back without commenting; some say “You can’t speak!”; one man said to me: “You have no voice. Your husband must be happy.”
  

  A street in Beverly Hills

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