Martin Cox, who has evolved into Chicken Corner’s occasional waterfowl correspondent reports the following activity at Echo Park Lake:

Odd geese sightings, after week of absence the pair of Canada geese with their grown chicks number 11. Well, they came back one evening last week with 13 of their best friends. We heard them land with a great splash, and then in the twilight form a single line of 24 geese and head up the lake towards the island. They spent the night but were gone before 7AM. Since then various numbers have been coming and going, sometimes 18 and then back to the original 11.

Maybe they are making day trips to the county fair.

Martin is currently part of a group show of Los Angeles artists presented by the Millard Sheets Gallery at the L.A. County Fair. The exhibition, Fair Exchange, is curated by Irene Tsatsos, former director of L.A.C.E., among other things.

While I am contemplating the geese and my own peregrinations in efforts to see family and friends, I receive another email, this one from my friend Angela, who reports alarming gestures and swinging of arms from a “sharp-looking group of hucksters.” Angela lives across the street from me in Echo Park. She said the hucksters were...

...clustered on the front lawn of our neighbor-across-the-street. They were all huffing and puffing and scratching their chins - looking at the house at the bottom of a break neck slope that absolutely completes my southern view, one that I call, "the country in El Salvador". A vivacious Asian woman with spiked hair was making a swooping motion with her right hand - up into the air - and then spreading her fingers in a kind of spectacular fan shape to signify....what? A town house? A duplex? She did this a few times before her colleague stepped in - a 30-something, stately Lantino with a pony tail – and he responded with a similar sweeping motion to the left and then punctuated it with three long linear cuts, his hand like a spade - a giant parking structure? A home depot? Then, they all started cackling. Really, they did - which made me spill me coffee, just missing my one-year-old's head, who was shouting to them "Hi!!!!!" at the top of her lungs. I disappeared behind my curtains just in time for them to look up at my house, dollar signs gleaming in their eyes.

I am glad to be passing this description along from a distance, didn’t have to witness the performance myself.