“Feed two birds with one roll”
Monthly Archives: May 2012
the “evil eye”
If you see a cute baby and would normally look at them and talk baby talk or approach them in some friendly manner, but for some reason don’t, then the baby was just given the “evil eye”.
East L.A. Witch-doctor
Rafael, resident of Los Angeles for all his life, has heard stories of a “witch doctor” called “La Cebolla” meaning “the onion” in Spanish because of her big white hair in East LA. People would go to her about their “honey” and she could do some really good or really bad upon them.
Haunted Hollydale Mental Hospital
My friends and I were hunting for haunted houses and after googling haunted places in los angeles, we decided to go check out the abandoned Hollydale Mental Hospital in Downey, CA.
We drove around the hospital campus for a bit, and then decided we should probably leave considering all of the buildings were fenced in and we really didn’t know what we were doing. Then we pulled in to a nearby parking lot and saw a group of people get out of their car who looked about our age, in their early twenties. We asked them if they were there to check out the hospital and they said yes, so we asked if we could join. They were very welcoming (the four guys were drunk, and the one girl was clearly their sober driver) and explained that they were there to “initiate” Cherry because it was his first time visiting this haunted place. According to them, it was tradition to run up to the main house, “where they kept the craziest of the crazies”, and touch the front door for your first time visiting Hollydale. We decided this was exciting and tagged along. The girl, Cindy, began to explain how they were from the area and that they heard stories about Hollydale all the time from other kids in school. She also told us the story she knows of why it was abandoned:
Back in the 70’s, there was an outbreak of Tuberculosis at the hospital, and their way of dealing with it was to get all of those who had not yet been infected out and then left the rest of the people there to die. That is why the whole compound looks as if everyone just up and left, because they did. They just closed up shop like it was the end of another business day.
Cindy told us that they had been inside one of the buildings before and they took a whole box of papers from beside a desk and it had a lot of old, interesting papers and files inside.
She also said that about a year ago, the town planned on tearing the place down because it was costing them money to have policemen constantly patrolling and whatnot, but a group of animal rights activists wouldn’t allow them too because the site has become a breeding ground for stray cats.
Grass Joke
Informant:
This joke was provided by Jessyka Linton, 19. She considers herself African-American and is a student at the University of Southern California. Jessyka learned this joke from her younger brother, and she shared it while waiting to take a group picture at a retreat with members from an on-campus Christian organization. In her performance, she did not leave time between the question and the answer for people to answer. It was met with laughter.
Text:
What’s green and has four wheels? Grass, I lied about the wheels.
Analysis:
This joke, in many ways, qualifies as a nonsense riddle in children’s folklore. It creates nonsense by violating the riddling conventions and canons of common sense altogether. Interestingly, Jessyka left no time for the hearers to consider her “riddle.” This probably made the solution more satisfying. If serious thought had been put into it, the audience would have felt deceived and underwhelmed by the joke.