We have quite a few homeless in the neighborhood here, and some of them are real characters, selling poetry for example.

I don't know anything about the photo. I assumed that someone in a geeky town in the San Francisco Bay area suggested the sign for him as a way to pull in more donations, but who knows.

And just as a note, whether I personally met a head of state, a homeless person, or anyone in between, I always treated them in exactly the same way: as human beings, because that's what we all are.

There are two interesting differences with beggars in India vs. pretty much anywhere in the first or second world: they are actually hungry, and they have real dignity.

Santa Monica is called "Skid Row by the Sea" because of its large homeless population, caused by a climate that is suitable for sleeping outdoors year round and very good social services.

Of course we should be bothered by the homeless, especially the recent homeless who were middle class last year...

A lot of homeless people here would be in mental hospitals if they were in any other country. We used to have those hospitals too, but a famous governor a long time ago thought they were too expensive, so people with serious pathology were just dumped on the street and told to go forage in containers behind restaurants.

Values...

speaking of values.... if this guy COULD code html (and assuming other web languages) it's a great example of a generation of people told to go to school for something that isn't really necessary (just to go to college) & then having no work because they're not needed & they won't do anything else. :p

I just found out that he was a top HTML programmer who didn't want to learn CSS.

He should have displayed this mug with his placard to boost his income.

I was in Venice Beach, CA (south of Santa Monica) visiting a friend in 1981 when I ran across a homeless, alcoholic named "Bob Schmidt", known to the locals as "Alky Bob." I shot eighteen minutes of video the first time I met him on the boardwalk. He made a lot of outrageous claims about his life during the video and I was pretty certain it was the alcohol talking. He was a character.

I became interested in his story and did a lot of subsequent research and some of what he said was actually true. Not surprising, he was NOT the most decorated Marine in WW2, but he was in a few episodes of CHiPs and he did lose getting elected to the Venice city council on a write-in by less than 200 votes.

I wasn't going to buy him any alcohol (and curiously, he never asked me to) but I did end up buying him a lot of meals the week I was there in order to talk to him some more. When he had some food in him and was semi-sober, he was quite lucid and an amazingly nice guy. I never did find out why he ended up homeless on the beach.

Bob Schmidt video - August 13, 1981

Alky Bob story on VirtualVenice.com

Venice Beach hasn't changed much in 26 years....

Fascinating back story too. What did you shoot that on?

I didn't think fish eye adapters even existed for video cameras back then?

I shot that on a "portable" 3/4" deck using a relatively small Sony HVC-2000 2/3" Trinicon tube camera. I had a 55mm thread screw-on wide-angle lens for it.

Sony HVC-2000 brochure