Like watching an F-18 fly by on a high speed pass at 0.99 Mach, it seems that July has gone. I would feel better about that if it didn’t feel like we’re on a runaway train and the trestle and bridge have been washed away somewhere up ahead.
Here comes August…
Duck!
Actually, I think the black ones are grebes. But shouting “Grebe!” doesn’t make any sense.
Filed under Uncategorized
As a side note, if you’re out in the early evening these days with a clear sky, you can see six of the naked eye planets.
In the twilight to the west, Venus is super bright. Jupiter is almost as bright, about two hands high above the horizon in the west. Mercury is more dim, in between them, a little closer to Venus at the moment.
To the south, Mars is still bright red and Saturn is almost as bright just a bit off to the left (east). They’re both near the head of Scorpius, which can be a wonderful area to look at with any pair of binoculars, even from the light polluted city.
The sixth naked eye planet?
First, pretend I’m a smart-ass second grader.
A) You won’t have to pretend very hard, but…
B) The answer will be obvious.
Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space
That was my first conclusion tonight, but I think there’s more.
“Adulting” can be defined (at least by me) as “acting like the adult in the room, being responsible, keeping calm and reasonable – when what you really want to start smacking a bunch of freakin’ idiots upside the head with a baseball bat because they’re freakin’ idiots and really, really deserve it.”
Most of you know what I’m talking about.
Remember those times you had to count slowly backwards from twenty-five in Klingon to avoid spending some time as a guest of the city, county, state, or federal penal system? Yeah, those times.
This week has had more than its fair share of those moments, and today in particular felt like just one after the other.
So – adulting sucks!
Which is fine. Having recognized the universal truth therein, we somehow manage to muddle through to a better state of mind, even while we wonder why those freakin’ idiots are hit by a bolt of lightning out of a clear, blue sky. (Not enough smiting being handed down by a wrathful god these days, if you ask me!)
But why does it feel so much worse all of a sudden?
It came to me while flipping past the news. (As a side note, I would kill for a pill that I could take so I wouldn’t have to listen or see any political news until mid-November.)
The reason we go around adulting when we really want to go around slapping some sense into stupid people is because of the penalties involved. At best, people think we’re a flaming asshole and we’re socially shunned. (Except perhaps by other flaming assholes, but who wants to be around them?) We don’t want to be kicked out of the herd just for breaking social norms.
Abandoning our adulting ways could have permanent effects on our ability to earn a living, to have friends, to have people who can stand to be in the same room with us. As bad as adulting sucks, the consequences imposed by society for not adulting are much worse.
Unless you’re a current candidate for the US Presidency and you’re a smug, crude, ignorant, delusional, racist, hate-filled, misogynistic, jingoistic, pea-brained, dim witted, congenital liar who wants us to believe he’s the next coming of Christ and Buckaroo Banzai all rolled up into one.
This disgusting waste of flesh not only wouldn’t know adulting if it bit him in the ass, but no matter what he does, no matter how clinically insane, he has no negative consequences. His fortunes just continue to rise and rise and rise.
So why should we have to adult when he doesn’t?
And there we find the next level of the problem. We adult because people who don’t disgust us. But now an army of minions, most of whom are as racist, bigoted, ignorant, and clueless as their leader is, are crawling out from under their rocks and making our world a mess. They had been hiding in the dark with the slime molds, where they belong, but now it’s fashionable for them to come out into the light of day where they we have to put up with them and even more of their bullshit.
While we’re busing adulting and trying to carry on because we’re sane and good, despite the rising tide of hatred and ignorance.
Not enough smiting. I’m telling you, someone’s asleep at the wheel.
Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Politics
FYI, at this time of night there are a LOT of folks in these parts who don’t even pretend to slow down for stop signs.
Fortunately, these pictures are the result of me playing around with the iPhone camera while I was walking, not because I was running for my life or rolling down the pavement after being bowled over by a BMW doing 80 right through the crosswalk.
Filed under Los Angeles, Photography
The sky was wonderfully clear tonight after the smoky haze of the last few days (the big Sand Canyon fire is still less than half contained, but they’re getting the upper hand and it’s burning away from civilization and up into the mountain forests) and it was lovely going out for a 22:30 stroll around the block.
Up high in the southwest you can see Mars and Saturn in the head of Scorpius. Jupiter had set earlier (I’ll have to walk off the crazy earlier in the evening tomorrow to see it) but I could clearly see stars down to about magnitude 4, which is pretty good for Los Angeles. No sign of the Milky Way to the naked eye, but I know it’s there.
The skunks and raccoons left me alone and my fellow residents of the neighborhood actually stopped at the stop signs and didn’t run me over. A cat got freaked out because I walked by her wall and a couple of dogs expressed their displeasure with my existence, but that’s acceptable as long as they’re not lose and trying to gnaw on my leg.
The things that had me so frustrated and pissed off were still here when I got back, but I was able to separate them into the things I couldn’t do anything about tonight (they’ll still be here tomorrow) and those I could. I then did the ones I could.
Some days, that’s all you can hope for.
I’ll count it as a win.
Filed under Astronomy, Los Angeles
It’s true, if you don’t use it, you lose it. This is no less true of our mechanical and electronic systems than it is of our personal, meatware systems.
I recently needed to use the van which had died back in January. It would have been much easier if I had been able to do so right at the time it had its semi-fatal problem, since at the time all of the accompanying systems were working reasonably well. But when I let it sit for five months, only driving it around the block once a month or so, things got out of whack. Not only did I have to fix the original problem, but now I have a handful of other issues to deal with, all of which were caused by sitting in the driveway, neglected, for five months.
Tonight I’m spending way too much time trying to get my old iPad back among the living, or at least among the functional. But I’m not sure that I’ve used it since about December. Part of the problem is that it’s an iPad2, reasonably old by digital standards, and while it was the hottest thing on ice when I bought it, now it’s slow, short on memory, and closer to being a brick than not.
But I would like to take it to a work conference that I’ll be attending tomorrow, so it’s time to charge the battery. If it had a low charge but was being used regularly, this would have taken an hour or two. Three hours later, I’m at 43% charge and creeping.
Once it gets to the point where it’s actually on and staying on, it wants to update 163 apps. All. At. Once. After two hours, it’s down to 123, so it might be done by morning. Or not.
I’m sure at some point it’s going to want to upgrade the iOS operating system, if the hardware is capable of using the latest one. If not, there might be a number of apps that just won’t work any more, which again diminishes the utility of the beast.
Finally, it’s frustrating to find that 99% of the apps being upgraded have grown by anywhere from 45% in size all the way up to 250%. Which means that my 32GB of RAM is looking more and more puny by the second. I already had to temporarily delete all but three of the dozen or so movies I’ve bought for the iPad, and now I’ve had to delete two more. (“Blade Runner” made the final cut.) I guess I’ll just watch them on my phone on the next plane flight.
Next to start getting shaved down will be the music. That will be a dark day, indeed.
Use it or lose it!
Filed under Computers
I usually leave the sunroof on Hissy open a half-inch or so just to keep the heat from building up when it’s parked for a long period. This morning, even though that opening wasn’t much, I found the black seat to have some white ash on it.
This evening this translated to some amazing shadows on the white water vapor clouds, being cast by the much darker clouds of drifting smoke.
Fires like this can be terrifying and enormously destructive, but their side effects are not without a certain beauty despite that.
Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
The world is not black and white – infinite shades of grey, an infinite rainbow of color, and a spectrum that the eye can’t see but the mind’s tools can, screaming up through the ultraviolet toward X-rays and meandering down from infrared to radio waves.
Aside from having a wildly distorted and inaccurate view of the universe, those who see everything as either black or white are just missing so much, both literally and figuratively.
It would be sad if it weren’t currently so dangerous.
Filed under Photography, Politics
Smoke from the Sand Canyon fire is rising at the far left, about 20 miles to our northeast. The smoke plume has today blown more to the south than to the east and it covers much of the Los Angeles Basin and beach areas. Once it hits the onshore breeze, it’s scattering back along the coast to the north and west.
Here you can see the brown & orange cloud stretching all the way around to our west. So far the fire has covered over 20,000 acres and is only 20% contained.
Filed under Los Angeles, Panorama, Photography, Weather
At lunch I posted this on FaceBook & Twitter:
I particularly liked the way the “wind chill factor” brought the 108° in the shade down to where it only felt like 102°. And while I might have stretched the facts just a bit with the comment about “2% humidity,” I wasn’t exaggerating much. and the wind was blowing pretty good.
What happens under those conditions?
Yep, another large brush fire. I had been hearing sirens every five to ten minutes for quite a while. We’re a half mile from a very large hospital (“Hi, Long-Suffering Wife! I can see you!”) and in Los Angeles, so sirens aren’t uncommon, but having that many for that long was.
Someone mentioned they had heard there was a fire up in the Sand Canyon area, and someone else said they had seen it but it was small and should have been put out quickly. Then we looked out the window toward the northeast where Sand Canyon would be.
Well, there’s your problem!
Sand Canyon is a part of Santa Clarita, which is where we’re building our 78 homes for low-income veterans. As in, where we currently have 28 homes in various stages of framing, roofing, plastering, and generally being very exposed to flying embers and debris.
The good news is that our site is about five miles just to the left of where the smoke’s rising, and the wind is obviously pushing it away from us and the city of Santa Clarita, off into the canyons and mountains. That makes it harder to fight and put out, but it keeps lots of houses (not just the ones we’re building) safe tonight.
As I left the office, just after sunset, there were two vastly different views available. To the west, it was a sunset that was a couple of notches above average.
To the northeast, the pyrocumulus clouds of smoke were still rising, lit by the last fading rays of the setting sun.
Is it me, or does that smoke cloud look like one of the dwarves from “The Hobbit”?
Filed under Habitat For Humanity, Los Angeles, Photography
 | berich56 on Wispy With A Chance Of Straigh… |
 | Jemima Pett on War Board Review |
 | momdude on Above Average Sunset & Cre… |
 | Frederic Paulussen on Above Average Sunset & Cre… |
| Jemima Pett on Proof Of Life – Febrary… |
 | karen bear on iPhone 17 Moonrise |
 | Praveen Yadav on Evolution Of Some Weird C… |
| Jemima Pett on Why Is There Brain Freeze… |
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 