Bombers and cargo planes.
AAF’s B-25 “Executive Sweet”
CAF SoCal’s C-46 “China Doll”
CAF SoCal’s PBJ “Semper Fi”
Clouds, drizzle, cold, and occasional downpours courtesy of a dark and suck-filled timeline.
“It’s Not The Years, Honey…”
“…it’s the mileage.” – Indiana Jones
Yes, that is my toe starting to stick out of the left shoe. Running shoes do that after enough miles.
We were reminded at the beginning of the week that:
- The COVID-19 virus situation was getting worse (based on the situation in Italy and how little was being done in the US)
- The stock market was expected to dive even further (based on the futures market over last weekend)
- He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named was still in the White House (which explains a LOT about items #1 and #2)
- We had the freakin’ time change to Daylight Savings Time to mess with our heads.
- There’s a Friday the 13th today! (I’m 100% ***NOT*** superstitious, truly, but hey, sometimes an omen is an omen, know what I mean?)
CONGRATULATIONS! We all survived it!
With all of that “doom and gloom” on the horizon, no one was even warning us that the NBA, NHL, MLB, NCAA, NASCAR, MLS, and every other capitalized sports acronym on the planet was going to pull the plug.
Hell, Disneyland is shutting down! I believe that’s actually mentioned in the Book of Revelations as one of the Seven Signs of the Apocalypse.
There might not be toilet paper in the stores (there probably is if you just bother to go to the smaller stores instead of Costco) but there are a gazillion alternatives – if you don’t believe me, read the words of someone much more erudite than me.
Let’s be smart as a society, even if we have a world class moron as a “leader.” Ignore what he says and listen to the actual doctors say. A key is going to be “smoothing the curve,” spreading out the growth of COVID-19 so that people who get really badly infected and need ICU beds will have them over four to six to twelve months instead of all needing them at once in four to six weeks. It’s not rocket science.
Wash your hands.
Stay home if you’re sick.
Help others in need.
Then wash your hands again. Seriously.
Filed under Health, Photography, Sports
A Hole In The Clouds Between Downpours
It’s wet out there. A little late in the season, but it was a dry, DRY February, so we’ll take it!
Filed under Photography, Weather
Focus
It’s hard to do right now. Focusing. Prioritizing. Thinking straight.
What a day, huh? The NBA is shut down. Dozens, if not hundreds, of universities and colleges have shut down. The NCAA’s March Madness, if played at all, will be played in empty arenas. The Mango Mussolini stumbles his way through a teleprompter speech that wouldn’t get a C- from a fourth-grade composition class, makes at least three world-class errors or misstatements in it, looks like death warmed over, and instead of rallying the country it causes a drop of 1,000 points in the overnight futures market, which means that tomorrow’s opening is expected to be a blood bath in a market already over 20% off of it’s highs of just two weeks ago.
Oh, yeah. And people are starting to die. There are worst case scenarios that have over a million dead Americans, and people already arguing over whether or not they’re actually the worst case.
It’s hard to focus, to act, to think, to not be paralyzed.
A few years back, when I was becoming unemployed for the first time in my life and not sure what the hell was coming, one of my biggest fears was the potential for ennui, for depression, for falling off the planet and not knowing how to get back on. So I started keeping track of the simple things and forcing myself to hold myself accountable. I still might fall off the planet, but at least it wouldn’t be a surprise when it happened. And the process itself, the data, the lists, helped to steer me in the right direction and not lose my way.
Somewhere early in that process I started this website. It’s never been profound, or popular, or whatever else it might have been supposed to be, but it has been an anchor. In the almost seven years since I’ve started, I’m not sure there are ten days in which I’ve missed posting something. It might have just been a picture or a lame observation or something incredibly witty and clever that no one on the planet ever noticed or read – but it got posted.
At about 03:00 last night I woke up and realized that I hadn’t pushed the “Publish” button on yesterday’s article. Nor did I get up at 03:01 and go do that. And I missed posting about four days ago just because…I forgot.
That’s one symptom. There are plenty of others. None fatal. Not super critical. None involve the fate of the world. But they’re bothersome.
As the shit hits the fan, if I get sick, or if others around me get sick, there may be days I don’t post because of that. That’s okay – I’m not Superman. But while I and my family and friends are still not sick, it would be nice to still be on top of things and in control (yes, I’m well aware that it’s a “control issue”) and not seeing little cracks in the dam.
Yesterday’s post?
It was about the thunderheads roaming the area.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Photography, Weather
Calm & Courageous Lizard
Keep being courageous – keep being kind.
Avoid watching cheezy English “vampires from space” horror movies! (A mistake I made last night – how did they spend $25M on that when “Alien” was made for $18M the next year??!!)
On a walk yesterday I saw a wall lizard catching the last rays of the day.
See him? Her? It? (I’m still not big on IDing the sex of fence lizards from ten feet. Or ten inches. Or millimeters.)
By the way – did you check for rattlesnakes behind that transformer or in that tall grass before you went closer? Neither did I. Which I just realized about five seconds ago…
He’s still calm. He’s courageous. Like I want to be. Like we need to be.
Too close! Screw courage! We don’t want to get eaten! (Or worse!) No paparazzi! We’re outta here!
Courage. (Within reason.)
Filed under Critters, Photography
Courage
We’re going to need it.
I won’t even bother repeating what I think about the current head of the US government and those around him – go to my Twitter or Facebook feed if you’re curious. Be prepared for massive amounts of profanity.
This is going to be a bad week.
I just deleted a whole big, long rant about economic crises and health crises and you can read the news yourself.
We’re going to need to keep moving forward, keep fighting, and keep watching out for one another.
This is going to be a bad week.
Filed under Deep Thoughts, Paul
Uranus
Want to see it? Do you have clear skies and a pair of binoculars any evening in the next week or so?
I went out and saw it tonight. The next few nights probably will be cloudy here in SoCal, but you might get luckier.
An hour or so after sunset, go outside and look to the west. You’ll easily see Venus, it’s the brightest thing in the sky except for the Sun, Moon, and sometimes the ISS. It’s so bright that you can literally read a newspaper by it.
Raise the binoculars and put Venus on the far right side of the field of view.
(Image from Star Walk app)
Look at this image from the Star Walk app. We’re zoomed in here and the objects’ positions are similar to what I saw through binoculars. Their size is ***NOT***. The app is showing icons for the planets. They’ll both appear as pinpoints. Venus will be really, REALLY bright. Uranus will be about as bright as the other stars shown. Let’s look at the patterns and locations and positions relative to each other – it’s a map app, not photo realistic.
Got it?
Annotated image – this is your cheat sheet. (Remember, pinpoints, not icons!)
Okay, so through my slightly hazy & seriously light polluted sky I saw Venus on the right, three stars in a triangle (labeled 1 to 3 in the annotated image), and if I moved over to the left just a bit there were two slightly brighter stars (labeled A & B).
Got it?
- Venus on the right
- Triangle of much dimmer stars to the left (Uranus is the one on the upper left of the triangle)
- To make sure, just look a bit to the left and you’ll see two brighter stars
Uranus and Venus are moving a bit each night. They’ll be the closest tomorrow night, but they’ll be close for days and days.
Got binoculars? Got clear skies? Go see Uranus.
A Symptom
There is much that ails us as a society. There are many diseases, both literal and figurative, that rot us from the core.
I ran across something that I see not as one of those diseases, but merely a symptom. I don’t know how to solve it.
Charity auction, among the items are concert tickets with meet & greets with the artists.
When the winning bid on the Jonas Brothers concert is almost ten times the winning bid on the Incubus concert, we might not deserve to survive.
Just sayin’.
No Context For You – March 04th
Still not sure if it’s “THE FUTURE!!” or the greatest techie Ponzi scheme of all time.
I’m leaning heavily toward the latter.
Filed under Photography
Super Tuesday 2020
For decades California has had their primary in June, by which time the Presidential candidates had long since been chosen. Now they’ve moved the date up to Super Tuesday, so we got to vote today.
In addition, Los Angeles County has done a 52-pick up with the election process. Instead of having specific polling places with ink marks on paper ballots (and usually five to ten minute waits) we now have a small fraction of the number of polling places and they’re “Voting Centers” open for about ten days before the election. Piece of cake, you can vote any time in that ten days or so! Right?
Except they didn’t do a good job of advertising that, so 99% of us thought that today was the day. So we were all in line. Some of those lines got long.
The good news was that you could go to any “Voting Center” in the county, and it’s a big county. I didn’t have to drive all the way back home and get there at 7:00 or 7:30 and then wait for a couple of hours. I went to a place just a few blocks from the office, got there at 5:30, and then didn’t have more than about a 45 minute wait.
The process itself also changed completely. We got what was basically an almost legal-sized sheet of heat sensitive paper, which had some QR codes on it for security, which then got fed into a station with a touch screen about twice the size of my iPad. The touch screen process was easy, once it was done I got to confirm my choices, it printed out on the sheet, I got to review the sheet, then fed it back in to be stored. Interesting. Easy peasy.
Secure? Who knows?
But there were a couple of notable sights in the line:
A teenager with her grandmother. It looked like the teen was voting for the first time, while her grandmother must have been in her 80’s. Maybe it was her great-grandmother. But it was interesting to watch them go through the sample ballot and other materials to discuss the judges, measures, and the Presidential candidates.
There were signs all over for people who were just dropping off their mail-in ballots. No need to stand in line for that, so just bypass the line and go in. At one point a mom came in with a little girl. They were working their way through the crowded hallway and the little girl was real upset, worried that they were “cutting” the line and all of us would be mad at them. (We weren’t.)
Compared to other locations in LA County it was a breeze and not unpleasant. But let’s face it – it was a white, upscale neighborhood with a 35-40 minute wait. And our machines worked. Apparently there were plenty of other places where it was not so pleasant, the wait was 3-4 hours, and the machines didn’t work all the time.
Was it secure?
Good question.
Did my candidate win?
I’m sure she didn’t.
Filed under Los Angeles, Politics
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 