Thurs. 11.07.19 – With the autumn SoCal Fire Season in full swing, I am off to non-asthma indicing fresh air.
SoCal Fire Season Smoke
Posts Tagged: california
La Virgen de Chiriaco
Photo taken on Sun. 11.03.19, aka yesterday, at Chiriaco Summit where the fabulous shrine to La Virgen stands next to the post office and diner.
Usually the Virgen’s shrine is bedecked in flowers, flags, and offerings of candles and other devotional items. But yesterday, the shrine and it’s general locale was the most cleaned up / cleared out I have ever seen it in years of stopping by to visit. It was practically minimalist, as far as a Virgin Mary shrine goes.
If you are driving between LA / Palm Springs and Arizona on the Interstate 10, make sure you stop at the Chiriaco Summit, not just to pee or get a Diary Queen iced something, but also to say hello to one of the most delightful shrines in California.
Desert Quarter Moon
Sun. 11.03.19 – Driving back from Arizona along Rice Road / CA Hwy 62 westbound through the desert just a bit after sunset and the first quarter moon was high up in the southern sky. It was beautiful.
Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Samsung Note 9.
Weekend Tidbits or an Ode to Hedgehogs, Water, and the Deep Time of Trees, plus a few Con Men
Hedgehogs, UK Politics, and general understated Amusement in this Metafilter post: “1566 seems very recent, but the hedgehog was around before then”
Transcript of MP Rory Stewart’s hedgehog defense in Parliament in 2017.
Of all the possible Tory MPs possible to be the next Prime Minister, one can only hope that the Conservatives will vote for Mr. Stewart and not Mr. Johnson.
Black, Hot Ice May Be Nature’s Most Common Form of Water
This Evangelical Prayer-Coin Grift Is What the Age of Trump Is All About
“The Wall Street financiers and C-suite lords-of-the-universe have made a Faustian bargain of their own, simply accepting that the President of the United States will have regular bouts of public insanity and upend the post-World War II geopolitical order because the Dow is up and taxes are down. This will not end well for them or for the Evangelicals, because everyone who gets in bed with Donald Trump ends up debased and disgraced. Often, he convinces them to do it to themselves. “
Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden
Toxic masculinity—and the persistent idea that feelings are a “female thing”—has left a generation of straight men stranded on emotionally-stunted island. Unable to forge intimate relationships with other men, it’s women who are paying the price.
A landmark malaria vaccine has been rolled out in Malawi
This Graphic Shows the Best Air-Cleaning Plants, According to NASA
Trees of deep time are a portal to the past : The vanishing groves
A chronicle of climates past and a portent of climates to come – the telling rings of the bristlecone pine
A Man Watching the Sunset with Two Dogs
02.26.19 – Testing posting to this blog from my phone’s browser, as the official Android WordPress app will not save a post, it just throws error messages. Also, I am testing out an Android app, Photo Exif Editor Pro, that allows one to add exif artist/author data to a photo.
How are we at 2019 and I can’t set my name and preferred copyright into my camera phone’s camera settings to automatically write the data to the exif metadata? Adobe Lightroom for Android does not allow you to make a watermark, although they allegedly do for iOS.
Photo above taken on 01.13.19 at Huntington Cliffs, aka Dog Beach, California, by Ms. Jen with her Ssmsung Note 9.
Tidbits for a Weekend’s Reading
Fri. 01.11.19 – Here are a few articles to start your weekend out right. Happy Friday!
* Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and geologists don’t know why
* Memo to conservatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understands taxes better than you do
“The real story of machine learning is not how it promotes home bomb-making, but that it’s being deployed at scale with minimal ethical oversight, in the service of a business model that relies entirely on psychological manipulation and mass surveillance. The capacity to manipulate people at scale is being sold to the highest bidder, and has infected every aspect of civic life, including democratic elections and journalism.”
“Frankly, as long as we continue to view the planet as an endless “resource,” as long as we uphold the rights of individuals and corporations to amass infinite wealth while others go hungry, as long as we continue to believe that governments do not have the responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone—all our talk is mere posturing. Why do these simple things scare people so much? It is just common decency. Let’s face it: the free market is not free, and it doesn’t give a shit about justice or equality.”
* Arundhati Roy on How to Think about Empire
“And now we have the era of Trump, in which we learn that intelligence and nuance are relative terms. And that W, when compared to Trump, was a serious intellectual. Now U.S. foreign policy is tweeted to the world on an hourly basis. You can’t get more transparent than that. The Absurd Apocalypse. Who would have imagined that could be possible? But it is possible—more than possible—and it will be quicker in the coming if Trump makes the dreadful mistake of attacking Iran.”
* Why Rashida Tlaib’s “We’re gonna impeach that motherf*cker approach” is good for Congress
“One of those leading that charge is Rashida Tlaib, the new representative from Michigan’s 13th district and one of the two first Muslim women to serve in the House of Representatives – and she is wasting no time in making her voice heard. “We’re gonna go in there,” she said, speaking to the progressive organising group MoveOn just hours after she was sworn in, “and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.”
This caused the predictable backlash of pearl-clutching from Republican circles, whose faux-outrage at the swear-word would, perhaps, have had more moral weight if they had not spent the previous three years justifying their support for a president who boasted of “grabbing” women “by the pussy,” and attacking Democrats for their “political correctness”.”
Photo of the Snowy Convict Lake Reflections taken by Ms. Jen on 01.08.19 with her Nikon D850 and a Nikon 50mm f/1.4G lens in Mono County, California.
Sweet Pea and the Pine Cone
Sat. 11.10.18 – On our afternoon walk, Sweet Pea stopped to enjoy the sunshine next to a pine cone. It was too picturesque…
Pygmy Nuthatches at the Dripping Faucet
Sat. 10.20.18 – Once again the pygmy nuthatches returned to the water faucet today and I was prepared with my Nikon D850 and a 300mm f/4 lens. I was further prepared by optimizing the fn button on the front of the D850 to switch image size between FX and DX crop so that I would get more reach to take a nice photo(s) of any birds at the water faucet.
This photo makes me happy.