Year: 2007
Drumming
Posted on December 8, 2007 in Weather
Last night, I lingered a bit in the loft listening to the rain drumming on the skylight. Woke late this morning. Rainy days are good for this. Friend of mine woke me up to talk about how another woman upset her with her rudeness. Commiserated and then rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, showered, and discovered that the battery in my blood sugar checker had died. Our stores of batteries had lost their charge, so Lynn added getting more as one of the things she had to get while she was out running her errands. In the meantime, I walked, barefooted, out in the rain, to get a carton of Coke from the truck.
The rain keeps coming, legion upon legion. Yet the local creek hasn’t risen much yet. The webcam shows cola-colored water, short plateaus of rock, and raindrops on the lens.
A Clean Rain
Posted on December 7, 2007 in Weather
This time there is no smell of wet ashes. The last storm must have massaged the scent out of the hillsides. Threatened mudslides have not appeared this time and the USGS-monitored stream near our home is nowhere near innudating its banks. I went out briefly to fetch a new ink cartridge and a Logitech webcam that sold for $5.00 after the rebate. Lynn’s brought home a new computer: we’ll attach the cyclops to that and see how it plays on Skype.
Lori Drew’s Daughter
Posted on December 7, 2007 in Compassion Scoundrels
REVISED.
Note: There is now question whether Lori Drew wrote the Megan Had It Coming blog. Word is that her attorney is mounting action. Check out the Jonathan Turling blog link below and this. The question now is Will the Meiers file a wrongful death suit?
Police patrols in Mother Predator’s neighborhood have increased: evidentally law enforcement does not want to find itself in the position of prosecuting someone with whom it is in sympathy. (Ambrose Bierce once said that there are five degrees of homicide: first degree, second degree, manslaughter, justifiable, and praiseworthy.) I do not condone killing Lori Drew — let her live with the shame for the rest of her life. Let others remind her at every turn of what she has done. Let her know that she is a pariah. And unlike Drew herself — who plotted with teenagers to create a fiction — let the human faces who reject her be visible as they turn away. Leave her no doubt that real people condemn her. It’s a very Amish approach.)
One thing that commentators don’t speak much about is what to do about her daughter who is undoubtably coming under fire for her mother’s deed. The girl first came under attack by a young girl who was mentally distressed. Even knowing this can doesn’t make it hurt any less. Now her mother is the villain of the year the girl has become an outcast for things she did not do.
Unfortunately, there is no way to save her. Calling in social services isn’t legal at this point unless Lori Drew has been secretly molesting her. For the rest of her life, this poor girl may be programmed to think herself as evil because of her mother. I see a lot of therapy in her future.
If there is a way to counsel/comfort her without letting her mother off the hook, I am all for it.
Some noteworthy articles about Lori Drew that have appeared in the last few days:
- Karoli shows no mercy towards who she calls “the witch-victim“. She talks about how an outsider destroyed her own family.
- Zephonia blames the affair on the contemporary parenting “absolute belief that you’re child is the best child ever” [sic].
- jasonunger numbers the ways in which Lori Drew is being made to pay for the seduction-suicide of Megan Meier.
- And here’s another Lori Drew.
- Attorney Jonathan Turley states: “While there is ample reason for anger, these individuals appear to be using the very same abusive means to mete out their own brand of justice. It shows how the absence of legal recourse can trigger vigilantism.”
[tags]Megan Meier, Lori Drew, cyberbullying, cyberbully, scoundrel, wild wild web, monsters, creeps, suicide, mental illness[/tags]
Latin Practice – Seneca Got It Wrong
Posted on December 5, 2007 in Reading
He said “Immodica ira creat insaniam.” (“Immoderate anger creates insanity.”)
It should be “Insania creat immodicam iram.”
The Power Behind the Darkness of the Orange
Posted on December 4, 2007 in Scoundrels The Orange
The L.A. Times has frontlined with a story about Donald Haidl, the power behind Sheriff Michael Carona’s throne and the father of Greg Haidl, notorious cue-stick-and-cigarette rapist.
Webcam in my Neighborhood
Posted on December 4, 2007 in Neighborhood Santiago Fire The Orange
The USGS just launched a new webcam which is positioned about a mile from where I live in Santiago Canyon as a means of monitoring post-fire floods. It should be quite the thing to watch on Thursday Friday.
Wouldn’t it be fun to stand in front of the camera for a picture?
Read more about it here.
[tags]disasters, groundwater, water, California, Southern California, California wildfires, wildfires, flood[/tags]
Santiago Fire Ash Poisons the Land
Posted on December 4, 2007 in Santiago Fire
Pretty soon, when storms dump water on the mountains that were burned over in the Santiago Fire, the streams below my neighborhood will be fit for hazardous waste cleanup. The ash from the fires is going to wash off the hillsides and concentrate in Aliso Creek, meaning that the local wildlife will may turn sick to its stomach from the arsenic and other contaminants. Thus spake the USGS:
Samples collected from two residential areas burned by the Grass Valley and Harris wildfiresindicate that the ash contains caustic alkali materials and can contain somewhat elevated levels of metals such as arsenic, lead, zinc and copper. Ash from burned wildlands can also contain caustic alkali materials, though at lower levels than the residential ash.
“These findings are consistent with the scientific knowledge about wildfire ash that has led counties in California to issue advisories regarding appropriate precautionary measures to avoid health problems associated with exposure to the ash,” said Dr. Geoffrey Plumlee, a USGS lead author of the study.
“The study results also indicate that rain-water runoff from burned areas may adversely affect ecosystems and the quality of surface drinking water supplies,” said Deborah Martin, a USGS wildfire ash specialist and study co-author. Additionally, critical habitat for some aquatic species may be affected by spikes in alkalinity as rainwater mixes with ash to form surface runoff.
This goes to show that a disaster doesn’t end when firemen douse the last flames. The more spectacular catastrophes end up as geological features such as [[Channeled_scablands|Washington State’s Scablands]] (the result of a flood) or The Sinks in my neighborhood (an ancient landslide). Mix that ash with fertilizer residues and oil and you’ll have plenty of little pockets of poison water.
You won’t see me drinking groundwater any time soon.
[tags]disasters, groundwater, water, California, Southern California, California wildfires, wildfires, hazardous waste, poison, pollution[/tags]
Mickey Mouse Will You Please Come to the Stand….
Posted on December 4, 2007 in Strange
The Italian judge who ordered the world’s most trademarked mouse to court doesn’t quite get a Nipper Kettle Award because, quite honestly, he wasn’t grasping for fame and the whole thing may be a clerical error anyways:
The court summons cites Titti, Paperino, Paperina, Topolino — the Italian names for the characters — as damaged parties in the criminal trial of a Chinese man accused of counterfeiting products of Disney and Warner Bros.
Instead of naming only the companies and their legal representatives, clerks also wrote in the witness list the names of the cartoons that decorated the toys and gadgets the man had reproduced, said Fiorenza Sorotto, vice president of Disney Company Italia.
“Unfortunately they cannot show up, as they are residents of Disneyland,” Sorotto joked in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. “It certainly pleased us that the characters were considered real, because that’s what we try to do.”
Disney continues to enjoy unbridled profits from Mickey who has managed to evade death by lapse of copyright for many years now.
[tags]strange, odd news, odd, Mickey Mouse, Tweety, Disney, cartoons[/tags]
Sugar and Satiation
Posted on December 3, 2007 in Sugar and Fat
Here’s a conundrum if you diet: exercising self-control can break down your resistance. In other words, if you force yourself not to eat that chocolate, you’ll waste the energy and, in a matter of moments, find yourself eating it anyways.
A group of people were put through what is called a Stroop test and then subjected to blood-glucose level tests:
Participants in this task are shown color words that are printed in different-colored ink (like the word red printed in blue font), and are told to name the color of the ink, not the word. Baumeister found that when participants perform multiple self-control tasks like the Stroop test in a row, they do worse over time.
Researchers discovered that taking the Stroop test ate up blood and muscle glucose. Furthermore:
They found that the group performing the self-control task suffered depletion in glucose afterward. Furthermore, in another experiment, two groups performed the Stroop task two times each, drinking one of two sweetened beverages in between. The control group drank lemonade with Splenda, a sugar-free sweetener; the test group got lemonade sweetened with real sugar. The sugar group performed better than the Splenda group on their second Stroop test, presumably because their blood sugar had been replenished.
Exercise is said to help. But maybe you need to eat that one chocolate so you aren’t gorging yourself in a few minutes time?
The worry that I have is will this become an excuse for me to eat when I shouldn’t? “Oh, I feel that I want that chocolate and I know I shouldn’t, but if I resist, I’ll eat it and more anyways, so why not eat the whole bag now?”
You get the picture.
So Where Do You Think He’s Been?
Posted on December 3, 2007 in Strange
An interesting niblet from The Guardian:
A canoeist who disappeared off the North Yorkshire coast more than five years ago and was presumed drowned has walked into a London police station and identified himself to officers.
John Darwin, a married father of two and former prison officer, was thought to be dead in 2002 when his shattered red canoe washed up on the beach below his clifftop home in Seaton Carew, near Hartlepool.
Darwin, 51 at the time, had last been seen setting off heading for rocks opposite his home at about 9am on March 21. He was reported missing when he failed to turn up for the night shift at neighbouring Holme House prison, sparking a 16-hour search along the coast involving police and coastguard teams, aircraft, nine lifeboats and a Royal Navy ship.
A paddle was found and weeks later the wreckage of Darwin’s canoe washed up.
At 5.30pm on Saturday, Darwin identified himself to officers at a police station in central London. Where he has been in the intervening years remains a mystery.
A few months after his disappearance, Mrs. Darwin said “All I want is to bury his body.” Now Mr. Darwin must tremble at the thought of the Victorian’s worst nightmare to be enacted once she returns from Australia and gets her hands on him.
Just where do you think he’s been?
I Must Go to Bed
Posted on December 1, 2007 in Weather
Earlier tonight a cloud, dripping with rain, settled on the street and kept dropping its substance through a thick fog. On Sunday, we’d seen an exhibit of gems at the Bowers Museum. Most memorable was a piece of quartz — the world’s largest cut gemstone. When you shone a light through this rain cloud, you got fine flecks and thick gold scratches of rain. That was how this quartz crystal was and how the rain cloud was.
