Here’s a photo from the same April rainstorm in which we spotted the red rainbow at sunset:
This was taken about an hour earlier, driving up the 405.
Author Archives: Kelson
BEM: Ladies Man
The Other Blue Ice
Saw this truck on the road a while back, a possible case of branding gone awry:
The problem is, when I see the words, “blue ice,” I don’t think of glaciers, I think of this:
And I seriously don’t want to drink the contents of a re-freezable block for portable coolers.
Ah, well, Google disagrees with me, returning the vodka as #1. (For the record, it’s hard to go wrong with Grey Goose.)
Saw Transformers
I finally got out to see Transformers today. Yes, I grew up with the cartoons, the toys and the comics. Yes, I even collected every comic book from the original Marvel series through the Generation 2 series (including the prologue in G.I. Joe) through the first round from DreamWave. But somewhere along the line I just lost interest, and ultimately sold off my entire collection. (On eBay, actually.)
But still, there’s some sort of primal thrill—at least for anyone who grew up as a boy in 1980s America—in seeing giant robots fighting each other. So I finally decided to catch it while it was still in theaters.
It was better constructed than I expected. They had a plausible reason for the Autobots and Decepticons to be on Earth, and they were very good about following up on exposition. Every gun that appeared on the wall was eventually fired, down to Sam’s eBay auctions, with one exception: I really expected them to blow up Hoover Dam.
Which brings me to the biggest gap in logic. SPOILERS follow, for anyone who, like me, has been living in a cave. Continue reading
click: a lesson in font design
Two views of Katie’s mousepad:
I don’t think that second view is quite what they had in mind…
Lenticular Cloud Over Irvine
One of the problems with photographing clouds is that you can’t run and grab a better camera. You have to shoot with what you have, or they’ll change configuration and quite possibly look completely different by the time you get back.
As I left for a late lunch today, I saw a set of half-discs stacked together, with a long trail stretching off to the left. We don’t see lenticular clouds that often in this area, so I stopped the car, grabbed my cell phone and aimed it out the window.
The Santa Ana Mountains are hidden behind the office buildings, and are probably the cause of the cloud formation.
Unfortunately, the detail isn’t that great. I tried to enhance the image a bit, but it looks like the brightest parts of the cloud overwhelmed the sensor. This is at the camera’s native resolution:
Update: Spotted some more interesting cloud formations later in the afternoon. Continue reading
Prim(a)tech Sighting
In honor of the Heroes DVD release, here’s a truck that’s almost, but not quite labeled for Primatech Paper:
Interestingly, it’s been a month for timing pop culture releases with relevant astronomical events. First Stardust, all about catching a falling star, arrived in theaters the same weekend as the Perseids meteor shower. Today, the Heroes Season 1 DVD arrives on the same day as a total eclipse (albeit a lunar one, rather than solar).