In checking my pre-order status for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, I noticed this customer recommendation:
I assumed it was yet another book about the OS timed to come out just as people would be interested. No, it’s the 1982 rock album by Survivor, featuring the well-known Rocky III theme…which has now lodged itself firmly in my head.
This week’s issue of The Flash featured brief introductions to all of the reformed Rogues. The inclusion of Magenta on that team got me to thinking: she’s the only woman on either of the two Rogue teams. She’s also one of only three who have ever been part of the Rogues Gallery. Of the other two, Golden Glider had an in—two, really: her brother and her lover were both members of the group—and Blacksmith actually had to form her own team.
Still, they’re not doing so bad in proportion. It turns out there just aren’t very many female villains in Keystone and Central City. I’ve got 72 villain profiles on my site right now, not counting teams, and just 7 solo women. (8 if you count the second version of Colonel Computron, but who can tell under all that?) By my reckoning 19 villains have been members of the Rogues proper. (That’s counting legacy villains, like the original and replacement Trickster, both times, and counting all of Blacksmith’s team.) 3/19 is roughly 16%, and even 8/72 is roughly 11%, so women are actually represented a bit more in the Rogues than in the general Flash villain population.
As long as I’m debunking myths about Southern California, check out this picture of the Los Angeles skyline:
Granted, I doubt it looks like this very often (the mountains only get snow in winter, and you can only see them like this on a clear day). Source: public domain photo on Wikipedia.
Update January 2008: I see this post is getting a lot of attention with the recent snowstorms. I’ve posted a panorama photo of almost the entire mountain range covered in snow.
Update January 2016: Apparently the photo I originally had here was deleted from Wikipedia years ago because it wasn’t actually in the public domain. I’ve removed it and replaced it with a photo by Nserrano from the Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC-BY_SA 3.0. It’s not quite the same view, but it’s just as impressive.
Update February 2019: We’re having another winter with lots of storms. I’ve posted some of my photos of the mountains from this month.
An intense deluge woke us up briefly around 5:00 this morning. I think I was awake enough to say “Damn!” and fall back asleep. It reminded me of something that’s been bugging me.
I looked through the first few pages of Otherworld #2 in the comic store yesterday. As at the end of the first issue, one character made a big deal about how it never rains in L.A.
Admittedly, people drive as if it were true. It starts drizzling, and people freak out. Three days of rain is billed as Stormwatch 2005 on the TV news. Some years we don’t get much rain at all.
But every 7 or 8 years, we get drenched.
I’ve heard people cite this year’s near-record rainfall as an example of the extreme weather that climate models predict for global warming. While I do think there are plenty of valid examples, this isn’t one of them. We got just as much rain in 1997—eight years ago—when the UCI campus flooded, stairs turned into waterfalls, streets and underpasses became rivers, and one student infamously bodysurfed naked down the hill next to the Student Center. (A yearbook(?) ad later remarked, “Who says nothing happens in Irvine?”) We got nearly as much rain two years before that. I knew someone from Vermont who brought friends out to visit during the heaviest period of rain. They got their preconceptions handed to them.
Every once in a while the cycle skips. Those skips coincide suspiciously with droughts. I remember tons of rain and the occasional hailstorm in the early 1980s, then it was all dry until 1995.
The thing is, while a very wet winter is uncommon for Southern California, it’s not unusual. In fact, it’s very regular. I recommend looking up El Niño as a starting point.
Dave Hyatt has succeeded in making Safari pass the Acid2 test. (And on the eve of Mac OS X Tiger’s release, too!)
No word on when the fixed version will make it into users’ hands (probably with the first update to Tiger), but he’s posted all the patches for KHTML, so the Konqueror team can start working the fixes back into the main codebase.
Congratulations, Dave!
We didn’t get to see much of the Hilo side of the island. Our last day there, we checked out of the hotel and just started driving, figuring we’d just see how far we could get before turning back to make our flight. We did actually make it to Hilo itself—just in time to turn around. (It was a Sunday anyway, and supposedly there isn’t much open in Hilo on Sundays.)
When we first crossed through Waimea to Hamakua, we took a side trip north to the lookout for Waipio Valley. The valley itself is unreachable without 4-wheel drive (the road has a 25% grade), but the view from the lookout was incredible:
No one liked Susan B. Anthony dollars. “Gold” dollars all but vanished from circulation, as far as I can see (I can’t remember the last time I saw one that wasn’t change from a vending machine.) And while CNN/Money seems skeptical, Congress wants to try for another dollar coin. The catch? Collectability. Modeled after the state quarter series, they’ll release four Presidents a year, in historical order.
OK, it could work. But I have yet to see any of this year’s crop of commemmorative nickels, and I’m not even sure I’ve seen all of 2004’s quarters, never mind any from 2005.
Then there’s the matter of living people:
When the time comes to honor contemporary presidents, such as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and their successors, their likenesses are to be minted whether they are living or dead.
That means by 2018 or so — when Bush and Clinton would be in their early 70s — the United States could break a long-standing tradition that money only honors the deceased.
I had thought this was codified somewhere, but I may be confusing the issue with postage stamps. The important part is keeping current government figures off of the money (too monarchist), but I’m not exactly thrilled about the precedent.
Of course, the real question is this: Why hasn’t the dollar coin caught on? I remember an Australian grumbling about American currency and how “you can have a pocket full of coins and have nothing.” Admittedly Australian currency no longer uses $1 bills (coins go from 5¢ to $2 and bills from $5 to $100), but they had a point: A pocket full of £1, 1€ or even AU $2 coins can buy a lot more than the same pocket full of quarters and dimes.
