As I was about to get into the car after lunch, I spotted a full-circle halo around the sun.
I’m fairly certain it’s a 22º halo based on the size. Continue reading
Category: Life
More Holiday Creep
Spotted the following in a grocery store on Saturday, three days before Valentine’s Day.
I think the holiday decoration/candy/card industry has started selling two holidays ahead. Christmas stuff was out in October, with both Halloween and Thanksgiving ahead. Here’s Easter stuff on sale with both Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day in the future.
Decoration-wise, there’s not much between Easter and Independence Day. Sure, people get the day off for Memorial Day, but the closest you get to a themed aisle in the grocery store is that you can buy American flags in more places. After the big Fourth of July patriotic blow-out (which of course is on sale by June), the holiday-industrial complex doesn’t really get going again until October—though back-to-school sales seem to be getting earlier all the time. I wonder when they’ll start going straight into back-to-school from graduation sales?
Smoke and Fog
Monday morning dawned foggy. By the time we left for work, most of the fog had burned off, but we looked out the car window and saw a huge, billowing gray cloud hugging close to the ground. If this had been the usual fire season, or if there had been no fog to start with (or if there had been time for coffee to take effect), I think we would’ve both immediately recognized it as smoke from a brush fire. The Sierra fire in the Cleveland National Forest had started just a few hours earlier.
There was still fog around, though. Continue reading
Smoking Dutch Cleanser
Here’s something I just don’t understand about the whole electronic eavesdropping controversy.
Given that FISA warrants are:
- Easy to obtain
- Secret
- Obtainable retroactively, so you can legally start listening in immediately
Why is it necessary to eavesdrop without one? What’s so hard about getting a warrant?
While we’re at it, given that the bad guys almost certainly knew we were spying on them as much as we could already, what’s so dangerous about revealing the warrantless spying program?
Instead of these endless self-justifications, it would be nice to see President Bush or Attorney General Gonzales say, “You’re right, we should have gotten warrants. From now on, we will.” End of story. Instead of digging in their heels and insisting on powers that should scare the hell out of anyone, no matter what their party affiliation.
Blogging to the top
Molly Holzschlag writes about the Accidental Blogger Effect—what happens when you post something offhand that somehow ends up as a prime search result, leading to that offhand remark taking on a life of its own. I made a comment about how Another One Bites the Dust turned into a 3-year-long thread about Frosty, Heidi and Frank, but it occurs to me that the often-viewed Fallen Angel cover art I posted about last week is the same phenomenon.
Sunrise, Sunset
The first photo is from Wednesday morning around 8:00. Katie took it on our drive to work. There’s actually another shot that shows more of the sky, but this one is more striking. The second shows tonight’s sunset as seen from the Metro Pointe parking lot. Yes, it’s a freeway in the foreground, but the sunset itself was incredible. Both thumbnails are linked to larger copies of the photos.
Finally, here are some vaguely lenticularish clouds I saw looking north at sunset on Friday. This one’s full-size already:
Rummy Caption Contest
The BBC has posted an interesting article on the US Military’s plans for Internet operations. But that’s not what I want to write about here. What I want to write about is this accompanying photo of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld:
The article mentions that messages put out for psychological operations in foreign markets are making their way back to American audiences. I’m not sure this photo qualifies as PsyOps, but I think it does qualify for a caption contest.*
Please post your suggestions in the comments.
*OK, you won’t win anything, but with luck the other entries will make you laugh.