If I stepped out into untamed water
If I were to melt–
All this worldly spray paint
Swirling in bright whirlpools over the tiles–
If the sugar, the sweetness dripped off the light
Would the rain wash away in forty minutes
All I have left of self and greed?
Category: Life
I almost saw this happen once…
Back at the UCI Artslab one of my co-workers opened a CD-ROM and the disc kept spinning and flew out at him (though it didn’t actually hit him). I was on the other side of the room and just missed seeing it.
Cybernetic counselors….
Typing the title “C.R.C.” after a counselor’s name today, I started out with my finger on D instead of C and nearly turned her into a Farscape maintenance droid.
Don’t think she’d have been happy about that.
Blustery Night, Blustery Day
The Santa Ana winds are back. I spent a considerable amount of time last night wondering just how strong the glass is in our windows, particularly the big sliding door onto the balcony. We had several brief power outages, the first just long enough for us to head for the flashlights and convince us to not turn the computers back on, the rest lasting only a few seconds each, but plenty long enough to set all the digital clocks blinking again. Three cheers for battery backup in alarm clocks.
The drive to work was… interesting. First we saw one of the apartment complex’s flags had been knocked over, the pole sheared off at the base. Then there was the cop directing everyone away from a nearby street (we couldn’t see anything down there, but we figured maybe a tree had fallen across the road or something). Then there were huge fallen eucalyptus branches by the side of the road, and a number of young trees that had pulled their stakes down with them as they went. At one point traffic slowed to a crawl, until we passed several police cars, a fire engine, an ambulance, and a four-car accident in which a smaller car had hit an SUV from behind, actually pushing the front end underneath the SUV. (And just yesterday we’d been talking about the dangers being in a small car in a collision with an SUV.) After I dropped Katie off, I had to avoid a large tree limb that had fallen into the right lane.
On the other hand, I think all the tumbleweeds went last November.
They have customers who don’t?
For a long time Amazon.com has provided a short list of “Customers who bought this book also bought…”
Well, I saw a new one today:
Presumably nudists don’t buy puppy-footed one-pieces for newborns, even for their clothes-wearing friends.
Vaccini, Vaccina
So there’s finally a plan to start up smallpox vaccinations. The bad news is, it’s likely to become necessary. Worse news is, I may be at risk for some of the nasty side effects. As Katie pointed out, it worked so well the first time that no one made any effort to improve it. The good news is, they hope to have a safer vaccine by the time it’s made available to the public in 2004.
We’ll see.
In other news, while looking for a reference to the NPR story, I found this story about London’s Killer Fog of ’52 and the history of smog going back to twelfth-century London. So smog not only predated the Industrial Revolution, it predated Shakespeare.
And finally, the other story I heard on the way in, about military-funded butterfly research. Apparently the Air Force is very interested in building insect-sized robotic flying cameras, and at that scale it makes sense to use insects as a model. They could be sent down into caves to locate enemy troops, or sent into buildings to check on hostage situations. (The paranoid in me is also saying they could spy on ordinary people, but it’s a lot cheaper to just search the place when they’re not home.) So if someone’s studying insect flight, the military is quite happy to fund it.
Fallen Trees and Tumbleweeds
Despite what you might believe, tumbleweeds are actually quite common in suburban Southern California. They often grow by the side of the freeway, occasionally getting picked up by the wind and bouncing across cars.
Never is this more noticeable than during the Santa Ana winds, which seasonally sweep out from the desert to the coast, blowing over trees, knocking out power lines, and sending the smog out to sea. (Unfortunately, by the second or third day, all the dust from the desert has taken its place.) The two of us got some great shots from the most recent Santa Anas which hit during the week leading up to Thanksgiving.
A tumbleweed seeks relief at a fire hydrant.
Even a support stake couldn’t keep this tree up.
Hey! Get off the road! (Yes, tumbleweeds can get that big.)