I could not believe I managed to spot these next to each other. I mean, Bart and Keystone?
It’s right up there with Flash Transport.
Snow!
Okay, so it’s ~40 miles away (and likely to stay that far, barring a freak storm or new ice age), and it’s not much (compare this April 2006 view)…and I half-suspect it’s all melted by now (this photo was taken Monday morning, and it looked lighter by Tuesday), but still…
Say, all those places that are getting flooded—we’d be happy to take some of that extra water off your hands.
Not the Flash
Speedster? Check.
“World’s fastest man?” Check.
Skin-tight costume? Check.
Wings on head? Check.
Lightning motif? Check.
Round insignia on chest? Check.
Yellow boots? Check.
I first saw this ad for movietickets.com with 3:10 To Yuma a few months ago. He’s trying to impress his date by running and buying the tickets for their movie while they’re still at dinner. The show’s sold out, but it turns out she’s already bought the tickets online. Noticed a poster outside afterward. Amazingly, they’ve got the video clip online. And they’re selling posters. *shudder*
I haven’t been quite sure what to do with it, since I’m not sure I’m ready to start in on listing every parody of the Flash to ever appear in media.
Hmm, now that I think about it the Blur in that Baby Ruth commercial back in the 90s was blue, too.
Before and After
On a clear day in early October, I went driving up into the Tustin Foothills to see what I could see. I took a bunch of photos at a turnout, and also stopped at an intersection that gave me a nice view of Peters Canyon, the hills behind it, and Saddleback in the background. I used this photo a few weeks later for my drought post.
After the Santiago Fire, I waited for another clear day (which took several weeks), and set out to do it again and see just how far north the fire had reached. I managed to get a great pair of before and after photos from the intersection of Foothill and Lemon Heights.
October 6, 2007. Click for a larger version
November 24, 2007. Click for a larger version
While the orchards seem to have been spared, you can see the field in the foreground looks scorched, and most of the trees making up firebreaks seem to have died. More dramatic are the hillsides. Before the fire, you can see expansive dark patches of scrub, wide expanses of lighter dried grass, and occasional dark green bushes. Now it’s all dirt, except for the blackened remnants of the bushes. There are several gullies whose sides were hidden and softened by the ground cover, but are now starkly visible. And after this week’s rain, they’re probably eroded even more.
A few notes: The air was somewhat clearer for the “after” photo, and it was earlier in the afternoon, so the angle of the sunlight helped pick out terrain features a bit better.
Frozen Shows
I ordered tickets for an upcoming production of The Phantom of the Opera (the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical) and something occurred to me: In all likelihood it’s going to be an exact replica of the 22-year-old London production (with a few concessions to the realities of touring). When did this start happening?
Most of the time when someone puts on a play that’s been done before, they take the script and do their own thing with the sets, costumes, and performances. This is generally true with older musicals as well; people generally aren’t worried about seeing the original staging of, say, The Sound of Music. But these days, when a big show goes on tour, audiences expect the same experience they’d get on Broadway or in the West End.
Les Miserables opened in London in 1985, went through some tweaks on the way to Broadway, and then every production worldwide for the next 10 years was identical save for cast and translations. They retooled the show for the 10th anniversary, and those changes stuck around until they decided to cut it so that they wouldn’t have to pay the orchestra overtime.
Same with Miss Saigon: opened in London, tweaked as it went to Broadway, then frozen until 2003, when it was retooled to make touring simpler (fewer sets on palettes, using a projection of a helicopter instead of a model on a boom, etc. And let me tell you, watching a show about the Vietnam War during the week leading up to the Iraq War was an odd experience.)
It’s probably been 10 years since I saw Phantom (not counting the movie, about which the less said, the better), but I’ll be surprised if it’s much different (aside from cast) than the last time. I’m sure that’s what the rest of the audience is looking for, after all.
Proportionate Response: You’re Doing it Wrong
Yesterday, Colleen Doran wrote about several recent human rights abuse cases, including that of Gillian Gibbons, the British teacher in Sudan who was sentenced to 15 days in prison and deportation for “insulting religion” because she allowed her students to name a teddy bear Mohammed, after one of their fellow students. And she could have gotten a lashing for the “crime.”
This morning I heard on the radio that there were Sudanese protesting the teacher’s sentence— “Good for them, ” I thought, briefly. “At least someone has sense.”—and demanding instead that she be executed. “Wait, what?”
Seriously, what kind of thought process leads you to believe that killing someone is an appropriate response to that person letting someone else name a toy? This should have ended with her apology. That’s it. Execution? I guess life is cheap when you’re busy killing each other anyway, and a foreign infidel woman’s life must be even cheaper.
I hate to say it, but in that climate, deportation is probably the safest thing that could happen to her.
Full-Spectrum Coffee
Between cash, lunch and an errand, I walked the full length of the Irvine Spectrum today, and realized there will soon be 7 coffee shops in or near the shopping center—and 4 of them are Starbucks.
It opened with just one: a Diedrich Coffee, attached to Barnes & Noble.
Phase 2 (from the movie theaters to the carousel) added a Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.
Phase 3 (from the carousel to the ferris wheel) doubled the number, adding a Kelly’s Coffee & Fudge, and a Starbucks inside Barnes & Noble, which moved into the new section.
Somewhere around then the Diedrich closed. Without the bookstore traffic, it was off in a corner where only people going to restaurants would see it.
Then they put in a Nordstrom, with a Nordstrom e-Bar.
Then they extended the mall past the Nordstrom, put a Target at the end, and put a Starbucks in the Target.
Then they built an apartment complex across the street, and put a Starbucks in the apartment complex.
Now they’ve gone back to the first section, adding a new row of shops in front of the movie theater. And they’re filling in a corner long left vacant…with another Starbucks.