Ordinarily, there wouldn’t be anything odd about this sign. But look at the placement.
Why do they need a No Parking sign in the middle of the lawn? It’s a new sign, too—they just redid the entire lawn last year.
Seriously, I don’t think they’re going to have much of a problem with people parking on the lawn in front of an office building in Irvine.
Come to think of it, though, this is only 50 feet or so from the crosswalk warning device.
I just found out that Empire of Ivory, the fourth book in the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik, came out today!
The series takes place in an alternate version of the Napoleonic Wars in which dragons exist, and are used in warfare. This results in an odd mix of naval battles and aerial dogfighting, with full human crews carrying bombs, guns, etc. Dragons bond with the first human they see (not telepathically, like in the Pern books, just emotionally), so captains in the Aerial Corps are given quite a bit of leeway—though the entire Corps is considered rather unsavory by the general public.
It focuses on naval Captain Will Laurence, who captures a French vessel just as an egg is ready to hatch. The dragonlet Temeraire imprints on him, and he is whisked away from the sea and into the world of air warfare. (Think of it as Master and Commander with dragons instead of ships.) During the first 3 books they go through training together, travel to China to discover Temeraire’s heritage, and find themselves called back to Europe in the thick of the war.
Our friend andrea-wot lent us the first three books last year, and we both really enjoyed them. In fact, Naomi Novik has joined the short list of authors whose new books I’ll pick up sight unseen (currently sharing that spot with Neil Gaiman and Greg Keyes), though for some reason I thought this one was coming out in October. I’m definitely going to be stopping by Borders or Barnes & Noble tomorrow to pick this up. If you’re at all interested, I highly recommend picking up the first book, His Majesty’s Dragon (in the US; in the UK it’s just called Temeraire) and giving it a test flight.
Every once in a while, I manage to get a decent shot with my cell phone camera (currently a RAZR V3T).
Taken August 4 at 6:20pm. Cleaned up slightly to remove a digital glitch just above the cloud.
I just realized that as of last week, this blog has been online for 5 years.
Crazy, huh?
This is the 1,398th post. We’ve got 2,307 comments at the moment, including pingbacks. Typical traffic these days seems to run around 650-700 views on weekdays, 550-600 on weekends. Most of it seems to be people searching for images.
The top-viewed posts lately have been:
Arr! Barry Allen may not know how to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day, but he do celebrate Jog Like a Pirate Day!
From Showcase #13, it’s “Around the World in 80 Minutes,” a tale of the Flash. (Mostly he runs around the world, helps people out, and gets kissed by women. Aye, it be good to be a superhero.)
(Cover via GCD. This story appears in Showcase Presents: The Flash vol.1 and The Flash Archives vol.1.)
If ye be wonderin’ why this site be lookin’ strange this day, wonder no further. It be Talk Like a Pirate Day.
This day o’ pirate speak is brought to ye by the Text Filter Suite of Dougal Campbell.
I might be recommendin’ ye set course for the sea shanty, Voyage of the Fyrefawkes, or embark upon the Tall Ships of San Diego. Or if ye wish, ye might search yerself fer more pirate tales.
