I’m half-following the build up to San Diego Comic-Con. I haven’t been there since 2014, though I’ve been to WonderCon and Long Beach every year. The first year I couldn’t get tickets I shrugged. It’s exhausting, and there are other cons. I didn’t even try this year or last.
But now I find I’ve started to miss it.
In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, when the Dementors search the Hogwarts Express, Professor Lupin derisively says that none of them in the compartment are hiding Sirius Black in their robes.
But Ron has Scabbers in his robes, not knowing his “pet rat” is the actual murderer who committed the crime Black was wrongly imprisoned for!
If they were looking for the fugitive mass murderer, they were in the right place after all.
Another building under (severe) renovation near LAX. The Solo movie posters are still up on this side of the construction wall, more than a month later, though the posters around the corner were replaced with ads for Mamma Mia today.
Update (Monday): The posters on this site were replaced over the weekend. Still, it was a long tenure for the first Star Wars movie to disappoint at the box office.
Update (7/24): After only two weeks, the Mamma Mia posters were painted over. It seems weird since the Solo posters stayed up for so long.
Californians: If you can vote this November, don’t sit this one out.
We have a governor to choose. We have representatives to select. And we need to shut down the 3-Californias plan hard. It’s a terrible, outlandish, unpopular idea…but in a midterm election (low turnout already) with the specter of voter suppression? Don’t rely on it being too outlandish to pass. No one expected Brexit to happen. No one expected Trump to even be nominated, never mind win the election. Outlandish doesn’t mean impossible.
So check your voter registration status. Make sure it hasn’t been cancelled or otherwise lost, because that does happen.
Breaking up California’s economic and electoral power isn’t going to help California much. And if you think the water situation is bad now, wait until everything’s split across three states, one of which doesn’t touch the Sierras or the Colorado…
You needed to fix your car. You could have gone to the established shop, but the new guy told you they were crooked. You went with the new guy.
Now he’s stripping your car, telling you he’s doing a great job & complaining about the cops investigating a stolen car parts ring.
Back in 2005, we visited the Kilauea volcano in Hawaii. There were active lava flows at the time, but the main caldera was only venting gases (this was before the lava lake formed in Halema‘uma‘u).
We followed the road around the main caldera, then down to the coast to see where lava flows had obliterated the road and look at active flows waaaay off in the distance.
With the current eruption transforming the area, I’ve just uploaded an album to Flickr. You can look at the full-sized images there, or look back at my original blog posts in which I describe the trip.
Expanded from a post at Photog.Social
Those “Call one number and we’ll connect you to key decision makers on this issue” campaigns are convenient, but I wish more of them would…
Show a list of all the people they’re going to connect you to. I’d like to know how many calls I’m making before I start.
Mark which lawmakers are already co-sponsors so we can adjust our message between “thanks for supporting” and “please support.” Sure, I can look it up, but the whole point is to make this easier.
Update the campaign as things change. One wanted me to call my state reps, but copied and pasted the information from a federal bill on the same issue. And it included my senator, even though the bill had already passed the senate and was in the assembly. I took one look at the misdirected talking points and ignored them. I also skipped calling the senator who had already voted for a bill that had already passed that chamber. I wonder how many people cared enough about the issue to call, but relied on the campaign for the specifics, and ended up calling the wrong people about the wrong bill?
