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Round Table: If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it.

Usually they put movie quotes on the sign. This year they’ve taken to posting tributes to recently-passed celebrities. Usually in the form of relevant movie quotes. It’s been a year for that.

In related news, I found a bottle of Snozzberry Soda on Saturday. A few days later, the timing seemed really weird. Continue reading →

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Target Pokéball

I went to Target this morning and found that someone had painted one of their signature red ball traffic barriers as a Pokéball. At first I figured it was a local thing, but I ended up having to make a second run, hit a different Target, and found that they’d done the same thing.

I don’t know if it’s regional or chain-wide, but it’s clearly more than a one-off!

Target Pokéball

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Flowers with moon and jupiter

I spotted this view of the moon and Jupiter bordered by flowers while at the Orange County Fair last week. While I love the look of the shot, it’s terribly grainy and full of compression artifacts. My phone isn’t great at things like zoom or low light conditions. I’ve been using it as my main camera for the past year, since it’s great in bright daylight, and my old camera is riddled with dust I can’t get rid of. But this, plus plans for a vacation where I knew I’d really want a working zoom, combined to be the last straw.

Major criteria:

  • Serious optical zoom
  • Low light
  • Long exposure
  • Wi-Fi would be nice, but not critical

I checked out a bunch of cameras and settled on a Canon PowerShot SX710 with 30x(!) optical zoom. They’ve automated a lot of the mode settings the older models used to have, but there are still a few specific modes you can use and you can still take photos with manual settings. And yes, you can transfer photos over Wi-Fi, to a device, a computer, or a cloud service.

One of the first things I did after charging the battery was go outside to see how it handled night shooting. Then I looked up and saw the moon.

Moon

So far, so good!

Amusingly, this happened the last time I bought a camera too.

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I received a scam email claiming to be from the IMF, all about who to contact if you fell for an advance fee fraud scam claiming to be from the IMF. All you have to do to get your money back is send your info and $150 to Barrister so-and-so to set up an account, just contact this GMail address…

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Bleeding tree stump

I’ve described sap as “tree blood” before, but this seems a little too apt.

There are a bunch of tipuana trees mixed in with the jacarandas and palms around the area where I work. (One fewer now.) They look a lot like jacarandas with yellow flowers instead of purple, though the leaves are a little bit wider and the bark is just a bit different. (They make just as big a mess, too.) Tipuanas look close enough that I actually mistook them for jacarandas until I saw them flowering — which, oddly enough, I haven’t seen any of them do yet this year.

And now I know that they have blood-red sap.

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The Beat’s offhand mention of Anaheim GardenWalk got me curious and I went looking around for more info on the mall’s current status. The last few times I’ve been there, it’s been practically a ghost town: behind the anchor restaurants out front, there were a handful of stores, then nothing, nothing, more nothing, and finally a movie theater way at the back and a Johnny Rockets that probably only stuck it out because it was so close to the theater. (The mall opened in 2008 — very bad timing — and never recovered.)

Apparently they’re trying to reinvent it as a restaurant/entertainment hub, with House of Blues moving over from Downtown Disney and more luxury hotels. (What is it with the luxury hotels?) Edit: I think I’ve been to the old location a half-dozen times, and it did suffer from sightline issues and crowding. They’re taking over part of the movie theater at Garden Walk to build the new venue, which will be bigger, add some seating areas in addition to the standing room, and have some of the side spaces as well. I think the HoB has a better shot than the rest of the mall, honestly.

So I’m not convinced, but if it works out, it could benefit WonderCon next year. It’s not a super-long walk (except in hot weather), and if they have a shuttle for parking like last year, it would make it even easier to get to.

From a comment at The Beat’s article on the Guardians of the Galaxy ride opening at Disney’s California Adventure.

2026 Update: I haven’t been back in ages, probably not since the last WonderCon I attended in 2019 (if then). But the mall’s still there, and the House of Blues at the back and anchor restaurants at the front are still open. There are still a lot of empty spaces on the map, though, especially on the upper level. Johnny Rocket’s apparently is still there, which I think makes it the only restaurant to have closed at Del Amp and stayed open at Garden Walk.