There are now 1,400 wildfires burning in the state of California. 364,000 acres have burned so far. That adds up to 570 square miles.
Drought + high temps + lightning.
British TV fans cited how ABC ruined Cracker when it remade it with the late Robert Pastorelli taking Robbie Coltrane’s role of Fitz, especially when news of a US remake of Life on Mars surfaced. (No twitters, meanwhile, on news that the Spanish are remaking the show; also the critics seem to be silent on the botched British remakes of Married with Children, Who’s the Boss? and Outrageous Fortune).
Get ready for more mud-slinging heading westward across the Atlantic. The Americans are having another crack at Cracker, executive-produced by Robert Duvall (who isn’t called Robert in this?), as a TNT original production. No whispers yet in the article about whom will play Fitz. I actually hope it could be Coltrane himself, who has faked an American accent often enough.
Just a couple more photos to add to my "Lens, Pencil or Brush?" series. Quite like the whole concept of playing around and making ones own art from distorting photographic images. (See previous post with attached article on this subject, here>>).
Besides the fact that I don't have the talent to pick up a brush, or the time, money or materials - its also, well, just plain old fashioned fun (and a hell of a lot quicker to do to get that 'creative' fix ha ha).
Have many others that I've fiddled with but not quite ready to blog. Wouldn't say the below are the 'finished' product of any idea, just the finished 'seeds' of an idea in making.
(Below trials:) Looking very wallpaper-ish or of the print-making style when enlarged, these (modified pics) appear to resemble more the art of a brush and canvas-like-composition, than material originating from the lens.
Original stock photo (below here) was taken when at the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show April 2008, another clematis.
The tool box of a makeup artist has the things you would expect to find but also some highly specialised tools that you would just never know about unless you had the opportunity to look and ask.
For anyone who has followed the story of my Uncle, I just wanted to let you know that he passed on today at 1:30pm Atlantic time. He was up and down for all these months....getting over one thing to have another complication take place. So much for an older man to have to endure. I believe that he was a special case for the doctors and staff simply because 1. all this suffering was caused by one of their own by her incompetent surgical skills and unethical conduct regarding it, and 2. because every time they thought he couldn't possibly withstand another procedure or operation, he kept LIVING. He was Superman! Lol. He drew a lot of attention, and when anything was occuring, they immediately were calling in specialists for that particular situation. They had never seen such damage done to someone by a surgeon, and they did not expect him to make it past the first week when he first arrived from the little county hospital to the city where the GOOD doctors are! But he just would not die, even when his kidneys shut down....zap, they started working a little again and they thought that after 1-2 months of dialysis they would be fine. His lung collasped, blood clots in his other lung, body cavity filled with blood and pus, bile leaking from the duct and eating away at his stomach, blood clots in his legs, depression, oh...I can't even remember all the complications that happened to the poor man. And much pain, of course. Shunts and tubes and wires and injuries. But with all these incidents that happened within his body, all due to one simple but extremely botched surgery, he made it. Even when the surgeons didn't think he had the strength to make it through yet a third or fourth surgery....he always did. Like I said....he was Superman! They were amazed, and openly admitted that they never expected this type of severe damage in an older man to be survivable. Surprise!! And he held on for 5 or 6 months. A few days ago, he winked at the doctor and said, "I'm getting better", as he was sitting up in a chair. Then he got an infection. His kidneys started shutting down again, another clot in a lung, and his lungs were filling up with water. The doctor phoned today to let us know that a shunt was gong to be placed in Uncle Bob's lung to help the fluid drain, but he did not expect him to survive. He wanted my other Uncle (who has been the liason for the whole family this entire time) to get the family to come into the hospital today. It was time. And my poor dad.....who has been a good friend with Uncle Bob for over 50 years (as my parents just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary last week!!) couldn't go inside the hospital to say his good-byes. Because where do you get sick? In the hospital, of course. He has caught a case of Shingles, so had to wait outside in the car while other family members went in to say their farewells. And, like I said, he passed on at 1:30pm Atlantic time July 7, 2008. Wow, he sure put up a fight. I had just told my mum a few days ago that if that were me in the hospital.....even with all the family support, including my two wonderful children....I probably would have given up long before this just from sheer exhaustion. And Uncle Bob is twice my age!
There is a celebration in heaven now. He is with Gram (his mother), his father (who passed on when my Aunts and Uncles were just kids themselves), his own son, his brother, his sister (who just passed away a few months ago from cancer), and my cousin Katrina (who walked across the highway one foggy night when she was in her early 20's, and a car hit her at full speed because he just did not see her). And I am sure there are many others that I don't know. Maybe they are jamming up there! *smile*
Speaking of jamming, I know that John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival will want to be at the funeral if he possibly can. This was his friend. But he is putting on concert with The Eagles just a few hour's drive from here....I'm not sure of the date. I hope he can make it. I think probably the jamming sessions have ended now. It just wouldn't be the same without Uncle Bob there.
I've added two videos with this posting. Both are of John Fogerty, for two different reasons.
CCR in 1969. John Fogerty is, of course, the singer. No more jam sessions in my Aunt's basement with my Uncle Bob now and the rest of my family. He just lost his friend. I wanted to pick out a song by CCR that had a happy, jam-type atmosphere. I'm sure they all played this at one point or another....smiling, drinking sodas, eating, talking, and just plain having fun for hours. He's going to miss my Uncle Bob.
Lyrics:
Lyrics: Early in the evenin just about supper time,
Over by the courthouse theyre starting to unwind.
Four kids on the corner trying to bring you up.
Willy picks a tune out and he blows it on the harp.
Chorus:
Down on the corner, out in the street,
Willy and the poorboys are playin;
Bring a nickel; tap your feet.
Rooster hits the washboard and people just got to smile,
Blinky, thumps the gut bass and solos for a while.
Poorboy twangs the rhythm out on his kalamazoo.
Willy goes into a dance and doubles on kazoo.
Chorus
Chorus
You dont need a penny just to hang around,
But if youve got a nickel, wont you lay your money down?
Over on the corner theres a happy noise.
People come from all around to watch the magic boy.
Chorus
Chorus
Chorus
And this is John as we know him now. We all age, and he is no longer the cute young man talking with my dad when my silly older sister (in the early 1970's) tripped going up our backsteps into the house...and he made a joke about it. We are all older and wiser and seen a lot more of life....but we sometimes still trip over tings. Lol. This was recorded in February, 2008.....so this is John as he jams with my family in a basement these days whenever he is in the area....even though he still tours extensively. He is truly a decent man and, as far as I know, has always been. Never a harsh or vulgar word. I'm just showing this video to allow you to realize the age group that he is in now...and how he enjoys jamming informally with my family as we all continued to age and mature.
Lyrics:
I see a bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightnin'.
I see bad times today.
Don't go around tonight,
Well, it's bound to take your life,
There's a bad moon on the rise.
I hear hurricanes a-blowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear rivers overflowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.
Don't go around tonight,
Well, it's bound to take your life,
There's a bad moon on the rise.
All right!
Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we're in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.
Don't go around tonight,
Well, it's bound to take your life,
There's a bad moon on the rise.
Don't go around tonight,
Well, it's bound to take your life,
There's a bad moon on the rise.
What is the most annoying stereotype people say about the country or place where you're from?
About New Mexico: "Oh, do you need a passport to come to the U.S., then? Wow, you speak really good English!" And so forth. One of my friends from NM went to Chicago and someone actually asked her if her family followed the buffalo. She was only in 4th grade at the time, and she was totally confused. We don't even have buffalo in NM, let alone follow them. We actually shop at supermarkets there, like most Americans. Because we are Americans. It gets so bad at times that one of NM's senators had the US Congress pass some resolution to make a special "New Mexico is a State!" Day. I think it's in June. We celebrate it by kicking up our feet with a nice cold margarita and arguing the finer points of living in teepees. (Just as an aside, the native people of New Mexico do not and never did live in teepees. Just so we're clear.)
About Arkansas: Oh, all the ones about the South. Yes, we're all members of the KKK. We all used to own slaves and wish we still did. We all marry our siblings when we're still teenagers. Etc. Pick your stereotype. At least the stereotypes about New Mexico are stupid but essentially harmless. The stereotypes that let all non-Southerners dismiss people on intellectual, emotional, and moral levels--those are harmful stereotypes. My dad used to pick up on it when someone had the idea that anyone with a Southern accent was a half-wit bigot and play up his accent, making it thicker and thicker, until the crucial moment when he would demonstrate that he was actually smarter than they were (and not a bigot, btw).
About rural America: These are quite similar to the ones about the South. Yeah, none of us out here care about the environment the way you incredibly superior urbanites do. We are also bigots. We blindly follow the words of our church leaders, because we are very stupid. We vote exclusively Republican, for the same reason. We carry guns and drive trucks because we either have penis envy (women) or are concerned that we have small penises (men), and not because they are useful tools at all. We are hateful and spiteful and all up in your business all the time about every little thing. Also, apparently urbanites don't gossip, because I hear that a lot, that small-town people gossip. OK. You get the idea. It's all ridiculous and stupid and can be harmful, because, again, it allows urban people to totally dismiss rural people on intellectual, emotional, and moral levels. Don't think that's true? Oh, well, go read "Urban Archipelago" and see what I mean. Yeah, rural people can read, actually.
About America, in general: I think we all know these ones, too. I used to make my ESL students, at the end of their second semester in American university, write an essay that gave some of the stereotypes that they had of America and whether or not they had found those to be true during their stay here. Those essays were quite illuminating. Of course, many of them were along the lines of, "I thought all the women would look like [pick a movie star--Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan came up the most often], but actually some American women are really ugly." And the Russians all seem to have come to the US with the impression that Americans are fat and lazy and then found out that, actually, people here are very "sportif." Heee. Apparently some of my Russian students speak French (also, most of the Russians had very definite opinions about American drinking--we either drank too much or not enough or just in the wrong way, but our alcohol habits came up a lot in the Russian papers).
But a lot of them were along the lines of "Americans don't really care about anything" or "In America, everyone is equal" or "In America, there is no rigid hierarchy" and overall they found all of those to be untrue. My Japanese students in particular didn't know how to handle the fact that the US has a surface equality--we call professors by their first names, for example--but it's only on the surface. Japanese students tended to either keep Japanese-ish formality in their interactions with others, which made it hard for them to make friends and made their professors uncomfortable, or they went way too far and took the surface equalities for fact. One thing no student ever wrote but that I basically inferred from the sum of their papers is that they think that American culture either does not exist or exists only on the surface. Europeans and Asians alike are guilty of this. They all think that since America is "young" compared to their cultures and also has a very superficial superficiality to it, that there is nothing behind it, no substance or depth. It's an attitude that I've ridiculed before, but it's one that even some Americans unthinkingly hold, especially ones who are critical of the nation of their birth. But it's patently incorrect. American culture certainly has roots in Europe, especially the Enlightenment, but it's wrong to think that the US is merely offering a superficial take on what is essentially European culture. The things we care about are thus not the same things that people in other cultures care about, but it's false to say that Americans don't care about anything.
The thing is that these stereotypes about America don't harm me particularly; for the most part, I don't give a fig what people in other countries think of us. Holding these stereotypes did greatly affect my students' abilities to interact appropriately with Americans, though, and colored their time here. I don't especially care, on a day-to-day basis, what urbanites think of me, or Northerners, or whatever. Stereotypes prevent real interaction and real learning, though. And that's kind of sad, especially when (just as an example) Democrats need some votes from the South and/or the rural West, people they have nothing but contempt for, contempt so complete that they think we can't or don't even read the insults they hurl at us. But here's a tip: If you want someone to vote for your party or your agenda, you might not ought to call them bigots and treat them like they're just too stupid to even talk to. At the very least, recognize that this behavior makes you a bigot. Mmmmm-kay?
"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." - Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)
"Often war is waged only in order to show valor; thus an inner dignity is ascribed to war itself, and even some philosophers have praised it as an ennoblement of humanity, forgetting the pronouncement of the Greek who said, "War is an evil in as much as it produces more wicked men than it takes away.": Immanuel Kant
What question do you hate being asked?
Whats for dinner? - that one always sucks.
What did you do today? - This is one your husband asks when he gets home from work and you've spent the day with three kids under the age of four and although it seems like you've been flat out all day doing things, when you think back over the day you can't think of a single one of them. Not one worth discussing anyway.
How long until we get there? - never soon enough.
Where's my school uniform? - usually in the bottom of the dirty washing basket when they ask this about 20 minutes before they're due at school.
Are you wearing that. Out? - usually from a daughter.
The list could go on.
I have a friend in England who calls July 4, Colonial Ingrates Day (I suspect many British do likewise - in jest of course!).
This was our first July 4 in the 'hood and it was very different to the other side of town. Just about everyone in our row had a barbie and it felt like we were all just hanging out together even though we were separated by fences.
The neighbourhood was lit up with illegal (to DC) fireworks until 2 o'clock in the morning! We, somewhat apprehensively, watched for escaping embers trying to light up our awning or wooden deck.
The kid from across the alley tried very hard to set our timber fence on fire by lighting all his fireworks right next to it. His house has a back fence of wire cyclone fencing - obviously not nearly as exciting as the prospect of burning a neighbour's fence! Luckily he ran out of fireworks before he damaged property or his limbs.
We could not see the fireworks on the National Mall but we could see the red glow in the sky over the houses across the alley from us. I think that "feathery" line is part of a local firework:
Our gun shot triangulation system must have been going nuts - all those bangs & pops! And smoke everywhere:
I know these shots are not as spectacular as some people have posted of fireworks displays but remember these are just in my city neighbourhood!
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In case you are not aware, bees are usually necessary to pollinate flowering plants. This includes trees such as apple, almond and olive. Also crops like squash, tomatoes, carrots, even potatoes. Berries need bees to pollinate them. So does tea. Some species of onions need bees to pollinate them. Other insects also pollinate, such as butterflies, wasps, and the like, and a few species of birds and bats. But bees are the primary pollinators. More than 3,000 plant species are grown for food by humans. If a plant is not pollinated, it can not bear fruit and thus, seeds. Potatoes and other root vegetables are different: we eat their root bulbs. But they must flower before forming seeds and therefore, continuing their species. Some plants are wind-pollinated such as corn and wheat. Can you imagine a world without pumpkins, tomato sauce, wine, blueberry pie or olives? Many farm-raised animals eat bee-pollinated foods. Legumes like alfalfa and clover feed a lot of them. And what would happen to the creatures in the wild, which eat food such as blackberries or grapes? They would disappear, and so would the predators that eat them. Or how about a world without many of the flowers we love? Like farms themselves, over the years in the U.S. and other countries, beekeepers have become industrialised. Big time bee-keepers haul their hives around the country on a massive lorry (tractor-trailer) truck and visit the farms. Anyone with any type of biology knowledge would say, that is a bad idea. The bees will become inner-bred and not diversify their genes. This will weaken them and make them more vulnerable to disease. Also this will restrict their diet and make them more resistant to infection. In 2006 it became apparent that something horrible was happening: bees were not returning to their hives. Where did they go? (maybe they went back to Jupiter, where they came from, having had enough of global warming and stoopid humans) This caused a collapse of their colonies. Researchers in the US, France, and other countries scrambled to figure it out. They found that bees were suffering from malnutrition, fungus, viruses, and disorientation. They named the syndrome Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). Also they discovered that beekeepers would purchase bees from other countries, mainly Australia. When you import critters or plants from other countries, you usually end up with diseases infecting native species (in North Carolina in the late 80s, it was discovered that a disease that had ridden into the country on Japanese dogwood trees was infecting indigenous dogwoods and quickly killing them off). What is apparent is that a new kind of pesticide, clothianidin, kills bees, and was banned in Germany almost immediately. The USDA approved it anyway. The company who manufactures it, Bayer, claims it is perfectly safe if "applied correctly". "We are saddened by the loss of the bees…" said Dr. Richard Schmuck (Are you kidding me? Yes, this is really his name), a Bayer scientist, in a news release. CCD is still on the rise in the United States. A survey by Apiary Inspectors of America found that between September and March, 36% of colonies have been affected, as opposed to 31% the previous year. In China, in the Sichuan Province (the one hit by the recent big earthquake) where pears are grown, bees are now extinct. In the 1980s, the Chinese government decided to increase the pear orchards and step up pesticide usage. This makes it apparent that pesticides are a leading factor in this global problem. One Chinese pear farmer is hand-pollinating his pear blossoms, which is very expensive and time consuming, and not as many pears are produced by the trees. He says with a sad smile, that he is just not as efficient as a bee. Am I a doomsayer? No, I am a realist and I report the facts. Bee! I'm expecting you! The frogs got home last week, You'll get my letter by Emily Dickinson
Was saying yesterday
To someone you know
That you were due.
Are settled, and at work;
Birds, mostly back,
The clover warm and thick.
The seventeenth; reply
Or better, be with me,
Yours, Fly.
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