Quartz City

(Insert obligatory photo of Killer Bees sketch from vintage Saturday Night Live here) Bees get tired of working conditions and that tired “busy as a bee” nonsense, and drop out of society (and apparently the planet).

VISALIA, Calif., Feb. 23 — David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.

“I have never seen anything like it,” Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. “Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home.”

This story is weird by itself, but when chimpanzees are using spears, and colossal squids are on the advance, I’d be thinking about getting out of Dodge too.

UCI just demolished their Gehry and now Tustin is going to tear down one of the most iconic buildings in all of Orange County: the old Tustin MCAS blimp hangar.

A historic wooden hangar that housed military blimps during World War II will be razed to make way for homes, businesses, parks and schools, Tustin city leaders decided this week.

The City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to reject proposals for a motocross facility, a culinary complex, shops catering to the elderly and a futuristic airship building center. Each would have preserved the hangar. The proposals, city staff found and council members agreed, were neither economically viable nor properly planned.

“Overall, they were very poorly done,” Councilman Tony Kawashima said. “They were not specific and didn’t comply with our questions.”

Hangar 29 is one of two blimp shelters on the former Tustin Marine Corps Air Station that are on the National Register of Historic Places. The hangars, more than 1,000 feet long, 300 feet wide and 170 feet high, are the world’s largest all-wood buildings, according to Paul Freeman’s “Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields” website.

The hangars were built in 1942 for Navy blimps that prowled the Pacific coast for Japanese submarines. After World War II, the base was largely idle until the Korean War, when it became the Marine Corps’ primary West Coast helicopter base. The base was closed in 1999, and the military entered into an agreement with the city and Orange County to allow the redevelopment of the land and hangars. The second hangar, which is on county land, is being turned into a sports and entertainment complex.

The developers who were turned down by the Tustin council were angry Wednesday, saying the city never seriously considered their proposals.

Shaheen Sadeghi, who created the Lab and the Camp shopping centers in Costa Mesa, had proposed building within the hangar a culinary community, which would have included a cooking school, artisan food shops, gourmet cafes and a year-round farmers market. He said city officials should have collaborated with developers and the community to figure out the best use for the hangar.

The vote “was just an exercise. They probably had a very good idea they didn’t want to save the building and went through the motions,” he said.

“Orange County needs as many iconic buildings as possible, because we don’t have much of a history. Why tear it down and put up another retail center or office complex? I don’t think anyone needs us to build another Starbucks ”

He said that city estimates that refurbishing the hangar would cost tens of millions of dollars were short-sighted because an interesting redevelopment project would eventually bring much more sales tax revenue into city coffers.

Lance Brown of Aliso Viejo, one of the backers of the motocross facility, said he had lined up $42.5 million in financing from the motorcycle industry.

Council members “don’t have the sense that there are young people in their neighborhoods that need something to do,” he said. “I don’t think they ever had any intention of allowing a reuse of the hangar.”

City officials said that was untrue.

Apparently, a listing on the National Register of Historic Places doesn’t guarantee you anything.

Mars as painted by Chesley Bonestell for Collier’s in 1952.

Mars as photographed by the Rosetta spacecraft last Sunday morning.

• Volvo 1800 Picture Gallery
  Pictures, promo photos, etc. of Volvo’s P1800 sports car
  (tags: volvo auto photography)
• Jules Verne: Collecting the Books of Jules Verne and Ephemera of French author Jules Verne
  (tags: retrofuture science.fiction book)

• Leonora Carrington gallery
  (tags: art painting carrington)
• Brian Jonestown Massacre archives
  (tags: music)
• Mike Davis: Fear and Money in Dubai
  Mike Davis on Dubai: hypercapitalism in turn shaping urban design & policy.
  (tags: architecture dubai urbanism)
• Imitating A Scanner Darkly | Illustrator Techniques
  How to recreate the animation style of A Scanner Darkly in Illustrator
  (tags: art design howto illustrator)
• Delia Derbyshire - an audio chronology
  (tags: synthesizer audio bbc music)
• Joe Idoni’s aircraft crash site photo galleries
  Photo gallery of old aircraft crash sites in Southern California.
  (tags: archeology aviation california)

When Zippy met Harbie. (see the full strip)

My alma mater UC Irvine has always had an odd image and self-esteem problem. Of course it doesn’t help when your campus has had problems with body snatchers, assault by radioactivity, a sign that cost more than some buildings, and a medical center under constant criminal investigation (a running joke was that the reason UCI wanted a law school was to supply enough lawyers for all the med center scandals, but even that fell through). The latest UCI news story? While other colleges are vying for starchitecture and name-brand buildings, UCI actually tears down their Gehry. Go anteaters!

Home again Garden Grove? Speaking of image problems and Orange County: Garden Grove (a name which I actively have to remember because its alternative Garbage Grove name is so widespread) still can’t figure out how to profit from being next to Disneyland. And no one is really hopeful about it.

The Antarctic kite skiers, who ran across those mysterious tracks awhile back, made it to the Pole Of Inaccessibility. A bust of Lenin which was left by a Soviet expedition 49 years ago is still sitting there - looking out over the ice.

Since no one in 2007 is really interested in Nine Inch Nails, I’m not surprised that the conspiracy-themed marketing for the new album is equally as empty. Let’s see how long it takes until it backfires into mooninite-scale pandemonium.

A worthier puzzle is the Perplex City game. Andy Darley of Middlesex worked out the clues to find the Cube and won the £100,000 prize. Game 2 will start soon (and maybe this time I’ll actually play the dang thing)

I’m always impressed with the images that come down via Astronomy Picture Of The Day, but February 8th’s picture of galaxy cluster Abell S0740 has stopped me dead in my tracks. The only feeling that’s similar was when I first saw the rings of Saturn through a telescope.

And finally, there is nothing I can add to this:

Norman Mailer created a film in the late 60s called MAIDSTONE. He played the part of a famous movie director who is considering a run for the presidency. Rip Torn played his potential assassin. At the end of filming, Rip appeared to get a little too far into his role, and he attacked Mailer on camera with a hammer, drawing blood. Mailer retaliated by viciously biting into Torn’s ear, drawing even more blood. This is the fight.

A little something I noticed in the latest trailer for Grindhouse:

An Alpine White 1970 Dodge Challenger with the license plate “OA 5599.” There’s only one of those…

In short, it’s difficult to have a bad day traveling around Italy. Details to follow over the next couple of days.