Quartz City

Just stepped out for a coffee and noticed a new column of black smoke a little bit east of where most of the smoke has been coming from. I wonder if this is the Acton fire. The Mt. Wilson Solar Tower webcam has a better image.

HPWREN has webcams distributed throughout San Diego County. The Lyons Peak webcam is pretty close to the action.

I know I’ve been harsh on Twitter before, but the KPBS and LA Times Twitter streams are pretty informative along with this Google Earth/Map page.

Franklin Avenue notes that California license place numbering has incremented up to 6xxxyyy style numbers. Not necessarily a big deal itself, but there’s a greater question that has remained unanswered and it’s something that’s been nagging me for years. I’m serious here, as a Californian this irritates me to no end…

When the HELL is California going to stop using that horrid script font? That Mistral font knockoff screams “I’m a logo for a dubious 1980s Redondo Beach nightclub/cocaine front for yacht rockers and their Magnum P.I.-style red Ferrari 308s!”

How come Oregon, Nevada and Arizona can consistently have terrific looking license plates but California can’t? Even the better looking California plates, the whale, Lake Tahoe, and the new Sierra Nevada one are ruined by that awful font.

Attention California DMV! It’s time to solve this blight upon our highways. There are several metric tons of graphic designers in California who could use some work and some sort of competition is in order to finally pound a stake into that ugly script.

P.S. While you’re at it, why not offer new replicas of the classic yellow-on-black plate? (Make ‘em reflective so the CHP will be happy). Nevada offers something similar with their 1982 plain blue plate replica. Nothing kills me more than seeing a classic car with a current-style license plate on it.

P.P.S. A plate redesign does not mean you can splat your state URL on it. Indiana, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, and Michigan all do it and each one looks like a civic cry for help.

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.

Holy cow!

Irvine-based Diedrich Coffee, conceding defeat in the coffee shop duel with Starbucks, agreed to sell 40 stores it owns to its Seattle rival for $13.5 million.

The local company will remain in business as a roaster and wholesaler of coffee beans. The sale includes all company-owned Diedrich and Coffee People locations. Franchise stores aren’t included in the sale.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I thought that the coffee bar cold war wasn’t in danger of heating up anytime soon. The most irritating side-effect of this for us itinerant IT workers that Diedrich’s free Wi-Fi will disappear for Starbucks’ pay system.

Much of the web has been wringing their hands over the giant relief map in China that someone stumbled across on Google Earth. It’s a cool map and yeah, there’s an element of mysteriousness to it but calling it “The Riddle of China’s Area 51″ is pretty overblown, even for the web.

Believe it or not, there’s a similar relief map sitting out in the desert just east of Joshua Tree. The concrete map was built in 1942 as a training aid for Patton’s army who were preparing for the invasion of North Africa and covered the entire training area from Indio out to the Arizona border. The training center was built pretty ad hoc and not much was left out there except for tank tracks and foundations, but the map endured for a while.

I’m not sure when this picture was taken (I got it from Larry Digera who put together a sky trail route for visiting pilots), but it should give you an idea of what it used to look like.

I was first there in 1983 and armed with an old copy of Desert magazine I was able to find the map, but the intervening forty years of exposure had weathered the old map into an unrecognizable series of funny-looking hummocks. It’s still there now - it’s inside the fenced-off area in the middle of this photo.

Almost exactly twelve years ago, these cheerful-looking Stepford Wives & Children were celebrating their non-individuality and neighborhood “sameness.”

“SAN CLEMENTE-On Optima, as on all the surrounding byways, there is no room for ostentatious individualism.

The houses in Richmond Pointe are neatly packed and hygienically Mediterranean. Strict codes prevent homeowners from adorning their places with nonconforming colors or add-ons, or parking cars in front of their own driveways. Each house has one of four floor plans.

But the neighbors who live behind the stucco facades say the exterior conformity has bestowed a special neighborhood-ness - a secure, tidy, friendly feel - upon their little community.

Check out the whole article, it’s a hearty helping of that old-time Orange County xenophobia. Whenever you find yourself thinking that “OC”-fueled satire like Weeds or The Real Housewives Of Orange County might be going too far, just remember that the reality is probably far stranger. At the very least, you need to know who you’re sharing the planet with.

If you had asked me back then what I thought would happen to these people, I probably would have shrugged out a “dunno” or two with a side commentary about repression exploding unexpectedly. Of course, the reality is indeed far stranger and San Clemente has it’s share of oddness. It’s the home of Richard Nixon’s Western White House, the setting for the movie Brick, and a place where the locals don’t want an In-N-Out.

The formerly peaceful neighbors have declared all-out war in a neo-Ballardrian spectacle of public namecalling, “abortion” graffiti, and gallons of human shit and rotting animal parts. The OC Register is back on the case.

SAN CLEMENTE – Rick Collins said his children were shunned at the beach and the word “Abortion” was splattered on his house when he added a second story.
Al Cullen said 10 gallons of human feces and rotting animal parts were thrown into his yard after he began circulating a petition to ban the addition of second stories in the Shorecliffs neighborhood.

The two are on opposite sides of a festering dispute in Shorecliffs that has pitted neighbor against neighbor, disrupted city government and spilled over into county Republican politics.

…

Jane Graff grew up in the community and she is raising her three children in Shorecliffs. Graff is active in the faction that wants to maintain one-story homes.

“I received a threatening e-mail; it said ‘we should settle this the old-fashioned way, out in the alley,” she said. “These are bullies.” She said the neighborhood had prided itself on neighbors respecting the ocean views of others.

Brian Opp said he recognized that his family was being shunned after he built a second story and supported others who wanted one.

“We’d invite all the children in the neighborhood to our children’s birthday parties, but all of a sudden, our children were never invited to the birthday parties of other children,” he said.

I guess this is where my greying O.C. roots start showing. My hometown of Laguna Beach has had a planning commission in place for years and for the most part it’s been pretty effective. Why screw up something that benefits everyone? If you don’t like it, don’t move there. Do your homework ahead of time and don’t be like this dumbass:

Tuesday Price moved into Shorecliffs in 2004. She said she found herself ostracized by “the clique at the beach” after she revealed she wanted to remodel her home.

“We spent $1 million on a 40-year-old home and then found out there wasn’t much we could do to improve it. We thought we had found our dream house, and we’re totally disillusioned that government can do this,” she said.

I suppose the best summation of this entire fiasco come from this political campaign manager (natch):

“As much as everyone appreciates an ocean view, there is no constitutional right to have one”

Translation: The world is ME ME ME, and my neighbors and everyone else can go hang. Pretty much the state of USA2006 if you ask me.

In case you were wondering if there was an old Indian burial ground that would helpfully suck all of these people into the Netherworld, there isn’t. However, there is radioactive water leaking from the nearby nuclear power plant. It all makes sense somehow.

Los Angeles City Nerd throws down the authority on the proper name for Silver Lake. Folks, it’s TWO WORDS, not one word. May the ghost of Herman Silver smite you otherwise.

People who contract it into one word are clearly newbie hipster gentrifiers who are not to be trusted. As a geography snob, misuses like this are a completely irrational hot button issue with me.

Still unsolved (so far) is the name origin for Silver Dry Lake - the basin just northeast of Baker. I suspect that it’s related to the long defunct Silver King mine, but during the era (1900 - 1940) when the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad was operating there was a small town on the line called Silver Lake. Only a few foundations and a cemetery are left, but on older road maps you still might see a “Silver Lake” listed there.

I had no idea that folks had found meteorites at the desert Silver Lake. Best I was ever able to do was this wreckage of an indeterminate-looking car embedded in the playa.

I recalled from some net research that there was supposed to be another Harbie The Harbor Gasoline Seal on Harbor Blvd. in either Garden Grove or Anaheim and a short drive revealed not just one, but TWO new Harbies - both of them cheerfully guarding the front of an RV park in Garden Grove.

These are actually Harbies #3 & #4, Harbie #2 is at a used car lot in Bellflower that I don’t have a picture of yet. Of course, there’s the Bisbee Harbie that started it all.

The Lope visited the California Route 66 Museum in Victorville awhile back and made note of the artifacts recovered from Hulaville.

Depending on which local legend you go with, Hulaville creator Miles Mahan was either a former carny or a Vaudeville performer who bought some land along US-66 in Hesperia and began collecting and creating things as a tribute to either a woman he fell in love with or to former vagabond friends. Miles lived in an old trailer on the site for forty years without running water or power - existing only on what he picked up out of the desert and on the books of poetry he sold to whoever came by. Mahan died in 1996 at the age of 100.

I swung by Hulaville while exploring the aftermath of the Landers earthquake in 1992. I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet Mahan, but I’m glad that his creations were preserved.

Mahan was interviewed for NPR back in 1993. The audio is still online.

Following up on the post from a couple days ago, I ran across this on UFO Reflections…

Well, might we have a solution for the Heflin photo case? According to an anonymous post to UFO Updates, the object is in fact a model train wheel, and the smoke ring in the final Heflin image is from an airshow. Let’s take a look, shall we?

First, here’s a comparison of model train wheels with two of the Heflin photos… and then a comparison of the final Heflin image and an airshow photo (including the aircraft which created the ring).

Not conclusive, but mighty compelling justification for a re-evaluation, wouldn’t you say?