Council Ignores Most Horror Movies, OKs Construction On Indian Burial Site

Clueless Orange County civic government stories are always the best:

SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO – A group of Catholic business leaders will be allowed to build a high school for as many as 3,000 students at the site of an ancient burial ground after a 4-1 vote by the City Council on Monday night.

The school will be named JSerra High School – after the Rev. Junipero Serra, the priest who founded Mission San Juan Capistrano.

The council vote came after more than two hours of testimony, almost all of it from people opposed to the school at Camino Capistrano and Junipero Serra Road. Councilman Wyatt Hart noted that memorials to the site’s Indian past will be included at the campus and that the site was zoned for a hotel anyway.

Doesn’t anyone remember Poltergeist? Guess they will now.

[via Plastic]

Barcoding humans

Whether you want to call it the Mark Of The Beast, an innocent barcode, or another milestone in creeping fascism – the age of the implant chip is here.

Theoretically, this VeriChip will allow doctors to call up my medical records even if I’m too badly hurt to answer questions. It is also supposed to allow me to get money from an automatic teller machine by flashing my arm instead of punching in my PIN number. Or reassure airport security that I am a journalist, not a terrorist.

And, though the VeriChip strikes critics as Orwellian, its makers think the surgically implanted IDs could be the Social Security numbers of the future in a nervous world.

…

However, ADS officials say this is just the beginning. They want to build a chip that can store loads of information, or act as the key to a central database that stores information about the user. Ultimately, the company hopes to be able to track the movement of people with chips worldwide using global positioning satellites.

Up the hill. Down the hill. Repeat many times.

So the last time I was skiing was roughly twenty years ago: new wave was still king and MTV had yet to air a single video. So it was rather random to go up to Mammoth for a couple of days (credit goes to my mom, who’s 78 and still skies a couple weeks every year).

Amazingly, there’s still a lot of snow even this late in the season and no one is skiing on Mondays. So I had the whole mountain to myself, which is just as well since I was pretty much a public health hazard for the first couple of hours while I got my ski legs back.

uphill

downhill

By the afternoon, I was right back to where I left off in high school when I was skiing all the time. Could have stayed another couple of days!

Tonight’s total lunar eclipse

There was a early evening ocean haze here in Long Beach that was making totality rather hard to see. But once the moon just peeked out from under the Earth’s shadow it was high enough in the sky to clear the haze and just be absolutely spectactular.

In retrospect I wish I fished my telescope out of the garage, but there’s barely any room left here on the roof for anything. However, here’s a nicely overexposed featureless pixelated photo. I need to get a new camera adapter for the scope.

200305lunareclipse

Homeowner’s Associations out of control again

The Seattle Times reports on a couple who are being evicted from their house because the house is too small.

Alan Hord and Sharon Adams celebrated their third wedding anniversary yesterday by being evicted.

The couple were forced out of their 2,000-square-foot home south of Monroe because it didn’t meet the standards set by their tiny neighborhood association. The problem: The house isn’t big enough.

Hord bought the 5-acre property with a view of Mount Rainier about six years ago for $415,000. He moved into a home that had been converted from a barn.

But at 2,000 square feet, the barn off 238th Place Southeast didn’t satisfy the Mountain View Country Estates Homeowners Association’s rules. All homes must be at least 3,000 square feet.