Sacramento area community musical theater (esp. DMTC in Davis, 2000-2020); Liberal politics; Meteorology; "Breaking Bad," "Better Call Saul," and Albuquerque movie filming locations; New Mexico and California arcana, and general weirdness.
I heard the sirens and turned on the police scanner app on my phone to learn what was going on. The chase went all over Sacramento, and was in south Sacramento when Joe the Plumber called and interrupted my pursuit by app:
Three men were arrested following a robbery and chase Thursday night that wound across the streets and freeways of Sacramento.
The incident began as an armed robbery about 9:30 p.m. at a business on the 1500 block of West El Camino Avenue in South Natomas, according to Sacramento police spokesman Officer Anthony Gamble. Police dispatch records indicated the robbery took place at the Shell gas station on West El Camino at Truxel Road. Callers told dispatchers at least two of the men pulled handguns on the gas station employee before running away on foot.
...After several minutes, the chase was taken over by California Highway Patrol officers, who followed the suspects for more than 90 minutes through Sacramento roadways. The chase, which took to Interstate 5 and Highway 99, according to law enforcement flight logs, wound through downtown and midtown, as well as East Sacramento — before ending in Meadowview.
...The men, a 24- and 21-year-old from Sacramento and a 20-year-old from Concord, were being held Friday in Sacramento County Main Jail and face felony charges of robbery and conspiracy.
When I was in middle school, my favorite novel was the 1933 work "When Worlds Collide," (which was made into a not-very-good movie by George Pal in 1951) as well as its sequel, "After Worlds Collide." I particularly their portrayal of the U.S. President (a la Roosevelt) trying to coordinate the proper response of Bronson A's initial pass around the Earth:
Sven Bronson, a Swedish astronomer working at an observatory in South Africa, discovers a pair of rogue planets, Bronson Alpha and Bronson Beta, which will soon enter the Solar System. In eight months, they will pass close enough for gravitational forces to cause catastrophic damage to the Earth. Sixteen months later, after swinging around the Sun, Bronson Alpha (a gas giant) will return to pulverize the Earth and depart. Bronson Beta (discovered to be Earth-like and potentially habitable) may remain and assume a stable orbit.
Scientists led by Cole Hendron work desperately to build an atomic rocket to transport enough people, animals and equipment to Bronson Beta to save humanity from extinction. Various countries do the same. The United States evacuates coastal regions in preparation for the first encounter. As the planets approach, observers see through their telescopes cities on Bronson Beta. Tidal waves sweep inland at a height of 750 feet (230 m), volcanic eruptions and earthquakes add to the deadly toll, and the weather runs wild for more than two days. Bronson Alpha grazes and destroys the Moon.
Three men take a floatplane to check out conditions across the United States and meet with the President in Hutchinson, Kansas, the temporary capital of the United States. All three are wounded fighting off a mob at their last stop, but manage to return with a precious sample of an extremely heat-resistant metal one of them had noticed. This solves the last remaining engineering obstacle: no material had been found before to make rocket tubes capable of withstanding the heat of the atomic exhaust.
But truth is, the Earth did once collide with another world. The debris from that ancient collision formed the Moon. But what happened with the colliding planet?
A new paper discusses the fate of Theia, the colliding planet. I had heard about these blobs in the Earth back in the Eighties, when they were believed (and many still believe) to be sunken oceanic plates. But maybe they are something more!:
Scientists widely agree that an ancient planet likely smashed into Earth as it was forming billions of years ago, spewing debris that coalesced into the moon that decorates our night sky today.
The theory, called the giant-impact hypothesis, explains many fundamental features of the moon and Earth.
But one glaring mystery at the center of this hypothesis has endured: What ever happened to Theia? Direct evidence of its existence has remained elusive. No leftover fragments from the planet have been found in the solar system. And many scientists assumed any debris Theia left behind on Earth was blended in the fiery cauldron of our planet’s interior.
A new theory, however, suggests that remnants of the ancient planet remain partially intact, buried beneath our feet.
Molten slabs of Theia could have embedded themselves within Earth’s mantle after impact before solidifying, leaving portions of the ancient planet’s material resting above Earth’s core some 1,800 miles (about 2,900 kilometers) below the surface, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.
...They were already aware that there are two massive, distinct blobs that are embedded deep within the Earth. The masses — called large low-velocity provinces, or LLVPs — were first detected in the 1980s. One lies beneath Africa and another below the Pacific Ocean.
These blobs are thousands of kilometers wide and likely more dense with iron compared with the surrounding mantle, making them stand out when measured by seismic waves. But the origins of the blobs — each of which are larger than the moon — remain a mystery to scientists.
But for Dr. Qian Yuan, a geophysicist and postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology and the new study’s lead author, his understanding of LLVPs forever changed when he attended a 2019 seminar at Arizona State University, his alma mater, that outlined the giant-impact hypothesis.
That’s when he learned new details about Theia, the mysterious projectile that presumably struck Earth billions of years ago.
And, as a trained geophysicist, he knew of those mysterious blobs hidden in Earth’s mantle.
Yuan had a eureka moment, he said.
Immediately, he began perusing scientific studies, searching to see whether someone else had proposed that LLVPs might be fragments of Theia. But no one had.
...Their work, which assigned a certain size to Theia and speed of impact in the modeling, suggested that the ancient planet’s collision likely did not entirely melt Earth’s mantle, allowing the remnants of Theia to cool and form solid structures instead of blending together in Earth’s inner stew.
...The combination of high-resolution giant impact and mantle convection simulations, mineral physics calculations, and seismic imaging suggests that the lower half of Earth’s mantle remained mostly solid after this impact, and that parts of Theia’s iron-rich mantle sank and accumulated atop Earth's core nearly 4.5 billion years ago, surviving there throughout Earth’s history.
...Dr. Seth Jacobson, an assistant professor of planetary science at Michigan State University, acknowledged that the theory may not, however, soon reach broad acceptance.
...One other theory, for example, posits that LLVPs are actually heaps of oceanic crust that have sunk to the depths of the mantle over billions of years.
“I doubt the advocates for other hypotheses (about LLVP formation) are going to abandon them just because this one has appeared,” Jacobson added. “I think we’ll be debating this for quite some time.”
I remember hearing that "Break Bad" is a Southernism that Vince Gilligan picked up while growing up in Virginia. Gilligan was surprised to learn that no one else seemed to recognize the phrase.
I remember once using hydrofluoric acid in graduate school in about 1985 in order to etch glass. I read about its effects, so I was scared shitless. It doesn't burn you from the outside in. Upon contact, your skin sponges it up and you dissolve from the inside out.
It's interesting how Adam and Billy didn't quite treat the Little Girl in the Gas Mask as a separate filming location. For that matter, I didn't do so either. Still, the Little Girl in the Gas Mask scene is important. She represents Alice in Wonderland - a direct reference to the artistic tradition of Giorgio De Chirico (starting from his painting “Mystery and Melancholy of a Street,” from the year 1914), then Salvador Dali and his paintings from the 1930s, and the world of Surrealist art, especially the Disney short film "Destino." I talk about it from times 24:40 - 30:45 in this video:
What an excellent movie Martin Scorsese's new project! It's a long movie - three and a half hours long - but the time doesn't feel heavy. I was pleased to see so many character actors from the Southwest Noir world - "No Country For Old Men," "Breaking Bad," "El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie," and "Better Call Saul."
What Roth’s adaptation does allow is for “Killers of the Flower Moon” to blossom into a compellingly multi-faceted character study about the men behind the massacre. Even more importantly, it invites the most recent of Scorsese’s late-career triumphs to become the most interesting of the many different movies that comprise it: A twisted love story about the marriage between an Osage woman and the white man who — unbeknownst to her — helped murder her entire family so that he could inherit the headrights for their oil fortune.
That sepia-toned saga of slow-poisoned self-denial is sustained by the best performance of Leonardo DiCaprio’s entire career. The former matinee idol has never been shy about playing low-lifes and scum-bums, but his nuanced and uncompromising turn as the cretinous Ernest Burkhart mines new wonders from the actor’s long-standing lack of vanity.
I saw this documentary about Joan Baez and her career at the Tower Theater. There was lots of interesting imagery from her childhood - home movies from the Fifties with her gifted family - plus photos and film clips from the folk singing and civil rights movement days of the Sixties.
Once the Vietnam War ended, Joan Baez's career started fading. The movie discusses this period when she seemed to lose her way; when her career came down to Earth.
I was saddened to learn that Baez subscribed to the 'recovered memory' movement of the Eighties and Nineties. That was something my sister subscribed to as well, at least for a time, but it was an error, leading to estrangement in the family. As it turns out, nothing is as flexible as a memory. Memories can be manufactured pretty easily. So, Baez became estranged from her father for no good reason. She seemed to shrug off the harm to her father.
