Kreayshawn - Gucci Gucci

For some puzzling reason I can't explain, I can't seem to get enough of the Oakland rapper this weekend.

Lyrics:

[Sample:]
One big room full of bad bitches

[Hook:]
And we stunting like
Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada
Basic bitches wear that shit so I don't even bother

[Verse 1:]
Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada
The basic bitches wear that shit, so I don't even bother
I put that on my partner, I put that on my family
Oakland city representer, address me as your majesty
Yeah you can kiss the ring, but you can never touch the crown
I smoke a million Swisher blunts and I ain't never coming down
Bitch you ain't no Barbie I see you work at Arby's
Number 2, super-sized Hurry up I'm starving
Gnarly, radical, on the block I'm magical
See me at your college campus baggie full of Adderalls
Call me if you need a fix, call me if you need a boost
See them other chicken heads? They don't never leave the coop
I'm in the coupe cruising, I got the stolen plates
Serving all the fiends over there by the Golden Gate
Bridge, I'm colder than the fridge and the freezer
I'm snatching all your bitches at my leisure

[Hook:]
And we stunting like
Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada
Basic bitches wear that shit so I don't even bother

[Verse 2:]
Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada
I'm lookin like Madonna but I'm flossing like Ivana
Trump, you know I keep that work in my trunk
Got my hand on the pump if you wanna press your luck
I'm yelling "Free V-Nasty" 'til my throat is raspy
Young, rich and flashy I be where the cash be
You can't find that? I think you need a Google Map
My pearl-handled kitty-cat will leave and press your noodle back
Now Google that groupies follow me like Twitter
I'm rolling up my catnip and shitting in your litter
Why you looking bitter? I be looking better
The type of bitch that make you wish that you ain't never met her
The editor, director plus I'm my own boss
So posh, nails fierce with the gold gloss
Which means nobody getting over me
I got the swag and it's pumping out my ovaries

[Hook:]
And we stunting like
Gucci Gucci, Louis Louis, Fendi Fendi, Prada
Basic bitches wear that shit so I don't even bother

[Outro:]
Oh, all you basic ass hoes out there
Man I got rooms full of bad bitches
They don't need Gucci, they don't need Louis
We swagging, ehh, meow

Kaiser Permanente - Roseville

One of Jetta's close friends had a stroke, so we paid a visit to say hello.

A Bit Of Work On The House

Last night, I pulled a squirrel nest - a garbage bag's worth of dust, dirt, leaves, and wood fragments - from the space above my closet. An entire slat of the roof had been punched in by the tree rodents over the years. The only reason the huge hole didn't allow water in was that it was entirely under an eave. Nevertheless, I lost oodles of heat up that chimney over the years. Still working on that.

This morning, Joe the Plumber put a roof patch over the hole and placed a wire mesh under the eave, hopefully blocking access to any new residents. Joe also excavated a sprinkler on the front lawn that got engulfed by roots, and the rest of the lawn. (I thought I had a broken pipe: turned out, it was a buried sprinkler.)

Swept many leaves today. They are STILL coming down!

Intriguing

I didn't go to a casino, even once, in all of 2012!

Peter Byrne Retired!

With early forecasts suggesting Cyclone Freda might approach the Queensland coast in about a week, it was time to check on Peter Byrne and see what he made of it.

Alas, he retired!

About time!

Civil Society, New Mexico Style

The Vietnam vet was brave, and came close to paying the ultimate price, but has the satisfaction of seeing his dumb-ass antagonist go to jail. Great video too!:

The video then shows Williams with his hands in the air, and the victim still on the ground. The victim was a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran.

He told officers he did not like the bumper sticker on Williams' truck because it said derogatory things about President Barack Obama.

...But Williams told police, he told the victim to 'get out of his face', and claimed the victim ignored him. The two began to argue. It escalated to the victim ending up on his knees, with his hands up, and Williams allegedly holding the gun to the back of the his head.

Alan Simpson - Gangnam Style

We need to create some excitement for deficit control. Despite Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's warning that K-Pop will be the ruin of us all, I'm sure this video will get everyone in the right mood for some belt-tightening momentum!

Curtis Mayfield "Superfly"

"Junie B. Jones: Jingle Bells & Batman Smells" Closes

Bitter Coloradans Hurl Blame At California And Utah Regarding The Snow Drought

Blame, blame, blame, blame, blame!

Yeah, that's just how we roll in the Sacramento Valley! Keep the white stuff for ourselves, and none for the God-fearing folk deep in the interior.

I'm gonna buy me a Sno-Cone and get a brain freeze, just because I can! I'm gonna buy me a brand-new Zamboni and park it in the driveway. I'm gonna buy me a whole bunch of snow boards and give them to kids willing to diss the Denver Nuggets.

We do it because nothing gets a Left Coaster up faster in the morning than knowing someone in Colorado Springs is making fun of our deficit. So, it's payback.

Dictatorship Of The Weak Orange Man

Congress must be a strange place, where the weakest one in the room is the one who controls all the levers:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says that the U.S. is poised to head over the “fiscal cliff,” partially because John Boehner, R-Ohio, is running the House like a ”dictatorship.”

“Everyone knows, including the speaker of the House of Representatives today, that if they had brought up the Senate-passed bill that would give relief to everyone making less than $250,000 a year, it would pass overwhelmingly,” Reid said. “Every Democrat would vote for it, Republicans would vote for it. But the speaker, he says, ‘No, we can’t do that.’ It has to be a majority of the majority. So they’ve done nothing.”

He added that the House is “being operated with a dictatorship of the speaker,” and that Boehner is “waiting until Jan. 3 to get re-elected as speaker before he gets serious with negotiations because he has so many people over there that won’t follow what he wants. That’s obvious from the debacle that took place last week. And it was a debacle.”

Maybe the situation is akin to having your mother telling everyone what to do. I'm reminded of Ethel Merman in "It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World."

More On Twisted Contrails

Caption: "Celestial spiral. Morning of December 24, 2012, Kryukovskaya Pier."


Getting some Internet love today from the folks at Above Top Secret, who use my 2008 post regarding Traci Sotuela's photos of twisted contrails to inform discussion about a recent twisted contrail observed near Moscow.

[UPDATE: Also reposted somewhere on that Facebook behemoth. Also, here.]

Decoy-Making Amazonian Spider

I think I'll start doing this myself:

He described seeing the collection of debris in a web and thinking it was a dead spider, but upon closer inspection it appeared to be moving.

“Then we got closer and realized it wasn’t a spider at all,” he said. “We looked behind the decoy and lo and behold, we saw this little spider guy shaking [his web] back and forth trying to act all tough. We realized then that this is really something special.”

...“There are some species that will make a little ball of debris in their web, then they curl up in a ball themselves and look similar to it,” he explained. “So, if you look at a web and you’re a wasp or another spider and you see 10 balls, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to get confused and attack the wrong one.”

What A Winter-Solstice-Type Day Is Like At Fairbanks, AK

Three additional videos at the link. The sun rises only two degrees above the horizon at Fairbanks, AK (just below the Arctic Circle) on and around Winter Solstice.

NorCal/SoCal Rainfall Divide

Here is a longer-term view (6 months) of the current situation. The soggy Sacramento Valley is clear. What surprises is, that in the six-month view, the Colorado River Valley is also above its (likely low) average. The troubled San Joaquin Valley is also clear.  And LA and the upper Mojave are in bad shape too.

Checking In On Jiri Kylian

Back in the 90's, the cable subscription I had carried short video clips of an artistic nature - often classical. That was where I heard of choreographer Jiri Kylian. My impression at the time was that he was the best choreographer in the world.

Lamentably, I haven't checked in on him in fifteen years, or so. I have no idea what his current status is. Even this video is about fifteen years old. But still, it's cute!

Boy, It Sure Rained A Lot Today!

0.89" at Sacramento Executive Airport, apparently. We are about 190% of normal for the water year now.

I'm getting worried about the unfairness of it all. They really need it farther south. We can certainly spare it now.

Watching Nederlandse Opera's "Dr. Atomic"

I know little about opera, but I'm very attracted to any artistic representation about New Mexico. Thus, I'd like to recommend John Adams' and Peter Sellars' "Dr. Atomic", as performed by Nederlandse Opera, in 2007.

It seems odd that Amsterdam would have hosted the finest performance about New Mexico history ever staged anywhere, but the Manhattan Project was also one of the most important events in world history. Video costs $5.00 to rent (sung in English).

Adams: Doctor Atomic on medici.tv.

The sequence from 2:06:20 to 2:13:47 is particularly good:

Oppie:

…and with the hideous old man
the whole of his demoniac retinue
has returned,
Memories, Regrets, Spasms, Fears,
Afflictions, Nightmares, Rages and Neuroses.

[Five year-old Peter Oppenheimer awakens.]

Kitty:

To keep the weakness secret.
To keep it secret
To deny it and break through.
In the dream of chieftains,
the corn distinct again in gold-white tuft-feathers.
The roads all paved, stony, savage;
the knocking in the chest resumed.
Your father has a passion for freedom
Rang and rang in the small boy’s head.

Pasqualita:

Then word came from a runner, a stranger:
“They are dancing to bring the dead back, in the
mountains.
”We danced at an autumn fire, we danced the old hate and
change,
the coming again of our leaders. But they did not come.

Wilson:

I just finished reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
and of course
to go to this mysterious mountain
on the top of which
there would be a secret laboratory
which we would go into,the doors would slam shut
and a few years later
we would come out bearing
an atomic bomb…

Oppie:

I assure you that now the seconds are strongly and solemnly
accentuated and each one, spouting out of the clock, says:
“I am Life, insupportable, implacable Life!”

Pasqualita:

The winter dawned, but the dead did not come back.
News came on the frost, “The dead are on the march!
”We danced in prison to a winter music,
many we loved began to dream of the dead.
They made no promises, we never dreamed a threat.
And the dreams spread.

E.'s Granite Bay Christmas Turkey

12

I was channel surfing late last night and stumbled across this movie: "12". What an excellent movie! Missed the beginning, but it wasn't that hard to figure out the plot. I've never seen '12 Angry Men', so I can't compare the movies, but it stands on its own just fine!

Plot summary of "12":

A loose remake of 12 Angry Men (1957), set in a Russian school. 12 jurors are struggling to decide the fate of a Chechen teenager who allegedly killed his Russian stepfather who took the teenager to live with him in Moscow during the Chechen War in which teenager lost his parents. The jurors: a racist taxi-driver, a suspicious doctor, a vacillating TV producer, a Holocaust survivor, a flamboyant musician, a cemetery manager, and others represent the fragmented society of modern day Russia. A stray bird (a touch of New Age cinema) is flying above the jurors' heads, alluding to tolerance.

Temptation Proved Too Strong

I saw this at Brookstone, and bought it.

I also upgraded from an iPhone 3 to an iPhone 5.

Putting Restless Japanese Kids To Bed

Saw The First Of The Hobbit Movies

Liked the first of the Hobbit Movies. Much of it was filmed on Mt. Ruapehu (which is near Mt. Tongariro, which erupted recently). I got excited at one point, because I thought I spotted a flowering Pohotukawa Tree (but it was in Rivendell, and who knows if it was even real?)

Here's Kyle's review:

The final hour features two just outstanding action sequences. And they transition into each other so incredibly well. We get the heart of the film in the end here and it sets up the next film perfectly. I loved how Jackson takes the action seriously, but also has fun with it. The entire battle sequence between our heroic group and the underground Goblins is quite a feat of fight choreography and then to follow that up with a more brutal and rough action sequence is brilliant because the heroes go from looking like superheroes, unstoppable in any situation, to destroyed and beaten to mere inches from death. That contrast makes it even more thrilling for me. I found Martin Freeman's Bilbo Baggins to be funny, risky, and full of great character tics. I love his facial expressions. They fit within this world very well. I admit, I was hoping for Thorin to be just a bit more mysterious like Aragorn, but that might have been my inability to disconnect from the LOTR trilogy. I also liked that Jackson is not afraid to put in some Hobbit songs. One of them was too goofy for me. but they are a huge part of Tolkien's world and it was nice to hear some of them.

Meanwhile, In Hokkaido....

Seventeen meters of snow this winter, so far...

How The Romney Campaign Did Its Face-Plant

Instructive failures:

“Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and ­offices,” Beeson said. “They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters,” something that Romney did not have the staff to match.

...Democrats said they followed the trail blazed in 2004 by the Bush campaign which used an array of databases to “microtarget” voters and a sophis­ticated field organization to turn them out. Obama won in part by updating the GOP’s innovation.

...In a major gamble, the Obama campaign moved $65 million in advertising money that had been budgeted for September and October into June, enabling the president to unleash a series of attacks that would define Romney at a time when the Republican would have little money to respond.

From Axelrod’s viewpoint, the timing was perfect. Romney had been weakened by assaults from fellow GOP candidates during the primaries. Romney alienated many Hispanics by suggesting that illegal immigrant families should “self-deport,” and he said he had been a “severely conservative” governor, hurting his strategy to move to the middle for the general election.Continued

...The Obama campaign used a program called called “the ­optimizer” that linked data from its voter databases, focus groups, and television ratings to determine how to reach people who do not typically see campaign ads. As a result, Obama purchased ads on channels such as TV Land and Hallmark that were watched by voters who rarely saw news programs where ads often appear.

...Building on its 2008 field organ­ization, Obama’s campaign had far more people on the ground, for longer periods, and backed by better data. In Florida, for example, the ­Romney campaign said it had fewer than 200 staff members on the ground, a huge commitment of its total of 500 nationwide. But the Obama campaign had 770 staff in Florida out of 3,000 or so nationwide.

“They had more staff in Florida than we had in the country, and for longer,” said Romney adviser Ron Kaufman.

...“It is like sitting in the ­Alamo,” Stevens said in the postelection interview, comparing the siege by Mexican troops in 1836 to competing against the superior forces of the Obama campaign. “Yes, it is alarming. There are a lot of Santa Anna’s soldiers out there.”

...In Florida, 266,000 more Hispanics voted than four years earlier. “They altered the face of the election by driving up the Latino turnout,” Romney political director Rich Beeson said. “They told us they would do it. I didn’t think they would do it, and they did.”

Ohio was the greatest surprise of all. Romney pollster Neil Newhouse calculated that 209,000 more African-Americans voted this year than in 2008 in Ohio, while 329,000 fewer whites had voted.

“I don’t know how that’s possible,” Newhouse said. “If that is what the Obama campaign achieved, hats off to them.’’

...As dawn broke on Election Day, 800 Romney volunteers filled the floor of TD Garden in Boston. This was the centerpiece of the campaign’s turnout operation, code named ORCA, that was supposed to swallow Obama’s Narwhal program. But the Romney team was so determined to keep ORCA secret that it had never run a test at TD Garden; it had only gone through some lesser runs in a different building.

...But as volunteers on Election Day began tapping in the names of voters, it became clear something was wrong.

...The Obama campaign, which had suffered a similar meltdown in 2008 and had been zealous about testing its systems this time around, had no glitches.

...Exit polls told a stunning story. The majority of voters preferred Romney’s visions, values, and leadership. But he had clearly failed to address the problem that Romney’s own family worried about from the start. Obama beat Romney by an astonishing 81 to 18 percent margin on the question of which candidate “cares about people like me.”

Maybe Wayne LaPierre Was Right

About how well the NRA's press campaign went this weekend. It looked like a disaster to me, but I'm not in his shoes. Maybe he achieved exactly what he wanted to:

Keep this firmly in mind. LaPierre's only goal yesterday was to hijack the media narrative. He wants us talking about Natural Born Killers. He wants us talking about Grand Theft Auto. He wants us talking about mental health services. Hell, he's perfectly happy if we spend our time talking about how crazy his proposal is and how unhinged he is personally. Not only does it keep us from talking about gun regulation, but it's good for the NRA's fundraising efforts in the bargain.

...[E]very minute you spend talking about this stuff is a minute spent doing exactly what the NRA wants you to do. If you want to have any chance at all of passing gun legislation, that's what you should be talking about. Guns. End of story. The other stuff can wait.

Worst Drought On Record In New Mexico

I'm disturbed how even powerful storms haven't been enough to make it rain in New Mexico. What will it take? There are several possibilities on the horizon, but if the last storm was such a flop, these others might be too. It's like New Mexico is in a desert, or something:

"When you look at a 24-month period ending last month, it is the driest on record," National Weather Service representative Kerry Jones said.

The 1950s were considered a dry decade, but no two-year period has been as dry as the current one.

...It is also much warmer than it was in the 1950s, and drought has a nasty way of reinforcing itself.

"It's feedback. A positive feedback in terms of you have very dry soil that heats up very intensely over large areas, and that tends to prolong drought," Jones said.

This is the second-driest year since 1870, and the past two years together are the driest.

The odds are the drought will continue in the state.

Damn Squirrel

The last several days, I've heard a rustle in the ceiling above the closet in my bedroom. I wasn't sure whether there was a squirrel in my ceiling again, liked what happened about eight years ago on the other side of the bedroom, when they ate several holes through my ceiling, or whether the squirrel was under the protective eave just on the exterior side of the closet. The squirrels use the gutter to access the space under the eave, and the sound from the gutter transmits into the house.

Last night, while it was raining heavily, about 1 a.m., I heard the rustle again. I banged on the ceiling, and opened the closet.

Chaos. The squirrel was indeed in the ceiling. It had eaten two ventilation holes through the ceiling right above my clothes. There was dust, insulation, leaves, and twigs all over my clothes.

Enraged, I started banging on and shouting at the ceiling. The rustle went silent.

I ran outside, onto my back porch, and looked up at the eave. Sure enough, in the uncertain light and protected from the heavy rain, there sat a concerned-looking squirrel. I ran downstairs and grabbed some pebbles from the graveled driveway. Then I returned to the porch, ready to throw stones at my house at 1 a.m. on a rainy night, and hopefully clobber the squirrel.

The first two stones were wide-of-the-mark. Indeed, the squirrel approached each strike, just to investigate. I was grimacing at the squirrel, jumping up and down and and making menacing noises, and basically playing the role of the angry, hairless ape.

Surprisingly, the squirrel got the message after the third stone. It left the protective cover of the eave, and ran away into the rainy night.

I hope that squirrel stays away. I'll have to clean my clothes and closet, and repair the ceiling later. For now, I basically smell like wood. Eau d'squirrel, I guess.

Sacramento Ballet - 'The Nutcracker' 2012

After Junie B. Jones, I returned home and marveled at just how much rain had fallen. I checked the basement for water and put a meal into the microwave. I turned on the TV and noticed the San Francisco Ballet's 'Nutcracker' was on one of the cable channels.

Then my blood went to ice. I had forgotten! I had a ticket for Sacramento Ballet's 'Nutcracker' that very afternoon, at 5 p.m.! I got the ticket from co-worker Craig, whose daughter Viktoria had been among the dancers last weekend. What time was it? 4:40 p.m.? I could still make it to the performance, but I had to leave IMMEDIATELY! So I abandoned the meal in the microwave, grabbed my clothes (still saturated in squirrel dust) and headed to work, where the ticket resided on my desk. Then I practically ran to the theater!

Great show! Ballet is the best art form, ever, and ballet on the grand scale is the bestest of all!

Very little in the way of errors or mistakes.

Christopher Nachtrab and Alexandra Cunningham were the Snow Queen and King.

Saw familiar names in the program, but I couldn't identify them from seat M31. Since the casts are doubled and tripled, it's possible they weren't performing on Sunday evening: Campbell Salmon, Paige Almendariz, and in particular, Brittney Almendariz.

Not looking forward to the microwaved dinner now. Maybe I should eat out?


Here is the promo for last year's Nutcracker (probably taped in 2010), but similar to this year's version:

A Junie B. Jones Weekend

It's been fun! Two more shows to go.

Liked how, after the first Saturday performance, two little girls approached the light booth and thanked both Jenna and myself for being good directors of the show. We thanked them, graciously. I also liked how, after every audience member left the theater, how one boy lingered, and went to the top of the stairs, in order to burp as loud as he could.

I had one big sound mess-up at the very end of Saturday's second performance. Instead of hitting 'Advance' on the hand-held CD player controller, I hit the button right next to it: 'Info.' What that did was to change the CD player display so that it no longer showed elapsed time per track, and instead showed overall elapsed time. When the display showed I was 19 minutes into Track 19, I panicked, and played bits from several tracks, featuring many burps. It sounded like terrible Christmas indigestion.

Glitchy, this is....

Even Trained, Armed People Fail, Fail, Fail In A Mass Shooting Situation

Wow! That Was A Lot Of Rain!

At Sacramento Executive Airport, the storm total so far seems to be 2.12 inches. We are 179% of normal, so far, for the water year (which starts July 1st). Wow!

This winter's precipitation pattern in California keeps getting clearer and clearer: North of Fresno, everything is great. South of Fresno, everything is a disaster.

“I Think It Went Pretty Well”

A disconnect, perhaps?:

As criticism continues to flood in about the National Rifle Association’s news conference Friday —the first since the Newtown school massacre—the group’s president quickly concluded critics had it all wrong. “I think it went pretty well,” NRA President David Keene told the Daily Beast’s Lloyd Grove a mere nine hours after NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre seemingly blamed everything but guns—including movies and pop music—for the Sandy Hook shooting.