Sh*#t NDN (Indian) Girls Say

Here is a video that fascinates me. It's Northern NM Native Americans (or Indians - NDNs), likely from a variety of Pueblos, and the Navajo 'Res'. The accent is half northern NM - half not - maybe too Hispanic for the Navajos. The world of regional pow wows has become very big and important in recent decades, so they mention other tribes (e.g., Crees, in video #2 of this series) that they never, ever would have mentioned traditionally. One girl even mentions Vine Deloria, an influential Sioux writer, whose lawyer brother, Sam Deloria, was my next-door neighbor in the mid-Seventies! So, many, many influences crashing around!

How To Speak Posh

How To Speak Bristolian English

Year Of The Horse

"Breaking Bad" Touches One Of The Deep Mysteries Of The Southwest

"Breaking Bad" takes the viewer on a dark journey through the drug underworld, but it also touches something deeper. In Season 5a, episode 5, "Dead Freight", Lydia is kidnapped and taken to a basement. To save her life, she describes a railroad radio dead zone by pointing at a map. Where she points has no railroad, however. What is at that point?

Pueblo Pintado.

Here is a wonderful documentary about the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon. The section between 39:10 - 41:40 is most significant. As Robert Redford narrates: "From no one building, and at no one time, would a person see this pattern. It's as though this intricate symmetry of relationships to the sky and the Earth was drawn on the landscape, but only to be held in the minds of the people." Like "Breaking Bad" itself!

Puzzling False Alarm At 10th And J Streets

Baffled firefighters mingled with baffled nightclub goers at 10th and J Streets on Friday evening, about 10 p.m.. Someone called in a fire, but there was no fire in sight. "This is 1009 10th Street," offered a nightclub doorman. "1009? We're looking for 1001," said a fireman. But there was no such address.

No smoke, no flames, but the nightclub crowd was growing by the minute.

Who would have an incentive to call in a false alarm? There was one woman on the sidewalk who seemed to have an incentive: "Hose me down, baby! These firemen are HOT!"

Dramatic faceoff: Fire engine faces west on J Street; everyone else faces east.

Some of the fire engines regrouped on 10th Street between F and G Streets, where they busied themselves for a few minutes ousting a homeless person from a doorway. Still, no flames.

Oscar Nominated Animation Shorts

À La Française

Competition strong in the Oscar-nominated animation shorts!:

Bleeding Apple

Engineers at Apple are trying to contact me regarding my failed ITunes installation. Apparently it's topical today.

"Cabaret" Strike

Thursday Train

Mars Rover Opportunity Looks Pretty Dusty

Went native!

Here's a side-by-side view of the solar panels from December 2004 (left) and today:

Climbing Transmission Towers

Fierce Funk Class, In The Groove

I missed this fun last week. In the foreground, the girls in red, Steph (with the Fierce Funk labeled pants) and Sadie (the blonde) look particularly good. Sadie's considering three trips to various parts of the world next year. It sounds wonderful!

Still Haven't Got A Flu Shot

I'm pretty complacent about getting a flu shot. How could I get sick? I feel so good! On the other hand, it took only four days for H1N1 to terminate a healthy 46-year-old:

These were Nancy Pinnella’s last days: On Jan. 21, she felt sick, leaving work early. On Jan. 22, she went to a doctor, hardly able to speak or breathe. By 6 p.m. that day, she was in intensive care at Sutter General Hospital in Sacramento. Her kidneys were failing, her lung capacity severely reduced. Doctors sedated her, induced paralysis and put her on a ventilator and dialysis.

...On Friday, a bright spot: her kidneys and vital signs got better. Then, between midnight and 6 a.m. Saturday, Pinnella suffered three severe strokes in three different parts of her brain. On Sunday, the family said goodbye and took the 46-year-old advertising executive at KXTV News10 off life support.

Water Shortages Already Starting

It isn't even February yet:

The state department of health has identified 17 communities across the state that are running out of water and need help to keep their residents supplied with healthy and available water. It's what many fear may be just the tip of the iceberg as California's drought gets worse.

Four of the communities are in the Sacramento area, including the Whispering Pines Apartments in Mariposa County, the Jackson Valley irrigation district in Amador County, Washington Ridge Conservation Camp in Nevada County and a tiny group of cottages known as Ophir Gardens in Placer County near Auburn.

Ophir Gardens began running out of water late last year.

"The difficulty that they're facing is low yield from their single well," said Brent Smith, with the Placer County Water Agency.

Smith said the well is only able to provide one gallon of water a minute.

The parks owner has begun bringing water in by truck, an expensive process that has so far kept the 16 small cottages from running dry.

Residents like Rita Bainbridge are dreading what may happen if the system runs completely out of water.

"Cutting back on showers and dishes and stuff. And I won't like that...at all," said Rita Bainbridge, who has lived at Ophir Gardens for about nine months.

National Review Death Watch

There's a chance climatologist Michael Mann's defamation lawsuit against the National Review might succeed in bankrupting the magazine. Scientists in general, and climatologists in particular, are ill-equipped to handle brazen slander; a world where anything goes. Here's hoping!:

Scientist Michael Mann is suing the Review over statements made by Canadian right-wing polemicist and occasional radio stand-in for Rush Limbaugh, Mark Steyn. Steyn was writing on the topic of climate change when he accused Mann of falsifying data and perpetuating intellectual fraud through his research.

Steyn went on to quote paid anti-climate science operative Rand Simberg — an employee of the right-wing think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute — who compared Mann to Penn State’s convicted child molester Jerry Sandusky.

Mann, Simberg said, is “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data.”

Strangely Enough, The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) Seems To Correlate Better With Precipitation In Albuquerque Than San Francisco

Friend Jerry notes:

I see that some people are blaming the harsh winter in the eastern US on the PDO.

But he's skeptical:

Preliminary analysis: correlation between subzero days in South Bend, Indiana vs December-January-February PDO index = 0.08. Correlation with average PDO index for previous year = 0.07.

ABQ Annual Precipitation vs. Annual avg. PDO * 10, 1949-2013. R-squared = 0.20. (To my surprise, according to National Weather Service (NWS), ABQ precepitation was nearly normal last year - 9.32 inches. According to NWS:

"This was the 6th year in a row with below normal precipitation, although 2013 was only 0.13 inches below the official 30 year normal of 9.45 inches (1981-2010). The long term annual normal precipitation (1892 to current) is 8.56 inches. 2013 was the 76th driest (46th wettest) on record since 1892."

Similarly, San Francisco Precipitation vs. Annual Avg. PDO*10, 1960-2009. R-squared = 0.04 (corrected for July 1 - June 30 water year - labeled in end year).

Jerry describes his efforts:

I also tried correlating the average FALL PDO index with the occurrence of subzero temps in South Bend, to see if there was any PREDICTIVE value in the index. Result: Rsq = .00001. I'm concluding that the PDO index is about as useful for forecasting as the Farmer's Almanac.

I'm not quite so ready to throw the PDO away:

I'm intrigued about its usefulness for Southwestern drought. Some connections work - Eastern Australia's precipitation swing from 2006 - 2011 vs. ENSO, for example.

Jerry warns about the seductions of ENSO:

I think that the usefulness of the ENSO index is what has misled some people into thinking that the forecasting problem can be reduced to the calculation of indices.

When I saw "some people", I include a local TV weathercaster. He attributes the harshness of this winter to the fact that the PDO is in its negative phase, conveniently forgetting that the previous two winters, during which the PDO index as also negative, were mild, with NO subzero temperatures at all.

Yes, consistency is a silly thing!

"Breaking Bad" Locations - Incremental Update

Every few of months, I do an incremental update to my "Breaking Bad" Locations Web Pages. I've finished another incremental update today to all my Locations posts. (Much of the update involves sneaking over to Shayne's and Marius' Web Sites and quietly copying a few of the spectacular art images there.)

The biggest changes were to the final post. What I was doing during the run of "Breaking Bad" was collecting and posting elsewhere on my blog the best of "Breaking Bad" reviews, videos, photos that I was running into on the fly. I take that blog collection and drop them onto this Web Page. In the event you missed them the first time around, or just like it all in one place.

Infrequent Posting As Of Late

I'm preparing an incremental update to my Breaking Bad posts.

The Smell Of Approaching Rain

It's a real thing:

There's a name popularly ascribed to this range of post-precipitation scents: petrichor. Petrichor was first described in 1964 by mineralogists Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. As they defined it, it occurs when airborne molecules from decomposing plant or animal matter become attached to mineral or clay surfaces. During a dry spell, these molecules chemically recombine with other elements on a rock's surface. Then when the rains came, the redolent combination of fatty acids, alcohols and hydrocarbons is released.

Australian Fire Tornado

Steve sends this amazing video of a whirlwind on FIRE!

SNL "Her" Parody Trailer, "Me"

Pope Francis Is The Catholic Church's Obama

Like that's a bad thing:

Pope Francis is undergoing a popularity surge comparable to the way Barack Obama was greeted by the world in 2008. And just as President Obama has been a disappointment for America, Pope Francis will prove a disaster for the Catholic Church.

...Much is being made of his ‘compassion’ and ‘humility,’ but kissing babies and hugging the sick is nothing new. Every pope in recent memory has done the same, yet only now are the media paying attention. Benedict XVI and John Paul II refused to kowtow to the liberal agenda, and so such displays of tenderness were under-covered.

Francis is beating a retreat for the Catholic Church, and making sure its controversial doctrines are whispered, not yelled – no wonder the New York Times is in love.

...Francis not only panders to enemies and professional grievance mongers, but also attacks his allies. Just as Obama snubs Britain and Israel, Pope Francis swipes at practicing Catholics.

So not only has he insulted, and severely damaged the work of, pro-life and pro-marriage groups with his comments, he has also gone on the attack, dismissing Catholics who attend the older rites in Latin as ‘ideologizing’ and being guilty of ‘exploitation.’ Apparently “Who am I to judge?” doesn’t apply here.

...Apart from the fact that there is no major nation practicing unfettered capitalism (like Obama, Francis loves attacking straw men) there is more real tyranny in socialist cesspools like Francis’ home of Argentina than in places where capitalism is predominant.

In the document he rejects the free market and calls for governments to overhaul financial systems so they attack inequality. In doing so he shows himself painfully misguided on economics, failing to see that free markets have consistently lifted the poor out of poverty, while socialism merely entrenches them in it, or kills them outright.

List Of Rainy Season Dry Spells

The National Weather Service in Sacramento compiled a handy list of the worst dry spells during rainy seasons ever recorded since records started in the 1870's. The current spell will likely last until next Thursday, making it, at 53 days, far and away the worst of these dry spells:

(will likely reach 53 days): Dec. 8, 2013-current
44 days: Nov. 15-Dec. 28, 1976
42: Jan. 17-Feb. 27, 1899
41: Dec. 18, 1962-Jan. 27, 1963
38: Nov. 4-Dec. 11, 1959
38: Nov. 8-Dec. 15, 1940
38: Feb. 15-March 24, 1883
36: Nov. 26-Dec. 31, 1989
36: Dec. 18, 1960-Jan. 22, 1961
36: Nov. 15-Dec. 20, 1958
34: Dec. 16, 2011-Jan. 18, 2012
34: Dec. 5, 1956-Jan. 7, 1957