Back in the Breaking Bad Bunker Again

The magnificent team of William James Dickey from Cushing, Maine, and Adam Ramirez from Austin Texas, joined from Thomas Maddock from Albuquerque, NM, are reporting their visit to Albuquerque last weekend, and my books swell with their new stuff.

Better Sticks

A walk is my idea of a refreshing ramble across the landscape. In contrast, Jasper conceives of a walk as a way to get more and better sticks.

Every morning, Jasper has me walk him completely around the house, going through the yard next door, where the ladies in the apartments there smile and pine to own a dog like him. As long as they have sticks, life's good.

Jasper's collection of "sticks" includes:

- Bottle cap
- Broken switch from car dashboard
- Badly-worn book cover
- Various chunks of branches and discarded wood
- Old Q-Tips
- Discarded lollipop
- Found Kleenex
- Pieces of upholstery
- Plastic shard from a broken Starbucks cup
- Bits of grass
- Occasional cat turds

Whatever chews well.

Among Jasper's "sticks" was a campaign card from Jrmar Jefferson, who is running for Congress again. I remember meeting Jrmar and his wife in 2016 at Arden Fair. This time around, his campaign card features a cute picture of their young son. Jrmar's wife would probably make the better candidate, but he's the one with "fire in the belly."

Another one of Jasper's "sticks" was a mystifying price tag from "DDS Discounts" (Mens Tops - Comparable value $15.99. You pay $8.99). At first, I was confused. Is there a dentist's office with a boutique? That would be a grand idea! I should immediately tell my dentists about it over there at Amy Woo and Associates.

Speaking of dentists, two weeks ago at the Turn Verein Oktoberfest, I met a UCD sorority girl, a cheerleader and biology major who wants to be a dentist. The girl taught me the Delta Gamma salute. I told her she should meet one of my dentists, a UCD grad who seemed like a sorority girl from central casting. Surprisingly, the girl was already familiar with my dentist's qualifications - she had been studying my dentist's website. "Your dentist is real smart," she said. "Look at her bio and see how young she was when she was studying Organic Chemistry!" Interesting! I need to get back to my dentist soon.

Walks can end abruptly. Yesterday, Jasper started staring at the side of a black car in the DMV parking lot. He eventually got spooked by his own reflection there and ran home.

Beginning To Come Out of My "Breaking Bad" Bunker

I've updated my filming locations guide, and my new architecture book is in process. There may be some error-correction to do over the next two weeks, but the hard part looks like it's over.

Plays

Jasper and I were taking a short walk just when all the folks at the DMV were getting out of work. Lots of people walking around the alley.

Just then, an apparently-homeless but well-dressed woman in sunglasses and a sharp-looking dress started yelling at us. I stared and rocked awkwardly from foot to foot. Jasper cocked his head and tried to make sense of it.

"Plays! My mother owned five drama schools in the Sixties. My father put me in a fucking limousine when I was five years old. Do you know what that fucking felt like? DO YOU KNOW WHAT THAT FUCKING FELT LIKE?"

I was thinking, 'Good lord, I wonder if I've been in a play with her before? No more unbalanced than some people I've known.' I couldn't answer her question. Was it a rhetorical question? A leading question? I didn't know.

Jasper had trouble with the question too, and sensibly-enough turned to eat a tuft of grass.

What Happens in Nebraska Stays in Nebraska

A new ad campaign:

"We're just simply not on people's shopping list for a vacation," said John Ricks, executive director of the Nebraska Tourism Commission, on ABC News' "Start Here" podcast.

New Nebraska Tourism advertisements boast of the state's "flat, boring landscape" and "dusty" Great Plains as part of a self-deprecating marketing campaign to tackle its "brand apathy" problem.

"You can't change perceptions just by providing information, so we had to be disruptive in some way," Ricks said of the sarcastic ads.

One print ad points out "there's nothing to do here" as a group floats down a river in a livestock tank, or what Nebraskans refer to as "tanking."

Fierce Funk Thursday

Infuriated by the Situation at Siobhan’s

Probably aggravated by her protest against Joe Arpaio. Arson is a serious crime, and her neighbor needs to get his ass arrested:

Shavaun Wolfe says the timing of the fire is suspicious. It comes just 24 hours after a judge issued a restraining order against her neighbor.

Mary Young's Car Accident

On Tuesday morning, longtime community musical theater enthusiast Mary Young was driving on northbound Interstate 5 to her job as a mathematics instructor at Woodland Community College, when she failed to notice the traffic ahead of her was at a dead stop. She plowed into a stationary work van at 70 mph.

Mary scrambled out of the smoking car, fearful that it might catch fire. The vehicle didn't ignite, but Mary was grievously injured: broken sternum, clavicle, 3 ribs, injured vertebrae, etc. She was transported to Kaiser South. The two people in the work van were not hurt.

Wednesday afternoon, I saw Mary in the hospital. Her first priority, apart from healing, was to get a substitute to teach her math classes. I put my name into consideration, and that afternoon I was notified I was chosen.

On Thursday morning I went to Woodland to teach her 2-hour long Math 50 class. Interesting morning: I was dismissed halfway through the class. Apparently administrators decided to move in a different direction.

Saturday afternoon, Mary moved to a nursing residence in Roseville. The best of healing to her!

Voter Suppression

In Georgia, county officials directly intervene to prevent black seniors from voting:

Government officials in an east Georgia county told about 40 African-American senior citizens to get off a bus taking them to vote Monday, leading to complaints of voter suppression.

The bus, run by the group Black Voters Matter, was preparing to depart from a senior center operated by Jefferson County when the center’s director said they needed to disembark, said LaTosha Brown, a co-founder of Black Voters Matter.

A county clerk had called the senior center raising concerns about allowing the bus to take residents from the senior center in the city of Louisville, south of Augusta.

“We knew it was an intimidation tactic,” Brown said Tuesday. “It was really unnecessary. These are grown people.”

The senior citizens agreed to get off the bus and cast their ballots later. Monday was the first day of in-person early voting in Georgia in the election for governor between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Brian Kemp.

Bob Woodward's Deeply-Dishonest Book, "Fear"

In exile from the GOP, David Frum produces excellent book reviews. Here, he tackles Bob Woodward's deeply-dishonest book, "Fear":

"A Woodward book is composed of a series of transactions.

...Trump’s staff needed an external validator, a person of unimpeachable integrity and prestige who would endorse their view of themselves as victims of an out-of-control FBI. And on January 15, 2017, that’s exactly the service Woodward performed for them. That day, he appeared on Fox News Sunday to deliver a scathing attack on the Steele dossier....

...At the time Woodward spoke those words, he was already engaged in intense negotiations for access to the new administration.

...Woodward does report that Flynn accepted money from Vladimir Putin’s regime. He does not mention that Flynn violated Pentagon rules against retired generals accepting payment from foreign governments.

...Trump is leading the most unethical White House and most corrupt administration in modern U.S. history, arguably in all of U.S. history. But that does not rate attention from Woodward, perhaps because those scandals do not perturb his sources.

...Woodward’s access to the administration’s relatively normal figures ... actually erodes rather than enhances understanding of the administration’s actions. Their need to justify their own service to Trump compels them to minimize what Trump is and extenuate what he is doing. Woodward’s reliance upon them leads him to minimize and extenuate, too."

Dirty Money

The United Arab Emirates uses American mercenaries to assassinate Yemeni politicians. Not terrorists, just ordinary politicians:

Their target that night: Anssaf Ali Mayo, the local leader of the Islamist political party Al-Islah. The UAE considers Al-Islah to be the Yemeni branch of the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood, which the UAE calls a terrorist organization. Many experts insist that Al-Islah, one of whose members won the Nobel Peace Prize, is no terror group. They say it's a legitimate political party that threatens the UAE not through violence but by speaking out against its ambitions in Yemen.

Nervous Dog

It’s strange to have a dog with such a nervous temperament. I have to teach him how to be a dog.

I’ve been trying to accustom Jasper to short walks, but it’s more like dragging a panic stricken puppy around the block. There are strange people out there! This morning, two women approached on the sidewalk. One woman looked down at him, smiled, and said “hi!” Spooky!

I took Jasper to Sierra II, to the big field where dogs play. Two different dogs approached, a hound dog and a border collie. Not ill-mannered dogs, just insistent on getting to know the newbie. Jasper retreated to my arms and shook with fear.

I rake leaves. Jasper helps out by collecting individual leaves and chewing on them. Upon leaving the yard, he heads next door to collect cat turds. “That’s disgusting!” I tell him. “You’re the one with the pooper scooper,” he replies.

Yesterday Jasper was growling at a mirror. Daddy let in a mysterious dog and didn’t even tell him.

Sears Sunset

The modern method of management is to load the firm with debt, loot it, and then leave. Given this treatment, it's no surprise Sears continues sliding.

President Donald Trump said that Sears Holdings Corp. had been mismanaged for years before it declared bankruptcy. Among those responsible for its management: his Treasury secretary.

Steven Mnuchin was a member of Sears’s board from 2005 until December 2016, and before that was a director for K-Mart Corp., which was acquired by Sears in 2005.

“Sears has been dying for many years,” Trump told reporters as he departed the White House on Monday to inspect hurricane damage in Florida. “It’s been obviously improperly run for many years and it’s a shame.”

Treasury didn’t immediately respond to questions about Mnuchin’s service on the company’s board.

Neanderthal Health Care

Hard lives in a difficult time:

Compared to modern humans, they are often thought to have lacked the necessary compassion or cognitive abilities to look after the sick. “We can infer from the fact that they survived that they must have been helped by others—and in some cases that help must have been knowledgeable and quite well planned,” says Penny Spikins, an archaeologist at the University of York in the United Kingdom. Their survival would have only been possible, in other words, if they had sophisticated health care.

Thunderbolt and Lightning

On the Origin of Wimpy Supernovas

Binary stars can do anything:

Stars born with more than eight times the mass of the sun quickly run out of fuel and succumb to gravity at the end of their lives – collapsing in on themselves and exploding in a supernova. When this happens, all of the star’s outer layers – a few times the mass of the sun – are scattered.

When I started working with my advisor, Mansi Kasliwal, as a new graduate student, I decided to study supernovae that quickly fade in brightness. Mining the database of events discovered by iPTF, I came across iPTF 14gqr, a quickly fading supernova that was discovered more than a year before but whose true physical nature remained mysterious.

The data were puzzling because our preliminary models suggested this supernova was caused by the death of a giant massive star, yet the explosion in itself was quite wimpy. It ejected only a fifth of the mass of the sun, while its energy was only a tenth of a typical supernova. Where was all the missing matter and energy?

The clues indicated that the exploding star must have been stripped of nearly all of its original mass before the explosion. But what could have stolen so much matter from this giant star? Perhaps an unseen binary companion?

Annihilation Came Knocking

The warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico provided the perfect environment for Hurricane Michael to intensify very rapidly as it came ashore:

After coming ashore Wednesday afternoon as a powerful Category 4 hurricane, Michael slashed a path of near-total destruction across the Florida Panhandle and into southeastern Georgia. The storm’s freakishly low pressure and sustained, brutally strong winds—which peaked at 155 miles per hour—flattened neighborhoods, snapped trees in half, and left hundreds of thousands without power. At least six people lost their lives to the storm, according to officials.

Scenes of near-cataclysm are trickling out from across Florida’s Gulf Coast. In the beachfront town of Mexico Beach, Florida, roads now provide the only interruption to piles of rubble that used to be city blocks. At Tyndall Air Force Base, also on the shore, the storm tore the roofs off military hangars and then pushed around the heavy warplanes resting inside as if they were children’s toys.

Even inland, the winds—which blew as fast as those inside a tornado—collapsed churches and gas stations, knocked 18-wheelers on their sides, and stripped dense woodland entirely of its greenery, leaving behind only clusters of huddled, naked trunks.

“Students in tropical-meteorology classes are going to be talking about this storm for 20 years,” says Colin Zarzycki, a tropical-cyclone scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Now, When I Was Young, This Wasn’t A Game

Launch Difficulties

Scary stuff!:

BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (AP) — The problem came two minutes into the flight: The rocket carrying an American and a Russian to the International Space Station failed Thursday, triggering an emergency that sent their capsule into a steep, harrowing fall back to Earth.

The crew landed safely on the steppes of Kazakhstan, but the aborted mission dealt another blow to the troubled Russian space program that currently serves as the only way to deliver astronauts to the orbiting outpost. It also was the first such accident for Russia’s manned program in over three decades.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin had a brief period of weightlessness when the capsule separated from the malfunctioning Soyuz rocket at an altitude of about 50 kilometers (31 miles), then endured gravitational forces of 6-7 times more than is felt on Earth as they came down at a sharper-than-normal angle.

About a half-hour later, the capsule parachuted onto a barren area about 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of the city of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.

Corrales Balloons

Viva Hurricane Leslie!

As Hurricane Michael returns to the Atlantic Ocean for some rejuvenation, let's not forget Hurricane Leslie, the longest-lasting hurricane I can remember, which has been churning away all by itself in the middle of the Atlantic for nearly three weeks now.

Leslie is finally sweeping eastwards. They've issued a tropical storm warning for Madeira Island, off the coast of Morocco. The National Hurricane Center reports:

"It is the first known tropical storm warning for that place, and there are no known tropical storms in the historical record anywhere within 100 miles of that island, with the closest being Vince of 2005."

Leslie is forecast to slam into the northwestern corner of Spain on Saturday, and finally dissipate over the western Mediterranean early next week.

Pictures Featuring Me From DMTC's "Bye, Bye Birdie"

Jasper And His Brother Teddy, At Play

Zombie Ants!

Reading about zombie ants:

To find the world’s most sinister examples of mind control, don’t look to science fiction. Instead, go to a tropical country like Brazil, and venture deep into the jungle. Find a leaf that’s hanging almost exactly 25 centimeters above the forest floor, no more and no less. Now look underneath it. If you’re in luck, you might find an ant clinging to the leaf’s central vein, jaws clamped tight for dear life. But this ant’s life is already over. And its body belongs to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, the zombie-ant fungus.

More Free Speech Bullshit

Conservatives always complain that free speech is being impeded on campus, yet when they are in a position to implement free speech policies, they inevitably choose to introduce mechanisms to police free speech on campus:

But, it seems, these existing policies are not good enough for the province. The Ford government wants each institution to conform to a specific set of criteria and demands, including the introduction of a “monitoring and compliance” mechanism. Furthermore, if an institution fails to meet these new standards, they are threatened with “reductions to their operating grant funding.”

Gyllian Phillips, president of the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations, warns that “threatening to withhold funding from post-secondary institutions will only serve to undermine the quality of education at our universities and unfairly penalize students.”

Surprise BikeParty!

I ALMOST decided to go see Stormy Daniels Friday evening, but I couldn’t justify leaving Jasper, the insecure Pomeranian puppy, alone for hours.

This turned out to be a good decision. Hundreds of people associated with BikeParty Sacramento passed by the front door, then parked directly behind my house, and jammed to fireworks and loud music. Jasper is scared out of his wits.

Dirty Tricks, 2018:

It could be worse, I suppose:

A neoconservative foreign policy group appeared to try and get audio recorded claiming erroneously that Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s (D-TX) Senate campaign was endorsed by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.

The campaign appears to have not made it into production, and maybe never will, as the site where the group posted a call for voice actors took down the solicitation on the grounds that the script was clearly false.

Entertainment Question of the Weekend

See Stormy Daniels, or pass her up?:

Stormy Daniels’ Sacramento-area strip club appearance is on, and the porn star is drawing immense interest just as her tell-all memoir hits retailers.

“She has a special following because of her interaction with Donald Trump, and now, kind of the world,” said Mark Boyles, co-owner of Gold Club Centerfolds in Rancho Cordova, where she’s set to perform this weekend.

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, will perform two back-to-back striptease shows this Friday and Saturday night, with showtimes commencing at 9 p.m. and midnight. Afterward, she’ll be available for “meet-and-greets” with patrons, who will be able take photos with her, Boyles said.

The Trump Administration Fans the Flames of Violence

Even as National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn represented the Turkish government, and it looks like one of its agents decided to pay a call today:

Police were called to Fethullah Gulen’s longtime home in the Pocono Mountains after a security guard fired a “warning shot in the air” around 8:30 a.m., according to a statement from the New York-based Alliance for Shared Values, a group that promotes Gulen’s philosophies.

The man, “who appeared to be armed, attempted to enter the retreat center,” and the guard responded by firing the shot, the statement said. No injuries were reported.

The Pig Race

Like the rat race.

Pencil In Playtime

Introducing My New Companion, Jasper

The first few hours with my new dog, Jasper. He is more independent than the rest of his siblings, and I hope he adjusts well to being away from them. He took the 40-mile drive down from Placerville well. He wandered the truck cab and spent time standing in my lap as I drove, but it was all good.

Jasper’s mystified by virtually everything. He watches every single thing I do and keeps me in sight. He doesn’t like being picked up and figured out that no one can get him if he sits under the kitchen table. He doesn’t like steps, but figured out the two steps into the bedroom.

Jasper’s personality is much closer to that of a Papillon than a Pomeranian. We took a brief walk in the back yard, the back alley, and a parking area. He peed on the concrete rather than the lawn, but thats good enough for now.

Minutes after retiring to bed, there was a sudden crash somewhere in the house. We all started searching for the origin of the sound, and Jasper joined in the hunt. Turned out a hanger failed, and the painting it supported fell to the floor. It was a weird fluke, but Jasper didn’t bark. For all Jasper knows, it’s the new normal.

Jen Broke The Rules And Took A Few Photos Of Me Performing in "Bye, Bye Birdie"

She even took a video, but I can't embed it.

Here Comes Rosa

Maybe Heavy Rains for the drought-stricken Colorado River Valley and Arizona.

Devin Nunes' Family Moved To Iowa More Than A Decade Ago

Very curious. The dairy-farmer family of Congressman Devin Nunes of Tulare, CA, moved to Iowa more than a decade ago:

So here’s the secret: The Nunes family dairy of political lore—the one where his brother and parents work—isn’t in California. It’s in Iowa. Devin; his brother, Anthony III; and his parents, Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, sold their California farmland in 2006. Anthony Jr. and Toni Dian, who has also been the treasurer of every one of Devin’s campaigns since 2001, used their cash from the sale to buy a dairy eighteen hundred miles away in Sibley, a small town in northwest Iowa where they—as well as Anthony III, Devin’s only sibling, and his wife, Lori—have lived since 2007. Devin’s uncle Gerald still owns a dairy back in Tulare, which is presumably where The Wall Street Journal’s reporter talked to Devin, and Devin is an investor in a Napa Valley winery, Alpha Omega, but his immediate family’s farm—as well as his family—is long gone.

There’s nothing particularly strange about a congressman’s family moving. But what is strange is that the family has apparently tried to conceal the move from the public—for more than a decade. As far as I could tell, until late August, neither Nunes nor the local California press that covers him had ever publicly mentioned that his family dairy is no longer in Tulare.