Eighteen Year Record as a Social Influencer, and I Get Squat

Bloomberg really wants to buy this thing:

Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg's campaign is paying social media influencers and a social media firm to flood Instagram with fake messages purportedly sent by the billionaire.

Bloomberg's campaign is offering social media influencers a fixed $150 fee to create content that "tells us why Mike Bloomberg is the electable candidate who can rise above the fray, work across the aisle so ALL Americans feel heard & respected," The Daily Beast reported last week.

The campaign is using Tribe, a "branded content marketplace" that allows brands to reach "micro-influencers" with 1,000 to 100,000 Instagram followers.

Hmmmm.... That's the problem with text instead of memes. I've been trying to be a social influencer for years. My blog is actually older than Facebook, but no one throws me any money.

Take Two

DNC Chairman Paints Fake Tunnel to Sideline Sanders Campaign

Acme Corporation Superpac.

Jasper and I Find Timely Campaign Wear in the Alley

Prescription Absurdity

This is absurd, but everything about prescription prices in the U.S. is absurd:

SALT LAKE CITY -- Ann Lovell had never owned a passport before last year. Now, the 62-year-old teacher is a frequent flier, traveling every few months to Tijuana, Mexico, to buy medication for rheumatoid arthritis — with tickets paid for by the state of Utah’s public insurer.

Lovell is one of about 10 state workers participating in a year-old program to lower prescription drug costs by having public employees buy their medication in Mexico at a steep discount compared to U.S. prices. The program appears to be the first of its kind, and is a dramatic example of steps states are taking to alleviate the high cost of prescription drugs.

In one long, exhausting day, Lovell flies from Salt Lake City to San Diego. There, an escort picks her up and takes her across the border to a Tijuana hospital, where she gets a refill on her prescription. After that, she’s shuttled back to the airport and heads home.

Lovell had been paying $450 in co-pays every few months for her medication, though she said it would have increased to some $2,400 if she had not started traveling to Mexico. Without the program, she would not be able to afford the medicine she needs.

“This is the drug that keeps me functioning, working,” said Lovell, who works at an early-intervention program for deaf students that's part of the Utah Schools for the Deaf and Blind. “I think if I wasn’t on this drug ... I’d be on disability rather than living my normal life.”

The cost difference is so large that the state's insurance program for public employees can pay for each patient’s flight, give them a $500-per-trip bonus and still save tens of thousands of dollars.

Idling Car

One a.m., and Jasper and I passed a mysterious car idling in the alley. Not terribly worried about the folks’ intentions, though. As I explained to Jasper, “if this car’s a-rockin’, don’t bother knockin’.”

Rainless February

We've never recorded a completely-rainless February in Sacramento - the lowest amount on record is 0.04 inches in 1899 - but we might just do it this year. Welcome back our old friend, Drought.

"Come Rain or Come Shine" - Rachel Hoover - 11th Annual DMTC Cake Auction - 02/08/20

Rachel knocks it out of the park with her rendition of "Come Rain or Come Shine." There are a lot of different versions and interpretations of this song. I really like Rachel's emotional interpretation.

11th Annual DMTC Cake Auction - The Singers - February 8, 2020

11th Annual DMTC Cake Auction - February 8, 2020

Some of the cakes!

Changing Times Along The Canals of Phoenix

People's ideas change over the decades:

Part of the canals’ mystique is that some of their routes predate Phoenix by nearly two millennia. Beginning around A.D. 200, Hohokam Indians, using handheld digging tools, moved tons of earth and engineered the largest pre-Columbian irrigation system in the Western Hemisphere. Some 250 miles of canals fanned like tufts of hair from the Salt River, irrigating several thousand acres of corn, squash, beans, pumpkins and cotton. Having reached a population of twenty thousand, the Hohokam abandoned the Salt River Valley around 1400, possibly because they had depleted the soil.

For the next four centuries the drainage cooked in the sun, its canal system choked with the debris of flash floods. The dormancy lasted until just after the Civil War, when gold miners burst into the Arizona Territory. Migrants to the West Coast passed through the valley. U.S. Army forts were established to the northwest at Prescott and Wickenburg, and upstream from Phoenix at Fort McDowell, to fend off Apaches. Miners, migrants, and soldiers all needed to be fed. In 1867 a scheming ex-Confederate soldier named Jack Swilling responded with the Swilling Irrigation and Canal Company. Using Mexican labor, he retrenched many of the old Hohokam canals. Alfalfa for horses and grain for persons soon flowed from the Salt River Valley to the forts.

Mapping Underground New York City

The good uses of computers:

It was 2010, and Leidner was consulting for the government services company Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., contracted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to identify potential threats and vulnerabilities in the nation’s critical infrastructure. Leidner was examining a region that included New York and New Jersey. One day he was thinking about the area’s electrical power grid. He consulted some flood projection maps the Federal Emergency Management Agency had prepared. Then he stared at a map of the grid maintained by Consolidated Edison Inc., the region’s power supplier. And it just jumped out at him: The substation at East 13th Street, on the banks of the East River, was smack in the middle of a flood zone.

Leidner voiced his concerns with utilities, hospitals, and other major facilities. “The reaction was mostly, ‘Eh,’” he recalls, as we sit in the Tribeca offices of the Fund for the City of New York, where he directs the nonprofit organization’s Center for Geospatial Innovation.

When Hurricane Sandy arrived in 2012, barreling up the Eastern Seaboard and heading straight for New York, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projected a massive surge in New York Harbor. “I realized it would hit the flood maps that FEMA produced,” Leidner says, “which meant East 13th Street was about to be flooded.”

Maybe a Wind Record

For the Sierra:

SOUTH LAKE TAHOE, Calif. —

A gust of 209 mph was recorded atop a California peak on Sunday, a potential record that wowed forecasters monitoring a cold storm moving south through the state.

The blast of wind was captured around 7:45 a.m. by an instrument at 9,186 feet on Kirkwood Mountain south of Lake Tahoe, said National Weather Service forecaster Alex Hoon.

He and his colleagues at the NWS office in Reno, Nevada watched in surprise as wind speeds across the crest of the Sierra Nevada hit 150 mph and kept rising.

“It went up and up," Hoon said. It could take months for state climatologists to verify the record, he said.

“But the way that the winds did ramp up, it looks legitimate,” Hoon said. “It's an exciting moment for sure."

The previous record was a gust of 199 mph at Ward Mountain west of Lake Tahoe on Nov. 16, 2017.

Bunny O’Hare (1971)

Link to map

Last updated: March 8, 2023


Link to Top-Level Menu
Link to Top-Level Map





Notes on Individual Scenes
-----------------------------

Link to movie: https://ok.ru/video/333248137891

Bulldozer on street - where?

Daughter's house

Driving - SoCal? - Cedar Crest

Gas station

Ed's House

More travel - NM roads

Drive-in restaurant

Playground

Stream/Sand Dune

Bank of NM - Los Lunas Branch - in Belen, where Becker meets the main drag, where the Bank of ABQ sign is now

Onate Theater, Belen, 700 Dalies Ave.

Bank interior

Drive in the Sandias/Manzanos/ Road - where?

Valencia Co. Court House/ Los Lunas City Hall/ Building with windows/ Wells Fargo bank across the street

NM State Police Building - is this Albuquerque? There used to be a building that looked like this, but it's long gone. Old 1936 phone book lists the Angelus Hotel at 121 1/2 N. First St.

Wards at Winrock

Fleeing at the curve on Highway 550

Ruins - Sandias, near Placitas?

NM State Police Bldg.

Bank of NM Building - Candy striped bldg - Eubank & Constitution, at the Princess Jeanne Shopping Center, where the Carl's Jr. is now.

Motorcycles blockade - probably road to Coronado National Monument

Bank of NM Building - Candy striped bldg - rotating sign

Post Office - downtown

Coronado National Monument

Lt. Greeley's office

Phone booth/newspaper machine - probably Winrock

Ed's Apt.

Bank of NM Building - Candy striped bldg - interior

Cross country near Texaco station

Junky looking place

Post office

NM State Police Bldg

Coronado National Monument

Printing shop

Santa Fe looking type place - Old Town?

Lulu's place

Bank of NM Building - Candy striped bldg - Alameda Branch

Fleeing - Menaul & Carlisle

Ed's Apt.

Bank of NM Bldg - NM Bank & Trust? - American Finance Loans - Luxfer Prismatic Windows resemble Cemtral Ave. just east of Broadway, but likely not there, but maybe on Gold Ave. SW instead.

Near St. Joseph's Hospital - Elm St. & Marquette Ave.

Tijeras Cement plant - 11779 S. NM 337 (old NM 14)

Road south of Tijeras - (35.070270, -106.383502)

Parrot interrogation/Group therapy

Ed's apt.

Bank of NM - Manzano branch - small town - where?

Streets

Roadblack - Rio Rancho?

Post office

Coronado National Monument

Bank of NM - Belen branch - Becker St.

Hotel Belen - Eagle Bank

Old Town Bandshell.

Old Town Bandshell.

Socorro branch - near Shell and Conoco stations

Rotating bank of NM sign

Fleeing along street

Fleeing - Valencia Shopping Mall

Believe road to Coronado National Monument is used, and then they turn down NM 528 - I remember that sign blocking the path northward at Highway 550. The area sures looks different these days.

Rio Rancho - NM 528 - Bunny shot - hard these days to pin down exact location - I remember hearing when they were filming up there

Driving to doctor - I believe this is near Tramway & Cloudview

Looks like creosote - towards Socorro?

Bank of NM - Cedar Crest branch - ?

Traveling on road - Curve with intersecting road - Y

More roads

Town - Las Palomas - Chilili, NM

Lulu & Ed's places

Credits