Burglar Reconnaissance

It's summer, and it looks like the usual suspects are getting restless. I was talking on the phone this morning and my dog Jasper came into the house barking, and unusually upset. It did not click immediately that something was wrong. It took me about an hour to discover that someone had intruded into the garage. 

No items appear to have been stolen, but I was surprised at the brazenness of the entry, since I was at home. Some items, like an axe, were moved around. I did not observe suspects.  I reported the incident to the cops, and posted on Next Door Curtis Park and Facebook.

Back at Jamaican Dancehall Again!

Century Plant Wows The Neighborhood!

The neighborhood paper covered the amazing century plant blooming three doors from my house:

Craig Reynolds of California Agave Ventures, a Yolo County agave grower, identified the plant as an agave americana, commonly called a century plant.

“They grow slowly for many years, then bloom only once in their lives, emitting a long central stem, the quiote,” Reynolds said. If pollinated, the flowers eventually form seeds – “then the stalk and entire plant die.”

The seeds fall to the ground; some may produce new plants. Not all agaves are monocarpic, a type of plant that flowers just once, then dies. The chemical change the agave americana goes through to produce the giant stalk, fruit and seeds takes all of the plant’s energy. The mother literally gives her life for her future babies. She can also produce pups and future plants through underground horizontal stems called rhizomes, which the agave already has accomplished.

Most agave americanas live 10 to 30 years despite their “century plant” name, although an extremely well cared for agave americana in a university greenhouse in Michigan was 80 years old when it bloomed in 2014. The stalk grew so high that it burst through the greenhouse ceiling. 

Neighbors estimate the Second Avenue agave is about 30 years old.

Joshua Trees Are in Trouble

Too hot; too dry:

When we visited, dry limbs drooped.

Some barrel-shaped, dead leaf clusters dangled while others had fallen onto ground as dry as death. In decades past, those clusters dropped seeds that sprouted after rains.

“There’s no recruitment” now, Cornett said, scanning an area without a single sprout.

A drier climate means more vulnerability to fires caused by lightning or vandalism.

There’s no more devastating example than last year’s Dome fire at the Mojave National Preserve, an hour or so to the north. The fire, ignited by lightning, incinerated more than 1 million Joshua trees.

At the Queen Valley site, Cornett examined the stems of the four surviving trees and discovered yet another assault on their health.

“This is the first time I’ve seen signs of rodents attacking stems on this site,” he said, pointing out some gnawed branches. As with the ocotillo, the problem seemed to be that the plants usually found around the trees were dead or dying, leaving virtually no moisture for rodents.

They appeared to have dug their teeth into Joshua trees in a last-ditch effort to survive.

At the base of one tree, whose age Cornett put at about well over 100, he noticed another threat: A patch of bark had been scraped away.

Cornett crouched, inspected, harrumphed. It looked like the work of a jack rabbit, he said, which must have been trying to get at the moisture in the stem. 

“To chew through bark like that,” he said, “that is one desperate jack rabbit.”

Patti Smith - "Rock and Roll Ni**er"

I never paid any attention to Patti Smith before. Never had any interest in punk music.  Nevertheless, I had some easy-listening music on (the soundtrack to "Natural Born Killers"), and heard this song. It's great! According to the Wikipedia article on Patti Smith, rocker Courtney Love says it's the best rock-and-roll song of all time. And she should know, right? 

   

 Patti Smith still tours too! From 2015, when she would have been age 69.

 

I Just Like "That's Not My Name"

Final Report on the 2020-21 Rainy Season

My last report on the 2020-21 rainy season. 

California and the Southwest are firmly locked in extreme drought. The situation is just as bad as the 2012-2016 drought, and maybe even worse. 

The 2020-21 rainy season is the fifth driest of the 144 seasons on record in Sacramento (only the 1912-13, 1923-24, 1975-76, and 1976-77 rainy seasons were drier). 

Having two failed rainy seasons in a row is brutal. It doesn't rain in most parts of California in the summer. Fire season prospects look bleak. Violence too appears all but guaranteed this summer in the Klamath Basin. 

Looking forward to rains again come November.

Demise of a Palm Tree

Demise of a palm tree, two doors down. It’s been there, like, forever, and it will be weird to have it gone. 

 Reason for early termination: “uncorrectable structural defects.”

My Upcoming Talk on Salvador Dalí!

I'm excited about a talk I'm going to give under the auspices of the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, FL. My talk is entitled "The Influence of Salvador Dalí in 'Breaking Bad' and 'Better Call Saul'." The talk will be streamed on the museum's YouTube channel on Thursday, June 24 at 6 p.m. EDT (4 p.m. MDT, 3 p.m. PDT). 

I gave the original version of this talk to the 42nd Annual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference (usually hosted in Albuquerque, but held virtually this year on February 22). On a lark, I shared a YouTube link of the talk to the Dalí Museum, and they liked it, in part because it dovetailed nicely with other presentations given at the museum regarding Dalí's impact on popular culture. The talk will be adjusted to emphasize art works held in the collection at the Dalí Museum. 

According to Wikipedia: "With the exception of the Dalí Theater-Museum created by Dalí himself in his hometown of Figueres in Spain, the St. Petersburg Dalí Museum has the world's largest collections of Dalí's works."

Lunar Eclipse, May 26th

Approaching 4 a.m.: approaching totality on the lunar eclipse. 

Man, they’ve got to start scheduling these things at better hours.