Sacramento area community musical theater (esp. DMTC in Davis, 2000-2020); Liberal politics; Meteorology; "Breaking Bad," "Better Call Saul," and Albuquerque movie filming locations; New Mexico and California arcana, and general weirdness.
(CNN) Idaho police officers on Saturday arrested 31 people who are believed to be affiliated with the White nationalist group called Patriot Front, after they were seen gathering near a Pride parade in the city of Coeur d'Alene, police said.
"It is clear to us based on the gear that the individuals had with them, the stuff they had in their possession, the U-Haul with them along with paperwork that was seized from them, that they came to riot downtown," Coeur d'Alene Police Chief Lee White said during a news conference.
The FBI is assisting local police in its investigation, according to FBI Public Affairs Specialist Sandra Yi Barker. Barker said Coeur d'Alene police are the lead law enforcement agency investigating the situation.
The people who were arrested were all wearing similar clothing associated with Patriot Front, including identical insignia, and there was at least one smoke grenade in their possession, police said. They were still being processed at the time of the news conference and have not yet been identified.
White said the group was equipped with "shields, shin guards and other riot gear with them," along with papers he described as "similar to an operations plan that a police or military group would put together for an event."
The 31 individuals were arrested for conspiracy to riot, which is a misdemeanor, White said, adding the suspects came from at least 11 states.
Walt sends this. Interesting. I’m looking at some of the two and three week weather-model simulations, some of which suggests an early start to the summer rains. I hope that’s true:
LOS LUNAS — Only months into the 2022 irrigation season, Jason Casuga, chief engineer and CEO of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, told the 50-plus farmers gathered at the Los Lunas Transportation Center on Wednesday afternoon the district was predicting irrigation waters would run out by the first week of June.
During a follow up interview on Friday, Casuga told the News-Bulletin the district might be able to keep ditches running until the third week of June.
“Based on the water meeting today (Friday, May 27), we’re hopeful that while a lot of the native water will be gone somewhere in the second week of June, if we can get there, we plan to use San Juan Chama water to extend that out another week, week-and-a-half,” Casuga said. “If the best happens — outside of getting rain — we could get into the third week of June before we run out.”
One a.m. The DMV building on 24th St. is experiencing an alarm, and flashing rhythmically. Jasper and I would sit and watch, but this is about the time in James Bond movies when fireballs appear, so we’ll head home instead.
I saw Seals and Crofts in a peculiar double-bill with Jerry Jeff Walker at Red Rocks Amphitheater outside Denver, CO in 1976. Pretty locale, and we were hit by two thunderstorms during the evening:
Seals died at his home in Nashville, Tennessee on June 6, 2022, aged 79, after a long illness.
It took a couple of years for Seals and Crofts to record “Summer Breeze” to their satisfaction, but when the song—with its catchy hook and indelible chorus evoking sunnier times—finally hit the airwaves, in 1972, Jim’s nostalgia became everybody’s. ... Their smiling, bearded faces were everywhere as soft rock was embraced by millions and ruled the pop charts for much of the rest of the seventies—even as it was reviled by critics, who pointed their fingers at Southern California as the likely source of this plague of mellow.
Sitting in his house in tiny Rankin, Texas, a retired oil field roughneck and guitar player named Wayland Seals knew better. Wayland was Jim’s father, and he knew firsthand that L.A. wasn’t soft rock’s sole origin point. In fact, some of the genre’s deepest roots ran under the sidewalks and streets of the very town he lived in—and then pushed out through the barren fields of West Texas. It was a vast, desolate area, one that Wayland knew well, one where young men with pitch-black grit under their fingernails and dried mud in their hair dreamed of country music every day and played it every night.
The world's largest living plant has been identified in the shallow waters off the coast of Western Australia, according to scientists.
The sprawling seagrass, a marine flowering plant known as Posidonia australis, stretches for more than 112 miles (180 kilometers) in Shark Bay, a wilderness area protected as a World Heritage site, said Elizabeth Sinclair, a senior research fellow at the School of Biological Sciences and Oceans Institute at The University of Western Australia.
That's about the distance between San Diego and Los Angeles.
The plant is so large because it clones itself, creating genetically identical offshoots. This process is a way of reproducing that is rare in the animal kingdom although it happens in certain environmental conditions and occurs more often among some plants, fungi and bacteria.
I thought this was an interesting article. My (third?) cousin was a recent football hero at Timberline High School. He's attending classes at Boise State these days:
Timberline High School student Annie Birch Wright felt a connection to her school’s mascot because it wasn’t just another generic animal.
The mascot is the wolf, which led to a real pack of wolves living in the nearby Boise National Forest being named for, symbolically adopted by and studied at the high school.
“It is just a really cool thing to have,” said Birch Wright, who is a member of the school’s TREE Club, which stands for Teens Restoring Earth’s Environment. “It was a way for students to connect with the environment and wild species, especially because it is a wolf, which is our mascot, and because of how big of a role wolves play in our ecosystem.”
Before Birch Wright and her friends attended Timberline, some previous students even got to go on field trips with their teacher and a wolf tracker near Lowman, where they looked for wolves, listened for their calls, analyzed their scat and urine and followed their prints in the snow.
...Because of COVID-19 precautions and this year’s usually cold and snowy spring, Birch Wright hasn’t yet had the chance to go out tracking wolves from the Timberline pack in the Boise National Forest.
Now, she’s worried she will never get the chance to track her school’s pack. Based on information from a wolf tracker, Jordan told the TREE Club members that pups from the Timberline pack were killed in 2021, in the wake of the Idaho Legislature’s passage of Senate Bill 1211.
The 2021 law allows Idaho hunters to obtain an unlimited number of wolf tags, and it also allows the Idaho Department of Fish and Game to use taxpayer dollars to pay private contractors to kill wolves, including on public lands. Also in 2021, the Idaho Fish and Game Commission expanded the wolf hunting season and hunting and trapping methods.
“When our pack was killed, nobody knew about it at first, but when we were told by Mr. Jordan, it took all of our breath away. It hit hard,” Birch Wright said.
I got real excited about seeing this movie at the Tower Theater, because it has Kristen Stewart in it. Stewart chooses the most interesting movies these days. Director David Cronenberg has a reputation for body horror, but hadn't directed a movie in a while. So, a lot of potential here for a great sci-fi movie.
What a weird film! A world where pain and infection and even blood-letting are unknown. A world that develops a lust for amateur surgery, performance surgery, surgery on street corners, etc. Like tattoo culture, but much more extreme.
The movie doesn't seem to be all that popular (68% on the Tomato Meter), but it is thought-provoking:
“Crimes of the Future” is a thinly conceived dystopian fantasy that offers its characters little psychology and little context, little view of the social order around them or the history that led them there; it displays ideas in isolation from their whys and wherefores. In this regard, it’s a classic “late film”—it’s the first feature that Cronenberg, who’s seventy-nine, has made since 2014, and what he has to say here he lays on the line with few of the blandishments of popular movies, and little of the aesthetic care of art-house ones. It’s a movie to have seen rather than to see. The ideas that Cronenberg puts forth are powerful and poignant; his subject is the effort to make art amid a despoiled cultural environment and debased cultural consumption. It’s a drama of eight years of silence, of a vision of the end of the line, the end of the world as he knew it.
In the movie’s first dramatic scene, the boy’s mother, Djuna (Lihi Kornowski), finds the boy, Brecken (Sozos Sotiris), sitting on the floor of their bathroom, munching on a plastic garbage basket—which is telling, as “Crimes of the Future” is very much about the crimes of consumption and the system of production that led to them. The movie’s protagonists are a couple of artists, Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux), who live and work together. Saul, who has a sort of “accelerated evolution syndrome,” manages to generate inside himself—supposedly even wills into being—new internal organs of unspecified function or no function at all. In private, Caprice examines them invasively, by inserting an endoscopic-lens tube through his skin into his abdomen. Then, in public, their performances involve Saul lying passively on an “autopsy bed,” which Caprice manipulates, via remote control, to open him up and extract these new organs, to the hushed and breathless delight of their audience. (Though directing a film of body horror, Cronenberg tones down the gross-out, in quality and quantity, as if rendering it a mere symbol of itself.)
