Don't Underestimate Hawaiian Volcanoes

RIP, Margaret Gidding

Many fond memories. RIP, Margaret Gidding.

A short film clip of Margaret Gidding dancing with Laure Courtellemont on December 5, 2014. (I was outside the room because I had a cold.)



Margaret was also part of this PSA (filmed November 10, 2012; choreographer Krystle Morales):




And this film clip:

Checking In With The Cardio Doctor

I’d been pleased with my tolerance of blood thinner. Turned out, I was taking only half the recommended dose. D’oh!

Nice view of historic Ft. Sutter. Thar’s gold in dem dere medical suites!

No TV For Me, For Now

The DirecTV fellow came by, and immediately objected to using the previous DirecTV antenna. New rules specify that their workers can't stand on roofs to reach the antenna, and the old antenna was accessed by standing on the roof of the shed. He wanted instead to lean a ladder against the gutter and mount the new antenna on the roof - a considerable distance up there - but I objected to what I saw as the potential isntability of a ladder leaning against the gutter. So, I elected to cancel the installation. Sean Hannity will just have to wait....

Yanny vs. Laurel

Today's hot item. Myself, I hear Laurel.

Here's what my Echometer provides. Saying the name spans the x-axis (time) from 50 milliseconds to 450 milliseconds. The bottom display covers the full range of hearing of a young person, from 0 to 20 kilohertz. Most of the world we hear is below 4 kHz. The upper display shows overall magnitude of the sound. There do seem to be quieter frequencies (2, 6 and 9 kHz). A good portion of the sound from 4 to 6 kHz continues after the word is said, suggesting significant background noise at these frequencies. The "L" sound seems to have components up to 13 kHz frequency. Maybe these are harder to hear for older folks. The "R" sound may include that ghostly 16 kHz spike - maybe also harder to hear. Still, I doubt it's that simple. If so, older people would be unable to understand speech.

This article is most interesting. The folks here say it depends on pitch:

One of the more interesting things to come out of the yanny/laurel debate was the discovery that, by changing the pitch of the recording, you could adjust what you heard. In general, people heard yanny more consistently when the pitch was lower and laurel when the pitch was higher.

Facebook Fakes

Impressive. Nearly a third of all Facebook accounts are fake. Facebook has only recently realized it has many nemeses, and who knows if it can survive?

Meanwhile, Facebook’s rate of squashing fake accounts is decreasing. The site removed 583 million fake accounts in the first quarter of the year, roughly 100 million fewer than were removed in the last quarter of 2017. The company attributed the decline to the "variability of our detection technology's ability to find and flag" fakes. A Washington Post report this month found that the company’s facial-recognition tool, which the company says could help spot impostor accounts, reviews only a small fraction of the site’s roughly 2 billion monthly active users.

Toto's "Africa," in Gaelic

"Rubber"

At Awesome Video’s going-out-of-business sale, I picked up a DVD of “Rubber,” a 2011 movie about a vengeful tire with psychokinetic powers wandering across the Mojave Desert. Watched it Monday night. The movie is pretty dumb, but vaguely entertaining. I like this review:

I developed a theory while watching Rubber. I honestly believe the filmmakers set out to make the most unwatchably pretentious, utterly repetetive, vile nonsense they could possibly come up with and then laugh hysterically at all of the morons who pull some kind of "unique hidden meaning" out of it. The film opens with a pointless opening monologue, followed by a three minute sequence of a tire "waking up", both of which had me scrambling for the fast forward button. Then things went sharply downhill from there. There's only about 30 minutes of actual content here, the rest is just one long shot of a tire rolling around after another after another until you want to cry. I love unique and quirky films with a passion but this film is neither, no matter how hard it tries to be. It's grating, irritating, stretched-out, inane, fatuous, embarrassing boredom on a piece of celluloid.

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day! Marjorie Louise Buzzell, 1941 graduate of Hirschfield High School in Chicago, IL.

More on MH370 Pilot's Motives

Four years on, experts think they are finally beginning to understand some of the motives of the pilot of doomed flight MH370 (perhaps rage at Anwar Ibrahim's sentence, delivered that day in court in a session attended by the pilot), and his evasive path along the Thai-Malaysian border. In particular, he changed course at Penang, in order to get one last look at his hometown, before vanishing forever:

There has been much speculation as to why the plane went so far off course and “dipped the wing” over Penang before making a sharp turn and heading south for the next six hours. According to Mr Hardy, it was so the pilot could see his hometown one last time.

“I spent a long time thinking about what this could be, what technical reason is there for this?” he said.

“And after two months, three months of thinking about it, I finally got the answer — somebody was looking out the window.

“It might [have been] a long, emotional goodbye or a short, emotional goodbye to his hometown.”

Green Valley Theatre Company's "A Chorus Line"

A few photos from Green Valley's "A Chorus Line" opening night (for this show, at Hiram Johnson High School). Everyone looked fabulous, particularly Christina Castro, Kris Farhood, Elio Gutierrez-Montoya, and Stephanie Hodson. Jenny Lillge looked great too. Loved Jacob Gutierrez-Montoya's choreography (with traces of "The Doorway"), except for the finale. I couldn't put my finger on the difficulty until Ron Cisneros said "I'm glad they did the traditional finale choreography." (I never much liked that traditional finale choreography. Indeed, there are some aspects of the show I've never much liked - it's a bit juvenile - but the concept was always a winner.)

There were some opening night glitches. Sound was a bit weak at times. 'Zach' was having some opening-night jitters. All stuff that will get hammered down as the run proceeds.

Christina Castro as Cassie.

Ana Hansen was there opening night. She explained she's rehearsing for "Mamma Mia" at the Mountain Play in Marin County (opens in a little over a week).

Stephanie Hodson as Judy.

Jennifer Rubin Takes on Hateful Culture of the Trumpies

But conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin needs to understand, this is what conservatives are, and have always been:

Kelly, like Sadler, was not speaking out of school. One could imagine President Trump saying very similar things in private or even in public. Kelly’s boss, who does not want black and brown people from “shithole” countries, would no doubt applaud Kelly’s comments. Trump has yet to apologize for ridiculing McCain’s status as a POW during the campaign. Fox News’s business model is built on promoting crackpot ideas and airing hateful rhetoric that feed the anger and resentment of its base. That means tearing down genuine heroes who challenge the Great Leader Trump. They are utterly comfortable voicing obnoxious slurs, revealing a stunning lack of human decency. They are superstars in the right-wing ecosystem, not in spite of their crass, bigoted views, but because of them.

The ensuing firestorm did force the Fox host interviewing McInerney to apologize and Fox to say it wouldn’t have McInerney back on. He might be excused for thinking his rhetoric, of a piece with so much of what airs on Fox, was entirely acceptable. Indeed, why invite on a birther if not to say outrageous things?

This is the political culture blessed and cheered on by evangelical leaders — for whom nothing Trump or his cronies do (be it paying hush money to a porn star or slandering a POW or endorsing an alleged child molester) is over the line. There is something dark and twisted at the core of the Trumpian political movement and philosophy (if you can call it that). You don’t get criticized, let alone fired, for perpetuating hurtful conspiracy theories (about Seth Rich’s death, President Obama’s birth certificate or McCain’s captivity) or for voicing hateful views.

In short, not all of Trump’s followers and enablers are bad people, but in the Trump universe, bad people sure do flourish.

Khalia, TIFA - "Ride Up"

Facebook Ads From The Election

Beginning to look at Russian-Troll Facebook Ads from the 2016 election. Zipped files are here.

Keeping an Eye on Florida

Forecast still has a tropical storm in it, but it's delayed a bit: Friday May 25th - Saturday May 26th - a Memorial Day surprise. Projected path still hasn't settled down from one forecast to the next. Starts in the Caribbean and heads north. Path could easily include Tampa.

Fierce Funk Group Picture

The two us with recent health challenges kneel in a fighting pose.

Mockingbird

It’s funny what you remember from Facebook. Several years ago, Amber Jean Moore posted about not being able to sleep because of a Mockingbird outside her window that just wouldn’t shut up. Amber’s rage against nature made me smile.

Now, there’s a Mockingbird outside my window that just won’t shut up....

AT&T Came Banging on My Front Door

Bang, bang, bang! Who's there? It's AT&T!

The two young salesmen at the door were desperate to sell me on getting DirecTV. They came with iPad in hand asking me for all my numbers, Social Security number too. Hope this isn't a scam. If it's a scam, it's an unusually well-done scam. Now, I used to have DirecTV, but abandoned it at least four years ago due to the cost, plus all the absurd bullshit that passes for news these days.

The reason the salesmen gave for this visit was as a customer-retention effort, given neighborhood Internet interruptions due to construction and with new, faster, fiber-optic cable now being available. Hmm.... Maybe plausible. I certainly have had lots of Internet interruptions on AT&T. I don't know about construction going on, but Xfinity and Comcast have been trying to grab my attention, with flyers in the mail, and especially when their technical people block my driveway with big trucks and are up on my utility pole after sunset. Customer-retention makes some sense, given the competition.

Still, what caught my attention was being to get DirecTV and Internet for about the same cost as getting Internet alone. I hate TV, but what's not to love about getting free TV? Plus being able to watch TV on the iPhone?

So, why are they giving me free TV?

There may be a tie-in with what's happening elsewhere:

The body isn’t even cold yet, but AT&T is wasting no time in rolling out new “features” that fly in the face of net neutrality. The company has expanded its “sponsored data” program to prepaid wireless customers, offering content companies the option to “sponsor” their data so that it doesn’t count against users’ caps.

This, in case you’re wondering, is what you find under the definition of “paid fast lanes” in the net neutrality false promises hall of fame.

As of right now, the only three services using AT&T’s sponsored data program are DirecTV, UVerse, and Fullscreen. By a huge coincidence, those are three video services owned by AT&T. “Now your plan includes sponsored data. This means, for example, that customers who have DirecTV or U-verse TV can now stream movies and shows … without it counting against their plan data,” AT&T told customers in a text message earlier today.

This flies directly in the face of a statement AT&T made just last year, when it was trying to persuade consumers that the FCC’s net neutrality repeal wouldn’t be the end of a free and open internet. “AT&T intends to operate its network the same way AT&T operates its network today: in an open and transparent manner. We will not block websites, we will not throttle or degrade internet traffic based on content, and we will not unfairly discriminate in our treatment of internet traffic,” executive Bob Quinn said at the time.

By any definition, offering paid fast lanes to companies constitutes “discriminating” against internet traffic. I’d say that only prioritizing traffic from AT&T-owned companies, or companies willing to pay up, constitutes unfair discrimination, but then again I’m not an AT&T lawyer.

The salesmen and I didn't talk about net neutrality. Instead, my effort to sign up was bollixed by an iPad upgrade not installed, and didn't succeed until the third time. Since they were on my doorstep for a long time, we started talking. They saw my "Breaking Bad" T-Shirt and talked about being fans of the TV show. I started expostulating on my theories regarding sets and filming locations. So, I went to go find a copy of my book. I couldn't find any except old copies, so I gave the old copies to them as gifts. They were pleased, and it made the tedium of waiting easier to endure.

Maybe an Early Start

Forecasts are suggesting next week will be rainy in Florida - south Florida especially.

The long-range GFS forecast suggests an early start to the hurricane season, with a tropical storm/hurricane in Florida's vicinity 12 days from now - Monday, 5/21.

The long-range forecasts are often wrong, and the forecasts vary about where in Florida a storm might strike. I notice that forecast certainty increases when back-to-back forecasts agree, and the last three back-to-back forecasts all feature this tropical storm/hurricane.

Still, it would be a surprise, maybe unprecedented, to have a storm this early in the season. Hurricane season doesn't even start until June 1st.

So, hoping for a bad forecast.

Kleinfeld

I'm plugging away on the draft of my new "Breaking Bad" book, to be released beside my fifth edition of "Guidebook to 'Breaking Bad' Filming Locations" in November, after Season 4 of "Better Call Saul" has aired.

I keep finding all kinds of mysteries and associations in "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul." I really like this one....

Judging from the large sign out in front of their new Wexler-McGill law office, Jimmy and Kim do business with Kleinfeld Commercial Brokerage, which happens to be a real business in Albuquerque owned by a fellow named David Kleinfeld (“Better Call Saul,” Season 2, episode 8, ‘Fifi’). Kleinfeld signs are extraordinarily common in Albuquerque. You'll see five Kleinfeld signs in passing while driving to the supermarket. Thus, Kleinfeld signs attract no special attention - at all!

Nevertheless, as first pointed out to me by Eabha Conal (someone from outside Albuquerque, because Burqueños are too close to see it clearly), Kleinfeld is a reference to “Carlito’s Way,” a 1993 Brian de Palma gangster film starring Sean Penn as sleazy lawyer David Kleinfeld.

Another example of Vince Gilligan and company hiding a gem in plain sight!

Mass Bat Emergence on My Third Visit to the Extreme Western End of the I-80 Yolo Causeway

These Mexican Free-Tail Bats are known for their big emergence displays in summer. I thought it was too early to expect one yesterday, but I was wrong! I got all kinds of ultrasonic bat recordings too. The supporting literature says the recordings are particularly unreliable during roost emergences, and indeed, the recording waveforms looked like static when a zillion bats appeared at once. Still the recordings I got are robust, with tons of bat signals.

I almost left too early and missed the emergence of the bats. It was amazing when it came! There were a couple of people from Concord nearby. As I walked away, the woman bid me stop. "Can you see the bats flying around under there?" she said. I thought she was nuts at first. It was more than thirty seconds before I finally saw movement. The mass emergence started less than a minute after that.

Next time, I'd like to be in a position to see the bats come out of their homes in the expansion joints under the I-80 freeway. And I wonder about all the solitary bats of other species left behind.

I like playing the bat recordings at 1/16 speed. Makes them sound like mysterious monkeys. This recording is labeled Canyon Bat, but since it was just a few minutes before the mass emergence, there are lots of other bats here too, and all very loud.

Big Day of Giving 2018 at DMTC

May the Third with Mayzie La Bird! Fun time. Lots of potatoes, and other food. I led the Yopp contest. Ella won for ages 12 and under, and Tate for the older crowd. My understanding is that DMTC got $23,500, plus an additional $3,000 in offline donations.

Underworld - Cowgirl (Footage from BBC Deep Blue)

Electronica, with fish (the crabs at 8:14 are amazing).

I'm guessing it's a mashup of BBC nature video with Underworld's House style. According to Wikipedia, the music dates to 1994. I love the music, and I especially like the hyperfocused crabs. Not sure what kind of crab they are - not the red crabs of Christmas Island, nor the Cuban crabs:

Fire Brings Down The Building

Just like with the WTC, explosives not required to bring down the building:

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — A high-rise tower in São Paulo, Brazil, collapsed early Tuesday after a fire raged through the building and spread to two other structures nearby. At least one person was believed to have died.

The collapsed building, which reached more than 20 stories high, was a former federal police facility that was inhabited by about 150 squatters, city officials said, but it appeared that the vast majority of them escaped the blaze.

May The Third With Mayzie La Bird

Don Miguelo - "7 Locas"

This is Zumba!

Burro Banton - "Lyrics Daddy"

Pepper uses this song for Zumba, but its hypnotic rhythm seems more-suitable for Dancehall. I just like it!

"Finding Your Feet"

I was bored, so I went to the Tower Theater to see this film, "Finding Your Feet," about which I had heard nothing.

I was alone in the theater, so I guess no one else had heard of it either.

I was hoping it would prove to be an English version of "Strictly Ballroom," but it wasn't that. It was a clash of lifestyles: stuffy lady moves in with her freewheeling sister, and laughs occur. Someone somewhere said that the English used to be the most proper people in Europe, but now they are the most emotional, and that seems right somehow. So, a bit formulaic of a movie, somewhat amusing, but not an epic by any means.

"I Can Only Imagine"

As a heathen, I generally avoid the Christian subculture in America, but I did see the J. Michael Finley/Dennis Quaid movie "I Can Only Imagine," which tells the tale of Bart Millard, lead singer of a Christian band named 'Mercy Me.' To my surprise, the movie's actually quite good. The acting is excellent, and the theme of father/son conflict is universal. Plus, excellent cinematography, reflecting lots of capital investment and artistic thought. Even though the song "I Can Only Imagine" is apparently very popular on the Christian side of things, I had never heard of it before, no doubt due to my heathen status. Apparently the band 'Mercy Me' was honored at a recent Presidential dinner, and a clip from the dinner was included in the movie, but they didn't show Trump, which shows good judgement on the moviemakers' part.

In An "Arcade Fire" Mood Today

Happy Beltane Everyone!

The Slow Death of Rural Kansas

Commodity agriculture is to blame:

That’s the thing about rural Kansas: No one lives there, not anymore. The small towns that epitomize America’s heartland are cut off from the rest of the world by miles and miles of grain, casualties of a vast commodity agriculture system that has less and less use for living, breathing farmers.

U.S. census data tells the story. The population in most of Kansas’s rural counties peaked 50 years ago or earlier. The state’s annual population growth rate is among the slowest in the country, steadily falling from 1.2 percent in 1960 to 0.9 percent in 2016, with nearly all of that meager growth concentrated in a handful of eastern urban areas—Wichita, Kansas City, Topeka, and Lawrence.

Population is also growing in the areas around the state’s massive slaughterhouses and feedlots, which have built communities largely around immigrant labor. But that’s nowhere near enough to stave off the decline, which is only expected to increase more rapidly.

World's Oldest Known Spider Dies

Forty-three years!:

The world’s oldest known spider has died at the ripe old age of 43 after being monitored for years during a long-term population study in Australia, researchers said Monday.

The trapdoor matriarch comfortably outlived the previous record holder, a 28-year-old tarantula found in Mexico, according to a study published in the Pacific Conservation Biology Journal.

The spider did not die of old age but was killed by a wasp sting, researchers said.

...Number 16 was monitored in the wild. Female trapdoor spiders stay in and around the same burrow virtually all their lives, so researchers marked her burrow and went back to check on it regularly.

...Trapdoor spiders traditionally have a lifespan between five to 20 years. While females stay in or near their burrows, males leave once mature and go in search of a mate.

Life Out in the Country

Fun video.

Try Subtraction!

Something doesn't add up.

My Photos of DMTC’s “Guys and Dolls” are Posted

Link.

Leukemia and Lymphoma Society Sunday Zumba Fundraiser

Fundraiser at California Northstate University Events Center in Elk Grove.

Toy Boat

Dropping That Hot Potato

Catastrophic Rainfall in Kauai

Unbelievable numbers:

Since the 1940s, the Hawaiian island of Kauai has endured two tsunamis and two hurricanes, but locals say they have never experienced anything like the thunderstorm that drenched the island this month.

"The rain gauge in Hanalei broke at 28 inches within 24 hours," said state Rep. Nadine Nakamura of the North Shore community. "In a neighboring valley, their rain gauge showed 44 inches within 24 hours. It's off the charts."

Actually, it was even worse. This week the National Weather Service said nearly 50 inches of rain fell in 24 hours.

Now, as Kauai continues to recover, scientists warn that this deluge on April 14 and 15 was something new — the first major storm in Hawaii linked to climate change.

"The flooding on Kauai is consistent with an extreme rainfall that comes with a warmer atmosphere," said Chip Fletcher, a leading expert on the impact of climate change on Pacific island communities.

He noted that the intense rainfall not only triggered landslides, it also caused the Hanalei River to flood and carve a new path through Hanalei. Homes, cars and animals were swept away in raging waters, but no residents or visitors died. Some were airlifted to safety or rescued by boat.

Members of a bison herd were displaced or carried off by floodwaters, and some were rescued from the ocean after swimming for their lives. "Poor buffalo," said Sue Kanoho, executive director of the Kauai Visitors Bureau, who saw video and photos of the animals roaming around businesses and neighborhoods.

The picturesque North Shore communities of Wainiha and Haena are considered the hardest-hit because the only road that leads to them, Kuhio Highway, is now blocked by landslides. Officials say it may not fully reopen for months.

...For about a week after the storm, the normally aquamarine ocean around the island was an eerie orange — a sign of the volcanic soil. The more iron in the lava, the more orange the soil, said Dolan Eversole, a coastal geologist with the University of Hawaii Sea Grant College Program.

Since Kauai is the oldest of the Hawaiian Islands, the mountains are exceptionally steep and the distance between the mountaintops, where it rained, and the sea is relatively short. There was no time for the red-orange clay to settle as water raced out to sea, he said.

We Made This

Stark Rain Divide Between Northern and Southern California

And so, the California 2017-18 rainy season is over. Sacramento Executive Airport ended up with 89% of average precipitation, which is nearly-identical to the 2015-16 rainy season value of 91% two years ago. Northern California's nearly-normal rainy season contrasts with Southern California's terrible rainy season. It will be a long, hot summer this year in the South Coast and deserts.

Five Bat Species

I was out underneath the western end of the I-80 Yolo Causeway again shortly before sunset on 4/29, listening to the batspeak in the vast colony there with my Bat Echometer. Once again, Mexican Freetail Bats were common (as the Echometer ID'd in the picture below), as were Hoary Bats, but as sunset approached, the squeaking chatter grew louder, and other bats began drowning out the more-common bats, namely the Yuma Myotis, the Canyon Bat, and the Western Red Bat. These five bat species are common enough in the Davis, California area, but I didn't realize they all live right next to each other, cheek by jowl. It must be bat heaven there under the Yolo Causeway. Once again, I never actually saw the bats (although one apparently pooped on my head). The rising cacophony was exciting. The mass flights of summer are approaching. I can hardly wait!

I'm worried about the small Midtown Sacramento colony of Mexican Freetail Bats. They've begun a large construction nearby, and although the bats aren't directly affected, all the noise and fuss nearby might be problematic.

Spending Too Much Time at Awesome Video’s Going-Out-Of-Business Sale.

Visit to Gunther’s

Time To Fight The Donuts

A Clip from Salvador Dali's Film

Comet 67P

Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko:

The video clip (below) shows roughly 25 minutes of flight past Comet 67P on June 1, 2016. The scene looks like something out of a science-fiction film:

Sneaking Up on the Sloths of New Mexico

Prehistoric encounter out at White Sands:

Last April, Matthew Bennett was lying on a white salt flat in New Mexico, uncovering fossilized footprints that had been preserved in the white rock. The print belonged to a ground sloth—a bulky animal, whose large feet and curved claws left apostrophe-shaped impressions wherever it walked. There were many such tracks around, but Bennett found one that was very different.

Inside the outline of the sloth’s 20-inch-long foot was a human footprint.

He looked at the next track in the series and found the same thing—a human footprint, perfectly nestled inside a sloth one. There were at least 10 of these, all in a row. “It slowly dawned on me what was happening,” he says. Thousands of years ago, a ground sloth had walked along this site, and a person had followed it, carefully matching its every step. “There was a lot of profanity [from me],” Bennett adds. “That’s what geologists do when we discover something.”

White House Primatology

Sean Hannity, Welfare Queen

All that money!:

The Guardian found that Hannity owns millions of dollars of real estate through more than 20 shell corporations, which shield his identity. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, The Guardian notes, insured the mortgage loans with which Hannity purchased the properties. Let's be clear: This is a subsidy. This is a benefit. This is big government aiding a very wealthy man. This is welfare.

Karma Comes For The Troll

He earned it:

Milo was apparently at a bar in Manhattan recently when the bar patrons (many of whom were members of the Democratic Socialists of America) began chanting “Nazi scum get out.”

Milo eventually left the bar in a perfectly calm and collected fashion, and no physical intimidations appear to have been made. However, he later recalled the incident on his Instagram, claiming that he was afraid of getting “hurt or killed” and that the situation “was about to escalate into something ugly.”

Dairy Queens of the Southwest - Canaries in the Coal Mine

DQs have always been more vulnerable than other fast-food outlets:

The old saying that every Texas town has a Dairy Queen is no longer true for many communities, especially the agricultural hamlets of the Panhandle, which have been disproportionately affected by a spate of closures. On October 30, Vasari LLC, which operated about 70 Dairy Queens across Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico, filed for bankruptcy and announced it was closing 29 stores, 10 of them in the Panhandle.

...The old saying that every Texas town has a Dairy Queen is no longer true for many communities.

Vasari’s explanations for its troubles are puzzling. Its bankruptcy filing claims that many of its restaurants are located in “prime oil country” and were hurt by declining oil prices. Yet only three—in Hobbs, New Mexico; Denver City; and Seagraves, all southwest of Lubbock—are close to the oil patch. Most are in cities like Post, Claude, and Perryton, in the heart of cotton country. Vasari also blamed its demise on Hurricane Harvey, claiming that it ruined inventory and damaged stores. But most store closures weren’t in areas battered by the storm. (Neither Vasari officials nor their bankruptcy attorneys responded to requests for comment.)

Deep in the bankruptcy documents, in a subsequent filing, Vasari hinted at a more deep-rooted problem: while some of its stores were profitable, the company “as a whole [was] facing net operating losses that [could not] continue unabated.” That might have left the Panhandle locations particularly vulnerable. Though most seemed to be doing a healthy business, at least in the eyes of locals, supplying remote towns miles from the interstate is an expensive proposition. Vasari doubtless burned through a lot of money paying for gas, cargo space air-conditioning, and truckers’ salaries in order to get frozen burger patties and soft-serve ice cream to restaurants that weren’t exactly booming. “In small-town fast-food restaurants, the profit margins are small,” said Mary Dawson, an associate dean at the Conrad N. Hilton College of Hotel and Restaurant Management, at the University of Houston.

Fire At The Albuquerque Rail Yards

Stupid arson:

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — A fire ignited inside a vacant building at the historic Albuquerque Rail Yards Monday afternoon, spreading to the roof and two other adjacent buildings before it was contained, according to a spokesman for the Albuquerque Fire Department.

Officials believe the fire was intentionally set. The AFD Fire Investigation Division along with the Albuquerque Police Department are following several leads, said Tom Ruiz, a spokesman for the fire department.

“There was a pile of pallets, and a pile of trash and rubbish – that was where the point of origin was,” Ruiz said.

In a news conference held in front of the building on Second Street, south of Downtown, Mayor Tim Keller said highly flammable logs soaked in creosote left over from when the Rail Yards was operational caught fire and contributed to its spread. He said the buildings that were affected had been closed to the public and no one was injured in the blaze.

It also is not expected to affect the Rail Yard Market, which opens for the season on May 6.

“The Wheels Museum has not been harmed,” Keller said. “The building where the Rail Yards Market is held is also fine and not affected by this fire.”

Damage was limited to three buildings, Ruiz said.

Short Zumba Stretch With The Barreto Brothers

Dancehall Powerup Promo Video

Kate writes:

The promo piece you posted on dancehall powerup looked fun, so I googled to see when/where the classes are, and this popped up. You probably saw it at the time, but in case not … you’re in it J

Whoa! No, actually I had NOT seen this! Thanks, Kate!

My Neighborhood

"Lean on Pete"

I was stunned with the hillside that opens this preview for "Lean on Pete," because I passed along this exact road near Burns, Oregon when I was traveling back from the Idaho eclipse trip in August. What are the odds of that?

I was very impressed with the beauty of the country near Burns. If the Pueblo Indians had even seen Malheur Country, they would have given up the Southwest in an instant.

Impressive movie! The perilous journey of a 16-year-old homeless kid in the Pacific Northwest. Plus, horses!

The Addams Family - Sheldon High School

A surprising fact, since I knew Craig Howard, but it was the first time I'd ever been out at Sheldon High School. I wanted to support Choreographer Katie Rogers, and her students. The dancing did not disappoint!

Like it a lot. I particularly liked Fester, Pugsley, and Morticia.

This Video Has Been Out For Years, But I Still Find It Disturbing

Not as disturbing as googly-eyed animated cars, but disturbing enough.

Second Foray with the Bat Echometer

I went under the western end of the Interstate 80 Yolo Causeway, shortly before sunset. The device was flagging about 2/3 of the bat calls as Hoary Bats, and the remainder as the expected Mexican Freetail Bats.

I eventually attracted the attention of a Wildlife Area volunteer. He explained that there were a number of different bats here, but that the main body of mature Mexican Freetail Bats were at the eastern end of the Causeway. Later in the year, juveniles would move out here towards the western end. Both ends have spectacular and distracting bat displays at sunset in the summer. I don’t know why the juveniles would choose to live apart from their elders. Maybe their ultrasonic rock and roll grates on the ears of their parents.

I never saw any bats, but I knew they were there. I could hear them a bit. Something whirred past my head. I looked up and saw midges floating above me. If I attract insects, it’s logical I’d attract bats too.

As I left the Causeway in the gloaming, in the distance, I could see a midge tower forming. In June 2011, I saw a spectacular series of midge towers out here. I hope they come back.

Now, time to look into the spectral analysis software.

I'm impressed with the loud pings of Hoary Bats. In the lower display, the horizontal line is at 20 kilohertz, which is the upmost range of a young person's hearing range, and exactly the frequency at which the Hoary Bats were loudest. I couldn't hear them, though. My ears are just too old.

Namibia's Fairy Circles

Interesting. Deserts around the world have similar patterned landscapes:

A new study published in Nature has found that Namibian Fairy Circles are the product of not one, but two ecological forces. By combining field observations and computer models, researchers from Princeton University, the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, and several other institutions, have shown that the interaction between both termites and self-organizing plants (i.e. plants that either clump themselves together or disperse according to the availability of resources) is sufficient to explain this enigmatic landscape feature. Importantly, this new theory could be used to solve similar mysteries around the world.

One Toke Over The Line - Lawrence Welk Show (1971)

Kafkaesque