Maybe If It Wasn't For The Water Diversions....

...And the warm temperatures and the low precipitation, maybe we could bring Lake Bonneville back!

Left: The current situation: The level of the Great Salt Lake at Saltair....

And this is the goal....

Pluvial lakes and glaciers in the Great Basin at their maximum late Pleistocene extent. Darker blue areas are late Pleistocene pluvial lakes: Bonneville, Lahontan, Russell (Mono), Searles, Manix, Manly, Kawich, and Mojave.

Map courtesy of Jerry. Original reference: Morrison, R.B., 1991, Quaternary stratigraphic, hydrologic, and climatic history of the Great Basin, with emphasis on Lakes Lahontan, Bonneville, and Tecopa, in Morrison, R.B., ed., Quaternary Nonglacial Geology: Conterminous U.S: Boulder, Colorado, Geological Society of America, p. 283-320.

Bird #95998 Update

It took a bit of persistence, and several calls, but Wilma at the Wildlife Care Association (WCA) in McClellan Air Park finally got back to me with some information regarding the Scrub Jay fledgling I took there last week.

The bird's injuries were not as grave as I had feared. The bird is recovering.

After treatment, birds are taken home by WCA volunteers and released into flight cages with others of their kind. After several weeks of socialization and strengthening, the birds are released back into the wild.

If the bird is an older bird, efforts are made to release the bird in the same generally location where it was originally found. With fledglings like Bird #95998, however, such efforts are usually not made. By the time the bird is released, the bird has generally 'forgotten' about its original home. The bird is given a fresh start at a location of WCA's choosing.

I tried to urge Wilma to persuade the bird's caretakers to release it back at my home, since family members are still flying around in the neighborhood, but it's unlikely WCA will deviate from their established policies.

Well, at least this bird now has a decent chance of making a happy life for itself....

It's All About The Intimidation

An American version of facism gets an Arizona foothold:

Phoenix police have beefed up their security detail for Mayor Phil Gordon after he received death threats apparently spurred by his opposition to the state's new immigration law.

Cmdr. Jeff Hynes, who oversees Gordon's security detail, says the mayor has received several specific death threats, and one claimed he would be killed by sniper fire.

The mayor is under round-the-clock surveillance, and The Arizona Republic reports the heightened security includes plainclothes officers outside his north Phoenix home while he sleeps.

Retiring Phone Number 0888 888 888

Just an unlucky number:

The first owner Vladimir Grashnov – the former CEO of Bulgarian mobile phone company Mobitel which issued the number – died of cancer in 2001 aged just 48.

Despite a spotless business record there were persistent rumours that his cancer had been caused by a business rival using radioactive poisoning.

The number then passed to Bulgarian mafia boss, Konstantin Dimitrov, who was gunned down in 2003 by a lone assassin in the Netherlands during a trip to inspect his £500 million drug smuggling empire.

Dimitrov, who died aged 31, had the mobile with him when he was shot while eating out with a model.

Russian mafia bosses – jealous of his drug smuggling operation – were said to have been behind the killing.

The phone number then passed to Konstantin Dishliev, a crooked businessman, who was gunned down outside an Indian restaurant in Bulgaria's capital Sofia after taking over the jinxed line.

Dishliev, an estate agent, had secretly been running a massive cocaine trafficking operation before his assassination in 2005.

He died after £130 million of the drug was intercepted by police on its way into the country from Colombia.

Gringo Masks

For those times when you can't help but drive across Arizona! (I was amazed when I posted a comment at the Palm Beach Post, only to discover a mountain of racist comments had preceded my own comment. Just another demonstration of the necessity of a mask!):

"When we first heard of the law in Arizona and the effects it could have in terms of racial profiling, we discussed at the agency what we could do about it, since we have access to media," says Michelle Zubizarreta, the agency's chief administrative officer and co-owner along with her brother Joe. "How can we address the issue, but do so in a creative way while at the same time delivering a message?"

Ergo, the mask.

"What caught our attention was the absurdity of this law, and the notion that we all must look a certain way," continues the Cuban-American executive. "Once we talked about it, my creative team came back with the idea of the mask and the website [which went live on April 30. Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are also being used to spread the word]. Basically, this is all a satire of what is happening in Arizona."

The Ice Age Was Probably Something Like This

Late spring has been unusually cool in California, as well as inland in the Great Basin. As a result, snowmelt has been slower than usual.

I recall that Donald K. Grayson's book "The Desert's Past", which is all about the natural history of the Great Basin, featured a discussion to the effect that the kind of weather that led to the growth and development of lakes in the Great Basin during the Ice Ages is a subset of the current climate of the Great Basin. You don't need a truly dramatic change in climate to bring the Ice Age lakes back. Nothing so dramatic as the "The Day After Tomorrow". Grayson discusses the findings of Larry Benson:

Today, evaporation rates in the Lahontan Basin are on the order of 48" a year. What if the 1983 water inflow figures were combined with the lowest monthly evaporation rates known to have occurred during historic times? Those lowest known rates yield 24.8" of evaporation a year, roughly half the the average amount. Given the 1983 inflow rates (2.5 times the average) and the minimum monthly evaporation rates (about 0.5 times the average) Benson showed that Lake Lahontan could, in fact, reappear.

Grayson then relates that Benson suggests that the mean annual temperature decrease known to have occurred during the Pleistocene, of 9 to 13 deg F, would be required to bring Lake Lahontan back.

There is evidence that the Laurentide Ice Sheet's presence in the Ice Age led to a split in the jet stream that brought cooler temperatures and more rains to California and the Great Basin during the Ice Age ("Climatic Changes of the Last 18,000 Years: Observations and Model Simulations," COHMAP MEMBERS, Science, 1043-1052, August 26, 1988).

Aerial pictures might do justice to the topic, but at least at the Stillwater Refuge near Fallon, NV, water levels appear to be up. If we could just keep the weather like this for an extended period, Lakes Lahontan and Bonneville might slowly reappear before our eyes!

Can't Do Much, And That's A Problem

John Cole states the obvious, because it really does appear we need to state the obvious. And restate it again. Criticism of the Obama Administration doesn't really help, and criticism of BP doesn't really help. Suspending ALL permits for deep sea drilling might help in the long run, but not now, not for this case.

Considering that it took Pemex ten months to get Ixtoc I under control, BP is moving pretty fast. They are thinking control by August. But this leak is much bigger than Ixtoc I and we will not be able to tolerate the damage from five months of this.

But we might have to.

I've wondered exactly what went wrong with the containment dome(s). Did they try to extract oil too quickly, triggering the phase change into methane clathrate hydrate? It seems odd that the domes would fill up so quickly with clathrate slush. Would a different approach help?

But I'm in California, and I can't help. It's a nice, rather cool spring here. Even as the world falls apart elsewhere, the rest of the world rolls on, unfeeling and uncaring:

I know that no matter what I say, some of you are going to claim I am shilling for Obama while others of you will read the same piece and claim I am unfairly attacking Obama, but I have a serious question- what exactly is the Obama administration supposed to do about the oil spill?

I’ve thought about it, and there are some things that really have pissed me off:

1.) BP keeps missing deadlines they themselves set to cap the spill

2.) BP keeps trying to hide the size of the spill anyway they can, whether it be using dispersants to keep the oil under the water so no one can see it, refusing to allow independent sources access, or just flat out lying.

3.) The government is, as we speak, issuing more permits to drill, even though it is perfectly clear we aren’t prepared for this kind of catastrophe.

Of course, the obvious damage to the gulf and the wildlife has me livid, but these are specific things that have pissed me off about the government and BP’s response. I also almost through something at the wall yesterday when I read Jake Tapper report that the Coast Guard called BP their “friends.”

Having said that, I just don’t know what the administration is supposed to do. What can be done? That, I think, is the real lesson from this- that we can’t really do anything about this sort of disaster, and i think the administration has done a really shitty job of getting that message out.

I hear screams to “take over” the operations from BP. And do what? Is there some secret naval division that handles deep-sea drilling that we have not deployed? Does the government have some elite unit with better equipment than BP? I’m as pissed at them as anyone and want the government to make them pay for every penny of the clean-up, but I have to believe that all the people with experience fighting these things and all the equipment to deal with this sort of thing is already there with BP. And that if we “took over” from BP, it would still be the same people.

In short, I just don’t know what kind of federal response there really could be to this kind of disaster. In Katrina, the reason fro anger was clear- there were people who needed food, shelter, water, and medical treatment, things we have a lot of all over the country, and we just dropped the ball getting it to them. But with this- what are we supposed to do?

Mark Twain Gets The Last Laugh

His Autobiography appears in November: at his request, at least 100 years after his death:

"There is a perception that Twain spent his final years basking in the adoration of fans. The autobiography will perhaps show that it wasn't such a happy time. He spent six months of the last year of his life writing a manuscript full of vitriol, saying things that he'd never said about anyone in print before. It really is 400 pages of bile."

Twain, who was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, had made several attempts to start work on autobiography, beginning in 1870, but only really hit his stride with the work in 1906, when he appointed a stenographer to transcribe his dictated reminiscences.

Another potential motivation for leaving the book to be posthumously published concerns Twain's legacy as a Great American. Michael Shelden, who this year published Man in White, an account of Twain's final years, says that some of his privately held views could have hurt his public image.

"He had doubts about God, and in the autobiography, he questions the imperial mission of the US in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. He's also critical of [Theodore] Roosevelt, and takes the view that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel. Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa. He said they had enough business to be getting on with at home: with lynching going on in the South, he thought they should try to convert the heathens down there."

Blogger Remembers Ixtoc I

We've been here before!

"Dance With Me" Reference

Here is an interesting guide to the making of the 1998 movie "Dance With Me". When I lived in Tucson in the early 80's, I took lessons at the same studio where Rick Valenzuela taught, and I briefly met Liz Curtis, Ron Montez, and Natalie Mavor too, and so the movie is a kind of a personal touchstone for me.

"Fly"

I just finished watching "Breaking Bad" Season 3 episode: "Fly".

Reminds me of a story.

In January, 1975, I escorted a brand-new student at New Mexico Tech, a Pakistani named Ali, all around the campus. It was his first day in America, and he was excited to tour his new home.

On the west side of campus, we looked inside some new buildings. Inside one room, a fly buzzed hopelessly against a window, trying to escape outside.

Ali shuddered and said seeing the fly made him sad. Ali had grown up in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh), and in 1971 was forced to move to West Pakistan to escape the war. All his life, he had lived amongst flies. He had hoped that in an advanced country like the United States, perhaps there were no flies at all.

Another hope crushed....

Katerine Avgoustakis - Enjoy The Day

Plus the fine video!

What The Oil On The Beaches Looks Like

Mother Jones, since no one else seems to be covering the most important story of the decade.

Another Sunny Day, As The World Slowly Dies

No sign yet that anyone has a grip. The news isn't the best:

Sometime Wednesday, BP plans an exercise called "top kill" that will shoot heavy mud and cement into the well to try to plug it. BP officials estimated the chance of success at 60 to 70 percent.

"They are pressing ahead. We are overseeing them. They're exhausting every technical means possible to deal with that leak," Allen said.

Allen dismissed suggestions that the federal government take over, noting that the government doesn't own the kind of equipment needed to operate at underwater depths of 5,000 feet. "BP or the private sector are the only ones that have the means to deal with that problem down there. It's not government equipment that's going to be used to do that," he said.

Mind Reader

Walking through the Home Depot parking lot back to my car midday on Sunday afternoon, I thought "Boy, I'm beginning to get hungry!" Just as I formed the thought, a voice next to me quietly said "tamales?"

Startled, I turned and saw a Hispanic man riding a bicycle cart through the parking lot, no doubt with a cargo of tamales. Even though I didn't purchase any, it was interesting to see a man at work, presumably in the business of reading the minds of people walking through the Home Depot parking lot.

Orwell Understood History Was The Key

The recent approval of new Texas standards for the teaching of history helps highlight the dangers when an ideology (in this case, conservative ideology) gets to make up its own version of how things happened.

In "1984", George Orwell illustrated just how important it is for a Dictatorship to control history, and to instantly rewrite history when it gets inconvenient.

Here's a fresh example from Arizona - trying to justify the unconstitutional nature of all the wars we have fought since World War II. Orwell would have understood this is just a form of currying favor with the Imperial Executive, to the detriment of our Republic:

Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth (R-AZ), who is challenging Sen. John McCain in the Republican primary, said that the United States did not formally declare war on Germany in World War II -- at least, that's how it went in his history.

While speaking last week to a local GOP organization in Phoenix, Hayworth was asked by an attendee about America's failure to formally declare war in our modern conflicts. Hayworth defended the modern-day authorizations for the use of military force. "But I would also point out, that if we want to be sticklers, the war that Dwight Eisenhower led in Europe against the Third Reich was never declared by the United States Congress," said Hayworth. "Recall, the Congress passed a war resolution against Japan. Germany declared war on us two days later. We never formally declared war on Hitler's Germany, and yet we fought the war."
The questioner then responded that he thought the United States did declare on Germany, and he would check it. Hayworth responded: "I think we should check it. Perhaps we made the rationalization -- since there was the Axis alliance -- that the attack of Japan was tantamount to the attack of the Third Reich. But as I recall in my history, Germany declared war on the United States, not vice-versa."

In fact, the United states did declare war on Germany. The timeline goes as follows: Japan attacked the U.S. Naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war against Japan the next day, December 8, 1941. Then on December 11, 1941, Germany declared war against the United States -- to which the United States immediately reciprocated by declaring war against Germany that same day.

Weep For The Coast

It just gets worse, and worse, and worse! For some reason, the "top down" procedure keeps getting delayed [updates to this several-day's old article in brackets]:

BP is preparing to launch a procedure as early as Sunday [now postponed till Wednesday] to clog the flow of oil and gas from the month-old Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But the proposed "top kill" method is untested at the 5,000-foot depth of the spill, and could easily join the growing list of fixes thwarted by the spill's punishingly remote environment. It is also the most invasive maneuver attempted to date, and could rupture the leaking well and actually accelerate the flow of crude.

Oil containment operations simultaneously gained ground last week as BP installed a tube in the crippled mile-long riser that once linked the Deepwater Horizon rig to its seafloor wellhead. By Wednesday, the ad-hoc Riser Insertion Tube Tool was sucking 3,000 barrels of oil per day into the holding tank of a drilling vessel, cutting releases to the sea by roughly half [today, being reported as overestimated, with no more than 1,000 barrels/day captured]; the vessel is also flaring off about 14 million cubic feet of captured natural gas per day.

BP's riser insertion operation marks its first real technology success after a string of high-profile failures. One early effort to suck up spilling crude--a 100-ton steel box lowered over the wellhead--jammed within hours with a frozen slurry of natural gas and seawater. This fiasco followed weeks of fruitless attempts to stimulate the blowout preventer, or BOP, that sits atop BP's crippled wellhead. Ongoing Congressional investigations last week highlighted design limitations and potential maintenance lapses involving the equipment, which the offshore industry hitherto regarded as a "fail-safe" defense against deepwater spills.

...The top kill procedure, if it works, will stanch the flow of oil and ultimately allow workers to cap off the well with two relief wells-but these caps won't be ready for several months. It will use the BOP's three-inch-diameter choke and kill lines, which open into the space between the well's casing and the drill pipe that runs up the riser. The lines are being cut and spliced into hoses connected to the Q4000, a vessel on the surface, whose 30,000-horsepower pumps will drive a dense mix of clay and other substances called kill mud into the lines. If the mud cannot stop the flow of oil, BP says it will be ready with a "junk shot," in which a mix of materials from shredded rubber to golf balls are pushed into the lines to further gum up the flow paths through the BOP.

Federal officials acknowledge that the top kill carries a risk of breaking open the well or the BOP and exacerbating the spill. "We're carefully looking at all the pressures involved--what the BOP can handle, what the down-hole [pipe] can handle," says Lars Herbst, director of field operations in the Gulf for the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS), the federal regulator that both sells offshore oil and gas leases and regulates the resulting drilling.

Paul Bommer, a senior lecturer in petroleum engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, says he believes the junk shot will prove necessary. But he also sees it as a gamble--the junk shot could fail to block the BOP and further damage and open up the riser. "The bent riser is the weak link. The riser probably does not have the pressure rating of the BOPs and possibly could rupture," says Bommer.

Infighting is beginning to start as people try to dodge the blame. I was amazed by Sarah Palin's efforts in this regard, not only to shift blame to the Obama Administration, but to continue shilling for Big Oil:

Palin, who has supported drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife, told Fox News that onshore drilling is "even safer than way offshore." She said:

Maybe this (Gulf spill) is a lesson too for those who oppose safe, domestic supplies being extracted on our shores and on the land."

It's a tautology, I suppose. It's now crystal-clear that we really do lack the technology to safely exploit deep sea oil reserves, which just means we'd better step up our onshore drilling exploitation.

Can't figure out whether to laugh or cry about that.....

"Cinderella" - Runaway Stage Productions

Bows. It was good to see Mike Jones as the King, and Karen Day as the Queen.

One of the White Mice. At left, Choreographer Pam Kay Lourentzos catches herself just before entering the field-of-view.

Don Marsden and Stepmother Lillian Baxter. Lillian had fine comedic timing in her role as the Stepmother.


Cinderella (Katie Veale) and Prince Christopher (Brian Watson; Scott Woodard plays the Prince on other weekends.)

I think this is only the second show I've seen with Katie Veale. I really liked her as Cinderella. Brian Watson has a wonderful singing voice and played a strong Prince.










Stepsister Darryl Clark.

When DMTC did "La Cage aux Folles" two years ago, Darryl subtly resisted my efforts to persuade everyone to use high-end, expensive cosmetics from Sephora. Not that there was anything wrong with expensive cosmetics, it's just that it struck Darryl as - imprudent - particularly onstage, where the audience can't examine the work too closely. Despite my best efforts, Darryl proved good at resisting peer pressure too. So, when I praised his excellent makeup job here (the shot is a bit overexposed, so it doesn't quite do justice to the handiwork) it was as if we were taking up the same conversation from two years ago.

"Wonderful job," I said. "Where did you get the cosmetics?" Darryl hesitated slightly and said "Walgreens." I furrowed my brow and said, "Walgreens?" Darryl replied "It isn't what you use, it's how you use it!"

Darryl may have a point.....




Anne-Marie Pringle and Darryl Strohl.

"Jack And The Beanstalk" - DMTC YPT (II)

This is the last weekend for DMTC's YPT's "Jack And The Beanstalk". Here are a few pictures that I still had from the first weekend.

Fowl!

Aw, shucks! I was looking forward to some crowing:

RENO, Nev. -- Voters dressed in chicken costumes won't be allowed inside Nevada polling places this year.

State election officials on Friday added chicken suits to the list of banned items after weeks of ridicule directed at Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden.

The millionaire casino executive and former beauty queen recently suggested that people barter with doctors for medical care, like when "our grandparents would bring a chicken to the doctor."

Democrats responded by setting up a website, "Chickens for Checkups," and by sending volunteers in chicken suits to her campaign events.

...Under the new rule, chicken costumes will be banned along with political buttons, shirts, hats and signs within 100 feet of polling places.

Washoe County Registrar of Voters Dan Burk said such a costume would be an "inappropriate and obvious" advocacy message against Lowden.