Thinking About "Breaking Bad" Film Locations

For an Albuquerque native like myself, watching AMC's television series "Breaking Bad" is an amazing experience, because so many of the locales are recognizable, or nearly so. Even though I live in California now, I yearn to see these places again, and find out where the nearly-recognizable places are located.

Interestingly, this part-time Albuquerque resident has experienced the same yearning, and she devoted a lot of effort to tracking these places down, taking pictures of them, and posting Google placemarks. Like me, she had become obsessed with the precise shooting locales.

For example, the high school was driving me nuts, because it clearly was one of the newer high schools in town - but which one? She identifies the high school as Rio Rancho High School. The school didn't exist when I lived there, but when I was in high school I used to love to hike to Loma Colorado, the large, red hill that gives the school's street its name, and look at the ancient Rio Grande river mud frozen into rock on the hillside there. Ah, memories! When I visit in July, I want to take a little time and do something similar, analogous, or complementary to what she did.

There must be something about being expatriate Albuquerqueans that makes the yearning so keen for us. For much of my life, all I wanted to do was get away from seeing the Hi-Lo Market every day. Now, all I want to do is make sure the Hi-Lo Market is still there. And did I ever anticipate wanting to see the Octopus Car Wash again? I mean, who could ever have anticipated that?

Judging from a few comments on some Web Site I was looking at yesterday, I think there might be small-scale tours led by fans already underway in town. If the series continues, it could even become a small-scale business, reminiscent of the bus tours of SF's Haight-Ashbury District in the 60's; or, more recently, LA's 'Cholo' bus tour, or the bus tour of the Colorado Strip polygamous communities of southern Utah and northern Arizona. "Here we have a typical Albuquerque mobile home, and its atypical low-life owner. Wave at him, folks: for a fee, he'll let you take his picture! Despite his ferocious, whacked-out appearance, and his numerous tattoos, he's pretty clean, and excepting that one bad week in 2002, he's been off drugs since 1995!"

Recycling Those Tea Leaves

It looks like the economy is stronger this year than last year, but not as strong as in 2007 and 2008.

Election Night At Adam Sartain Headquarters

Left: Candidate Adam Sartain monitors the election results.

Tuesday night wasn't the kindest to Adam, but there were some grace notes nevertheless. In the Assembly District 9 race, Adam spent only about $16 per vote; roughly on a par with fellow candidate Lauren Hammond's campaign, and in stark contrast to more than $100/vote by fellow candidate Chris Garland. In addition, mapping software showed that Adam's percentage of the vote was higher in the neighborhoods he canvassed on foot.
Left: Campaign Manager Leighton Worthey provides inspiration.

When election returns provided fodder for humor, Adam and Leighton played suitable sound effects (e.g., wah-wah-wah) on a boom box.
Left: Campaign Mascot 'Midas' provides companionship. On Election Night, every candidate needs a canine!

As of Wednesday, June 9th, 1:34 a.m., the Assembly District 9 election results are as follows:

Kevin McCarty - 9,359 - 35.2%
Roger Dickinson - 9,294 - 35.0%
Lauren Hammond - 5,003 - 18.8%
Chris Garland - 2,278 - 8.5%
Adam Sartain - 691 - 2.5%

Where'd They Put That Reunion?

I was several keystrokes away from confirming my plane reservations to attend my 36th high school reunion in Albuquerque this coming weekend, when I thought I should double-check the reunion times and location. Turns out, they moved the reunion to the weekend of July 24th. So, I've got a month-and-a-half to figure out how to present myself as more successful than I really am....

Wading Through The Election Mailers

I wanted to do a more thorough analyses of these, but wouldn't you know, Election Day is already here! So, just an impressionistic sense....

It's very impressive how many gubernatorial candidates from the 2003 California Recall are on today's gubernatorial and lieutenant gubernatorial ballot: Eric Korevaar, Chuck Pineda, Jr., Robert Newman, and Bill Chambers. Plus, Daniel Watts is running for Davis City Council. I'm sure there are others out there too. What was old is new again! [Update: I voted for Chuck Pineda, Jr. I met him in the 2003 race and I have a soft spot for the guy. He really wants to help East LA gang members to give up the gang life. For lieutenant governor, I voted for Eric Korevaar. A fellow scientist! I don't know his positions on the issues, but I did meet him once, also in 2003!]

In the District 5 City Council race, the candidates are mostly very capable, which makes decisions hard. Patrick Kennedy's campaign has been the scrappiest, most-innovative, and most interesting one. Terre Johnson seems to have faded from view somehow. Nevertheless, I will probably vote for Jay Schenirer. [Update: Indeed I voted for Schenirer, and I'm shocked to see how overwhelming his victory in District 5 was!]

In Assembly District 9, Chris Garland's amusingly sleazy attack on Kevin McCarty left no real damage. Roger Dickinson damaged himself with all his whining about Wall Street being the source of Sacramento's budget problems. Lauren Hammond has been lower-profile than I expected in this campaign: she retains a lot of respect in the area, though, and could provide an upset. Nevertheless, I'm a friend of Adam Sartain, so I'll vote for him today. (And head over to his house after DMTC rehearsal tonight - for the victory celebration?? Quien sabe??) [Update: See nearby blogpost.]

The mailer that really annoyed me was the 'Latino' mailer. What a joke that mailer is! Only half-wit Latinos will follow their advice. Every issue they identify as important to Latinos they suggest voting in such a way as to hurt Latinos. It's this practice of selling space to candidates and ballot measure campaigns that really destroys the integrity of these mailers. Even the 'Green' mailer sells out, but not as bad as the 'Latino' mailer.

I'm just disappointed in these mailers! I should send out my own mailer!

I will vote NO on the propositions (with a possible yes on 15). [Update: I voted yes on 13 and 15. In some kind of crazy spasm, California voters demonstrated a real urge to vote yes on all the propositions in this election.]

Vote NO! on Proposition 16! A Yes victory could seriously damage non-profit community theaters, and businesses of all kinds, since, without the effective competition provided by public power agencies like SMUD or LAW&P, PG&E would essentially have a monopoly over electrical power generation and could raise rates without challenge (with the last remaining, weak, feeble resistance coming at the CA CEC). Only half-wit Latinos will vote Yes on 16! Don't be a half-wit Latino!

[Update: Words can't express my shock in seeing how close the Proposition 16 race is! It's as if, after Godzilla devastates the Japanese countryside and approaches the city limits of Tokyo, the Tokyo voters held a referendum whether to permit Gozilla to enter the city limits, and the voters split 50-50 over the question. WTF? Are people crazy? It's Godzilla (aka, PG&E) for crying out loud!

This measure had better go down to defeat or we are all screwed!]

"Crazy For You" - DMTC - Monday Night Rehearsal

"I Got Rhythm"

Free At Last

Bernie Madoff:

But that evening an inmate badgered Madoff about the victims of his $65 billion scheme, and kept at it. According to K. C. White, a bank robber and prison artist who escorted a sick friend that evening, Madoff stopped smiling and got angry. “Fuck my victims,” he said, loud enough for other inmates to hear. “I carried them for twenty years, and now I’m doing 150 years.”

For Bernie Madoff, living a lie had once been a full-time job, which carried with it a constant, nagging anxiety. “It was a nightmare for me,” he told investigators, using the word over and over, as if he were the real victim. “I wish they caught me six years ago, eight years ago,” he said in a little-noticed interview with them.

And so prison offered Madoff a measure of relief. Even his first stop, the hellhole of Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), where he was locked down 23 hours a day, was a kind of asylum. He no longer had to fear the knock on the door that would signal “the jig was up,” as he put it. And he no longer had to express what he didn’t feel. Bernie could be himself. Pollard’s former cellmate John Bowler recalls a conversation between Pollard and Madoff: “Bernie was telling a story about an old lady. She was bugging him for her money, so he said to her, ‘Here’s your money,’ and gave her a check. When she saw the amount she says, ‘That’s unbelievable,’ and she says, ‘Take it back.’ And urged her friends [to invest].”

Pollard thought that taking advantage of old ladies was “kind of fucked up.”

“Well, that’s what I did,” Madoff said matter-of-factly.

“You are going to pay with God,” Pollard warned.

Madoff was unmoved. He was past apologizing. In prison, he crafted his own version of events. From MCC, Madoff explained the trap he was in. “People just kept throwing money at me,” Madoff related to a prison consultant who advised him on how to endure prison life. “Some guy wanted to invest, and if I said no, the guy said, ‘What, I’m not good enough?’ ” One day, Shannon Hay, a drug dealer who lived in the same unit in Butner as Madoff, asked about his crimes. “He told me his side. He took money off of people who were rich and greedy and wanted more,” says Hay, who was released in December. People, in other words, who deserved it.

...Remarkably, that ego appears to have survived intact. H. David Kotz, the Security and Exchange Commission’s inspector general, investigated his agency’s failure to uncover Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and Madoff volunteered to speak to him—he is, no doubt, the world’s expert on the subject. He quickly reminded Kotz of his stature—“I wrote a good portion of the rules when it comes to trading,” Madoff said. He insisted that he’d been “a good trader” with a solid strategy, explaining that he’d stumbled into trouble because of his success. Hedge funds—“just marketers,” he said with evident disgust—pushed cash on him. He overcommitted, got behind, and generated a few imaginary trades, figuring he’d make it up—and never did. Whatever his own missteps, Madoff saved his scorn for the SEC. He did impressions of its agents, leaning back with his hands behind his head just as one self-serious agent did—“a guy who comes on like he’s Columbo,” but who was “an idiot,” Madoff said, as recorded in the extraordinary exhibit 104, a twelve-page account of the interview that is part of Kotz’s report. Madoff is no ironist. His disdain for the SEC is professional, even if the agency’s incompetence saved his skin for years—all Columbo had to do was make one phone call. “[It’s] accounting 101,” Madoff told Kotz, still amazed.

Madoff’s ego was on display in prison, too. ... One evening, Bowler, a drug trafficker (“I’m not a con man, I’m a businessman,” he wrote to me), sat next to Madoff watching a 60 Minutes segment about him. Prison authorities keep the volume off, and inmates wear headphones and tune in to the radio signal that broadcasts the sound. Bowler removed one earpiece. “ ‘Bernie, you got ’em for millions,’ I said to him. ‘No, billions,’ he told me.” Another evening, one former inmate was watching a TV news report on the auction of Madoff’s much-chronicled watch collection—he owned more than 40, from Rolexes to a Piaget. The watch featured that evening fetched just $900, and Madoff, whose only watch now is a Timex Ironman that he bought at the commissary for $41.65 and is likely engraved with his inmate number, called out, “They told me that watch was worth $200,000.” The inmates laughed along with him. They didn’t see any reason for Madoff to regret his past. “If I’d lived that well for 70 years, I wouldn’t care that I ended up in prison,” Evans says.

...Prisoners crowded Madoff seeking investment advice—missing the fact that Madoff, being a con man, hadn’t invested for years. Other convicts saw in him a fellow entrepreneur, ignoring the obvious fact that his scheme wasn’t a business at all, just smoke and mirrors. But Madoff had amassed the symbols of success, and for criminals, that counts.

Oily Crystal Ball

Today's NOGAPS weather forecasts suggests tropical storms will arrive in the Caribbean south of Haiti in about a week. That would mean maybe nearly two weeks before they start seeing storm activity near the Deepwater Horizon.

Then again, NOGAPS is a 'Chicken Little' kind of tropical forecasting tool: it nucleates hurricanes faster than Tiger Woods changes girl friends. Maybe the Gulf will have good weather for a couple of weeks. Still, at some point, NOGAPS will be right. A storm will approach, the ships will be forced to leave, and that incredibly-leaky Rube Goldberg machine they have down there will dump all the oil into the Gulf with no interruption.

Even though they are capturing some of the crude now, BP is still dumping unconscionable amounts of it. In news coverage, a kind of oil fatigue has set in. People keep trying to move on, but the crude won't let them.

If I had to guess, I'd say most tropical storms will track into the western Gulf of Mexico first. The persistent trough off the east coast of the U.S. has moved the storm track pretty far south, and west.

"Four Lions" Trailer

Comedian Jeff Denham seemed to be the first to explore the comic ramifications of the "War on Terror". Now, here is this movie....

Interesting Speculations About Life On Titan

Titan is an interesting place:

Two new papers based on data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft scrutinize the complex chemical activity on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan. While non-biological chemistry offers one possible explanation, some scientists believe these chemical signatures bolster the argument for a primitive, exotic form of life or precursor to life on Titan's surface. According to one theory put forth by astrobiologists, the signatures fulfill two important conditions necessary for a hypothesized "methane-based life."

...The hydrocarbon mapping research, led by Roger Clark, a Cassini team scientist based at the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver, examines data from Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer. Scientists had expected the sun's interactions with chemicals in the atmosphere to produce acetylene that falls down to coat the Titan surface. But Cassini detected no acetylene on the surface.

In addition Cassini's spectrometer detected an absence of water ice on the Titan surface, but loads of benzene and another material, which appears to be an organic compound that scientists have not yet been able to identify. The findings lead scientists to believe that the organic compounds are shellacking over the water ice that makes up Titan's bedrock with a film of hydrocarbons at least a few millimeters to centimeters thick, but possibly much deeper in some places. The ice remains covered up even as liquid methane and ethane flow all over Titan's surface and fill up lakes and seas much as liquid water does on Earth.

"Titan's atmospheric chemistry is cranking out organic compounds that rain down on the surface so fast that even as streams of liquid methane and ethane at the surface wash the organics off, the ice gets quickly covered again," Clark said. "All that implies Titan is a dynamic place where organic chemistry is happening now."

Somebody's Got To Do It

Trapped in hot, sluggish westbound traffic on Interstate 80 just east of the Yolo Causeway, this driver pulled over Sunday afternoon to give his dog some water.

Interesting vehicle there!



Unemployment is growing in Albuquerque, the Duke City, which just means it's time for folks there to get more creative in exploring employment opportunities.

Jim, the computer guy, said he just saw this fun movie: "Sunshine Cleaning". The movie was filmed, naturally enough, in Albuquerque, NM, and explores the more comedic side of that rapidly-growing, substantive body of work I like to call Southwestern Film Noir.

Nearly Useless Media In The Gulf

MC Hammer - Turn This Mutha Out

Kat Holder Graduation Party

Kat Holder graduates from high school! She also gave one of the valedictory speeches at Heritage Peak Charter School that mother Lisa proudly showed off on video.

As the get-together progressed, I found myself sitting with a group of, I think, mostly eight-year-old kids. We all agreed we liked the Black Eyed Peas, but the kids also suggested that the Jonas Brothers and Nickelback were worth listening to as well.

Several kids, H. in particular, took particular interest in my touch-screen i-Phone: a decided improvement on their Nintendos. They were disappointed at first that I had so few games on the i-Phone, but by taking free rein, they were soon doing what they really wanted to do: take pictures of their friends (see below), download music, and watch Miley Cyrus videos.

I did worry about the ability of eight-year-olds to tell jokes, however....

H.: What did one volcano tell the other volcano?
M.: I don't know; what did one volcano tell the other volcano?
H.: I wuv you!
M.: (?????)

H.: What happened to the peach rolling down the hill?
M.: I don't know; what happened to the peach rolling down the hill?
H.: He ran out of juice!
M.: (?????)

Maybe I was just missing something here.....

Solved The Wrong Problem, Apparently

Didn't see THAT coming!:

A Cheektowaga liver transplant recipient pleaded guilty Friday to driving drunk at seven times the legal limit when he struck a pedestrian, two parked cars and a moving vehicle on French Road in Cheektowaga in late March.

Gurninderjit Thandi had a blood alcohol reading of 0.56 percent after the hit-and-run incident about 3:15 p.m. March 20, said Kelly A. Omel, chief of the Erie County district attorney’s Vehicular Crimes Unit. Omel said that’s the highest reading she has seen in a local drunken driving case.

...Thandi, who came to court with his wife, told the judge during the plea proceedings that he is still under a doctor’s care for the liver transplant he had at a Rochester hospital in January, and that he is taking anti-depression medication and being treated by mental health experts.

Trying To Puzzle Out The News From The Gulf

It's hard to make clear sense of BP's efforts to fit a cap over the Gulf oil well, in part, because BP is spinning like mad to control the news, and mislead people, if necessary. (For example, in their trademark patronizing way, BP didn't inform many people watching what they thought was the topkill procedure on live feed that they had stopped the procedure). In part, problems in understanding occur because news reporters garble the news out of ignorance. Nevertheless, the news reports out of the LA Times seem fairly reliable.

Two days ago, CNN reported that BP was closing four valves in the cap only slowly. CNN has reported several times that the engineers are closely monitoring pressures, but that just sounds wrong to me: they don't have a hermetic seal on the riser pipe, so pressures would be a secondary concern. Instead, I think they are closely monitoring flows. They are trying to create as dry and dessicated an environment as possible - in a leaky vessel a mile below the surface of the sea, no less! - in order to minimize formation of methane clathrate hydrate ice. Talk about Sisyphean labor! There's a lot of water coming up with the oil and natural gas that must be accomodated as well. Nevertheless, since ice could gum everything up, slow-go is the game.

All of this effort is to buy time, of course, to finish the relief wells. There is no assurance they'll be able to capture enough oil to save anybody's ass, however. The cap might remain just a leaky vessel - in fact, to maintain the dessicated environment, they might have little choice but to keep it leaky. And all bets are off if hurricanes pass nearby - as they are almost bound to!

Drilling The Relief Wells

Likely to be an arduous, difficult, time-consuming activity.

Haley Barbour: The King Of Denial

Good science fiction and adventure thrillers often feature a stuffy, complacent VIP who is so invested in the current power structure that he can't see the blindingly obvious danger posed by a new, alien phenomenon. The town mayor in "Jaws" is a fine example of this sort of person.

The BP Gulf oil spill thriller has one of these folks too: Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. He can't seem to comprehend that his state has been betrayed by his oil industry benefactors: it's simply inconceivable. He equates calls to halt offshore drilling with liberal treachery (rather than simple prudence) even as an oil spill as large as Mississippi cuddles up menacingly right next to Mississippi.

Amazing! What a work of art this Haley Barbour is! He's the kind of guy Hollywood only ever dreamed of!:

Barbour originally claimed several times that the spill "isn't anything like Exxon Valdez." (He was right, it's much worse.) He has appeared on television and gone out of his way to praise both BP and the government's efforts: "BP has never said no to any request," he told CNN, while "the federal government, whether it's the Coast Guard or whomever, has worked hard with us." And he has compared washed up oil to "caramel-colored mousse" and "toothpaste."

Barbour has repeatedly blasted the media for hurting his state's tourism with reports that make the spill sound "like this is Armageddon." He told a local newspaper that cancellations at hotels and other attractions were "are at a record pace, and the reason is they think we are inundated with oil or that it's imminent."

The Governor has also been critical of calls to halt offshore drilling in the Gulf. "A bunch of liberal elite were hoping this would be the Three Mile Island of offshore drilling," he told a business group.

On Tuesday, when oil actually washed ashore on an island off the coast of his state, Barbour initially sounded a different note. "This could turn out to be something catastrophic and terrible," Barbour said, before adding, "but that has just not been the case so far." He called the incident, which occurred 43 days after the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon rig, a "wake-up call." (And he did eventually ask the government for more boats to be stationed off the coast.) Still, the Governor who insisted his state was prepared for spill damage thanked "God's grace" that Petit Bois Island did not suffer more harm. "I don't think the island was hurt one iota," he said. "[Tar balls] are all on the beach, and they should be easy to clean up with rakes and shovels." So all's well.

Meanwhile, three of Barbour's fellow Gulf Coast governors have been front and center with criticisms and demands in response to the catastrophe. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) has slammed both the government and BP for failing to act fast enough in response to the spill. Florida Gov. Charlie Crist (I) has asked BP for millions of dollars to fund a tourism ad campaign. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley (R) has admitted that the spill has forced him to reconsider his support for offshore drilling. And when those three fellow Gulf Coast governors traveled to Louisiana last Friday to be with President Barack Obama while he surveyed the effects of the spill, where was Barbour? He preferred staying home.

Bleak Roadway Vista

Last night, about 6:40 p.m., I sailed through the intersection of 19th & W Streets about one minute after a three-car collision there had tossed cars to three of the four corners of the intersection. Folks were just starting to clamber out of their broken cars, cell phones in hand.

I sailed back through the intersection from the other direction about 35 minutes later, at 7:15 p.m. This time, I had my camera in hand. One car still hadn't been towed away.

Looks pretty bleak out there....

Bobby Jindal, Slave

And I thought I was a petroleum addict!

This is just sad. I thought that, despite his annoying habit of blaming Obama for everything and accepting no blame for himself, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal might still come out the disaster in reasonably good shape, because he was supposedly hard at work down in the marshes.

Nevertheless, just like any other addict, it looks like Bobby Jindal didn't learn a damned thing. What does it take to make these politicos hit bottom? How many other calamities do their constituents have have to suffer before they even get the merest clue?

Prudent Southern conservatives are not so invested in their pro-business, anti-government ideology that they can't see the dangers of continuing on the same path, or are unable to think matters anew in the face of danger. For example:

Ben Brooks, a lawyer and Republican state senator from coastal Alabama, says he's no fan of big government but he expects an aggressive federal response to the oil spill. "There's nothing inherently contradictory in saying we believe in smaller government and demanding that the government protect public safety," Brooks said. He's not alone. All along the Gulf Coast, where the tea party thrives and "socialism" is a common description for any government program, conservatives who usually denounce federal activism suddenly are clamoring for it.

Nevertheless, national conservative leaders would rather sacrifice the coastal South - the real coastal South, where people live and work - rather than pause for thought. Listening to a representative of the Heritage Foundation on the "Jason Lewis Show" last night on Talk Radio 650 KSTE, I was flabbergasted to hear the representative emphatically rule out more regulations on the oil industry, or stronger regulations, as a response to this crisis. That must not be considered. So there you have it! We aren't even supposed to think about these things! AT ALL! These are FORBIDDEN thoughts! FORBIDDEN!

These effing addicts rule the world!:

A stunning new letter by the oil-addicted governor of Louisiana gives the lie to right-wing claims that environmentalists are to blame for the BP oil disaster.

On Wednesday, Bobby Jindal, who blames everybody but himself for the environmental disaster hitting his state, wrote to President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar pleading with them to end the deep water drilling moratorium immediately.

He expresses "grave concerns" for the "economic impact of a six-month (or longer) suspension of activity" at 33 Gulf rigs -- "including and in particular the 22 deepwater drilling rigs currently in operation off the Louisiana coast." Jindal warns that the "announced moratorium of deepwater drilling activity creates a significant risk that many of these drilling platforms would be relocated to other countries -- along with the hundreds of high-paying jobs that they each create."

Jindal seems oblivious to the "significant risk" and potentially devastating economic impact posed by the drilling itself -- risk that will be present until we figure out all of the causes of the spill and how to make sure it never happens again.

Amazingly, Jindal writes:

I fully understand the need for strict oversight of deepwater drilling. However, I would ask that the federal government move quickly to ensure that all deepwater drilling is in proper compliance with federal regulation and is conducted safely....

Jindal omnisciently -- and mistakenly -- asserts here that current federal regulations are sufficient to avoid another blowout disaster. He has no way of knowing if this is true, whereas we have every reason to believe it is false.

Under the Cheney-Bush administration, efforts to strengthen regulation were blocked and the industry demanded and achieved essentially voluntary, "trust us" self-regulation and self-certification. For instance, when the Minerals Management Service considered requiring an acoustic backup system to shut off the blowout preventer in the event of a disaster, as Brazil and Norway require, lobbying by BP and other oil companies persuaded them not to.

The Wall Street Journal reported that "the safety record of U.S. offshore drilling compares unfavorably, in terms of deaths and serious accidents, to other major oil-producing countries. Over the past five years, an offshore oil worker in the U.S. was more than four times as likely to be killed than a worker in European waters, and 23% more likely to sustain an injury." A 2007 MMS study of 39 blowouts from 1992 to 2006 found, "Nearly all the blowouts examined occurred in the Gulf of Mexico." Big Oil clearly can't be trusted to regulate itself.

That's why some are calling this disaster "Cheney's Katrina." And that's why Obama set up a commission to figure out exactly why this disaster occurred. Until we know all the causes, we can't be sure we are taking every possible step to make sure it doesn't happen again. And that's why the president put in place the moratorium for six months, to wait until the findings from the commission are in. That's also why the president on Tuesday called the disaster a wakeup call that should lead us to once and for all end our addiction to oil.