The Professionals Arrive

[Originally published 1/3/23, 1:37 a.m.] 

The crew had just arrived (about 9:50 a.m., January 2, 2023) as I entered the house to tend the pets. 

Twenty-five minutes later, when I emerged, the crew had already dispatched with about 2/3 of the tree. My little path vaporized! 

I understand Gabe and Eleanor arrived later in the afternoon. There is damage on the gutter on the front of the garage. I don't know about the roof of the garage - possibly some damage there. 

But considering the possibilities, Gabe and Eleanor escaped harm! Their car and home were unscathed. No one was hurt or killed. 

Here is an obituary of the man who planted the tree, about 1960. By the end, the tree was about 80 feet tall, and a notable landmark along California’s Highway 99:

Adam was born in New Mexico and graduated from Lyda Patterson Institute High School in El Paso, Texas. He joined the U.S. Navy immediately after high school, at the height of WW II. He served in combat in the Pacific Theater and was proud to have been a witness to the surrender of the Japanese from his ship, the USS Pasadena, anchored in Tokyo Bay in 1945.

Making A Little Path

[Originally published 1/3/23, 1:18 a.m.]

Some people are made to change the world. Not me. I adapt to it. Throw down a huge tree in front of me, and I’ll make a little hobbit residence of it. (Home owners will return soon- they may have a different philosophy).

Pet-Sitting Adventures

[Originally published 1/3/23, 1:12 a.m.] 

Happy New Year?

A Huge, Fallen Tree Blocks The Path

[Originally published 1/3/23, 12:49 a.m.]

Well, this is a conundrum! I went to a dog sitting assignment tonight (New Year's Eve, Dec. 31, 2022) at Gabe and Eleanor's house, only to discover an immense tree had fallen and blocked the path! A nearly-impenetrable wall of leaves and wood! 

It took 15 minutes of desperate jungle parkour through the fallen tree canopy in the rain and wind to get through the driveway to the front door. (This is when the ballet training comes in handy - keeping my balance under duress.)

Inside, complacent pets wanted food and attention.

Shoki Ramen is Open

This restaurant went through terrible times. They remodeled the old Trails Restaurant, opened, and immediately had a kitchen fire. Then there was Covid. But now, it finally looks like they are open:

Shoki Ramen House built a Sacramento cult following in the 2010s, then fell on hard times around the end of the decade. Now it’s back, and already sold out through its opening weekend.

Shoki is reopening its Land Park restaurant this weekend, five years after a fire forced its closure, owners Yasushi and Kathy Ueyama announced on social media Thursday night.

The Japanese restaurant initially opened in Curtis Park in 2008, expanded to the R Street Corridor in 2011 and accrued a devoted following for its tan tan men and rustic setting. The Curtis Park location was then closed when Shoki moved to at 2530 21st St., formerly home to longtime barbecue restaurant Trails. 

Two years later, that building was destroyed in a fire. It’s been fenced off ever since, and Shoki’s R Street Corridor restaurant closed in 2021. But the Ueyamas kept their ramen shop alive via a Shoki food truck while they refurbished the Land Park restaurant.

Motorcycle Accident - April 24, 2023

Jasper and I had to take a detour on our walk because of this incident:

23-110965 (Vehicle Collision - Investigation): W St / 24th St at 1529 hours. 

Officers responded to a report of a vehicle collision involving a motorcycle. At the scene, officers located the motorcyclist, a male adult, who sustained serious injuries. Officers performed life saving measures, but the individual was declared deceased on-scene. The driver of the vehicle involved in the collision remained on-scene. Major Collision Investigations Unit Detectives responded to process the scene.

Tucker Carlson Out

Hooray! Still, conservatives are cryptic these days, so it's unclear why Carlson got canned. Conservatives themselves seem befuddled, but they may understand better than liberals can:

The night before Fox announced Tucker was out, “60 Minutes” aired a segment debunking “Patriot Purge’s” central claim that Ray Epps, a Trump supporter at the Jan. 6 rally, was an FBI asset deployed with a MAGA hat to goad the protesters into storming the Capitol so that the deep state could purge our finest patriots before going after the rest of them — i.e., you, dear viewer. 

According to this newspaper, that “60 Minutes” segment was a concern for Rupert Murdoch too. Apparently, the $787-million settlement in the Dominion lawsuit wasn’t a factor (which explains why worse offenders on that score remain at Fox). But the two things are not unrelated. 

Much has been written about the damage Donald Trump has done to the right, less has been written about how the right had become so damaged as to be ripe for him to take over. An important part of that story is how the right became seduced by Saul Alinsky, the leftist radical, whose politics and tactics were once condemned by conservatives, me included. But many of my fellow conservatives became convinced the left “always wins” and they do so by using “Alinskyite tactics.” Over time, the condemnations turned to admiration, then envy, and, finally, emulation. 

Some of Alinsky’s rules for radicals include: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” and “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” This got translated into “Own the libs.” 

This was the soundtrack of Trump’s presidency, for which “Tucker Carlson Tonight” served as a kind of liner notes. Trump’s move was to claim his weaknesses were strengths — his phone calls to the Ukrainian president and to Georgia election officials were “perfect,” passing a basic test for cognitive impairment proved he was genius, etc. 

But it was Carlson who took Trump’s biggest political sin — his complicity in Jan. 6 — and spun that into a tale of right-wing virtue and left-wing villainy. That was the point of “Patriot Purge,” — to go beyond merely and meekly “respecting the audience” to outright pandering by declaring that Trump’s most deplorable supporters were actually the right’s most righteous victims. 

Carlson turned tactics — ridicule, nastiness, flipping the script — into an ideology unto itself. His departure from Fox will not make the network more acceptable to its haters and harshest critics. But Fox without Tucker means the worst elements on the right have lost a megaphone.

The Trouble With Guns

This time, from Farmington, NM.  

You get into these terrible situations where cops feel they have no option but to kill you. My sister once nearly got into a shootout with cops. Guns heighten the danger of misunderstandings.  That's among the reasons I have no guns:

The neighborhood was dark when police arrived, and dispatch gave officers both the correct house number – 5308 – as well as a photo of the correct house, the attorneys said. 

But the officers went to the wrong house – 5305 – and knocked on the door. “Their announcement was not loud,” the Dotson family attorneys said. 

After no one answered the door, an officer asked dispatch to call the house to talk with the residents – but “no phone is heard ringing; no sound is heard at all,” the attorneys said. 

The police bodycam footage shows an officer walking away from the front porch when Dotson, armed with a gun, opens the door. 

“There is no announcement of ‘POLICE’ despite more than ample time. And that is obviously crucial,” his family’s attorneys said in the statement. “Wrong address. Late at night. The Dotson’s never called the police.” 

The officers’ encounter with Dotson happened quickly, and it can be difficult to decipher everything that happened in those few seconds. 

According to Dotson’s family attorneys, a “freeze frame of the tape shows Robbie holding the gun, and not pointing it at the officers. Rather, the gun is clearly pointed down at the ground.”

Just a Reminder of Why It's Important to Stop Russian Aggression in Ukraine.

Russia does not respect the existence of other countries in Eastern Europe, or the rights of those peoples to separate existences, and Putin has emphasized the illegitimacy of these other regimes. So, Ukraine is first - Poland, the Baltic nations, and the Scandinavians must follow. There is no logical stopping point either. Since the Russians were part of the alliance that defeated Napoleon, a good stopping place might be France. There's a lot of territory between Moscow and Paris. For a lasting peace, Russia must be conclusively stopped; here, now, in Ukraine.

A Russian lady discusses what is wrong with the world. Basically, it was all Russian and should be given back to Russia. pic.twitter.com/ObMmr0rZoR

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) April 23, 2023

Vivian Lee - The Side Door - April 22, 2023

Vivian Lee sings at The Side Door. With her is Brenden Lowe on piano, Jeff Minnieweather on drums, and Buca Necak on bass.

Rachel buys a CD from Vivian at intermission.

I don't know the emcee very well, but admire what he's done with the space at 4th Ave. and Franklin.  He's having a lot of fun.

The emcee is also an accountant.

LaToya's Thursday Dancehall Power Up Group Celebrates Shannon's Birthday

Mira Loma High School International Night 2023

Nice mural at Mira Loma High School.

Various Science Fair projects.  In my day, we never had a Neurobiology Club.

I started talking to one student about a Science Fair project using the conductivity of water as a proxy for water contamination.  As a demonstration, a solution of baking soda is used.  Not only does the solution conduct electricity, but gas bubbles are emitted, which supposedly shows the electrolysis of water into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen.

Except I don't think I believe it.  Instead, I think the bubbles might be carbon dioxide from the more acidic solution around the cathode.

Yet, this electrolysis experiment is a common educational high-school science experiment with a big literature.  And I disagree with it.

I didn't think this high-school student knew very much.  Diffident and unsure of herself.  I hurried off.

Inspirational messages.

Various dances.

x

Mexican dances.

x

x

x

Alpacas Humming

In The Trenches with the Da Vinci Wolves

From Daily Kos:

The Honor Squad from Ukraine’s DaVinci Wolves battalion has filmed 11 minutes’ worth of a first-person experience in the trenches outside of Bakhmut. In this video, the members are trying to clear trenches and protect the area east of Khromove along what has been called alternately the “Road of Life” and the “Road of Death.” It’s the only paved road that can bring men and materiel in and out of the area of Bakhmut still in Ukrainian hands. However, it’s also under fire control from Russian forces to the north, making every run down the road a contest against a rain of artillery shells while dodging the burned-out hulks of vehicles that failed. 

Take a deep breath before watching this, because it’s intense. And here’s a big and serious warning: There is some very close-range exchange of fire in this video. People get shot. People get killed. Those people are sometimes up close and in daylight, not distant shapes on a thermal screen. Combat takes place at a shockingly short range. All of it is set on a nightmare landscape where not a leaf on a tree or a blade of grass has survived.

 

Local Drag Queen Story Time Runs Into Problems

This place is quite close to where I live. Still, I had no idea what they were up to. I should help out, if I could:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A protest forced police to close Franklin Boulevard in the area of 2nd Avenue Sunday, the Sacramento Police Department said in a post on Twitter. 

...On Sunday, what started out as a peaceful Drag Queen Story Time for children and families inside Poppy + Pot, ended up looking a lot different outside the business on Franklin Boulevard. 

A crowd outside was met with a group of people against the event. It led to someone being pepper sprayed, someone being arrested and a man going as far as to demonstrate the Nazi salute. 

"It's just very upsetting. Obviously, I got emotional because I can't believe it's 2023 and there's still people that think that's a value to uphold. And it's a thing that's written in the history books and then we're still going through and people are still being targeted," said Karina Salcedo, who was a parent attending Drag Queen Story Time with her family.

Lubricant Leaks From the Cascadia Subduction Zone

Friend Bruce wondered if this meant a major earthquake might result from lubricant loss. I explained this loss was small compared to the vast amount of lubricant that must exist. There must be many more such holes. The lubricant is squeezed from ocean-botton mud as the oceanic plate subducts and plunges under the North American plate. Still, this phenomenon is interesting:

A study led by the University of Washington discovered seeps of warm, chemically distinct liquid shooting up from the seafloor about 50 miles off Newport, Oregon. The paper, published Jan. 25 in Science Advances, describes the unique underwater spring the researchers named Pythia’s Oasis. Observations suggest the spring is sourced from water 2.5 miles beneath the seafloor at the plate boundary, regulating stress on the offshore fault.

The team made the discovery during a weather-related delay for a cruise aboard the RV Thomas G. Thompson. The ship’s sonar showed unexpected plumes of bubbles about three-quarters of a mile beneath the ocean’s surface. Further exploration using an underwater robot revealed the bubbles were just a minor component of warm, chemically distinct fluid gushing from the seafloor sediment.

“They explored in that direction and what they saw was not just methane bubbles, but water coming out of the seafloor like a firehose. That’s something that I’ve never seen, and to my knowledge has not been observed before,” said co-author Evan Solomon, a UW associate professor of oceanography who studies seafloor geology.

The feature was discovered by first author Brendan Philip, who did the work as a UW graduate student and now works as a White House policy advisor. 

Observations from later cruises show the fluid leaving the seafloor is 9 degrees Celsius (16 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the surrounding seawater. Calculations suggest the fluid is coming straight from the Cascadia megathrust, where temperatures are an estimated 150 to 250 degrees Celsius (300 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit).

Passenger Ferry Runs Aground in Washington State

Hey, I recognize this ferry! Rode it (or one of the other similar boats) in October, 2021:

All passengers have safely disembarked a passenger ferry that ran aground on Saturday in Rich Passage near Bainbridge Island in Washington state.

A total of 596 passengers and 15 crew members were aboard the ship, according to a tweet from US Coast Guard Pacific Northwest, which responded to the scene. The last of the passengers had safely disembarked by 10 pm, Washington State Ferries said in an update.

The ferry Walla Walla ran aground at around 4:30 pm Saturday while making the trip from Bremerton to Seattle, Washington State Ferries wrote in a tweet. There were no injuries reported, said Washington State Ferries. 

The agency said that initial signs suggest the vessel suffered a “generator failure” and an official investigation is forthcoming.

"Freaky Friday" - Sheldon High School - April 14, 2023

I came to see this show, out in Vineyard east of Elk Grove, because I know the Choreographer, Katie Rogers, but I also know the Piano Player, Dave Williams (seated at far right).

There was a terrible car accident at Kingbridge and Calvine Rd. shortly before the show, so they held curtain for 15 minutes so theater goers could negotiate the necessary detour to get to the theater.

Nice show!  The two lead girls had strong voices and I liked the dancing of one of the boys (Lucas).

Here are bows:

Ask Alice

And if you go chasing felines 

And you know they take a stand 

Tell 'em a Walrus and a Carpenter 

Charm oysters on the sand 

Ask Alice 

If White Cat gets tanned

When You're Straight and Accidentally Drink a Bud Light

Stocking up for the weekend in Sacramento’s Lavender Heights.