My All-Time Favorite Eighties Song

Signs of the Times

A Las Vegas Jigsaw Puzzle

I picked up this puzzle at the Neon Museum in Las Vegas when I was there for Ira's funeral at the beginning of February, 2022. 999 pieces (the last piece in the upper-left corner was unaccountably missing).  Classic Vegas!

Walking Jasper Around the Neighborhood

Tomorrow is Jasper's fourth birthday, and so he's getting more walks than usual. We walk all over the neighborhood. 

Here's an oddly-specific sticker on a car that was parked in front of the Sierra II theater. 

I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who approach us and tell me what a handsome dog Jasper is: at least three groups of people in front of Gunther's ice cream parlor, plus a homeless man passing by on a bicycle. A woman carrying a dog in her lap stopped driving for a moment on Fourth Avenue in order to point out Jasper to her canine. Jasper's a rock star! 

There have been a few odd moments in the neighborhood too. Jasper and I were walking along Freeport Blvd. when a vehicle stopped. Windows rolled down on the passenger side of the vehicle. "Please help us," the heavy-set driver said, pointing to a woman, his wife, sitting in the back seat. "We are from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and we are low on fuel. Please, if you would, buy this ring so we can get gasoline." He removed a big, heavy, expensive-looking ring from his finger. Nevertheless, I never carry any money on our walks, so couldn't oblige. The disappointed folks rolled on. 

Then there was a punkish-looking young woman, with razor cuts embellishing her short hair, riding a bicycle. She stopped at the corner of 24th and X Street and started ripping the tips of limbs from a ornamental, succulent-looking shrub growing at the corner, and throwing the debris into the street. This plant attack looked all-wrong to me, so I approached her and asked her what she was doing. She smiled - apparently I looked harmless - and said it was time to prune the shrub. I couldn't tell if she belonged there, or not - I thought not, but I could be wrong - so Jasper and I kept on walking. Passing by the next day, it looked like the shrub is still intact, despite the abrupt pruning. Maybe it was time to prune the shrub?

Orrin Hatch Shuffles Off His Mortal Coil

What a dreadful man. Glad he's gone:

In any case, Hatch could routinely be the worst during Supreme Court nominations. He was outraged that Bork didn’t get confirmed. Moreover, he was on the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas hearings, where he read from The Exorcist to “prove” that Anita Hill had stolen her (obviously false natch) sexual harassment allegations from that book. 

In fact, few did more than Hatch to push the Republican Party toward extremism in the judiciary. He was a huge supporter of the nomination of Mr. Torture Memos himself, Jay Bybee, to the Ninth Circuit Court.

Father/Daughter Dance - Corina Bianca and Pepper Von

Lots of wonderful people here! Pepper Von, acclaimed fitness instructor, together with his daughter, Corina Bianca (former Sacramento Kings dancer and Assistant Director of Respiratory Care at a hospital in LA), at her recent wedding in Los Angeles. Tyehimba Kokayi plays Djembe drum. One of Pepper's other daughters appears to lead the group in dance too (possibly Gabrielle Perez).

Thinking I'll Wait

On Thursday, I talked with a surgeon about having an ablation procedure (via catheter from the groin to the heart) to address my heartbeat irregularity problems. It was an interesting discussion. 

There are at least two different types of irregularities that are affecting me - SVT and atrial fibrillation. The surgeon was keen to go after SVT principally. Nevertheless, there is a big element of trial-and-error in a SVT ablation procedure, and if their attempts to stimulate irregularities (in order to identify the areas that need to be ablated) fail during the procedure, they might not ablate anything at all. So, I could have all the risks of a procedure, and none of the benefits. They could instead go after the atrial fibrillation, of course, but there are possible risks to nerves and the esophagus that could leave me with permanent shortness of breath, even as the "problem" is technically "fixed." 

I have some shortness of breath now, but I can deal with it. I'm still doing ballet without much problem.  If the heart races out of control, I have medication to bring it back under control.  And there is always the ER.  And strange as it seems, there is also the possibility the SVT problem might disappear altogether. Heartbeat issues are strange like that.

So, I think I'll wait for awhile. If you do surgery, it helps to be 100% committed to doing it. Totally freakin' gung ho.  Right now, I'm at 50%.

Worried About the Tunnel Fire

Wow, Sunset Crater was completely burned over. Flagstaff forests are pretty dry, but despite their scattered nature, they have lots of underbrush:

(CNN) Hundreds of homes near Flagstaff, Arizona, have been evacuated as a fast-moving wildfire threatened hundreds of structures Wednesday after destroying at least two dozen buildings, officials said. 

The Tunnel Fire in northern Arizona's Coconino County had burned more than 19,700 acres as of Wednesday afternoon, according to InciWeb, a US clearinghouse for wildfire information. It was first reported Sunday afternoon.

The fire, about 14 miles northeast of Flagstaff, was rapidly moving to the northeast, pushed by significant winds, officials said. It had no containment as of Wednesday afternoon.

"I cannot stress enough how rapidly this fire is moving," fire management officer True Brown said.

Here's the Inciweb link.

Double Ridges

I just love reading stuff like this:

Ridges that criss-cross the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa indicate there are shallow pockets of water beneath, boosting hopes in the search for extra-terrestrial life, scientists said Tuesday. 

Europa has long been a candidate for finding life in our solar system due to its vast ocean, which is widely thought to contain liquid water -- a key ingredient for life.

There is a problem: the ocean is predicted to be buried 25-30 kilometers (15-17 miles) beneath the moon's icy shell. 

However water could be closer to the surface than previously thought, according to new research published in the journal Nature Communications.

The finding came partly by chance, when geophysicists studying an ice sheet in Greenland watched a presentation about Europa and spotted a feature they recognized.

"We were working on something totally different related to climate change and its impact on the surface of Greenland when we saw these tiny double ridges," said the study's senior author Dustin Schroeder, a geophysics professor at Stanford University.

They realised that the M-shaped icy crests on Greenland looked like smaller versions of double ridges on Europa, which are the most common feature on the moon.

...The scientists used ice-penetrating radar to observe that Greenland's ridges were formed when water pockets around 30 meters (100 feet) below the ice sheet's surface refroze and fractured.

"This is particularly exciting, because scientists have been studying double ridges on Europa for more than 20 years and have not yet come to a definitive answer for how double ridges form," said lead study author Riley Culberg, an electrical engineering PhD student at Stanford.

"This was the first time that we were able to watch something similar happen on Earth and actually observe the subsurface processes that led to the formation of the ridges," he told AFP. 

"If Europa's double ridges also form in this way, it suggests that shallow water pockets must have been (or maybe still are) extremely common."

NASA's Perseverance Rover Sees Solar Eclipse on Mars

Green Bud Holiday

You know it’s 4/20 when they’re lining up to break down the doors to the local marijuana dispensary. One fellow came out and said “It’s a f*n nightmare in there!” He didn’t look too scared, though.

Finally Getting Some Details on the Sacramento Mass Shooting

Two weeks of wondering what the hell happened:

At 1:57:02 a.m. April 3, surveillance cameras at 10th and K streets caught a crowd of 70 to 80 people gathering on the northeast corner of the intersection.

Eight seconds later, the crowd began to run. Some drove away in cars. A hot dog vendor ran away from their cart.

But Smiley Martin, his brother Dandrae and Joshua Hoye-Lucchesi stayed. They stood near Sharif Jewelers as a man dressed in black and standing next to Smiley Martin pointed north toward two other men: Mtula Payton and DeVazia Turner.

In less than three minutes, the shooting in downtown Sacramento began, with Smiley Martin reportedly firing 28 rounds from a fully automatic Glock 19 handgun and others returning fire until more than 100 shell casings littered the streets and 18 people were shot — six of them dead including Hoye-Lucchesi and Turner. Twelve others, including Smiley Martin, were wounded.

This description of how one of the largest shootouts in Sacramento history unfolded is contained in newly filed Sacramento Superior Court documents, which are based on homicide detectives scouring numerous video files and studying the events second by second as they search for the five people they say were involved in the gang battle.

The documents, filed Friday afternoon by Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert’s office, are largely focused on Smiley Martin, a recent parolee officials say they will charge with being a felon in possession of a handgun and of carrying a machine gun — the Glock with aftermarket auto sear — that night.

Martin is recovering at a Sacramento hospital. Deputy District Attorney Brad Ng filed the documents in a bid to see that Martin does not win his release on bail once he is booked into the Sacramento County Main Jail, where his brother Dandrae, 26, is being held on a weapons charge.

The court documents outline the gang affiliations attributed to five men at the scene that night, including the three who were killed, and provide a glimpse at how police came to decide the incident resulted from a gang dispute involving five shooters. Besides Turner and Hoye-Lucchesi, the four others killed in the melee were Sergio Harris, 38; Johntaya Alexander, 21; Yamile “Yami” Martinez-Andrade, 21; and Melinda Davis, 57.

The documents do not reveal the precise nature of the dispute, but note that three men — the Martin brothers and Hoye-Lucchesi — were seen together on an Instagram video posted hours before the shooting several miles away on Traction Avenue in Old North Sacramento.

The three were seen posing with two black handguns, one equipped with a high-capacity magazine, as well as a rifle, the documents say.

“In the video, filmed while the three men were in north Sacramento (territory claimed by the Del Paso Heights Bloods), both Joshua Hoye and defendant Smiley Martin discuss going to downtown Sacramento while armed to loiter outside nightclubs, display gang hand signs to the camera, point firearms at the camera, openly and repeatedly state their allegiance to the Garden Blocc Crips (“GBC”) and boast about shooting rival gang members,” the 13-page document says.

In the video, Smiley Martin can also be seen saying he cannot go into any downtown nightclubs because he is not carrying identification. The document identifies Smiley Martin, 27, and Hoye-Lucchesi, 32, of Salinas, as validated members of the Garden Blocc Crip, a gang that includes the 29th Street Crips.

After posting the video, the three made their way downtown, where cameras picked them up near Sharif Jewelers just before 2 a.m., the documents say.

SHOOTING BEGINS

“At 1:57:28 a.m., an individual in all black clothing, standing next to Smiley Martin, raised their right arm parallel to the ground while pointing northbound on 10th Street in the direction of Mtula Payton and Devazia Turner,” the documents say.

Payton, 27, is being sought by Sacramento police as one of the shooters and is identified in court papers as once having been a Garden Blocc Crip but later being validated as a G-Mobb member, which the documents say includes the Starz or Guttah Gas gang.

Turner, 29, of Carmichael, also is named in court papers as a G-Mobb member.

Five seconds after the man in black is seen pointing toward Payton and Turner, Payton turns to face the northeast corner of 10th and K and reaches toward his waistband, the documents say.

Then, Payton, Turner and two other people start approaching the corner where the Martin brorthers and Hoye-Lucchesi are standing, the court papers say.

At 1:58:36 a.m., Sergio Harris joins Payton, Turner and the other two men. Smiley Martin turns to face them, the documents say.

Harris, a father of three, is identified in the documents as a Del Paso Heights Blood, an ally of the G-Mobb gang.

One of the female victims pulls up in her car as the groups face off. Alexander, of Elk Grove, parks her car and walks to get her sister, who is standing near Harris by the jewelry store, the documents say.

“At 2:00:21 a.m., detectives observe that Smiley Martin is holding a handgun with an extended magazine in his left hand beside his leg,” the court papers say. “Three seconds later, Smiley Martin moves west toward the corner of the intersection.

“At 2:00:38 a.m., Devazia Turner and Smiley Martin are observed exchanging gunfire. During this exchange of gunfire, detectives were able to observe that Johntaya Alexander, Sergio Harris, Joshua Hoye, Yamile Martinez-Andrade (who was walking along K Street at the time of the confrontation between the two groups of men), and Devazia Turner were all struck by gunfire.”

The documents continue: “In the video surveillance footage, detectives observed that Smiley Martin fired multiple rounds from his firearm. A preliminary ballistics analysis indicated that the defendant Smiley Martin fired approximately 28 rounds.”

After the shooting, the Martin brothers ran toward the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament and detectives saw Smiley Martin on video tossing his handgun away in front of 1029 K St. just before officers stopped him in front of the cathedral, court papers say.

“While securing the scene, officers located the firearm that defendant Smiley Martin discarded: a Glock 19 handgun with an extended 30-round magazine, a tactical laser sight, and a full-automatic selector switch, making the firearm an illegal machine gun.”

The court filing is aimed at convincing a judge that Smiley Martin should not be released on bail once he recovers enough to be booked, and notes that another man arrested after being seen carrying a handgun near the scene was released before arraignment on $500,000 bail. Police have said they do not believe the man was involved in the shootings.

The court papers note that Smiley Martin “has demonstrated a life-time commitment to violence” and cannot be safely released into the public.

Judge Michael Savage agreed, signing an order Friday that says Smiley Martin cannot be released before he is arraigned and a hearing on the motion by the District Attorney’s Office to deny bail is heard

The DA’s filing contends Smiley Martin was not going downtown to visit a nightclub, but to commit crimes.

“As the defendant told his social media audience, he had no intention of going to nightclubs or bars that evening,” the documents say. “Instead, based on his lack of identification, his clothing, his prior gang-related statements, and his decision to come to downtown Sacramento with a loaded, illegal full-automatic machine gun equipped with an illegal high-capacity magazine, there is clear and convincing evidence that defendant Smiley Martin intended to engage in armed criminal action with an illegal firearm.

“Inevitably, when a conflict presented itself at the intersection of 10th Street and K Street, the defendant did not leave the scene. Instead, with a full-automatic Glock 19 drawn out in his left hand, the defendant stayed in front of the Sharif Jewelers, waiting for a confrontation with Mtula Payton, Devazia Turner, Sergio Harris and the other men they were with.”

Godspell "Beautiful City"

 

I was struck in Sutter Street Theatre's production of the 2012 revival of "Godspell" with how humanistic (rather than entirely religious) the lyrics of "Beautiful City" are. It's all the more remarkable considering that the song comes around the Last Supper. I'd like to be able to sing this song, in a humanistic way. Lyrics:

We can build

A beautiful city

Yes we can

Oh yes we can

We can build

A beautiful city

Call it out

And call it the city of man 

Curiosity Avoids a Field of Knives

Mars is a dangerous place for machines:

 

These rocks, known as ventifacts, are wind-sharpened rocks, and Curiosity has had a previous run-in with ventifacts before.

Early in the missions, Curiosity's wheels suffered some wear and tear after rolling over them. But there are more of these ventifacts in the field Curiosity came across on March 18 than the rover has ever encountered. They're made from sandstone, the hardest rock found by the rover on Mars to date. 

"It was obvious from Curiosity's photos that this would not be good for our wheels," said Megan Lin, Curiosity Project Manager at JPL, in a statement. "It would be slow going, and we wouldn't have been able to implement rover-driving best practices."

Vladimir Putin's "Blueberry Hill"

Vladimir Putin sings Fats Domino's "Blueberry Hill" to various Hollywood celebrities in St. Petersburg in 2018:

 

Speaking To Graves

The coverage of the war in Ukraine has been excellent on Daily Kos, capturing not only the military news, but what it likely portends. 

There was a strange incident in Russia recently, where a large number of people driving earthmovers labeled "Z" gathered outside the graveyard to World War II's Katyn Massacre. In a speech directed to the graves on loudspeaker, the organizers announced they could easily erase the graves, but wouldn't do so because they were "good people." 

Creepy??? What on Earth does it mean? 

The Katyn Massacre was where the Soviets executed 20,000 Polish soldiers and officials. Stalin blamed the Nazis for the massacre. The truth was an open secret. The Russian government only reluctantly acknowledged responsibility for their actions in 1990. 

My guess is that even the Russians acknowledge limits on their ability to alter reality through official pronouncement. By erasing the graves the Russians could restore their innocence. Massacre? What massacre? They weren't going to do that - at least for now. But it's hard to miss the menace and threat. Today's Russians could get worse - much worse - but for the moment, they remain their amiable selves. Just don't defy them.

First, threatening to destroy graves makes you good? Second, who the hell are they talking to over that loud speaker? Ghosts?

Salad Bags

I talked to a dietitian about ways to improve my diet. I'm not big on fruit, but eating more salads seemed like an option. 

I confessed to her that I hate to eat salads that I make myself. My salads never seem to taste good. I much prefer to eat salads made by other people - people who have the imagination and experience to assemble the good-tasting ingredients that excite both rabbits and people. 

The dietitian suggested using those prepackaged salad bags that you find in supermarkets. A good idea!  So, I started chewing my way through salad bags. Life was good. 

I'm not sure what I'll do now that the place where the salad bags come from burned to the ground yesterday. I hope the salad bag industry is strategically-hardened, with more salad bag places scattered elsewhere. If worse comes to worse, I might have to make my own salads again:

Experts were waiting to see what kind of impact the fire will have to stores like Safeway and Walmart, which sell Taylor Farms packaged salads.

"To have something like this happen in a transition period is just tragic," said Steve Del Masso, owner of Bay Cities Produce Co. Inc. in San Leandro. "This is such an important time in California. All your major processors like Taylors are moving from Arizona, where they’ve been for 6 months to California."

Officials with Taylor farms said in a statement Thursday that they will shift production their 20 other locations around the country, including thief facility in Yuma, Ariz. '

"Our total production locations and geographic diversity is our best defense to this scenario," the statement says. "We will work to reassign and support our Salinas Foodservice production team this season as we rebuild the facility."

Alpha and Beta

Stressful among the birds today at the feeding spot. They are SO hungry! I shovel out the seed. I watched two pigeons bully a sparrow. A sparrow! No dignity left, it seems, among the rock doves. 

Here is a picture of two pigeons, Alpha and Beta, fighting over seeds. Alpha was very aggressive, and pushed out Beta. As I approached, I could see him sizing me up for battle. You don’t want that, tweety! I’m a hundred times bigger than you are. I can sit on you! Go away!

Genocidal Rage

We are living in dangerous times. It's pretty clear that the Russian failure to subjugate Ukraine has led to a rage that can be satisfied only by annihilating everyone. Stepping back from that brink will be hard. Even military necessity might not be enough:

Written by journalist and Kremlin-aligned political operative Timofey Sergeytsev and published in RIA-Novosti, the article answers the question posed by its headline: “What should Russia do with Ukraine?”

The answer, Sergeytsev writes, is total annihilation. He writes that “all who have associated themselves with Nazism should be liquidated and banned.”

Sergeytsev urges Russian soldiers to be merciless and force Ukraine to its knees and calls for more of the same inhumane tactics that took place in Bucha and the towns of Mariupul and Berdyansk.

...Sergeytsev’s piece merits close attention because RIA-Novosti is one of the three largest news agencies in Russia and has a mass circulation. It functions as a loyal mouthpiece of the Russian government and has an inordinate impact on what Russians see and hear about the war in Ukraine.

...Sergeytsev is an experienced Russian political operative who worked on behalf of the Russian government to prop up pro-Russian Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma in 1991. He also supported Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, whose questionable election victory, promoted by Putin, resulted in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004.

Sergeytsev is also a member of the Russian far right Zinoviev Club, named after Alexander Zinoviev. Zinoviev was a champion of Josef Stalin as a model leader, the murderous dictator who ruled the Soviet Union from 1928 to 1953.

...In the invented world he describes in his article, Sergeytsev accuses both Ukraine’s former President Petro Poroshenko and current President, Volodymyr Zelensky, of using “total terror” against the Russian “anti-fascists in Odesa, Kharkov, Dnepropetrovsk, Mariupol and other Russia cities.”

As for the Donbass regions of Donetsk and Lukhansk in Ukraine’s east, where pro-Russian separatists have fought Ukraine over the past eight years, Sergeytsev says they have been bravely rebelling “against Ukrainian Nazism.”

Sergeytsev calls for the destruction of all “Nazis that have taken up arms” and that they “should be destroyed to the maximum on the battlefield.”

He includes the Ukrainian armed forces, the national battalions, the territorial defense forces and “a significant part of the masses, which are passive Nazis” and “are also guilty.”

All “are equally involved in extreme cruelty against the civilian population, equally guilty of the genocide of the Russian people, and do not comply with laws and customs of war,” Sergeytsev writes.

...In order to achieve the ultimate goal of “de-Ukrainization,” Sergeytsev calls for a rejection of Ukrainian ethnicity and the peoples’ right to self-determination.

Echoing Putin, Sergeytsev writes that Ukraine has never been a nation state, adding that its attempts at becoming independent have led to “Nazism.”

Sergeytsev calls on all of Ukraine’s elite to be “liquidated” and “the social swamp which actively and passively supports it should undergo the hardship of war and digest the experience as a historical lesson and atonement.”

A Vote of Confidence

Mama Scrub Jay is back in this cypress tree for another year! I can hear her nestlings. Her choice is a vote of confidence. This is the closest safe location a bird can build a nest from my feeding spot - 25 feet, or so. With seeds covered, Mama Bird can focus on getting what baby birds really like - worms, spiders, and such.