This is the first bloom this year from one of our cereus cactus plants. This one was still opening when I got this shot last night. Its the first of many more to come on this cactus (one stalk has five flower pods, another three and most others with one or two pods. More photos will come later, I’m sure.

Tomorrow night, when the full moon rises over North America, it is believed that this will be a “blue moon.” The modern definition for “blue moon” is the second full moon to occur within a calendar month and tomorrow’s full moon will indeed be the second to occur in the month of May, 2007.

Cartoon Image courtesy of NASA.

But hold on - Sky and Telescope magazine retracted it’s 1946 second-in-a-month definition in favor of stating that the “blue moon” is actually based on the four seasons and is the fourth full moon to occur within a season (Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn). Using this definition, a “blue moon” may or may not occur within a calendar month.

It gets even more confusing.

Continue reading » Just What Is A Blue Moon?

Our selection for Weblog of the Week this week is Iraq War Today. IWT is always a good place to go for a military-oriented perspective on current news. Pam has a feature where she offers her “Two Cents Worth” on varying topics which is always interesting. We’re glad to feature Iraq War Today as our Weblog of the Week.

Since most of the cooking yesterday was in the crock pot, we found ourselves with a little time on our hands. We decided to go to the range and rent one of their .45 caliber Springfield 1911 pistols. We bought a hundred rounds of ammunition, got a couple of silhouette targets and went out to a booth to shoot.

We found out a couple of things about the pistol; it had a kick only a little greater than our 9mm pistols and we each got hit by ejected brass since the casings seemed to fly out in semi-random directions.

All in all, it was fun though and we got a taste of shooting the larger caliber.

Click on the picture for a larger view.

This is part of the meal we prepared to celebrate Memorial Day. We started cooking this morning with baby back pork ribs in a special barbecue sauce in the crock pot. The ribs cooked all day until we took them out to the grill and browned them up for about 10 minutes over some smoking hickory chips. The corn was roasting on the grill in their husks before shucking them and browning them a little with butter and pepper brushed on. We also had Cole slaw and baked beans. This meal was every bit as good if not better than your favorite commercial BBQ restaurant.

We took the time last week to send a donation to The Wounded Warrior Project knowing that some of our soldiers would be facing this holiday with serious injuries and we hoped that we could make it a little better holiday for those recovering from their injuries. We hope that you might consider donating to one of our fine Military Charities. Look in our sidebar for a few links to some organizations that make a difference for our troops. God bless our Military Men and Women.

In recognition of the Memorial Day Holiday, the folks at our local Lowe’s arranged these petunias in their garden department to resemble Old Glory. I thought it looked pretty and was a nice patriotic gesture.

One of our stops today was to briefly visit the Bonsai Show sponsored by the South Coast Bonsai Association at the South Coast Botanic Garden. This is a picture of a Shimpaku Juniper, one of many beautiful exhibits on display.

For a couple of years, we have been posting about Reggie, the alligator. Now, it appears that he has been relocated to the Los Angeles Zoo. Before the capture, one of my colleagues took this shot of Reggie floating serenely on Lake Machado in the Harbor City District of Los Angeles.

Photo credit & © Des Wong (used by permission)

Life was getting good for Reggie the alligator.

The scaly, 7-foot-long abandoned pet had basked in his own legend on the shores of Machado Lake for nearly two years.

Sightseers by the hundreds came to get a glimpse of the creature that had eluded professional gator wranglers over the months.

But about 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Reggie’s luck simply ran out.

Read the rest of the story about Reggie’s capture (South Bay Breeze):

Continue reading » Alligators in the Sewers - The Epilogue

Two houses — two contrasting stories . . .

The first house:

A 20-room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house, all heated by gas. In ONE MONTH ALONE this mansion consumes more energy than the average American household in an ENTIRE YEAR. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2,400.00 per month. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American Home. This house is not in the northern or Midwestern ’snow belt .’ It’s in the South.

The second house:

Designed by an architecture professor, this house incorporates every ‘green’ feature current home construction can provide. The house contains only 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on arid-high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground. The water (usually 67 degrees F.) heats the house in winter and cools it in summer. The system uses no fossil fuels - such as oil or natural gas - and it consumes 25% of the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Flowers and shrubs native to the area blend the property into the surrounding rural landscape.

The Assessment:

By now, you probably have guessed that house number one is that of environmental activist, film maker and former Vice President Al Gore, located near Nashville, Tennessee. This house has been under siege in the news lately since Gore won the Academy Award for “An Inconvenient Truth” — which has a few accuracy flaws, to say the least. Gore shrugs the excess off by purchasing “Carbon Offsets” — from himself, incidentally. The mainstream media give him a pass on it.

What surprised me about the second house is that it is the home of George W. and Laura Bush, located near Crawford, Texas. So, why isn’t this trumpeted in the Greenbat news, heralding the President as being an environmental icon? I think you can figure that out on your own.

Hat Tip to Global Warming Hoax — A Story of Two Houses

Mark Steyn writes this interesting piece regarding ‘fast-track’ legalization for illegal aliens. The ‘Kathryn’ Mark is speaking to is KJ Lopez who also blogs on NRO’s The Corner.

Great news! The terrorist Z-visas will take 48 hours! [Mark Steyn]

Kathryn, that [Senator John] Cornyn amendment is a good example of the kind of final “bipartisan compromise” Congress may settle for: The 12-20 million illegal immigrants will get legal residency in the United States by the end of the next business day (and, incidentally, I’d love to see a list of other US agencies which guarantee full service within 24 hours - or is the express line only available to lawbreaking foreigners?), but terrorists will have to be subjected to what Sheila Jackson-Lee described to me as an “ongoing background check”.

The more you look at this bill the more it seems just the usual Beltway kabuki. Secretary Chertoff says in a time of war we need to know who’s in the country. Okay. But is dumping a gazillion new applications on a sclerotic immigration system the way to do that? Mohammed Atta was the second most famous terrorist in the world and on the front page of every American newspaper but the then INS still sent him a valid US visa six months to the day after he died, and without even updating his address from that Florida flight school to Big Hole In The Ground, Lower Manhattan. And the excuse the agency made was, oh well, we’re only issuing visas to dead terrorists not living ones - which Americans pretty much had to take on trust and which seems a distinction far less likely to be maintained once there’s another 15 million in the system entitled to next-day service. If I were Mullah Omar, I’d apply for a Z-visa. The odds have got to be better than even.

So it will be a fraud on “conservative” enforcement grounds. As for “liberal” fast-track-to-citizenship grounds, I would be surprised if most of those “undocumented” choose to go beyond limited legalization. If you’re remitting vast percentages of your income back to your village in Mexico every month, US citizenship is only going to complicate your life, given that the IRS is one of the few revenue agencies on the planet to claim global jurisdiction. Some things are best left “living in the shadows”.

“Comprehensive” reforms usually backfire in spectacular ways: the “war on poverty” gave us ongoing cross-generational poverty, etc. “Comprehensive” immigration reform will metastasize illegal immigration, embed the “undocumented” support networks as a permanent feature of American life, expand identity fraud, and make it even more impossible for Washington to know which aliens are in the country at any one time.

Last week, I saw a poster at Sharp as a Marble that inspired me to tackle a new sidebar widget project for our blog. It is a work-in-progress at this point, and I hope that I can get some suggestions and advice from those of you with an interest in this.

The idea is to pose the question of how you are prepared to cope with ever-increasing violence in suburban areas in light of the ever-decreasing police coverage and, of course, the constant attacks on your Second Amendment rights. We previously posted an article about how the police are spread too thin to protect everyone.

So have at it. Don’t hesitate to criticize what you see because it’s still an unfinished product. Consider what story you would like to tell with it and suggest away. As an extra incentive, I am willing to provide the resulting sidebar widget to anyone who is willing to help out.

The resulting product will be a Flash™ animated widget that fits in the sidebar or just about anywhere else on your web page. You can use the raw file or I will provide scripting to make it compatible with most browsers.

Update: By the way, if you don’t want to register for comments on this post, you may also email me at capnbob (’at’) capnbob (’decimal-point’) us, or use the secure feedback feature.

Update II: For the time being, user registration will not be required for commenting on this post.

This week’s WOW selection goes to Dr. Sanity. Dr. Sanity is an M.D. practicing in psychology and aerospace medicine. She also runs a very popular and widely read weblog where she shares her common sense views on a variety of topics.

Dr. Sanity’s blog was a finalist in the 2006 Weblog Awards and for good reason. We enjoy visiting Dr. Sanity on the web often, and are pleased to select her site as our Weblog of the Week.