I logged into http://gov.ca.gov/interact this afternoon to express my frustration at the Governator’s signing of California anti-ammunition bill AB 962. Click image below to magnify the fine print.
You can send him a note also. You don’t have to live in “Kullyfoania” to express your disappointment with “Ahnold.” Please – let him have it.
On the way to the range today, we heard the train coming down the track, so we decided to stop for the photo op. Damsel took some stills and I made a movie.
I have always been fascinated by trains, especially old steamers, but I like ’em all. In the summer of 2005, Damsel and I rode the Alaskan RR from Anchorage through Denali and on to Fairbanks. Seeing any trains always brings out a little wanderlust in me.
Pardon the crappy bandwidth compression. One of these days I’m going to upgrade the website for streaming video. I kept telling myself that I would do it when I get the time – well now that I’m retired, I no longer have much of an excuse. I’ll get on it real soon now, just as soon as I do a few chores and we make an out of towner or two . . .
Today, we went to the South Bay Orchid Society‘s show and sale at the South Coast Botanic Gardens. I took about 128 images of the beautiful orchids but I can’t show them all. It was very difficult to pick the 15 images for this slide show, so these were randomly picked.
Updated to include the Nobel Prize Committee’s latest upstaging of their own stupidity . . .
None of them are champions of peace, yet they have all been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel Peace Prize has been a joke for years. Consider the following with regard to the discretion of the prize award selection committee:
They should rename the prize to something like the Nobel Anti-American Prize and be done with it.
Finally, read Jim Geraghty’s list of Obama’s peaceful accomplishments at NRO‘s The Campaign Spot.
We were at Lowe’s this afternoon getting some birdseed and garden supplies. While we were there we shopped around looking at the pretty flowers. Well, we weren’t the only ones interested in the flowers. This little guy browsed these little purple flowers long enough for me to get a half dozen shots of him. This was the best of the lot. Click on the image to see full sized.
While running errands today, we passed the Lomita Railroad Museum. Damsel took this photo of their locomotive as we drove by. Click to enlarge image.
The Lomita Railroad Museum was the first of its kind west of Denver, Colorado. It was made possible through the generosity of Mrs. Irene Lewis who donated the Museum to the City of Lomita in honor of her late husband, Martin Lewis, in 1967. It was a rather natural thing for Mrs. Lewis to do since she had been a dedicated railroader and spent many years building Little Engines, a business devoted entirely to developing and manufacturing miniature steam operated locomotives which were sold all over the world. The museum proudly displays some of these locomotives.
Over at the STEREO Solar observation website, they now feature an animated image of most of the solar globe. From the vantage points of the STEREO Ahead and Behind spacecraft, images are processed into this movie of the globe. Note the hot regions near the right edge just before the blank region – those spots are not in view of the SOHO spacecraft which sees the sun from the same angle as the Earth from its station at L1, the first Lagrangian point between the Earth and Sun.
From the STEREO website:
STEREO consists of two space-based observatories – one ahead of Earth in its orbit, the other trailing behind. With this new pair of viewpoints, scientists will be able to see the structure and evolution of solar storms as they blast from the Sun and move out through space.
This movie shows a spherical map of the Sun as it currently appears, formed from a combination of the latest STEREO Ahead and Behind beacon images. The movie starts with the view of the Sun as seen from Earth, with the 0 degree meridian line in the middle. The map then rotates through 360 degrees to show the part of the Sun not visible from Earth. The black wedge shows the part of the Sun not yet visible to the STEREO spacecraft.
