UPDATE: New Panoramas added at the bottom.
There is a wildfire on Catalina Island this evening. Near real time pictures are available on the Catalina Interior Webcam from Los Angeles Coastal Monitoring Network “interior webcam.”
I made this composite panoramic view of the fire at just after 7:20 PM (Pacific Daylight Time) this evening. Click on the panoramas for a full-sized view.
Update – 7:50 PM:
More updates below the fold.
This video is from a collection of SOHO images taken over the operational lifetime of the spacecraft (a little more than eleven years). In it you can see some of the more spectacular solar activity that occurred over that period.
“The Sun is anything but a stable, yellow ball in the sky.” That quote is the opening line of commentary in a recently-produced NASA video about the STEREO project — another spaceborne observation system that captures solar images in three dimensions.
I look forward to seeing a three-dimensional equivalent of this video from STEREO in the not-to-distant future.
Off to the Supreme Court for the Washington D.C. Gun Ban:
A federal appeals court May 8 denied a petition by D.C. officials to reconsider a March ruling that overturned the District`s 30-year-old gun ban. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 6-4 to deny the District`s request that the entire court review a previous ruling in which a three-judge panel found some of the District`s gun restrictions to be unconstitutional.
What I want to know is Why aren’t D.C. residents allowed to get guns now? Their gun-grabbing law has been declared UNCONSTITUTIONAL! TWICE!
Update: These two articles discuss the next steps for D.C. and the effects on gun owners:
Our choice for the Weblog Of the Week (WOW) this week is Ms. Underestimated. She runs a great-looking site with interesting opinions and plenty of visual appeal. She supports Second Amendment rights, supports the troops, displays our Never Forget Tribute and calls Al Sharpton out for what he is. What’s not to like?
Some time ago, our neighbor’s adult children would throw wild parties, attended by scores if not hundreds of people that were noisy, inconsiderate and littered the street with food and drink containers.
When we called the police, they would sometimes respond, but the problem persisted. To make a long story short, we contacted an arbitration service who conducted a meeting between us and the neighbor; after we met and exchanged grievances, the neighbor agreed to stop after I enumerated a long list of incidents and threatened a lawsuit. Basically, we had to do it ourselves.
None of the events above were life-threatening, although some of the young adults made threats against us. We decided to acquire even more home protection than we already had.
The police’s ability to intervene on the behalf of the law-abiding will get worse before it gets better.
Here’s another case of having to do it yourself as told by Mike Adams to a reporter at The Athens (Ohio) News (excerpt):
While taking my after-lunch walk today, I saw this mailbox painted up to resemble R2D2. Apparently, there is a contest underway to select which Star Wars character gets depicted on a stamp. Yoda is ahead. Click the image for a full-sized view.
From the Washington Post:
Under cover of night, officials at the USPS stealthily deposited 400 of the costumed letterboxes on high-traffic street corners nationwide — about a dozen in the Washington area — to promote a new line of postage stamps. They unbolted mailboxes from sidewalks and replaced them with ones decked in decorative adhesive panels.
The switcheroo, carried out March 16, was intended as a teaser until the new postage design was announced.
The 41-cent stamps — the rate is going up May 14 — were unveiled Wednesday in Hollywood to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Star Wars phenomenon. You know the one. And if you don’t, well, that sort of admission will find you subject to all sorts of derision.
Sometimes called “confederate jasmine,” this beautiful and energetic evergreen vine creates a special scene all through the year as it climbs up a trellis in the back yard. During March and April the plant flushes light green with new growth. Shortly thereafter, delicate white pinwheel flowers breathe their enchanting fragrance into the spring air.
