Currently watching he Steelers/Ravens, and I would be shocked if the Ravens don’t win by 40 points. That Jackson is a helluva talent and I don’t think the Steelers have an answer for him
Speaking of yinzers, a moment ago the dogs were acting like jackasses and Joelle yelled “Both of yinz settle dahn!” which made me laugh because she picked that up living in the burgh for 20 years and every now and then a little pitssburghese slips out. Normally she doesn’t talk like that at all.
At any rate, Joelle cooked tonight- we had grilled steak, broccoli, and one of those cheap dollar pasta side things you can get. It was good, and after dinner stood up and said, as I sometimes do, “mighty fine cereal flakes.” Which is something I have been meaning to discuss because I have a lot of old movie quotes I say a lot and realize now the kids will look at me like I am nuts if I use them in front of them. I already had to retire “Love your body, Larry” and “Lighten up Francis” isn’t far behind.
Because I have a lifetime habit of making poor choices with how to spend my time, I watched a good bit of the DNC candidate thing we highlighted earlier, and I thought many of them had some great ideas. Martin O’Malley is just past his time, and Marianne Williamson needs to be blasted into outer space, but a lot of them felt very capable. I liked the one fellow who was railing about the no-bid contract and the excessive bullshit like fliers. I wasn’t watching so much as listening along while working on another screen, so I missed a lot of names. Being who I am, I DID get the names of the people I thought were complete fucking morons who said something so stupid I looked to see who it was “Who’s this fucking idiot,” so that is how I knew Williamson and O’Malley were there.
And obviously know who Wikler is. Place was still too god damned white.
I’m not super familiar with the neighborhoods of California because, well, why the fuck would I be, so one of the things that is really shocking to me is how residential and suburban the areas on fire are. It’s not like the 2018 Camp Fire where it was more rural and fire whipping through there made total sense. Like this is residential areas with bodegas and small businesses with streets and parking lots and not in urban areas with lots of dry grass and needles and it’s jumping city blocks and it’s fucking terrifying in an end of the world movie sense. And of course this is obvious to many of you but I am still new to this whole city/suburbs thing- it’s such a marked difference to how I spent most of my life. Houses are so far apart and the vegetation is so wet always in my hometown that the only thing setting multiple houses on fire there is napalm or a gas line break.
I keep seeing before and after photos, and what keeps killing me the most for many of these people is not the pictures and awards and mementos and family heirlooms, it’s the vegetation. In that kind of climate there have to be people who have had the same rose bushes and house plants for 30, 40, 50 years or in some cases longer as they were handed down. Losing the plants you have nurtured and loved on for decades, on top of everything else, would just crush me. I was in a funk for an entire damned month when one small limb fell off my maple in the front yard this summer.
I’m glad to see we were able to help some folks out in the gofundme and I pitched in a bit, and I am willing to volunteer some time to drive to Cali and bring pets further inland to shelter, and I reached out to John Rogers to see if any young creatives on a deadline and now homeless wanted to hop a flight to Bethany and stay in my house for a few months until things calm down, but I don’t know what else we can do. So depressing.
I think we are almost to halftime and it seems pretty clear there is no need to watch the second half, so I think Joelle and I are going to start a full watch of Deadwood. We’ve been on this western kick since I got here, and she told me she had never seen Deadwood, so I am totally down to watch that again.
Y’all be good to each other.
*** Update ***
I forgot to tell you all this- the other day, I picked a free hate chicken sandwich (I hate the place, but Joelle got some thing where chik-fila sends her a coupon for a free sandwich every couple of weeks), so when she gets one if I am out I will pick it up, and she mistakenly fed some chicken to Steve. I tried to warn her but now he is begging every time she eats, and earlier I said “If you think Steve loses his shit over chicken, watch him with steak tonight.”
And he is a maniac when it comes to grilled steak, to the point that before I sit down to eat I cut up a piece into tiny tiny pieces, put it in a bowl, and then as I am eating, Steve gets a little piece, It keeps him occupied and from bugging me. But you say, why not feed him before you? Because I feed him before I eat my steak and then he comes out and wants more steak. But what about after? Then he assaults me the entire time I am eating. Put him in another room. And who can eat while their cat is yowling and headbutting the door? So this is how we do it and will do it.
As I published this post, I walked out to the living and Joelle was sitting there hand-feeding Steve.
War for Ukraine Day 1,053: A Brief Saturday Night Update
SpaceUnit
The Steelers are sucking the life out of me.
ETA: Put the cat in the garage with a bit of tuna before you ever start cooking or eating.
BSR
I’ve watched Deadwood 3 times all the way through. You’ve got me thinking about making it 4.
trollhattan
“A now fully operational Steve.”
Luck, y’all.
trollhattan
@BSR: Deadwood is damn near perfect teevee. The abrupt ending was a crime and while the movie helps stitch the wound, it warranted two more seasons. I challenge a cocksucker to argue this point.
Chetan Murthy
I’m not a history buff, nor a hydrologist, but my understanding is that SoCal exists because of water engineering, moving water from Northern California down south. Those areas would be uninhabitable without all that engineering. So in a way it’s not even surprising that as global warming changes the probabilities (of what’s too dry, what’s gonna burn), human efforts at engineering to keep places safely habitable will just fail, and catastrophically.
NotMax
Howzabout an Aussie western? Thumbs held high for Wild Boys, currently available on Prime. Also too on YouTube. One season, 13 episodes.
Kent
Watch Chinatown. It tells the story.
Hildebrand
Is Bluesky down?
Kent
@Hildebrand: Looks like it. I can’t get on either
Gin & Tonic
@Chetan Murthy:
Gee, wasn’t there a movie about that?
ETA: Shakes fist at Kent.
TBone
@Hildebrand: appears to be. Could be the huge influx, or some other SNAFU.
Anne Laurie
Thought you’d been warned — *ALL* Maine Coons are pirates. Jovial, but relentless. They will share your steak, unless you are dumb enough to leave the steak unattended, in which case: You just learned a valuable life lesson!
Chetan Murthy
@Gin & Tonic: @Kent: Haha, yes. I watched it decades ago. And perhaps it’s even historically accurate (! *grin*) I was trying to imply that what little I knew, didn’t actually come from verified sources — just from “da movies”.
Timill
@Hildebrand: Sorta. I get the framework and LHS menu, but no posts.
dmsilev
John (or anyone), if you want to help with pets who need temporary care, the latest update I got from Pasadena Humane, which is the org taking point on the Eaton Fire, is that they’re overwhelmed with in-kind donations and volunteers (including short-term foster homes) and the most useful thing to give is money to help them buy medicine and bulk supplies and the like.
Edit. Their latest email:
Dr Daniel Price (Saint Vincent)
Before we emigrated, we lived about 10 km south of what became the 2021 Marshall Fire (Superior, Colorado). [We saw smoke from the conflagration shortly after it began.] That blaze, which began as a small grass fire, was pushed by winds exceeding 160 km/hr and destroyed a thousand homes in a few hours. We were in a pre-evacuation zone but were never in danger as the wind’s direction was not going to change. The event was horrifying and stunning; grass would not ordinarily provide sufficient fuel for such fires, but once structures began to burn, fuel was abundant.
Kent
@Hildebrand: Now it is back up for me
karen gail
Los Angeles is another place we can thank railroads for; along with Spain. Spain decided to send settlers to place forming a mission and then once it was part of the US white settlers flooded the area via the Santa Fe line from Chicago.
We forget how much damage humans have done and made what was once a floodplain into a desert.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
I had a cat like Steve once, a Tuxedo rescue named Coco (utterly inappropriate name for her, but she knew her name and I wasn’t her first human) who went crazy over pastrami. She treated it as if it was the ancestral food of her alley cat forebears, which it might well have been, and I had to share it with her whenever I had some — which was more frequently that I would have preferred on my own but she liked it so much I couldn’t resist getting some for her at least once a month.
Thanks for posting the info for Pasadena Humane. It turns out the Santa Ana winds are a type of foehn wind that occurs whenever there are high enough mountains, and they have a distinct name wherever they occur: foehn in the Alps, chinook in the Rockies, zonda in the Andes, etc.
Chetan Murthy
@karen gail: I think I read once that “Las Vegas” translates to “The marshy bottomlands”.
frosty
One reason I like being a Ravens fan is to watch Jackson every weekend. Like you said, he’s a huge talent. You can count on one crazy scramble each game.
mark
@Kent: I was thinking the same thing. Mullholland Drive in LA says it all. We have some 40 year old roses. Live in a town home. Squeeze every drop of life out of our tiny patch of land that we can.
Tenar Arha
@dmsilev: just donated, thanks for mentioning it.
frosty
@Kent: Chinatown is only part of the story. SoCal gets more water now from the Colorado than the Owens Valley.
Sister Golden Bear
@Chetan Murthy: The LA Basin is a savanna and definitely supported life — in fact there was originally a huge wetlands — but definitely couldn’t support anywhere near the current population without importing water from elsewhere. Not unique, see all the Roman aqueducts.
Chinatown isn’t all that historically accurate in the details, being fiction after all, but gets the general story right about how LA stole it’s water from the Owens Valley and how it also impact rampant real estate speculation and corruption in the San Fernando Valley. The Valley became part of Los Angeles because at the time that was the only way to get access to the LA Aqueduct water.
Nerdy historical fact: The St. Francis Dam disaster is the reason Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena and other cities never joined LA. The same engineer who designed LA Aqueduct designed the dam that failed, so these cities didn’t trust LA to provide a reliable supply and began looking for their own water sources, eventually leading to the formation of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is a cooperative of multiple cities and local water districts. The Met was created primarily to build the Colorado River Aqueduct.
Sister Golden Bear
@frosty: SoCal now also gets much of its water from the State Water Project that imports it from Central/Northern California.
mark
@Kent: Jake Gittes : Hello, Claude. Where’d you get the midget?
A great piece of dialog delivered by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Hope I don’t get sanctioned for the movie quote.
kindness
John is wiley in the ways of critters. Not because he wants to be, but because he has to be.
Good call on Steve.
Melancholy Jaques
@Chetan Murthy:
The Dreamt Land by Mark Arax is a good, recent book on the subject.
The State of Water by Obi Kaufmann addresses broader issues, including endangered species. It also has maps.
NotMax
@Chetan Murthy
Wait until DOGE insists on auctioning off Hoover Dam.
Shane in SLC
Glad to see some love for Deadwood. Ellsworth is my favorite character in the whole history of fictional narrative.
Kent
Oh of course. It is just a movie.
But it does a good job of capturing the seedy origins of modern LA and the water theft that made modern LA possible.
sab
@Chetan Murthy: Allternatively, Las Vegas translates to “the meadows”, or at least that’s what they used to tell us in the Nevada one.
Redshift
@Kent: There’s a similar (older) story for New York. There’s a great book called Water for the City that tells the story of the massive engineering project to bring water from the surrounding area, stealing it from communities in those places.
I got interested in it because Ms. Redshift went to college in the mid-Hudson valley, where the local water quality was terrible because the good water got shipped off to NYC.
UncleEbeneezer
One of the things that made Altadena special was our trees. When I first started dating my wife and came up to her place it just took my breath away. The amount of trees in the foothills of the San Gabriel’s was a total surprise to me. Our street had the most majesitic and gigantic ficus tree at the end of it that was a favorite hang out for the parrots that somehow ended up living here. But I believe it burned down. My wife is heartbroken as she has several favorite trees in the area and very few of them survived the fire. The landscape will be drastically altered and we lost something really unique. There are some really great videos by residents floating around about the wildlife, trees and the history of Altadena as the first city in CA where middle-class, Black families could by homes. I can’t watch them without wheeling for the city we so loved. And it’s jarring how much more attention the Palisades Fire has gotten, dominating most of the coverage, even though the Eaton Canyon has destroyed similar amounts of homes in a much more population-dense area. Both are tragic disasters but it’s hard not to feel like the race plays a big part in that diisparate attention.
UncleEbeneezer
If you want to see the ficus tree you can see the Google Earth image of 2739 Santa Rosa Drive, Altadena 91001.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/4C8hWfc4G7zcuMB77
So many glorious trees like this are now gone
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@UncleEbeneezer:
And water is wet. Let’s track over the next year how rebuilding goes and what disparities will come up between the two neighborhoods. I can predict them now.
Watching cable news “fire porn” the one thing that’s jumped out is just how many cable news people (all white) are from Palisades, have friends or family there, etc. It’s telling.
Trivia Man
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: Kamikazee in Japan?
Memory Pallas
If there’s no more net neutrality then the internet isn’t “the digital town square” and doesn’t need to worry about (bogus) free speech protections for the various platforms.
Trivia Man
@UncleEbeneezer:
When I was a cab driver many years ago, a fare took me to Sierra Madre. It was a shockingly quaint small town nestled up against the foothills. Sone unique corners in the LA metro area.
Looks like the next town east of Altadena.
UncleEbeneezer
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: My local news has had Asian-American and some Black reporters. But still mostly-white. And probably 2/3rds of coverage has been focused on Palisades.
UncleEbeneezer
@Trivia Man: Yes. Sierras Madre is a bit more bougie/affluent/white but has similar charm. Someone told me it was one of the only cities in the area that went for Romney in 2012, but I never confirmed that.
Almost Retired
I never had much interest in a Los Angeles meetup because I just figured we would never agree on the mutually inconvenient location. And then people would flake at the last minute for traffic or whatever reason. But an Uncle Eb send off and in person GoFundMe might be fun?!!!!! Especially if someone else organizes it.
UncleEbeneezer
LA Times had a good piece on Altadena here.
UncleEbeneezer
@Almost Retired: We did one at Lucky Baldwins in Pasadena in 2017 that was fun.
Lily
Watching the organization and timing of the fire fighting aircraft at work in CA has been mind boggling. This article has some wild diagrams of their flight paths, and lots more info/graphics about the incredibly complex operation:
https://www.reuters.com/graphics/CALIFORNIA-WILDFIRES/AIRCRAFTS/egvbjgkajvq/
Pete Downunder
Convenient news coverage is a thing. When Brisbane had a massive flood in 2011 there was excessive coverage of one little suburb near us because many of the local news people lived there and their station was only a 10 minute drive away. In other news, my nephew has a newly renovated house just west of the Eaton fire and was told to evacuate, but that order has now been lifted so it appears safe at least for now. A friend commented I think correctly that all those expensive houses in the Palisades and Malibu probably also held a great deal of very valuable and unique art, all of which would have been destroyed. A shame for the people who lived there but also for society.
Lily
@Lily: But it doesn’t go into the terrain they’re flying over (steep-sided canyons w single roads through + fire roads, and lookout spots) and the decisions and analysis based on it. Or the ground fighters positioning water lines high up the sides of ravines.
sentient ai from the future
@BSR: if anyone could get me to watch that show again, it’d be the limber-dicked cocksuckers writing here.
NotMax
A different, amusing sort of Western, Gunless is currently streaming on Freevee via Prime and also on Hoopla.
Aussie Sheila
@Pete Downunder:
Yes destruction of beautiful and rare things is a tragedy. Not on a par with the loss of human life, obviously. However I wonder how the insurance claims will go ?
Once this catastrophe is over I would be following the insurance claims and more importantly whether they are honoured, very closely. Australian flood victims have many stories to tell about the perfidy of Insurance companies.
The other thing I would follow is the ability of people in the affected areas to reinsure and at what price. That metric will tell you nearly everything you need to know.
Neo-Librettist
Plate subduction generates tectonic uplift. The costal ranges are young and unstable. The chaparral reduces the number and severity of the slides, but boy it burns real good. The humans live (mostly) in the flats in between, so fires jumping wild <-> urban occurs with the seasonal high winds. Some of the risk could be mitigated by stricter codes, etc. but shit happens.
ArchTeryx
@Lily: Air attack is one of the most complex, difficult to coordinate and utterly vital parts of wildfire fighting. An air attack failure was a key reason for the deaths of the Nineteen, the Granite Mountain Hotshots. They were pinned down in a box canyon by a sudden firestorm, and their leader, Eric Marsh, attempted to call for a tanker drop. The tanker did the drop – and missed them by 100 yards or so. That doomed the entire crew – there was zero time to get another one to the site before the firestorm overran and killed them all.
( They had fire shelters and used them, but they were only good to about 500-700 degrees. The firestorm that hit them was over 2000 degrees – blast furnace heat. The aluminum in the shelters melted. They had zero chance of survival. )
SpaceUnit
@sentient ai from the future:
Freud calling. Line three.
Grover Gardner
Oh, yah, Pissburg! Git ot! Yunz gon gay donton?
Aussie Sheila
@Neo-Librettist:
Shit happens for a reason. If people don’t understand the reasons, then sure. But when it comes to this kind of catastrophe, people who know anything understand the reasons. Rather than ascribing the unseasonable winds and lack of rainfall in winter to geological plate movements maybe use Occam’s razor and look to increasing CO2 in the atmosphere and its demonstrated warming effect on the earth.
You know, sometimes it’s the simplest explanation that gets you there.
Just saying.
SpaceUnit
@Grover Gardner:
As always Ravens class is a disease without a cure. You make Raiders fans look good. Nice job.
Ruckus
@UncleEbeneezer:
So Sorry about your home and the horror of losing everything.
I lived in the foothills (Monrovia) for a lot of years as a kid but moved out over 50 years ago after being in the USN. My sister and her business partner lived in Topanga Canyon and he still does after she passed a few years ago and he called to tell me they were able to protect the homes. I had called him earlier and he didn’t answer so I expected the worst. Watching the news I was worried he didn’t get out. Some got lucky and a hell of a lot did not.
Ruckus
@Almost Retired:
We haven’t had an LA get together for some time but have had a couple a few years ago. But yes any location is going to be a bit inconvenient to a number of someones. Maybe we could find a place inconvenient to everyone.
Ruckus
@ArchTeryx:
In the USN I was on a fire crew – as the nozzle man – first to the fire, the one in control of putting it out. Had to attend fire fighting school. I can’t imagine very many would understand having to put out a gasoline fire in an open tank about 3 feet high and 20 feet round, as practice. We had a fire on board – once. The guys in the compartment got it out with a fire extinguisher just in time so I didn’t have to. I still don’t like any kind of fire and that was over 50 yrs ago.
prostratedragon
“Source Code,” Jessie Montgomery
Jay
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/los-angeles-fires-unhoused-homelessness-crisis/
JWR
@ArchTeryx:
I heard a good, 20 minute interview last Thursday on this and other aspects of firefighting. In short, the people flying these missions are stunt pilots!
MagdaInBlack
I’ve been remembering this from Raymond Chandler:
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”
— Raymond Chandler, “Red Wind” (1938)
oldster
This is why cats are called “obligate carnivores.”
If you eat meat, then you’re obligated to give them some.
J.
@oldster: Indeed. We have a seemingly sweet little kitty who turns into a ferocious tiger whenever there is meat or some form of dairy to be had. We gave up shooing her away and just set a place for her at the table now.
eclare
@J.:
I have to shut one of my kitties in the bedroom whenever I fix anything for dinner. He has jumped on the stove before while a gas burner was going!
Grover Gardner
@SpaceUnit:
I know nothing about football. I was just indulging in a little Pittsburgh-ese, where I grew up.
Spanish Moss
So funny to hear you like to sprinkle in movie quotes. Our family does it constantly. Fragments of song lyrics too. It is a bit confusing to others until they catch on.
TBone
Next week has been exhausting.
Miss Bianca
@Shane in SLC: Ellsworth’s opening scene is quite possibly the best character introduction in all of teevee. (Rivalled only by Spike’s entry in Buffy.)
Why yes, Deadwood is my favorite TV show ever, why do you ask…