I have just finished reading a few feeds through Google News. Actually, always opposing pornographic wealth and greed, I welcome all of you who send a "boo" to the author of the Harry Potter series. Why "reveal" now Dumbledore is gay? Why not before, when my child was nine years old?
This story goes with "A new sucker is born everyday." Repeal it. Boo the millionaire's (from rags to riches) obvious greed. Boo her, J.K. Rowlings, for this ought to be a despicable ploy to trigger the attention of teenagers whose attention span is no longer with Harry Potter. Ruin the magic for a possible new generation.
The air is hard to breathe. There are two occasions when I remember this kind of "snow" we see. One was after the Simi Valley trial of the police officers who beat and tased Rodney King. The ashes after the riots looked like snow, tiny specs in the air, a really exquisite æsthetic effect of beauty until they caught in your throat. The second time was in "Shindler's List" when the ashes were from war victims's cremains.
The firestorms takes up an area half the size of the disaster area of New Orleans, so I read. Displacement is going on in five different counties, San Diego the worst. Two people have died and the injured are mostly firemen.
See that and more at the Los Angeles Times on-line coverage. And leave Dumbledore alone. The Los Angeles Times, please click. We live in a situation where Malibu, the closest community impacted, has fire damaged homes, road and schools. Webster Elementary smells of burn. Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District's Superintendent Talarico will make an effort to visit the site in person. There goes the Santa Monica voters' BB money (a megabond effort originally meant to fix SAMOHI's architectural decrepitude.) From SMPTSA feed.
The focus here in California, despite the number of people who had to leave their homes so they could breathe is home insurance and property values. Do you sit on a home mortgage valued at over 300K, generally in the median of 540 K ? The mortgage imbroglio will be huge.
Do you sit in expensive shacks like these? Do you, fellow Americans? So you can "commune with nature" more closely?
The world watches fascinated 500,000 people displaced by fumes or danger. El presidente is coming here on Thursday, el gobernador now orders all kinds of this and that. The fires started over a week ago in an isolated (apparently) incident of bad engineering and wind, in Santa Clarita, a northern L.A. bedroom community. That accident closed the I-5.
My personal thoughts on this? Californians "desire for communal sharing with nature" translates into costs that will be phenomenal. FEMA is coming, now everybody is coming. Now, only now. Gee, that's supposed to make politicians popular. I fear the infamous, "This is a step ahead for us all" from talking heads. Picture that.
If anyone tells me Al Gore is coming, please bring along the polar bears. What he could do he didn't in year 2000. I saw this caption on the polar bears in TIME magazine. Cute. Let the man bask in his celeb glory. Not in politics, please. Each day that goes by I contemplate with fonder eyes a Hillary - Bill Richardson ticket.
In the meantime, Tina Oiticica Harris muses on two remarkable literary people: Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain. Dickinson's "I'm nobody" and Twain's "The despicable human race" haunt my mind right now.
It's time for coffee. Later!
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