Simi Valley fire

(Note: TextAmerica just started a camblog of photos of the California fires, it’s at fire.textamerica.com)

Ordinarily a fire of 50,000 acres that had destroyed fifteen homes would be getting huge attention, but given the number and ferocity of the firestorms in Southern California, this Simi fire just gets mentioned with all the other fires.

The first photo is looking north across the San Fernando Valley (one of the few areas in SoCal still with unsmoky skies although that may not last much longer) from the Santa Monica mountains.

The second photo was taken much closer, from Chatsworth. I couldn’t get any closer because Topanga Cyn, a major secondary street, was gridlocked, probably due to the freeway closures on the 118.

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Blogrolls and comments

The blogrolls in the right hand column have been loading very slowly, and thus have been slowing the site down — so I’ve taken them off temporarily.

I’m changing the comments system to HaloScan, which should give a nicer look and feel as well as being faster. You can tweak the messages, put words in boldface, add smileys, etc.

Let me know what you think! (However comments made in the old system will no longer be accessible)

(PS The blogroll is back! It’s hosted by blogrolling.com for a very reasonable price, however it appears that having two blogrolls greatly slows things done, so I combined them into one blogroll.)

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Southern California wildfires

On the bus ride back from the San Francisco demo last night, we passed dozens of fire engines, also headed South on I-5, and realized the fires must have gotten very bad indeed.

When fire companies come from hundreds of miles away to assist in a California fire, then you have one of those hellish firestorms that takes days, if not weeks, to put out.

Today is the worst of all possible conditions, with predicted 104 degree heat and strong, dry 50 mph Santa Ana winds in the canyons. The perfect (fire)storm…

By Thursday temperatures are supposed to drop to the mid 60’s (finally!), so that should help the fire fighters, as well as cool off a very hot Southern California.

PS From the roof of my three story condo building I see most of the east filled with smoke from the San Bernardino fire, which is at least 50 miles away, plus considerable smoke to the northwest from the much nearer Simi Valley fire. It is just past noon, already 93 degrees, and even here in the flatlands, the wind is dry and blowing at 25 mph.

AP is reporting that two San Bernardino fires have merged into one fire, which is precisely the worst possible thing to happen in the worst possible fire weather.

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San Francisco demo

I’m exhausted! Twelve hours of bus rides and a march and rally in a 24 hour period. However I did want to get these photos up. There are more photos on my camblog – posters, street theatre, etc..

I worked the front of the march, as I usually do. For some reason  SFPD refused to do street closures, even though we had a permit. So we volunteers in the front had to run ahead, get in the streets, link arms, stop traffic, and motion for cars to take alternate routes.

Oddly, for this Los Angeles resident, it went smoothly. S.F. traffic barely grumbled, and we re-routed the cars with little trouble. Only one person screamed at us.  Therein lies the difference between the two cities. S.F. laughed and dealt with the traffic disruption. Had we tried blocking traffic at a Hollywood demo in Los Angeles, well, I’m thinking some of us would have been road kill. Non-Los Angeles residents reading this probably think I’m kidding…

The DC and SF simultaneous demos got excellent media coverage, and ANSWER is getting mentioned more and more. Good! While the demos themselves may be smaller than the monster rallies of last February, the media is steadily coming around the the view that the war(s) are disastrous and that Bush is an extremist.

Hey, at the beginning of this year, virtually no criticism of Bush appeared in major media. Now it’s everywhere. This is a sea change. Let’s keep the pressure on.

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