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Thursday, October 30, 2003
More auroras 
| | SpaceWeather.com says "Northern lights appeared as far south as Florida, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas." That was last night. There's another storm going on right now. If it's at all clear where you are, go out and have a look. It may be your only chance. Ever. |
| | [Later...] Just got this notification from SpaceWeather by email: |
| | Sky watchers at all latitudes should be alert for auroras after local nightfall. |
| | Watch here and here for a best guess of your chances for catching the show, which is going on right now, apparently, in all of Canada, and the northernmost edge of the U.S. |
| | According to this site, it might stay good until November 1. |
Spanked by Camille
| | Blog reading for me is like going down to the cellar amid shelves and shelves of musty books that you're condemned to turn the pages of. Bad prose, endless reams of bad prose! There's a lack of discipline, a feeling that anything that crosses one's mind is important or interesting to others. People say that the best part about writing a blog is that there's no editing -- it's free speech without institutional control. Well, sure, but writing isn't masturbation -- you've got to self-edit. |
| | Now and then one sees the claim that Kausfiles was the first blog. I beg to differ: I happen to feel that my Salon column was the first true blog. My columns had punch and on-rushing velocity. They weren't this dreary meta-commentary, where there's a blizzard of fussy, detached sections nattering on obscurely about other bloggers or media moguls and Washington bureaucrats. I took hits at media excesses, but I directly commented on major issues and personalities in politics and pop culture... |
| | If bloggers want to break out of their ghetto, they've got to acquire a sense of drama and theater as well as a flair for language. Why else should anyone read them? And the Web in my view is a visual medium -- I don't log on to be trapped on a muddy page crammed with indigestible prose. |
| | ...every writer must work on his or her prose to find a voice. No major figure has emerged yet from the blogs -- Andrew Sullivan was already an established writer before he started his. A blog should sound conversational and be an antidote to the inept writing in most of today's glossy magazines. |
| | As a writer, I'm inspired not just by other writing but by music and art and lines from movies. I think that's what's missing from a lot of blogs. Most bloggers aren't culture critics but political or media junkies preoccupied with pedestrian minutiae and a sophomoric "gotcha" mentality. I find it depressing and claustrophobic. The Web is a wide open space -- voices on it should have energy and vision. |
| | Yeah, she misses a lot of what blogging is about; but she also hits the nail right through the board. |
Atkins Xplained
| | Four overweight guys lose weight! stop the presses! |
Scattering thoughts in the wind
| | I'm back in Santa Barbara, where the wind is off the sea and the air feels brisk and cool. Definitely not Santa Ana conditions. |
| | But the fire danger is still high. And I just realized, reading the latest at Ztuff, that Santa Barbara is the only county in Southern California to miss out on most of the current round of fires. We've had smoke, but not much fire. |
| | It creeps me to note that the perimeter of the 1977 Sycamore Canyon Fire included half the street I live on. That fire stopped only a few houses from the one I'm in right now. |
| | As was pointed out to me not long after I arrived in California in 1985, the redwood — our state tree — is adapted to fire, as are many other forms of vegetation around here. |
| | Makes you think. But not enough to make you move. Unless, of course, a fire is on the way. |
| | This morning on Liddy, I learned that the California forest fires were the fault of "environmental wackos" who got the state government (Pete Wilson?) to prohibit clearing brush. Bet you didn't know that. (Liddy has also been ranting about liberal machinations behind allowing that Florida man to take his brain-dead wife off life support.) Meanwhile, lefty writer Mike Davis says the fires are the result of homeowners who oppose controlled burns that would clear brush but leave unaesthetic landscapes behind. |
| | What's new it seems to me is that every public calamity becomes instant fodder for gutter-level partisan politics. Some right-wing nutjobs blamed the Columbia disaster on environmentalists too. Years ago, when I still watched the McLaughlin Group, Eleanor Clift blamed Reaganomics as the root cause of two homeless persons starting a forest fire. |
| | Tonight the news says there has been a huge explosion on the surface of the sun, resulting in a solar flare that will hit the Earth tomorrow morning, causing untold geo-magnetic havoc, whatever that means. I will be fascinated to hear how the liberals engineered that. |
| | The comments are just as funny. |
In case you were wondering
Flying home
| | It's 4am, and I'm heading back home, soon flying off into the sunrise. I flew in three days ago through a sunset reddened by smoke from the Southern California fires. That's the picture I shot above. |
| | This morning the air here in Las Vegas is hazy with smoke from the same fires, the biggest in the history of the state. |
| | [Later...] Now I'm at LAX grabbing a moment of Boingo broadband. Nice. |
| | I was hoping to see something of the fires from the plane (our path was roughly over the Grand Prix fire perimeter, but with clouds below), but I was sitting on the wrong side. No big deal. Roughest turbulence I've felt in awhile during the ascent out of Las Vegas, though. |
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