Ron's Log

Will This Damn Rain Never Cease?

Okay, it's been well more than 12 hours and way more than half an inch, so okay, the rain can stop now, any time.

"best known as the former Vice President/failed presidential candidate turned Nobel Peace Prize-winning global warming campaigner"

I'm linking to this article only because I want to highlight that bit: "[Al Gore] best known as the former Vice President/failed presidential candidate turned Nobel Peace Prize-winning global warming campaigner" It just rolls off the tongue. Is there a pension connected to that title?

Pope Makes It Personal

"Pope Benedict, in a new encyclical released on Friday, said atheism was responsible for some of the 'greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice' in history." What the mutha-fuckin-christ does the pot think it's doing calling the aluminum foil black? The extraordinarily ill-informed German seems to equate Marxism with atheism. Did Pope skip out on his logic classes?

Party!

A wonderful collection of party photos from some time back. Somebody said the 60s, but it could've been the 70s in Missouri.

Go here to see one of my favorites, which is almost SFW, so very close to SFW that you might as well take a peek.

Bancroft Gardens

Last Saturday, Emrys and I went to Bancroft Gardens in Walnut Creek, California. This is a great place. It's a 3-acre garden of mostly succulents and other drought-tolerant plants. Ruth Bancroft started collecting succulents in the 1950s and began moving them from her greenhouses to this garden in 1972. She'll be 100 years old in October 2008, and I think she's still in the process of moving things from the greenhouses to the garden. At least she's still gardening - even getting down and dirty in it.

The place is overwatered with its own well water which, our tour guide told us, is rich in boron. That's bad for some plants, I take it, and those anti-boronic vegetables have died, clearing the way for the boron-tolerant.

As a result of all the water and being in an environment not quite as hot and dry as Our Favorite Desert, a lot of the desert plants in Bancroft Gardens have grown gi-fucking-normous. They've got yuccas as tall as redwoods and agaves with flowers so huge that to stand near them on a windy day is to risk swift death. Here's a page where they document the whole process of the flowering of a Agave marmorata.

You can see my set of photos here, and these are a few samples:

The Naked Firefighter

I guess I didn't link to the original story about a firefighter being photographed while entering his fire station naked in Johnson City, New York. It was all over the news, and I thought it more likely that he was caught while trying to get a photo of himself to share online with those who love naked firefighters. He was arraigned this week, but the interesting thing is the comments from the local townsfolk. Do they all mis-speak and use double entendres like this, or was the reporter doing some creative editing?

"He needs to be punished for it, I think he does because it's not fair to anybody who brings their kids outside," says Arvella Randolph of Johnson City.

"When somebody does something very in lewd and indecent, they should be charged with it," says Monty Jones of Johnson City.

"The firefighter just was pulling a prank, nothing big," says Courtney Holcomb of Johnson City.

"I think he was just fooling around with his fellow firefighters having a good time and it got out of hand," says Marjorie McKay of Johnson City.

Gay Visitors to Palm Springs

The Bay Area Reporter reviews resorts, bars, restaurants and more for gay visitors to the Palm Springs area. They seem to like almost everything.

These Are Good!

I spotted these Candy Cane Joe-Joe's at Trader Joe's yesterday. I suppose the incorrect apostrophe is meant only to echo the apostrophe in the store name. I'm not much of a cookie man, by which I mean that I can resist them when shopping, but put a box of cookies in front of me and I will inhale them. But these appealed to me. I do like Oreos, and these are similar to Oreos except they have peppermint candy bits mixed in, and I love peppermint. Reading the ingredients I could find nothing that would absolutely stop me from buying them (no high-fructose corn syrup, for example).

So I bought 'em, and they are wonderful! From my Googling around on the subject, they seem to be a seasonal item, and last year they sold out well before Christmas in some markets.

Santa Cruz Boardwalk

On the day after Thanksgiving, rather than doing our patriotic duty of sitting in traffic to get to the malls so we could stand in lines so we could squeeze into crowded stores so we could shove aside other shoppers to grab crap we didn't need, we visited the Santa Cruz boardwalk.

Real Rain Right Now!

This is wonderful! I awoke to a dark morning with actual, real, steady rain falling from the sky...and it's still falling! The Weather Channel predicts we may get half an inch today! That is almost as much rain as we've received this whole year, and flooding will result, but we really, really need this. I haven't seen rain like this here for over 2½ years.

I've got lots of plants, including half-grown trees, that have NEVER been rained on. I hope they know what to do with it. I feel like I should go out there and explain things to them, but they're probably too busy to listen.

Next week: desert flowers!