44 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 11-9-18”

  3. 😦 Chas didn’t sleep in. My ATT e-mail wants a password. I have no problem with that, I have to do it every couple of weeks.
    But it won’t take my password. I gave up after a while and went to breakfast. I came here before I tried e-mail again.
    Maybe later.

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  4. That photo says “happy fall.” A European starling in its winter plumage in fall colors.

    Two points of trivia:

    (1) Starlings only have all this white on them in fall and winter, but it isn’t because they grow new feathers in spring. It is because the white tips of their feathers wear off over time.

    (2) We only have starlings in America because some brilliant person decided we should have every bird mentioned in Shakespeare. We lacked starlings, so he imported some, and now they may be our most numerous bird species and are certainly a pest species. They are cavity nesters, and so they fight for nest holes with bluebirds and other cavity nesters.

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  5. Morning! Hope ya’ll have a wonderful day…I am off to have coffee with friends, then errands to follow….
    That is a pretty bird up there….I have an urge to connect the dots!! 😊

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  8. Smoke is so bad they closed schools today—we’re 150 miles south.

    Here at Oakland airport, another 60 miles further south, air reeks of smoke.

    I’m having trouble picturing an entire town burned to the ground in 2018. 27K people lived there.

    What happens now? Di you rebuild an entire town ?

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  10. Oh, interesting. I see Drudge agrees.

    APOCALYPSE CALIFORNIA…

    PARADISE LOST…

    (Paradise being the name of the town Michelle was referring to — the one that burned to the ground).

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  11. And the rest of the headlines on Drudge:

    Trio of wildfires gain strength…

    Mass exodus…

    Video shows terrifying drive to escape…

    Flames spread 80 football fields per minute!

    Thousands of buildings destroyed…

    Cars abandoned with babies in arms, explosions…

    Actor James Woods Aids In Search For Missing…

    Bay Area air choking…

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  12. CBS:

    75K Homes Ordered To Evacuate As Woolsey Fire Jumps 101 Freeway; Malibu Evacuated

    BELL CANYON (CBSLA) — A wind-driven brush fire that broke out in Ventura County, west of Chatsworth, jumped the south side of the 101 Freeway near Calabasas early Friday morning and prompted authorities to order the evacuation of 75,000 homes in L.A. and Ventura counties. It’s one of two wildfires burning in the region.

    The Woolsey Fire was zero percent contained as of 6 a.m. Friday after scorching at least 8,000 acres. Just after 5 a.m., the blaze jumped the southside of the 101 Freeway into the Calabasas area. The California Highway Patrol shut down a four-mile stretch of the 101 Freeway from Las Virgenes Road to Kanan Road.

    CBS2 reporter Tom Wait described conditions on the ground as “apocalyptic,” as ember and ash rained down on the streets below.

    A large swatch of the city of Malibu was under a new mandatory evacuation Friday morning: from Liberty Canyon, west to Decker Canyon, south to the Pacific Coast Highway.

    Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Scott Dettorre told CBS2 that “dozens of homes” had been damaged or destroyed, but there was no exact count.

    “The fire has progressed down into the city of Thousand Oaks,” Dettorre said.

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  13. chas, good luck with the password, I hate passwords. Sometimes the problem is as simple as having your keyboard caps locked. I do keep mine, using my own code letters, written down, especially those you have to change often (ours at work are that way).

    We’re getting up to 80 degrees today but it was cold overnight and my house was at 60 when I got up. Trying some coffee to warm and wake me up, then it’s a rush off to work. Our sister paper in the valley and others east of there will be busy on fire coverage today, along with probably some reporters from the other papers. I think I’m safe from being called in for that. 🙂 One advantage of being among the ‘older’ reporters.

    I still remember a co-worker years ago saying how the soles of his shoes melted to the ground as he was covering a fire once, scared the heck out of him. Photographers have told stories of being trapped and having to make immediate U-turns while trying to drive out of fire areas when the flames suddenly switch direction. Covering these things isn’t for the faint hearted.

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  16. To add to some of the comments on yesterday’s thread which referred to couples in same-sex marriage – I’ve often thought it odd that in a male couple both are husbands, and in a female couple both are wives. It is human nature in relationships for one to be the stronger, the leader, and the other to take a more “domestic” role. I would have thought that these couples would have determined one of them to be the wife and one to be the husband.

    As for Christians who believe in same-sex marriage, I wonder how they can ignore Jesus’ teaching on marriage, and that other teachings on marriage in the NT specify the roles of husband and wife.

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  18. Kim- Welcome to the not-so-temperate part of the Temperate Zone. Of course, none of us in the US have it as cold as Roscuro will experience.

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  21. Who, Kare! We’ve had lows down around 0 (Celsius), but I’m so not ready for anything colder just yet. It’s gray and gloomy, with a little bit of drizzle, though.

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  23. I made a mistake. Kare is in Canada, not Minnesota. Okay, so anywhere in the USis what I originally said, is not as cold as Roscuro’s current location, except Minnesota in January.

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  25. This is our ‘normal’ fire season; we sometimes have preview seasons in late summer.

    Now there’s a brush fire in Griffith Park, a lot closer to home (and very close to where Carol is). The zoo is evacuating at least some of the animals. The site of the fire within the park is very hard to reach so firefighters are having to get in by foot.

    And we’ve lost one of our movie location sites:

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  28. I’m sad to see that Paramount Ranch’s Western Town burned! They filmed Dr. Quinn there, when we were still living in California. When Mrs. B’s parents came from Michigan to visit we took them there and we all really enjoyed it.

    We went back there when we were in California this past May. It was no longer dressed up as Dr. Quinn’s Colorado Springs, but many of the buildings were still recognizable, even with different paint and signage. Now I’m really glad we went.

    How much sadder for people who live in those mountains losing their homes.

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  29. Northern California has had no rain since last May. Things are so dry. It is only God that can save the whole place from burning. Paradise is close to my home. I have friends there who have come here and are trying to raise support to return.

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  30. Peter, Kathaleena is in Minnesota. Maybe you were mistaking Kare for Kathaleena when you mentioned MN?

    Then, too, I mention Minnesota now and then — not necessarily meaning I live there 🙂 — because I listen to the live stream on Classical Minnesota Public Radio when I’m online, and sometimes post articles from their site.

    Like this one, which may be of interest to Michelle and others with an interest in World War I and classical music:

    https://www.classicalmpr.org/story/2018/11/07/university-of-minnesota-marks-100th-anniversary-of-world-war-i-with-huge-concert

    __________________________________

    The University of Minnesota’s Lest We Forget: World War I Armistice Centenary Concert will be broadcast live at 4 p.m. Sunday on Classical MPR, with host Julie Amacher.

    Patrick Hawes grew up in Lincolnshire, England, and remembers his grandfather Bert vividly. Bert was deaf in one ear and had a finger missing from his service as a soldier in World War I.

    But his spirit was irrepressible. He sang war songs, regaled the young Patrick with stories of the trenches, and marched him up to bed every evening beating a metal tray in military fashion.

    Half a century later those reminiscences became the seed of Hawes’ The Great War Symphony, a large-scale work for choir, soloists and orchestra whose U.S. premiere will happen at Northrop Auditorium on Sunday, Nov. 11, as part of Lest We Forget: World War I Armistice Centenary Concert.

    […]

    The hourlong symphony is “very economically composed and very tuneful,” Mehaffey says.

    “I was chatting to our tenor soloist Nick Chalmers,” he adds. “He said the music is like one part Dominick Argento, one part Benjamin Britten, and one part Les Misérables. I laughed at that, but it’s pretty accurate.”

    Other music of the period is featured in the first half of the Northrop concert. The University of Minnesota Wind Ensemble will play a medley of popular wartime tunes, the choir will sing Vaughan Williams’ “Dirge for Two Veterans,” and organist Helen Jensen will perform Marcel Dupré’s Poème Héroïque on Northrop’s restored Aeolian-Skinner organ.

    Nov. 11, 2018, is the 100th anniversary of the armistice that brought the Great War to a conclusion, and other events are planned on Sunday as a lead-in to the Northrop concert.

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  31. LA Times headline:

    “Malibu residents flee as destructive fire hit the Pacific Ocean: ‘It’s just like everything happened all at once’ ”

    It’s really crazy out here, saw a report that malibu high school is on fire and there’s talk about evacuations spreading next to Pacific Palisades & Topanga Canyon.

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  35. It is relatively warm up here. Even Iqaluit, which is further south, tends to be slightly colder. Also, we have little snow, just enough to cover the ground. Except, that is, for the places the gale force winds have blown bare. The locals were saying they usually have more snow by this time of year. It will get colder as the days get shorter. It was dark by about 3:30 this afternoon.

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  37. I’m not in an area that would be prone to those kinds of fires — we have some open hills around us, but I believe it’s too developed to rage out of control as it does in the mountains and more rural areas. But yeah, I have occasionally thought “now the big earthquake we’ve all been waiting for will hit” following all this work I’ve done on the house.

    Saw a woman interviewed near Zuma Beach where the fire is raging — they have horses and were wondering if they’d just have to let them go if they had to make a run for it.

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  38. We’re close enough, though, that these fires feel very close — I’m looking west toward the ocean out of a newsroom window right now and see a heavy, black horizontal ‘cloud’ of smoke just sitting out there, coming our way.

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  39. If they leave, it would only be right to release the horses.
    Phos, I opened the link but it wanted me to install some cookies’ I backed out.

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