In downtown San Francisco, there’s a multi-level shopping mall with an atrium and a skylight. If you stand in the dead center of the atrium and look up, it resembles an eye, looking down at you through a giant microscope.
This was taken during WonderCon 2009. Years later, I posted it for a February 2015 photo challenge on the theme “Symmetry.”
I was recently reminded of the view while reading author Annalee Newitz’ latest newsletter, Inside the Dying Malls of San Francisco. Continue reading
Humble Bundle is offering 30 books* by Ursula K. Le Guin supporting Literary Arts, including all of Earthsea, several Hainish novels, Catwings, short stories, Gifts/Voices/Powers, nonfiction writing…
I’ve read the Earthsea series (good-to-great) and most of the Hainish novels (some great, some good, some OK), plus Lathe of Heaven (great), and I’ve got copies of several more on my to-read pile, but I’m totally grabbing this for the nonfiction and short stories. Plus I get another format for my Earthsea reread that’s not the giant collected hardcover tome or my old fragile paperbacks.
I’m going to have a lot of reading material next year.
*As ebooks through Kobo
Update: Unfortunately they aren’t DRM-Free. Kobo does have some of her books without DRM, but as far as I can tell, the only one in this bundle is The Unreal and the Real.
The others I’ve found just now are: Worlds of Exile and Illusion, The Eye of the Heron, The Word for World is Forest, and The Beginning Place. Tor seems to be big on requesting non-DRM formats. These may be all of them currently available without DRM: eBooks.com, where I previously bought Forest, has a filter on their search for DRM-Free, and only turns up the same four books.
It seems kind of ironic to sell The Dispossessed (of all books!) encumbered with DRM.
The part that kills me — and I hope that doesn’t turn out to be literal — is that Trump actually won the popular vote on a platform of hurting large segments of the population. It’s not hidden. It’s not some weird bogus claim made by the opposition. He’s been shouting it from the rooftops. And it’s not just Trump, it’s all the other Republicans riding his coattails as they push against civil rights and promise to punish people for the crime of being different.
That means large segments of the American population either:
Ultimately it doesn’t matter because it amounts to the same thing: Trump and the people around him can credibly make excuses about having a mandate to hurt people. Lots of people.
I was really hoping that if nothing else, the Trumpist scapegoat-and-punish brand of politics would be discredited. Instead it’s been rewarded.
I hope the people who voted for him eventually realize: He will turn against you too, just as he turns against everyone the moment they stop being useful to him.
You handed power to someone who’s big on retribution and revenge and just got a court ruling granting him absolute immunity from prosecution. What do you think is going to happen?
And don’t count on anything less cruel from the people around him, because they’ve seen that bullying works and they’ll keep going, tearing down everything they can, blaming some group for the problems it causes, promising to punish them, lather rinse and repeat.
Related reading: Last year A.R. Moxon wrote an insightful piece about how Republicans’ own actions have convinced him that Republicans are fascist. And a “what now?” post from Ken White at Popehat.
If you haven’t voted yet, make sure you vote in favor of Proposition 3. While court cases have *blocked* 2008’s language defining marriage as only between a man and a woman, that language is still in the state constitution.
And as we’ve seen with, for example, Arizona’s pre-Civil-War law about abortion being reactivated when Roe vs. Wade was overturned, all it takes is another court case.
Proposition 3 removes that language entirely and replaces it with an affirmation of the right to marry, future-proofing marriage equality.
When wild jackrabbits roamed the fields of LAX. (Los Angeles Times)*
From time to time passengers in giant air liners are amused when giant jacks race the plane on take-off. Until now, none of the rabbits has left the ground.
I’m reminded of all the rabbits we used to see near UCI in the 90s, especially out in the housing complexes on the edge. A lot of that open space has been filled in since then. I’m told they were still all over the place as of 2010, but I can’t remember seeing any the last few times I was on campus. Though several of those were Wayzgoose, which I’m sure would have most of the rabbits hiding in their burrows, waiting for all the people to leave so they can see what food they might have dropped. Then again, I don’t remember noticing squirrels at the time either, and I’ve seen squirrels walk up to me and pose like Oliver Twist asking for more soup.
Anyway, the rabbits at LAX were eventually wiped out by foxes, who have since disappeared from the airport as well.
But the foxes are still around! Just not on the runways. LAist ran a story about the local population of red foxes on the Palos Verdes Peninsula just last month. The LA Natural History Museum has an article on the species’ history in the area, from being imported and farmed for hunting and fur in the early 20th century, to going feral, to a population boom in the 1980s.
The red fox coexists with the native gray fox on the peninsula, but coyotes will kill them, and the current population is believed to be fairly low.
Could be worse, though. The Channel Island fox almost went extinct through a Rube Goldberg food chain of events. SFGate reported on their plight and rebound (on the same day LAist published the piece on red foxes, oddly enough!) due to the feral pigs (way more than 30-40) left over from the islands’ farming days. The pigs not only overran the islands’ vegetation — it was basically trees and grass and nothing in between for years — but they attracted predatory birds from the mainland who, once they were in the area, went after the smaller, easier prey: the foxes. By 2004, there were only a dozen on each of two islands.
The National Park Service hired an outfit to hunt down the feral pigs over the next few years. The islands’ vegetation — and the foxes –rebounded. By 2016, the island fox was removed from the endangered species list entirely.
*Photo credit: Art Rogers, originally published in the Dec. 2, 1946, edition of Life magazine and later in the Aug. 4, 2011 LA Times.
Expanded from a Mastodon post I wrote back when the LA Times highlighted the LAX rabbits in a “From the archives…” story in 2017.
