Category: Life

Posted on
by

Line of rabbits along the ground, silhouetted against some old-looking airplanes and trees in the distance.

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.

About Those Foxes…

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.

Posted on
by

Finally getting around to sorting through photos from a walk at the pond and botanical gardens at Polliwog Park…um…two months ago.

Two ducklings with mottled brown feathers swim, following their mother, who has similar coloring. A third is off to the side, not far from where a turtle's head is poking out of the water.

The third duckling on the right was spooked by the turtle surfacing its head right next to it. Between this shot and the next, a few seconds later, it had darted away and hidden behind its mother!

The same two ducklings and their mother, only the third duckling is nowhere to be seen. For that matter, neither is the turtle.

Ducks (mostly mallards like these), coots and geese (mostly Canada Geese) make this pond one of their regular migratory spots. Seagulls, pigeons and crows stop by regularly. Smaller birds mostly stick to the other parts of the park. The turtles, like those in most of the ponds around here, are feral – released pets and their descendants.

Posted on
by

A while back, I mentioned one of the exhibits I remembered from a childhood visit to the Los Angeles Museum of Science and Industry (now the California Science Center) in the 1980s:

…a multi-screen cartoon about energy sources and engine types called “The Water Engine.” (Each screen has a character talking up internal combustion, flywheels, mag-lev, electric, etc. I still quote the Peter Lorre-inspired fuel-cell scientist saying “And then…we burn the hydrogen!”)

At the end, the scientist tries repeatedly to ignite the hydrogen while everyone else watches nervously, then starts hiding behind obstacles or off-screen before the inevitable explosion bursts across all the screens. Then they all climb out of their hiding spots and agree that this would be really cool once the kinks are worked out, but it’s not there yet.

Brooke brought it up on Mastodon last month and I decided to go looking for it again. In 2017 there was nothing I found to show it even existed. In 2024 the only thing she could find at first was…my blog post from 2017. Which I’d forgotten writing. 🤦‍♂️ I kept looking, and found a brief note that it was later shown at EPCOT, with a link to a long-dead page that had been archived in 2002 containing some extremely tiny screenshots!

9 tiny cartoon screens in a grid: You can just barely make out a cowboy, a child with a large tricycle-like assembly, a football coach, a miner with a hard hat, some old, yellowed parchment with a sketch on it, someone carrying an axle with wheels, a large lab flask filled with water, an old man holding up a picture of a horse, and someone in a superhero outfit standing on a row of horseshoe magnets.
Rescued from a long-dead web page via the Internet Archive.

Adding EPCOT to my search eventually turned up an extremely sparse IMDB entry and…*drumroll please* someone’s home camcorder video of the whole presentation!

It does exist! It wasn’t a shared hallucination! The fuel cell scientist (who extracts the hydrogen from water, hence the title) does sound like Peter Lorre! He does indeed say the line that my family still quotes decades later! And it does indeed explode across the whole display!

Posted on
by

“Here’s a metaphor to help you get a sense for how this complicated thing functions.”

“But it’s not really doing that!”

“That’s why it’s a metaphor, not a description.”

…

“Here’s an explanation in layman’s terms.”

“No, that’s wrong, that term only means this specific thing when used in the relevant technical jargon.”

“I’m not speaking to people who use the jargon, I’m speaking to the general public, who use the term in a much broader sense than you do.”

…

And then there’s the flip side:

“I learned this thing was simple. These edge cases can’t possibly exist.”

“You learned the simplified version. The real thing is more complicated.”

…

As the saying goes, The map is not the territory. The map isn’t complete, but that doesn’t make it wrong either, as long as you don’t insist that the real things that aren’t on your map must not be there.

Posted on
by

A squareish hand-painted metal sign with the words 'Coffee,' 'Espresso' and 'Wifi' stacked vertically. The letters and border are black on a bright yellow background. The sign hangs from an ornamented wrought-iron-style stand above a planter and is viewed diagonally from above. Between 'Coffee' and 'Espresso' there's a drawing of a cup and saucer with steam rising from it.

When I took this photo back in 2016, it was a combination coffee/Chinese food restaurant: they sold coffee in the mornings and Chinese food for lunch and dinner. The owner had previously run a separate coffee shop (The Bean Counter, IIRC) in the same shopping center, then combined the two businesses to save on rent. It was one of our go-to Chinese takeout sources, and I’d sometimes grab coffee in the mornings if I was in the area or on my way somewhere in that direction.

The old coffee location sat vacant for a few years until a bakery (with coffee on the side) moved in. Amusingly, the bakery — which is still there today — also chose a pun-based name: Redondough (as in Redondo Beach).

In early 2020 — and I mean early, either January or February — they were offered a really nice buyout price by someone who wanted to turn-key convert it overnight to a Hawaiian restaurant. I imagine when mid-March rolled around and the initial Covid lockdown started, they were extremely relieved to have accepted it!

I never did get around to trying the Hawaiian place, even for takeout. Eventually it was taken over by a Korean fast food chain.

Photo taken February 27, 2016 and originally posted on my Instagram account a few days later with this title, but no commentary.

Posted on
by

Brightline West is ready to start breaking ground this week, according to The Washington Post. The southwest endpoint will be in Rancho Cucamonga, where it will connect to Metrolink. (Which is definitely better than Victorville, which I’d seen suggested a few years ago.) Connecting to the existing lines here will make it simpler to build than trying to connect all the way to Los Angeles proper. (gift link)

Electric trains will depart every 45 minutes from a Las Vegas station south of the city’s storied Strip and a Southern California station in Rancho Cucamonga, a Los Angeles suburb about 40 miles east of downtown.

Traveling at up to 186 mph — faster than any other train in the United States — Brightline West trains will make the 218-mile trip in about 2 hours and 10 minutes.

Cross-posted from Metafilter