Pic Dump at Theo's

One of the best things about Theo's blog, increasingly rare, the Pic Dump.

Trying to Beat the Un-Bearable Heat

Via Theo Spark:

'Hurricane Irene' at The Big Picture

An astonishing photo essay.

At the Vans Skatepark Café...

You can get a lot of reading done while your kid knocks himself out (not literally, let's hope):

And outside Lucky Strike Lanes, adjacent to the parking lot as you're walking in, you can enjoy huge pictures of beautiful women bowling:

Thus progressive asshats like Scott Eric Kaufman should just GTF away. ASFLs.

P.S. I'm borrowing the café blogging concept from Althouse: "At the Picnic Café..."

PREVIOUSLY: "Vans Skatepark — The Block in Orange."

Pics From Pechanga

The view from our hotel room, sixth floor, overlooking the Journey golf course:

And looking south, over the pool area at left:

Getting ready to party ...

The Pechanga staff didn't seem to mind people taking photographs during the show, but I didn't take my camera inside. Yesterday morning, I saw this sign as I headed out to the parking structure to load the car:

Heading back to find my wife, a shot from the casino:

Went ahead and cruised out to the front of the hotel. It looks spectacular at night:

Walking back through the casino (looking for my wife), a poster for The Beach Boys. That'd be hella fun:

And see my report from yesterday, "Billy Idol Rocks Pechanga!"

Irvine is 22nd in Money Magazine's Best Places to Live

Via Althouse, in Wisconsin, where Madison is ranked 95th.

And clicking over to Money's entry for Irvine, the picture at the link includes a shot of Bill Barber Park.

Coincidentally, I just introduced readers to Colonel Barber the other day. Love the patriotism:

RELATED: Wisconsin beats Irvine in U.S. News and World Report's top national universities, but not by much.

Photoblogging

From my good friend on Facebook:

Hollywood Walk of Fame

At Father's Day dinner, my wife mentioned that she'd never seen the "stars" on Hollywood Boulevard. I told her that I was just up there in February, when I covered the communist protest against "Obama's wars."

If you're not careful, you'll miss some of the cooler stars on the sidewalk, which are often located where you least expect them. Below, just reading their names was breathtaking. At bottom, the parking attendant took my picture (the ANSWER commie stickers on my shirt are part of my "cover" for my inside reporting). I parked at Hollywood and Vine, across from the Capitol Records building. I think I'll take my family up there one of these weekends. It's much more family friendly than it was in the 1980s, when I used be in Hollywood all the time for punk rock concerts:

Ralphs Irvine Beehive

Last Sunday, while at the checkout stand at my local Ralphs, folks inside the store started gasping at a huge swarm of bees that began swirling out in the parking lot. I took my groceries home and came back with my camera. The bees had mellowed out by then:

You can see the hive as I got down a little bit:

And then a little closer:

I'm using my little Nikon Coolpix L20 Digital Camera with 3.6 Optical Zoom. It's been fantastic for point-and-click at tea parties, although not so great for closeups like these. Speaking of which, I'll have what Ann Althouse is having (er, using). Here's another angle of the hive. A couple of bees started to come at me, and while I'm not sure if these were the "killer" Africanized bees, I didn't feel threatened. That said, they were densely packed and potentially dangerous if someone were to get attacked by the swarm:

Africanized bees defend their colonies much more vigorously than do European bees. The colonies are easily disturbed (sometimes just by being nearby). When they do sting, many more bees may participate, so there is a danger of receiving more stings. This can make them life threatening, especially to people allergic to stings, or with limited capacity to escape (the young, old, and handicapped), and to confined livestock or pets. Once disturbed AHB will continue the attack for a long distance.

Anyway, Althouse has another photoblog here.

Meanwhile, I'm looking into a more specialized camera. I'm starting to do a lot of photography.

RELATED: At Iowa Voice, "Red-Bellied Woodpecker - Female."

Blue Marble (Planet Earth)

From NASA on Flickr (full-size is here, and be sure to cruise around a bit while visiting there ... incredible stuff):

Also at The Big Picture:

The most detailed true-color image of the entire Earth created to date. Using a collection of satellite-based observations, scientists and visualizers stitched together months of observations of the land surface, oceans, sea ice, and clouds into a seamless, true-color mosaic of every square kilometer of our planet. Much of the information contained in this image came from a single remote-sensing device-NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer, or MODIS. Flying over 700 km above the Earth onboard the Terra satellite. (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center)

Lots more unreal photography at The Big Picture.

RELATED: Bob Belvedere's got some more down home earthiness, "Rule 5 Saturday."

'Planet War' @ Foreign Policy

Take a few minutes with this absolutely phenomenal photo-essay at Foreign Policy, "Planet War." This screencap shows a portion from the eighth slide, "Pakistan":

Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are two of the world's most volatile war zones. Located along Pakistan's porous, 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan, the two regions have, since 2001, seen fierce battles between Islamist militants and the Pakistani Army. Al Qaeda's top leaders are thought to reside here, and U.S. drones patrol the skies in search of terrorist and Taliban leaders. Above, a Pakistani soldier stands guard while an Afghan-bound NATO oil tanker burns in Peshawar after being destroyed by militants on Feb. 1, 2010.

Unbelievably awesome pictorial. Check out the whole thing, here.

Tsunami Saturday Laguna Beach!

Well, the Orange County Tea Party Patriots had an event scheduled yesterday in Laguna Beach, but it was cancelled due to weather conditions and tsunami warnings. I left the Temecula rally a little after Noon hoping to catch the tail end of the Laguna rally. I texted my good friend Megan and got word the event had been cancelled. I thought I'd hang out a little bit anyway. Walking down the boardwalk, tourists check out the surf conditions at the main beach lifeguard station:

A closer look at the tower:

The conditions at about 1:30pm:

Walking back across PCH now, looking north. That's Laguna Canyon Road at the second intersection with the green light. It's normally bumper-to-bumper at this stretch on the weekends, especially in the summer. Not too many folks heading to the beach on this day. Notice the movie theater up the road at right? I'm heading over that way, to the Starbucks just before it:

But I checked out the newsstand first. Actually, I didn't need to buy anything, which is unusual for me. I can read the New York Times online, at least for now, and I wasn't in the market for fashion or gossip rags:

Okay, here's a quick couple of shots of the Laguna Cinemas. "The Hurt Locker" is playing (Jules Crittenden's got an interesting post up on that today, "The Ass-Kick Locker"):

"Alice in Wonderland" is playing at Midnight next Thursday. Cool:

Heading back over to the coffee shop, which was doing good business:

This is the Fingerhut Gallery, featuring a life-size Cat-in-the-Hat sculpture. Asking price was $150,000:

The place might use some of that cash to hire a landscaper -- that ivy foilage needs a trim!

The obligatory surfer-boutique-on-PCH photograph:

I said hello to Thomas, who was cruising the sidewalks for recyclables. Nice guy. He was kind enough to pose for a picture:

Here's the sculpture of Eiler Larsen (1890-1975), the Laguna Beach Greeter:

The plaque's a little hard to read, but there's more on Eiler at the Los Angeles Times:

Okay, heading back south (which is an incline here, next to the Laguna Hotel, along with the Miranda Galleries):

Okay, walking back to my car now. Here's the obligatory downtown Laguna Beach cottage residence photograph. A beautiful home:

Now this is the ultra-obligatory Laguna Beach enviro-Subaru-owner's-car-with-a-Barbara-Boxer-for-Senate-2010-bumper-sticker photograph. I was about to hop into my car and I noticed the Boxer-for-Senate sticker and said to myself: Yes! It doesn't get any better than this. Orange County is known as the heartland of California conservatism, but the Laguna artists' colony is a left-wing bastion in south county. Laguna, which includes a substantial gay community, voted overwhelmingly against Proposition 8 in 2008:

Okay, that's it for today ... more great blogging throughout the week -- so tell a friend!

Bull Riding at Johnny Utah's!

From Julia Roy, "Too many girls on the bull at @johnnyutahs51":

Johnny Utah's in here.

I'll bet Theo likes that! And Courtney too!

Coffee and Pictures in Fresno

I mentioned yesterday, at my Facebook, that I'm in Fresno visiting family. Actually, my wife's uncle's in intensive care, and we're not sure how long he's got (he had a stroke two years ago and pneumonia now; breathing tubes have been inserted, etc.). We're staying at my wife's sister's house, in Clovis, out by Herndon and Fowler. We did our visiting at the hospital yesterday, and I didn't take a camera. So, I took the camera today when I went out for coffee this morning. Driving south down Fowler I slowed down to take pictures of a couple of turkey vultures that were making themselves at home in front of a nearby farmhouse. I stopped the van and walked over to the fence to get a look. The pictures of the vultures are blurry. Sorry. I'm not sure why, but I'm using the zoom. It's a Canon digital, my wife's, and I hope to get something more advanced soon. I'm starting to have fun again with photography:

I took a few shots of these birds. Normally soaring overhead, they are pretty majestic, although scavengers get a bad rap. One of the guys got spooked and took off just as I was walking up, here. After I took this picture below, this guy flew up here.

Here's the house. I already noticed it yesterday. Twenty years ago this part of town was all agriculture. There's wasn't a bit of track-housing development, but you can't stop progress, I guess. It's all a mix of old farms with horses and such, and modern urban development:

I stopped off for coffee at Starbucks. I thought about buying a copy of the New York Times, but at $6.00 for the Sunday paper, I decided just to read inside the store for a bit. The Times is going to a full subscription mode soon. I think it's a mistake (folks want to blog it anyway, so forget about it if you gotta pay). But the paper's so dreadfully liberal I won't make too much difference in my blogging, in any case:

I drove for a ways, back down Highway 99, and took the Highway 43 cutoff west toward Hanford. It started raining pretty good. I wanted to get a picture of this country store a few miles down the road. We saw the place yesteday, and the El Mexicano advertising really stuckout:

I'm still kind of shy about taking folks' pictures, but I did click one guy as he headed back out to his car. His clothes looked like he'd been working, worn and soiled. His face was haggard as well, perhaps from many years in the hot sun:

I took one more shot after the cars cleared out:

I started back west on Conejo. I stopped by a dairy farm, Nash Holsteins, according to the sign next to the farmhouse:

Walking down the side fenced area, some friendly cows came over to say hello:

Really nice cows. They were just feeding across the way, so I don't think they were looking for a handout, like animals at a park or something. They just like people, it turns out (more here, here and here):

I like the farm homes throughout this valley. Reminds me of Small-Town America. This one was up the road from the Nash Dairy Farm. It's real country out here, like it's been for decades and decades:

Before heading back home to my sister-in-law's, I wanted to get a couple of shots of this funky old gas station with a warplane sticking out of the roof. This is along old Highway 41, which is really Elm Avenue. This used to be the main highway southwest, toward Paso Robles and Morro Bay. I used to travel this road all the time when I was at UCSB in the 1990s:

Here's another angle. Sorry I don't know the make and model of this plane (vintage WWII, by the looks of it):

Almost back home, I snapped a shot of downtown Fresno heading north on Highway 41:

Then I got another cup of coffee at Starbucks:

My wife and I are loading my boys up in the van early tomorrow. We have some business to attend to at home, and I'm looking to report from the GOP Orange County Central Committee Meeting tomorrow night. Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots is expected to speak, so check back late tomorrow or Tuesday for that entry (if I can get it done).

P.S. I'm getting a lot spam, so comment moderation is enabled. I won't be able to clear 'em till way later, but don't be shy in any case ...