Sunday, June 12, 2005
Saw these beautiful grasses in Cuyamaca State Park today, right in the middle of the burned out pine forests, on one of the sharp switchbacks in the main road.
It's rather amazing that just 20 months after the huge fire the plant life has recovered to such an extent. Thank goodness for the rains this winter!
On a drive today, Debi and I spotted these flowers coming down toward Descanso from Cuyamaca State Park. I've no idea what they are, and I do not recall ever seeing them before. The plant is quite large — some individuals were over 8' tall, with stems about 3/4" diameter at the base.
If anyone can identify this for me, I'd sure appreciate an email with the particulars...
Chemise (adenostoma fasciculatum) is the most common plant in the chapparal that we live in. Today Debi and I took a drive up toward Mt. Laguna (one of the tallest peaks in San Diego County), and along the Sunrise Highway not far from Pine Valley we spotted some hills whose color was not the normal dull green (see at right; click on pictures for a larger view). Instead, there were splotches of white turning the hillside into a mottled and brighter mix of green and white. This turned out to be from all the chemise in bloom (second photo), and they were quite a sight (remember, this is a desert!). I'm sure the spectacular and unusually synchronous bloom is due to the heavy rains this year, though I don't know the actual mechanism.
At this point, the highway is about 4,500 feet above sea level, so the bloom here is a few weeks behind the chemise bloom at our home. The bloom there wasn't nearly as overwhelming as these hillsides. Plus we don't normally think of chemise as "attractive"...but that's a different story...
Anyone who knows us well is probably very surprised to see the word "chemise" without cuss words nearby in anything I've written. That's because most of the time, chemise is (a) ugly, (b) wretched looking, (c) out-competing much more desirable plants, (d) a serious fire hazard (dry, oily, easily ignited wood), and (e) ugly. Chemise is my enemy. I spend lots of time, effort, and money attempting to eradicate chemise from my property.
But just today, I'll grant that it can be, under certain very limited circumstances that include it being off my property, attractive.
Michael Yon is back with the troops in Mosul, and he's filed another (and quite long) report. An excerpt:
Hot information comes in that a high value target is at a specific house nearby. There is radio chatter as the Battle Captain in the TOC communicates with the Recon platoon on a quick plan to hit the house and the one next to it. Within minutes, the Recon soldiers roll up to the homes, drop ramps, and burst into the bottom floor. They rush in and begin securing the rooms on the bottom floor, where they detain three men, while other Recon soldiers flow up the stairs.
Benjamin Morton is part of Recon's raiding patrol. He lives directly across from me on base. Everyone calls him “Rat” because he saves everything. Rat moves upstairs, training his rifle above him. Rat’s the #1 man, in the most dangerous position. Two enemy men are hiding on the balcony, and one has an automatic weapon with a large drum of ammunition. As Rat comes round the corner, the insurgent sticks the weapon around the balcony corner and fires a long burst of about twenty rounds. Four bullets strike Ben Morton. His buddies come behind him and throw a flash bang into the room, and return fire, catching a bed ablaze with tracers. They pull Rat out and call for medics. Despite everyone's valiant efforts, Benjamin Morton does not survive his wounds. Had they thrown grenades first, three women and four children would have died alongside the four men who were captured or killed that night. The men were elements of a car bomb cell.
The night got worse for our people. Sometime later, soldiers from the 73rd Engineers (Deuce Four is their parent unit) patrolled the roads of Mosul searching for IEDs to clear the roads for other patrols and convoys. A bomb buried in the road exploded under a Humvee, rupturing the fuel tank, engulfing the men inside in flames, killing Creamean and Seesan, and severely burning another soldier.
The next day, we are rolling in the streets of Mosul when I hear radio chatter on the net that our brother unit, 3/21 across the Tigris, just found two men held as hostages in a dungeon-like basement. As the truth unfolded over the next few days, we learn that their captors were trying to blackmail one of the men into carrying a bomb into a police station, possibly to kill us.
This is don't-miss-it stuff.
Stay safe, Michael.
KLEENEX ALERT: This is a real tear-jerker, in a good way.
From the Clovis, California newspaper, an excerpt:
Ryan was a special education student who would do anything to fit in and worked tirelessly to make that happen. His basketball career began as a ninth grader passing out balls to the girls' team. Then he hooked on with the boys' team, getting there every morning at 6:30, helping out in drills, running the practice clock and cleaning up afterward.
Now, he sat proudly on the sideline in his own white No. 12 uniform.
The crowd wanted him in the game. Amundsen wanted him in, too. But he was also afraid the slightly built 18-year-old might get hurt.
Amundsen considered all this as he walked toward Ryan and patted him on the shoulder. Off came the warmup jacket, the buzzer blew and Ryan kind of half hopped, half ran onto the court, his left leg trailing slightly at an odd angle.
The noise was deafening as he ran out on the court.
In the stands, Justin Belflower was near tears. A few years earlier, he was a jock at Clovis East, one of those big men on campus. He knew how hard his kid brother had worked for this moment.
"If you had said four years ago he'd play in a varsity basketball game, I'd say stop lying because it will never happen," Justin said.
On this afternoon in February, it did.
And Clovis East would never be the same.
Read the whole thing here.
APOD brings us...
Are stars better appreciated for their art after they die? Actually, stars usually create their most artistic displays as they die. In the case of low-mass stars like our Sun and M2-9 pictured above, the stars transform themselves from normal stars to white dwarfs by casting off their outer gaseous envelopes. The expended gas frequently forms an impressive display called a planetary nebula that fades gradually over thousand of years. M2-9, a butterfly planetary nebula 2100 light-years away shown in representative colors, has wings that tell a strange but incomplete tale. In the center, two stars orbit inside a gaseous disk 10 times the orbit of Pluto. The expelled envelope of the dying star breaks out from the disk creating the bipolar appearance. Much remains unknown about the physical processes that cause planetary nebulae.
Click on the picture for a larger view.
The best computer is a man, and it's the only one that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
Werner von Braun
