Paradise

Paradise California

I thought fire season was over. Guess not. Paradise was wiped out.

Flying over Paradise California
Notice the clear view of the ground on the screen

Picking up water to fight the Woolsey fire
Not Paradise, but still California

Zuma Beach is near Los Angeles. Paradise is in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Polarized tape Art

Polarized tape Art by Dino Tomic
I sort of knew that Scotch tape polarized light, but I've never made use of this property. I am surprised by all the colors. I can see (imagine) that you could get different shades of gray by altering the orientation of the tape. (Tape that runs vertical would be white / clear while tape that runs horizontally would be black / opaque. I don't know where the colors are coming from.

Hot Glue

Glue Gun Stanley

This is for my friend Jack. His go-to solution for fixing anything is hot glue.

Via Reddit.

Election

Ballot Boxes in storage

I didn't vote because, well, nobody is talking about any of things I think are important. It's all just noise. Jeff Deist sums it up pretty well:

By any objective measure, the ideological and policy disagreements between the national Democrat and Republican parties are not significant. Both accept the central tenets of domestic and foreign interventionism, both accept the federal government as the chief organizing principle for American society, and both view politics simply as a fight for control of state apparatus.

Similarly, differences between policies actually enacted by Mr. Trump and the existing Congress and those likely to have been enacted by Mrs. Clinton and the same Congress are fairly small. While Mr. Trump alarms the Left with his tone and tenor, his actual views on taxes, spending, debt, trade, guns, immigration (the "Muslim ban" was neither) and war (unfortunately his good campaign rhetoric is largely abandoned) plainly comport with the general thrust of Clinton's neo-liberalism.

Today's ugly midterm elections are about style rather than substance, party rather than principle, and power rather than ideas. Americans do not much argue about whether we are governed by DC, and only slightly over how we are governed by DC. But we argue viciously about who governs us from DC.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Motorcycle of the Day

1939 Jawa 350 OHV

Take a sparse functional design, realize it using some steel, aluminum and red paint, add a healthy serving of chrome plating and I'm in love.

Jawa was started in 1929 and is still in business in the Czech Republic.

From a 2012 classic motor vehicle show. Via Posthip Scott.

The Fifth Head of Cefberus by Gene Wolfe

The Fifth Head of Cefberus by Gene Wolfe

An engaging story. A mix of a Victorian explorer's journal, mystic crystal revelation and Franz Kafka.

We have a pair of habitable worlds orbiting a common sun and perhaps orbiting each other. One world may have had some aborigines who were able to change their appearance to appear like humans.

We have some people, but for the most part they seem to be devoid of human warmth. Gangsters and cannibals, mostly.

There are three separate stories that are thinly linked. It's an engaging story but it doesn't go anywhere and left me feeling disappointed.

425

Oh Henry 4:25 Candy Bar

Rumor has it that 4:20 was the time a group of stoners would get together to get stoned. Getting stoned sometimes results in getting the munchies, and Oh Henry is capitalizing on our restored freedoms.