Storm

We had a sudden storm on Monday night. It's nothing unusual here - thunder and lightning is common on summer afternoons and evenings, though there seems to have been more this year than most. As a result things have been unusually lush and green, though the sun has begun to bake the grass yellow in the last couple of weeks.

Monday's storm came through at about 10 at night. We could hear the wind and sudden heavy rain, and then the lights started to flicker on and off before going out altogether. I haven't been in a power-cut worthy of the name since I was a child, so it was exciting to light candles and brush my teeth by torchlight and worry about whether the fish in the freezer would all have to be barbecued the next day and where I could possibly have put my battery powered radio. Unfortunately, it was a little too close to bedtime to enjoy it to the full. Lying in bed and watching the lightning through the blinds was fun, though. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night with the bedside light shining in my eyes.

Afterwards I looked at Denver Post reports about the damage caused, including this one this morning. I thought that they must be somewhat sensationalized, going on about fallen trees and windows being blown out of buildings just a few roads west of here - after all, the only effects visible in my garden were some extra bits of next-door's tree scattered around my lawn, and my tomato plant knocked a little askew. However, we learned otherwise when went for a bike ride along the Clear Creek Trail, a trail from Denver to Golden that passes to the north of us through a particularly nice wooded area by a small river - part of Wheat Ridge's green belt. The path was officially closed due to "hazardous conditions," and there were fallen trees everywhere - uprooted, snapped in two, lying over the path or in the river. There was one resting on the corner of some unfortunate person's roof nearby. At some points the path was carpeted with fallen leaves, giving a whole new meaning to the term "green belt."




There is a "no swimming" sign planted by some of the small lakes that this path goes past.


I like the way that it manages to look as if it's OK to swim, as long as you don't expect to be happy. Or, Beware of Octopus.

California

The sea, the sea!

Last month we took a brief trip to California. I was giving a paper at a conference in Orange County, and we stayed on for a couple of days to see Los Angeles and its environs.

We flew into John Wayne Airport, Orange County. My first impressions as we drove to our hotel were that it was both like and unlike the greater Los Angeles area I had imagined. I'd expected it to be all roads and cars, which of course it was, but it was strange beyond that. There was lush greenery all around, towering palm trees lining streets and surrounding buildings, beautifully tended bushes spilling flowers - but at the same time it felt oddly dead. Office blocks, apartment blocks, hospitals - they take up huge spaces, with wide roads in between them, so that they somehow seem like so many remote islands; of course, it doesn't help that there is minimal sign of people moving between them, other than in their cars. The built-up area seems to fill up all the space between the mountains and the sea, and yet there seems to be nothing there. It's a good place to produce films concerned with illusive realities.

We stayed relatively near Laguna Beach, though of course to get there (or anywhere else) you had to get in a car and drive. In fact, most of the time we spent there was in the car, driving along one freeway or another, only to get somewhere from which we had to drive back. Even the Pacific Coast Highway has only the rarest scenic glimpses. It mostly looks like this:

Overall, it seems untenable. There are lanes and lanes of cars on freeway after freeway, all those people going in the same direction but individually powered by a non-renewable resource. There's no point in calling for more public transport in such a place; either technology has to change, or the whole place will be left an abandoned monument to the strange way people used to live. Somehow it was easy to imagine distant generations marvelling over a deserted landscape of huge empty roads.

Still, there are lovely places amidst the general dystopian monstrosity of it all. The coves around Laguna Beach, with their flourishing greenery, were beautiful.

By the pier at Santa Monica, the sea was dotted with strange seal-people bobbing up and down in the water:


And sitting on the railings at the end of the pier, we saw this juvenile pelican, with its beautiful beady eyes.

We also went to the Getty, where I was happy to come across James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels. Afterwards we took a quick drive through the Hollywood area. Once is enough! In spite of being right next to all those residential areas of the rich, Hollywood Boulevard itself is a grimy tourist strip that you can see for yourself if you imagine Oxford Street and then add in the worst of the souvenir shops on the Royal Mile.

Reading signs

From when I first started driving in the U.S., I noticed that there is a much greater reliance on words for road signs than on the kinds of symbols you'd see in Britain, Europe or - I suspect - pretty much anywhere else. For instance, "right lane must turn right" is usually indicated by a sign that reads "right lane must turn right," and if like me you have a tendency to confuse right and left when they are presented in words rather than in symbols that relate directly to your symmetrical existence, you often find yourself embarking on little adventures on streets you'd never intended to visit. Things get even more confusing, however, when words get combined with symbols. The above is my favourite, a sign on a road passing through the middle of my university. Whenever I pass it, I get so distracted by trying to decode it that I run the risk of ploughing through the crowd of students it is trying to warn me to avoid.

The Eco Zoo

Last night I searched for online pop-up books and found this one, Ecodazoo. Why aren't there more sites like this one? Or are there?