What Color is a Canyon?

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WATCH THE BIRDIE DEPT.

  • On the whole he’d rather be in Philadelphia, but Old Ben don’t need bifocals to enjoy his View.

It was an uncharacteristically dark day when I last visited Placerita, breathtaking though the scenery proved. So yesterday, with sunshine and blue skies — also the return of lockdown/shutdown –I hauled my View over the San Gabriels for Placerita gold while it’s there for the panning. My first find was the remarkable hoodoo, at the top of a steep anticline. I googled “old man in a chair, rock formation” in 100 ways, but couldn’t find any mention online that anybody in the Park had ever even noticed this formation before. So to me he’s “Old Ben.” Not a bad View, eh?

I found many amazing shots, but surprisingly, the sparkling clarity of the air made the brights SO bright; and the steep canyon elevations made the shady spots SO dark; that I was pushed to the edge of my photographic ability (or at least my iPhone camera’s ability) to get a satisfying image.

It’s a challenge to portray say, cottonwoods shimmering in the sun, without obscuring the scene with glare or dark spots. So I started playing around with the color-filter settings on the camera.

I usually shun these artificial enhancers for a natural View; but here I found the range of tones and finishes helped to interpret the scenes. Together, they portray a small bit of the richness of fall in Southern California. None of them is the true image, in other words, except all of them.

This is how the spot looked to me last week, in gloom. What color is a canyon?

For the trip home, I took the “back way,” Sand Canyon Road. The freeway route over Newhall Pass takes twenty minutes to Valley Village. But this way, you cut right through the mountains to connect with Little Tujunga Cyn Road, and it only takes forty minutes. Rather than just another freeway trip, this route is a ride you’ll remember all your life. In living color!

‘555 Fulton’ Corruption Scandal Disgraces Another Official

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It’s amazing, but the legal rakes are still dragging the depths of the muck — ordinary bribery and slush — and dredging up more wallowers in the City’s construction permitting process.

https://news.yahoo.com/san-francisco-public-utilities-chief-022246061.html

So what? Municipal bribery, blah blah The reason it’s in View at all, is that my brother Chris used to live at that address, when it was a fantastic, unique, funky (affordable) old light-industrial mixed-use loft. It is important to remember that even when the building was torn down for spec luxury condos six or more years ago, the avalanche of homelessness, the displacement and diaspora to the East Bay of maybe 100,000 dyed-in-indigo San Franciscans, the loss of civic identity, dying local businesses, and collapse of affordable livability, were already in full swing and much discussed. Yet this project and thousands like it, were then and are still being, built. And sitting empty. Where once lived thousands of folks.

https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/28/21157317/555-fulton-nuru-housing-development-san-francisco-fbi

https://sfist.com/2020/02/27/14-subpoenas-issued-by-city-attorney-relating-to-555-fulton-project/

https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/amid-coronavirus-lockdown-sf-supervisor-calls-on-building-owner-to-house-homeless/
Empty spec buildings are still going up as coronavirus surges — all over California. But they’re too gleaming to ever use.

https://sf.curbed.com/2020/3/11/21174475/tom-hui-fraud-scandal-555-fulton-san-francisco

It’s not “the market” that’s hollowing out America’s cities, not when greedy developers are flinging their phony money around to undermine or skirt regulations and approvals. The market MEANS, that there are rules and regulations and truth and clarity in the transaction, so that when something is valued, it is actually valuable. There is nothing healthy or natural about turning cities into grids of dead empty boxes on spec.

It’s Not Max Weber, But…

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT.

Classical economics is the bastard offspring of capitalism, which is itself the misbegotten love-child of the Protestant Reformation. That’s not me, it’s him: https://is.muni.cz/el/1423/podzim2013/SOC571E/um/_Routledge_Classics___Max_Weber-The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_Spirit_of_Capitalism__Routledge_Classics_-Routledge__2001_.pdf

Thus I found the following article somewhat compelling, but ultimately a bit irritating. On the one hand: it’s a rare example of history written by economists rather than historians. On the other hand: it’s an example of history written by economists rather than historians. (Assume a Reformation...) Anyway, the article demonstrates how computer number-crunching allows for new statistical analysis of meta-data, to shed light on historical events already well-covered by generations of historians. The implications are thousand-fold; but you can mumble those over yourselves, at your leisure, which, if you’re a good Protestant, or a good capitalist, you shouldn’t have any of. It’s a fast, easy read and it’s fun to try to decode the maps (Since they don’t give you any help identifying cities, I offer a map, presumably NOT made by economists).

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/11/spreading-like-wildfire-luthers-network-and-the-early-reformation.html

Mingulay; Caller Herrin’; Fishgutters; Mac Fisheries; Brexit?

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THE DISMAL SCIENCE DEPT./
FOLK SONG ARMY HQ

https://news.yahoo.com/scottish-fishermen-aim-bullying-eu-124554059.html

Scotland, which overwhelmingly DOESN’T want Brexit, might very well vote to break the Union (1707) if Brexit goes through. Or they still might, even if it does, with a deal that sells out the Scottish fisherfolk. Essentially the big sticking point comes down to fishing rights — which sounds arcane and small bore and pettifogging; but it isn’t for Scotland. What they’re saying seems to be, we don’t want to leave Europe, but if we do, we don’t want to see bloody Dutch and French and Danish trawlers up and doon the herring banks. It could all come down to fish, on Dec. 31. Here are three fantastic fish songs: get the roll of the swell in your legs, the whip of salt in your face, and that fishy tang in your nostrils.

You’ve GOT to sing along when it’s the Corries. Swing that octave leap into the voce, you’ll need it later.

How about that octave leap fish call? No Leith wife ever shouted Caller Herrin’ – fresh fish — into the wind like Jean Redpath. My God, what a voice… The words are by Lady Nairne; it was the first of her songs I ever learned.
Of course you can’t be shy singing in the Scottish idiom; cock an ear to Christine Kydd, belting the AMAZING Song of the Fishgutters, preserved with all its folkloricum, on the Scots Language Center website:

https://www.scotslanguage.com/articles/node/id/396

Finally, the View recalls the fascinating saga of Mac Fisheries, and of Lord Leverhulme, who tried to buy the Isle of Lewis (as in the British film, I Know Where I’m Going)l; and the emergence, from mountains of Scottish fishguts, of Unilever as the gigantic industrial-products globalist octopus that was partly the impetus for the EU in the first place.

They once cornered the British fish market, but are now defunct. Click for a Wayback Machine Archive of Mac Fisheries:

https://web.archive.org/web/20161019054149/http://www.macfisheries.co.uk/index.htm

Mac Fisheries was a branded United Kingdom retail chain of fishmongers, founded by William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme, the co-founder with his brother of Lever Brothers, which later merged to become Unilever. In his thirties, Lord Leverhulme had taken a boat trip and fallen in love with the Western Isles of Scotland. In May 1918 at the age of 66, he bought the Isle of Lewis for £167,000. Convinced that he could resurrect the fishing industry, he set about investing in all aspects of the supporting industries and supply/distribution chain. Leverhulme’s plan was to build an ice-making plant in Stornoway, building refrigerated cargo ships to take fish to a depot atFleetwood, where he would build herring-curing facilities, a canning factory and a plant installed to make fish cakes, fish paste,glue, animal feed and fertiliser. To create a market for the fish, he started buying up independent fishmongers throughout Britain, rebranding them Mac Fisheries. But in 1919, servicemen demobilised from World War I and promised land, started occupying plots on the Isle of Lewis. Leverhulme protested and took legal action against the people he considered squatters, but the Scottish Office took the side of the ex-servicemen, leaving Leverhulme’s plan in tatters. Leverhulme announced that he would leave Lewis in 1923, offering to gift the Isle to the locals. But suspicion ran so high, that he was forced to sell again to long-term absentee landlords.

— Quoth Wikipedia