I wanted to play golf at the Lincoln Park Municipal golf course on Wednesday, before the ancient course is privatized and turned into an overpriced horror like the Harding course further south.
The greens were all being worked on, however, and had been replaced by 18 temporaries, so I continued walking along the shoreline trail known locally as Land's End.
The area has new signage, improved trails, and the local forests have been seriously pruned.
My favorite, non-euphemistic sign in San Francisco has remained, though.
The powers-that-be in California might consider some new signage as we're coming into deadly serious fire season for the next two months, and Bay Area skies are already grey with smoke from the "Moonlight Fire" in Plumas County hundreds of miles away, possibly mixed with a little seasoning from the fire east of Morgan Hill that started on Monday. (For great photos and maps, click here for a story in the "Sacramento Bee.")
Actually, fires have been raging out of control all year long in California, the most spectacular being the Zaca fire in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties which started on the Fourth of July and still hasn't been completely extinguished.
A Los Olivos rancher (white) and his Mexican laborers were arrested yesterday for being the originators of the fire while doing soldering work on the farm, but that strikes me as a bogus prosecution. California is as ready to ignite as Greece and the spark could be from anything.
One of my favorite photoblogs is called "A Change in the Wind," written by Kit Stolz about world climate change in general and Southern California in particular, where he lives in the mountains around Ojai. Stolz is the opposite of a ranter, which just makes his prose even more terrifying, rather like the 1950s sci-fi books by John Wyndham where everyone acts very restrained and British as the world quite emphatically ends around them. Check it out by clicking here.
Thanks Mike! I'm going to look for those books by Wyndhmam...let me know if you have a particular favorite.
ReplyDeleteThey sound potentially kind of funny, actually. In a dark way, of course. Kubrickian, perhaps.
Dear Kit: You've never read "The Day of The Triffids"? Get thee to a used bookstore.
ReplyDelete"Out of The Deeps," though not one of his best books, is all about journalism and lying and "the official story" following an invasion from outer space of creatures who live in the deepest trenches of the ocean. When the Americans drop bombs on them, they decide to go to the polar ice caps and melt them, effectively destroying every major city in the world. As with much of Wyndham, it's weirdly prescient.