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Hand Crews Bring Hands, Holding, To Apache Fire

Friends,

Apparently our little 700 650 700+ acre wildfire is no longer news. The only information you’ll receive from now on is from the relentless Jaunty Little News Team and the CalFire blog. We’d like for Jaunty meteorologist Dr. Barry Spoon (68th in the class of ’84 at Universidad do Chiropractico in Caracas) to get a little rest after a full night of pouring over charts and graphs, so let’s see what CalFire has to say as of 7:00 this morning…

Fire is burning in the San Jacinto Wilderness but is visible from many areas.
Hand crews accessed the fire and established an anchor point and began building fire line along the ridgetop and the handcrews have spent the night Coyote on the fire and more crews will hike, fly to fire this morning.
Winds have died down and based on fire weather forecasts, fires projected movement is expected toward the South by South East.
Medium ROS, 15 mph winds, smoke, heavy downed timber, moving into brush.
The Steep terrain have made accessing fire difficult and ground resources have lengthy travel times to access incident.

640 personnel on fire, Resources assigned include 28 handcrews, working the fire in very steep terrain today. Aircraft should fly due to favorable weather and light winds.

Got that? A ton of guys had a hard time getting here and can’t fly to the fire, so they’ll have to walk. With huge packs. Then fight a forest fire.

Would it be weird if I brought them cookies or something?

– bob

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Wouldn’t It Be Funny?

So we’re sitting around in the breakroom at the Festival Of Dirt and in the glow of the dimwitted noon newscast discussing the fire, we started speculating. Ho ho! The mountains are on fire, and the winds outside are insane, what could possibly happen? Geez, what we need is a freakin’ earthquake! Stop! You’re killing me!

8:57 PM
Yeah. A 4.2 hit about twenty minutes ago. I’m gonna need a frog umbrella, I think.

– bob

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Because We’re Supposed To Worry About This

Friends,

Some flamey flames on the other side of the ridge this evening. Here’s a shot from Palm Springs (via the Desert Sun):

A vivid example of rapid oxidation.
We’re not really supposed to be alarmed though. My little burg is, at this time, not threatened. Let’s have a surprisingly responsive news media explain it…

Smoke and flames from a wildfire burning near Idyllwild in the San Jacinto Mountains is visible across the Coachella Valley tonight.

The fire, which burned about 1.5 acres as of 8 p.m., can be seen at least as far east as La Quinta and was even more visible at the base of the San Jacinto Mountains.

“It’s coming down the ridge over on to our side of the mountain … very high up … but we can see it and certainly smell it from Andreas Hills,” said Marie Weigel in an e-mail to The Desert Sun. She is wife of Palm Springs City Councilman Lee Weigel, who lives in the Indian Canyons area.

The fire was reported about 4:35 p.m., U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Valerie Baca said.

Firefighters are hiking 3.5 miles, starting at Keenwild Station, on the Pacific Crest Trail to reach the blaze in the Apache Peak area, she said.

They are expected to remain at the scene all night and continue their battle Wednesday morning.

Not my idea of a fun nature hike, that’s for sure. Updates as they occur…

Your pal,

– bob

UPDATE: Oh yeah, KESQ is covering it too. Fewer words, more pictures…

Hey kid, get a shot of that smoke.

Fire crews from the U.S. Forest Service have been called in to battle a brush fire that sparked Tuesday evening in the Apache Peak area near Idyllwild.

The fire has burned at least 1.52 acres by 7 p.m., Forest Service officials said. Officials, though, are still assessing the acreage burned.

Firefighters are hiking to the fire to battle the blaze.

Officials say the town of Idyllwild is not being threatened.

Well, not threatened. That’s good. I love officials.

UPDATE II: Hey Bob! Where’s Apache Peak fer crissakes! It’s here:


View Larger Map

UPDATE III: The Desert Sun (which seems to be the only halfway serious news organization to be covering this thing) has a new article with a News Infographic™ to explain where the fire is. Kind of like the Google terrain map above. Scooped!

UPDATE IV: The Idyllwild Town Crier weighs in at 8:00 AM on Wednesday with essentially the same information you’ve already read, except for one thing. As is their custom, breaking news can be a teachable moment:

Apache Peak, named sometime after 1867, is a double-headed mountain along the Desert Divide in the State Game Refuge Boundary of San Jacinto Wilderness. The highest of Apache’s summits is the westernmost with a height of 7567 feet, while the eastern summit reaches approximately 7400 feet, barely a quarter of a mile away.

Now class, I want everybody to take out a clean sheet of paper…

UPDATE V: I’m now looking at the CalFire blog (of all things) for the latest from the Forest Service. Not encouraging:

Apache Wildland Fire
Current sizeup: 650 Acres – 0% containment – Potential for 3000 acres [emphasis added – ed]

Now it’s time to get worried.

UPDATE VI: Here are a couple reasons for people on The Hill to be encouraged:

  • The wind, although it’s gusting up to 40 MPH, is heading West to East. This pushes the fire away from us.
  • On my way back to the Lodge this afternoon, I noticed that somebody had managed to bring a helicopter with a bucket to the party. The levels at Lake Hemet are a little lower this afternoon. Maybe they’re dropping trout and bass on the fire. It’s a Fish Show!
  • According to InciWeb, they’ve replaced the incident commander. Hard to know why. The first guy did such a nice job letting a 5 acre fire expand to 700+ acres. (um, you’ve heard of wind and dry brush, right? don’t you think it’s possible that there were circumstances beyond his control? – ed He had to go! An utter disaster! Boo! easy there, sport. – ed
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This Week In Technology Gone Wrong

Friends,

Work. What can you say? The medical systems I’m responsible for have decided to pitch a fit, leaving our family health clinic in America’s Finest Decent Satisfactory Declining Doomed City without their electronic charts. Fine, they can break out the ballpoint pens and legal pads while I fix it. We’ve had a good run of uptime, so they’re not too upset.

I’m anxious to get in on the burgeoning Bismati rice futures trading market, considering our global food crisis. I don’t really know how to get started though. By the way, can we blame Al Gore for this too? The corn to ethanol thing we can totally pin on his biofuel ideas, but rice? We’ll see.

The very big problem is that the spambots have started using bob [at] bobtherieau [dot] com for their evil ends. If you’re sending email then, please use info [at] bobtherieau [dot] com instead. Thanks China! (Just asking, is this the next salvo in their information war with us? Fun thing to think about, no?)

So, um, good times! Whee!

Your pal,

– bob

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Happy Earth Day!

Friends,

I know you’ve heard stories about the Earth, and some of them are true, but I thought I’d take the time on this Earth Day to remember our home planet.

You could wake up early on a spring day, throw open the window and smell the pine trees. Maybe even hear the the creek gurgling by. We sure didn’t like the stinging insects though. That was a big problem back then.

The flowers were in bloom, the birds were chirping (and speed dating), and then the call rang out. We were all evacuated to this planet (which seems to be a pretty close approximation, actually) because of some global catastrophe (thanks a lot, President Gore), but to avoid panic they erased the minds of the slow-witted and…

Uh oh.

– bob

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Best Wishes!

Friends,

First, I’d like to extend a warm welcome from this bitter nation, clinging as we do to our guns and religion, to Pope Benedict XVI. Happy birthday, Benny! Next, to the n00b in the blue Honda Civic who decided (on his own, with no help from me) to make his own turnout yesterday and remodel the right side of his car using a mountain, sorry about that (and “uh oh, better go to Maaco”). And finally to my sister who is not at all happy with me for skipping her daughter’s birthday, you were much better off. Trust me on this. Unless you wanted to watch me take a nap, which is pretty exciting.

So, happy Wednesday, everybody!

– bob

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Self-Reproach

Friends,

My sister held my niece’s first birthday party today. I did not attend. There were fairly good reasons on my part to do that too, mostly involving driving fatigue—on my part and the fleet. None of that matters though. The targeting computers were locked on and the keys were turned to deploy a “guilt bomb” (no, I’m not making that up). As officers stationed in missile silos during the Cold War had to agree to launch their weapon, so did my siblings. The specs are simple:

guilt |gilt|

verb [ trans. ] informal
make (someone) feel guilty, especially in order to induce them to do something : Celeste had been guilted into going by her parents.

They failed in their inducement to drive to Los Angeles County on this overly warm Sunday. Where they succeeded was in making me feel terrible about resting up for another fine week down in the dirt. Pretty unfair in my humble opinion.

I hope the party went well, but my contribution would’ve been minor at best. What a bizarre state of affairs.

– bob

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Are You Nuts? It’s Gorgeous!

Friends,

Today is picture day, just because the late Winter rains have encouraged some fantastic Springtime blooms. I’ll just keep updating this post throughout the day with camera and crappy cellphone shots. It’s too good to pass up!

By the way, if you have Spring photos to share, let me know. If they’re on Flickr, people here at La Gran Fiesta de Dirt won’t be able to see them, so let me know if I can host them somewhere else. Thanks!

– bob

UPDATE: Here’s one from the James Reserve up by my house…

Stop staring!

UPDATE II: It’s very windy up here this Saturday morning, so it’s a wonder that the old Canon was able to catch this without a blur.

The first blooms.

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The Anti-Destination League: A Primer

Fellow Fangio Lovers,

I’ve had the opportunity over the last year to tangle daily with the various factions of The Anti-Destination League (a term that I believe is credited to the irascible and brilliant Brock Yates). I’ve had fun with this and have attempted to determine why any individual might wish to join this dark, life force draining cabal. I have theories!

  • No Replacement For Low Displacement- This is going to be a big problem for everybody in the future. Gas prices go up, engine sizes and power go down. It’s free market economics, yet the productivity losses brought on by the time spent goosing the gerbils in the engine compartment of your new hyper-mileage transportation appliance don’t seem to factor into Adam Smith’s equation.
  • Holiday Makers: Local 92210- This isn’t Alberta, or Saskatchewan, or Idaho, or Utah! We actually have things to do and, surprisingly, places to go. I hope you’re enjoying the leisurely pace your vacation is taking, because we’re not. Really.
  • Amigos Del Slow- Ay carumba! The signs are en ingles! ¿Como se dice “turnout?”
  • The Grey Panthers- Your eyesight is failing, reflexes slowing, we’ll pry that Oldsmobile’s steering wheel out of your cold dead hands. I get that. In fact, the trusty old Ninety-Eight is a visual clue to the rest of us to steer clear. What we can’t stand is the progeny of the Greatest Generation™ puttering about in Lamborghinis, twin-turbo Bentley Continentals, Land Rover Sports, et al. When we were kids, we exacted harsh penalties for party-goers spilling a single beer. A “beer crime” we called it. The only reason The Early Bird Special driving team gets away with the crime of under-utilizing this kind of vehicular firepower is because we don’t want to see their droopy naked butts long enough to paint them purple (it’s a long story).
  • Doctor I. Don’t. Know.- Get off your phone. You’re not that important. Ever. Your inattentiveness is gonna get us killed. Hang up. Seriously. A wireless headset doesn’t count. You’re just not paying enough attention to piloting three tons of swerving mess.

Anything you’d like to add? Please do, just not while you’re driving. Thanks.

Your pal,

– bob

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Out Of The Space

Friends,

So, anyway, I’ve taken a week away from the site. You needed a little break, didn’t you? I did, especially since the news has been either crappy or boring. The elections are beating us down with the sniping. My adorable little iBook crashed mightily and is enduring a restore at the moment. You’re backing up, aren’t you?

The old, old, old Powerbook (check this, it’s brown. classy in a west elm kind of way.) is in the shop at the moment to fix the video system. Same speed though, just much heavier. It has a beautiful and very large screen, when it works. Maybe I’ll move everything over there just for kicks. None of this funny Intel business for me!

This site, as well as bobtherieau.com has been flaky lately due to crashed servers at our webhost as well as security updates. With my production machine on its back (Oh, you had to go there, didn’t you?) I’ve taken way too long to fix stuff. Most everything is back up, just in time for the site updates. Brilliant!

Any news or interesting bits to share? Throw everything into the new, easy-to-use comments section!

Your pal,

bob

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Entertainments In This Fine Establishment

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I need help, so call this another bleg if you will. Where would you rather go for the podcasts? The Angry Sweeper videocasts are a long way off, but the audio version is very close to fruition. I’m thinking of adding a page to bobtherieau.com for audio and syndicating on iTunes. Should I just link to new shows or embed the audio here as well? It’ll slow down page loads, but do you really care? Are your connection speeds fast enough that embedding wouldn’t be an issue?

Speaking of entertainments, I just received a refurbished Airport Express base station and I love it. For the uninitiated, it’s a wireless base station the size of a pack of the old fat Marlboro Reds (oh c’mon, you remember those, don’t you? back in high school? pounding the things at parties looking tough, coughing your lungs out the next day?). It has an audio jack to connect to your stereo, so you can stream tunes from your computer through the ether. The sound quality is as good as the junky bitrate you encoded your songs in, and speaking for myself, the high end clipping is entirely due to my frugality in ripping CDs to keep the sizes down rather than the connection itself. The lavishly large AAC files I’ve created lately though, sound wonderful.

The price has dropped because there’s a new version that has much faster wireless transfer speeds. My crop of machines can’t use the extra speed, so the last generation works well for me. I love me some gizmos and this fits the bill quite nicely. You should pick one up before they’re gone.

Oh! There’s this too—both sites are due for a redesign. My thought is is that they should have a similar look. Same fonts. Similar banners. Same color schemes. Remember, if you don’t make suggestions I’m liable to stake out on my own and we all know how badly that can turn out. I’ll answer that for you…

Really quite badly.

– bob

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Maintenance Of Some Sort – UPDATE

Dear Leaf Peepers,

It looks like my web host has taken down the server that my site was hosted on and backed up my site with a version from some time in 2007. Because of that, the webcam has crashed (my old site didn’t even have a webcam page) and we won’t know when the rain anticipated for my little burg will start falling.

Here’s surprising news—I’m not too happy about this.

– bob

UPDATE: Well, my site is up, but Mr. Anonymous’ site is still down. “Website Disabled” is the precise term. Apparently there was some “crash” of the “server” that stores all of the “scary quotation marks.” And you know how important those can be.

UPDATE II: Mr. Anonymous’ site is a version from a time long ago, before I fixed it. Now if I could only remember what I did…

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New Highbrow Arts Feature!

The Idyllwild Little Tokyo Flower Drum Song Poetry Circle
– Proudly Presents –
– Another Ongoing Feature –
– Of This Very Same Blog –
– Entitled –

A Very Delightful Haiku

“Haikus are easy,
but sometimes they don’t make sense.
Refrigerator.

From Tony Kornheiser Show listener Murray Robb