Stu News and Photos

There's this science fiction movie, I forget the storyline, coulda been Star Trek or Star Wars or Superman or 2010. Anyway, the ending is a voiceover, a man, saying something to his kid about "You are alive during the age of 2 Suns in the sky." And there's this romantic shot of a sky with two Suns. Very cool.

Well, I went out walking today and found myself in a real life situation that had the taste of that feeling of 2 Suns.

As I turned a corner and faced south, the building around me had a golden hue, giving a feeling that it was late afternoon. Except the shadows were short, because in reality, it was about noon.

I looked up, and I saw a cloud of smog extending all the way across the sky. The fires in San Diego are so bad that they are coloring the sky for miles. The look of the neighborhood is the look of a late afternoon sun-shower in Florida or Hawaii. But I'm in Southern California, where it hardly ever rains, and when it does, the Sun disappears behind thick sheets of clouds. It's never *partly* cloudy in L.A., never. This was officially weird.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a state of emergency in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties. If my math is right, that means that on Monday, October 22nd, there were approximately 20,579,095 people - twenty billion, five hundred seventy nine thousand, ninety five human beings who were not in the best of situations. The cost of this is going to be astronomical. Wildlife, humans, agriculture, all will be effected by this.

As the Chinese say, may you live in interesting times.