Swoop

AS YET ANOTHER rain storm passes through the Southland, some of the canyons hit by the fire are on a flash-flood watch, but no mandatory evacuations are expected this time around, not in Orange County.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Forest Service has a squadron of planes hydromulching the bejesus out of the hills in the canyons—to “stabilize” them.

Essentially, they're gluing things down using dive-bombers.

The Reb, who lives in Modjeska Canyon, called me today, inviting me to bring my camera and check it—i.e., the hydromulchery—out. So, taking a break from grading, I did.

The aerial H-mulching is all very cool, if you ask me, but a person (such as Reb) could easily get weirded out by all these noisy crop dusters buzzing so close to the ground and to homes. I mean, as soon as I arrived, without warning, a plane roared from behind a hill and commenced swooping and mulching right at me. I think Reb ran inside.

I could see the pilot as he flew by (see). Couldn't see his eyes. I think he was a Republican.

Check out my pics.

LATER, I WENT Christmas shopping, guided by an article I found today in the online version of OC Weekly: 25 TOYS FOR THOSE 25 AND OLDER.

The article is a slide show with mostly the kind of stuff you’d expect the Weekly to notice (e.g., a Hillary Clinton nut-cracker). But I did like three of the toys:

"#17 Holy Toast Bread Stamp: Who says ALL toast can't be holy?" —This is way cool, doncha think? Too bad I don't eat toast. But my friends do.

"#20 Nun Punching Puppet: Because no one messes with a nun." —I think Tom will like this. I can just see him wearing these things and going at it.

"#25 Periodic Table Tarot Cards: For those of us who can't decide whether to be into science or pseudo-science." —Unfortunately, I can give this one to nearly all of my friends. Most of 'em go to chiropractors or worse. I'll gift 'em. Then, I'll mock 'em.

ALSO APPEARING today in the Weekly is a nifty post by our pal Scott Moxley:

SCHROEDER LAW ENFORCEMENT EMPIRE AT STAKE TODAY:

Mike Schroeder will jump out of bed this morning in Corona del Mar, neatly hang his Darth Vader pajamas in the closet, shower, kneel at his USC football altar and don an expensive, natty suit befitting Orange County’s leading Republican strategist-slash-chiropractic insurance company king.


It’s a big day in Schroederdom. He’ll drive his jumbo-sized, black Hummer to the state court of appeal (COA) in Santa Ana in the hopes of teaching a onetime disciple a lesson: Don’t Mess with Mike. Schroeder—consigliere to both District Attorney Tony Rackauckas and Sheriff Michael S. Carona—wants the justices to toss First District Republican Supervisor Janet Nguyen from office.


…Schroeder claims the Registrar of Voters certified the wrong Nguyen as the winner (by just three votes) in last February’s special election. He says the Republican who finished second, Trung Nguyen, should be seated. Surely coincidentally to the merits of the case, Trung is, to put it bluntly, Schroeder’s boy. Janet, on the other hand, has had the audacity to show occasional independence from local GOP bosses like Schroeder.


…If the COA tosses Janet’s election, Schroeder—the reigning mastermind of OC insider games—will be in excellent position when his pal—the federally indicted Carona—leaves office prematurely. How? In his corner, he’d have three likely votes on the board of supes: Trung Nguyen, Pat Bates and Bill Campbell. That board majority gives Schroeder key influence over who will complete the remainder of Carona’s term at the county’s most powerful government agency.

So if you see Schroeder running excitedly into the COA building on Spurgeon this morning, it's not a pit stop. It's not even to distribute Mitt Romney For Prez brochures. Half of his law enforcement empire is at stake.

"The opportunity to do something bad"

.....ORANGE COUNTY is lots of things. Sometimes it's real. Sometimes, it’s odd.
.....Now, here’s an odd story. According to the OC Reg, “Deputies responded to a disturbance call at 8:10 a.m. on Monday, Dec. 10 from a residence in Coto de Caza. ¶ A woman said that her 15-year-old son was refusing to go to school. The youth punched a hole in the wall when his mother asked him to go to school. ¶ Deputies arrived at the home an hour later and took the boy to school.”
.....OK.

.....THE LA TIMES offers this peculiar story about “hoodies” at Capo Unified: Danger under the hood?:

.....The sweat shirts zip up through the hood to completely cover the face, becoming a mask and making it virtually impossible to tell who is underneath.
.....…They're fashion statements to some, but to administrators in Orange County's Capistrano Unified School District, there's danger lurking under the hood. All six high schools last week banned hoodies from campus.
.....…School administrators say the problem is that someone could hide behind the mask. "There is no way to identify who kids are," said Tom Ressler, principal at Capistrano Valley High. "Generally, we don't think that is a good thing. It gives kids the opportunity to do something bad."
.....…Sergio Magana, 17, a Capistrano Valley senior, bought two masked hoodies after he saw some of his favorite hip-hop artists, including Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco, sporting them.
....."They bring the style and we roll with it," Magana said.
.....One friend owns the same-style hoodie West wore, with a skeleton on the sweat shirt and a skull on the hood, he said.
.....…Others feel the hoodies are a fashion faux pas.
....."From a girl's point of view, they're ugly," said Lisa Harlow, 16, a sophomore. "Nobody wants to see a skeleton running around."….

.....WHILST LECTURING on Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan) recently, I mentioned that, according to the FBI, Irvine is the 14th safest city in the country. I speculated that Irvine had dropped to 14th owing to our new Performing Arts Center and it’s “assault on the senses.” I also mentioned “all the hookers.”
.....Surely I’m joking! Hookers in Irvine?
.....Why, allegedly, yes! According to the OC Reg (Women plead not guilty to prostitution in Irvine apartment), Irvine is a seething cauldron of illicit & unsafe sex.
.....Well, no, but the city does sport at least two alleged hookers (who, btw, kept lots of alleged condoms in their alleged refrigerator).
.....One of the women “is accused of having a cell phone with the phone number listed on a Craigslist.org ad for ‘hottie Asian girls waiting for you.’ The ad promised a ‘good time’ for one hour between 11 a.m. and 2 a.m. for ‘160 roses.’”

.....THINGS REMAIN DICEY in our fire-ravaged canyons. According to the Reg, “A storm that was expected to bring light rain has intensified, leading the National Weather Service to issue a flash flood watch for the Orange County canyons and foothills that burned during the October wildfires. ¶ The watch will go into effect at 2 p.m. and will likely last until Wednesday morning as the region gets drenched with an inch or more of rain, forecasters say.”
.....The Reg provides a link to the notorious Modjeska Canyon webcam. Check it out.

Hydromulch swoopage?

—Late this afternoon, in Modjeska Canyon.

Rains are expected soon. Tomorrow, maybe tonight. Should be light. Let's hope so.

The Reb sent me two super low-res pictures that she took with her digital Brownie, and so I tarted them up a bit. These planes were buzzin' her house. Limber Lou that it was great. The Reb, not so much.

Hydromulch is a kind of adhesive that holds the soil together. They'll be dropping this goop for days. Could be they're shoveling shit against the tide.

1. To me, this first one looks like an Me109 from the perspective of the nose gun of a B-17.

2. I guess there wouldn't be trees and a hill and power lines over the skies of Germany. Clouds, though.

3. This 3rd one just looks like a guy dropping hydromulch. Not that I'm complaining!

See Forest Service bulletin re hydromulch:

...Pilots will apply a layer of hydromulch, which is a wet mixture of, 40% shredded wood, and 60% paper with a guar gum based tackifier, a sticky substance that helps the mulch material cling to hillsides and steep slopes (Guar gum is used in ice cream as a thickener). The green-dyed biodegradable hydromulch stabilizes the soil and provides a nutrient media for new plant growth on fire-damaged lands. After drying it will harden and turn gray. It will intercept some of the rain’s impact energy and minimize erosion. No seed or fertilizers are included in the hydromulch mixture....

Trout Fishing at Christmas

.....A neighborhood holiday party inspired Rebel Girl to dig up the article below to share with ya'll. She was, at the time, busily digging into a paper plate of Christmas tamales when she heard the story of how the homeowner, sitting in his livingroom, spied the recent Harding Canyon mudslide as it slid. His perch, on our side of Modjeska, opposite Harding, gave him a perfect view.
....."It was like the hand of a dark ghost," he said. The man is a sheriff, not usually as given to metaphor as, say, an English major like Rebel Girl. She was impressed.
.....It is believed that the mudslide, the dark ghostly hand, took out what was left of the Harding Canyon rainbow trout.

From the Associated Press:

.....SANTA ANA – A mudslide in fire damaged Orange County wiped out one of the last remaining populations of native rainbow trout in Southern California.
.....“What we feared, happened,” said Adam Backlin, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “The hillsides just slumped into the canyon, and buried the entire creek.”
.....Backlin said he became concerned about the Harding Canyon trout after the Santiago fire, which burned more than 28,000 acres during the October wildfires, creating mudslide conditions. The fish lived in rocky pools along a stretch of creek.
.....The loss is just one example of how many of Southern California's dwindling species teeter on the edge of disappearing completely. The once thriving populations of fish and amphibians have shrunken into small pockets easily threatened by storms and mudslides.
.....Backlin had tried to arrange with the Department of Fish and Game to temporarily remove the fish, fearing that one good rain could fill the trouts' refuges with mud. When it did rain, the trout disappeared under as much as six feet of mud.
.....This isn't the first time a post-wildfire mudslide appeared to wipe out a population of animals. In 2003, the last mountain yellow-legged frogs in the San Bernardino Mountains appeared to be lost forever. Later, a few surviving frogs were found, and now scientists are working to re-establish them.
.....The Harding Canyon trout, however, seem unlikely to make such a lucky comeback. Backlin and another scientist searched below the mudslide, hoping to find a few trout that had washed downstream, but came up empty.
.....Rainbow trout can become protected steelhead if they can get to the open ocean. While moving from freshwater to the ocean, the fish take on a streamlined shape that gives them their name. The process known as anadromy allows the fish to exploit both habitats, and to return to protected upland pools for breeding.
.....But during the rainbow trout phase, the fish are not protected. The Modjeska reservoir and other barriers prevented the Harding Canyon trout from ever reaching the ocean and gaining that protection.

.....Pictured right is Harding Canyon, along the Seven Pools hike, before the fire and the mud.
.....Years ago, when Rebel Girl was growing up in Torrance, California, a flatland So Cal suburb that lacked trout entirely, she fell for post-beat poet Richard Brautigan in a big way. He is an writer she finds almost entirely unintelligible now, absurd, embarrassing—but she keeps him on the shelf like one might keep the letters of old lovers. At one time they meant everything, the world, to our young selves.
.....Here is what Brautigan has to say about trout. It's not that bad.

The opening page of Trout Fishing in America:

.....As a child when did I first hear about trout fishing in America? From whom? I guess it was a stepfather of mine.
.....Summer of 1942.
.....The old drunk told me about trout fishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.
.....Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.
.....I'd like to get it right.
.....Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.
.....Imagine Pittsburgh.
.....A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.
.....The Andrew Carnegie of Trout!

Texas is special

From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: Creationist College Advances in Texas:

…On Friday, an advisory committee to the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board recommended that the state allow the Institute for Creation Research to start offering online master’s degrees in science education. The institute, which has been based in California, where it operates a museum and many programs for people who don’t believe in evolution, is relocating to Dallas, where it hopes to expand its online education offerings. ¶ …Raymund A. Paredes, commissioner of higher education for Texas, stressed in an interview Sunday that the advisory panel’s vote was just that: advisory. ¶ ….Officials of the Institute for Creation Research could not be reached for comment, but there is extensive information about the institute’s programs on its Web site. The list of courses required for the master of science education includes a number that are fairly standard ("Advanced Educational Psychology” and “Instructional Design,” for example), but also some that are not.

“Advanced Studies in Creationism” features this description: “Scientific study of the creationist and evolutionist cosmologies; origin and history of the universe, of the solar systems, of life, of the various forms of life, and of man and his cultures. Critical analysis of both creation and evolutionary theory using data from paleontology, astronomy, biochemistry, genetics, thermodynamics, statistics, and other sciences. Study of geologic principles and earth history in the light of Creation and the Flood; scientific comparative studies of recent creation; application of principles of Biblical creationism in various fields.” [My emphasis.]

…Asked for his views on evolution, Paredes said “I accept the conventions of science’ and “I believe evolution has a legitimate place in the teaching of science.” But he declined to say that evolution should be taught as the science….

Among the biggest funders of Creationist "research" in this country is Orange County's own Howard Ahmanson, Jr., a good pal of Trustee Tom Fuentes (who himself helps direct Eagle Publishing, which publishes [through Regnery Publishing] Creationist and anti-evolution tomes). To read about Ahmanson, go to The greatest bad for the greatest number

More Jesus glasses

THE STORY about the Capo Valley High School teacher slamming religion—the Times broke it on Thursday—seems to be getting hotter, what with the likes of Bill "red meat" O’Reilly climbing all over it. Even UCI's Erwin "no meat" Chemerinsky has weighed in, saying the lawsuit against the teacher is not likely to prevail.

The OC Reg provides a link to the complaint (a pdf file). Presumably, this is the suit against the teacher/district filed recently in federal court.

Hey, those darned kids down at CAPO VAL are already protesting. And on a SUNDAY! Check out this pic:

(Actually, this is fake. On the other hand, this scene is genuinely in my head.)

From Thursday’s LA Times: Lawsuit targets history teacher's comments:

.....A San Juan Capistrano high school student and his parents filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday alleging that his history teacher violated his constitutional rights by making "highly inappropriate" and offensive statements in class regarding Christianity.
.....James Corbett, who teaches Advanced Placement European history at Capistrano Valley High School, consistently "demonstrates a sense of hostility toward religion," causing Christian students to "feel ostracized and treated as second-class citizens," according to the lawsuit filed in federal district court in Santa Ana by Chad Farnan, 16, and his parents, Bill and Teresa.
.....The lawsuit contends, among other things, that Corbett told students during class that "when you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth"; said that religion is not "connected with morality"; compared Christians to "Muslim fundamentalists" who want women to "stay pregnant, barefoot, and in the kitchen and have babies until your body collapses"; and suggested that churchgoers are more likely to commit rape and murder.
.....…Teresa Farnan said her suspicions were aroused on the first day of school when her son—a sophomore honors student required to take Corbett's class for college admission—asked her whether America was founded on Christian values, which he said his teacher had denied.
....."He had learned in the eighth grade that our country was founded by persecuted Christians," said the mother, who describes her family as nondenominational Christian, "so I sent him to school with a tape recorder."
.....During the next two months, Chad Farnan said, he taped Corbett's lectures with the recorder in plain sight on his backpack.
.....…Eventually the Farnans contacted Advocates for Faith and Freedom, a nonprofit organization based in Murrieta dedicated to "protecting religious liberty," a spokeswoman said.
.....…"The teacher is a representative of the state and the Constitution requires government neutrality toward religion," [attorney Jennifer Monk] said. "This teacher's conduct and words clearly show he is hostile toward religion and is indoctrinating these kids, who are a captive audience."

From Friday’s OC Register: Teacher's religion remarks spark lively community debate:

.....…Many of Corbett's current and former students have rushed to his defense, saying he not only had the right to criticize traditional Christian viewpoints on topics such as birth control, teenage sex and homosexuality, but that his talks forced students to think critically about their own views….
....."I don't agree with everything he says, but that's not the point," said Capistrano Valley High graduate Erica Bashaw, 18, now a freshman at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. "Can you tolerate someone saying something that you don't agree with? Can you have a fiery debate about ideas? It scares me that that's not acceptable."
.....…Some student supporters wore handmade T-shirts to school Friday with messages such as "Keep Corbett." And dozens of Corbett's current and former students are planning a rally at 7 a.m. Wednesday at the high school to show their support for him.

....."Corbett has been a powerful reminder to me that we 'Christians' do not have the monopoly on truth," Capistrano Valley High geography and history teacher Tom Airey wrote in the Orange County Register's opinion section. "… In an age where there is probably too much emphasis on teaching to the standards and getting 'the facts' right, Corbett is training young students to think critically."
.....At issue in the lawsuit is whether Corbett violated the separation of church and state as outlined in the First Amendment's establishment clause. Court papers cite statements tape-recorded by Farnan such as "From conservative Christians in this country to Muslim fundamentalists in Afghanistan … it's stunning how vitally interested they are in controlling women" and "When you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth."
.....…"He's only giving one side – that's not thinking critically at all," said Farnan, 16, who does not plan to attend his AP European History class again until Corbett is removed. "This might be a college-level class, but it's in high school, so he doesn't have the same rights."
.....…"All of his opinions would have been fine with us if he had invited opposing points of view and the class was actually debating," said parent Birgit O'Hearn, 46, of Mission Viejo, who pulled her daughter out of Corbett's class this year. "But the opinions he was putting forth are not opinions that are worthy of an instructor."
.....…The case also has sparked disagreement among legal scholars about its merits and chance of success.
.....UC Irvine's new law dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, who has litigated several high-profile church vs. state lawsuits on the secular side, thinks the lawsuit is "very unlikely to succeed," he said.
....."Court will be very reluctant to open the door to students suing when they find the teachers' speech objectionable," Chemerinsky said….

Cold, stark, vulnerable canyons

At or near Modjeska Grade/Live Oak Canyon
(Orange County, California)

Today, I asked Dora, the realtor, just how vulnerable Modjeska Canyon is, and she said, "Well, the little canyon above my house—the fire burned so hot there that even the roots are gone, so if we get three or four inches of rain, well, the mud can all come down at once."

I stared at her. Finally, I said, "Let's hope that doesn't happen. Maybe we'll get lucky."

"Yeah," she said.

But she was worried. She didn't even try to hide it.