Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "hella"
¤ Usage: "Hella m'ungry, Punchin!"
¤ Origin: Old Valley-Girl speak, or something like that. It was big in the 80s, vanished, and has been reborn largely thanks to Cartman.
¤ Etymology: It's short for "hell of" I suppose, even though no one has ever used that two-word phrase for the purpose that "hella" exists. It's basically a synonym for "very" or "extremely" and is best used to great excess, or for intentionally-annoying sarcastic effect, in much the same way adults can effectively use L33t sP34k.
¤ Notes: An annoying and stupid word, but one you'll soon find yourself almost powerless to cease overusing, if you dare take a verbal step down that mixed metaphor of a road.  Cartman says "hella" about twenty times in an old episode of South Park, driving everyone else crazy, and while it's amazingly annoying to hear him say it... neither Malaya or I can keep from throwing it into conversation when we get a chance.  Mostly to each other, as a sort of "that sounds so stupid it's funny" joke, but we slip up and use it when talking to other people from time to time as well. Much to their horror, I'm sure. -- May 3, 2004

here's heaps of news down below, so I'll throw in some recent back patio photos up here, just to change up the order of things a bit. Expect more personal blogging type stuff Saturday, though that's not saying much since there's virtually none of that type stuff today.

The back patio has been redesigned and rearranged quite a bit lately, a redecoration that coincided, not coincidentally, with a recent rash of plant buying.  We've added several hanging plants, several several potted plants, a tree fern, and more. Some of those are pictured here, and I'll take some more shots once we've got the new shelves put in by the back railing, and the big ugly bookshelf removed entirely.

Unfortunately, there is yet another ongoing remodeling/new-paint project going with the condo complex, where workers are going to paint over the walls of the back patio, in the next month or two or three. When that happens we need to remove everything from the back patio to give them room, which means we can't nail anything too tightly to the walls. Which rules out installing the shelves we want to put beside the sliding glass door, mounting trellises for the climbing vines on the side wall, etc. Postponing all home improvements to wait for workers to do something we don't particularly want them to do in the first place makes Flux unhappy.

Here you see the wall that's to be painted, with one of the trellises that we can't attach yet. Or if we attach it, we have to be prepared to remove it any day.  The potted plant with the bamboo poles inside next to it is a jasmine, and when we purchased it from CostCo it was covered in white blossoms that bloomed at night and filled the living room with a glorious aroma.

Unfortunately, the aroma wasn't strong enough to entirely mask the burning tobacco stench that our smoking downstairs neighbors occasionally emit from their leaf-covered disaster of a back patio, so our basking in the pleasant smells and lovely night breezes was periodically interrupted by a mad dash to close the sliding glass door to block out the stink. There's been no such fun for the past couple of weeks, since in typical new plant style, the jasmine lost all of its blooms about a week after we purchased it, and appeared to be doing its best to die immediately.

Fortunately, I got some bigger pots and pulled the root-bound vine out, replanted it, gave it a nice tall trellis to wind around, and began fertilizing it daily. It's rebounding, and while it never gets any direct sunshine on our tree-covered back patio, and there still aren't any new blossoms, I see numerous buds growing, and have hopes that it will bloom once again.

The back bedroom window is seen here, from the outside. As am I, the photographer, in the reflection. The fern there is half of a big one we had that was dying madly. I split it in two, took out about a pound of dry dead fronds, planted them in two pots, and I'm hoping that at least one of them will survive and thrive. Neither appears to be dying, but I don't see many new fronds unfurling either, so the coin is still spinning on this one. The other three hanging plants shown here are going like mad though, and since our goal is to see almost nothing but green things when we look out the bedroom window, that's fine. The fern will never hang down, but it's in this location for now since it needed more light than it was getting in the back row, off to the right of the ivy.

The drawback is that they block most of the sunlight and make it harder for me to grow the back patio plants, while simultaneously shedding tons of pollen. The pollen grows in these curly little yellow things, which fall constantly, and blow about in the wind. This table was next to the wall of our back patio for a single day, and you can see how many pollen things fell on it in that time.

These falling things, and dead needles, combine with the ever-present and ever-spinning spiders to create amazingly ugly drifts of spiderweb, all of which are immediately dirty from blowing pollen dust, and immediately clogged with these little spore things, along with dead needles, and dead leaves from non-pine trees. I regularly have to take a whisk broom and gently brush off the plants out there, just to clear away the spider webs which are so full of stuck on leaves and pollen spores that the plants can hardly conduct their photosynthesis in peace.

We've also got six tomato plants growing out there in a big pot, and while I don't think they'll do too well in the partial sunlight (tomatoes like sun, sun, and more sun, with lots of water, and here they only get the last part) they were only $1.20 at Home Depot. They've grown some in the week+ we've owned them, but they're still far from a size that might actually produce any fruit, and now that we've found Concord Produce, home of the most affordable fruit and vegetables in the East Bay area, the economic necessity of growing our own is lessened.

Of course Concord Produce is guarded by senior citizens with Buicks stuck in reverse, but what reward would there be without risk?

US warns al-Qaeda set to attack

Credible intelligence from multiple sources indicates al-Qaeda is planning an attack on America in the coming months, US security chiefs have warned.

Attorney General John Ashcroft told a news conference that information showed al-Qaeda's specific intention was "to hit the United States hard".

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Cable network MTV refused to air advertisements for documentary "Super Size Me," a critical look at the health impact of a fast-food-only diet, its distributors said on Wednesday. Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn Films said in a statement the cable TV channel targeted to young audiences told them the ads are "disparaging to fast-food restaurants."

An MTV spokeswoman disputed the claim and said the network was willing to run the commercial but the distributors turned it down. She did not provide details of the negotiations. MTV and VH1 are owned by media giant Viacom Inc., which depends on advertising for a major portion of its revenues.

The distributors also said MTV sister network VH1 was planning to use clips from the movie in a program called "Best Week Ever," but the clips were pulled before the show aired.

I think I blogged about Super Size Me months ago, when it was first in the news after showing up at Sundance. It's gotten a lot of press since then, even in the mainstream like Entertainment Weekly, and I must admit it's more press than I ever thought it would get, given McD's advertising clout.

¤ And to close with some movie news, The Day After Tomorrow is opening on Friday. It presents the ultimate disaster scenario of weather gone insane, due to global warming shutting down the gulf stream, and while 99% of climate scientists say it's pseudo-science that could never, ever happen, at least not so suddenly, it's at least spurring some debate and conversation on the issue. Not that there is a unanimous verdict on whether or not that's good. Check out this article from CSICOP for a rather dry discussion of the topic.

...the science depicted in the film is generally agreed, by all knowledgeable commentators, to be pretty much loony...

A loose grip on science is hardly surprising given the origins of the film's plot, which apparently involves a sudden collapse of the Gulf Stream that unleashes a devastating new Ice Age. The conceit seems based on a book by UFO enthusiasts Whitley Strieber and Art Bell entitled The Coming Global Superstorm (for a devastating Skeptical Inquirer review see here). A quick refresher on these bozos: On his radio show, Bell has endorsed all manner of pseudoscientific and paranormalist nonsense, including the idea that the comet Hale-Bopp had a "companion UFO" alongside it (which may have played some role in inspiring the tragic Heaven's gate suicides, though Bell has denied responsibility for this). Strieber, meanwhile, is an alleged UFO abductee himself, a story he tells in his bestseller Communion. Apparently the UFOs who picked up Strieber left him with an alien implant deep in one ear, causing him to hear voices. So perhaps the aliens are the ones who told him to write about climate change.

Combine this history with the usual license taken by Hollywood disaster blockbusters, and we can expect some serious abuses of legitimate climate science. Indeed, climatologists have stated clearly that the scenarios depicted in the film are absurd.

...

So the film is the most fictitious kind of science fiction, but serious climate change may well be in our future. And therein lies the complication. While scientists agree that the movie's science is bogus, they also agree overwhelmingly that human-caused climate change is real and will have real impacts, such as rises in sea level, species extinctions, dangerous heat waves (like the one that killed thousands in Europe last summer), and so forth.

This raises an inevitable question of tactics: Should mainstream climate scientists and responsible environmental advocates seize upon The Day After Tomorrow as an opportunity to talk about the real issues that we're facing, as Gore and others have done? Or will any association with the film's ridiculous scenarios discredit them by association?

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