The Soberanes Fire is still going strong, with 95,716 acres burned, and still only 60% contained. Almost all of the active fire area is deep in heavily forested mountains, and for extra fun, there’s apparently a heck of a lot of poison oak in that area, which is affecting firefighters despite their precautions.

Still no word on catching the clowns whose illegal campfire started it.

Air quality is good in my area; I think everything that’s still burning is on the other side of the mountains now, and the winds are pushing the smoke and ash southeast.

Another strike against 2016. Dammit.

The County called my home phone number this morning, instructing me to stay indoors with my windows closed. I can’t imagine why.

The closest point is a good 20 miles from my house, but part of what keeps Salinas cool and damp in the summer is the wind coming in from the ocean, so while the fire won’t come anywhere near me, the particulate matter will.

It doesn’t look like they’ve caught the person whose illegal campfire started it.

What songs can never be played again in Our Sanitized Future?

• Brown Sugar
• China Girl
• Only 16
• Kung Fu Fighting
• Knock Three Times
• Coward Of The County
• Young Girl


This is just off the top of my head; I'm sure there are hundreds of others banned from the public consciousness for not meeting today's "standards". And that's not even considering all the songs that assume there are two genders, generally attracted to each other.

Gangsta rap is somehow immune to these bans, for much the same reason that animal-rights activists don’t go around assaulting Hells Angels for wearing leather, and slutwalks don’t take place in neighborhoods filled with “youths”.

[Update: how could I forget Running Bear and Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room?]

(via)

And in unrelated news, may I say that I like the happy ending in this story from Nashville?

…now it’s a documentary of the typical college experience.

Every time I think the tools who write for the site have bottomed out, they dig deeper. Emphasis added:

Dolores Park is a symbol of the clash between of the Mission District's low-income, non-white traditional residents and the flood of gentrifying tech world.

As rents in the neighborhood have climbed to unthinkable heights and landlords have engaged in sleazy mass-eviction/ethnic cleansing programs, Dolores Park has been a site for an ongoing culture war.

In other words, people like boingboing writers want to live in San Francisco, and can afford to pay higher rent than the current occupants in certain neighborhoods. I’m willing to wager that the writer wouldn’t use those particularly loaded phrases to describe a middle-class neighborhood being overrun by a “different-looking” population…

[Update: the comments on this one are surprisingly refreshing, with plenty of people calling out factual errors and bullshit in the article.]

Reminder: when they say “Warmest March in recorded history”, they really mean “…since the invention of the cash register”.

Truly, it was a force for change.