Correcting my search for “flash gordon & the warriors of mongo” to “flash gordon & the warriors of manga” is not useful, especially when you actually have someone trying to sell the book. (for more than I’m willing to pay, but…)

…for not teaching her “don’t play in traffic”:

Mariana Flores, a sophomore at UCSD, was demonstrating against Donald Trump’s victory on a busy San Diego freeway when a vehicle hit her. The accident crushed her pelvis, fractured her leg, and caused other serious injuries…

Flores, in her suit filed in late November, partly blames campus officials for her injury, arguing they should have stopped the protest before it got dangerous…

Pity this happened in California, where she’s sure to get paid off instead of laughed out of court. Seriously, how do you get to be old enough for college without knowing that running out into the middle of I-5 at night is a bad idea?

If I’d known there were girls like this in Japan in 1984, I’d have found a way to get there…

(via)

Seriously, Funko: McDuck, Balrog, Blossom, Chibi Sailor Moon, Bulma, Faye, Jack, Joey Ramone, Bob Ross, Ted, Jaws, Kevin, and coming soon, Queen Elizabeth and Kurt Cobain.

I think the Bond Golden Girl figure is in poor taste, but I confess I’m a bit tempted by the Dark Willow.

With all the talk about “food deserts” (no large groceries within a mile) and the newly-invented “food swamps” (too much nearby fast-food), I thought I’d take a look at my town, which has its share of poverty (driven in large part by waves of low-skill immigration).

The official USDA definition of a “food desert” is a census tract where either 500 people or 33% of the residents are more than 1 mile from a supermarket or large grocery store (10 miles for rural). Basically the entire US circa 1940.

The Atlas shows two in Salinas. The first is a well-populated residential area bounded by Market, Capitol, Central, and Clark. The second one consists almost entirely of a golf course, a college campus, a bit of farmland, and an airport, and has two large groceries within half a mile.

Looking at the area around the first, the North edge is mixed commercial/industrial, with more residential past that. South is residential with scattered commercial, ending in farmland. West is more farmland, East is our tiny downtown, including the Steinbeck Center, a massive cinema complex, and lots of good restaurants.

A quick look on Google Earth confirms that the area contains mostly well-maintained single-family homes, with at least one car each, which means they can easily reach the Star Market, the Nob Hill, the Smart and Final, and the giant Costco that are all about 1.5 miles away (at least two of these have delivery options…). So, no, this ~~mostly-~~middle-class neighborhood is not deprived of healthy food options. By the way, I drive by it on my way to the Nob Hill; it’s pretty nice. Zillow lists homes in this area selling from around $350,000 to over $650,000, and the appraised values are all in that range as well.

West of Salinas is a much larger food desert. It consists of an airport and a former military residential area, the latter of which is gradually being absorbed by Cal State Monterey Bay.

There are some giant “deserts” when you zoom out, but they’re mostly mountains, scrubland, and farms. Yes, Big Sur and Shasta are “food deserts”, gigglesnort.

Good: family, good food, prezzies, white Christmas.

Bad: high temperatures in Chicago less than half the low temperatures at home. Update: how could I forget my sister playing Christmas music all day long. And, yes, it included this. All of it. I hadn’t heard any of it in forty years, and wish it had stayed that way. Sorry, Nellie.

Also, there’s a perfectly good reason that one of my presents was a 5-pound bag of rice. And it’s completely unrelated to the four cookbooks I got.

• Santa Cosplay Roundup
• Super Girls Santas
• Yūno Ōhara
• Hitomi Yasueda
• Hoshino
• Mio Tomonaga
• Nanaka Matsukawa
• Rina Nagai
• Noda Ayaka
• Momoka Itō
• Harukaze
• Neru Nagahama
• Rika Izumi
• Saki Suzuki

(via 大盛りあがりグラビア館)

Dinner with the family tonight. My variation of James A. Thorson’s lasagna was a big, big hit; somehow I’d never shared it with them in any of their visits to my place in the nearly 30 years I’ve been making it. It didn’t hurt that my sister had a stash of amazingly good parmesan cheese.

Surprisingly, the giant box that arrived labeled Cassano’s Pizza was in fact filled with dry ice and Dayton-style pizza. Not tomorrow’s dinner, but soon we shall feast.