Category: Oddlies

Photo by Joe WilcoxApr 14, 202310:04 pm

How San Diego will Kill People

The Featured Image and companions document the beginnings of a disaster. For weeks, San Diego contractors have been dropping compost containers outside residences. These are in addition to recycle and trash bins already in use by apartments, condominiums, and homes across the area. Their deployment is the worst kind of stupid public policy, which is designed to protect the environment and diminish the so-called effects of climate change. Humans aren’t important enough to matter in the public policy equation.

Shortlist of grief: Animals knocking over bins and spilling rotting food into the alleys and streets. Hungry homeless people digging into the containers, also spilling rotting food, becoming sick from eating it, and likely spreading one or more of any number of bacterial infections. Disease is the clincher. These compost bins surely will be breeding grounds that could, and likely will, lead to E. Coli and Salmonella outbreaks—to name but two. One is reason enough to worry.

Photo by Joe WilcoxMar 21, 202310:19 pm

My Cat Wants to Know: What’s Your Problem with DPReview, Amazon?

Amazon’s decision to shutter (absolutely no pun intended) photography site DPReview demonstrates why I recommend that creators own their content whenever possible. Speaking from personal experience, I bleed for the hardworking editors, reviewers, and writers (among other staffers) whose body of work may soon be whisked away.

Seven years ago, I discovered that during a publishing system upgrade, CNET expunged my byline from my thousands of stories written for the site. In a separate incident, the analyst firm I had worked for merged with another and all my online musings vanished. What I consider to be the most valuable, posted to the Apple Watch and Microsoft Watch blogs between 2006-09, disappeared from the web in 2010. You wouldn’t know I had written anything professionally online for the 10 years 1999-2009. All was deleted when publishers decided to scrub the sites (or in the case of CNET modernize).

Photo by Joe WilcoxFeb 23, 20238:30 pm

World at War

February 24 marks the first anniversary of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine. The United States’ involvement prolongs the conflict—leading to more lives lost and ever-increasing destruction of homes, businesses, and infrastructure.

As allies join the fracas—and increase armaments supplied to Ukraine (OMG, tanks!), along with billions upon billions of financial support—what should have been a regional conflict escalates to global war. We are on the brink, and Joseph Biden’s ministrations in Kyiv this week and elsewhere among NATO members sets the world on a dangerous course. Europeans prepare for the possibility of nuclear bombings (one, two, three examples), while Americans are as clueless as lemmings racing towards the cliff.

Photo by Joe WilcoxDec 23, 202210:39 pm

No Christmas Cheer Here

One of the nearby assuredly festively-decorated houses isn’t this Christmas season. You can get a sense of what’s typical from the profile of Queenie, who joined my “Cats of University Heights” series in December 2021. Sadly, she vanished last month, and her owner assumes coyote.

Sad as that may seem, the family suffered another emotional assault a month earlier, when the homeowner came home to find that the four towering palms outside her house had been marked for removal (e.g. clearcutting). Reportedly, San Diego Gas and Electric ordered the curbside destruction.

Photo by Joe WilcoxSep 1, 20228:40 pm

Who You Gonna Call?

If electric cars are the wave of the future, and California calling for a ban on gas-guzzlers by 2035, is the power grid ready? The question demands an answer during the Labor Day weekend heatwave underway and officials advising citizens to conserve energy between 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. PDT. On the list: “Avoid charging electric vehicles“. Need more be said on the topic than that?

The Featured Image comes from Leica Q2 on Jan. 1, 2022. Vitals, aperture manually set: f/5.6, ISO 100, 1/640 sec, 28mm; 10:15 a.m. PST.

Photo by Joe WilcoxJul 30, 20229:18 pm

‘We Don’t Socialize on Leash’

About two weeks ago, as I approached the barber for my bi-monthly trim, two adults, child, and dog pranced around in front of the adjacent grocery. The woman is sister to the owner and the little girl either belongs to her or the brother—my apologies for not knowing which. The doggie’s owner is the barber’s tenant living in an alley apartment. Their infectious happiness lifted the entire block’s emotional atmosphere.

But then the dark cloud came. In the bike lane, a woman approached, running behind another smallish dog. The little girl walked towards the newcomers, for a moment of meet-and-greet fido fun. Then came the tersely-emphasized putdown: “We don’t socialize on leash“. I turned to the store owner’s sister with a shrug, uplifted palms, and WTF expression. She similarly acknowledged.

Photo by Joe WilcoxJun 30, 20229:59 pm

Comic-Con’s Crazy COVID Conniption

To close out the month, and first half of the year, we connect the somewhat distant past with the not-so-far-off future. San Diego Comic Con returns July 21-24, 2022 with Preview Night on the 20th. The show floor, or break-out sessions, will look nothing like the Featured Image, taken seven years ago.

SDCC apparently didn’t get the memo that SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2)/COVID-19 is endemic and no longer pandemic. Locally, people move freely about without being required to wear masks, be tested, or verify vax status. Based on the official tally, the cumulative-calculated case fatality rate in San Diego County is 0.64 percent. Meaning: Your chance of surviving Coronavirus is better than 99 percent, while more than 85 percent of those infected likely show no symptoms.

Photo by Joe WilcoxJun 17, 20229:48 pm

Missed Moment

This is not the photo you are meant to see. I failed to capture the right one for you. Please accept my apologies for being too stunned and too slow to get either camera or handset out before opportunity passed. Lesson learned; I need to practice my draw, so to speak, like a gunslinger of old—or modern-era concealed carrier.

While walking along Monroe Avenue this morning, close to 10 a.m. PDT, two police cruisers, their lights flashing, slowly approached from the East. They trailed the lame-legged coyote that some locals call Notorious. My wife and I first saw him along Louisiana on Sept. 8, 2021, date of the Featured Image. Sadly. Honestly, there should have been enough time for me to get off a quick shot of Notorious, if not the cop cars.

Photo by Joe WilcoxJun 6, 20229:55 pm

Jeopardy Answer: In California. Question: Where are Bees Fish?

Yep. Last week a court basically reclassified bumble bees as fish. Where else but California could one thing that is be called something it ain’t. Hehe, it’s the craziest, but not necessarily intentional, twist on identity politics yet. Someone tell me: What’s the appropriate pronoun, so I don’t offend anything that flies or swims?

The problem, if you can call California legislative narrowness anything less, is the definition of protected species used in the 1970 Endangered Species Act. Amphibia. Check. Bird. Check. Mammal. Check. Reptile. Check. But, whoops, somebody overlooked insects. Which is how through one court proceeding and appeal the definition of fish now applies to some bees.

Photo by Joe WilcoxMay 5, 202210:21 pm

We All Need a Smiley Break

Flashback two years, to May 2, 2020: SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome Coronavirus 2)/COVID-19 lockdowns compelled Californians to avoid anyone and to otherwise practice so-called safe social distancing. The seeming hardship would pale compared to racial riots that would erupt weeks later.

One of my neighbors literally put on a happy face—among several encouraging, or funny, street decorations to adorn this University Heights property and/or the sidewalk straddling Meade Avenue. Seems like every time I walked by something different greeted. Thank you.

Photo by Joe WilcoxMar 19, 20229:04 pm

So Which Is It Supposed to Be?

Yesterday, while walking to the used bookstore where receiving a U.S. Constitution booklet and unprompted lecture, I came upon the oddest objects—on the outer fringes of University Heights’ boundary, along Georgia between Howard and Polk. Are these signs in the Featured Image more signs of San Diego bureaucratic bungling? This stretch is part of the Georgia-Meade bikeway, for which someone in the city authorized traffic circles with the wrong community name that later required sandblasting to correct.

Tell me, when have you ever seen a posting stating “Speed Humps Ahead”. Gasp, is that, ah, innuendo for approaching sexual activity (e.g. humping) in hedonistic Hillcrest? Yes, I am being facetious, but it’s not an unreasonable question to ask about the neighborhood.

Photo by Joe WilcoxMar 15, 202210:57 pm

Let’s Not Save More Night for the Day

My work blog for JupiterResearch disappeared after Forrester’s acquisition during Summer 2008. I had long left the analyst firm and smartly brought a copy of all the content with me. On April 7, 2005, I griped about Congress’ plan to add two months to Daylight Saving Time, which, incidentally, commenced day before yesterday for 2022.

This afternoon, my newsfeeds flared with a report from Washington, D.C. that our, uhm, illustrious senators unanimously voted for the so-called Sunshine Protection Act, which would make DST permanent. Meaning: Year-round. I am almost impressed by their god-like gall—that they, and they alone, can protect the sun. Okay, they do need cooperation of the House of Representatives drafting like legislation and signature from the President. But aren’t they, as a collective group, one big ego? You don’t need answer.