A fire in the hills behind Burbank filled the entire valley with smoke and a strange over-cooked-barbecue stink...

update: I didn't realize the fire behind IKEA wasn't an isolated event, several fires have been raging in the L.A. area since Wednesday afternoon... here's a clip from yahoo news:

Thick smoke hung over much of Los Angeles on Thursday as a wildfire burned out of control in the Southern California foothills, threatening upscale suburban neighborhoods as firefighters struggled to keep the flames from racing to the sea.

"We didn't come to work this morning, we came to war," Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Brian Humphrey said.

Officials conceded that while the improved weather had slowed the progress of the blaze, some 3,000 firefighters were nowhere close to containing it amid 100-degree F (38-degree Celsius) temperatures at the end of Southern California's notorious fire season.

Fire crews responded quickly when another brush fire was spotted in the hills near the heavily populated Los Angeles suburb of Burbank.

"We are aggressively trying to contain this thing before it starts because of the weather conditions," Burbank Fire Lt. David Gabriel said.

Click here to watch video.

This is who i get to spend my day with. arent you jelous? we just got back from a nice walk now i am giving nick a bottle as i type, gotta go.

As of now, three weeks after Katrina hit, there are still hundreds of stranded and abandoned pets that are starving to death in their homes. A dedicated group of volunteers is doing their best to feed and water these animals and 2,000 others until better shelter arrangements can be made.

Ideally, they are asking for volunteers, not money. If you can possibly be of assistance, see contact information below.

PLEASE COME NOW!!!!!!!!! we are DESPERATE for reliable people to assist in feeding and watering animals trapped in homes. We have thousands of animals still trapped WITHOUT FOOD OR WATER AFTER 3 WEEKS! We do not have enough rescuers to save them. Volunteers are stressed and overworked and heading home. We need as many people as are able to come down immediately with tents and sleeping bags. If you have a van, SUV, ryder truck, ETC. you're expecially needed since you can ferry in supplies. Report to barn 5 when you arrive or go to the 6am meeting to be deployed with a rescue team. Just come, no need to respond to this email. THANK YOU!!!!!! PLEASE CROSS POST

There is an urgent need for volunteers to come for three day shifts in Louisiana to help starving dog and cat victims of hurricane Katrina. HSUS and other organizations need people to staff what is now the nations largest animal shelter. Which is in truth, nothing more than a makeshift facility with over 2,000 animals.

We also need people to go into the city and feed and rescue thousands of starving animals. Volunteers need only report to:

La Mar Dixon Center Command Center
9039 S. Saint Landry Road
Gonzales, LA Anytime - Day or Night

Be prepared for a chaotic situation. Bring a tent, sleeping bag or be prepared to sleep in your car. There is also an air conditioned area with cots. People that are physically fit and can enter New Orleans must bring sturdy shoes, long pants, sun visor or hat, crow bar and a utility knife. If you can just commit to a three day shift you will save more animals than we can express. Please come now! Just do it.

This request is coming from: David Meyer Executive Director 1-800-save-a-pet.com Acting Feed & Rescue Commander HSUS at La Mar Dixon

this is boring to many of you, i know... but i just wanted to put it up... this is a new blog written by rescuers in new orleans. i read every entry and cried. anyway... insted of going to san diego for my b-day mike and i are seriously considering driving to gonzales, LA to help at the make-shift shelter there where 2,000 animals have been housed and are in desperate need of food and love. please check out this blog. thanks. goodnight everyone.

I'm not sure how he is able to sleep in the "superman" position, but he seems to be managing just fine... what a strange little cat.

we went to hollywood tonight to see 'Thumbsucker', at the laemmle sunset 5 (a theater that plays mostly independent films on sunset blvd). it was really good. i had the day off. got lots done. i crossed many things off my to do list, though most of them were very boring.

i babysit for nick tomorrow afternoon and then stella in the evening. last week i took nick for a walk by the school with the goats. it was fun. they are so cute.

on sunday i have 4 days off. mike and i are driving down to san diego for my birthday which is on wednesday (the 5th). we're gonna go to the zoo and stuff. and maybe TJ, too. my friend liz says i must go.

liz is beautiful. i don't really know what else to say about her. but it feels good to have a girlfriend again.

i bought tickets to go see my sister in miami. oct 8th- 11th. what sucks is that i'll have to work on friday until about 10:30 and my flight leaves at 1am so i'll basically have to leave from work and when i arrive in miami it will be 11am on saturday. anyway i'm really excited about seeing my sister.

i guess i should go to sleep. i want a ibook for my birthday.... and i want a digital camera... the laptop is dying now. goodbye.

What's new - the main motivation for the face-lift was our camera phones, to explain; when we sent pic's from our phones to flickr, they could be posted as-is, which is around 550 pixels wide, or at the next size down, which is 250-something. The first size was too big for the "season three" template - and the mid-size is just annoying, it was starting to bug me that you had to go to a different site just to see the picture's detail. So now you can expect a lot more pictures from our phones on this site.

Secondly (I actually started this with one video on the last template, but still), if you click on the "video archives" in the side-menu, you'll notice a small icon besides some of the files - I'm trying to go through the archives and find the post where we originally linked our long list of videos, so that new readers can easily see what the clip is in reference to.

I've also been wanting a more obvious way to push our other sites, which is the idea behind the tabbed links beneath the "header".

And lastly, I've gone back and tried to find screenshots of past templates of caliblog... unfortunately, I only found two, and one of them was season three... so that doesn't much count - if anyone out there for some strange reason has screenshots, please send them to me and I'll post them. You can find them under "cali'archives".


Note - I noticed that this site seems to load correctly in most browsers - I've personally checked: Safari, Firefox (Mac & Win), Opera, Explorer (in Win only, if you are using Explorer on a Mac then congratulations, you're using the world's most pussy browser). But I do know that, last time I checked, this site doesn't look right in MSN's browser... I can't figure out why, I've tried everything I can think of, and nothing seems to change, so if that's your browser-of-choice then this site is going to look all crooked, sorry.

And that's all you need to know about the new look, I suppose I should also add that Amanda doesn't this new look what-so-ever. Okay, enjoy.

I took this picture of mike when we went to the getty center. he has been dying for me to post so i thought i would send this from my phone to show him how much i care.

Paul, I'm glad you're alive.

I don't know the date, I'm not even really sure of the time, it's been too long, it could have easily been 11 at night or 2:30 in the morning, but it was the only time Amanda and I got Billy to go to the ocean. The three of us, Billy, Amanda and myself, drove down to Santa Monica and walked the beach north of the pier.

We chased the waves out into the ocean, and then, at the last second, would sprint back to shore when they came crashing back in. We danced around in the sand and stared out at the night sky... it was such a simple moment, one that I would have never assumed at the time would be such an important memory to me... but it is, and that's it - I just felt like sharing. Okay.

"I’m Oscar Bluth and I need medical attention!"

I wrote a big post about this video clip being denied airtime by major media outlets like ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, FOX, etc... but I decided to delete it, and just ask that you please follow the link and watch this short 30 second spot... and maybe instead of my telling you what I think, you can come back to the site and tell me what you think.

Yahoo weather had this to say about the Santa Monica forecast: "...high surf advisory remains in effect until 11 PM PDT saturday...", "coastal flood advisory remains in effect..." and "waves of 5 to 8, with occasional sets of 9 to 12 feet are expected on exposed south facing beaches...".

So, of course, I had to see this for myself, I drove out to "the rocks" near the naval base north of Malibu... unfortunately, due to heavy 101 traffic, I arrived just as the sun had set behind the horizon, which gave me only 15 more minutes of dim daylight left. But I grabbed my camera on the way and taped what I could, the waves were massive, here's what I could get before the sky went pitch black:



Note: notice at the end of the first clip - around the 15 second mark - the height of the cliff compared to the ocean, as judged from the size of the old couple on the left of the screen, and keep this in mind when the wave at the end of the second clip throws water all the way up onto the other couple sitting at the edge of the rocks...

Last night, I had a strange nightmare... but unlike most nightmares; this one involved aspects that are still terrifying to me after waking up.

I dreamt I was above the clouds, parachuting down, it was beautiful and slow. Then as I began to fall through the clouds, I could start to see below what looked like something besides land. But I didn't know what. The clouds were cool and I was wet with mist... Then I could make out the blackness more, and I knew once I saw the long white reflection of the sun, I was falling slowly above the ocean.

There was no land, no ships, no one to save me. Just endless… black… ocean. I was miles above and started to panic - since I am both terrified of the ocean in my dream as well in real life - and as I drifted downward, I wondered if I should release my chute and die from impact... or over the next 40 minutes fall closer and closer into my worst fear.

Thankfully, the dream didn’t go any further than that. It was the kind of terrifying that makes your stomach sick.

I'm doing something I should have done two years ago when we first started caliblog... organizing the server. There are about 500+ files I'm trying to tidy up, so for the next day or two if you stumble across a post that's missing an image, movie or other, just assume I'm still in the process of putting things in order.

Click the image above to see a handful of photos of Amanda and I at the Getty Center.

In the last week I've seen more CNN, Fox "news", interviews with political-players, heart-wrenching conversations with people who are still, several days later, in a state of shock, etc, than I would normally see in a year's time. Most of this I catch after the fact on blogs such as: one good move, crooks & liars, and boing boing - as I can't really stand to sit infront of the tv for long periods of time. But this is besides the point...

Tonight I clicked on a short 11 second clip that confirmed everything that is wrong and derailed and frightening about this government's mismanagement and utter-incompetence in handling the life-or-death needs of thousands and thousands and thousands of people.

The 11 second clip was from an interview with Laura Bush during a school visit in Southhaven, in the first few seconds she makes reference to hurricane "Corrina"... Okay, just an obvious slip of the tongue, shouldn't be scrutinized too closely, right? I'm sure the first lady is just very exhausted and overwhelmed from the days and days of closely following the events of the Gulf. She couldn't possibly not know the hurricane's actual name is Katrina... could she?

Cut to moments later, when she makes yet a second reference to hurricane "Corrina". This, unbelievably enough, is no slip of the tongue - our president's own wife has not once, but twice revealed the level of obliviousness and lack-of-understanding that has cost the city of New Orleans an unimaginable number of lives and made painfully-obvious that we are, as a country, in the hands of an administration who "has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water".


Now, the above statements, I'm sure, will get lumped into the partisan-based "blame game" category - like so many other dead-on observations and what some would call "finger pointing", and others would call "accountability"... But for the 40 percent 38 percent of you out there who still think Bush is doing a "heck of a job", don't forget this: it took Bush three days after the city of New Orleans found itself 80 percent under water... three days to cut short his vacation... a vacation that was suppose to already be over but was extended.

Take your pick, what's worse: "Corrina" or the 'three days'?

Something caught my eye this morning while scanning my usual news feeds, half way through an article titled, "Bush Tours Katrina Damage Amid Criticism", a quote from Bush reading,

"The people of this country expect there to be law and order, and we're going to work hard to get it... In order to make sure there's less violence, we've got to get food to people."

At first I wasn't sure why those words stopped my in my tracks. But I stopped reading, and sat back in my chair for a moment. Then read it again, "In order to make sure there's less violence, we've got to get food to people".

The aftermath of hurricane katrina has left countless people with no home, no clean water, no electricity, no stability, and no security. People are now hungry, desperate and in a position where they don't have a hell of a lot to loose.

Now, none of this is news to anyone - but the fact that these people need our generosity and help, whether it be in the form of money, volunteer work, or other, is obvious. And then the reason hit me, I made the connection...

What is the difference between the crime we are seeing as a result of a massive hurricane, and the crime we see day in and day out within big-cities, say Detroit for example? Both situations are, when broken down, just people who are hungry, and need help, but aren't getting it fast enough. But look how differently we approach each circumstance:

Katrina - there is an overwhelming outpour of help, as there should be, everything from individual donations all the way up to fortune 500 companies pledging thousands & thousands in aid. There is an overwhelming understanding that if the people are feed and housed, the crime and looting will diminish. But...

Detroit - there is an overwhelming amount of money, everything from local tax-dollars to federal loans and grants worth billions, diverted from feeding, housing and educating desperate people, and instead, spent on throwing them in prison. There is an overwhelming assumption that if someone is stealing food, electronics, etc, they need to be locked up, not helped back onto their feet.

I'm not saying that criminals should be allowed to run rampid, doing whatever they feel like out of hunger or greed, but I am suggesting that if we focused not on the symptoms, but the prevention, by housing, by educating, by feeding people in need of help... we'd be a lot better off.

I just don't get the disconnect. I don't see how people can look at the same situation, the same desperate circumstances - and have a completely opposite solution.

The only difference I can see between the crime we are seeing in New Orleans vs Detroit, is that one is the concentrated aftermath of a natural disaster, and the other the aftermath of a man-made disaster.