We diverted from our usual Saturday errands when we saw that there was a LA County Fire Department Expo in progress at the Botanic Garden. This giant American Flag was suspended between a fire department crane and a hook and ladder truck’s extended ladder. Click the image for the wide angle view.
One of the things we love to do in the evenings, is to watch a DVD on the flat screen TV. Verna has an extensive DVD collection with an eclectic assortment of titles in all genres. We are constantly adding to the collection, as well as retiring DVDs that we will probably never watch again – we donate them to charity.
Last week, she acquired “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” an action/adventure movie that included a copy in 3D – complete with the nerdy colored glasses. We first watched the movie in standard format; as we watched, it became clear that the producers were obviously accentuating some of the scenes for 3D. After numerous such scenes we resolved to watch the movie again – this time in 3D. It was quite spectacular, actually. Lots of stuff came flying out at us – from birds to giant dandelion seed pods and from flying fish to T-Rex dinosaur slobber (really). It was a lot of fun.
Click on the thumbnail image to get a closer look at a couple of 3D nerds and don’t forget to visit the 3D Stuff pages.
Last weekend, while we were down by the ocean looking for photo ops, I put my little camera on a post and took this picture of us together. The gazebo we’re standing in is located at Roessler Point at a scenic overlook with a dramatic vista of the Santa Monica Bay.
Click on the image to zoom out.
The South Coast Botanic Garden had an event today where they had a model railroad show. Inside the main hall, there were several very elaborate model railways set up. Most of them were set up with displays of nostalgic accessories, most around mid 20th century and WW2 eras. Outside, they had an exhibit with live steamer scale models and down at the cactus garden, they set up several little trains and a lot of tracks, right there among the cactii.
Check out this short video of some of the railroadin’ action.
I found this on the NASA Image of the Day web page – check out the haircuts, sideburns, bell-bottoms and leisure suits:
In 1976, NASA’s space shuttle Enterprise rolled out of the Palmdale manufacturing facilities and was greeted by NASA officials and cast members from the ‘Star Trek’ television series.
From left to right they are: NASA Administrator Dr. James D. Fletcher, DeForest Kelley, who portrayed Dr. “Bones” McCoy on the series, George Takei (Mr. Sulu), Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura), Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock), series creator Gene Rodenberry, an unnamed NASA official, and, Walter Koenig (Ensign Pavel Checkov).
Clickable image.
Verna has a rather extensive DVD collection. So, to try and keep track of each title, genre, rating and any remarks, I developed a web-based database interface. One of my technical skills deals with doing that sort of thing, so it was fairly easy for me to do.
One feature allows us to assign a rating to the DVDs we see. When I enter a DVD into the database initially, it is rated as ‘UNRATED’ and gets updated afterwards. We have the following ten rating categories (least to most): Sucks, Bad, Weird, So-So, Good, Very Good, Excellent, Outstanding and Sensational.
Less than stellar DVDs get RETIRED and are donated to charities like Goodwill or The Salvation Army. You can check out the listing on the public DVD page, Verna’s DVD Collection.
Not everyone will agree with our ratings, but we think very highly of the following Outstanding and above titles:
