Blog Blender

Addressing large scale problems requires large scale commitment

Mike Davidson writes about the recent Southern California fires in a post titled, 47 Years Later, The Palisades Disappeared Overnight. It tells a story of growing up in a particular time and how Los Angeles overcame its smog epidemic. Plus, his father was a unique position to contribute as a meteorologist. What eventually did it? Everyone agreed it was a problem and people went along with the solutions.

When you fly into LA today and see what you think is smog, rest assured it is nothing compared to what we had in the ’80s. The one advantage this public health problem had though is that it was in your face every day. Everyone in LA felt it daily and supported their government’s efforts to solve the problem.

PJH Studios artwork, Portrait of a sun

PJH Studios

Movies, music, books, whiskey, and culture in a blog blender

  • Addressing large scale problems requires large scale commitment

    Mike Davidson writes about the recent Southern California fires in a post titled, 47 Years Later, The Palisades Disappeared Overnight. It tells a story of growing up in a particular time and how Los Angeles overcame its smog epidemic. Plus, his father was a unique position to contribute as a meteorologist. What eventually did it?…

  • Flow

    A wondrous journey, through realms natural and mystical, Flow follows a courageous cat after his home is devastated by a great flood. Teaming up with a capybara, a lemur, a bird, and a dog to navigate a boat in search of dry land, Flow really was a magical movie. No talking, just a motley crew…

  • Lessons learned from writing 52 short stories

    This was originally posted on reddit a while back, and I’ve been meaning to post it here. The what I wrote 52 short stories across 9 different genres that totaled over 52,000 words. My constraints were one short story every Sunday, at least 500 words, and I’d publish them on my personal website. I’d consider…

  • A Haiku Garden – Published!

      A Haiku Garden: Selections from the Everyday Photo Haiku Project is published on Amazon! I created the book, which contains 104 of the most interesting photo haiku from the project. All photos and haiku done on an iPhone (4s then 6).

  • Map of whiskey producing countries

    For some time, I’ve been meaning to play with web friendly mapping and visualization tools such as d3.js, datamaps.js or crosslet.js. D3 is quickly becoming the defacto standard for displaying statistical visualizations on the web, and other libraries are hooking in to add additional capabilities, like mapping. Communicating data effectively is the future, if not…

  • 31 days of live music summary

    Thirty one days span the month of August. In those thirty one days, I saw, experienced, and absorbed live music. Everyday. The days ranged from loud, raucous, sweaty, boozy, sober, smokey, smoke-free, quiet, infectious, challenging, enthralling, boring, fun. Much like a mix cd with thirty one tracks, some shows surprised me with how much I…

  • Show #31 – Fou at Zio Carlo’s

    During the TCU-LSU halftime, I rolled down to Zio Carlos’s to catch Fou. The three piece played jangly dream pop as part of a benefit show for To Write Love on Her Arms. Thus mark’s the end of 31 straight days of live music.

  • Show #30 – Darrin Kobetich

    For the third time, I ventured to a patio show when the temperature read 100 plus degrees. Darrin Kobetich cooly played acoustic guitar instrumental songs with a classic guitar bent. One song, used the entire guitar, creating what sounded like three instruments. He tapped and thumped the body of the guitar while strumming and hammering…

  • Show #29 – Bob Noble Band

    The Bob Noble Band blues jam played a bluesy cover of “I Can See Clearly Now” with a velvet voiced female lead singer. Definitely pretty cool. Aside from that, I sat on Mambo’s patio and could hear the band perfectly.

  • Show #28 – Joey Green at Fred’s

    Joey Green strums a guitar laying tunes in the alt country vibe of Ryan Adams. He played a well received cover of Eli Young Band’s “Even if it Breaks Your Heart”.