Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Tehachapi's Online Community News & Entertainment Guide
Sorted by date Results 51 - 75 of 78
I recently saw a program on PBS about an opera that was performed in 2013 at the Los Angeles Union Station. It wasn’t that long ago that we’d gone down to Union Station using the Metro Link and had a tour, so there was a lot in the show that we’d seen. The “story” was based on the book Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino and adapted as an opera by Christopher Cerrone. It showed an imaginary conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. The show was performed inside and in the courtyard...
When you read this I will be coming up on my period of jury duty. It has actually been a couple of years since I’ve been called, but for a while I was getting called every year. Usually I would go and get put in a pool at the end of the afternoon, and I would have to come back the next day. Then, after being questioned, one or the other lawyer would reject me. Sometimes I would wonder why. Was it that I seemed to smart? I could tell myself so. One time I had a tenuous connection to the family of...
Now, “urban coyote” is not some re-imagined movie starring John Travolta. Urban coyotes are in fact “a thing”. I have been looking at some articles on animals (and other things) for a project I’ve been fiddling with on the natural history of the area. One of the topics I’ve been reading that has been of special interest to me is that of coyotes in an urban environment. Now according to the research, Tehachapi isn’t really an urban area – not enough population or population density. We are...
On June 30th we had a leap second added to the year. A leap second? That’s right, a second. We’re all familiar with the leap day we add to the year every 4 years (next year will be one). That day is added to keep our calendars aligned with the stars. When someone asks how many days in a year, we automatically say 365. And that’s pretty close. But it actually takes us about 365.25 days. That extra quarter of a day gets added together every four years into a leap day. (Actually it’s not really...
A couple weeks ago I was having Chinese food down in Bakersfield and opened up my fortune cookie. It said that I was to receive a “great honor”. It’s not that I put any store in what a cookie thinks, but I did try to think of anything that I might be in line for that could be considered an “honor”. And I came up with two. And they both came true. First, I had submitted some poems to be considered to read at the Woody Guthrie poets event at the Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in July. I have sinc...
Just the other day I was flipping channels since I couldn’t find anything on and stumbled across the PBS show Nature, reshowing the episode “My Bionic Pet”. This concerned the lives of several animals using prostheses. There were dogs with three (or two) legs, a pig with a wheel chair, and even an alligator with a prosthetic tail. While some people probably think it odd to do this for pets, I thought that this was a very good sign. At its least empathetic, people are working at developing bette...
It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’m sure we can all think of organizations and groups, and even individuals that have done terrible things with the best of intentions. On the other hand, I’m not sure where the road paved with donuts goes, but it isn’t hell. Every year in the United States we have National Donut Day on the first Friday in June (June 5, this year). Often this is celebrated by eating an (often free) donut, but the origin of donut day goes back to th...
Getting a book published can be difficult. It took years before J.K. Rowling found a publisher for her Harry Potter books. And many other authors have told stories of wallpapering rooms with their rejection slips. Down in Bakersfield the Writers of Kern writing group regularly starts meeting by asking who’s been rejected since the last meeting. And I’m a member of “The Failure Club” on Facebook. This isn’t to rub noses in our failures but to celebrate our attempts. But when it comes to books...
When scientists want to understand something they will often use an experimental “unit” and a control “unit”. And when studying something if you have a second copy around then you can control for more kinds of factors. And when it comes to people identical twins are the closest you can get to a second copy. Genetically they are the same, so you can rule out genetic differences. Though identical twins can still be very different. This is one way that scientists can determine when somethi...
A few weeks ago I took part in an outing that took the MetroLink from Lancaster down into Downtown Los Angeles. On the weekend you can ride unlimited for $10. This includes not just MetroLink, but the other rail lines in the L.A. area. (It also includes some of the bus lines down there as well.) So you could ride from Lancaster to Oceanside. then back again all for $10. Also, it isn’t hard to do. You buy your ticket from a kiosk (which, when we were there, the security guard was happy to help w...
Mark your calendars – it is almost Pi Day! "What is Pi Day?" you may ask. Well, it a bit of fun based on math. The number pi (the Greek letter π) is the ratio of the length around a circle (the perimeter) to the distance across (the diameter). So to calculate pi you just need to measure around the edge of a circle then divide by its width. The number you will get (depending on how well you measure) will be about 3.14, and just for fun people have started to call March 14 Pi(e) Day (3/14, get it...
Having gone to school in Oklahoma I learned about the state’s many “historically black towns”. At least that was what they were called when I went to school. There were many such towns in Oklahoma, and while some are still in existence, there are many that no longer exist. Sometimes the town names tell us about the people that lived there, names like Bookertee and Liberty. Well, California had an all-black town and it isn’t too far from here. The town of Allensworth is preserved in the Colonel...
Wikipedia says that monoculture is growing a single crop over wide regions. This provides advantages since the farmers can concentrate on developing techniques to maximize yields for only one crop. So they can develop machines that can efficiently harvest one type of fruit or grain. Crops can be developed that are specifically designed to do well in a specific area. But monoculture has its disadvantages, too. It makes large regions more susceptible to diseases. Think of things like the Irish...
Back in the 1980s observations of a layer of sediment right when the dinosaurs went extinct led to a hypothesis of an asteroid or comet impact being the cause of the extinction. Like many hypotheses that are fairly radical, it took a while to gain acceptance, yet now it is considered the likely cause of the extinction. There is a saying that when your only tool is a hammer everything starts to look like a nail, and this is true of scientists, too. So, after the dinosaur extinction was determined...
Often when someone says they saw a crane, what they actually saw was an egret or a heron. All are often found around water, but herons and egrets are typically more solitary. Oh, you might see several at the same place, but usually not too close together, and cranes come in flocks. Odd thing that is different about cranes and egrets or herons is their feet. Cranes only have three toes, all pointed the same direction, so they can’t grip a tree branch like most birds, including herons and egrets....
Wine making is an important California industry. It’s even becoming more important in our own local area. And some of us make wine as a hobby. So when I saw a post recently on the Internet titled something like “Things Wine Makers Don’t Want You To Know” I had to check it out. Now I can’t answer to techniques for any particular wine maker, but there was one topic mentioned that seemed worth reading more about. And that was the fining of wine. Now wine fining isn’t some magic process for making...
Over the summer back in Oklahoma I had the opportunity to sample some white zinfandel jelly. I really enjoyed it. So once I got back from my trip I went out on the Internet and searched for a recipe. Well one popped up immediately. Exactly four ingredients. Wine, pectin, sugar, and a bit of butter to prevent foaming. So I went into the kitchen and tracked down a bottle of white zinfandel (I had some Two Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s). The recipe took 3 cups. Well that took almost the whole b...
Near Coalinga (southwest of Fresno) back in 1948 a plane load of Mexican citizens were being flown to El Centro to be sent back to Mexico. The plane crashed in Los Gatos Canyon. Depending on where you lived the news didn’t have much coverage of the event, so when Woody Guthrie heard about it, no names were given. In his poem, “Deportee”, he said that “you won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane”. And for years the mass grave up in Fresno only listed “28 Mexican Citizens” on...
The recent strong winds from out of the west help generate some very impressive lenticular clouds. These are the "flying saucer" shaped clouds that form from time to time around Tehachapi. Okay, they can form elsewhere, but we do get our share. The reason we get them here is the combination of wind and mountains. As the wind comes through we get the wind going up the sides of the mountain (orographic lifting, if you want a fancy term for it) and then forming waves in the atmosphere. These are...
Science denialism is a problem in this country (Okay, it’s a problem in other countries too, but I don’t live there so...). We have so many varieties: creationists, global warming deniers, vaccine avoiders, Flat Earthers, folks that don’t think germs cause disease and so on. These people, you probably know some, don’t like what science has told us, so tell us that it just can’t be so. Sometimes there is big money behind the denialism, like that which kept lead in our gasoline for so long and...
I recently spent a day out at Joshua Tree National Park. I was participating in a writing workshop. They included a Ranger in just about every activity, and they told some interesting facts about the Park. This time the Ranger had some information about Joshua Trees. One of the first items was that the biologists are splitting the Joshua Tree in to two species. If you’ve paid attention, then you may have noticed that the Joshua Trees around here, like the ones that dominate Joshua Tree N...
Recently (April 15), we had the first of four total lunar eclipses that are going to occur in the next several months. The media kept calling it a “blood moon”, apparently from the red color of the moon when the eclipse was total. I’m not sure when this started to be done. When I was young and we watched lunar eclipses, the Moon turning red was how we could tell the eclipse was total. It was just part of the deal. The moon has always turned red when there is a total eclipse. The reason why i...
About 14 billion years ago the universe came into existence with the Big Bang. Early in process the universe was too hot for matter to form and the was a fairly uniform “glow”. As the universe expanded it cooled. You can think of compressed gas in a can being released, like spray paint or cooking spray, as the gas expands it cools off. After a while things cooled down so that matter could start forming. That “glow” is still around. It too has cooled off, to just a few degrees, but it comes f...
I’m sitting here at the keyboard trying to figure out what I’m going to say, while Moonpi my dog paces around my chair attempting to communicate with me. Sometimes it can be pretty obvious what he’s trying to tell me. For example, he has a pretty specific noise he makes that says, “I’ve lost my rawhide under the sofa. Get up and help me get it.” After lunch, when he thinks it is time for a walk, there’s not much chance of misunderstanding what he’s trying to say. For someone incapable of us...
As you’re reading this some of your fellow Tehachapi area residents are getting ready to put on a show. Actually eight shows. That’s right, it’s time once again for Tehachapi Community Theatre’s Playwrights Festival. Starting March 7 and going through March 16 at the BeeKay Theatre TCT will be doing world premieres of eight 10-minute plays. These plays were selected from 45 that were submitted at the end of last year. Four of the plays selected were written by Tehachapi Playwrights (Yes, o...
