Sunland residents Michael and Susan Schaafsma watch the hills near their home burn at twilight on Tuesday. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)(Click for larger version.)

A towering cloud from the super-heated Station fire in Angeles National Forest billows into a blue sky behind downtown Los Angeles on Monday. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)(Click for larger version.)

Newhall residents Will Moriarty and his son Max, 2, keep an eye on the Station fire along Aliso Canyon Road in Acton on Sunday. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)(Click for larger version.)

The LA Times is doing a great job covering this disaster. Here is a page of hi-res photos from the fire zone.

A sailboat makes its way through the harbor in Marina del Rey against a backdrop of smoke from the Station fire. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times / August 29, 2009)

Palos Verdes fire: Residents of Cartier Drive in Rancho Palos Verdes watch as a helicopter, right, makes a water run at a brush fire in the Portuguese Bend area. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times / August 27, 2009)

Los Angeles Times fire photo gallery.

“It is a low cost strategy to get motorists to slow down as they approach the bike trail and pedestrian path. While at first motorists may be a little disoriented, the main point is to get them to pay attention and slow down through that area.”

[Source: SNAFU-ed .... Situation Normal]

Japanese superstar Shokotan in a hazmat suit. Terror chic?

More on Shokotan, from her Wikipedia entry:

Shoko Nakagawa born May 5, 1985 in Tokyo as Shiyoko Nakagawa is a Japanese idol and tarento (an actress, seiyÅ« (voice actor), illustrator, and singer)…. Her nickname is Shokotan. (In the blog by Mika Kaneda, who appeared with her on “ÅŒsama no Brunch”, she is called Shokotasu).

This is a beautiful image, but also quite chilling, especially if you remember the Tokyo subway sarin gas attack by Aum Shinrikyo cult members on March 20, 1995. This memory must be even more acute for people in Japan who encounter the source of this image, a Norton Symantec billboard advertisement at the west exit of Shinjuku subway station in Tokyo:

Norton Symantec billboard at the west exit of Shinjuku station. (Click to enlarge.)

And if the image is unsettling, the text hammers the point home:

"I am in danger. You are in danger. Japan is in danger. Protect yourself with yellow." (Click to enlarge.)

Unfortunately, as nasty as computer viruses can be, they’re nothing compared to a chemical or biological attack on people, so it seems kind of flippant to trade on the fear of human suffering to sell protection against technological trauma. But it does make for great advertising, and using a current pop idol helps sweeten the medicine a little.

Haruki Murakami wrote a great book about the Tokyo subway gas attack, Underground, comprised mostly of interviews he conducted with people connected to the attack in one way or another. [Shokotan source: Pink Tentacle]

Hand dryers from around the world. Photos: Douglas Wilson. (Click to enlarge.)

[Via Gizmodo]

Sadly, the two pilots were both killed; fortunately, nobody else was killed or injured. [Source: YouTube, via Gizmodo]

An undersea volcano erupts off the coast of Tonga, Tuesday, March 17, 2009.

An undersea volcano erupted on Wednesday, March 18, 2009, off the coast of Tonga, tossing clouds of smoke, steam and ash thousands of feet into the sky above the South Pacific ocean. The eruption occurred  at sea about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the southwest coast off the main island of Tongatapu, an area where up to 36 undersea volcanoes are clustered.

Image sources:

• San Francisco Chronicle
• Associated Press
• Xinhua News
• Stuff.co.nz
• Reuters
• MSNBC
• Toronto Sun

Saginaw Bay, Michigan -- ice from Lake Huron is on the move.

The last few days have seen a strange and rare occurrence in Saginaw Bay, Michigan: wind-driven walls of ice coming off Lake Huron and plowing into beachfront homes. Apparently, this strange phenomenon occurs every few decades. Here are some vintage photos of a 1946 event that Life magazine published on March 25, 1946:

Life magazine published images of the 1946 ice damage in its March 25, 1946 edition under the headline "Terror on the Bay: Weird Michigan ice mass runs amok."

[Source: mlive.com]

Cold War era playground rockets. Photos by Lauren Orchowski. Click to enlarge.

Artist Lauren Orchowski created a great photographic series of 23 Cold War era rocket-theme playground structures, called Rocket Science, made with an 8 x 10 inch view camera between 2005 and 2008 all over the United States. [Source: Lauren Orchowski, via Gizmodo]

Mash-up Stefan Hester photos of Tom Fuller's Roadside Church. Click to enlarge.

Accidental Mysteries has a story about photographer Stefan Hester’s photographs of Tom Fuller’s sign-saturated “religious environment” in Crystal Springs, Mississippi, that Mr. Fuller calls the “Roadside Church.”

I created the mash-up, above, from four of Stefan’s photos, just to highlight the obsessive textification of this religious environment. Be sure to check out the Accidental Mysteries post, not only for the photos, but for Stefan’s story about meeting Tom Fuller and encountering “Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product.”

There are people like Senhor Jose everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos. [page 11]

That’s a brilliant critique of the “collector impulse” and how most of what is collected and passed off as “valuable” or “interesting” is really just more kipple. Collectors, Saramago points out, may delude themselves that they are creating a sense of order, as opposed to chaos, but what they are really doing is just creating organized kipple, and organized kipple is still just as kipply as disorganized or non-organized kipple. In other words, the byproducts of the collecting impulse are merely an arbitrarily “organized” manifestation of, in Technovelgy’s words quoted previously, “available resources transformed into objects that cannot be used for anything (kipple).”

Satellite and computer visualizations of human activity. Click to enlarge.

The first image, in the upper left,

…shows air traffic in the US based on the data from FlightView, a page that tracks air traffic in real time. You can see it using three different criteria. The first is altitude—which is the one you are seeing here. The darker blues indicate higher altitude, while the lightest blue indicates take off and landing. [Source, with more images: Gizmodo ]

The other images are all of the United Kingdom, and are from a new BBC TV series, “Britain from Above“. These aerial/computer images show, clockwise from the top right: aircraft flight paths, London Taxi activity, Internet activity in the South of England, images on Britain’s roads as seen from over the M4/M5 junction near Bristol, and UK telephone exchange activity. [Source, with videos: Gizmodo]

A typical Mondadori giallo cover.

Giallo is the Italian equivalent of pulp fiction + film noir, though, being Italian, sexier. And more lurid. Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

Giallo (plural gialli) is an Italian 20th century genre of literature and film, which in Italian indicates crime fiction and mystery. In the English language, however, it is used in a broader meaning that is closer to the French fantastique genre, including elements of horror fiction and eroticism. The word giallo is Italian for “yellow” (see Wiktionary: giallo) and stems from the origin of the genre as a series of cheap paperback novels with trademark yellow covers.

Giallo Fever, written by Edinburgh-based “PhD student and self-employed computer guy” Keith Brown, is a great blog devoted to all things Giallo. I especially appreciate Mr. Brown’s in-depth analysis, accompanied by a fantastic assortment of screen shots, of many very obscure films that I and probably most people in the United States have never heard of. As an example, check out Mr. Brown’s post about Paranoia (released in the U.S. as A Quiet Place to Kill), a 1970 film by director Umberto Lenzi, the final part of a trilogy that includes Orgasmo (1969) and Così dolce… così perversa (1969). Here is a sample of Mr. Brown’s analysis that sets-up a series of film stills that I have assembled below into a grid (click to enlarge):

Up-tight American women meet “typical European male, selfish, amoral and corrupt,” but finds him irresistible nonetheless; blocks of red recur throughout Lenzi’s compositions, with colour being used in an expressive manner.

And speaking of yellow/giallo, here are six stills from Una sull’altra (1969), by director Lucio Fulci (In the U.S., One on Top of the Other) — the top three use the color giallo for expressive purposes, and the bottom beautifully demonstrating “time-capsule eroticism, tease and sleaze from 1969″ (click to enlarge):

WW1 listening device for airplanes

In the days before radar existed, this was the only way to detect incoming aircraft. These days it could be adopted by the NSA to listen in on Al Qaeda chatter. [Source: Gizmodo]

I get the feeling that nobody was running for cover while wearing one of these Brewster body armor suits. Still, for launching a modern day run on the bank and fending off rabid bankers and foreclosed families, this might come in handy. [Source: Flickr]

WWI German messenger dog gas mask

No beast is immune to the forward march of progress. I can actually see these becoming quite chic if chemical and biological weapons begin to seriously threaten our pets or military messenger dogs. Messenger dogs? [Source: New Sciences of Protection]

WWI mobile shield

Finally, perhaps the most practical technology of all, as this coffin-like “mobile shield” could easily double as a mobile final resting place. Comes with handy oversized ruler to measure grave depth. [Source: Dark Roasted Blend]

Nah, on second thought, better take the bus. C’mon Japan, WTF? Hentai as a form of city planning, or just trying to “cute up” old Godzilla’s image? For those of you who are (even more) confused, Wikipedia can bring you up to speed:

Hentai (変態 or へんたい) is a Japanese word that, in the West, is used when referring to sexually explicit or pornographic comics and animation, particularly Japanese anime, manga and computer games (see Japanese pornography). In Japan it can be used to mean “metamorphosis” or “abnormality”. The word “hentai” has a negative connotation to the Japanese and is commonly used to mean “sexually perverted”.

Yep, I think that about sums it up. No idea where in Japan this is from, or even if it still exists (or ever did, for that matter). Still, if you see it, run for cover, and report back to us. [Source: BuzzFeed]

UPDATE: Here are a couple more images of this oddity.

Images from Masahisa Fukase's The Solitude of Ravens

The Solitude of Ravens sadly foreshadows the photographer’s own deep solitude to come, as Wikipedia explains:

His greatest and last photobook was “Raven”. Shot in Hokkaido in 1976 in the wake of his divorce, the gloomy and emotional photos are a sharp contrast to his earlier works. The enormous renown won by their release in 1986 then the American release (“The Solitude of the Raven”) in 1991 was short lived as he fell down a flight of stairs while intoxicated and into a coma which he remains in today.

The Photo Book Guide review of The Solitude of Ravens tells Fukase’s haunting story in more detail, and includes some other brilliant photos, such as this gem:

A page from The Solitude of Ravens, by Masahisa Fukase