The LA Times has a story on a new dictionary that is helping to save Samala (the Chumash language) from extinction: “Chumash language brought back from the brink”:

A generation ago, the ancient Chumash tongue of Samala was all but dead, its songs and sagas buried in a university basement beneath mountains of yellowing research notes.

But now Samala is the talk of the reservation.

Thanks largely to a non-American Indian graduate student who was working for pocket money 40 years ago, the tribe has unveiled the first major Samala dictionary, a key moment in the language’s rebirth.

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Richard Henry Dana (for whom Dana Point was named) wrote Two Years Before the Mast as a diary during a sea voyage. I’ve not read it yet, though I will definitely be checking it out soon, if for no other reason than the portrait it contains of early 19th Century California.

In the book, which takes place between 1834 and 1836, Dana gives a vivid account of “the life of a common sailor at sea as it really is”. He sails from Boston, around Cape Horn, arriving in California when it was a remote Mexican land, and San Diego, San Pedro, Los Angeles, and San Francisco weren’t much more than a few sheds. He gives descriptions of landing at each of the ports up and down the California coast as they existed then. In the book, he makes a tellingly accurate prediction of San Francisco’s future. He also gives a nice description of a society wedding amongst the “Californios.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Years_Before_the_Mast

The text is available at Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4277

If you pretend those are her eyes, this is an exceedingly creepy photo:

The alien popstar queen prepares to suck the brain out of an unsuspecting toddler.

I was out watering the back yard plants earlier when a huge BOOM! BOOM! exploded somewhere. We had no idea at the time what it was, thinking maybe it was fireworks or something. But I think I know what it was!

“California landing for Atlantis”

The shuttle touched down at the Edwards Air Force Base in the Mojave desert at 1549 (1949 GMT).

Poor weather conditions caused the touch-down to be first delayed and then moved from the original landing site, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Congratulations to the Anaheim Ducks, who have brought Lord Stanley’s Cup to Southern California.

The first hockey game I ever attended was Red Wings at Ducks. I found myself tearing up seeing the emotion on the guys’ faces as they hoisted the Cup over their heads, particularly Teemu Selanne.

Well done et félicitations!