Not Stukas Over Disneyland, but instead Zeppelins Over California!

Slashdot points to a story in The Industry Standard on a very, very cool thing: “Look, up in the sky: Zeppelin company Airship Ventures raises $8M” —

This fall, if our San Francisco Bay Area readers spot a zeppelin overhead, don’t worry — you haven’t been caught in a time warp. It will just mean that a startup called Airship Ventures has succeeded in bringing the zeppelin (an icon of 1930s aviation) back to the United States. The company just raised $8 million in a first round of funding.

Specifically, Airship Ventures plans to offer zeppelin rides out of Moffett Field. If the company follows through on its plans, it will bring the first zeppelin to Moffett Field since 1947. In a few months, Airship will operate a single Zeppelin NT based in Moffett’s Hangar 2, which was built by the Navy to house zeppelins in 1942.

Now if only they were down here in SoCal…

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.

Continue…

From the AP comes a curious item about the potential of Belize having its World Cup qualifier in LA or Houston:

Belize is working to stage its home World Cup qualifier in June against Mexico in either Los Angeles or Houston, the head of the country’s soccer federation said Wednesday.[…]

Belize doesn’t have a stadium that meets FIFA standards for the first leg of the two-match series on June 15, Mexico’s opener in qualifying for the 2010 World Cup.

I imagine getting tickets if it’s here in LA would be a smidgen difficult.

Did you know there’s a California Nebula? I found out myself today thanks to the ever-awesome Astronomy Picture of the Day and its March 7th entry, “Comet over California” showing Comet Holmes gracing the edge of the image:

Today’s entry linked back to a March 2005 APoD entry: “NGC 1499: California Nebula” which shows it off to better effect:

More info on NGC 1499 is available at the Atlas of the Universe and also at SEDS. Wikipedia’s page on the nebula says:

It is almost 2.5° long on the sky and, because of its very low surface brightness, it is extremely difficult to observe visually. It can be observed with a H-Beta filter (isolates the H-Beta line at 486 nm) in a rich-field telescope under dark skies. It lies at a distance of about 1,000 light years from Earth.*

* Other sources place it at about 1,500 light years.

Chivas (the original one) has something of a scandal on its hands, thanks to Sports Illustrated.

‘Gringo’ in Chivas’ midst

Because of his ties to California, Chivas de Guadalajara forward Jesús Padilla earned the nickname “Gringo.”

Turns out, there’s more to his nickname than just his American upbringing, and the reality may cause some serious credibility problems for Chivas, a club whose massive support south of the border is in part thanks to its policy of fielding only Mexican-born players.

SI.com has learned that 20-year-old Padilla was, in fact, born in California and not in the Mexican state of Jalisco, as his bio on Chivas’ Web site states. At any other club in Mexico, such a fact wouldn’t be an issue. At Chivas, however, it’s a big deal.

Whoops!