Winsome....

Night was clear for a while, then the clouds returned and brought a dismal drizzle which I am now enjoying. Others will be enervated by this dreariness, which will please me all the more. I am blessed with meteorological schadenfreude. The others, however, get their revenge when I go poking about the Internet, finding more and more irritating errors. Wackypedia is full of them. For example, a line in the article on the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland claims that the theater's design is Art Deco (in an edit made by this user. Making it up as you go, indeed.) This is the exterior of the Grand Lake, and this is the auditorium interior.

So, we have a Renaissance-Baroque Revival facade, and a more restrained Renaissance Revival (so restrained as to be almost Adamesque) interior being identified as Art Deco. OK, it's a trivial thing to find annoying, but I'm annoyed anyway. I usually can't tell Louis XIV from Louis XV, myself, but conflating Art Deco with Renaissance Revival is more like not being able to tell the difference between a Louis XIV commode and Louis Armstrong. And the thing that annoys me most is that, if there are such egregious errors in Wackypedia articles about things with which I'm familiar, there are probably many equally egregious errors that I don't spot in other articles, about things with which I'm unfamiliar. Errors in important stuff! Wackypedia could be filling my head with crap!

I'm going to fix the error in the Grand Lake article when I get around to it (it's been there since June, for Bob's sake!) But I can't fix the ones I don't catch. I don't have time to fix most that I do catch, in fact. Internets drives me crazy. I like weather better.

Big Noise

Treetop winds sound ominous during a rainstorm. It sounds like a mass of rushing water, as though the dam had broken and we were about to be swept away by the flood. Of course, none of the dams around here could flood this high ground, even if they did break. But sometimes I doze off and hear that wind and half-dream that I'm at the elementary school I went to, downstream from the leaky MWD reservoir in Monterey Park. Then I fully wake, startled, and remember that all I need to worry about here is having the wind uproot one of those big trees from the sodden ground and topple it onto the house. Then I go eat the tastiest thing I can find in the kitchen, so it won't go to waste if I'm killed. Life is simpler than we sometimes think it is.