"Impossible Perspective"

(Photo taken in Los Angeles by Asier Ibañez)

Talk about traffic jams and gridlock ????

Thousands of birds -- mostly Caspian terns -- take flight at dusk in the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve.

The Ferris Wheel -- Still a Favorite

(Photo from the recently held Orange County Fair)

Nice Shot of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate

(Photo by frankinho on Flickr)

Eye-Catching Excitement

On September 4-7 in Bismarck, N.D. the 39th annual United Tribes International Powwow will showcase more than 1,500 dancers and drummers from 70 tribes.

The Spectacular Art of Jiang Zhi

Conceptual Photographer and Artist Jiang Zhi's Rainbow N.2, 2006

Aston Martin Rapide

Prediction: The Aston Martin Rapide will make the competition – the Porsche Panamera, also due in 2009 – look like used strudel. The Rapide, based on the guts and innards of the DB9, is stunning, flashier than the tinfoil tassels on a burlesque dancer. The Panamera, um, isn’t.

Honda's Mystery Hybrid ?????

We don’t know what to call it; we don’t know what it looks like. But we do know that Honda has said “Prius-Schmius” and will field a cheap, high-mileage hybrid that will seat four or five and cost less that Toyota’s beloved eco-dumpling. Honda will also field a zippier hybrid based on its CR-Z (pictured) and, in 2010, a Hybrid Fit.

Bay Breasted Warbler
Swainson Thrush
Painted Redstart

Emerging Architect

Xu Tiantian is founding principal of DnA Design and Architecture, an interdisciplinary practice of city planning, urban design, and architectural design based in Beijing and Issaquah, WA. The office’s projects address “new relationships between architecture and urbanism in contemporary culture” particularly in the “interaction of program and context.” Recent projects include the Ordos Art Museum, Inner Mongolia; Xiaopu Culture Center, Beijing; Songzhuang Art Centre; Jinhua Architecture Park Public Toilet; public activity centers in Baixi Resort, Changbai Mountain; and private residences in Tokyo and Seattle.
Xu received her B.Arch from Tsinghua University in Beijing and her MAUD from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She has taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) School of Architecture in Beijing and has been a guest critic at numerous schools including Peking University and Tokyo Chiba Institute of Technology. Shown above is her proposal for a visitors' center in Baixi.

Chinese architect thrives on innovation

Above, Pei Zhu’s proposal for the Art Museum of Yue Minjun resembles a river stone.

Civil War Re-Enactment

Visit Huntington Beach and tour large scale Confederate and Union encampments as more than 200 re-enactors stage famous battles of the Civil War. The two-day event includes live canon and weapon demonstrations, actors in full costume, food vendors and a Civil War-era band.

On Saturday the first battle will be at 1:30 p.m. and the second at 4 p.m. Sunday features a church service at 9 a.m. then a battle at 11 a.m. and another one at 2 p.m. Admission is free.

Amid the rubble -- double trouble

A Barack Obama lookalike has been turning heads in Denver but Gerardo Puisseaux is in actual fact a Cuban immigrant from Miami.

Puisseaux was a construction worker until six weeks ago when he was hired by Spanish-language news channel America TeVe (www.americateve.com).

In his new guise as a budding television star, Puisseaux goes wherever Obama goes, causing confusion all round.

"Sometimes I get tired because everybody stopping me, a lot of questions, sometimes political questions," he told The Rocky Mountain News.

"I am not Obama."

Little League . . . Big Effort

Tokyo Japan's Takumi Ozeki pitches to Lake Charles, Louisiana in the consolation game of the Little League Baseball World Series in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania August 24, 2008.

REUTERS/Tim Shaffer (UNITED STATES)

An automobile that emits virtually nothing but water vapor

BMW claims "Our long-term EfficientDynamics strategy can be summed up with one vehicle: the BMW Hydrogen 7. As the world's first luxury performance sedan with hydrogen drive, it runs on the most plentiful element in the world and emits virtually nothing but water vapor. And because the infrastructure for refueling a hydrogen internal combustion engine is not yet complete, the V-12 engine also runs on gasoline at the push of a button, though emissions will result. But all it takes is the power of the Hydrogen 7's 12-cylinder, 260 horsepower engine to prove the capability of our EfficientDynamics. The BMW Hydrogen 7 is not available for purchase at this time, but is considered to be a milestone in bringing forward hydrogen as the sustainable fuel for individual transportation."

"On a global level, hydrogen technology addresses the growing gaps in the supply of fossil fuels. More specifically, it is the only fuel that can allow for a reduction in the overall emission cycle, while meeting our energy needs in a sustainable way. Besides, not many fuels can be produced from renewable sources such as sun, wind, water and biomass."

Save Our State Parks Campaign

In response to the Governor's January 10 proposal to close 48 state parks and reduce lifeguard staffing on 16 state beaches, the Foundation quickly developed a statewide campaign to generate attention about the proposal and mobilize Californians to oppose the draconian measure. To see how you can help keep State Parks front and center in our legislator's minds when they are crafting California's budget, click on the link below:

"The Lost Spy" by Andrew Meier

ON THE night of Feb. 20, 1939, three Soviet secret policemen knocked on a door at the Hotel Moskva in the Russian capital, asked to see the (fake) passport of its occupant, gave him a few minutes to gather some belongings and whisked him away to the notorious Lubyanka prison. Charged with espionage, he was questioned for almost a year before being sentenced to eight years in Norilsk, a mining center hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle and one of the bleakest islands in the Gulag Archipelago.

So far, so routine. Something like this occurred to millions of Russians during Stalin's paranoid regime. But this arrestee was different. He was an American citizen named Isaiah Oggins. And he was not spying for his native land. Since the 1920s, he had been a Russian spy, working in several countries, including his own. Andrew Meier's "The Lost Spy," a biography of Oggins, is, necessarily, a little vague on those matters. Putting it mildly, it is not in the nature of a secret agent's work to leave an easily documented record of his clandestine activities.

Nevertheless, "The Lost Spy" is utterly fascinating, a sad and sinuous study of true belief carried beyond all reason by a man who committed himself to the labyrinthine way without once, so far as Meier can determine, openly discussing what motivated him or offering an ideological rationale. That makes him, in some sense, a perfect spy, a guy who took his secrets with him to his unmarked grave.

From the John Kobal photography collection

Katharine Hepburn, by Ernest Bachrach, in 1935. "What was unique about Hollywood photography is that the stars would work with the same photographers over and over again," Kobal Foundation Chairman Simon Crocker said. "There was a trust. They knew that the studio's only job was to make them look fabulous."

"Richard Ehrlich photographs an archive of Holocaust cruelty"

FOURTEEN months ago, Richard Ehrlich left his office at the UCLA Medical Center, flew to Berlin and rented the best digital camera available. With the 39-megapixel Hasselblad safely stowed, he drove about 250 miles to the small town of Bad Arolsen and found his way to the International Tracing Service.

Ehrlich, a veteran urological surgeon with a second career in photography, had pulled plenty of strings to take pictures in the sprawling, six-building complex. But what he found was beyond comprehension: 50 million documents of Nazi atrocities in the world's largest Holocaust archive.

The vast repository would become the subject of hundreds of photographs, shot over seven intensely focused days and winnowed to a 54-image portfolio. He started in June 2007 and returned in September, taking long views of the storage system and close-ups of individual items, including Oskar Schindler's list of people who escaped death by working in his factory, a pile of snapshots confiscated from prisoners, badges that Jews were forced to wear, the order that sent Anne Frank to Bergen Belsen, where she died in 1945.

If the records and artifacts were placed side by side, Ehrlich says, they would form a 16-mile path into the minds and practices of Adolf Hitler's followers, who attempted to eradicate Jews and others deemed defective or undesirable. The materials -- divided into sections on incarceration, forced labor and migration -- are stored on shelves and in cabinets, arranged in neat rows in a former military facility.

Orderliness -- "the banality of evil," as Ehrlich calls it, quoting author Hannah Arendt -- is part of the story.