131. Empire Strikes Back is only better than the original Star Wars if you accept the premise of the franchise as a serialized narrative. Star Wars is the better movie; Empire is the better Episode.

Altadena is really cool. Near huge population centers but with small-town vibe, diverse, lots of old Craftsman and Spanish-style houses, kinda artsy, very outdoorsy.

You're going to hear a lot about Altadena, a beautiful, eccentric, really special community that suffered massive losses. If you haven't had a chance to visit, help them rebuild when it's time by coming, supporting local businesses and donating; they don't have the resources some other areas do.

The Pasadena Red Cross resource center desperately needs pillows, sleeping cots/mats/pads & diapers in bigger kid sizes. Donations just wrapped for the day but opens at 7 am tomorrow.

Address if you can help: 128 S Marengo Ave

Not to be corny but I do think the ongoing aspiration to make America a pluralist democracy of equals is righteous, beautiful, and worth honoring, even if it has more often been the struggle of minorities & dissenters than the policy of the government. 🇺🇸

my advice to young writers? if you buy coffee in brick packaging it can be tough to open, easy to spill, and difficult to reseal. the trick is to buy a can of coffee first, and when it runs out, reuse that can as a place to pour bricks of coffee in. i’m sorry, what was the question

One of my favorite sub-genres of art is Cats Stealing Food in Still Life Paintings. It’s so wonderfully disrespectful. Like Still Life with Cat by Alexandre-Francois Desportes, 1705. www.thegreatcat.org/the-cat-in-a...

I just got a pocket-sized gamma-ray scintillation spectrometer. The first thing I did was a run a rough scan on a smoke alarm. Not the cleanest spectrum but it looks like it works!