This morning I'd feared we might be in for another lightning storm because the entire sky was streaked with clouds. Fortunately, nothing came of them. It would be annoying for another storm to start new fires when the last of those started on June 21 has finally been contained. I still smell a bit of smoke in the early mornings, but the remaining hot spots which emit it will probably soon be out. The fires burned just a bit less than 60,000 acres in the county, and destroyed 106 houses and 16 outbuildings. The few remaining firefighters working on them will soon be able to
Speaking of disasters, this is interesting: The news media were badly shaken by a moderate earthquake which struck an L.A. suburb today. Oh, those poor newscasters! How stressful their jobs must be!
And speaking of news media, today we got our first delivery of the new, downsized Sacramento Bee. They are still using up their old paper stick, so our copy had very wide margins, but I can see what it's going to be like from now on. The most distressing thing for me is something the publishers probably consider compensation for the diminution of the paper: the daily comics (except for one strip) are now being printed in color. I'm reading shrunken daily comics in color! It's like Sunday got shriveled up somehow! The one non-conforming strip is Wiley Miller's Non Sequitur, and The Bee decided to tint the speech bubbles of that black-and-white strip in yellow and pink, while all the other, colorful strips have black-and-white speech bubbles. It reminded me of the black-and-white Betty Boop among the full-color characters in "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?"
There was something else but it's completely slipped my mind.