Things remain extremely dry here in Southern California with no snow or rain in the forecast for the rest of the month. Hopefully, we'll see more precipitation and cooler temperatures soon.If not, last week could just be the first wave. Elsewhere in the West, potentially even more dangerous conditions are in the forecast.

The arctic air that chilled Colorado all weekend continued Monday, bringing heavy snow and strong winds with it.

The National Weather Service issued a wind chill warning for the central mountains, southern Colorado, the Front Range and the Eastern Plains Monday, saying wind speeds above 50 mph could lead to temperatures of at least 20 below zero. The warning was in effect until Tuesday.

 

Which got me thinking about André de Toth's sadly under-recognized Day of the Outlaw featuring Robert Ryan and Burl Ives at the top of their games, with strong support by Tina Louise (who really should be remembered for more than that TV show). Unforgettable last half hour.

I talked yesterday about how most of LA was getting back to normal but how the demographics of the fires (or more accurately, of one of the fires) fed the perception of the whole town lying in smouldering ruins.

The second piece of information you need in order to understand how this story has been reported is that one of the two major fires, the Palisades Fire seemed to target the richest and most famous people in Southern California. This is not entirely a coincidence. Wealthy celebrities are attracted to the spectacular views and relative isolation found in the Santa Monica Mountains. People like Ben Affleck pay a considerable premium to live in these beautiful tinder bundles. The median home price for Pacific Palisades is somewhere around $4 million and the outliers raise the mean considerably.

Many, perhaps even most of the Hollywood's elites were either in or adjacent to the Palisades Fire. These people tend to take themselves and their problems very seriously in the best of times. You can imagine how they react to an actual conflagration.

 [Emphasis added]

How the 2025 Oscars Could Save Los Angeles (and Themselves) by Steven Zeitchik

How in the midst of the wildfires‘ unfathomable tragedies, [awards shows] could heal our soul like Barbra Streisand at the Emmys after Sept. 11, or unify our disparateness like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s posthumous win did at the Grammys in 1971, or even channel our rage like Michael Moore at the Oscars at the start of the 2003 Iraq War.

A well-designed Academy Awards on March 2, with some tasteful tributes from victims and a no doubt powerful acceptance speech or two, would be exactly what Los Angeles and the country need — the national Thanksgiving dinner that, at their best, awards shows can manage to be.  

...

The Academy has just said that the Oscars will continue as planned but without some of the run-up glitz, like the Nominees Luncheon (and amid several Academy governors losing their homes in the fires). It’s clear they’re still figuring out the shape and tone of this year’s show. But if they were simply to go forward with the usual list of presenters and acceptances under more somber lights and some time roped off for a tribute, it would feel … not exactly tone-deaf, but certainly like a missed opportunity.

 Brief side note. The combined death toll of the widely covered Palisades Fire and the far deadlier Eaton Fire (not a lot of movie stars in Altadena) is currently 25. In 2018, 86 people died in the Camp Fire. As far as I can tell, no one at the Academy at the time mentioned the need for a national day of healing.

I had lunch outside on Monday. Airnow.gov said that the air quality was good so I took the opportunity to enjoy the sunshine and walk down to a neighborhood restaurant not far from my place with a nice patio facing the sidewalk. It was a beautiful, chilly day. Things felt back to normal.

People I encounter are still talking about the fires, of course. They compare notes on the damage wrought by the windstorm and what the air quality was like in the days after, conversations of people who shared and interesting adventure, the sort you hear after a typical Los Angeles earthquake. There is a small amount of anxiety about the next fire – – conditions in Southern California remain very dangerous – – but no sense of trauma, certainly nothing like what the coverage would suggest.

There are two essential pieces of context absent from the stories that have been dominating the news. The first is the sheer scale of this place. Los Angeles County (and, as is usually the case, county is the appropriate unit here) has over 10 million people and covers over 4000 square miles. A considerable portion of that is forested. For those living next to those wooded areas, or worse yet nestled in them like Pacific Palisades or La Cañada Flintridge, these fires can present a serious and immediate danger and there have been some real tragedies, but for the vast majority of us the impact of the past few days has been limited to wind damage and smoke.

The second piece of information you need in order to understand how this story has been reported is that one of the two major fires, the Palisades Fire seemed to target the richest and most famous people in Southern California. This is not entirely a coincidence. Wealthy celebrities are attracted to the spectacular views and relative isolation found in the Santa Monica Mountains. People like Ben Affleck pay a considerable premium to live in these beautiful tinder bundles. The median home price for Pacific Palisades is somewhere around $4 million and the outliers raise the mean considerably.

Journalists love talking about the travails of the rich and famous; they love showing pictures of desolate wreckage and burned out buildings. The past week has given them lots of the sort of things they look for and has made for some very happy editors, but the picture that the rest of the country has gotten has been wildly inaccurate.

Tuesday afternoon a week ago I watched heavy metal lawn furniture get picked up and thrown in a pool. That night the power went out, perhaps due to the huge tree that came down half a block from my apartment, the trunk of which I had to climb over to get to the one isolated restaurant that still had the lights on. (I have no idea how they still had power. Everything else was dark for miles.) For about four days after that the air had that distinctive orange-brown-purple bruised color. Other than some drives to the store, I stayed inside my apartment, occasionally checking to make sure that nothing unlikely had happened with the evacuation zones.

It was an interesting week, representative of the recent experiences of most Angelenos, but fallen trees and smoky air are not the sort of footage that goes national, which is why I also spent the week fielding calls from friends and family seeing how I was doing.

I'm fine. It is still too dry, still too windy, and the next fire might be closer, but for the moment I am doing just fine.