(Illustration found here).

A deeply-beautiful afternoon on California’s northern coast — finally after what’s  seem like weeks and weeks of rain in various forms, so far, appears like we will get a full-day’s worth of sun, and, there’s not much wind, so it’s about as good as it gets up here.

A lawn mower bangs somewhere in the distance, somewhere close out my window.

And a kind of lazy day — been listening to last.fm — jumping from one artist radio to another, mostly stuff from the ’90s, Toad The Wet Sprocket, Better Than Ezra, etc., along with the notables, Bush and Pearl Jam.
Just finished You Tubing Blur Song #2 — such scratchy, pithy fun.

I got my head checked
By a jumbo jet
It wasn’t easy but nothing is

Despite what we think.
In my humble opinion, the early to mid-1990s was one of the best ever for real rock-n-roll — dude, that’s covering a shitload of ground, yeah, so what — and this when the best stuff was produced outside the mainstream, although some of those bands, like Third Eye Blind off its first album, became big names in pop music (Semi-Charmed Life opened 1997’s Contact, the Jodie Foster movie).

I also heard a most-interesting version of Van Halen’s Jump earlier — catch it at Balloon Juice.
Performed by a band I’ve never heard of — Aztec Camera, a Scottish group out of the 1980s, which apparently has since disbanded or something, can’t find anything new from them online anywhere.

In a distant relation, also read at CNN those SS agents caught partying-hardy in Columbia were part-n-parcel of a likely assessment: All the employees are accused of cavorting prostitutes ahead of last week’s visit by Obama. They’d arrived earlier that morning as a part of the “jump team” that flies in on military transport planes with vehicles in the president’s motorcade.
Yep, might as well go ahead and jump…
And those boys jumped fast, too — in country by daylight, banging whores by dark.

And I missed the big bang this morning (find out tomorrow if anyone locally heard it):

A loud boom sounded over much of Northern California early Sunday, the apparent result of an ongoing meteor shower.
A meteor was streaking across the sky when it apparently broke up above the Earth, sending the sound reverberating across the area, said Stefanie Henry, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Sacramento.
The National Weather Service received reports of the sound across Northern California, and even as far south as Orange County, she said.

Odd that shit.
And apparently along with the bang,  the incident also carried some rocking and rolling, though, without any earthquake: Erin Girard-Hudson of Arnold, Calif., told The Union Democrat of Sonora, Calif., that the loud boom that occurred around 8 a.m. made her 2-year-old daughter, Elsie, cry. “It knocked me off my feet and was shaking the house,” she said. “It sounded like it was next door.”
And included a fireball that was “…extraordinarily bright in the daylight” that accompanied the phenomenon, but even more odd was this from Dan Ruby, associate director of the Fleischmann Planetarium at the University of Nevada, Reno: “People are putting two and two together and saying it has something to do with the meteor shower,” he said. “But the fireball was probably coincidental and unrelated to the peak of the meteor shower.” Though the fireball was seen over such a wide area, Ruby said it was likely just “a little bigger than a washing machine.”
Ever tried to pick up a washing machine, Dan?
Heavy as shit, and have pieces of it falling on you can’t be delightful at all.

This too on Earth Day (via Raw Story):

The UN is to conduct an investigation into the plight of US Native Americans, the first such mission in its history.
…
The UN mission is potentially contentious, with some conservatives almost certain to object to international interference in US domestic matters.

Well, I bet — a lot of the screaming GOP-ers/Tea Party-ers won’t stand (or sit) for anything like genocide to crop up in this country’s history, but reality is not part of their constitutional make-up.

And also most appropriate this Earth Day, ‘The Snake,’ by Emily Dickinson:

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,—did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun,–
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature’s people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

The last verse most telling.
And tomorrow’s Monday.