Overcast and way-windy this early Friday on California’s north coast as we face the second major rain storm coming today and lasting all through the weekend.

Here on the ocean’s edge we don’t get as much rain as just a mile or so inland — yesterday was mostly just drizzle/fine mist with a heavy downpour every so often. No much in the way of drought-busting.
Dr. Jeff Masters brings us up to measure: While this week’s rains and snows in California are a welcome respite, they will put only a modest dent in what is one of the worst droughts in California history. Today’s U.S. Drought Monitor showed that the portion of the state in “Exceptional Drought”–the worst category of drought–was 26 percent, nearly double the previous week’s value.
In the Bay area, this new storm could bring up to 4 inches of rain — San Francisco has received only 6.8 inches so far this rain season, way-down the chart from the normal of nearly 18.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Musician, Dancer, Goat & Bird‘ found here).

Meanwhile, there’s a couple of stories out there I spotted this week and never had a chance to comment, or make note — in reality, there’s most-likely thousands of similar items undetected by radar.
One was the interaction of human heads and health. Supposedly, “selfies” could spread head lice — whoa!
From UK’s Independent:

Experts have said that young people’s propensity to put their heads together and say cheese for the camera is causing an increase in head lice cases.
Speaking to SFist, California-based lice expert Mary McQuillan said: “I’ve seen a huge increase of lice in teens this year. Typically it’s younger children I treat, because they’re at higher risk for head-to-head contact. But now, teens are sticking their heads together every day to take cell phone pictures.”
McQuillan, of treatment centre Nitless Noggins, said that she has noticed a link between teens taking selfies and catching head lice.
“Every teen I’ve treated, I ask about selfies, and they admit that they are taking them every day…I think parents need to be aware, and teenagers need to be aware too. Selfies are fun, but the consequences are real,” she said.

There’s a spoil-sport, though:

“This is a marketing ploy, pure and simple,” Dr Richard J. Pollack, who teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health and runs a pest identification business called IdentityUS, told NBC News.
He said that lice are normally spread through “direct and prolonged head-to-head contact” and that it was “ridiculous” to claim that selfies were contributing to a widespread infestation problem.

And nothing said at the outset on how ridiculous are “selfies” — high-tech meets human vanity. And personal porn.
When you dispatch that “selfie” or pass along shit from some other Internet communications device, just remember nothing is private anymore.
From the Guardian:

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.
GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.
…
One document even likened the program’s “bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events” to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.
“Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for ‘mugshots’ or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face,” it reads.
“The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright.”
…
Sexually explicit webcam material proved to be a particular problem for GCHQ, as one document delicately put it: “Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person.
“Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography.”

The NSA and it co-conspirators have no bounds. Remember, Carlos Danger is not the public name for the private parts.

And the legalization of marijuana could save a lot of fiscal work.
First public financial returns off the legal sale of marijuana in Colorado — officials said Pueblo County in the southern part of the state has already made $56,000 in local sales taxes, and, should “…generate roughly $670,000 in new tax revenue for his county this year.”
From Colorado Springs, and, The Gazette:

Pueblo officials joked about the pot tax haul Monday in a county finance meeting.
“The irony is that the only new revenue we have coming in is in marijuana, and yet we have to open a new judicial building,” Commissioner Liane “Buffie” McFadyen quipped, according to a report Tuesday in The (Pueblo) Chieftain.
County Budget and Finance Director Cal Hamler replied, “We’re going to have to sell more weed.”

And we gotta smoke more weed — load the bong, pleze, to commemorate that it’s Friday.
Dude…?