Decal Update, Fires

Decal Update:

I know there's a few that are waitlisted, but I asked for a fairly large class. And, after speaking with somebody in the Ethnic Studies Department, I'm fairly sure anybody that wants to get in will be able to do so. The capacity of the reserved classroom is sixty-five students and from the past two semesters I've facilitated this course and the two semesters before that in which I enrolled in Stella Kim's DeCal, I believe it should be plenty of space.

Fires:

I've been meaning to post in detail what happened when I visited the North Korean embassies in the U.K. and France, but among other things, such as the beginning of my (super) senior year, I've also been preoccupied with the fire as of late. Despite what I may have said about the reporting done by the Los Angeles Times, which to me strikes a sensational tone to this tragedy, it truly is amazing when you consider how large of an area the fire has spread to and continues to burn, and yet how few homes have actually been lost. Not to mention the fact that my mother's home in La Crescenta had been until today under mandatory evacuation, but as I lived there for a large chunk of my life, from Mountain Avenue Elementary and Rosemont Middle School to Crescenta Valley High School, I still hold a strong affinity to the neighborhood. I lived on the La Crescenta side of Pickens Canyon and as a kid I remember building clubhouses with friends and then setting traps to protect our clubhouses, getting poison oak while exploring, or just simply making a routine cross through Pickens Canyon to reach those friends that lived in La Canada. While the two suburbs straddle each other, there is no direct road that runs from La Crescenta to La Canada until you get down to Foothill Blvd, so I remember the canyon intimately. A picture "Los Angeles firefighter Thomas Rindge takes a break from battling the Station fire in La Crescenta Monday" (Los Angeles Times):

And, from Wikipedia, this is a beautiful picture of the area before the fires. La Canada-Flintridge is also in the picture and is the middle-right part of the picture.

DeCal Update, Fires in Los Angeles

The DeCal page is now up.

More information will be posted on this blog, yes, I do indeed plan on podcasting all the classes. The page can be found here.

On a personal note, the fires that are blazing through Los Angeles have been on my mind a lot over the past two days. It wouldn't have been possible to anticipate how wide the fire has spread, but my mother's house is in one of the mandatory evacuation zones as of 2 am Sunday morning and until now 1am Monday morning. And, my hometown of La Crescenta is one of those neighborhoods that are threatened by the fire. I came across this piece of work here in the Los Angeles Times, a publication that I have been critical of in the past:

At its southwestern flank, the fire is spreading actively in the foothills above
the 210 Freeway, from Altadena to Little Tujunga. Officials said they had four
control objectives for the day:
-- Keep the fire west of Mt. Wilson Road
-- Keep it south of Highway 14.
-- Keep it east of Interstate 5.
-- Keep it north of both Foothill Boulevard and Altadena Drive (Firefighters predict another difficult day as they battle blaze on multiple fronts Los Angeles Times)

I mean, I don't know if the situation is that desparate, though it looks pretty bad or if its a typo or if its probably the least ambitious goal I've ever seen. Though I fear I am treading on hallowed ground here by criticizng the firefighting effort, that statement right there should and probably would induce panic in a lot of people -- I believe it is an extreme case of irreponsible journalism.

If I were to criticize all four of those statements together, it would sound even worse as that's a huge stretch of land right there, but if just all the houses above Foothill Boulevard were lost, then that's half of La Crescenta and La Canada-Flintridge, not to mention the neighboring suburbs of Tujunga, Sunland, and Altadena. Twelve thousand homes as one publication put it. My family has lived there for more than two decades now and I've never seen this before nor have I seen such a lackluster goal before.

The Los Angeles Times does provide an "interactive map."