Rider On The Storm

4:21 p.m.

It was pouring at St. John's in Rancho Santa Margarita when I left for a meeting at the Diocese. Out of Orange County, Interstate 5 (or the 5, as we say in southern California) runs northwest toward downtown Los Angeles. When traffic opened up north of Disneyland, we seemed to be headed into blue sky.

4:32 p.m.

As the freeway turned a few degrees north around Imperial Highway, which connects LAX to Yorba Linda, this cloud bank suddenly loomed. A moment later it was raining again.

5:09 p.m.

Something about all that water. I took the opportunity to inspect a Holiday Inn in La Mirada. When I emerged, the rain was over. The storm seemed to be moving southeast at the same rate the rush hour traffic was moving north.

5:31 p.m.

I was 15 minutes from downtown as the setting sun colored the clouds lingering over the San Gabriel Valley. The foothills looked like they were on fire. I couldn't get a picture of that; too dangerous.

34,000...

...feet above the Grand Canyon ...residents lost power in and around LA during an outage in September...new troops sent to Afghanistan by President Obama in November 2009...fewer jobless claims this November than the month before...cars Toyota said it would fix in an announcement last April...as of 3:30 this afternoon, page views of The Episconixonian since I started blogging again in August. Thanks, readers!

Aw, Their First Schism!

As 300 hundred atheists gather for a conference at the Biltmore in Los Angeles, there's already blood in the water, just like in the Church, which means that the movement is experiencing a vital moment of denominational maturity.

The largest tactical question the no-faith faith faces is how aggressively to challenge and confront believers. Books, articles, and conferences? Wearing sandwich boards on street corners? Throwing Gideon Bibles into the hotel pool? More cartoons of Mohammad (let's not and say we did)? The chairman of the Center for Inquiry, dedicated to fostering a secular society, has already been ousted in part because he was considered too mellow. Purges are good; they've definitely worked for us over the centuries, as has the public denunciation of apostates. When a second member of the accommodationist clique, author Chris Mooney, said that you didn't have to believe in God to be spiritual, biologist P.Z. Myers responded:

Whenever we start talking about spirituality, I just want to puke.

No worries. You guys are doing just fine!

Acting Cooley

LA's DA isn't letting up on Roman Polanski, "Slate" reports after interviewing him. Steve Cooley's office also notes that the more serious charges against the director were never officially dropped, since he skipped town after copping a plea.

Echo Park, Los Angeles, At Dusk