GOVERNOR ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER:
Hey, hasta ('til) la vista, Baby! I'll be back! [1]
JUDGE:
You cain't stop marriage, whether gay or straight [2]
CONGRESSPERSON NANCY PELOSI:
'Lected me to Congress; surely *proves* they're wack [3]
OLD, POLITICALLY-INCORRECT JOKE:
Fruits, nuts: livin' in the Golden State [4]
ALL CALIFORNIANS:
New self, make!
Boobs 'n butts are fake!
Legal marijuana: medical production
Past your prime? Age, battle?
Lots of liposuction!
Oil by the barrel makes the "boom" go "zoom" [5]
Movies move there: it's sunny; much room [6]
Plen'y arrive with naught but hope [7]
Plen'y park cars; no CinemaScope™ [8]
Caaalifornia, where the bucks come sweepin' down like rain [9]
Millionaires: replete; from tax, retreat
As the windbag pols collect their gain [10]
Caaalifornia, where the plastic surgeons: privileged class
Wantin' men to gawk, the gals say, "Doc,
"Tuck my tummy; facelift; tighten a*s"
The long Central Valley's the land:
Produce grown, fresh or frozen or canned [11]
You want to ski?
Wow! Squaw Valley, Mammoth, play
Two states: snow sprayin'
Straddlin' the line, there in Heaven [12]
Wetter snow, but - OK [13]
Ooooklahoma, came the Okies fleein' from the plain [14]
Hopin': life more sweet in land they greet
Irrigation takes the place of rain [15]
Ooooklahoma, ev'ryone, though old or young; gal, guy (gonna try!)
Spit and moan at luck, then drive or walk
Hopin' Valley, work'll more, supply
We must take a strong de-fense stand
Ere the Japs overrun US land! [16]
(Nip? Oh, no!) (Nippon, woe!) (Nipponese:) (Not *here*, please!) (Nip see? No!) (Nips don't show!) [17]
"Skunk Works" essay: [18] [19]
S- --- R-seven-one, display
So fast, it's flyin' [20]
Great plane for spy, Lockheed Martin [21]
Other nations: "Oy, vay!"
(agri-) (-culture) (oil) (aero) (movies) (techno)
Diverse? Man-y throng to this land [22]
Silicone? Silicon? We command! [23]
When buildings sway:
Oh! An earthquake hit today! [24]
Calm; no dismayin'
Seis-mograph line: small, no trauma
California: CA! -- [25]
F - O - R - N - I - Cate
California!
Yeah!
[1] More-or-less literal translation of Ahnold's trademark line™: "Until the (our) next sight (of each other)", i. e. "Until I see you again."
[2] TT agrees. Why aren't gay men entitled to the same misery as straight ones? (Wouldn't be so "gay" then, huh? heh heh ;)
[3] For one thing, who would want to have congress with her? (heh heh)
[4] Large agricultural production, plus the state's reputation for tolerance of diverse lifestyles (especially in metropolitan areas like San Francisco and Los Angeles) and cults, gave rise to the derogatory, if punny, slogan, "California: The Land of Fruits and Nuts". TT disclaims the slur-word, having had gay friends and co-workers during his time there.
The state's official nickname, "The Golden State", derives from the California Gold Rush that started with a discovery in 1848 and caused both population and economy to boom
[5] Little-known fact (*very* little): Oil discoveries within the City of Los Angeles in the late 1800s "put it on the map" long before the movie industry moved there. By 1923, Los Angeles was producing one-quarter of the world's petroleum, spawning millionaires and their mansions before the movie moguls became prominent.
Kern County, just north of Los Angeles County, presently produces about 10% of all oil produced in the US. At one time, (possibly still true today; can't immediately verify), it produced more oil than any other county in the continental US, surpassing those in the state usually associated with land-based drilling, Texas. It's lower-grade crude, though, and hence commands a lower price than Texas oil (which is lower-grade and lower-priced than Saudi oil.)
There were still working oil wells in and around Los Angeles when TT was there a decade or two ago. Any locals confirm that there still are? ... .strange sight in a huge, highly-populated metropolitan area..
[6] With a semi-arid climate, Southern California offers frequent good weather for outdoor filming. There was a lot of land back then for large studio complexes, large enough that they could build whole "towns" as needed, and a diversity of backgrounds for filming within a short drive: ocean/beach, teeming city, suburbia, mountains, desert, etc.
[7] Every day, thousands of wanna-be actors (gender-neutral, in LA, at least), arrive by bus or car; most get nowhere. Even among those few who make it into the union (Screen Actors Guild, or SAG), 98% earned less than $2,000 per year from "the business" when TT ttook his shott a while back -- and at least TT already had his SAG card before arriving.
[8] Homage to the lines in Dionne Warwick's 1968 hit recording, "Do You Know the Way to San José":
"And all the stars that never were
"Are parking cars and pumping gas"
(song so old, gas station attendants used to pump your gas for you! ;)
CinemaScope was an early technology for wide-screen movies, long since rendered obsolete by newer and better ones, but the name lives on.
[9] If California were a separate country (sorta' is. heh!), it would have the world's ninth-largest economy (eighth, before the current recession).
Southern California alone (commonly called SoCal), consisting of the State's seven or eight southernmost counties (depends on who is the county counter), would rank only one place lower worldwide, if it were a nation.
[10] This very wealthy state has had a budget crisis since 2008, with a deficit then of at least $11 billion, projected to top $40 billion over the 2009–2010 fiscal years. (Ya tryin' to outdo the US Government, or what?)
One reason: a substantial portion of the state's income comes from income taxes on a small proportion of wealthy citizens. For example, it is estimated that in 2004, the richest *3%* of state taxpayers (those with tax returns showing over $200,000 yearly income) paid approximately *60%* of state income taxes. The taxable income of this population is highly dependent upon capital gains, which have been severely impacted by the stock market declines and general recession.
"Rich people pay no taxes; they all fall on the poor and middle class!" ... Hey, don't let facts get in the way of your slogans.
"Soak the rich!" As above, they're already being soaked, which is a good incentive to move elsewhere (several US states still have *no* state income tax), and maybe to move your business and jobs elsewhere.
E. g., much movie filming has moved to Oregon or Washington (the two states north of California), Toronto (Canada), the Deep South US states, and others, to avoid the costly permits and union wage demands -- contributing to the job losses and budget deficits. Hence, the large number of movie scripts being written to be set in North Carolina or (sleeplessly) in Seattle.
[11] California's Central Valley, between the Coast Range mountains to the west and the Sierra Nevada ("serrated" (jagged), "snowy") to the East, runs about 500 miles (~800km) north and south. It's one of the world's most productive agricultural regions: On less than 1 percent of the total farmland in the United States, the Central Valley produces 8 percent of the nation’s agricultural output by value:
Nearly all non-tropical crops are grown there, including grapes. Anyone remember Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" being used as the theme song for commercials by the California Raisin Board, complete with dancing raisins?
[12] Heavenly Mountain Resort straddles the California-Nevada state line. So you can not only ski two states in one day, you can ski two states on one *run* -- there's a trail there that straddles the line, itself. You can change states with each turn.
[13] Unfortunately, the closeness to the Pacific Ocean tends to produce wetter, heavier snow, commonly called "Sierra Cement", versus the drier, lighter, fluffier (blow the flakes off your glove) snow of the farther-inland Rocky Mountains, most of whose resorts adjoin high-desert country; hence, more powdery snow.
TT's trip to Squaw Valley was a disaster: On arrival in the afternoon, 60F (~ 16C) and *raining*. Never saw people skiing in ponchos before. That night, it turned to sleet, then finally to snowing the next day. Damage done: On the steepest trail, you had to push your way down through the muddy snow. Two more tries at Mammoth Mountain, then back to the Rockies forever, as both skier and instructor.
In 1998, Congressman Sonny Bono, no longer chering the billing with Cher, died at Heavenly after skiing into a tree. Coincidentally, only a week earlier, Michael Kennedy, a son of Robert F. Kennedy, died in a similar skiing accident in Aspen, Colorado. The latter led to the joke that while the official story was that only one tree killed Kennedy, conspiracy theorists believe that there was a second tree on the snowy knoll.
(Some idiots actually suggested removing all trees from ski resorts. You think Al Gore is angry *now*? ... Besides, the trees serve a Darwinian function: instead of getting rid of the trees, the trees get rid of the stupid and/or drunk skiers.)
[14] The "Dust Bowl" (drought and resulting sandstorms) of the 1930s, undoubtedly caused by Global Warming long before the automobile, air conditioning, and other high-consumption fossil-fueled gadgets were commonplace***, drove many farmers and farmworkers to flee the American Great Plains. Oklahoma was among the hardest-hit; thus, many "Okies" fled to places like California farms.
Somehow, Rodgers and Hammerstein never saw fit to do the obvious sequel to their highly-romanticized musical, "Oklahoma!" (source of TOS). Instead, John Steinbeck's novel about said Okies, "The Grapes Of Wrath", which, like Gore, blamed capitalism for the weather and everything else, was made into a movie in 1940. Some critics felt the movie was less politically-biased than the book: one wrote that the producer and director "purged the picture of the editorial rash that blotched the Steinbeck book."
Steinbeck was a member of a Communist organization and frequented Communist circles. I guess farmers in the Soviet Union were much better off than ours.
Some analysts believe the "myth of the Okies", depicted and supported by Steinbeck's novel, is a mistake and that the story rings false. The Australian conservative commentator Keith Windschuttle, writing for The New Criterion, wrote, "In the film of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's statement that people owned their land not because they had a piece of paper but because they had been born on it, worked on it, and died on it is given to the half-crazy character Muley Graves. His sentiments, and the injustice of the dispossession behind them, resonate throughout the drama. Again, however, these remarks bear very little relationship to the real farmers of Oklahoma." ... OK (heh!), let's get back on topic (California).
*** NASA studied the causes of the Dust Bowl: The study found cooler-than-normal tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures combined with warmer tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures. These changes in sea surface temperatures created shifts in the large-scale weather patterns and low-level winds that reduced the normal supply of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and inhibited rainfall throughout the Great Plains.
So,.maybe we can hope for Pacific Warming? Pipe warm Atlantic water to the Pacific? Or just use sustainable, organic agriculture that doesn't deplete topsoil or ground cover.
[15] The northern portion of said Central Valley gets a goodly amount of rainfall, but the climate becomes more dry towards the south end. Massive irrigation projects bring water from the northern lakes and rivers to the dry southern end of the Valley.
[16] After the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and initial Japanese success in the Pacific Theater of World War Two, there was genuine fear of a Japanese invasion of California. (We locked up American citizens of Japanese descent, just to be on the safe side, so that we could fight to uphold American values of liberty and justice for all.) This gave rise to a huge defense industry that gave yet another boost to Southern California's economy: Not only would the goods be there if needed, but the climate gave plenty of fair-weather days for test flights of new aircraft.
Hughes Airport, in Los Angeles, was privately owned by Howard Hughes for his Hughes Aircraft Company. It's now defunct. Lockheed Aircraft Company, another huge (not hughes) defense contractor, bought the former Union Air Terminal and renamed it Lockheed Air Terminal, which it was known as until 1967, when it became Hollywood-Burbank Airport. In 1978, it was renamed Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport, and in 2003, Bob Hope Airport in honor of the recently-deceased comedian. But I'll bet most residents still simply call it Burbank Airport. (Paging 2Eagle... paging 2Eagle....)
As a souvenir of the fear (hey, TT's a poet! Who'd know it?), you can go to San Pedro, south of Los Angeles, and see (and climb into) the observation tower where anxious soldiers kept their binoculars trained on the Pacific, watching for the Japanese fleet to arrive. (It never did. TT knows how poorly history is taught these days, and therefore, takes no chances.)
[17] Unlike some of today's fashions, where the Nip *does* show. (That was *not* a complaint!)
[18] "Skunk Works" is an *official* alias for Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Development Programs (ADP), Originally based in Burbank, it moved in 1989 to a US Air Force facility in Palmdale, California, in the desert northeast of Los Angeles, though still in Los Angeles County.
[19] "essay" - here, not their term paper or press release, but "put to the test, as for its quality, or give experimental use to".
[20] The Lockheed SR-71 jet, nicknamed the "Blackbird", both for its color and for the "black" (covert) nature of the development project, was the world's fastest and highest-flying operational manned aircraft throughout its career. It set an "absolute altitude record" of 85,069 feet (25,929 m). That same day, one set an absolute speed record of 2,193 mph (3,530 km/h.) It has held the world record for the fastest air-breathing manned aircraft from 1976 to the present day.
It had virtually no defensive capability. If a surface-to-air missile was detected, the pilot would simply accelerate and climb, outrunning the missile and/or going higher than the missile could. The ultimate spy plane...
The SR-71 also holds the "Speed Over a Recognized Course" record for flying from New York to London in 1 hour 54 minutes and 56.4 seconds, The Concorde ate its exhaust, doing that route in 2:52 at best.
When the SR-71 was retired in 1990, one was flown from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. (2,300 mi., 3,700km) in 64 minutes 20 seconds. Sheesh -- it would take longer than that just to get through airport security.
[21] Lockheed Aircraft merged with Martin Marietta in 1995 to become Lockheed Martin. After the great defense build-up of the 1980s under President Reagan, culminating in the capitulation of a Soviet Union that realized that its plans of world domination were hopeless, the end of the Cold War cut back the defense budgets, resulting in numerous mergers of aerospace and defense contractors.
[22] You want "diversity"? Ever since Chinese workers were imported to work on the Trans-Continental Railroad, doing jobs that American workers wouldn't do (Sound familiar? As Yogi Berra said, "It's like deja vu all over again!"), the state has been a magnet for immigrants, both from within the US (see "Okies", above) and without. California also has more Native Americans than any other state, and about one-third of the entire US population of Asian-Americans.
California has the largest Muslim population of any US state, and Buddhists, too - by one count, 40% of all US Buddhists live in Southern California. Spanish Roman Catholic priests built the early missions, many of which became cities; hence, the prevalence of "Saint" in so many cities' names -- Santa Barbara, San Diego, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Luis Obispo, ... oh, and San Francisco. The Los Angeles Archdiocese is the largest in the US. The state is second only to New York in Jewish population.
Surprise, even to TT: California has more members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ("Mormons") and more LDS Temples than any other state except Utah, the home of said Church.
[23] "Silicon Valley" is in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California.. The region is home to many of the world's largest technology companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, HP, Intel, Cisco, eBay, Adobe, Agilent, Oracle, Yahoo, Netflix, and EA. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the American high-tech sector.
According to a 2008 study, Silicon Valley was the third-largest high-tech center in the United States. The Bay Area as a whole, of which Silicon Valley is a part, would rank first. Silicon Valley has the highest concentration of high-tech workers of any metropolitan area, with 285.9 out of every 1,000 private-sector workers. It also has the highest average high-tech salary, at $144,800/yr.
"Silicone" was just a word-play and call-back to the previous mentions of
fake ?
knockers, a/k/a
augmentation ?
mammoplasty, or
simply, "
boob ?
jobs".
(Guess it was also a sly way to sneak in TT's entire "body" of work on mammaries, or what one might call his "boob jobs" - plus the other one today.. ;-)
[24] Hey, it wasn't TT's fault, it was San Andreas' fault!
(Come to think of it, hearken back to footnote [22] and all those "Saint" names. How did San Andreas get to be a saint if he had such a large fault?
[25] (Non-US readers) Official US Postal Service abbreviation for California (CA). If you use something unofficial, they "go postal" on you. ;-(