You can really see the shape of this particular cloud system: pulled along by midlevel winds into a long, linear formation.
More info: Cloud Streets.
(Clouds.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
Peninsula Standoff
So a jailed senator being tried for a previous attempted military mutiny walks out of his hearing, joins with his band of rebel soldiers and political supporters, and once again initiates another mutinous standoff in a swanky Makati hotel, with Guingona calling on the people to start yet another EDSA-style revolution.
Bad move, bad timing. As with the Oakwood Mutiny, they’re once again trying to get their message across via the intimidation of foreigners. Plus, from the photos I’m seeing, it’s raining rather hard right now — not particularly conducive to spontaneous mass protest gatherings, and certainly not weather that curries the good graces of all the Peninsula hotel guests who just had to be evacuated into the storm. (Anyway, “Makati Avenue People Power” just doesn’t have the ring that “EDSA Revolution” did.)
Once again, Trillanes is doing it wrong, hoping to goad the public into a widespread protest big enough for the military to decide that it is “the will of the people,” but doing it outside the rule of law via petty grandstanding and scare tactics. He petulantly speaks out from an insubstantial, contradictory platform of threatened violence — all against a political opponent whose wrongdoings, while serious, are of somewhat dubious verifiability, nowhere near the egregiously oppresive kleptocratic tyranny of the Marcos regime.
This might be a good time to hark back to the Open Letter to Trillanes, a.k.a. “We’re not, like, tanga naman.”
More info: Manila Metroblogging, Inquirer, ABS-CBN News, Kelvin Lee, Underside, Amee.
You can also view the rebel soldiers’ website (if its limited bandwidth on free hosting lets you) and get news via free streaming Filipino radio stations.
At the time of this writing, Arroyo’s troops have begun raiding Peninsula Hotel with gunfire, but it’s almost 4AM here in DC and I need to get some sleep. Let me know how it goes.
Update: Gloria smacks down another Trillanes mutiny attempt, then proceeds to systematically squander the political capital gained from this victory by arresting journalists covering the spectacle and establishing a seemingly-draconian but actually pretty ham-fisted curfew over the area, probably to try and quell Friday’s planned protests.
(Mall explosions, congress bombings, multiple typhoons, an earthquake, and now this new coup attempt. I can’t wait to visit again!)
Luzon Earthquake (Nov 2007)
The text message from Mom came around 11:30pm: We just had a strong earthquake here in Makati. I checked the USGS Latest Earthquakes Map and list and found that preliminary data for the quake was already available in an event report: Magnitude 5.8 – LUZON, PHILIPPINES, 2007 November 27 04:27:00 UTC. The reported magnitude jumped to 6.0 once before settling back to 5.8, but the epicenter stayed pretty set in Pangasinan, about 50 km west of Dagupan. The PHIVOLCS earthquake report has the epicenter further west, off the coast, with the Manila Trench as a possible source.
Internet people in the Philippines were still online on various messaging systems, so obviously the quake hadn’t knocked out power. I sent a few friends the info, then leaned back and marveled at the wonders of this age; that I could get earthquake data from monitoring stations around the world scarce minutes after the event, from federal government scientific services freely and instantly available to me on the web and paid for by my own taxes. Thanks, USGS!
Fortunately, no one seems to have been injured. More on the earthquake from Manila Metroblogging, Inquirer, and GMA News.
Fall Comes to DC
It’s a bit late, but Fall color is finally showing itself in Washington. Here’s the C&O Canal towpath at 30th Street, covered in fallen leaves. Also check the thumbs for a few other snaps from a short trek down the towpath to the grassy slope between Lock 1 and Rock Creek, and a quick snap of the Capitol Dome behind shadowed treetops near Union Station:
Pigeons on Streetlight
Small flock of pigeons in a row atop a streetlight on Pennsylvania Ave NW near Georgetown, Washington, DC.
Scenes from Metropark
A few snaps from last night while waiting for the delayed train home at Metropark:
The top two are long exposures of passing trains — five and eight seconds — which suffered the wobblies from lack of a tripod. As for the arrow on the track, I have no idea what it was marking besides a white dot.
NJSunset.jpg
Sunday evening, sun setting behind the world’s tallest water sphere.
(NJSunset.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
FBCUbrd.jpg
Blackboard in the fellowship hall at First Baptist Union, possibly after a kids’ Sunday School class. What can it all mean?
(FBCUbrd.jpg uploaded by brownpau.)
AMNH Demotes Pluto
Please do indulge me in just one more AMNH entry tonight, but I just wanted to point out that, in yet another great stride for the Holy Cause for the Demotion of Pluto, the solar system exhibit at the Hall of the Universe (under the Hayden Planetarium in the Rose Center) has been seamlessly updated to exclude Pluto as a planet, mentioning it instead as a major member of the Kuiper Belt. This is right and decent and proper, and we praise the AMNH for their rational and progressive stance.
Central Park West
While at the AMNH we very wisely decided not to have lunch in the museum itself, and instead walked out into the cold to have lamb gyros and coffee at Niko’s, a cramped but delicious Greek diner at W 76th and Broadway.
Walking back along W 77th we found a little string hanging on the fence of a schoolyard, which when pulled would ring a bell on a tree. A little sign by the makeshift bellpull complained of vandals, while nearby a toy train announced the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, two days over by then.
