Posts Tagged → dirt
One Year Later…SoCal still a disaster
Recently I had the pleasure of visiting southern California. But the much vaunted amazing Mediterranean climate SoCal is famous for was nowhere in sight, as buckets of rain fell day after day. The temperature stayed between 45*F and 60*F, which coming from the frozen East Coast sure felt like a vacation to me. But boy did the locals beeatch up a storm of complaints about this unseasonal discomforture.
What was striking about the trip’s weather was not so much the uncharacteristic cold, but the lack of official preparation for the torrential rains that accompanied the cold. You would think that the people there have been through this enough to know what to do by now. You know, mitigate the threat, reduce the pending damage, save lives, save property.
Much of SoCal’s building surface is a weird mix of loose dirt and small rocks, and it is prone to easy erosion. This has been known since the time of Ronald Reagan’s ranching days there, an Ice Age ago. As we drove north along the 405, we could see many large, often extravagant buildings perched unsteadily over chasms below, which had once held enough dirt to comfortably, on which to confidently, build a house.
And then the summer fires came (year after year) and burned the vegetation that holds the dirt in place, and then came the winter rains that washed the loose un-anchored dirt away, and left the expensive homes literally hanging, clinging for life to shreds of dirt on the uphill side of the ever-deepening slope below.
Eventually all the homes and buildings we saw hanging out in the wind, perched over a void, will slide downhill like a toboggan, like those before them that were once closer to the growing chasm and which are now completely removed from that landscape.
Their once carefully secured electric, water, data, phone, and sewer connections will be lost forever. Many are already visible, sticking out of the dirt like veins and arteries of a heart held high in the hand of a surgeon, or of an Aztec priest.
The place, the actual land itself, that was once surveyed and measured and given a parcel number, will no longer exist. The old building lot will be seen on paper and on old aerial photos, like a ghost, but the actual dirt that it was once made of will no longer exist. That building lot will go the way of so many others right there over the past few decades: Mass wasted by heavy rains downhill into steep arroyos, and eventually washed out into the Pacific Ocean.
When I was a kid, people not from California joked a lot about how the great San Andreas Fault would eventually crack open, Biblically swallowing great swaths of expensive SoCal real estate and its fancy cars and shiny people, and then shearing off the surviving residual into the Pacific Ocean. The more culturally conservative the joker was, the more emphatic was their lack of humor about this looming armageddon. And why not?
Yes, you and I must be curious about the strange mindset of all those tanned beautiful people living their pretty plastic lives over there in SoCal, surrounded by palm trees and perennially perfect days. It cannot possibly be real. Kind of like the American Pompeii – not if it will happen, but simply when. Especially curious about the people, because They seem so damned judgmental and contemptuous of Us, the great unwashed and untanned living in Flyover Country.
And while there have been some exciting earthquakes in SoCal, it is more the tick-tock-tick-tock metronome-like regular prosaic wildfires and monsoons that are the real threat to house and home and happiness in SoCal. These natural disasters happen like clockwork, and yet are treated each time with wide-eyed amazement by SoCal residents. Yes, the rains come every winter, but these rains, oh God, THESE rains, this year, they say…
Even worse have been the elected officials, whose reactions have run from feigned amazement to outright glee at the opportunity to score so much waterfront or Pacific view properties at such low prices…and so why not wonder at both the residents and their duly, unquestioned elected leaders, who fail to prepare for the erosive rains or the wildfires. A year ago this week, catastrophic wildfires ate a lot of beautiful SoCal real estate and homes, due to no brush management, no water in reservoirs, incompetent DEI firefighters.
Nothing has changed a year later. SoCal residents now just as defiant and silly as they were last year, still blaming the unusually extra strong sunshine or some guy in Washington DC for their unhappiness. I think just one building permit has been issued for the thousands of homes lost last year, and yet the Los Angeles mayor and the California governor enjoy plenty of support from their victims.
But just maybe the failure to issue building permits to last year’s total loss homeowners of Malibu and Palisades is the biggest mitigation step ever taken. That would be ironic. I don’t know, can’t know, and really don’t want to know. Rather, I am sitting over here on the cold East Coast drinking a hot cocoa with a splash of whisky, watching SoCal go through the death convulsions and twitches of a dying body politic and its sick land base.
You could possibly write the script to this Hollywood movie, but I think the best one was already written a long time ago. It is called The Bible…
(My iPhone screenshots of the 2025 fire are below, taken as it developed, and they include some heartbreakers such as spectacular homes and barns catching on fire, and a homeowner racing back to his home in his pickup truck, only to be blocked by smoke and then fire, and then turning and retreating just as the flames engulf his position, his beautiful mansion going up in flames behind him. Some of the mountain cameras send messages that they cannot upload their images… because they have been burned to a crisp)
Recall that the beautiful Will Rogers homestead and farm in Topanga burned to the ground. It was my favorite hiking destination in SoCal
Note the pickup truck on the road. One of the screenshots I took showed the driver get out with his hands on his head, obviously upset
My dream clothes washing machine is from 1999
In the past twenty years- plus, an aggressively misleading effort has been shoved down our American freedom-loving throats that the only home appliances we should ever want to own are so energy efficient and water efficient that they don’t actually achieve the results they are made to achieve.
Mostly we are talking about clothes washers (washing machines), although dishwashing machines, ovens, and even microwaves and toaster ovens have been bastardized on the false altar of “efficiency.”
What I miss most about washing machines are two things: A powerful agitator, and a manual override so I can select exactly the combination and level of functions I myself believe best fit the clothes I have placed in the clothes washing machine. I miss these two aspects that were basic to washing machines up until about 1999-2000, because absent them, it is now almost impossible to find a washing machine that actually and fully cleans my clothes.
All electronic/electric clothes washing machines sold today are extremely water efficient, and also extremely energy efficient. For those who struggle with what we are talking about here, neither water efficiency nor electricity efficiency will clean your clothes. You need lots of water and energy to clean clothes in a modern washing machine. Water and electricity efficiency means less of both key ingredients, and energy-efficient machines will not clean your clothes. High efficiency will result in your clothes being far less clean than they could be, were we using a real basic washing machine from 1999.
Today’s washing machines use so little water that the clothes bathing in it are essentially just getting dirty over and over again. Insufficient water is used to actually clean the dirt out of your clothes and hold it in suspension. And the low-electricity thing is just as ridiculous, because the impellers that have replaced agitators do absolutely nothing to actually clean your clothing. What agitators are available on the market are pathetic, limp-wristed little creatures.
Watch an old-fashioned agitator at work. The water is flying everywhere, the clothes are being pushed violently in the water, and your eyes can see that the clothing is being bathed in a lot of water that is also moving very aggressively. That is how clothes get clean.
Now go watch an impeller do its thing. An impeller kind of limp-wrists a pizza throw. It is a half-hearted effort to move whatever is on it. It hardly moves the clothing or the water. I have put folded clothing and sheets and pillow cases in our “deluxe” washer with an impeller, and with the alternative mini agitator, and after the longest possible wash cycle, the objects are removed just as neatly folded as they were when they were placed in the “washer.” Yes, they are wet, but they were not moved around, and the dirt that was lodged in them before they went into the washer is just as lodged as it was in the beginning. In other words, impellers do not work, and claims that they are just a more efficient type of agitator are BS. Your own eyes will tell you this, and probably your nose, too.
And today’s agitators are so small, with such pathetically short turns (guessing about ten degrees of arc) that they, too, do very little to wash the clothes surrounding them.
Why are Americans being fooled into buying electronic appliances that do not work? Because people who think they are smarter and better than us have strong-armed appliance manufacturers to provide “efficient” items that use less water and less electricity than prior models. Yeah, it is true that these dish and clothes washers use less water and less electricity, and it is also true that their amount of clothes and dish cleaning also drops about 90% for the same effort.
The Maytag washer we mistakenly bought takes an hour and a half to do a “Normal” load of wash, and when it is done, we are lucky if the clothes don’t require a second wash. Maytag is not alone; it appears that all of the washing machines made today are just as weak and pathetic.
In other words, “efficient” washing machines are such bad cleaners that they require much more use (= more time, more water and more electricity) to achieve even a modicum of result. The now old fashioned washing machines kicked the crap out of our clothes in a large amount of water, and in about fifteen minutes our entire load of laundry was done. And in fact the formerly dirty clothes emerged very clean.
So my dream washing machine today is one from 1999. It has simple analog turn dials, very few gidgety-gadgety electronics or computer chips, and the entire thing is one big manual override. Every choice I make is because I want that choice and that outcome. The machine makes no choices for me. It is also a top-loading drum that holds enough water to actually wash the clothes that are placed in it, and it has a powerful enough agitator that sweeps far enough (at least a 30 degree arc, and 60 degrees of arc is even better) and aggressively enough to actually knock the dirt off of my clothes and push it into suspension in the abundant water.
That is how we clean clothes with a washer. Anything else is just getting the clothing wet.
When it comes to cleaning my clothes, I really don’t give a cr@p about water efficiency or electrical efficiency. I want performance. The job has to be done right, and whatever it takes to get the job done right is what should be put into the job. Lots of water? OK. Lots of electricity needed to push a powerful motor that churns a strong agitator? OK.
High efficiency? No thanks. I will take the very low efficiency and highly effective washing machine, please.
It is hilarious and also a little spooky that what used to comprise the most basic washing machine that cleaned the most clothing with the least amount of effort is now sold as a machine with “lots of bells and whistles.”
I can’t believe we consumers have to write things like this, because it all seems so self evident. Then again, literally everything surrounding us Americans has been hijacked for some “higher purpose” that ends up leaving us and our needs in the dust. Because the people who push this garbage are “better” than us and “smarter” than us, and they think we are dust, over whom they must exercise heavy manual control.
Funny how symbolically asymmetrical this all is. Like a washing machine that in the 1960s symbolized how advanced America was is now a symbol of how screwed up America has become, and all because of the Left’s extremist politics.
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, washing machines had reached their zenith of effectiveness
If I could get a “modern” and “high efficiency” washing machine to work half as well as this 1960 model, I would put on a dress and dance around, too
Imagine doing laundry dressed like you were ready to go out for dinner. Oh the painful irony that our grunge-dressing culture embraces crappy washing machines that in fact don’t get the grunge out of our clothing. Some things in Western Civilization were definitely much better in 1961 than now. Probably a lot of things.