Many people out there believe that Southern California is one of the best places to live. Well, perhaps that is so, but if you love frequent fires then it indeed is the best.
Because of its hot and dry climate, fires in Southern California are a common phenomenon. Sometimes only the winter season is free of them, but not always. With the arrival of new spring, their season starts for good again. Until yet another late fall.
Where I happen to live, in Hollywood, arguably the most famous part of Los Angeles, I have witnessed two fires this year already and it's not even mid May! Both on the Hollywood hills that feature the famous Hollywood sign. The first of them broke out a few weeks ago, started allegedly by some teenagers. It ravaged the northern part of the hills overlooking Burbank that hosts the NBC studios famous for The Tonight Show.
The more recent fire broke out just yesterday in the eastern part of the hills, close to the Griffith Observatory, another famous Hollywood landmark. Famous largely to the locals as the Hollywood sign dwarfs all other landmarks squarely.
Both fires were relatively easy to manage and got contained within several hours. I happened to see a large cloud of smog from the first fire, but the other one was only a TV event to me. It looked really spectacular though as you can see in the picture posted on my site. Fortunately, the observatory survived unscathed.
However, some fires can go on for many days. When this happens and the fire location is close to town, you see a lot of smog in the air. The last time this happened, in late Fall 2003, you could watch sunspots with a totally naked eye. No protection was really necessary.
Because of the thick fire smog, the Sun face was reddish most of the day, its shorter wavelengths extinguished by the dust in the atmosphere. This usually happens only during sunsets and sunrises when the Sun is close to the horizon, but then it was possible even with the Sun still high above it. I could easily see a huge sunspot and a few smaller ones on its surface. It was around 4 PM as I was approaching the local Hollywood library along Selma Street, facing west.
To see the picture of a really spectacular fire ravaging the hills near the Griffith Observatory in Hollywood please visit this page (http://www.eminimethods.com/la_fire.html).
Waldemar Puszkarz, Ph.D., is a web veteran with 15 years of web surfing under his belt. By training, he is a theoretical physicist, but his interests are much broader than science and include trading financial markets, sports betting, poker, and researching online business opportunities. He is also an avid book reader and sports afficionado. Currently he is making his living mostly as a day trader. He has been in the trading trenches for almost a decade during which he has traded a variety of financial instruments. He is the owner and webmaster of Eminimethods.com (http://www.eminimethods.com) which provides free common sense trading education and simple trading systems for e-mini and stock markets as well as reviews of honest online business opportunities in Meet HOBO (http://www.eminimethods.com/HOBO.html) section of his site.