Taken with my crappy cell camera while waiting at a stoplight over the weekend.  And keep in mind that I just came back from Iceland.

I knew it was crazy hot, but thermometers are often off by at least a few degrees, of course. I had to check when I got home — and yup, it was 110 in much of the Valley, 112 in Woodland Hills.  Somebody driving through across the Malibu hills could experience a 30-degree jump in about twenty minutes.

We get heat waves like this from time to time. But not usually during football season.  This is new. 

And certainly a heck of a welcome back from Iceland.  Kinda like the last time I came home from a long trip, arriving on the night of the Hollywood fires after two months in the Caribbean.

Sweet home, Los Angeles…

Taken with my crappy cell camera while waiting at a stoplight over the weekend.  And keep in mind that I just came back from Iceland.

I knew it was crazy hot, but thermometers are often off by at least a few degrees, of course. I had to check when I got home — and yup, it was 110 in much of the Valley, 112 in Woodland Hills.  Somebody driving through across the Malibu hills could experience a 30-degree jump in about twenty minutes.

We get heat waves like this from time to time. But not usually during football season.  This is new. 

And certainly a heck of a welcome back from Iceland.  Kinda like the last time I came home from a long trip, arriving on the night of the Hollywood fires after two months in the Caribbean.

Sweet home, Los Angeles…

Wonderful waterfall called Gullfoss — for a sense of scale, spot the teeny specks of humanity along the left edge.

But there’s no railing or protective fence.  Just a small reminder rope.  Apparently tort law has yet to reach Iceland.

So some people wander a little close to the edge.  I thought for a moment that I might even see an accidental human sacrifice.

Same level of non-security around Geysir, the giant geyser after which all other geysirs are named.  (Actually, Geysir hasn’t geysed much in many years, so most people hang out around its little brother, which blows a crowd-pleasing 35 feet in the air every 3 or 4 minutes.  Pretty remarkable.)

You can get pretty much right up to the edge here, too; a half-dozen tourists get scalded around here each week, in fact.  Not my idea of a great souvenir, but hey.  Got close enough myself (after checking the wind direction!) to get this pic — not of the explosion, since I’d seen geysers before, but of the millisecond just prior, as surface tension creates an enormous four-foot superbubble.

Talk about a cliffhanger.  More shortly.

This week’s timid animalito es este pudú, que está haciendo autostop, as they call it en Chile:

I was wondering how pudus get back and forth to work at the zoos. Pudus don’t like to drive.

And if you watch the video, turning the world sideways is a natural pudu form of defense.

Back in the US, but I’ll be posting Iceland stuff now and again for a while.  Seriously wonderful.

First stop: Thingvellir ("assembly field"), the inland stretch of land where the Althing, the world’s oldest parliament, began convening outdoors over 1000 years ago.  The air was so clear that the horizon was almost limitless.  Except for the few small buildings, this is probably much as it looked in A.D. 930.

Stunning place.  UNESCO World Heritage Site as of 2004.  (There are 851 on earth; they’re the real 1000 Places To See Before You Die.  Well, 851, anyway.  For me, this was 41 down, 810 to go.  Ulp.)

The traditional meeting spot was near the end of this huge ravine with 120-foot walls.  Scientists later realized that this is actually where the edges of the North American and European plates are slowly separating.  Cool, huh?  On the left, football is called "soccer," tectonically speaking. 

Next stop: what appears briefly to be a possible human sacrifice.

More shortly.