August 21, 2008 archive

Threefer Wednesday: On Foreclosures of Rental Units, Yugoslavia and the SEIU!

The first original article, titled Renters caught in the housing bubble (by Adam Turl) via socialistworker.org:

EVEN THOUGH it was hard, Patricia and Michael Phillips kept up on the monthly $600 rent. Both are disabled–Patricia can’t use her right arm, and Michael is in a wheel chair–and both depend on Social Security payments for their limited income.

So they were shocked when the local sheriff’s department turned up at their front door in July and told them they were to be evicted by the end of the day. Their landlord was being foreclosed on–and even though he hadn’t been paying the mortgage for months, he had been cashing their rent checks.

The San Diego Zoo: ungulates and their friends

We paid for priority parking at the zoo, not wanting to repeat any mistake from the previous day.  Priority parking turned out to be not too far from the front gate, which we saved a lot of time passing through since we had already purchased our tickets.

We immediately got in the queue for the guided tour.  The zoo’s set up is quite a bit better.  The guided tour lets you know what’s where and your ticket will allow you to take express buses the rest of the day to whatever part you desire to see.

And we managed to see quite a lot of it, from the entrance to the top of the polar bear “plunge” (which, being up, not down, is in my opinion vastly misnamed).  I’m afraid I almost gave up a couple of times on the climbing parts.  I was saved by an escalator system and a special bus that runs up the hill.  From there you can take a sky tram back to the exit.  Or you could catch the tortoises and the sea lion show close by it.  Your choice.

I had a limit to the number of photos I could take.  The camera allowed between 50 and 55.  That’s not as many as I would have liked to have.  I got no photo of the massive takin, the “goat-antelope” of the Himalayas, the national animal of Bhutan, in the very last exhibit at the top (that’s a hotlink from wikipedia to the left).  Neither did I get a shot of the tiny dik dik from Southeast Asia, smallest of the antelopes, right across from it.  Now that I am writing this piece, I regret that.

I’ve broken my set of photos, supplemented by some taken by Debbie’s cousin Laurie, into four groups, trying to make the essays more accessible to folks using dial-up.  Ungulates and their Friends will be followed by Lions, Tigers Cats and Panda Bears on Saturday, Primates, Bears and Flashes of Color on Saturday and finally Tortoises and Trained Sea Lions on Sunday.  The schedule is extremely tentative.

So on with the show, good health to you…

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