Christmas on Mars

This past weekend I witnessed the triumphant return of Robolights, Kenny Irwin’s holiday tribute to something-or-other that had been on hiatus for a couple of years. It’s not really something you would expect to see in Palm Springs. Truth be told, it’s not really something you would expect to see anywhere except maybe in a hallucination brought on by too much Pepto-Bismol. There is no way I can convey the magnitude of the display, but I’ll share some photos with you anyway.

It started off reasonably enough…

Oh, what am I talking about? This is actually the first thing that greeted me:

and things just, you know…

got really weird. And pink:

And robots. And lights.

Robolights. This is the last guy I remember seeing before I had a seizure:

Okay, it wasn’t really a seizure. More of just a neurological attack. It probably won’t happen to you if you go see Robolights.

She hasn’t long to stay

When I was in first grade the school district was making plans to close my elementary school, so we kids got to visit the other schools in the district to decide which one we wanted to go to the next year. The night before our field trip to the other schools, it snowed. I don’t think it ever snowed in Sunnyvale before then, and I know it hasn’t snowed there since then; it was pretty miraculous.

Anyway, it barely snowed enough to cover the ground, but when we got to Cherry Chase Elementary, I saw that some people who lived across the street from the school had taken all of the snow from their front yard and managed to make a little snowman. Even though it was really mushy and muddy and wouldn’t last the day, that snowman made me really happy, and that’s when I decided I wanted to go to Cherry Chase.

Dangerous weather

Don’t let the pelican-seal relations in this cartoon disturb you. There aren’t really pelicans in the Arctic Circle.

Seeking world’s smallest carrot

I went through Elysian Park this weekend and saw some really cute snowmen. Actually, this being Los Angeles, they weren’t snowmen – they were tumbleweedmen. I think this little guy in London wins the “cute not-a-snowman” prize, though:

Is there such a thing as a nanohaberdasher? This guy could really use a magic nanohat.