In my travels about town, I’m always on the lookout for something different, original, funny for the camera. One such find was on Cutter Drive the other day. It was the front half of a motorcycle emerging from the front of a garage. Different, yes…
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There’s a new traffic signal in town at the busy corner of Ohlone Parkway and West Beach Street. Considering the amount of heavy traffic there, including a lot of big rigs, farm equipment, people heading to Second Harvest Food Bank around the corner and A&S Metals, which almost always has a line of cars down the street — it comes as no surprise to regulate that intersection. A worker at the scene told me it would be up and working next week. They’re out there now painting the striping and such. The configuration will include a turn pocket from eastbound West Beach onto Oholone.
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This caught my eye in the news the other day: A 40 million-year-old skeleton of a saber-tooth tiger is up for auction in Geneva, Switzerland. The nearly four-foot skeleton was found buried on a South Dakota ranch and is said to be going for around $90,000. For me, the money is a small part of the greater story, the fact that such a beast was roaming around what was to become America 40,000,000 years ago.
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China has been collecting rocks and soil on the moon since Wednesday, thanks to a robotic spacecraft they launched Monday, named Chang’e 5. The gadget landed successfully and will return the collected goods in the next few days. The name stems from the mythical Chinese goddess of the moon, China’s state-run news agency Xinhua said. This is the first attempt to collect rocks from the moon by anyone since the 1970s. Chinese officials hope to fetch around 4.5 pounds of rocks and such and launch them back to Earth for analysis.
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Health officials now say that more than 100 people are infected with Covid-19 every minute in America. Worldwide there are now 64.7 million people with the virus and 1.5 million people have died. The US reports 14 million cases with 274,000 deaths. Santa Cruz County has 4,696 cases and 33 deaths.
The man who created the first ever vaccine for Pfizer in England said, as the vaccine was rolled out for public use this week, “This is the beginning of the end of the virus.”
