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So I’m walking down the leafy lanes of San Marino the other day -- no I don’t live there -- and couldn’t help but notice how lush and green all the lawns were. Hey. Wait a minute. Aren’t we in a drought? Aren’t Socal homeowners all being watched by the irrigation police?

A quick call to a spokesperson for city of San Marino revealed that residents of this affluent community don’t have to worry about what day of the week it is when their automatic sprinklers pop up. No water diet for these well-tended lawns. They get all the H2O they need to stay picture-perfect.

I asked the city official why? With TV commercials and the threat of fines reminding the rest of us to follow the watering schedules, how can they have virtual golf courses for front yards? And we’re talking some pretty big lawns for a city with only 13,000 residents. That means the water consumption per person must be pretty high!

He explained that the city isconsidering some lawn watering restrictions. But right now they don’t have any. San Marino gets its water from the MWD. So they DO have to abide by something called the “model water ordinance.” And the city has done good things like installing more efficient sprinkling systems along street medians. But as far as private lawns are concerned, it’s just another day in Seattle. So if you get tired of seeing blocks of brown and yellow in your neck of the woods, take a stroll among the moneyed mansions in San Marino.

Oh.. FYI.. the Huntington Gardens in San Marino, with its spacious lawns and scenic gardens --they get their water from their own wells. God bless the lawn that’s got its own.

Whenever disaster strikes California, which it does on a fairly regular basis, friends who live elsewhere are inclined to ask, with a slightly smug tone, "Why do you LIVE there?"

Good question, but not one we are likely to answer when we are actually going through the disaster-du-jour, in this case a fire so ferocious we could only stare in awe as enormous mushroom clouds of smoke blocked out the sun and drove us all indoors, a place we usually care to visit only for short periods of time. Forced to confront this preview of nuclear winter, we coped by reciting a familiar litany of loss - homes, lives, acreage.

We Californians like to quantify catastrophe - "38% contained!" - report the firefighters, and we rejoice, never stopping to question just how they KNOW it's exactly 38% contained. There is comfort in such precision, comfort in believing that - before too long - the beast will be not just contained but CONTROLLED.

And then we can all go back to doing what Californians do best, letting go and moving on. Oh sure, we clear the brush around the house, make sure the earthquake kit is up to date, but then - a sort of collective amnesia sets in, disaster DENIAL, if you will, which is - I suspect - what's happening right now.

This week, a little breeze blew off the ocean, bringing just a touch of delicious humidity, but not too much, not enough to make us uncomfortable. "Muggy" is just not in our vocabulary. Ditto "Mosquitoes." As I sat outside with my family, enjoying the blue skies and mild temperatures, happy that I could no longer look directly at the sun, I had a sudden insight into just why the whole BE HERE NOW philosophy thrives in California. What's the alternative? Being Here Last Week was pretty hellish. And Being Here Next Week is also somewhat dicey, with the fire season just beginning. Throw in the rainy season, which will predictably bring floods and mudslides, not to mention the completely unpredictable moment when a couple of tectonic plates decide to shift under our unsuspecting feet, and you're looking at a pretty good argument for Being Here Now. We have learned to co-exist with the very worst that nature can throw our way, to accept the paradox that is California - peril and paradise, one-stop shopping.

Even so, the best time to ask us "Why do you LIVE there?" is not while we are immersed in our disaster, be it fire, flood or earthquake. The best time to ask is sometime in January, when we are sipping fresh orange juice at a sidewalk café, or hiking in those once-again-green hillsides overlooking the sea, or any number of things - except, that is, scraping ice off our windshields. In California, in January, we are snug and smug. Until, of course, we aren't.

Images by Flickr user Stacy J Clinton. Used under the Creative Commons license.

Last year we featured a story, reported by Judy Muller, about a Lake Elsinore family that was forced to "short sell" their home, but were doing everything they could to make sure the house was cared for while the bank tried to sell it.

Erin and Joe Balli, and their two sons, Joey and Matthew, moved into a mobile home. But on weekends, they went back to their old place, and did things like mow and water the lawn and make sure the house was kept up.

Now the Ballis are a featured family on a Sesame Street special called Families Stand Together: Feeling Secure in Tough Times. The prime time special airs Wednesday, Sept. 9 on KCET.

The producers of the special saw the SoCal piece about the Ballis, and contacted our producer, Angela Shelley. They told Angela they needed a family that had figured out ways to successfully deal with financial challenges. Angela assured them they'd never find anyone who better fit that bill than the Ballis.

So tune in to see them with Elmo and the gang. There's lots of information about the program, including suggestions for talking to your own family about financial problems, here.

Here's an animation of images taken by a JPL instrument on board NASA's Aqua satellite. It shows a very significant increase in carbon monoxide released into the atmosphere by the Station Fire.

According to NASA, carbon monoxide wafted up as high as 27,000 feet above the blaze. The "carbon footprint" stretches to the Great Lakes and north to Alaska.

More information about this at JPL's Web site.

Have you had an accident while texting? If so, we want to talk to you.

We're doing a story for an upcoming SoCal Connected episode, and we're looking for someone who can share their cautionary tale.

If you've crashed, and texting was to blame, please contact us. Just send a note to:

socalconnected@kcet.org

Please put "Texting" in the subject line. Just give us a brief summary of what happened. If you have photos of the accident, that's a big plus. And, if you wish, include a telephone number where we can reach you during the day.

See you on TV.

As has become the norm when disaster strikes, residents across Southern California posted images of the great fire - stills and videos - on sharing sites such as vimeo and flickr. Above, a small sampling of their work, with music by E S Posthumus.

If you are one of our many viewers who likes to share images, share them with other public television fans. We've created a flickr group for still images, and a vimeo group for videos. We'd love to see your stuff, so post something right now.

The volunteering suggestions from SoCal Connected's friends on Twitter not only save Get Involved's editorial bacon every week, but also provide a handy lesson in how community can work: we ask for help, our friends provide, and we turn around and share.

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This week's SoCal Connected segment on the future of newspapers took a look at the award-winning Voice of San Diego site. Voiceofsandiego.org bills itself as "the only professionally staffed, nonprofit online news site in the state focused on local news and issues," and while a few sites out there might might quibble about the meaning of "professionally staffed" - does that mean staff writers tasked full-time to work for site and blessed with health benefits, or does an edited site that freelances out to professionals in good standing count? - their tagline does illustrate just one of the many, often diverging trajectories fledgling online news operations are taking. There are for-profit sites and non-profits, professional sites, sites staffed entirely by volunteers, news aggregators, online community-driven sites and pro-am hybrids along the lines of the well-trafficked (but still unprofitable) Huffington Post. To sort that thicket out, we decided to bring you a guide to some of the sites out there trying to bring you the future of California news.

The Sacramento Press

Tagline:: The Sacramento Press will be the most comprehensive, local news source and information center for the Sacramento Metropolitan Area.
Model: For-profit; professionally edited / volunteer staffed. "We combined the best tools on the web and built an outstanding platform from scratch. This platform enables people to tell stories about their neighborhoods and have thoughtful conversations about these stories. Then our editors place the best content on the front page and section pages to highlight great work."
The Skinny: Boasts a clean, thoughtful Web 2.0 design that evokes what the SacPress describes as "the casual experience" of newspapers; the site also features a novel approach to tagging and related stories via the site's storyline tool.

Outside.in

Tagline: Tracking news, views, and conversations in 11,860 towns and neighborhoods
Model: For-profit hyper local aggregate providing geo-tagging tolls and services. No original content, so their resources go into development and design. "outside.in is a hyperlocal news and information service. We help you find places around you, get news for the places and neighborhoods you really care about, and engage more with your neighbors. We also offer bloggers and online publishers GeoToolkit, a great resource with tools, maps, widgets, and stats"
The Skinny: Hyper local and geotagging are the next stage of content aggregation, taking existing blog and newspaper resources and putting them in their proper and highly specific geographic frameworks. An Iphone app that pushes geo-aware content to you as come within range of it can't be far behind.

Spot.us

Spot.Us - Community Funded Reporting Intro from Digidave on Vimeo.

Tagline: Community Funded Reporting
Model: Non-profit news funder. Instead of taking a "crowdsourced" approach to producing news, Spot.Us takes a crowdsourced approach to funding the production of articles. "Through Spot.Us the public can commission journalists to do investigations on important and perhaps overlooked stories. All donations are tax deductible and if a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, your donation will be reimbursed. Otherwise, all content is made available to all through a Creative Commons license. It’s a marketplace where independent reporters, community members and news organizations can come together and collaborate. "
The Skinny: National in scope, but Bay-Area-based, the site offers a bleeding-edge solution to the business problem facing journalists interested in going beyond Octo-Mom chatter. Still in the early stages, Spot.us will have to leap the hurdle all collaborative "micropayment" systems confront: do enough people care about the product on offer to pony up a dollar? In Spot.us' case, the "enough people" threshold seems pretty reasonable in web terms - stories are in the $500-$1000 range - but if you generally assume that 1 in 10 visitors to a story pony up, that means a story must be visited tens of thousands of time times before the magic "FULLY FUNDED!" banner appears.

Examiner.com Los Angeles

Tagline:: Get Inside Los Angeles
Model: For-profit; professionally edited / volunteer staffed, with an aggregation component. Popular volunteers contributors may be eligible for revenue-sharing on Examiner ad take. "Our content is contributed by passionate, informed people known as Examiners. Examiners are people in your community with a common desire to share their knowledge and expertise with others. Examiners are college students, civil servants, retirees, doctors, musicians, magazine editors and stay-at-home parents."
The Skinny: Essentially a local update of the About.com guide model applied to local news and events. For a long time New York Times-owned About.com was one of the few brightspots piece of the paper's financial picture, but even they've stumbled during the downturn.

Printcasting

Printcasting Publisher Demo - Closed Beta from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo.

Printcasting Local Ad Tool from Dan Pacheco on Vimeo.

Tagline:: Developing tools to open print publishing to anyone
Model: Non-profit web-to-print technology developer hopes to turn the aggregation formula on its head by providing a suite of open-source tools allowing individuals and orgs to push web content and web ads to newsletter-style print publications. "Printcasting will make it possible for anyone to create a local printable newspaper, magazine or newsletter that carries local advertising - all for free -- by pulling together online content from existing sources, such as blogs, and combining it with local advertising that matches the content.
The Skinny: If it works, (always a big if) Printcasting could usher in an era of verdant local micro-publishing, where every shop, cafe, blogger and school could conceivably produce a financially viable and hyper-targeted print publication. The first test real world test of the technology will be coming up in Bakersfield later this year.

Did we miss anything? Let us know in comments below!

We'd like your opinion on super graphics. Love 'em? Hate 'em? Share your thoughts here, and we'll share your take on the next episode of SoCal Connected.

KCET's SoCal Connected, which launched on-air and online in September 2008, this weekend won two Golden Mike Awards for Best News Public Affairs Program and for Best Original News Commentary. The awards were announced yesterday by The Radio & Television News Association of Southern California, which presents the Golden Mike Awards for excellence in broadcast journalism every year.

In addition to the Best News Public Affairs Program Award, SoCal Connected won Best Original News Commentary for a piece by London Times correspondent Chris Ayers about the "changing seasons" in Southern California, frequently signaled by different types of disasters, such as fires. (You can see his commentary here.) KCET also won a third Golden Mike for Best Hard News Series Reporting for the Life & Times report "Aids in Tijuana."

SoCal Connected is made possible through the generous support of The L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education; The Ahmanson Foundation serving the Los Angeles community since 1952; Jim and Anne Rothenberg; The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation; the Elizabeth Hofert Dailey Trust; by US Bank and by UCLA.

Congrats team!

There won't be many weeks like this one, America's history and America's future sitting back to back on your calendar. A fine week to get involved!

As a warm-up for the big events Monday and Tuesday, get your hands dirty over the weekend at the Daniel Webster School's Environmental Education Garden: "The Daniel Webster Garden was established to teach children growing up in an urban area about the environment. Join us as we create new plots, remove weeds and brush, and add new plants."

MLK Day is Kingdom Day in Los Angeles. On January 19th you can check out the 2.5-mile Kingdom Day Parade, which starts at Western Avenue and Martin Luther King Boulevard at 11 am and snakes down Crenshaw Boulevard and Vernon Avenue before ending in celebration at Leimert Park.

President-elect Obama has called on January 19th to be a day of service. L.A. Works invites you to join them in a "special day of service" at Loren Miller Elementary School. "[W]e will revitalize the school with murals and green spaces, energize the community, and inspire a new generation of leaders. Project activities will include murals, planting and landscaping." Go here for more info.

Those of you feeling more introspective should consider the upcoming Zócalo lecture at the Hammer: The Future of Martin Luther King's Legacy. Randall Kennedy, author and professor at Harvard Law School and Debra Dickerson, journalist and author will "discuss the meaning of the King holiday, the rise of President-elect Barack Obama, and the ongoing significance of race in America."

And then, of course, there is the big day. The "inauguration party" dilemma has been chewed to death from every possible angle. (Green, anyone?) Our friends at LAist recommend keeping it simple:

Now here's a great use for those criticized TV screens all around LA LIve's Nokia Plaza. Councilwoman Jan Perry invites all to come "celebrate history" at "L.A.'s Biggest Inaugural Viewing Party." It's next Tuesday morning with events beginning at 7 a.m. Barack will take office around 9 a.m. with post ceremony coverage, entertainment, and the parade to follow.

The weather will be great, the screens will be huge and Get Involved/KCET New Media will be there recording the event for posterity. We'll buy you an inaugural tee if you can figure out who we are.

The image associated with this post was taken by Flickr user juliusbulius. It was used under Creative Commons license.

Well, after reading Tom Vanderbilt’s book on traffic and talking to Caltrans and L.A. City traffic experts, I learned some helpful and fun things about driving. Here they are in no particular order.

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It's a New Year. Have you gotten involved?

We've shared this particular tidbit before, but, like this week's look back at earthquake safety on SoCal Connected, a good "get involved" never goes goes stale. The Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) Program "educates people about disaster preparedness for hazards that may impact their area and trains them in basic disaster response skills, such as fire safety, light search and rescue, team organization, and disaster medical operations." You can find out about CERT training in the Los Angeles area by visiting the CERT-LA website. Those of you farther afield can check with www.californiavolunteers.org for information on disaster preparedness training.

Volunteer site L.A. Works offers a monthly calendar of volunteering opportunities. This week, this item leapt out at us.

Put on your boogie shoes for an evening of dancing with the delightful BCR clients... BCR offers day programs for disabled adults and children. Its mission is to enable its participants to develop their abilities so they may become independent and contributing members of the community. [Get involved here.]

For those of you whose tastes are more electronic than electronica, this week is the first Dorkbot SoCal event of 2009. Dorkbot - billed as "people doing strange things with electricity, mostly in Los Angeles" - brings together technology enthusiasts with artists Deborah Aschheim, Brian Evans and David Guttman for an afternoon of tech and community. As before, Dorkbot is being hosted by our friends at Machine Project.

(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)

Have a hangover from 2008? They say the ingredients in menudo are the perfect morning-after remedy, be it pork or beef:

• 1 calf's foot (about 1 to 1 1/2 pounds)
• 2 pounds honeycomb tripe
• 1 large onion
• 3 cloves garlic, peeled
• 6 peppercorns
• 2 teaspoons salt, or to taste
• 4 quarts of water
• A comal or griddle
• 3 large chiles anchos
• A spice grinder
• A large chile poblano, peeled or 2 canned, peeled green chiles
• 1/2 cup canned hominy (1 pound) drained
• Salt as necessary
• 1 scant teaspoon oregano

For those of you upset by "calf's hoof" reference above, Get Involved is told that the fideo soup, served every Monday at Homegirl Cafe is an excellent (and meat-free) menudo alternative. And for those of you whose lingering 2008 headache is more metaphysical in nature, here are some ways to put a bit of time and energy towards helping all of us avoid a repeat of '08's annus horribilis in '09.

The good folks at L.A. Works maintain an active calendar of "hands-on community service projects" that need volunteers. Opportunities just this coming week include rescued-rabbit sitting, art and games interaction with seniors, and box sorting at various food and donation banks. Which is to say: L.A. Works offers a volunteer opportunity for every taste and temperament, be it animal loving or introvert.

Looking for something more out-doorsy in hopes of making early progress on your health-related New Years resolutions? Check out the Los Angeles Hiking Meetup group, which provides a range of hikes in the area geared towards both the well-traveled enthusiast and the beginner. (If the hiking isn't your speed there are over 2000 Los Angeles region groups for you to choose from on Meetup. You only have yourself to blame if you can't find one.)

Maybe your '09 master plan for giving back first calls for you to amass a vast and impressive fortune, which you in turn plan to disburse to well deserved Gates Foundation style. If so, you will likely be spending an awful lot of quality time with your business plans and mock-ups in '09. When you start to go stir crazy in, say, mid-January, pay a visit to Jelly LA, weekly "casual co-working at venues around Los Angeles providing free wi-fi and creative company. We welcome small business owners and freelancers—from all industries—with pleasant attitudes needing to work, collaborate…or just get away from their desk for a bit."

Have a good week and an amazing 09!

The image associated with this post was taken by Flickr user kenudigit. It was used under Creative Commons license.

There's a tiny sliver of time between now and New Years. Make the most of it!

2008 may be (pretty much) over but there is still time to get a bit of a the great outdoors in before 2009. The Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy has a full slate of outdoor events to ease you into the New Year.

The 13th Annual Griffith Park Light Festival sponsored by the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power ends December 30th. Here's a preview:

[A tip of the bloggy hat to EyeSpyLA.com for the video.]

Lastly, we don't need to tell you not to drink and drive this year-end. Metro bus and rail will be free from 9pm until 2am on the morning of January 1, 2009, so do both the earth and yourself a favor and take public transit. If you're in Long Beach or the OC, non-profit group Scooter Patrol is offering free rides to the tipsy this New Years. They also need volunteers.

See you in '09!>

As the Thrift Economy segment on this week's SoCal Connected put it, "most everyone is looking for ways to save money. But many people are also looking to make money." In that kind of climate, the Owner's Manifesto - if you can't open it, you don't own it - isn't just a clarion call for the open-access set, it's a canny money-saving tactic. Being able to fix, customize and tweak your own technology is the first step to freedom from the tyranny of costly repairs, repeat buying and enforced, planned obsolesce.

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Like many workplaces, the libraries are full of bloggers. Here is a look at librarian life in librarian's own words.

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No discussion of education reform in Los Angeles gets very far without the United Teachers Los Angeles coming up. The union, headed by A. J. Duffy, represents "48,000 public school teachers and health and human services professionals in the Los Angeles area," and - fairly or no - many of L.A.'s schooling woes accuse the union of obstruction and foot-dragging at best, out-and-out malfeasance at worst. As unions from the UTLA to the UAW increasingly take the blame for the failures of their respective industries, we thought we'd take to the web to see what union members and teachers had to say.

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As this week's episode of SoCal Connected shows, Los Angeles' high school students are full of life, humor, insight and promise. Get off the proverbial couch and give them hand.

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