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The Island Fox (Urocyon littoralis) is a small fox that is native to six of the eight Channel Islands of California. It is the smallest fox species in the United States. There are six subspecies of the fox, each unique to the island it inhabits, reflecting its evolutionary history. Other names for the Island Fox include Coast Fox, Short-Tailed Fox, Island Gray Fox, Channel Islands Fox, Channel Islands Gray Fox, California Channel Island Fox and Insular Gray Fox.
The Island Fox shares the Urocyon genus with the mainland Gray Fox, the fox from which it is descended. Its small size is a result of island dwarfing, a kind of allopatric speciation. Because Island Foxes are geographically isolated they have no immunity to parasites and diseases brought in from the mainland and are especially vulnerable to those domestic dogs may carry. In addition, Golden Eagle predation and human activities devastated fox numbers on several of the Channel Islands in the 1990s. Four Island Fox subspecies were federally protected as an endangered species in 2004, and efforts to rebuild fox populations and restore the ecosystems of the Channel Islands are being undertaken.
Hurricane Linda was a tropical cyclone of the 1997 Pacific hurricane season. It was the strongest hurricane ever observed in the North Eastern Pacific Ocean, with sustained winds of 185 mph (295 km/h), gusts to 220 mph (355 km/h), and a central pressure of 902 mbar. Linda was part of an abnormally active season for both the Eastern and Western Pacific Basins. The powerful system had little impact on the mainland, although it did pass directly over Socorro Island.
A tropical wave moved off the coast of Africa on August 24. It moved across the unfavorable Atlantic Ocean without development. As it crossed Central America convection increased, and a poorly-defined center developed early on September 9. Banding and convection increased, and it became a tropical depression that night, 460 miles (740 km) south of the Mexican port of Manzanillo, Colima. Tropical Depression 14-E continued northwestward, and became a tropical storm on September 10. Linda started to intensify more quickly, becoming a hurricane the next day, 545 miles (880 km) south-southeast of the southern tip of Baja California. After 30 hours of rapidly intensifying, Linda reached its peak with 185 mph (295 km/h) winds on September 12.
Leo J. Ryan Memorial Park is a recreational city park, located in Foster City, California and run by the city government and local citizens. Originally called simply "Central Park", the park was named in honor and memory of Congressman Leo J. Ryan, the first and only United States Congressman to die in the line of duty. Congressman Ryan was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1983. The park is situated on 20 acres (8 ha) which overlook a lake and houses the William E. Walker Recreation Center, and includes a waterfront, outdoor amphitheatre, sailboat tie-up facilities, boardwalk, lawn areas, and a gazebo on the lake. There is a pathway that goes around the perimeter of the park, which also has ADA access.
In 2003, on the 25th anniversary of his death, a special memorial tribute was held in Congressman Ryan's honor in Foster City, California. Ryan's family and friends including California State Senator Jackie Speier and Ryan's daughters were in attendance. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that "Over and over today, people described a great man who continually exceeded his constituents' expectations."
San Francisco International Airport (IATA: SFO, ICAO: KSFO, FAA LID: SFO) is a major international airport located 13 miles (21 km) south of downtown San Francisco, California, United States, adjacent to the cities of Millbrae and San Bruno in unincorporated San Mateo County. It is often referred to as SFO. The airport has flights to destinations throughout the Americas and is a major gateway to Europe, Asia, and Australasia-Oceania.
San Francisco International Airport is the largest airport in the San Francisco Bay Area, and is the second busiest airport in the state of California after Los Angeles International Airport. As of 2006, San Francisco International Airport is the thirteenth largest in the United States and the twenty-third largest airport in the world, in terms of passengers. It is a major hub of United Airlines and is Virgin America's principal base of operations. It is the sole maintenance hub of United Airlines. SFO is also a focus city for Alaska Airlines.
Rancho San Francisco was a land grant of 48,612 acres (196.7 km²) by Governor Juan B. Alvarado to Antonio del Valle, a Spanish army officer, in recognition for his service to the state of Alta California. The rancho was the location of the first documented discovery of gold in California in 1842. The current cities of Santa Clarita, Valencia, and Piru lie within the boundaries of Rancho San Francisco, later known as Newhall Ranch. The rancho is a designated California Historical Landmark.
After Mission San Fernando Rey de España was established in 1797, the administrators there realized they would need more land for agriculture and livestock, and they looked north to the Santa Clarita Valley to establish their estancia, or mission rancho. Subsequently, the Tataviam Indians who had been living there were relocated to the Mission, where they were baptized and put to work. The Estancia de San Francisco Xavier was built in 1804 at the confluence of Castaic Creek and the Santa Clara River.
The California Condor (Gymnogyps californianus) is a North American species of bird in the New World vulture family Cathartidae. Currently, this condor inhabits only the Grand Canyon area and western coastal mountains of California and northern Baja California. Although other fossil members are known, it is the only surviving member of the genus Gymnogyps.
It is a large, black vulture with patches of white on the underside of the wings and a largely bald head with skin color ranging from yellowish to a bright red, depending on the bird's mood. It has the largest wingspan of any bird found in North America and is one of the heaviest. The condor is a scavenger and eats large amounts of carrion. It is one of the world's longest-living birds, with a lifespan of up to 50 years. Condor numbers dramatically declined in the 19th century due to poaching, lead poisoning, and habitat destruction. Eventually, a conservation plan was put in place by the United States government that led to the capture of all the remaining wild condors in 1987. These 22 birds were bred at the San Diego Wild Animal Park and the Los Angeles Zoo.
The Azusa Street Revival was a Pentecostal revival meeting that took place in Los Angeles, California and was led by William J. Seymour, an African American preacher. It began with a meeting on April 14, 1906 at the African Methodist Episcopal Church and continued until roughly 1915. The revival was characterized by speaking in tongues, dramatic worship services, and inter-racial mingling. The participants received criticism from secular media and Christian theologians for behaviors considered to be outrageous and unorthodox, especially at the time. Today, the revival is considered by historians to be the primary catalyst for the spread of Pentecostalism in the 20th century.
In 1904, the Welsh Revival took place, during which approximately 100,000 people in Wales converted to Christianity. Internationally, Evangelical Christians took this event to be a sign that a fulfillment of the prophecy in the Bible's book of Joel, chapter 2:23–29 was about to take place. Joseph Smale, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Los Angeles, went to Wales personally in order to witness the revival. Upon his return to Los Angeles, he attempted to ignite a similar event in his own congregation. His attempts were short-lived, and he eventually left First Baptist Church to found First New Testament Church, where he continued his efforts. During this time, other small-scale revivals were taking place in Minnesota, North Carolina, and Texas. By 1905, reports of speaking in tongues, supernatural healings, "physical demonstrations of emotion", and significant lifestyle changes accompanied these revivals. As news spread, evangelicals across the United States began to pray for similar revivals in their own congregations.
The Winfield Scott was a sidewheel steamer that transported passengers and cargo between San Francisco, California and Panama in the early 1850s, during the California Gold Rush. After entering a heavy fog off the coast of Southern California on the evening of December 1, 1853, the ship crashed into Middle Anacapa Island. ll 450 passengers and crew survived, but the ship was lost.
The Winfield Scott has been the object of numerous salvage operations since the crash, and currently rests underwater as part of the Channel Islands National Park and Marine Sanctuary. The wreck site of the Winfield Scott is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in 1848 brought thousands of people to California in search of fortune until the late 1850s. Since neither the Panama Canal nor the First Transcontinental Railroad had been constructed, people emigrating to California from the Eastern United States had three main routes of passage. They could travel over land, which was expensive and dangerous, or they could sail the roughly 14,000-mile route around South America. This was more attractive to some but no less dangerous, due in part to the rough waters of the Drake Passage. In addition to the inherent dangers of either route, the journey often took as long as six months to complete.
The Oakland Raiders are a professional American football team based in the city of Oakland, California. They currently play in the Western Division of the American Football Conference (AFC) in the National Football League (NFL). The Raiders began play in 1960 as the eighth charter member of the American Football League (AFL), where they won one championship and three division titles. The team joined the NFL in 1970 as part of the AFL-NFL Merger. Since joining the NFL, the Raiders have won twelve division titles and three Super Bowls, and have appeared in two other Super Bowls. The team has thirteen enshrinees in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
During their first three seasons, the Raiders struggled both on and off the field. In 1963, Al Davis was brought to the team as head coach and general manager. Davis immediately turned the Raiders into winners, and from 1963 until 2002 the team had only seven losing seasons. He also initiated the use of team slogans such as "Pride and Poise," "Commitment to Excellence," and "Just Win, Baby"—all of which are registered trademarks. Except for a brief term as AFL Commissioner in 1966, Davis has been with the team continuously. Upon his return to Oakland in 1966, he became a managing partner of the franchise.
The Fairfield Osborn Preserve is a 411 acre (1.6 km²) nature reserve situated on the northwest flank of Sonoma Mountain in Sonoma County, California. There are eight plant communities within the property, oak woodland being the dominant type. Other communities include chaparral, Douglas fir woodland, native Bunch grass, freshwater marsh, vernal pool, pond and riparian woodland. The flora is extremely diverse including many native trees, shrubs, wildflowers, grasses, lichens and mosses. A diverse fauna inhabits this area including black-tailed deer, coyote, bobcat and an occasional mountain lion; moreover, there are abundant avifauna (including some neotropical migrants), amphibians, reptiles and insects.
Copeland Creek and its tributaries drain the Preserve as they wend their way down steep ravines toward eventual discharge to the Laguna de Santa Rosa. The property was originally a Spanish Land Grant holding, devolving to private ownership and eventually gifted to The Nature Conservancy; the preserve is now owned and managed by Sonoma State University as a research and education site. An understated natural trail system weaves through the property to provide access to creek canyons, ridges and marshy areas. The preserve is situated at elevations 1,350 to 2,300 feet (411 to 701 meters) above sea level and features a landscape riddled with basalt exposures that betray the volcanic prehistory of Sonoma County. The climate at the Preserve is mild, with most rainfall occurring in the winter months and with some influence of the Pacific Ocean providing moderating temperatures and some marine fog on early summer mornings.
State Route 160 is a state highway in the U.S. state of California consisting of two sections. The longer, southern, section is a scenic highway through the alluvial plain of the Sacramento River, linking SR 4 in Antioch with Sacramento via the Antioch Bridge. The northern section, separated by the southern by Sacramento city streets, is the North Sacramento Freeway, running from the 16th Street Bridge over the American River to Interstate 80 Business towards Roseville.
This northern section was deleted from the definition in the Streets and Highways Code in 2003, when the relinquished portion through downtown Sacramento was also removed, but it is still maintained and signed by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) as SR 160. This portion is also part of the California Freeway and Expressway System, as is the piece south of SR 12 near Rio Vista, though, of the latter, only the southernmost piece in Antioch is built to freeway standards. The entire southern portion, from SR 4 to Sacramento, is part of the State Scenic Highway System.
Tool is an American rock band that was formed in 1990 in Los Angeles, California. The band consists of drummer Danny Carey, bassist Justin Chancellor, guitarist Adam Jones, and vocalist Maynard James Keenan. Tool has won three Grammy Awards, hosted worldwide tours, and produced albums which have performed well on international music charts.
The band emerged with a heavy metal sound on their first LP at a time when the genre was dominated by thrash metal, and later reached the top of the alternative metal movement with the release of their second LP, Ænima, in 1996. Their efforts to unify musical experimentation, visual arts, and a message of personal evolution continued with Lateralus (2001) and their most recent album, 10,000 Days (2006), gaining the band critical acclaim and success around the world. Due to Tool's incorporation of visual arts and relatively long and complex releases, the band is generally described as a style-transgressing act and part of progressive and art rock. The relationship between the band and today's music industry is ambivalent, at times marked by censorship and the band members' insistence on privacy.
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The University of California, Riverside, commonly known as UCR or UC Riverside, is a public research university and one of 10 campuses of the University of California system. The main campus sits on 1,200 acres (486 ha) in a suburban district of Riverside, California, with a branch campus of 20 acres (8 ha) in Palm Desert. Founded in 1907 as the UC Citrus Experiment Station, Riverside pioneered research in biological pest control and the use of growth regulators responsible for extending the citrus growing season in California from four to nine months. Some of the world's most important research collections on citrus diversity and entomology, as well as photography, are located at Riverside.
UCR's undergraduate College of Letters and Science opened in 1954. The Regents of the University of California declared UCR a general campus of the system in 1959, and graduate students were admitted in 1961. The campus is projected to grow to an enrollment of 21,000 students by 2015. To accommodate this growth, more than $730 million has been invested in new construction projects since 1999. Plans are underway to open a medical school—California's first new one in 40 years—by 2012.
Nine Inch Nails (abbreviated as NIN) is an industrial rock act, founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio, United States. As its main producer, singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist, Reznor is the only official member of Nine Inch Nails and remains solely responsible for its direction. NIN's music straddles a wide range of genres, while retaining a characteristic sound using electronic instruments and processing. After recording a new album, Reznor usually assembles a live band to perform with him; this live component is a separate entity from Nine Inch Nails in the recording studio. On stage, NIN often employs spectacular visual elements to accompany its performances, which frequently culminate with the band destroying their instruments.
Underground music audiences warmly received Nine Inch Nails in its early years. The band produced several highly influential records in the 1990s that achieved widespread popularity: many Nine Inch Nails songs became radio hits, two NIN recordings won Grammy Awards, and the band has sold over twenty million albums worldwide, with 10.5 million sales certified in the United States alone. In 2004, Rolling Stone placed Nine Inch Nails at 94 on their list of the 100 greatest rock artists of all time.
Griffith Observatory is located in Los Angeles, California, United States. Sitting on the south-facing slope of Mount Hollywood in L.A.'s Griffith Park, it commands a view of the Los Angeles Basin, including downtown Los Angeles to the southeast, Hollywood to the south, and the Pacific Ocean to the southwest. The observatory is a popular tourist attraction that features an extensive array of space- and science-related displays.
The land on which the observatory stands was donated to the City of Los Angeles by Col. Griffith J. Griffith in 1896. In his will, Griffith donated funds to build an observatory, exhibit hall, and planetarium on the donated land. Construction began on June 20, 1933 using a design developed by architect John C. Austin based on preliminary sketches by Russell W. Porter. The observatory and accompanying exhibits were opened to the public on May 14, 1935.
Hearst Castle is the palatial estate built by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951). It is located near San Simeon, California, on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Donated by the Hearst Corporation to the state of California in 1957, it is now a State Historical Monument and a National Historic Landmark, open for public tours. Hearst formally named the estate "La Cuesta Encantada" ("The Enchanted Hill"), but he usually just called it "the ranch".
Hearst Castle was built on a 40,000 acre (160 km²) ranch that William Randolph Hearst's father, George Hearst, originally purchased in 1865. The younger Hearst grew fond of this site over many childhood family camping trips. He inherited the ranch, which had grown to 250,000 acres (1000 km²), from his mother, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, upon her death in 1919. Construction began that same year and continued through 1947, when he stopped living at the estate due to ill health. San Francisco architect Julia Morgan designed most of the buildings. Hearst was an inveterate tinkerer, and would tear down structures and rebuild them at a whim, so the estate was never completed in his lifetime.
The Coachella Valley (pronounced /koʊəˈtʃɛlə/ in English) is a large stretch of land in Southern California that is populated by close to a million people and which includes the famed tourist mecca, Palm Springs. Geographically it is the agricultural and recreational desert valley in southern California, United States (U.S.), east of Riverside and also east of San Bernardino, California. The valley extends for approximately 45 miles (72 km) in Riverside County southeast from the San Bernardino Mountains to the saltwater Salton Sea, the largest lake in California. It is approximately 15 miles (24 km) wide along most of its length, bounded on the west by the San Jacinto Mountains and the Santa Rosa Mountains and on the north and east by the Little San Bernardino Mountains.
The San Andreas Fault crosses the valley from the Chocolate Mountains in the southeast corner and along the centerline of the Little San Bernardinos. The fault is easily visible along its northern length as a strip of greenery against an otherwise bare mountain. The Chocolate Mountains are home to a United States Navy live gunnery range and are mostly off-limits to the public. In comparison to the "Inland Empire" (Riverside-San Bernardino area and the California desert), some people refer to the Coachella Valley as the "Desert Empire". Geographers and geologists sometimes call the area, along with the Imperial Valley to the south, the "Cahuilla Basin" or the "Salton Trough."
The Dakin Building is an architectural award winning class A office building on the San Francisco Bay in Brisbane, California. Serving as a corporate headquarters building for several companies of national prominence, it was built from the profits of the Garfield character whose licensed products of the R. Dakin Company soared in sales in the late 1980s. Located on Sierra Point, it became a landmark in the San Francisco Bay Area for its distinctive design and was nicknamed the Luke Skywalker building for its dramatic posture overlooking the bay, in contrast to its ominous looking neighbor office building that was nicknamed the Darth Vader building.
The Dakin building has won a number of architectural awards including an American Institute of Architects Design Excellence Award in the year 1992. According to the San Francisco Examiner the jury awarded this distinction to the Dakin building because "Its chief strength is the atrium, with its views of the San Francisco Bay and asymmetrical skylight". The same newspaper article noted that the building "houses executive offices, research and development facilities and product showrooms."
The Disneyland Railroad (DRR) is a narrow gauge railroad located at Disneyland in Anaheim, California, United States, that was inaugurated on that theme park's opening day, July 17, 1955. The live steam railway was constructed at a cost of US$240,000 and each of the original four locomotives cost in excess of $40,000 either to build or restore. It remains one of Disneyland's most popular attractions as riders can use it as transportation to other areas of the park or to simply ride the trains on the so-called "grand circle tour." The railroad is the first thing visitors see upon entering Disneyland through the main entrance.
Laid to 3 ft (914 mm) gauge, the most common narrow gauge used in North America, the train's track runs in a continuous loop around the park, which has subsequently expanded past the tracks in some places. The line features several grade crossings, including one located near It's a Small World, automatic block signals, and a roundhouse for locomotive storage, located backstage behind It's a Small World and shared with the Monorail. Under the original track plan, two trains (one freight and one passenger) could operate on the railroad simultaneously in the same clockwise direction. A Rail siding was incorporated at Main Street station and at Frontierland Station where one train had to wait to allow the other to pass.
Islais Creek or Islais Creek Channel (previously known as Du Vrees Creek, Islais Channel and Islais Swamp) is a small creek in San Francisco, California. The current name of the creek is said to be derived from a Salinan Native American word "slay" or "islay," the name for the Prunus ilicifolia wild cherries. Once the largest body of water in the city, almost the entire creek today is covered by landfill and converted to an underground culvert and a storm drain, with remnants of the creek flowing at both Glen Canyon Park and near Third Street.
The original Islais Creek stretched from the San Francisco Bay 3.5 miles (5.6 km) west into the Glen Canyon Park and O’Shaughnessy Hollow. The creek, once the largest body of water within San Francisco covering an area of 5,000 acres (7.812 sq mi/20.234 km²), had two branches. One branch originated near the southern slope of Twin Peaks, formerly known as San Miguel Hills, slightly north of today's Portola Drive. It then coursed through Glen Canyon and through what is now Bosworth Street until it reached the bottom of the Mission Street viaduct at I-280. The other branch began at the Cayuga Avenue and Regent Street intersection. The creek flowed from the intersection down to the Mission Street viaduct where the two branches joined.
