July 11: More Sinners Than Winners, From The Packers to Silicon Valley to IndyMac to The New iPhone.

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The Week of July 11 is crammed with Sinners and only one (semi) Winner:

• After shoddy treatment from Ted Thompson, Brett asks to be released from Green Bay. 
• Single White Female, the sequel. The Mercury News reports that with the ouster of Dianne Green, CEO of VMWare, none of Silicon Valley’s 150 biggest corporations have a single female CEO.
• The Basin Complex Fire ravages more than 103,000 acres of pure, pristine California and moves closer to Carmel Valley.
• Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae tank. Then mortgage giant IndyMac Bank is seized by the Feds.  This bank deserved to be outed for its sleazy shenanigans.  Who’s next?
• And the obsession with all things Apple grows, with the launch today of the new iPhone3G, released this am at AT&T and Apple stores around the US. It’s faster, cheap, cooler than ever — and also capable of bringing down Apple’s activation system.

The Big Sur Basin Wildfires: Update from the Land of Soot, Smoke and Red Sun.

We came home last night to discover soot all over the deck and a bright red sun sending mad, shimmery beams of crimson down below. As we watched this fiery freak show, the thick brown fog rose, swirled and swallowed the sinking sun in one smoky gulp. Very Sci-Fi Channel. Like Mars over the Monterey Peninsula.

So far the Basin Fires in neighboring Big Sur have burned 39,606 acres and 16 homes, with 1200 more being threatened. More than 700 firefighters, 6 helicopters, two air tankers and 46 engines are hard at work fighting the blaze. This part of the world –Carmel and Big Sur, especially, is very six degrees: we’re a small, close-knit community where everybody knows someone who is a firefighter or someone who lives on Partington Ridge or Palo Colorado.

Funny how the maps they show on the evening news always seem so distant — until the roads they’re pointing to are the roads that lead to your home.

Photographs courtesy of Katie Carroll