David McNew/Getty Images

The Hollywood sign and the undeveloped land that surrounds it are seen against the snow-covered San Gabriel Mountains.

This week's song comes to me courtesy of my Off-Ramp colleague Kevin Ferguson. "Smoggy Mountain High," by Key Losers, is a song from the band's most recent album, "California Lite."

Smoggy Mountain High (from "California Lite" by Key Losers) by P.W. Elverum & Sun, ltd.

Its specific subject is the San Gabriel Mountains, hard to see through particulate matter and smog pollution that gets trapped in the LA Basin. 

Beyond the city they are towering
obscured sometimes, but still they bring
eternal height in a dying world
a deeper look into the sky
beyond the city they are flowering
I see them sometimes when I'm in my car
I often want to go up to them
I get distracted and I forget

Key Losers is a band whose name is perhaps inspired by a Guided by Voices song. According to their website, "Key Losers is a band based in Portland, Oregon, whose songwriter, singer, guitarist, and only constant member is Katy Davidson." Davidson seems to be in several bands I have liked, including Dear Nora (in San Francisco) and YACHT. She says about the record:

This album is about a few subjects at once: loneliness, transportation, and self-removal from nature at the hands of our increasing technological obsession. I use Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, as well as suburban Arizona and Oregon, as my backdrop.

Really, this song can be in honor of several things. Today the California Air Resources Board is deciding on a package of "advanced clean car" initiatives designed to do some "technology forcing," which would further cut the state's contribution to climate changing greenhouse gases, and mobile sources' contribution to airborne particulate matter that causes health problems. 

My colleague Stephanie O'Neill reported on a study of the cost of those health problems earlier this week. 

And the lyrics of the song remind me of a one-man show about global warming I saw on Monday night. Actor Mike Farrell played Dave Keeling, a cliamtologist who developed a method for measuring armospheric carbon in parts per million, making a continuous record at Mauna Loa Observatory for decades. Keeling spent time at Caltech, and there was a funny line in the play about him thinking about going up to the San Gabriels, which he couldn't see from the flats. 

Listen to the Songs of the Week 2012.

Sometimes, journalists spend all day monitoring regulatory hearings. So it has been with the advanced clean cars provram at the Air Resources Board (here in LA, happening at the Metropolitan Water District offices). It's risky business, alright. You run the risk of going cross eyed listening to public comment, techncial talk, and discussion among board members. Someday I'm going to come up with a bingo board for regulatory hearings, and it will include phrases like "kicking the can down the road," "broad cross-section of stakeholders," "landmark," and "bravo." At some point this afternoon, one guy in favor of what the Air Resources Board is doing spoke just after several specialty and minority Chambers of Commerce that don't, and he remarked on it. Chair Mary Nichols must have been punchy, because she advised the guy to form a chamber of commerce of his own.

Anyway, that's why we've got a photo of the day from NASA's Earth Observatory. Because my brain is mush. Click through this slideshow and you can see, in the rop right quadrant of the sun, a solar event called a coronal mass ejection, or a CME. Superheated gas becomes incredibly supercharged, too; that sends solar material off the ball of gas, in a sort of hot spot.

Mike Carlowicz with NASA (with whom, incidentally, I went to college, and after whom I was an editor at Georgetown's newspaper of record since 1920) writes about how the sun's activity has increased in recent days, with a CME on January 23:

Solar flares and CMEs are not a danger to humans on Earth's surface, as the planet's magnetic field (magnetosphere) and atmosphere deflect and absorb the solar energy and particles. The sun storms can pose some risks to astronauts, and they can upset the electronics and transmissions on science, military, and communications satellites. Closer to Earth's surface, solar activity can cause disruptions of radio signals (particularly HF), provide a small dose of radiation to passengers on high-latitude flights, and provoke auroras (northern and southern lights).

The storm is impressive by recent standards, but nowhere near the maximum intensities often generated at the height of the solar cycle. “I would expect that we will see more storms like this one or even bigger as we get closer to solar maximum,” said Michael Hesse, chief of heliophysics at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

That is all. NASA's imagery is cool. More tomorrow. When my brain will be able to do more than watch this: