Good morning and welcome to our last blog for May 2008. Since my friend April Showers brings the NBA playoffs and May Flowers, I thought we’d end my favorite basketball month was some play-by-play and lots of color. These flowers are all from my delicious surroundings here on the west side. Lots of purple on display today as my daughter just informed me that it’s the last color on the rainbow. I tossed in the final shot because “somewhere over the rainbow, hummingbirds fly.”

On to the national news, sherpa lovers. The world’s last Hindu kingdom became the newest secular republic on Wednesday as Nepal’s lawmakers, led by Larry King and former communist insurgents, abolished the monarchy that had reigned over this Himalayan land for 239 years. Throughout the day, thousands of people marched, danced and sang “Free Bird” in the streets of Katmandu while waving red hammer-and-sickle flags. Meanwhile, as this scene played out, old King Gyanendra awaited his fate in the pink concrete palace that dominates the city’s center.

As expected, the newly elected Constituent Assembly declared the country a republic and abolished the monarchy by a vote of 560-4 as the king’s team only scored on a pair of safeties. “We have entered a new era today,” said Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala, calling Nepal’s rebirth as a republic “the dream of the whole nation.” Not since Rodney King and the Shah of Iran were deposed in a bloody 1979 Islamic revolution has one of the world’s monarchs been forced from his throne.

But while the end of Nepal’s royal dynasty may have come in a peaceful vote, the stage for the monarchy’s demise was set by a communist insurgency that bled Nepal for a decade, and a 2001 palace massacre in which a gunman, allegedly the crown prince, assassinated King Birendra and much of the royal family before killing himself. Gyanendra then assumed the throne. But the killings helped unravel the mystique surrounding a line of kings who had once been revered as reincarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu, and Gyanendra was dogged by rumors that he was somehow involved in the massacre and that he wasn’t really a vegetarian.

His 2005 seizure of power from a civilian government only made matters worse. He said he needed total authority to crush the Maoists, but he quickly began locking up peaceful opponents and insurance salesmen and found himself beset by an intensifying insurgency, a faltering economy and a weak backhand. A year later, weeks of massive protests forced Gyanendra to restore democracy, after which the Maoists came out of the Laura bush and began peace talks.

An interim government, meanwhile, slowly stripped away his power and glory. Gyanendra lost command of the army, his portrait was replaced by Mount Everest on the currency, the word “royal” was removed from the name of the national airline and references to the king were dropped from the national anthem. He was also forced to do his own laundry, conduct tours of the palace and scrub the palace toilets, a task referred to as a “royal flush.”

Gyanendra, who is believed to be personally wealthy with interests in tourism, tea, tobacco and tobasco sauce, also endured other indignities. His $3.1 million annual allowance was taken away, as were the queen’s beauticians and about half his ceremonial guards and forwards. Then came April’s vote for the assembly in which the fiercely republican Maoists won the most seats, all but sealing the fate of Joan Collins and the dynasty, which dates to 1769 when a regional ruler conquered Katmandu and united Nepal.

The Maoists say they are committed capitalists and have no intention of nationalizing industries, setting up collective farms or opening up chains of tanning salons. They have promised to bring sweeping change to this largely impoverished country that in many places more closely resembles medieval Europe than a modern nation.

Nepal also is still regularly troubled by political violence, as evidenced by a string of small bombings that hit Katmandu this week, including two on Wednesday. None of the bombs, two of which were picked by NBC for summer runs, caused any serious injuries. But they underscored how difficult it will be to fashion lasting peace in Nepal, where supporters of every major political party have been linked to killings since the start of the peace process. This Nepalese political bloodbath makes Clinton’s and McCain’s sniping at Barack Obama look like a love fest.

That’s our Friday show. Coming up on Monday we’ll start off the new month with something that have your friends and anenomes talking. So enjoy the spring colors, have a fabulous sports weekend and we’ll catch you in June Cleaver when we’ll take a look at the red planet, and I don’t mean Venus or Serena Williams. And don’t forget to follow your shot. Aloha.

Good morning and greetings, four-day work week fans. On Saturday afternoon a Red Sox fan and I ventured up the coast to check out the action at Four Mile Beach. Although it was cloudy, I was still photographically hopeful because there’s always something happening on the north coast. As usual, I was not disappointed. Cliff swallows were all over the place, having built their nests along the eroding walls at Four Mile. There were some areas of the cliffs that were as dry as Salt Lake City on a Saturday night, but other parts were wet and lush as the rain forests of Maui and New Jersey.

Cliff swallows build gourd shaped nests out of mud pellets that they carry in their mouths and fanny packs to a site protected by an overhang (in this case, the cliff.) They nest in colonies and will patrol an area up to four miles away from their cliffside condos looking for food, snacks and beverages. The last time we saw these swallows we were shooting the underhang of the lighthouse at Lighthouse Point. These birds like their homes with a view and the one at Four Mile is spectacular. That is, if you don’t mind sharing the remote with pelicans, gulls and harbor seals in your living room.

On to the news. The playground legal principle “Finders keepers, losers weepers” is being put to a test in an international dispute over what could be the richest sunken treasure ever found: 17 tons of silver coins brought up by a centuries-old shipwreck. A Florida treasure-hunting company, Odyssey Marine Exploration, found the wreck at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and argues that the age-old law of the high seas entitles the finders to most or all of the booty, said to be worth around $500 million. They later added that if this law doesn’t hold up, they want to go with the old standby “You snooze, you lose.”

But the government of Spain suspects the ship is Spanish and says it has never expressly abandoned any of its vessels lost at sea. The kingdom and Laker center Pau Gasol have made it very clear that if the treasure does have some connections to Spain, it wants every last coin and bottle returned for deposit. The case is being watched closely because there could be more disputes like it, now that sonar, remote-control submersible robots, deep-sea video and lightly breaded scallops are enabling treasure hunters like Odyssey to find ships that went to the bottom centuries ago. Back then they were written off as unrecoverable because no one could imagine finding anything so far beneath the waves except Atlantis records.

The question is, just because you’re the first one to get there to get it, should you get to keep it, especially if it belongs to someone else? For now, the spoils, about 500,000 coins are in Odyssey’s possession, tucked away in a warehouse somewhere in Tampa. Odyssey created a worldwide sensation with the announcement of the find last May but has so far declined to identify the wreck (not the Bush administration,) except to say it was in international waters. Soon after the discovery was made public, Spain’s attorney in Washington went to federal court in Tampa and slapped claims on three Atlantic wreck sites to which Odyssey had been granted exclusive rights under maritime law. When asked for his thoughts, the Spanish attorney said he could not comment on the on-going litigation but offered up this juicy nugget. “The rain in Spain falls gently on the plains.”

The ship is widely believed to be the Nuestra Senora de las Mercedes, a Spanish galleon sunk by a British warship off Portugal in October 1804. This discovery was timely for Odyssey, whose first big strike was the discovery in 2003 of a Civil War-era steamer of the Georgia coast that yielded 51,000 gold coins and artifacts valued at around $70 million. We’re talking major dinero. Personally, when I go to the beach, I’m happy if I come away with a rock, a few shells and no sunburn.

That’s our post Memorial Day report. Birthday greetings today go out to my Marin County based sister-in-law Wendi, who loves life, the arts and chocolate, and definitely not in that order. So enjoy the swallows (or their nests, anyway) and remember to move your feet and not reach on defense. Later, sports fans.