Occupation of Independence

When you walk in a forest it is fun to imagine yourself as being taller than the trees and able to see over all the silvi-clutter and able to take in the topography, just as you would flying or ballooning. Of course you could shrink instead of elongate. What a jungle the grassland would be to a Liliputian.

Or, Requiem for a Lightweight A few weeks ago the requiem was written for smartbooks. These were meant to be similar to netbooks (with a keyboard and a clamshell design) based on ARM's microprocessors instead of Intel's, and on Google's Android operating system instead of obsolete Microsoft Windows. The lower power would have meant that you could leave them on all the time, like your cellphone, which is also based on an ARM microprocessor. You can see why this would have been appealing. I was hoping to use one instead of a WINTEL notebook to do the usual things, such as surfing the web, editing photos, and printing. Was that really asking so much from the computer world? Apparently it was. Why would the computer industry want to cannibalize the sale of $800 notebooks with $250 smartbooks? The losers would have been WINTEL, Apple, HP, Dell, Toshiba, etc. Fortunately for the computer industry, Apple found a solution to this conundrum: it assassinated the smartbook with th

Oh no, here comes that damned fool of a dog. Get ready for a lot of noise: Just look at her down there, carrying on so! I'm embarrassed for her. Nobody will ever convince me that dogs are real predators. I guess she thinks if she barks some more, I'll come down and let her eat me: I can't take any more of this. Besides I'm just encouraging her. Enough:

Overlapping yucca.

  There are some very colorful grasshoppers in the field these days. This one wasn't too colorful but I thought it was right handsome, especially that pharaonic neck collar.

It almost seems unfair that a season like autumn, which already has so many good things about it, should also have the football season. I sighed with pleasure about the football season to a non-football fan, the other day. I had her/him stereotyped as the kind of person who would turn up their nose and say, "There's already a perfectly good game that the rest of the world calls football. What's good about stupid American football?" They were referring of course to the deadly dull "world-sport" of soccer. Was there any point in trying to explain one of the finer things of life to a big, overgrown, NPR-listening, college sophomore? Probably not, but she did ask the question. With my best effort at being understandable and non-condescending, I started with the premise that Sports are mock-War. She agreed to play along with that, and suddenly my cause appeared hopeful. The rectangular field of football fits the TV screen well, but the same is true for socce

As expected I broke my internet slump by going to the library and walking down an aisle at random. Years ago I had a prejudice against rereading books, but now it seems like the option most likely to succeed. So I grabbed "The Education of Henry Adams." Yes, the famous Adams of Boston and Quincy. The young fellow at the circulation desk astounded me by actually knowing of this classic book. Young Henry served as his father's assistant when the latter was the Yankee minister to Britain during the War of Southern Independence. After the war Henry started thinking about his own career and thought of being an editor at a newspaper or magazine. He said that, "Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism." Hey wait a minute...

The other day a friend and I were discussing how hard it is to understand the lingo of youngsters who have grown up in MTV culture. He said it is indeed strange how the world passes us by. That was one of those statements that really sticks with you; it only happens once in a great while. Recently I rewatched Billy Wilder's classic movie "Sunset Boulevard." Gloria Swanson and her butler had turned away from the "real," outside world while living in an aging hulk of a Hollywood mansion. Bill Holden's narration said that they didn't want to look outside and be reminded of what has-beens they were. It's quite an issue for an old fogey to wrestle with. Recently I have found myself telling stories to young people; stories that didn't fit in all that well with the rest of the discussion. Oh no! Am I going to become one of those old men who hears some buzzword in a conversation and then launches into an interminable story about something that happene

  We can all agree that the last thing this blog needs is another photograph of curved bill thrashers, red tailed hawks, or grassland texture. But I can't help it; I'm obsessed with the perfect photograph of certain things, and dew-chandeliers are one of them. Besides, sweet obsessions are one of the under-rated pleasures of life.

When an internet junkie is having a slump, nothing rubs salt into the wound more than a rainy day. When a stick-and-brick house dweller asks me how I could live in a small RV, I just roll my eyes at them, because it is quite easy. But in rainy weather the difficulty goes up a factor of 5-10. If he is a dog owner, it goes up another factor of 5-10.  How do you handle an internet slump? The book reader who is slumping can walk into a new bookstore, or down a different aisle in the library. And it works (!) more times than not. But when that computer screen stares back at you, it can intimidate you how much information is on the other side of that screen. You become frozen with inaction. You are tired of wading through all the crap, the linkbait. In theory you should be able to branch out by going to the links listed in the websites that you have read in the past. Either that doesn't work as well as it should or I haven't tried it with enough persistence.

For extra credit, identify the movie where the guy said, "Oh, and Stockel, let's see some real flying." In case you can't get that one, at least help me with this bird. I was sure it was a turkey vulture from its magnificent, playful, flying style, but there was no red, featherless head. When the sun catches the underwing at the right angle, you can get deceptive iridescence, but still, white underwings?