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A Bum Experience on the Trail

Without making too big a deal out of it, I should write about today's mountain bike ride before common sense and good taste get the better of me. Once again the ride was under perfect conditions, including the ending : I was half lost, but as long as the trail was going downhill, it was getting closer to town. A couple friendly dogs were approaching from the other direction on the trail, happily wagging their tails, so I slowed down to make a bit of a fuss over them. As I coasted and slowed over a small hump, what did I see but a female hiker quickly rising from a squat. She was pullin' everything up as fast as possible, but I had time to get quite an eye-full. Why the heck was she taking care of business right next to the trail, in an open spot!, instead of behind a juniper a few feet away on either side of the trail?  She was an old hippie broad, in more ways than one. I wouldn't have minded to catch her a peein' if she were, say, European. Everybody knows how lax

Goldilocks in the Blogosphere

Recently a commenter mentioned that they're new to this blog. Suddenly I thought, "Dear me. The poor devil!" Perhaps this blog needs what some blogs have: an introductory paragraph that allows the reader to quickly know if they're barking up the wrong tree. Won't the poor devil be offended if they are female, environmentalist, neocon Republican, academic, a danged liberal (especially Left Coast), motor-crazed, suburbanite, New Ager, shopaholic, global Warmist, RV potlucker, TV watcher, Bible banger, etc. That's getting to be a pretty big segment of the population. Who's left! What if an introductory blurb scared away people who disagree with the blogger, who in turn actually enjoys disagreement? Over the years I've generally made friends with people who think I'm 90% full of crap. There's a big difference between 90% and 100%. And the 10% that they consider tolerable encourages them to try to redeem me, which is charmingly futile. On the other

Bloggers' Unfulfilled Mission

Amateur bloggers spend too much time blogging about domestic or personal trivia. That is what Facebook and Twitter are for. Many amateur bloggers might have an interest in philosophical or political issues but think that the world has already heard enough squabbling. Or amateur bloggers consider themselves unqualified. How can a three-paragraph-long post compete with an entire book written by a professional who has devoted years to his job? But this humility overlooks the advantages that the amateur has: he should never underestimate the group-think that most professionals fall into. The amateur is not constrained by ratings pressure, publication deadlines, legal worries, corporate policy, availability of grants, etc. Nor must the amateur start off with the same premises as professional pundits. After all, it's what doesn't get discussed that matters most. Many topics that might seem boring are not intrinsically boring; rather, their discussion was made boring by starting of

Desire Causes Suffering?

A reader recently emailed me about my last post; among other things she wondered about my less-than-reverent attitude towards the Buddha. Living in a town full of New Agers (old hippies for the most part), Greens, and refugees from Santa Fe and the Left Coast, it is hard to resist taking pot-shots at the conventional pieties of the enlightened ones. But don't worry; I don't take myself too seriously at it, since it's probably just the same sort of puerile and impish pleasure that the traditional village atheist used to get. In fact, the notion of 'Desire causing Suffering' was a big part of getting ready to retire early, both as a motivation and as a means. I looked at this issue from the point of view of ancient Stoicism rather than Buddhism, but perhaps there was some overlap. But when I did retire early I observed retired RVers who were twenty years older than me. It seemed necessary to adjust my attitude to the mantra of 'Desire causes Suffering.' I

Coyote Alarm Sounds

  Dogs hate coyotes. This morning Coffee Girl saw the coyote on the other side of the arroyo before I did. It was not the same large, powerful one that attacked my little poodle in October 2010. This one was scrawny. I've seen Coffee Girl raise her hackles twice as much as she is in this photograph.

Another Use of Ugliness

Today was a special day in the southern New Mexican highlands. Let me write about it before the memory fades. I had mountain biked on a paved road up the standard hill, until it was time to jump out onto a forest trail. The trail was so carpeted with long ponderosa needles that I wouldn't have been able to follow it if trees hadn't been marked, even though I was familiar with the trail. At the beginning of autumn I had been pelted by falling ponderosa needles near here. Wikipedia doesn't say whether ponderosas are semi-deciduous, but it sure looked like it. Instead of being cold and dark at these higher locations like I feared, the forest canopy seemed more open than in summer. It was actually warmish, 25% sunny, and dead calm. Thus it was warmer than at the lower elevations, which are open, windy grasslands. The gaps in the canopy allowed me to always feel connected to the cold clear sky. I was giddy in a forest! Previously I had belonged to a large school that dislikes

Mad Prophets of the Blogosphere

In the past I have poked fun at myself and other bloggers. Spiffy web designs, digital photos, and the extension of our mighty thoughts to the entire blogosphere, tempt us to puff up into a sort of mad prophet (without a license). Today I read something that made me giggle out loud, in Barrett's Irrational Man , p. 81: The Greek word for "I know," oida , is the perfect of the verb "to see" and means "I have seen." He who knows is the man who has seen, who has had a vision. Well, "Howard Beale" (of the movie Network ) and the rest of us agree wholeheartedly! (Movie information is at imdb.com)

The Vertical Blog Syndrome

'Trying to fit a square peg in a round hole' is an old cliche that might be disappearing from the American vernacular. In a way, that would be a shame because it expresses a useful and important idea. We need some new expression to replace it. How about 'trying to write a vertical blog on a horizontal screen.'  Well OK, the new phrase doesn't have much of a jingle to it. It needs polishing. But it's a truism nonetheless. This morning I was led to a blog from their comment on some other blog. They were an interesting young couple, and I liked their writing. But rather than focus on their content I was distracted by the vertical blog layout, which wasted 30% of the screen.  Why do so many bloggers opt for this inferior design? In fact if you look at the templates available on "blogger" (blogspot), most of the choices are vertical. The reader probably wants to know by now why I don't find something more important to complain about. Indeed it does s

Tickling the Ivories

Lately my musical preferences have shifted towards solo piano. The wi-fi in my campground is too slow for internet radio, so I am limited to CDs fom the local library and occasional downloads from Napster. George Winston and Craig Armstrong are my interests right now. It is too early to tell for sure, but this could turn into one of those lasting transitions that a person has a few times in their life. For the lack of a better term let's call it a musical conversion. I wonder what is true in general about these musical conversions. Does everybody have them? How often? What causes them? I don't even know where to go to learn about this. Society as a whole went through several musical conversions during my lifetime. I was just old enough to remember watching the Beatles appear on the Ed Sullivan show. I sort of liked them, but wondered what all the fuss was about. I never cared much for rock-pop music, even when I was a kid. Actually nothing is better at convincing me to renoun

Religion Reinvents Itself

The text for today's sermon is from William Barrett's Irrational Man , the chapter on The Decline of Religion.  The central fact of modern history in the West -- by which we mean the long period from the end of the Middle Ages to the present -- is unquestionably the decline of religion. The decline of religion in modern times means simply that religion is no longer the uncontested center and ruler of man's life, and that the Church is no longer the final and unquestioned home and asylum of his being. Oh really?! Hadn't Barrett ever heard of Marxism? What would he say of Global Warming and the regulation of carbon? If the Warmists had their way, the taxation and regulation of carbon would make Muslim Sharia law look as watery and flexible as the Garrison Koehler's proverbial Ten Suggestions of the Unitarians. As religion came to be doubted, it learned to adapt itself. It became less about quasi-mythological persons or writings of a distant past, and more orient

Saying No

These days it's easy to drown in all the financial news from Europe. I'm starting to admire the feistiness of the Irish. They have protested the bailout forced on them by foreign bankers and European bureaucrats. We will have to wait for Ireland's new government to find out how much spine the Irish actually have. I'm pleased with the blogosphere for refusing to go along with calling it a bailout "of Ireland"; rather, it is a bailout of the stupid banks in the UK and Germany who loaned money into the real estate bubble in Ireland. Ahh dear, I'm probably willing to romanticize the people in any country who have the gumption to stand up to the political and financial elite. Yes, that sounds pitchfork populist. In Irrational Man , William Barrett wrote some relevant things in his chapter on Sartre: The [World War II] Resistance came to Sartre and his generation as a release from disgust into heroism. It was a call to action, an action that brought men to the