Occupation of Independence

As long as I'm ranting against smartphones and tablets, I wonder if they are responsible for the poor quality comments on some of the blogs I follow. By 'poor quality' I don't mean that I disagree with their point. I just can't read their comment; my eyes and brain hurt too much. Perhaps the comment was pecked out by thumbs when the guy was waiting in his mega-saurus, king-cab, dualie pickup truck in the fast food drive-through; and the commenter hasn't gotten around to buying an app for spell checking. Then again, maybe he did get an app, except that it changes ordinary English prose to thumb-English: "R U L8?", "wut 4?," and the like. The rules of lower and upper case have gone out the window. An entire vocabulary of sub-English abbreviations flourishes. What the hell does LOL or IMHO mean anyway?! There is no more inexcusable form of sub-English than one made of abbreviations. Maybe I'm wrong to blame smartphones and their postage-

You don't have to run to the gasoline pump every few days to be a traveler. Somebody whose brain has been independent of television for most of his life visits a strange and exotic land every time he watches a TV commercial. I only watch football on TV, so I'm shocked and amazed by what I see: every other commercial during football games is for a smartphone. Why? Perhaps the advantage of a smartphone is that it allows the average American, who spends half his day stuck in traffic in his pickup truck, to hold the phone in one hand, with his $4 cup of Joe in the other hand, while steering with his left leg, while his eyes look over at the CD player with 64 tiny buttons on it. I don't see what body parts are left to operate the buttons on the remote control of the overhead DVD player, let alone the GPS. It seems obvious that a netbook provides a cheaper and more complete internet experience than a smartphone. Why would a smart consumer want to download, install, and pay for

Starting in October I go nuts over the texture of the grassy fields nearby. As winter wears on, these grasslands lose their spirit and become trampled down. With no birds in the vicinity this autumn and winter, I'm lucky to have this obsession with grassy fields. Normally my camera would switch its obsessions over to hoarfrost by Christmas, but it has been dry and snowless this winter. Ahh how nice it is to have a dry winter! Perhaps the oncoming storm is going to put an abrupt end to that. So let me put up these last photos to celebrate the end of the fall texture season and the beginning of snow and hoarfrost. As usual, click to enlarge.  

I'm pleased to report finding a new financial blog to follow, mybudget360 dotcom. Recently it has featured a post-mortem on the late Las Vegas boom and bust.  If we can't agree on anything else, let's agree that schadenfreude -- the joy felt over other people's suffering -- is not the fairest flower of human nature. But the shameful truth is that I exult over the demise of Las Vegas. Blame that on an ugly, vestigial streak of Puritanism, if you will. Actually it's a little more personal than that. During my years of RV travel, Las Vegas was pretty hard to avoid. Since I hung out in St. George UT during the shoulder seasons, and since the Grand Canyon lacked a bridge, it was necessary to go through Vegas. It was actually a practical and beneficial stop, where a traveler could stock up on supplies, get work done on his rig, and enjoy the last Barnes and Noble for awhile. I also enjoyed free camping at the casinos (where I never gambled) and early-morning, loss-lea

Apparently this hawk has learned from the ravens how to taunt my dog. It flew overhead, no more than thirty feet off the ground, which made focusing difficult. Then it was off to the races, as Coffee Girl chased it across the field.

One of the biggest news stories of the past year has been the financial crisis in Europe. If European unification fizzles, it wouldn't be the first time. But what does the current unifying force consist of? Bureaucrats and technocrats? A utilitarian ethic built around material comfort. Taxes, regulations, uniformity codes, and coercion. How inspiring! But "inspiration" of some kind has been a big part of Europe, beginning in the Dark Ages. From Toynbee's Study of History (abridged), vol. I, page 13: In fact the Empire fell and the Church survived just because the Church gave leadership and enlisted loyalty whereas the Empire had long failed to do either... Thus the Church, a survival from the dying society, became the womb from which in due course the new one was born. Some of that "leadership" was pure bureaucracy. The Catholic Church is almost an alien thing to people who grew up in the Protestant Midwest. As a young man I was on a airplane flight with

A couple Christmases ago, the dogs and I explored volcanic Saddle Mountain, near Tonopah, AZ. It worked out well to approach from the north, the green side. The rains have produced a lot of green "grass." It's not really grass, but looks like it from a distance. The spiny, stalky ocotillos are leafed out with dense, small, green leaves. They'd be perfect Christmas trees if they had their red blooms. Actually I didn't expect to see any green today. It takes effort to give up this notion that lichen belongs in alpine settings being licked by a mountain goat, rather than in the desert. It is surprising how lush and thick it can be here, on the desert floor at 1000 foot altitude. You really could do some rough orienteering on a cloudy day just by noticing the green (or yellow or orange) fuzz on the north side. As easy as it is to enjoy the Sonoran Desert in the winter, I sometimes wonder what I'm missing by not experiencing it at other times of the yea

It's not so hard to write a travel blog, as I know from past experience (rv-boondocker-explorer). After all, there are millions of armchair travelers who are easy to please with the morning news -- their daily dose of (free) escapism -- about where you slept last night and what the pretty scenery looks like there. Then there's your trip to the local Pioneer Museum, which is proud to feature the world's third largest ponderosa pine cone, etc. The challenge picks up considerably as you move away from the travel genre. My half-seniorish brain is a giant compost heap, a mouldering pile of half-forgotten quotes from a lifetime of reading classic books. I can't quite remember a nice quote about needing to be almost formally and ritualistically polite in conversations if we are to have full-bodied discussions of any type. This is pertinent to a blogger who wants to crawl out of the trivia and small talk. For instance you can't discuss much without using labels, which r

As a young lad I heard older men using expressions so out-of-date that I was embarrassed for their sakes. Usually the old expressions were agricultural in origin, or perhaps from popular radio programs of the 1930s or 40s. The expression, 'if a Martian landed tomorrow and saw that, he'd think...', has probably dropped out of the modern vernacular, perhaps due to the Space Age. That's a pity because looking at common things with an uncommon perspective is important. It's one of the great benefits of traveling. The archaic expression seems compelling during the Christmas shopping season. Since RV traveling meant dry camping or boondocking for me, for years I made coffee with an Italian espresso maker that worked on the propane stove. Finally I tired of cleaning it, or maybe the coffee didn't taste that good anymore. Before that I had used a simple plastic cone with paper filters. You might not believe it, but I've never owned one of those ubiquitous Mr. Cof

It's too much work for one day to beat up on the notion of Progress in general. Let's focus in on the movies. One of my Christmas presents was the dvd movie, All About Eve , 1950, starring Betty Davis, Anne Baxter (Frank Lloyd Wright's granddaughter), George Sanders, and Celeste Holm.  There are two kinds of directors: 1) the camera-oriented (such as Sergio Leone and his spaghetti westerns) and, 2) the script/dialogue-oriented. All About Eve was directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who started as a script writer and belonged to the second group naturally. Well, this introduction will have to suffice; this blog isn't imdb dotcom.  How would this movie affect a young person who has grown up with video games and with movies that imitate video games? In one scene two of the main characters are walking down the sidewalk in a big city's downtown. The camera only catches them walking from the knees up. Clearly it was shot in a studio, with a screened image in the background; t