Occupation of Independence

In honor of famed director Sidney Lumet, who died yesterday, I watched Twelve Angry Men . (Background information is available at imdb.com .) How long do you think it will be before movies like that are made again? It must be the most interesting lowest budget movie I've ever seen. "Low budget" is putting it mildly. How much did it cost to put twelve guys in the jury room and let them talk to each other? Intelligent dialogue between adults -- how boring and out-of-date can you get! If you want to give your imagination some exercise, try to put yourself in the shoes of a 16-year-old who encounters Twelve Angry Men today, by mistake no doubt. The poor lad must be bored out of his mind by a movie with no action, no bedroom scenes, no special effects, and no graphic and gratuitous violence. If he were capable of making it through the movie, he must think that people "back then" were ridiculously easy to amuse since, like, you know, they had a lower standard of liv

Naturally I want to be Fair and Balanced on this blog. Sometimes I might be too anti-government. The current administration claims to know something about pollution, even going so far as to declare carbon dioxide -- a gas without which life could not exist -- as pollution; perhaps these folks would be doing us more of a favor to remove some of the pollution off of the internet. The obvious place to begin is with the least controversial purging: surely most people would agree that travel blogs are internet pollution. Then they can quickly move on to bigger fish, such as product reviews. Yesterday I was reading reviews of RV parks, including the one that I'm currently in. Most people were charmed by the rustic nature of the park, but were disappointed by gravel, grass, "weeds", wind, sunlight, and juniper trees. The reviewers were disappointed that there was no cable TV here, and that there were few broadcast channels in our town. Such deficiencies detracted from thei

Wow. I needed to find some new blogs. It's funny how, with all this information available on the internet, it's so easy to fall into narrow ruts. I'm really getting to love Smith's blog, OfTwoMinds. He posted part II of his analysis of our consumer economy.

After I learned that a (now ex-) reader didn't care for my comments on motorhomes, I saw a chance to partially redeem myself. Of all the motorhomers that I've seen go through here, this is the first time that I've seen this arrangement. What a great way to get around town and really experience it, instead of being in a glass and steel cocoon. A moped might be limited to good weather, but RVers usually arrange it so that they are having good weather. I think these little cuties would really help an old boy feel young again.

In writing about all the turmoil in the Middle East, some pundits like to refer to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. This revived my interest in George Orwell, who volunteered for the (government) Loyalist side. In fact I checked out a 1300+ page collection of essays and magazine articles that he wrote during his short lifetime. It struck me how important it used to be that public intellectuals (like Orwell and Arthur Koestler) were not tenured professors or think-tank intellectuals. They put their beliefs into practice. You might disagree with their politics as I certainly do, and as they eventually did, later in life. But there was real integrity in an intellectual pushing back from his desk, and suffering the mud and stink of real war. Both were in physical danger. It's something that would never happen today. Imagine the suburban comfort of the interventionist today: their McMansions in northern Virginia or in fashionable areas of Maryland. They might have tenure at a uni

Considering the title and description line of this blog, it doesn't surprise anyone that the blog is implicitly hostile to the borrow-and-spend consumer culture of America. So it never seemed necessary to preach too much about it; people have heard the sermons before. And I never really aspired to go to heaven and sitteth upon the right hand side of Gandhi or Thoreau. But recently an excellent post has appeared on OfTwoMinds blog. There weren't any new ideas in the post, but it is an excellent summary of the idiocy of the American lifestyle. I got a kick out of the commenter who wondered, angrily, why consumers were good enough to buy the semi-useless crap sold by American corporations, but not good enough to be hired by them. 

There goes my self-image as a smart consumer. Never again will I ridicule the dummies silly geese hip/cool/sexy/smart people who buy Apple products, $43,000 pickup trucks, motorhomes, seldom-used boats, etc. I just got back from a 35 minute (one-way) walk from downtown in a pair of Keen "shoes". It felt like I walked home in my stocking feet. When they wear out I'll replace them with $25 sneakers from Walmart. How did those outdoor-equipment stores ever convince me to spend $100 for these lousy Keens? They're just over-priced house slippers.

The Iraq War started with a lie about weapons of mass destruction. At the time it seemed hard to believe that the Bush administration would lie about something that they would so easily get caught at, so I tended to believe them while suspecting that they were exaggerating. That is where I was a naif and the neocons were brilliant. WMDs were revealed as a lie gradually . At no time was the lie Breaking News; thus it wasn't news at all, and there were no consequences for the liars. In contrast, the Obama administration is not providing false evidence of a genocide in Libya; it provided no evidence at all. The only thing it provided was a "what if", that is, Fear. And thus we have come to see the Change we can Believe in: starting wars on the basis of no evidence at all, rather than false evidence.

During my siesta the other day I was listening to the opening of Verdi's La Traviata , a dance scene. Sometimes a music lover needs to be reminded of the connection between music and motion. It was a good time to let the mind drift off to possible connections between famous musical themes and motion. In fact, some of Verdi's dance scene music reminded me of Coffee Girl leaping and bounding through the field. Dogs aren't the only critter that is beautiful when in motion. When we made it up to Gabby's Ridge -- named after an Australian shepherd who led her owner there every day: (Gabby is on the left, above. Despite being disciplined and repressed more than any dog I've ever known, she can't hide her joy. That's dogs for you.) I looked down into the little valley and saw a horse prancing around its corral. It was stepping so high. So was its tail. It would have been grand if I had been down in the valley, looking up at the sprightly horse as it ran al

I'll give you one guess as to which direction I was cycling when I took this photo.

"Getting off the road" or "turning in the keys" have an ominous and depressing sound to a full time RVer, since it usually means that health problems and aging have finally gotten the upper hand. But let's say that it's not these typical issues. What else would make him get off the road? Imagine rolling into town and going out to run some errand. Perhaps your propane tank needs to be refilled. You have a couple minutes to kill while the attendant does his work, so you ask where the best grocery store is. The directions are totally useless of course, which you knew would happen if you had thought of it in time. Next you look up at the sky and start to make small talk about the weather, which should be more his speed. Well yea, he says while straightening up and lifting his baseball cap to let his sunburned head cool off, but you know what they say about Mudburg's weather: iff'n you doan lok it, ya jes wait 10 minutes! After delivering t