Occupation of Independence

I felt it welling up inside me: disgust and anger.  And yet it was glorious! Arizona is having a February heat wave , as if being ungawdly hot for 9 months a year isn't good enough.  And I was working outdoors, during the heat of the day, on rebuilding my wooden leveling ramps.  I tried to work in the shadow of my van, but the verticality of the sun in late February was making that difficult. "Glorious" in the first paragraph was not meant to be theatrical or facetious.  This is ranch country in southeastern Arizona, and it has become quite the little tourist trap, commemorating its glorious cowboy past.  But how do you experience the reality of ranching in 1890?  By looking at pretty sunsets?  By researching the area on the internet?  By going on a ranger-led hike?  ("Please folks, stay on the trail!  The rattlesnakes might come out on a warm day this time of year!") Hell no, it ain't about prettiness, although there is quite a bit of ...

 Before I left the desert-wasteland for this winter, I did a double-take at a certain saguaro cactus : You might think, What's the Big Deal.  It's just a classic saguaro postcard.  But that's the thing: I spend most of the winter in deserts that are marginal for saguaros.  You might be surprised how sickly most of them look.  The specimen above is thriving! Did it just get lucky genes?  Or are saguaros so picky about conditions, that perfect soil and weather only occur occasionally?  I wish I knew more biology .  Sometimes I start doing homework and become instantly bored with all the jargon and memorization needed. How could plants so picky about conditions even come into being, in the first place?  And then you have plants and critters on the other side of the spectrum: they are so adaptable or so tolerant that they can live just about anywhere.  Consider the coyote as the perfect example of that. At any rate, we have fled the desert ...

 Do you remember how people watched, time after time, the 9/11 videos of the Twin Towers coming down?  People couldn't believe what they were seeing.  There was some cheering in various parts of the world.  The gist of it only took a couple spectacular seconds. What would happen if Iran sends some missiles into the big, beautiful armada of the Trumpanyahu regime?  Imagine a burning, smoking aircraft carrier.  It could make for an hour of spectacular video footage.  Imagine the mighty symbol of American strength listing at an extreme angle, support ships hovering nearby trying to rescue lifeboats, sailors jumping off the sloped deck into the water, and flames and fuel explosions! It might provoke a world record of  schadenfreude.   That wouldn't be surprising, considering that Washington DC and Israel might be the two most hated nations in the world. In the future, history books would always show this image when writing about the end of the A...

 Whether it is good or bad, I seldom try to watch new movies.  But I made an exception on Tubitv.com with " The Music of Silence ", a semi-biographical story of the blind singer , Andrea Bocelli .  It deserves praise for a good story and the lack of the usual components of modern movies, such as insane violence, bedroom scenes, rainbow flag worship, etc. It is enjoyable for most viewers to stick for an underdog, and that is especially so for a blind person.  But it is almost too easy.  Most people remember the " Miracle Worker ", with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke , in the Helen Keller story.  So the path has already been well explored.  Halfway through the movie, I started to think that the viewer needed more of a challenge, in the same way that an outdoorsman needs to get off of heavily-used trails that have a brown, carsonite sign every 100 steps. Much to the movie's credit, it showed a scene when a heavy female singer spontaneously joined Bocel...