Occupation of Independence

Ahh, Spring.  But it doesn't really live up to its image.  For one thing I leave Arizona before there any flowers to look at. Since Arizona uses 'God's Time,' unlike the silly states in the rest of the country; and since I am still in Arizona, let's gloat by talking about the change of seasons a little bit today.  No matter how many springs a person has seen, there is still a stubborn tendency to expect temperatures to warm up gradually.   Wrong idea!  This notion needs to renounced once and for all.  It will save you unnecessary frustration. Gradually is the key word.  The only things that happen gradually are higher angles of the sun and longer hours of daylight. But temperatures do not warm up gradually in the normal sense of the word.  Temperatures toggle from winter to summer and back to winter.  They skip intermediate numbers, except in an immaterial mathematical sense of the word. A graph of spring temperatures looks like a squar...

It is fun for a hillbilly to go shopping in the big city.  So many choices!  But I lost track of how many times I told the checkout-human that I was not "in their system" and no, I would not give them my phone number. Harbor Freight has always been obnoxious and aggressive about that.  At least the biological unit who checked me out had a sense of humor about it. Later, something happened as obnoxious as McDonald's replacing their checkout-humans with those damn electronic kiosks, where the customer gets to fumble with a multi-step menu until they finally memorize it.   At one of the big gas station chains, I went in to pay cash as I usually do.  But instead of just giving the human a 20 dollar bill and saying, "Pump #7", he made me go to this iPad-looking thing, and fumble around with an arbitrary and non-intuitive sequence of steps in a multi-layered menu. He had to step around the counter and help me.  It took us 5 minutes to do what used to take 5 ...

The word, nomad, gets bandied about quite a bit these days, and it is not a complete misnomer.  Still, nomadism about looking at scenery or living off an internet job in a van is only convincing to a degree.  The latter don't need to move at all.  They really just need affordable   housing. By luck I ran into a marvelous documentary at the local library, "People of the Wind."   It is about real nomads in Iran.  The whole family gets involved in droving and caring for the many animals in their herds.  Most impressive to me were the scenes of the nomads pushing or carrying animals across a fast mountain stream.  (This tends to be an expensive DVD if you try to buy it, but you can stream it for free at kanopy.com). It feels so good to come across high quality DVDs at a library, especially at unlikely places.  Why shouldn't librarians be more assertive about being curators, rather than just filling the shelves with standard trash movies? It...

There are a lot of good things you can say about Mother Nature in western North America.  But she ain't perfect.  In spring, the thing that complicates the life of a traveler and camper is the mismatch between altitude and latitude. In an ideal world, one would take off in spring and gradually gain altitude and latitude.  Thanks to the great Southwestern Father of Waters, the Colorado River, altitude and latitude go hand in hand up to Lake Mead.  Then it gets crazy.  There is a huge hump of high altitude land at middling latitudes.  Call it the Colorado Plateau if you wish. To the west of that, Nevada has pretty high altitudes and is cold in spring.  It is huge. When you finally do get to the inland Northwest, the northern latitude is less important than the low altitudes found there.  Therefore you need to blast through the hump in middling latitudes as quickly as possible.  You feel like a fool.  "It is freezing here.  Why should ...

One of the difficulties of RVing with a dog is that the silly beast becomes spoiled.  They see their owner all the time.  Perhaps the owner should deliberately spend some time away from the dog, now and then. When I came back from town the other day, here is the welcome that was waiting for me:   Well, it certainly is a dog-friendly town, here in southeastern Arizona.  Perhaps too friendly. from pinterest.com But actually it works pretty well to allow dogs into the public library.  I didn't bring mine in.  But one of the librarians asked me if the white van was mine, and she said that the little dog inside had half-crawled out of the window, and should come inside the library.  Then the librarian went out and retrieved my dog. My little dog put on quite the performance for three lady librarians.  Soon they had her on the rug where they take photos of dogs for what I call the Readers Club. It is so rare to find small towns in America that are disti...

Yesterday was the most perfect day in a long time.  Oddly, it took very little to make it so good.  All it took was the old trick of going for a bike ride with my little dog, early in the morning, and on the right terrain, the right road, and away from motorsports noise and the misinformation of the RV blogosphere and tourism industry. Better yet, I was away from the desert.  Snowbirds rhapsodize over the "beauty" of the desert, but do they really mean beauty in a positive sense?  Or do they really just mean that they are away from clouds, snow, sleet, thawing snow, mud, and half-frozen slop? But they are connecting with "nature," you say.  Nature should mean more than rubble and cholla, and postcards of  saguaro cacti in front of a red sunset, and the like.  We are animals who need food and water.  There should be some goodies of that type in a "beautiful, natural" environment.    Some balance.      Here, away from the ...

The end of a war certainly is a poignant time.  Think of all those men dying for nothing!  As a war drags out to its bitter end, politicians show how little regard they have their own people.  The politicians only care about holding onto power -- to hell with how many peasants are dying needlessly. It seemed like a good idea to read about the end of other wars.  Since I had never really paid much attention to the Battle of the Bulge at the end of World War II, and had run into the movie at a local library, I bought a book on this battle by a well-known writer. It sounded like a good idea, but it didn't work.  And that is a real shame.  So many details, names, organizational units of the armies, locations.  All it added up to was a meaningless blur.  So I jumped to the Conclusion.   Even that didn't help. 'AI' might improve military history books -- by a lot!  We have certainly heard a lot of hype about its great promise.  Making mil...

I am not as 'fer' south as I am going to get this winter, but it is the end of the desert year.  I leave for the grasslands and oaks of southeastern Arizona when the sun comes up this morning.  Sadly, there was no secondary rainy season in the desert this winter.  But we got lucky with light winds.   Once again I will head north 'too' soon this spring, as is necessary if you want to make it to the inland northwest before the triple digit heat starts.  I am even considering hitting central and eastern Montana, in May perhaps? Digital zoom is doing OK, but you can see why I am getting interested in real optical zoom. My praise for a non-windy winter should have been a little louder than it was, above. Another chance to lust for a real camera.

  Tulsi Gabbard getting confirmed.  Wow!  Auditing the money that the US sent to Ukraine.  Shutting down the slush funds of NGOs.  Freezing foreign aid.  Shutting off the funding for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the chief meddler in other countries' elections.  What's next -- getting RFK Jr confirmed?  Things have been happening.   It is scary for me to move from a tightly leashed Hope to actual optimistic expectations.   Perhaps professional cynics like me are cowards who use their cynicism to protect themselves from disappointment.   Regardless of whether a person agrees with Trump or not, Trump 2.0 seems drastically more effective than Trump 1.0.  Does this show that it can be beneficial for presidents to have non-consecutive terms?  It makes sense that a four year hiatus for some deep thinking and reorganizing would have an effect.  Consecutive terms make it too easy for failed advise...

I saw the prominent white breast of an owl or raptor, who was resting on the top of a saguaro and facing the morning sun.   Quick -- grab the smartphone.  Yea, with its mighty 3X optical zoom!  And digital zoom only goes so far. I really wanted it to be an owl.  Sigh!  How I miss having a real camera with a telescoping 20X optical zoom.  I even started looking at You Tube videos on the latest digital cameras of that type.  They still make them, you know. But it is easy to get used to just carrying a smartphone.  I have learned the hard way that a mountain biker should not carry a real and blocky camera on a waistbelt.  Even more, it gets discouraging to see the plastic moving parts of a telescoping camera fail after a couple years, or sooner if you drop it.  Or maybe it was just a grain of sand that got in the gap between those plastic barrels, all those years. But who wants to lug around a bag-full of DLSR camera?   I don...

How many Americans were proud of their president appearing on stage with a genocidal maniac, while he vomited nonsense about America taking over Gaza?  What an opportunity for a political cartoonist!  They could start with one of the famous photographs from the Al Ghraib prison and torture era:   Then the cartoonist could label the American female soldier on the left of the photo "Miriam Adelson."  And redraw her image to look a little more like the billionaire's widow. The naked male Iraqi prisoner on the floor with the leash could be labelled "Trump", and also get redrawn to look more like Trump. I am so tired of the macho loud-mouth behavior of Donald Trump.  In fact he is a runt, a coward.   His behavior around Adelson and Netanyahu proves that. Speaking of runts, when was the last time the Muslim world in the Mideast had a real leader with some stature, like Nasser, Ataturk, or Saladin?  Extraordinary times are said to sometimes give rise to...

Do they still have the Super Bowl these days?  I haven't heard anything about it.  Maybe pro-football ain't what it used to be.   Maybe the internet isn't quite the hype-machine that old-fashioned television was. At any rate I miss the idea of the "office pool" for betting on the score of the Super Bowl.  Perhaps this year we should replace it with an office pool for betting on the fate of Zelensky of Kiev in 2025.  It is quite a challenge because the possible outcomes are so widely separated. 1.  His most obvious career path is the one chosen by Mussolini at the end of World War II. from wikipedia 2.  A quiet retirement in various mansions around the world, paid for by American tax dollars that stuck to Zelensky's fingers. 3.  A professorship at Columbia University in, say, "Peace Studies" or International Relations. 4.  Directorship of a big-name think tank in the Washington DC area.  The think tank will be affiliated with neo-cons, wh...

People who are unfamiliar with the American Southwest in the winter would be surprised to see a camper get out of bed and quickly grab a winter coat and stocking hat.  And shoes go on quickly -- the RV floor feels like ice.  Why call it a stocking hat?  One morning I became obsessed with this issue.  It doesn't look very much like a stocking.  The name conjures up images of Hans Christian Andersen or maybe a painting of Dutch ice skaters back in the 1700s. Wouldn't a young person scoff at 'stocking hat' as an old-fashioned term?  On Amazon I actually had to think what term wasn't antiquated.   They used 'beanie'.  And yes, the human skull looks more like a bean than a stocking.  I prefer 'skull cap.' Suddenly I thought of those books about the history of the English language.  They sometimes say the normal rate of evolution of a language means unintelligibility in 1000 years.  Of course 1000 is just a convenient round number. ...

  Most of the time when you see people walking in the desert, they are trying please their dog.  And those are the people I start to talk to.  When that happened a couple days ago, it turned into a nice conversation.  Why doesn't that happen more often when winter camping? Anyway, he told me about an interesting canyon and what mile marker it was at, out on the paved highway.  I didn't drive to it.  Could I find it on the mountain bike?  I headed off in that direction to see what would happen. When I hit a long steep hill that forced me into pushing the bike into the sun.  I started to suspect this route was going to be interesting. Something about trudging up the hill while pushing my bike, the harshness of the rocks, and the sun in my face conjured up the idea of Noble Suffering, like a pilgrimage -- say, El Camino de Santiago -- that a penitent peasant would have pushed through in the Middle Ages. When I popped over the top of the hill and saw ...

Never have I approached anything with the caution I am using on Trump 2.0.  I stubbornly cling to Hope, not because it is sensible but only because life is too grim for a puny human being without it.  My expectations have been pushed down to almost zero. How long will it take before we can see him stepping into the 'Peace with Honor' trap that Nixon used to extend the Vietnam War from 1968 to 1975?  Perhaps Trump will try to avoid that trap.  But the first time somebody accuses him of looking "weak" relative to Putin, he will fall for the trap.  Then the Democrats can smirk about how they destroyed his administration right at the beginning. So let's think of cheerful things on this day of his inauguration.  Like mindless eye-candy.  I have quite a backlog of photos from this fall's migration that haven't been used. Corrupting a friend with canyon camping Lake Mead Utah being Utah Cloud shadows and mountains

Is it just my imagination or are people actually getting stupider these days in west central Arizona?   The Quartzsite camping situation swells in late January.  Perhaps as crowds swell, one should expect people to act stupider and stupider. This is an unpleasant thought so it would not be beneficial to dwell on it.  But it might make sense to notice it, if only to steer away from it. Also, it might be fundamental to the human condition.  And if so, how can you really make a holy cause out of democracy?  There is no better time to think about that issue than when you are surrounded by hordes of the "general public." I try to be flexible, but I just can't see why 4WD vehicles are as popular as they are.  A small fraction of the time, the road becomes an interesting geometrical challenge to them.  They need to get it all right: angles, momentum, tire location, etc.  But 99% of the miles logged by the industry is nothing more than (noisy) 'channel su...

In my line of work, it would not do to be afraid of heights, and I'm not.  But it is actually an advantage to freak out when seeing mining shafts or strange holes in the ground.  A pleasant walk along a new arroyo can suddenly get a little dramatic when encountering a strange hole.   We were walking downstream when this hole came along.  I was so glad my little cutie was on a leash.  At first the hole seemed like it was part of an old mine, but after all, it was in the middle of the "water channel." What would it look like from the opposite side, the downstream side? OK, so it was a strange-shaped hole made by water.  Whenever you see something like this, you wonder what was so unusual about the rocks that caused such a strange shape. In general, reading an article on Wikipedia is no help.  The geology articles are just jargon and memorization.  I want to understand processes, and how the geology shaped the landscape -- that is, things I can see a...

Have you seen photos of those fires in LA?!  And yet, they say only 16 people have died.  To have such a low fatality count must mean that somebody is doing something right. But given such a low count, is it not possible that too much attention is paid to the LA fires?   Or does that sound cruelly indifferent?  Even one human death that is unnecessary is a tragedy, after all. But if that is true, why have Americans been completely indifferent to the half million unnecessary deaths in Ukraine that their own government is responsible for?  That tragedy might be winding down, finally.  But the American government is also largely responsible for the tragedy in the Mideast, which could get far worse. But it's not just a matter of numbers, you say.  The dead in LA are my countrymen.  But are they?  I don't consider the Left Coast to be my countrymen any more than Ukrainians or Gazans, and these latter peoples are suffering much more.  It makes...

  Sometimes it isn't helpful to be too good at being a 'late adopter' of new technology.  Until recently I resisted tablets because they were overpriced and too redundant with a laptop.  I just did not appreciate how much easier it is to relax with a tablet, while consuming media.    I even relax better while reading books with the tablet, compared to using a handheld eBook device like Kobo or Kindle. There is something about the keyboard of a laptop that makes me think I am working in an office.  I have tried covering the keyboard with paper or something, in order to escape that overly serious mindset.  But it didn't work. Adding a separate keyboard to a tablet will virtually make it a laptop-replacement.  But I resisted this.  Let the tablet stay in relaxation mode!  Let it maintain a separate personality.  It might be milking the act a little to say that the tablet has been 'transformative,' but it has. In case you are wondering ...

So, Trump wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the "Gulf of America."   Will he also rename the state of New Mexico, New America?  I'll give him credit for trying to get the USA to focus on North America, rather than places 6000 miles away on the Eurasian continent.   It seems that Trump 2.0 is just going to be a re-run of Trump 1.0.  He will spend his days as a publicity hound and loud-mouth.  What do you expect from a "leader" who has no real political ideals, and who only wants to be president in order to be the Entertainment Celebrity in Chief?

Undaunted by the hopeless mission of making New Year predictions, I now move on to New Year resolutions.  You'd think by this time in life I would have resigned myself to not achieving behavioral or moral perfection, and therefore postponed that project for my 'next life.'   But I can actually undo one error of this blog: excessive badmouthing of Arizona. It's not that there aren't legitimate reasons for running Arizona into the ground, or rather, the rubble.  To start with, there are Arizona drivers.  The soil-to-sharp rock ratio and the leaf-to-spine or sticker ratio and the green anything to brown anything ratio must be lower in this state than any state in the nation.  But that is only the bad side. On the good side Arizona is the only state that eschews Daylight Savings Time.  It probably has as many smooth-pebbled arroyos as any state.  But I want something more. I use virtually no heat here while camping all winter.  Oh, it is plenty chill...

Yes, 'predictions are very difficult, especially about the future.'  That won't stop me.  Through the year of 2025, expect: 1.  The Trump Derangement Syndrome will morph into the Musk Derangement Syndrome. 2.  Trump will fall into the trap of becoming the new owner of the Ukraine war debacle. 3.  100,000 civilians in the Mideast who are alive today will be killed directly or indirectly by Washington and Israel.  They will be called "terrorists", not murdered civilians. 4.  Zelenskyy's regime in Kiev will be over.  5.  The US government debt will expand by several trillion dollars.  High inflation will continue to be endemic in the American economy. I am still working on coming up with a positive development.  There's got to be something!  Wait, I've got it: 6.  America will not take over Canada, the Panama Canal, or Greenland. from calendar.com