Occupation of Independence

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