Occupation of Independence

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...