Occupation of Independence

We all get into ruts on the internet, reading blogs that talk about the same thing every time, or are thinly disguised infomercials, or are mere boob-toob level entertainment.  I just found a great blog on consumer culture, money, and financial independence called Living Stingy. It is intelligent, acerbic, and full of common sense. Why did it take so long to find this blog? The title of the blog is unfortunate. The writer really doesn't allow comments, which I think is a mistake. Well too bad, it is fun to read and written with mordant wit. Admittedly I am a bit prejudiced when it comes to style. I like to see a writer observe concrete things that seem bizarre to him. Then he must try to explain those things, and in the process of doing that, the blog post moves towards more general and universal principles. At any rate, give this blog a try and tell me what you think of it.

There must be people out there who are ten times better than me at internet searching. I don't even like buying things on the internet, other than music.  Today I dropped in on the local car dealer in Gunnison CO just to kick some tires. I was suspicious that my internet searches were at a dead end. As luck would have it, this dealer had recent models of all the categories I polemicized about, last post. It was uncanny. What an amazing difference there is between seeing something real and merely reading about it. Just think how good those reviewers made the Dodge Durango and Chevy Traverse sound. One glance at them and I chopped them off the list. They had those annoyingly-low, plastic, front-bumper skirts (air dams) that hang down to about 4 inches from the ground. Ridiculous! You couldn't even get close to a concrete curbstone with one of those suburban mommie-mobiles. The Subaru Outback had a high and clean undercarriage, but it didn't look like a real hitch could

It seems like many of the experiences, that I want to post about, occur during the food-stop in the middle of a bicycle ride. Why is that? Is it the mood that cycling puts me in? It certainly seems to be true that one's appreciation of a Thing depends more on the Context of the thing, than on the thing itself. At any rate, it happened again today. A couple of deaf people were having an animated conversation at a table in front of the window of a food stop. I could pretend to watch my unlocked bicycle just outside that window, without it being obvious that I was "eavesdropping" on their conversation in sign language. (I do not "sign.") Through my sunglasses I could watch them out of the corner of my eye. They had each other's undivided attention. No distractions. Compare the quality of the conversation of these two "handicapped" people to the usual 'barely listening' conversation of non-handicapped people! We struggle with the crappy bac

Because of the holidays and being between semesters, I haven't been assigning homework on a regular basis. I'm sure the reader will be relieved to get back in the swim of things. Very well then, today's assignment is the chapter on "Moral Perfection" in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography. ___________________________________________ Should we make more, or less, effort at New Year's Resolutions as we get older? A cynic might say that an oldster should have outgrown such nonsense by now. A wit might say that if such resolutions did any good, the oldster would have reached moral perfection long ago, and thus the question doesn't even come up. I hope you were lucky enough to have known a grandfather that you looked up to as a wise old man. Mine once told me that a young man never thinks about the consequences of his actions. That's not such a brilliant or original thought, but I 'remember it as if it were yesterday,' as old men are prone to

Perhaps the reader is relieved that there aren't Google ads in this blog. Actually, as a reader, I really don't mind stationary ads in parallel with the reading material. But product-placement ads infuriate me. So this blog doesn't offer those, either. Perhaps the reader thought that this was too good to be true. Well, it was. Today marks the beginning of a new policy on this blog. Not ads. But there will be homework assigned. Mandatory reading. I expect to double my hit-count because of this new policy. The only thing still to be decided is how to quiz the readers at the end of the post so I can see if they've been cheating. Very well then, today's assignment is a short essay by Jonathan Swift on conversation.

Very well then, we are all agreed that in pursuing a winter lifestyle that enlarges our overall lifestyle we must move towards complementarities rather than outright reversals. For instance, the internet is a pretty big part of most people's lifestyle these days. But surely most people suspect that much of their online time is wasted on predictable repetition of absolute trivia. It's tempting to fantasize smashing the computer with a hammer and chucking the whole thing into a dumpster, and then dropping the expensive monthly charge of the cellphone carrier. But wait. Where is the perpendicular move? It must make a youngster's eyes roll when an old timer tells them that that they used computers for several decades without being online. (Although they were hooked to a mainframe computer, usually.) In fact it even makes me wonder sometimes what I ever found to do with an offline computer at home. But remember my sighs over the great charnel houses in the cloud, or for tha

Call it a blessing or a curse as you wish, but it is certainly true that pontificating on the internet (even anonymously!) makes you feel obligated to practice what you preach. (How grim!) For instance, I was extolling the general value of the Rockhound Principle recently. The perfect place to apply this principle is in the reading of books. Where else can you benefit more from infinite patience with "detritus?"  Instead of feeling disgusted, you can channel this into delight when you finally do find something precious. You can also work to ensure that the precious nuggets you find stay found, by actively assimilating them into your life. Recall that I was reading "The Name of the Rose," by Umberto Eco. All in all, I don't recommend it. Still, there were a few precious nuggets on the way through the book. The leading character was a monk trying to solve some murders in a monastery in the early 1300s. One body was found in a vat filled with the blood of re

From time to time, most cellphone users must have wondered why, with all the progress in telecommunications technology the last 20 years, cellphone voice quality is not as good as landline voice quality when Alexander Graham Bell was still alive. But then they push the issue aside because every third TV commercial is about the latest and greatest, cool, smartphone; so the world believes in all this exciting "progress" taking place in that field; so why think thoughts that make you feel like a crank? It is very gratifying when I actually find something on the internet that is worth reading. And it happens so rarely, I feel like a fool for wasting as much time on the Internet as I do. There is an interesting article on Karl Denninger's blog today about cellphone service ("The Destruction of Quality"). You don't have to agree with his politics to enjoy the article -- the article isn't political.

I don't talk about specific dispersed campsite locations and resent it when other people do. Why this should be so might be the subject of a later post. Today I want to tell you about a large area of dispersed camping that is now attractive, thanks to it finally getting Verizon cell coverage. How many times does a huge block of high quality public land open up? Actually it isn't all that often that Verizon adds a whole new tower in a rural area. This is news, folks. For years it has been a pleasant drive through southwestern New Mexico, going from Silver City to Springerville AZ on US-180. There were many dirt roads heading off into interesting public lands, but I seldom stopped for long, because there was no Verizon cellphone/internet coverage. What a pity. From the Catwalk, near Glenwood, NM.   This year I was delighted to pick up a strong signal near Glenwood, NM. I pulled over to scan the horizon for a new tower. The only one visible was on a tall mountain three m

My head hurts. There are few things that will cause brain-pain as easily as reading discussion forums on the internet. Grim determination is indispensable. With enough patience you can actually learn a few things. But most of the contributors seem to want to make you suffer first. These days I read some of the pickup truck and tow vehicle forums. Let's hope the next generation is learning in school how to write on a discussion forum, the same way that my generation learned how to write a business letter or how to type. Until then, the forum reader will have to endure dumb jokes, habitual contradiction, sidetracking, ad hominem trollishness, misspellings, and the worst written English imaginable. Can any of those forum-mongers write two sentences without obtruding abbr. & acronyms? And don't even get me started on that LOL/IMHO crap ... because those people R the biggest PITA!!!! (LOL!!!!) Th e fr ustrated comedians are even worse. For one thing, they are hardly ever fu

Would it pay off to drop my Verizon Wireless internet connection? I'm talking about more than the $53 dollars per month. The main benefit would be the killing off of the bad habit that the internet has become. But there's more: without worrying about internet coverage, North America will be a much bigger and better place to camp. Does the reader know of anyone who has done this, and whether they are happy they did? There would still be wi-fi in town or at country stores. I r eally like the camping-style of coming to town once per week to do the usual errands. Internet usage w ould just be one more errand. It would be fun to look forward to it. Access once per week would be adequate for paying bills, catching up on the news (mostly just entertainment trivia), and reading websites and blogs (more trivia). Once per week would be adequate for a little bit of internet shopping. Nor would dropping Verizon Wireless internet service mean that my computer lies fallow all week.

Do our habits and attitudes carry over from "old" technology to newer tech? For instance, many people (and most men) do not like to shop. They already know what they want when they go into a store. They want to find it quickly, buy it, and get the hell out of there. But what happens when the reluctant shopper has to go to a search engine on the internet? How can he not growl at the 3.6 million hits for his search? That's as growl-able as going to a flea market at Quartzsite in January, and sifting through a ton of unsorted detritus piled up on a table. Recently I've been complaining a lot about wasting time on the internet, reading repetitious trivia. And yes, I have considered the possibility that some of this problem is self-inflicted. Perhaps I would find something fresh and worthwhile to read if I stopped being so impatient with those search engines. Where are the blogs that are reminiscent of the periodical essays of the 1700s? So I used "periodical

I w a nt to follow up with some suggestions about conquering the Uni nterrupted Prose Syndrome, by making verbiage "breathe" with some kind of pictorial illustration, gotten somewhere . (Let's ignore the fact that music might be eve n better for this purpose, since it's pr obably more technically difficult to get it into the blog post.)  So off I will go, searching for shareable photographs in the great charnel houses for internet photographs, such as publicDomainPictures.net, Picasa, or Flickr. Blogs that have a Creative Commons License, such as a commenter's blog , are also worth a serious look. Oops. There is a likely problem that we must address before rolling up our sleeves. Recall the controversy that good ol' Leo Tolstoy got into in the Colorado arts scene, one summer not so long ago. (grin) By invoking his arguments on "What is Art?" (free on Google Books), I am not trying to con you with an "appeal to Authority," as it might

Now don't be sus picious or skeptical if I boast of progress in my de-internetting project by reading adulterous love triangles. Thanks to getting a library card from the Yuma library, I picked up the late-1940s movie, Anna Karenina , starring Vivian Leigh. She was good in the role and, let's face it, agreeable to look at. It served as inspiration for a rematch with Tolstoy's novel. It took about 40 pages for the main characters to start the soap opera, proper, after which I just rolled my eyes and put the book away. Ahh but wait. Maybe things are different when re-reading a book.  Let's try to learn something from rewatching a movie. Years ago I learned the trick of focusing away from the center of the screen. Without any special effort, you prob ably would be focusing dead center, where the action is an d the leading c haracters are.  Perhaps this could work for re-reading a novel? For example I am merely skimming the main chapters in Anna , all ghastly s

How many years has it been since Time magazine switched from their famous "Man of the Year" award to "Person of the Year? " But that's still anthropocentric, you know. The award would be more PC if it were opened up to all species. Coyotes come to mind, especially wily ones. Since the financial turmoil of 2008 it has become almost common to picture our economy -- actually the world's economy -- as Wile E. Coyote running over the edge of a cliff, finally looking down and realizing the situation, and then disappearing into a shrinking point and a final poof at the bottom of the canyon. Despite its aging, th e coyote metaphor is so perfect that it should get the award for 2012. Just think of all the time and effort you could spend discussing so many issues and problems of our times; it tires you just to think of it. And we are sick of it anyway. Sometimes the metaphor seems to apply to someth ing perfectly, but the coyote in question just hang s out t

An internet dieter does not have the advantage that food dieters do when they finally step on the scale. Perhaps there is an app out there that keeps track of the hours you are on the internet. Nevertheless, at the risk of fooling myself, I claim to be making progress with my internet diet. When wireless internet access got better around 2005, I really thought I was done with book-reading, and that the internet would be my main venue for reading in the future. But experience has shown that most blogs are too trivial and repetitive to waste much time with. Of course the internet is still good for many things other than reading blogs. Ever m indful that one can't cut b ack on a vice without replacing it with something else, I've gone back to reading books , which thankfully has become much easier the last few years. For one thing , reading is no w easier on the eyes.  Th is is crucial to older eyes on winter evenings, e s pecially when they are camping in an RV without el

Occasionally it is fun to see if I can catch the readers sleeping by giving them a pop quiz. A couple comments about eReader gadgets recently revealed an opportunity for me to move in for the kill (grin). There seems to be a misunderstanding of what it takes to read a book comfortably .  This is an important topic for those of us who see internet addiction (on trivial and repetitive websites) as a serious problem to overcome. Has anyone ever beaten a vicious habit by trying to replace it with a vacuity? I doubt it. They need to replace it with something that has a positive existence; something that is tangible, lively, and takes up time. In my case that means giving up the insulting trivialities of the blogosphere and going back to reading "books." Now for the multiple choice quiz: which factor has the greatest beneficial effect on your comfort, endurance, and attention span when reading a book? Display size of the eReader, i.e, 7", 10", etc. Operating system

Baby Boomers should have something to say about consuming information as a way of life. When we came into this world, the great blight of television befell the world. Today, toward the end of our passage, the internet is taking over. These are two information revolutions just as big as, but far more sudden than, the invention of the alphabet or Gutenberg's movable-type printing press. Baby Boomers, destined to eventually become America's Worst Generation, started off life as the first generation raised on television. TV-haters (like me) would love to believe that that proves cause and effect. Whether you buy that or not, it is strange how uncritically many parents welcomed TV into their homes in the 1950s. Soon the living room furniture was all arranged around the TV set. Many children grew up with no restrictions on their TV habits. How ironic that many a traditional father in the 1950s kept a gun in the house to 'protect his family', you know. And yet he allowed th

So far I've resisted adding links to dozens of "me too" mainstream RV travelogues because, when I'm the reader, a mile-long list of such links is too daunting to even dig in to. So I've restricted the list to friends' blogs. In other cases I haven't listed links to certain blogs because they already have huge readerships, so my referrals wouldn't give them the slightest bump. (Examples are toSimplify.net and theBayfieldBunch.com) But even more fundamentally I don't list mainstream RV travelogues because they are stereotypical to the point of self-parody. They are too much alike and too predictable. Does it sound like I'm in curmudgeon mode today? I admit to being fairly hard to please. But there is a constructive way to use reputed "cynics" and "negative thinkers": when they give a recommendation it really means something . I added cheapRVliving.com to my list of links. It's been built by somebody who I have never

Arriving in Cuba NM I made a mistake that an experienced traveler has no excuse for: I asked some low-level employees in a couple stores where the Verizon cell tower was. If you want an assured, blank, uncomprehending stare from a local, that is the question to ask. But in fact I first asked two firefighters this very question, and they gave me the wrong answer. (Please don't tell me the answer is on the internet. The internet is full of inaccurate and obsolete information. Nobody ever corrects any of it.) I went away feeling like a fool for even asking. After such an experience it is always tempting to conclude that the average person is a know-nothing. But there might be a kinder and gentler explanation: most lives are actually quite circumscribed. Most people have little curiosity about things they have no immediate need to know. "Life" consists mostly of routines built around work, driving to work, household chores, shopping, and television. Asking where the cell