Occupation of Independence

Where we have coffee, downtown. The fountain-sculpture was just thawing out.

Advertisements certainly have their place on the internet. How else would you pay for websites? Government grants? Do everything with volunteers? Guilt-ridden PBS-style beg-athons? But today I went to an economic/political blog and found a flashing ad in the right margin. I tried to cover it with a popup window, but that didn't quite work. Then I enlarged the font of the website, hoping that would bump the flashing ad off screen. That too failed. Long ago -- back when "call waiting" was a new high-tech phone option -- somebody told me how he got a telephone call from somebody who immediately asked, "Can I put you on hold?" He responded by hanging up; it made his day. It's not quite as fun as that when you quit going to a website because of one of those obnoxious flashing ads, but it still counts. It's hard to believe that anyone would put up with them. What does it say of a person or society who does put up with flashing ads?

Long-suffering readers are probably tired of my complaints against the trivialness of travel-newbies or the romantic escapism of wannabees. OK then, let's keep it positive. Every now and then a reader runs across an exception to the trivia of travel, and it can occur in the most unlikely place.  I read bicycle touring blogs. Normally they show pretty postcards of landscapes, punctuated with mind-numbing prose about camping details. Or ride statistics. Everybody has a cycle odometer these days. If they rode  56.43 miles today, as read off the screen of the odometer, they will include the '3' in the hundredths place in their daily post, as if the reader really cares. Now I ask you, folks, what does the hundredths place have to do with the Human Condition or the state of the Universe in general? But there are exceptions. A bicycle tourer was going through Egypt during their recent uprising. He stayed at a hostel next to Tahrir Square. He actually had the guts (or recklessnes

Seldom do I willingly repeat myself on this blog, although it must happen. My favorite time of the day tempted me once. Coffee Girl (my dog) and I had finished a nice outing in the morning. After taking a shower, we did what we've done so many times: lied down on the bed for an early afternoon siesta. I wanted to write about it, but surely that would be repetition. What is so bad about that? Where did I get this sick idea that one is supposed to think of something new, new, new all the time? I ridicule the Constant Travel Syndrome -- and its puerile infatuation with novelty -- at every opportunity. Perhaps it is time to choose a new pinata; call it the Constant Thinking Syndrome. How much good has thinking ever done me? Maybe it's over-rated. Ironically there was something new about this siesta; completely new for me. I was actually enjoying some violin music for the first time in my life: Beethoven's Romance #1 (opus 40), Romance #2 (opus 50) and the famous violin con