Occupation of Independence

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. ...