Occupation of Independence

Every couple days we see this horseman, followed by a free-ranging adult horse and a sprightly colt, who gets visibly bigger every week. I wonder if they are all the same family? When a horse runs, it really is a beautiful animal.

If only I had a nickel for every hour I've wasted on the internet, reading junk. Now and then an article seems really worthwhile, and it's fun to advertise it. James Quinn might be the last of the Puritans; his attitude about the American debt culture is more moralistic and scolding than mine, if such a thing is possible.  But what if a person's values or political views are different? The article might still be worth reading since it is an antidote to thinking that 1980-2005 is the "normal" we are destined to return to.  "In the good old days, before the advent of the credit card in 1969, Americans saved up to buy a house, a car, or an appliance. Consumer expenditures as a percentage of GDP stayed in a range of 61% to 64% from 1960 until 1980. This range was reflective of a balanced economy that provided good paying wages to blue collar workers who produced products that were sold in the US and in foreign countries. What a concept. America ran a trad

When you walk in a forest it is fun to imagine yourself as being taller than the trees and able to see over all the silvi-clutter and able to take in the topography, just as you would flying or ballooning. Of course you could shrink instead of elongate. What a jungle the grassland would be to a Liliputian.

Or, Requiem for a Lightweight A few weeks ago the requiem was written for smartbooks. These were meant to be similar to netbooks (with a keyboard and a clamshell design) based on ARM's microprocessors instead of Intel's, and on Google's Android operating system instead of obsolete Microsoft Windows. The lower power would have meant that you could leave them on all the time, like your cellphone, which is also based on an ARM microprocessor. You can see why this would have been appealing. I was hoping to use one instead of a WINTEL notebook to do the usual things, such as surfing the web, editing photos, and printing. Was that really asking so much from the computer world? Apparently it was. Why would the computer industry want to cannibalize the sale of $800 notebooks with $250 smartbooks? The losers would have been WINTEL, Apple, HP, Dell, Toshiba, etc. Fortunately for the computer industry, Apple found a solution to this conundrum: it assassinated the smartbook with th

Oh no, here comes that damned fool of a dog. Get ready for a lot of noise: Just look at her down there, carrying on so! I'm embarrassed for her. Nobody will ever convince me that dogs are real predators. I guess she thinks if she barks some more, I'll come down and let her eat me: I can't take any more of this. Besides I'm just encouraging her. Enough:

Overlapping yucca.

  There are some very colorful grasshoppers in the field these days. This one wasn't too colorful but I thought it was right handsome, especially that pharaonic neck collar.

It almost seems unfair that a season like autumn, which already has so many good things about it, should also have the football season. I sighed with pleasure about the football season to a non-football fan, the other day. I had her/him stereotyped as the kind of person who would turn up their nose and say, "There's already a perfectly good game that the rest of the world calls football. What's good about stupid American football?" They were referring of course to the deadly dull "world-sport" of soccer. Was there any point in trying to explain one of the finer things of life to a big, overgrown, NPR-listening, college sophomore? Probably not, but she did ask the question. With my best effort at being understandable and non-condescending, I started with the premise that Sports are mock-War. She agreed to play along with that, and suddenly my cause appeared hopeful. The rectangular field of football fits the TV screen well, but the same is true for socce

As expected I broke my internet slump by going to the library and walking down an aisle at random. Years ago I had a prejudice against rereading books, but now it seems like the option most likely to succeed. So I grabbed "The Education of Henry Adams." Yes, the famous Adams of Boston and Quincy. The young fellow at the circulation desk astounded me by actually knowing of this classic book. Young Henry served as his father's assistant when the latter was the Yankee minister to Britain during the War of Southern Independence. After the war Henry started thinking about his own career and thought of being an editor at a newspaper or magazine. He said that, "Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism." Hey wait a minute...

The other day a friend and I were discussing how hard it is to understand the lingo of youngsters who have grown up in MTV culture. He said it is indeed strange how the world passes us by. That was one of those statements that really sticks with you; it only happens once in a great while. Recently I rewatched Billy Wilder's classic movie "Sunset Boulevard." Gloria Swanson and her butler had turned away from the "real," outside world while living in an aging hulk of a Hollywood mansion. Bill Holden's narration said that they didn't want to look outside and be reminded of what has-beens they were. It's quite an issue for an old fogey to wrestle with. Recently I have found myself telling stories to young people; stories that didn't fit in all that well with the rest of the discussion. Oh no! Am I going to become one of those old men who hears some buzzword in a conversation and then launches into an interminable story about something that happene

  We can all agree that the last thing this blog needs is another photograph of curved bill thrashers, red tailed hawks, or grassland texture. But I can't help it; I'm obsessed with the perfect photograph of certain things, and dew-chandeliers are one of them. Besides, sweet obsessions are one of the under-rated pleasures of life.