Occupation of Independence

It's too much work for one day to beat up on the notion of Progress in general. Let's focus in on the movies. One of my Christmas presents was the dvd movie, All About Eve , 1950, starring Betty Davis, Anne Baxter (Frank Lloyd Wright's granddaughter), George Sanders, and Celeste Holm.  There are two kinds of directors: 1) the camera-oriented (such as Sergio Leone and his spaghetti westerns) and, 2) the script/dialogue-oriented. All About Eve was directed by Joseph Mankiewicz, who started as a script writer and belonged to the second group naturally. Well, this introduction will have to suffice; this blog isn't imdb dotcom.  How would this movie affect a young person who has grown up with video games and with movies that imitate video games? In one scene two of the main characters are walking down the sidewalk in a big city's downtown. The camera only catches them walking from the knees up. Clearly it was shot in a studio, with a screened image in the background; t

A cool winter hike. If only dogs weren't so good at hiding their true feelings.

  Something caught my eye at last evening's sunset. There was a line of clouds that looked like a zipper. The setting sun projected shadows upwards from the zipper. These shadows are not as distinct in the photo as in real life, despite all the software tricks that I tried. Despite being a bit of a failure, it was still a noble effort. We live at a interesting point in history; over the last couple years the ubiquity of digital cameras and photo software has rendered the beauty of sunrise and sunsets obsolete. Not to the naked eye of course. When most people say that a  sunset is "breathtakingly beautiful" (groan), don't they really just mean that it was very red or pink or orange? Very? Who cares any more!? You can just click a couple things in the software to cause the colors to blow the eyeballs right out of your head, and if that's too much trouble, just rotate the dial on the camera to its "sunset" setting. Just think how many generations of ou

Without making too big a deal out of it, I should write about today's mountain bike ride before common sense and good taste get the better of me. Once again the ride was under perfect conditions, including the ending : I was half lost, but as long as the trail was going downhill, it was getting closer to town. A couple friendly dogs were approaching from the other direction on the trail, happily wagging their tails, so I slowed down to make a bit of a fuss over them. As I coasted and slowed over a small hump, what did I see but a female hiker quickly rising from a squat. She was pullin' everything up as fast as possible, but I had time to get quite an eye-full. Why the heck was she taking care of business right next to the trail, in an open spot!, instead of behind a juniper a few feet away on either side of the trail?  She was an old hippie broad, in more ways than one. I wouldn't have minded to catch her a peein' if she were, say, European. Everybody knows how lax

Recently a commenter mentioned that they're new to this blog. Suddenly I thought, "Dear me. The poor devil!" Perhaps this blog needs what some blogs have: an introductory paragraph that allows the reader to quickly know if they're barking up the wrong tree. Won't the poor devil be offended if they are female, environmentalist, neocon Republican, academic, a danged liberal (especially Left Coast), motor-crazed, suburbanite, New Ager, shopaholic, global Warmist, RV potlucker, TV watcher, Bible banger, etc. That's getting to be a pretty big segment of the population. Who's left! What if an introductory blurb scared away people who disagree with the blogger, who in turn actually enjoys disagreement? Over the years I've generally made friends with people who think I'm 90% full of crap. There's a big difference between 90% and 100%. And the 10% that they consider tolerable encourages them to try to redeem me, which is charmingly futile. On the other