Occupation of Independence

Another Protest Friday has come and gone in the Middle East, with Syria becoming a big headline grabber. I have appreciated the commentariat comparing current goings-on with the aborted revolutions in Europe in 1848. This is a subject that doesn't get enough attention in the history books. My first year RVing in the Southwest I was surprised to learn of the unsuccessful German revolutionaries of 1848 who moved to the Texas Hill Country, and left their names on many of the towns. But rather than choose 1848, why not choose the more recent 1968? Those of us who were a bit too young to be a part of the "Big Chill" generation have probably always held a grudge against those who were; and we learned to mock those whose brains froze in that year. But let's play nice and say that there were some serious reasons for 1968 being a year of riots, such as the Vietnam War, racial problems, etc. I still can't help believing that 1968 was put on the map primarily because of

It's so rare to have a success in the gadget world that I want to brag up LG, the cellphone manufacturer, and Verizon, the service provider. I managed to lose my old LG cellphone, after a run of six years. It had even survived one trip through a washing machine. I'll probably find it under a heap of something someday. But I couldn't call the lost cellphone with somebody else's phone, because the prepaid minutes had expired. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that I could keep the old service plan (which no longer exists for new people) and the old phone number. And all of this was explained by a nice young man who spoke English as his first language. I had another cellphone success, of a different type. Unaccustomed as I am to finishing a nice mountain bike ride with a coffee and cookie at a local coffee shop, I did so today. It was so pleasant just sitting there, thinking about the perfect ride and weather. Just then a woman had the effrontery to intrude on this

A camper friend and I were walking our dogs in the "south 40" when we spotted a herd of six deer trying to jump a chain link fence, 5-6 feet high. They didn't use a perpendicular approach as I might have guessed, but approached it at a glancing angle. I was surprised at how interesting it was to watch them try and fail, several times. Their bodies ricocheted off the fence ungracefully, yet they still managed to land gracefully. 'The deer as problem-solver' certainly doesn't fit the sentimental postcard of Bambi munching on a pretty flower, next to a cute witto stream. Perhaps it's an under-rated pleasure to watch animals solving problems, rather than standing around like dumbshits, trying to look pretty. But not everybody sees it like that. Bicycling up near the Continental Divide the other day, I saw a couple deer crossing the road. Yawn. A top-end SUV slowed down and then stopped, right out in the lane of traffic. At first I thought that the SUV had h

It was time for an uneventful hike in an Arizona sky island, a couple winters ago. We went up a canyon or draw, up to a saddle that I recognized from an earlier hike. Although I favored backtracking, since that is the safest thing to do, the little poodle made the decision for me. He headed up to the saddle, which would suck us into making a loop. It was good to see him exonerate himself from his unmanly behavior on a recent hike.   I stopped in my tracks when I saw a dead teddy bear cholla . Since my photograph didn't do it justice, I deleted it. It was as startling as seeing Norman Bates' mother at the end of "Psycho". The dead cholla was more anima-morphic in three dimensions than in the photograph. You could see its two eyes and maw. It was standing up with curved forearms. Its face seemed frozen in a death-agony.    Since villains are seldom that scary when you actually see them, Hollywood has learned to give the viewer indirect views of the vil

In honor of famed director Sidney Lumet, who died yesterday, I watched Twelve Angry Men . (Background information is available at imdb.com .) How long do you think it will be before movies like that are made again? It must be the most interesting lowest budget movie I've ever seen. "Low budget" is putting it mildly. How much did it cost to put twelve guys in the jury room and let them talk to each other? Intelligent dialogue between adults -- how boring and out-of-date can you get! If you want to give your imagination some exercise, try to put yourself in the shoes of a 16-year-old who encounters Twelve Angry Men today, by mistake no doubt. The poor lad must be bored out of his mind by a movie with no action, no bedroom scenes, no special effects, and no graphic and gratuitous violence. If he were capable of making it through the movie, he must think that people "back then" were ridiculously easy to amuse since, like, you know, they had a lower standard of liv

Naturally I want to be Fair and Balanced on this blog. Sometimes I might be too anti-government. The current administration claims to know something about pollution, even going so far as to declare carbon dioxide -- a gas without which life could not exist -- as pollution; perhaps these folks would be doing us more of a favor to remove some of the pollution off of the internet. The obvious place to begin is with the least controversial purging: surely most people would agree that travel blogs are internet pollution. Then they can quickly move on to bigger fish, such as product reviews. Yesterday I was reading reviews of RV parks, including the one that I'm currently in. Most people were charmed by the rustic nature of the park, but were disappointed by gravel, grass, "weeds", wind, sunlight, and juniper trees. The reviewers were disappointed that there was no cable TV here, and that there were few broadcast channels in our town. Such deficiencies detracted from thei

Wow. I needed to find some new blogs. It's funny how, with all this information available on the internet, it's so easy to fall into narrow ruts. I'm really getting to love Smith's blog, OfTwoMinds. He posted part II of his analysis of our consumer economy.

After I learned that a (now ex-) reader didn't care for my comments on motorhomes, I saw a chance to partially redeem myself. Of all the motorhomers that I've seen go through here, this is the first time that I've seen this arrangement. What a great way to get around town and really experience it, instead of being in a glass and steel cocoon. A moped might be limited to good weather, but RVers usually arrange it so that they are having good weather. I think these little cuties would really help an old boy feel young again.

In writing about all the turmoil in the Middle East, some pundits like to refer to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. This revived my interest in George Orwell, who volunteered for the (government) Loyalist side. In fact I checked out a 1300+ page collection of essays and magazine articles that he wrote during his short lifetime. It struck me how important it used to be that public intellectuals (like Orwell and Arthur Koestler) were not tenured professors or think-tank intellectuals. They put their beliefs into practice. You might disagree with their politics as I certainly do, and as they eventually did, later in life. But there was real integrity in an intellectual pushing back from his desk, and suffering the mud and stink of real war. Both were in physical danger. It's something that would never happen today. Imagine the suburban comfort of the interventionist today: their McMansions in northern Virginia or in fashionable areas of Maryland. They might have tenure at a uni

Considering the title and description line of this blog, it doesn't surprise anyone that the blog is implicitly hostile to the borrow-and-spend consumer culture of America. So it never seemed necessary to preach too much about it; people have heard the sermons before. And I never really aspired to go to heaven and sitteth upon the right hand side of Gandhi or Thoreau. But recently an excellent post has appeared on OfTwoMinds blog. There weren't any new ideas in the post, but it is an excellent summary of the idiocy of the American lifestyle. I got a kick out of the commenter who wondered, angrily, why consumers were good enough to buy the semi-useless crap sold by American corporations, but not good enough to be hired by them. 

There goes my self-image as a smart consumer. Never again will I ridicule the dummies silly geese hip/cool/sexy/smart people who buy Apple products, $43,000 pickup trucks, motorhomes, seldom-used boats, etc. I just got back from a 35 minute (one-way) walk from downtown in a pair of Keen "shoes". It felt like I walked home in my stocking feet. When they wear out I'll replace them with $25 sneakers from Walmart. How did those outdoor-equipment stores ever convince me to spend $100 for these lousy Keens? They're just over-priced house slippers.