Occupation of Independence

Seldom have I benefited more from a boob-toob-less lifestyle than recently, when I was spared the non-stop hype over the royal wedding. Why didn't they put it off a couple months so they could've hit the 30th anniversary of Princess Diana's wedding? (I guess there was a groom, but nobody remembers his name.) People who worship the false idol of Progress should ask themselves some brutal questions. For forty years women have been liberated, supposedly, and they've all wanted to become hard-boiled district attorneys Monday through Friday; but they still want to be fairy princesses on the weekend, or at least on one "magical" day of their lives. My gawd, did you see that ridiculous "train" or whatever you call it that Princess Kate dragged behind her with the help of an aide. (Lady-in-waiting?) Perhaps my whole problem is that I'm old enough to remember the world and the media making fools of themselves over Princess Diana. And yet the younger g

Dog owners know that one of their urchin's favorite tricks is falling behind on a walk, supposedly due to some worthy distraction. Then they suddenly look up and realize they're too far away. This brings on a mad dash back to their owner; their paws sound as loud as the hooves of a galloping horse. Coffee Girl, my Australian kelpie, pulled that trick this morning. But something was a little different this time. There was no wind to disperse her dusty contrail. It stayed intact a few feet off the ground and drifted away, ever so slowly. It seemed too solid for anything airborne, perhaps because the rising sun was illuminating the contrail, but not the field proper. It was cruise missile-like; in an earlier era we would have said that it belonged in a Loonie Toons cartoon. The contrail of dust, el camino del polvo , seemed like it was a part of her streaking body. Sigh, if only it had been possible to film a video of this, backlit by the morning sun. At first I wondered if it

I mountain biked up to a viewpoint on the Continental Divide and looked down at our annual bicycle race, once again using my 10 X zoom. When it comes time to buy a new camera, optical zoom will once again be the priority. These are the Men's Pro guys going by. Looks like a few are violating the rules of the road.

The annual bicycle race is back in town and today is the first day. Top) Men's Pro category starts off by heading through downtown. Bottom) I mountain biked to our public park built over old mining land, and photographed the boys leaving town, headed northwest for 94 miles. I needed the 10X zoom.

Finally I found a big-picture article on the subject of oil and other resources. I am not terribly familiar with Jeremy Grantham but I do like this article , particularly the second graph, "Exhibit 2", on page 5. The article is flawed. It is contaminated with standard environmental gloom and doom theology: mankind has been Sinful for living it up, therefore Gaia must punish mankind. I am heartily sick of supposedly intelligent "free-thinkers" taking pride in outgrowing outdated religious traditions intellectually , but then clinging to the most puerile, Sunday-school-kindergarten notions, emotionally . They do everything but suck on their thumbs. Today let's consider some of the ideas in Grantham's article that seem profoundly true. One of them is that mankind needs to focus on growing qualitatively, rather than quantitatively. That's a big topic for another day. In opposition to Grantham's environmental gloom-and-doomism, you could choose the