Occupation of Independence

This is the last of the swallow homebuilder photos. I promise. With hindsight I really appreciate how lucky I was a couple weeks ago to see and photograph them during their maximum presence near my coffee shop. I haven't seen them since. I was surprised how contentious these birds were with each other. It wasn't exactly a replay of the harmonious, Amish, barn-raising scene in the Harrison Ford movie, Witness . Nor did it make me want to go out and buy Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village . If anything, these swallows were fans of Ayn Rand.

I was trying to extract some sympathy from my neighbor about jury duty, or rather, why I should be excused from it. I complied with the court order to fill out my questionnaire honestly and completely. But the court order does not prohibit one from also being candid as well as honest, since candidness is just the particular form of honesty in which you offer more information than they perhaps wanted to hear. For instance, when they ask whether I would consider evidence legitimate if it came from a convict who is bargaining with the State, I said in no uncertain terms that I consider such evidence dubious and probably contaminated.

Is that a petroglyph of a bicycle in the upper left corner? I love close-up photography. There are interesting details that you wouldn't take the time to notice otherwise. Seeing those serrations on the ends of the flower petals surprised me more than driving up the standard scenic viewpoint of the Grand Canyon.

Box Canyon Blogger reprimanded me for my amateurish and emotional accounting: he thought I should stop obsessing over $4 gasoline since it doesn't really amount to that much at the end of a year. Indeed, it's easy to overemphasize gasoline prices because of their high visibility. The beauty of being a full time RVer, in a traditional land yacht, is that a retiree can kiss off the burdens of being a stick-and-brick houseowner; not just the financial burdens, but the domination of your ever-dwindling time by repairs, maintenance, remodeling, and buying excessive crap that you don't need just because you have space to put it. (Not that you'll ever be able to actually find that crap when you need it.) There is something even worse about house-slavery if you believe that true Evil is a banal and insidious thing: in a house you settle into soul-numbing routines centered around comfort, cleaning, and other trivia. One day leads comfortably to the next and you

Anyone who has an inflated ego should just spend more time as an amateur prophet in the business world, politics, or any place actually. That said, Google's Chromebook seems more portentous than anything we've seen in the computer industry for years. I am willing to believe that, five to ten years from now, Washington state politicians will be frantically patching up a government bailout of Microsoft Corp., which will then be called Government Software. The future might be as dark for anti-virus firms like Symantec, or for regular PC manufacturers like Toshiba, Dell, and HP. In order for Google's Chromebook to supplant Microsoft Windows and Office as the desktop standard, there must be an enormous expansion in internet traffic. So the biggest beneficiary of the new paradigm might be the telecommunications industry.