Occupation of Independence

You'd think that a blogger who puts 'independence' in his title would at least be good at it. I have a concrete example of how perversely difficult it is to be truly independent about buying and using an item that you use everyday.

Admit it. As sick as it sounds, you feel a certain admiration for the Greeks: living for today, with no concern for tomorrow; throwing a big party with borrowed money; lying to the European Union (oh boo-hoo); and being guilt-free about it all. Ahh dear, that is the difference between a Mediterranean and an up-tight Northern European. Strictly speaking, the creditor who lends money to an unfit debtor deserves more condemnation than the debtor, who just wants to have a good time. And the creditors are big banks in up-tight Germany. What's the worst that can happen? If Greece defaults, it will still survive -- ask Argentina. For a few years the big banks of Germany won't lend them any new party-money. But they will, eventually. Then the festival can start all over again.

I said "net", not internet. As an experiment I've decided to stop moderating comments; thus, comments show up on the screen immediately after typing them. After all, if a potential commenter thinks the blogger doesn't trust him, it's natural for the potential commenter to just back away, without wasting his time. I never really moderated anyway, except for an occasional spam comment. I only insist on comments not being personal or on names being used. Blatantly commercial comments will be deleted.

So the truck (of last episode) belonged to a non-profit corporation, did it? Why was that important enough to stick on the outside of the truck? Environmentalism -- that is, Karl Marx meets Bambi -- is an easy belief system to make fun of, but I'm in statesman mode today. Let's just take their belief system as it is, and try to make it compatible with high quality forests, instead of the overgrown tinder boxes and spruce bark beetle feeding-grounds that most of the national forests are. Besides that, national forests are just plain ugly. Do environmentalists really like these eye sores any more than the rest of us?

The Wallow Fire is still burning over 400,000 acres in northeastern Arizona, making it the second biggest wildfire in that state's history. I was reading some of the comments on this fire, particularly those that criticize bad forest management policies. They can get quite emotional! Unfortunately they break into two hostile camps that scream all the same ol' shibboleths at each other: tree-huggers versus rednecks, etc. There must be a better way. This is what I'm aiming at in this post.

We don't get many cholla or cactus flowers in the spring, here in the Little Pueblo, so I do appreciate them. But it was the needles that grabbed me.

Despite my sermons against the reading of books I am guilty of just that, from time to time. Normally I reread a classic rather than look for a new book, since the latter has only one chance in a thousand of being worth reading. For instance the other day I was rereading a semi-classic by Bronowski and Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition . The book is OK, but these cut-and-paste historical surveys seldom show much original thinking. They give a professor a chance to appear as an elder statesman, and to broaden his appeal outside a sub-divisional sliver of research. While reading about Hobbes, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and other celebrities of history, I got bored and went to the al-Jazeera website.

Many full time RVers start off with a Livingston TX address since that's where the Escapees organization is. The first year I got a jury duty notice from Livingston when I was in Washington state in the summer. I called a clerk in Livingston, where a human being actually answered the phone. She understood the situation -- they have many RVers on the voting list there apparently -- and I was excused from jury duty.

'Why' is a better question than 'How' when it comes to starting a travel blog. But let's say you have your reasons, and you aren't particularly interested in competing with the postcard industry. Must you get a camera despite your inclinations? That was the question I went off to ponder at a coffee shop in Las Cruces some years ago. Could a travel blogger really be so uncompromising as to expect readers to live without any eye candy? It was a pleasant coffee shop with the usual paintings and photographs on the wall, which I seldom pay much attention to. But I did today. There was something unusual about the photographs. The photographer was a professor at a local college and was a member of a sub-culture that was trying to revive the pinhole camera. (aka camera obscura .)

A couple years ago somebody was talking me into starting an RV travel blog. I had one last objection: buying a digital Brownie camera. I didn't believe in them, and had enjoyed a long career as a full time RVer out West without one.

Can you read the label on the little white poodle's "uniform?" I'm on a streak with small service animals: I love how seriously these little guys take themselves.