Occupation of Independence

At the beginning of Tom Jones , one of the first and most enduringly popular novels in the English language, Henry Fielding tried to give the reader a succinct and accurate description of what was coming in the novel, analogous to the bill of fare that a prospective customer might see on the door of a restaurant.  As a reader of blogs I can sometimes get annoyed with vague or misleading titles. They are used, presumably, by writers who want to harvest the greatest number of eyeballs, regardless of whether the reader's time is being wasted. It seemed long overdue to refine the subtitle on this blog so that readers can immediately decide whether they are barking up the wrong tree or not. So I've added "television-free" to the subtitle. Why is this important? A person can eat junk fast food on a frequent basis and not blimp out or develop health problems for a while, but it will catch up with you eventually. So too can you fill your eyeballs and brain with menta

Sagebrush-covered flats and hills were my first love as a dispersed-area-camper/mountain biker in the West. It's fun to be back in it. Greater Nevada and Utah are really the place to be if you like sagebrush, but Gunnison (CO) has a lot of it over 8000 feet. It would be more interesting if it was mixed with more grass. Would that be the case if controlled fires were used more? This hillside seemed odd when I first looked at it: You can't appreciate it as a postcard. What matters is what it represents. Presumably the dark (sagebrush) streaks are barely-visible troughs that collect rainwater and snow melt, allowing the sagebrush to survive -- barely. How much strife there is in Nature! Normally this brings up an image of scratching claws and bloody fangs, but that isn't the case here -- unless you see these streaks as the curved talons of a drought-beast, reaching down to rip at the soft flesh of the lower hill.  One way to insult a place is to say that it is