Occupation of Independence

After all these years I finally had a chance to visit the famous "toaster house" of Pie Town, NM. People doing the Great Divide mountain bike ride love to stop in here. Thanks to some good luck, I walked in on the proprietor who was checking up on things. She filled me in on the history of the toaster house: she had raised four kids in that house, before turning it into a donation-only hostel. Thanks to the riders' blogs I knew where to go for wifi. And let me tell you, getting on the internet is a challenge in this town. I -- or rather, my dog -- was noticed by a family of campers. After a certain amount of observation, their little girl insisted on making friends with my dog. I was then surprised and delighted to have a one hour conversation with this little girl, age 4. She was so well spoken. A cynic might say that her skill at adding inflections and nuances to her statements was just a mimetic skill, gotten from observing her parents. Still, it amazed me. 

(Click on the three short parallel lines in the upper right hand corner for information that used to be in the margin.) I only had to wait for one customer in the line at the grocery store today, just before I left town. Oddly enough, he started singing quietly as the checkout lady worked through his items. He accompanied a pop music song that was playing over the store's speakers. At one point he teased the checkout lady about how slow she was, but she joked that she didn't want to finish before the song did. So he went back to his singing. He wasn't showing off. It was quiet and natural singing, and he had a good voice. When it became my turn, the checkout lady told me I could take over now; but I said I couldn't sing the way that the other fellow did. I am glad that he could probably hear us talk about him. This is the first time I ever heard a man singing in the checkout line before. Why so? I wonder what an experienced world traveler would say. I'll bet

The roads that my dog and I were biking on were excellent. I am addicted to not really knowing what the answer is, when I go on a ride. There are no websites to spoon-feed you 'practical' details about these dirt/gravel side roads and two-tracks. (Contrast this with single track riding, where some smartphone app answers everything in advance.) There were pleasant surprises on today's ride. Granted, it doesn't take a lot to please me, as long as it is a surprise. Recently graded roads, flattish terrain, and nice grazing land with higher country in the background. I was so contented I wondered why it had bothered me for years that I had to do all that riding by myself, or rather, with just a dog for a companion. I am now longer bothered by it. Perhaps enough years of committing the same mistake makes a guy adopt the attitude of the old horse in the movie, "Babe", who told the farm's malcontents, "The only way you are ever going to be happy is to accept

The new template for this blog updates it some, but any blog that involves reading is still passé compared to the one-line quips and postcards of social media, or to the television-like experience of You Tube -- or should we call it Yoob Toob in honor of Boob Toob? My data plan is not unlimited, so I haven't been too tempted to fall into the habit of being glued to the Yoob Toob. But what I have seen of it has been disappointing. It's not like the world really needed one more way to waste time by consuming info-tainment. Apparently it has become quite the meme to convert vans into small RVs, and then show it off on the Yoob Toob. There are good practical reasons for that.  But there is something strange about it, too. They seem to think they are the first person on the planet who has ever done something like this before; that the Yoob Toob viewer needs a thousand-and-one microscopic details; and that they are now some sort of celebrity. No sooner does the guy convert his van

I've read quite a bit of Russian history the last couple years. In part, it is a rebellion against the 'Boris & Natasha' silliness in the news -- not that an attempted soft coup d'etat is silly. And there were other reasons. By now it is reasonable to ask whether all this history-reading is time well spent. Although the odds were against it, Google helped me find some Russian photographs to complement my reading. Take a look at this photograph from Beyond Sochi: Photos Of Russia By Russians Would you agree that this is not a trivial postcard of the type you have seen on the internet a million times? Doesn't it make you feel like you are right there, in the babushka's shoes? Now think of Tolstoy's essay, "What is Art?" , wherein he argues against the common notion that Art is about beauty, and instead, claims that art is the transference of feelings to the observer, by means of pictures, sounds, and words. The photograph is an ex