Occupation of Independence

'How have the mighty fallen!' I guess that old tagline applies well to my current situation of squatting at a GM dealership in Utah, waiting for a new replacement engine -- at GM's expense! It does seem like quite a come-down. I have never aspired to be an armchair traveler. On the other hand I read history books that take place a long way from home. It is fun running to a mapping app to learn about the geography that pertains to the story. Possible alternatives: 1. Rewrite old posts. 2. Make comments on the blog/vlogs of people who actually do travel.  3. Change the blog to a You Tube channel that photographs itself sitting in front of a computer screen, while critiquing people who really do travel. 4. Start a "how to" channel/blog that pretends to be friendly to "fellow" travelers but is actually about selling crap. from augustacountylibrary.org

Once upon a time when I was younger, I used to ask why. Why doesn't the world around me make any sense? Why are situations that are fundamentally insane allowed to exist and to persist? It never did any good. All it did was make me angry or full of complaints. Then other people would get sick of the complaints and blame the complainer, not the situation.  I am happy to be done with most of that. There is no better test than to be facing a serious mechanical problem at an automobile dealership. The good news is that it was a General Motors product, so the engine dissolved like toilet paper in a septic tank with only 25,000 miles on the odometer, so the powertrain warranty will cover it.  The American automobile industry -- or what is left of it -- is still relatively important. It is tempting to ask why American manufacturers didn't shrink down to marketing and finance, and outsource all design and manufacturing to East Asia, years ago. It has been a few years since I read any o

The new era of the Great Reset is not evolving quite as I expected, showing once more that predictions are difficult, 'especially about the future.' By now I expected the Climate Lockdown to have been announced in a dramatic way, with most of the news media trumpeting it as a New Dispensation. But we appear to be sliding seamlessly from Virus Lockdowns to supply-chain crises and energy shortages, with the Climate Lockdown staying implicit. Perhaps the Powers-That-Be learned that the public has become weary and wary of the very word "lockdown". More fundamentally, what is happening is that the Forever War era has transitioned to the Forever Something Else era in order to empower the people who don't think they have quite enough power yet.  Where does that leave a helpless individual? The good news is that we are not quite helpless. An individual can't do anything about soaring energy prices, which are probably Forever. But we can make certain adjustments such

  What good luck! I arrived on the top of the little mesa just before sunrise, that is, the vans were still in the shadow of the mesa but the mesa-top was in the sun.  As the sun crept higher in the sky, the shadow-line on the ground advanced slowly toward the vans. It seemed like fun to use my body to make a shadow on the windshield of my friend's van and then flap my arms and see if he got confused. But there was no shadow...anywhere. I kept moving my body along the cliff-line to align the shadow correctly, but nothing worked. I was beginning to feel like Bart Simpson after he sold his Soul: he couldn't get the automatic door openers to work for him, and failed to fog a mirror. After a few minutes my eyes adjusted enough to see a vague and weak shadow moving along on the ground. Well, really! I thought my shadow 100 yards away would be pretty vague, but not that vague. What a brutally honest metaphor for most people's insignificance for their own era or the next! No wond