Baillie Blog

New Obsessions

2010-12-30T22:44:00.004-07:00

For a few years now, I've been steadily becoming more and more obsessed with food. You may think this natural, considering that I live in San Francisco, snobbledy foodie capital of the U.S. But this started back in New Mexico, where the local cuisine is based entirely around one amazingly spectacular ingredient. The "localvore" movement that's come to the forefront over the past several years appeals to me, and I want to go ultra-local by growing my own food. Unfortunately, I live in an area with tiny, tiny "yards" for the most part, and I can't access the 1/2 acre that I was once told (by dry-farming New Mexico hippies!) it would take to supply two people with all of the food they need. Luckily for me, I live in the land of agricultural abundance, and have fresh, local, organic produce available year-round.

I still want to go self-sufficient one day, but I also know that it's not going to happen here. And there's the conundrum: by the time I'm able to supply myself with produce, I'll no longer be able to do so all year (as I'll live somewhere with a winter that isn't exactly like the rest of the year). The answer to the conundrum? Food preservation.

That long lead-in is to set up my big Christmas presents that I got this year. First, there's my brand-new, 23-quart Pressure Canner (Thanks, Alison!) and affiliated utensils. This guy can be used to can all kinds of food (unlike a water bath canner, that can't be used for low-acid foods like vegetables because it cannot reach temperatures above 212 degrees). My second acquisition is a fancy "Food and Jerky Dehydrator" (Jerky isn't Food?) (Thanks, Joan and Bob!). I'll be able to use this one to dry fruit, hopefully of my own production one day.

I'll be using my blog in the future to document my terribly novice attempts to keep and preserve the produce that I grow and buy (with picutres!). This will hopefully start in a couple weeks, when I will turn a theoretical delivery of surplus oranges (from DP) into something, probably marmalade (which I don't even eat) or orange slices or something. This time of year, about the only fruits available at the farmer's market are apples and pears, so there will be some applesauce, sliced apples and pears, and dried apples and pears prodcued soon (especially if my go-to apple retailer brings back the $0.50/lb bruised apple bin).

One more note about my motivation for this project. I jokingly told my brother-in-law-in-law last weekend that I was getting into this kind of thing to prepare for the apocalypse. While that is kind of sort of true (where are you going to get food when society breaks down if you can't make and keep it yourself?), there's another reason in addition to the localvore thing. I think most of us have parents or grandparents that once lived "in the country" if not directly on a farm, and growing and preserving food was a matter of course, which everybody knew how to do. When I was talking to my mother several months ago about doing this, I asked her if she had a food preservation cookbook I could have, and she told me that she didn't have one, as she just always asked her mother if she had any questions. Well, now grandma is gone, and the knowledge went with her. In this country, generations that knew how to be self-sufficient are slowly disappearing, to be replaced by children who think that milk comes from the supermarket, not from cows (or possibly rats, if you live in Springfield). I want to keep this knowledge alive, and, in the process, reduce my impact on the environment by not causing the shipping of apples from Chile, peaches from China, and oranges from Australia (and don't even get me started on bananas).

Let me know if you want to sample my wares (except during cherry season, because cherries are the single greatest foodstuff ever created (including the Twinkie), and I'm going to be very, very greedy with them), and you'll probably be getting something from my kitchen for Christmas if you're a gift-receiving-level friend or family.

2010 Holiday Letter

2010-12-29T22:56:00.001-07:00

Dear Friends,

2010 has been both an eventful and stable year for us. For the first time since we became a couple six (!) years ago, we lived in the same apartment and both held the same jobs for the whole year (which will make Alison’s mom’s life much easier when it’s tax time!).

We also did many exciting things – the most notable, of course, was our participation in Sail for a Cure and the Leukemia Cup Regatta. We could not have done this without the emotional and/or financial support of our amazing friends and family! Thank you so much! Although it turned out that we pretty much would have rather done ANYTHING other than go sailing on San Francisco Bay, we raised several thousand dollars for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to help find a cure for blood cancers and improve the quality of life for people who are living with blood cancer, including Max Harris, the brother of one of Alison’s good friends.

This year we also learned that Alison’s mom was diagnosed with breast cancer. She has been undergoing treatment, and we are relieved to report that she is doing extremely well! In November, we went to Phoenix and took part in the American Cancer Society’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer with our families and many of our very supportive friends. We were overwhelmed by the number of people walking to show their support. The next day Alison ran a half marathon in honor of her mom and in support of Susan G. Komen for the Cure.

Of course, we also traveled many places during the year: Avenue of the Giants in Northern California for a half marathon of the same name, San Diego with Alison’s family for another half marathon, Denver (mostly to drink beer and enjoy the scenery), and many day or weekend trips to various locations around the Bay Area. Our big vacation was a 10-day camping trip to Yosemite and Sequoia/King’s Canyon National Parks for Matt’s birthday in September, including over 65 miles of hiking. We also enjoyed Thanksgiving in Yosemite for the second year in a row, and were treated to the entire valley coated with snow. Everyone should see this!

To round it all out, Alison also completed her very first triathlon - a sprint - and got to spend time with some of her girl friends on solo trips to San Diego, Las Vegas, and Baltimore. Matt was thrilled to be able to attend the Nelson family reunion in Iowa and see many nth cousins, removed to various degrees, and see his grandparents’ ashes interred in the family plot. Best of all, we got to see our rambunctious toddling nephew, Tyler, several times throughout the year – thanks Karen and Bernie!

We wish everyone a fantastic holiday season and hope to see everyone very soon! Remember – you’re welcome to visit us in San Francisco – just make sure to bring your walking shoes.

Love,

Alison and Matt

Tracking Environmental Footprints of Products

2010-02-04T22:39:00.003-07:00

And here's a quick hit. From today's edition of The World, a story (http://www.theworld.org/2010/02/04/tracking-environmental-footprints/) on tools becoming available to track the actual environmental footprint of various consumer products, including where all of the various components are made. I don't think that these all list the source materials for each of the constituent products, but it's a good start for anybody that has ever caught themselves thinking about exactly where all the pieces of their computer/car/toaster/etc. were mined, farmed, pumped, refined, molded, and put together, or who has fretted over which of two options would be worse environmentally once you go through the entire chain of impacts connected to each choice. Maybe it's just me.

Incomplete, but a step in the right direction.

Don't ask, don't tell...that you're a jackass.

2010-02-04T21:49:00.004-07:00

The past two days, All Things Considered has aired two conflicting views on the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy that our military has employed since 1993. You can probably guess my stance on the issue; I think that if nobody was allowed in the military, regardless of race, gender, or sexual preference, then we'd probably have fewer wars.

This story was aired in three snippets. They can be found here, here, and here.

The first was with Duncan Hunter, an ex-Marine and Republican Congressman from California. Alison has mentioned this guy in the past (in a good way!). I listened to the story in disbelief, although I guess I should be numb to such things by now. Read the transcript for the full on crazy. In his very first reply, he implies that the biggest danger from the military is from those turds and miscreants, transgenders and hermaphrodites! The horror! I bet they're just hammering at the door to get into the military, I am sure. Way to couch the whole issue in terms of minorities of the minority group against whom you are discriminating.

He goes on to make two slightly less-crazy arguments, that I'll note here. The first is that the he believes the majority of young soldiers in the military are from conservative families, and that they don't want gays in the military. Which may or may not be true (more on that later). What it ignores is that the fact that a group doesn't want another group to be part of their organization has time and again been shown to be no reason to actually keep out that group. I'm going to give an example here in terms of both race and gender (which people who argue against homosexual rights claim is an unfair comparison because they actually believe that people choose to be homosexual and be constantly derided by a large number of their fellow citizens and taxpayers). I think this is reminiscent of the Augusta National Golf Club controversy, and similar situations played out at various other country clubs around the nation that don't allow women or some other minority to join. There's still no women at that club, but they're now on the waiting list. Second, prior to segregation, I am willing to bet that a majority of southerners didn't want black people in their schools, or drinking from their water fountains, or what have you, and they especially didn't want black people marrying white people. But our federal government said something along the lines of "Who the shit cares what you want? If what you want is wrong, then it's wrong!" I'm pretty sure it is against the law for a taxpayer-funded group (i.e. our military) to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, not to mention the moral odiousness of it.

The second only semi-crazy argument that he makes is that somebody coming out to their unit mates decreases the cohesion of the unit (I'll categorize his weird homoerotic comments about showering together with this one too). Now, I can understand how this could be true, if your unit is made up half of gay people and their supporters, and half of intolerant folks. But I don't think that's the way the military works these days. It's way more varied, and soldiers form bonds with other soldiers in battle situations where they feel like they can trust one another. My question is this: how can you possibly have unit cohesion if one or more of your unit members is hiding the biggest secret of their lives, being forced to lie about who they are, and presenting a pretend face to you while you are deployed in the most intimate and dangerous settings possible?

And don't even get me started on the likely amount of buggery going on amongst professed heterosexuals on deployment either.

I'll leave the Hunter section here with this quote, where he puts it all on the line with a full court press of insanity, trying to justify himself by comparing the military to NPR:

BLOCK: But Congressman Hunter, wouldn't you agree that there are gays and lesbians serving in the military right now, they just are not open about their orientation. So the problems that you raise presumably would be problems already. They are in the barracks already. They are in the showers already.

Rep. HUNTER: No, but they aren't open about it, like you just said. Its like if you want to work for NPR, you don't go to work and on the first day say, hey, I want everybody to know that I'm gay. You probably don't care one way or the other as long as they, you know, get their particular job done. I think the military is the same way. That's why don't ask, don't tell works.

To which I say, "Have you ever been to an NPR office? It's just one big gayfest!" And yes, NPR does not care "one way or the other;" the point is that the military does care one way, and it is codified.

So yesterday afternoon they had two more segments. The first was a letters segment, which I only include because not a single opinion read on air agreed with Hunter (shocking!). I liked two in particular.

1. "It's good to know that our representatives in Congress stay cognizant of national security issues. I had no idea that a hermaphroditic takeover of our armed services was a real threat."

2. "I am so glad that Representative Duncan Hunter gave an interview to NPR. His blatant ignorance and inarticulate yet transparent bigotry created some of the best arguments for repealing don't ask, don't tell that I've ever heard." FTW!

The third was an interview with Major Mike Almy, a former Air Force officer who was discharged under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. I don't have much to say about this one, since I obviously agree with the dude, and don't really have any analysis to add. I'll say this, though. He states in his interview that he would gladly go back into the military at the drop of a hat if he were allowed. Can you imagine wanting to rejoin a company that has treated you with such disdain for who you are? But there you go. In a time when we're fighting two wars (although, of course, there was never a declaration of war), and the military is stretched thin, should we really be kicking people out for this? We're allowing in criminals, and people are not going to be allowed to stay in a job they love because people like Duncan Hunter are uncomfortable with gay men seeing their willies in the shower, or they think that they're going to be taken forcefully by another man? I mean, come on, are we collectively in the second grade? Don't answer that.

Reading list update

2010-01-07T21:48:00.004-07:00

As you can see to the right, I got a lot of books for Christmas (this doesn't include The Onion Front Pages coffee table book, a new Stairway Walks of San Francisco book, and an organic living book), so my reading list is well-populated again. We'll see how long it takes to get through.

On the subject, I just finished "Galapagos" by Kurt Vonnegut, and he's swiftly becoming one of my favorite American authors.

And I have a blog backlog ("backblog"?) that my company would envy. Oy!

Sketch of a City Occurrence

2009-09-24T21:49:00.002-06:00

As I was walking to the subway from my office, I came upon and passed a group of 8 to 10 young people (am I old enough now to say things like "young people" when referring to twenty-somethings?) walking the same direction as me, albeit more slowly. This was around, say, 7:15 at night. I eventually noticed that one of them was carrying another fireman-style, with two more helping support the carried. He was most assuredly not conscious. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about this, in fact they all were quite jolly. These kids didn't seem drunk, however. The only snippet of conversation I heard was something about leaving him in his office, which it seemed they thought would be a hilarious idea.

I was going to close this by saying that I love the big city sometimes because you see this kind of thing sometimes, but I'm pretty sure it happens with just as much regularity in the small town too. Just they toss the unconscious in the back seat of a car and drive them home.

Steps to a Perfect Cantaloupe

2009-08-24T22:32:00.002-06:00

1. Go to the Farmer's Market (I went to the one in Noe Valley) and pick up any old cantaloupe. This one was a blue cantaloupe, which unfortunately refers to the tinge of the rind, not the insides.

2. Take the cantaloupe home and put it on your counter.

3. Forget about your cantaloupe, or don't find time to eat it.

4. Look longingly at your cantaloupe every day. This step is important.

5. Watch your cantaloupe until it just starts to get a bit of mold growing on it, where it was taken off the vine.

6. Look longingly at your cantaloupe for a couple more days. These days are critical.

7. Two days after you first notice the moldy growth on your cantaloupe, slice it open. Eat both halves in one sitting because dammit who can resist?

The end.

Bay Area Backroads #41: Pescadero

2009-08-16T13:47:00.008-06:00

We took our first Bay Area Backroads trip this weekend, starting with card number 41 in the deck, because, you know, we're logical like that. Note that card number 1 in the deck is Lassen Volcanic National Park, which is just a bit far away for a day trip if your wife has to run 6 miles in the morning for her Team in Training training (have YOU donated?).

It was a beautiful, warm, non-foggy day (note that these terms are all relative; it was warm for here, not necessarily for wherever you are), and we have quickly learned that the direction in which you go depends highly upon these factors; if it is a cold, foggy day, you have to go east, whereas if it's a day like yesterday, you must head toward the ocean and enjoy it while it's enjoyable. So we went west. And south.

Alison wanted to go down to Monterey to see the seahorse exhibit, but the Annual Santa Cruz Mountains Wildfire happens to be this weekend, and we don't want to take the ashmatic lungs through that. However, if you stay close to the city, you're, well, close to the city. What's the perfect compromise? Pescadero, of course!

This town is about an hour away from San Francisco, just a mile or so inland from the ocean, and very typical of small towns in the west. That is to say, everybody knows everybody, there's only a few stores, and the town is full of inveterate racists, misogynists, and homophobes (just kidding about that last one, I'm sure there's only a few of them around!). But that's not where this trip starts.

We totally missed the turn-off to Pescadero, because obviously the giant Pescadero sign was not sufficient. We drove south of the town for a ways, pulling off at one of those brown "Coastal View" signs typical of the Pacific Coast. As far as we could tell, getting to this coastal view entailed traipsing across somebody's property, but there's no arguing with the Man, as they say. Because it was such a strange, out-of-the-way access point, and because it wasn't one of the more developed state beaches, it turned out to be a great, secluded spot. We ate our home-made lunch of peanut butter +/- jelly sandwiches, then went looking in the tide pools. This is one of Alison's favorite activities, searching for anemones and urchins and starfish and crabs and whatnot; "creatures." We saw three starfish (two live, one dead), and got to discover what dead sea urchins look and feel like.

We had the place to ourselves for probably about 30 minutes before anybody else came down, which is probably practically unheard of for the bay area coast on a weekend. Also, these kelp forests were super neat:

After lunch we continued south to visit the Pigeon Point Light Station, the tallest operating lighthouse on the Pacific coast. It was pretty neat, and worth the stop, and the guy in the store was very nice and talkative, but if you're not interested in lighthouses, coastal views, or history, this might not be the place for you. It was built in 1872 and has a hostel onsite that you can stay in.

After the lighthouse we tried going down to the beach right near there, but it was covered in seaweed, flies, and fishermen. We drove back to the north, this time successfully seeing the giant Pescadero sign, and drove inland toward town. Luckily for us, this weekend just happened to be the Pescadero Arts and Fun Festival, a little fair type thing with a bunch of arts and crafts booths, food stands, and a live music stage. It was fun (as advertised), and Alison got some screaming deals on some handbags made out of repurposed fabrics from Ja Ja Ja Purses. The lady in the booth was super nice, and told us all about the purses and such. Hooray for reusing and keeping things out of the landfill! We left after some ice cream in a fresh waffle cone, and visited the business district.

The business district of the town is only a block long, and features one restaurant/bar, a church, an antique store, and a couple markets. We walked past all of the businesses to Pescadero Creek, which was flowing under the bridge. On our way back we stopped at one of the markets and got a steaming hot loaf of garlic artichoke bread (artichokes seem to be a local specialty) from a local bakery and a little thing of soft goat cheese from a local cheesery. We ate them out back behind the store, in a little grassy picnic area next to the creek with some apple trees scattered around. Beautiful. We stopped in at Duarte's, and had a beer at the bar (read the history of the place, it's great...although they don't mention the fire in the early part of the 20th century, during which the fire fighters apparently took special care to save the bar itself from burning; that bar is still in use today).

We left Pescadero, picking up the Echo from its spot next to a pumpkin field, and drove back north toward Half Moon Bay. Our Backroads card mentions the Pescadero Marsh, a prime bird-watching spot, but we're not interested in such things and so skipped it. I wanted to get to the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company for dinner. We stopped near the pier in Half Moon Bay when Alison screamed, scaring the driver before explaining that she'd seen a herd of sea creatures out near the pier. She ran over there and got a picture of the bunch of seals that were lolling about. I ran back to the car for binoculars, and by the time I got there they had moved out further.

We moved on to the Half Moon Bay Brewing Company, where we wanted to sit outside, but were thwarted by the 45-minute wait (despite the fact that at least 3 tables were empty, cleaned, and reset with fresh tableware). We opted for the bar area, where there was no wait, and sat down to a table with a nice view. After waiting about 10 minute for anybody to acknowledge my presence, I went to the bar to ask if we were going to be served, where I was made to wait by the bartender while he finished having a conversation with another group of guests (conversation's fine, but when somebody comes up to actually get some service, and you aren't doing anything important, well, the service is more important). Menus in hand, I thought we were sure to get served...after another five minutes we just left. They missed out on our custom that day, their loss.

We stopped one last time on our way back to the city at a farm stand to get some fresh produce. They had all sorts of organic stuff, but we started getting suspicious when Alison spied some mangoes and bananas, neither of which is grown locally. Apparently only a few things in their stand were actually grown by them, which seems kind of terrible for a farm stand. Another couple got there a few minutes after us, only to be told that the farm stand was "closed." What?

The results of this trip: Pescadero was neat, a nice little town with lots of picnic tables and people sitting around and chatting. Half Moon Bay was not neat, and seemed to be populated by people who couldn't be bothered. Go to Pescadero, skip Half Moon Bay. Especially for next year's Arts and Fun Festival!

Bay Area Backroads

2009-08-16T13:34:00.002-06:00

Those of you who read my wife's blog are likely familiar with her wildly successful City Walks SF series, the result of a gift from KEC of the deck of City Walks Deck of San Francisco (highly recommended!).

A few weeks ago, while out shopping around, we happened upon the Bay Area Backroads Deck, also from Chronicle Books, our local book publisher. This deck features 50 day trips from central to northern California, stretching from San Luis Obispo to the Oregon border. The deck was put together by the show Bay Area Backroads, a local program that features local trips you can take to see interesting sights in the area. We watched the show a few times before we willfully lost access to the airwaves, and enjoyed it.

As we have done with our City Walks (almost finished!), we are going to try to go through all of these trips, seeing the northern half of our new home state. I'm going to write about each one here, talking about what we saw, and what we liked and didn't like, and what have you. Hopefully it will be worth all of our times.

Issues of the day

2009-05-26T23:26:00.007-06:00

What a goddamn depressing day. Nothing surprising happened today, but it's amazing that we can be ready for something, brace for it, and still when it gets here it just takes the wind out of the sails and backhands our happiness like that dad did to his kid at the baseball game I went to last night (playfully...?).

It starts with waking up alone, something that mercifully happens very rarely to me. My wife is in Hawaii right now on her last few days of pre-job vacation (is it a vacation if it's pre-job? I guess it is, since she technically worked three days last week, but I'm not sure it fits the spirit). She left yesterday morning, gets back Friday, then flies out on Sunday to go to a company gathering for the new job until next Tuesday. This is not the first, nor the longest, time we've spent apart from each other, but I would always rather she be here with me - selfish, I know.
Dear Alison, please don't take the preceding paragraph the wrong way, I know that we both need our alone times sometimes, and I would never want my ramblings to make you feel bad about going on a vacation that I would have gone on too if our situations were reversed!

It's not only sad to wake up alone, but it always takes me a lot longer (something that would amaze Alison, who knows it takes me a long time to wake up as it is), and I hit the alarm for 30 minutes this morning before finally rolling out of bed. Whenever I do this, I inevitably feel ashamed later for the half hour earlier I could have gotten to work, which would have meant a half hour earlier getting home, and a half hour less of time wasted doing nothing, since I'm obviously conscious for that half hour. But actually getting up is so hard.

Today was an astounding day weather-wise. No fog to speak of when I got up, and it was actually warm enough that I was way too warm when I got down to the Castro on my commute this morning for the fleece I was wearing. In fact, it was a waste to carry the thing today, I never wore it again. Beautiful day; I actually took a walk this afternoon for 15 minutes, rather than eating lunch outside or going out.

But at 10:00 the news came in that the Supreme Court of California was upholding Proposition 8, the ban on gay marriage that the voters of California voted in this past election cycle. I think that everybody who was being realistic knew this would happen, but it hurts the same. I'm not going to go over again how much this sucks (not really my place because I'm not one of the many people the ban hurts, except by making me feel guilty for being allowed by law to marry the person I love), or how people who are anti-gay-marriage are jerks and bigots and such, because that's been said thousands and thousands of times. I listened to Forum and Talk of the Nation today, which both had shows on this topic. It seemed that the prognosis was generally good for the future, from the law professor who asserted that the court's opinion would logically lead to the State of California getting out of the marriage game entirely (something I wholeheartedly endorse), to the Governator (a conservative! Well, a California/Hollywood conservative, anyway...), who said that it's only a matter of time at this point before gay marriage is legal and equal (cold comfort to people today, as I'm sure Johnson's Reconstruction was to black people after the Civil War). It also amazed me to hear the opinions of people on both sides of the issue, from the pro-gay-marriage (It's religion, religion, religion) to the anti-gay-marriage (Marriage is for procreation, never mind that people who are biologically unable to have children are allowed to get married, and gay couples are allowed to have children; or, Why do gay people need marriage? Domestic unions are the same! I can't come up with an apt, non-clunky simile here, so please provide your own). I personally think that religion does have a lot to do with it, although a lot of people are likely uncomfortable with the idea, or all their friends are voting against it (I was in Williams, AZ, a few years ago on a job, and the folks from the City who we were working for chose seeing Brokeback Mountain as a jesting allusion to closeted homosexuality in a coworker, as in "I bet you're going to go see Brokeback Mountain [you big fag]!" I think there are likely a lot of similarities between small-town northern Arizona and much of inland California), or any other number of reasons that are not based directly in religion. Incidentally, those same City workers, I'm sure, don't go to church on Sunday, or, if they do, it's only for show.

I also had a ticket tonight to see City Arts and Lectures tonight with Dr. James Hansen. No, not the late, great Muppeteer, but the famous scientist. The one that spoke out against Bush II-era administrative censorship of scientific results. He had an interview-style talk that ranged over the science of climate change (no slides, and a layman audience, so you can imagine the scientist in me was left wanting more; luckily, he's a big nerd and easily intimidated - the scientist in me, not Dr. Hansen), although it dealt a lot with the political side of things. Every time I see one of these talks I get really depressed about the future, because I remember that everything I do as a consumer and user of energy is completely insignificant to actually solving the problem, and that the changes must be large, rapid, and fundamental to actually effect change. That realization then gets passed on to the cynic in me (who, though brooding and kind of an asshole, usually rules the roost), who declares such institutional changes to be pipe dreams that only the blind optimist believes will actually happen before things like this and this and this and this occur and won't somebody please think of the poor penguin babies?! No, we as a race/culture are far too selfish for that (I was thinking on my way home tonight that the "selfish" appellation is something that pretty much anybody on pretty much any side of pretty much any ideological debate could apply to the other side; isn't that exciting!) to ever occur. And that, my friends, is a depressing prospect when you know what the person familiar with climate feedback processes knows. A questioner in the audience mentioned, and Dr. Hansen confirmed, that the projection with all ice gone from Greenland and the Antarctic, as well as all ice caps melting, is about 70 meters, or 250 feet, of course happening over a long time frame, although the rate will continue to accelerate should we do nothing.

I took the subway home to the Castro after the lecture and surfaced to loud, thumping music and news vans and police everywhere, having entirely forgotten in my bout of inner composition on the subway (plus, I'm reading a thoroughly enjoyable book about Ireland right now, much better than the previous one, but more on that another time). I went to the Hot Cookie for a treat, more to avoid the news cameras on the other corner of the intersection than anything else. I did not buy a chocolate penis. They had a DJ on a flatbed truck cranking out some truly inspiring volume, but the party seems to have happened earlier in the night, if it ever got going (I'm sure it did; I've learned that people who live in the Castro do one thing spectacularly well, and that's party). There were maybe 100 people in the street then (around 10pm), and some of them were still dancing away. I wonder now, if I could be as down about things that really don't affect me directly, how can they be dancing when they've just been officially told by the government that they are, in the words of Dr. Harry Newman, "less than?" I guess they're just optimistic, and at least on this issue I can see some light at the end of the tunnel, with the examples set by good old Iowa (how did I ever make fun of you so much as a child, implying that all of your residents wore these things?) and several northeastern States.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. Maybe a little Baja Fresh or curry in a hurry will brighten my day.

Obama Endorses Gay Rights

2009-03-18T22:30:00.002-06:00

Today President Obama signed a non-binding resolution on universal rights for gay people. It calls for "decriminilization of homosexuality."

This resolution has been around for awhile, having been put forward on December 19 of last year. This means that the former administration actually resisted getting on board with a statement that it should not be a CRIME to be homosexual. What the hell century is this? Are we North Korea or something?

Somebody out there please try to defend not signing this thing because I really want to know what justification there could be.

Some hatin', true.

2009-01-21T19:15:00.004-07:00

I'm working on another blog post right now, but I thought I would compile some recent Bush-related articles posted on The Onion*:

Bush Dies Peacefully in His Sleep
Spider Eggs Hatch in Bush's Brain
Single-Engine Cessna Crashes into Bush
Bush's Eyelid Accidentally Nailed to Wall
Bush Dragged Behind Presidential Motorcade For 26 Blocks
Bush Passes Three-Pound Kidney Stone
Crocodile Bites Off Bush's Arm
Bush Tumbles Wildly Down Washington Monument Staircase

I forget sometimes that the ills that have been visited upon our country for the past eight years were foreseen by many. Check out this classic Onion article entitled "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over". This was posted January 17, 2001, just three days before Bush took office. A few quotes:

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

Turning to the subject of the environment, Bush said he will do whatever it takes to undo the tremendous damage not done by the Clinton Administration to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He assured citizens that he will follow through on his campaign promise to open the 1.5 million acre refuge's coastal plain to oil drilling. As a sign of his commitment to bringing about a change in the environment, he pointed to his choice of Gale Norton for Secretary of the Interior. Norton, Bush noted, has "extensive experience" fighting environmental causes, working as a lobbyist for lead-paint manufacturers and as an attorney for loggers and miners, in addition to suing the EPA to overturn clean-air standards.

Continued Bush: "John Ashcroft will be invaluable in healing the terrible wedge President Clinton drove between church and state."

An overwhelming 49.9 percent of Americans responded enthusiastically to the Bush speech.

"After eight years of relatively sane fiscal policy under the Democrats, we have reached a point where, just a few weeks ago, President Clinton said that the national debt could be paid off by as early as 2012," Rahway, NJ, machinist and father of three Bud Crandall said. "That's not the kind of world I want my children to grow up in."

"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

*I in no way wish pain upon Mr. Bush, although I whole-heartedly endorse him going through a war crimes trial.

You haven't lived...

2009-01-15T20:48:00.003-07:00

...until you've heard Arnold Schwarzenegger say "Ponzi Schemes." Also, should any governor ever say this?:

Conan's sword could not have cleaved our political system in two as cleanly as our own political parties have done.

The answer is: this should never be a thing that an elected official says. Thankfully, from the audio feed I was receiving it seems that nobody in the room laughed (this was delivered as part of the State of the State Address).

Some life instructions

2009-01-14T22:38:00.004-07:00

Picture this. You're driving down a highway and you see a car with a flat tire. Or you come across a car with a dead battery in a parking lot. The owner of the car is Jim Lehrer. You should stop and help him. It's like your prerogative. This is why.

Today our VP Dick was on The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. If you've never watched this show, it's a wonderful news program that I don't catch often enough because I don't watch a lot of TV. Strangely enough, KQED plays the Newshour over the radio every afternoon, which is kind of disconcerting since it isn't set up as a radio show and therefore you lose gestures and graphics and such, but that's neither here nor there. Jim Lehrer is an incredibly fair, patient man, and an extremely well-respected newsman.

Lehrer and Cheney discussed a number of things, and ranged into talking about the economy. The following exchange took place (italics are mine duh):

MR. LEHRER in a fair, patient tone of voice: What about - going back to the original question - about seeing this coming? Isn't that part of the stewardship of the president, of the vice president and of his administration - to see these things coming and try to prevent them from coming, rather than to act after they've happened?

VICE PRES. CHENEY in an asshole tone of voice: Did you see it coming, Jim? You're an expert.

MR. LEHRER winning: I'm not the president or the vice president of the United States.

MR. LEHRER: FTW!

Seriously? Does anybody buy this?

2009-01-08T22:14:00.002-07:00

I am in the process of writing another post, but I just saw this bit of news. An interview with our VP Dick. He asserts that nobody at the CIA did anything illegal in interrogations. You can argue, from a certain point of view (which I and other, expert, people would not) that torture is the way to get information. You could argue that it's justified to protect the national security or what have you, although I think the ethical questions overrule any kind of other benefit. But to argue that it's LEGAL? Come now, VP, I know that you think we're stupid, but really. The lying has to stop some day.

What I've been reading

2009-01-08T21:53:00.004-07:00

I just finished a book, which is getting annoyingly rare these days. I walk an hour plus every day now (I stopped taking the terrible neighborhood bus because it's terrible) plus 20 minutes on the subway per day. Which seems like a lot of time to spend reading except that it's not the easiest thing in the world to walk and read at the same time. Alison made it a little easier since she bought me a nifty reading light for a pre-Christmas gift. It still takes me about a month to read a book unfortunately. This book I just read is The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment by Paul and Anne Ehrlich. Alison had heard of these folks before but of course I'm ignorant and had not.

The book started out very slow...the whole beginning of the book was a lesson on the mechanics of evolution (why we evolved, and stuff). It was a strange way to write this book, with a lot of very technical scientific writing mixed in with language pandering to the completely non-scientific. It felt a little trite to the scientist in me, but also a little muddling to the non-geneticist in me.

It got way more interesting toward the end, with a lot of stats about the human ruination of the environment. I think that everybody should at least read the last half of this book to get a better understanding of our impacts, in case you don't already know. It's leading me to greatly reduce my meat intake (not because of my health, or the high price of good meat, or the cow farts, or the fertilizer in the waterway, or even my lovely wife's aversion to it, but rather simply because it turns out to be an incredibly inefficient way to get our food energy, and would make much more sense in terms of sustainability to eat vegetables instead).

My main conclusion drawn from this book is that there is basically no hope for the human race. I have felt this way for awhile to a certain degree, but the way we're headed in this book seals the deal. People, we are screwed.

Next I'm going to read The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. I hope this book cheers me up by thinking about what will happen to the world once we've destroyed ourselves. Alison already read this book, and wrote a blog post about it.

It's unfortunate that we as a species have decided that it's our right to do whatever we want to to make us happy at the cost of everything else on this planet, but there it is. It's also unfortunate that when we go down we're going to take with us an unprecedented number of species away from this world. The generalists will survive, cockroaches and rats and such. In a world devoid of lots of the species that usually fill the ecological niches present in this world, at least there should be a species explosion to fill them in rapid (geologically) order, yay!

A late goodbye, hello

2008-12-08T22:05:00.004-07:00

Some of you know, and some of you do not, that I recently left the Land of Enchantment for the Golden State. This means a lot of things, major shifts in my life. This means that I quit school (probably). I've never really quit anything before, and I don't feel too good about it, but I think it was the right decision. It also means that, for the first time in my life, I have no plans to be going back to school. Think about that. I've never not been either in school or preparing to go to school. There's a finality in that that I've never experienced, and I'm not sure how to take it. For now, I mostly just don't think about it.

This also meant moving again. We had some troubles with the landpeople, but luckily my wife is awesome. It meant I had to tear out my garden, which was a little sad because the yellow squashes were finally starting to bear fruit; the zucchini, beans, and corn were pretty much played out, with little result from the non-pop-corn (I should take a picture of my bean and popcorn harvests some time; I dried them and brought them with me...shhh! don't tell California). I had already finished up with the community garden, since my pepper plants succumbed to frost. The zucchini plant also proved to be pretty well infested with aphids, so it was probably time for it to go. It was taking up at least half of the garden when I killed it. I haven't yet gotten around to planting anything here, a month later. And we had to give up all our houseplants (including my grape vine that was doing quite nicely) before the move. Hopefully some of those plants still exist?

Another thing the move meant was that I got to realize what great friends I have. I am a complete douche when it comes to keeping in touch with people and such, as pretty much all of you know. I only talk to one of my friends on a regular basis, and that's because he's a bulldog about calling me regularly. So I had notified two of my friends about the upcoming move so they could come help me fill the truck. I texted (texted!) BT the day of to see if he wanted to come down the street to help out, and he passed the word to SB, who passed the word to KGS and PS...all of these people showed up at my front door on no notice, with SB, KGS, and PS having to drive all the way down from Santa Fe for this. They stayed for hours and hours, helping me move boxes and pack boxes and wipe down surfaces and such. I really don't know how to thank these people. And AKW wouldn't even let me pay him for the beer that he brought over, so I basically did nothing for anybody, with no notice, and all of these people still gave of their time and energy just to see me off. I am truly luckly to have such people in my life. I hope that they still want to know me after my little escapade, although I would not blame them if they did not. They are all welcome to come stay with us in the big city any time, of course.

The next thing the move meant was a very long drive by myself (Alison already having moved out here the previous month). I hope not to have to drive a rental van that far again, maybe ever. The trip took 16 hours, with all of it taken up by road either terribly boring, pitch black, or that I've already seen before. Or all of the above in some cases. The only new towns I got to experience were Barstow and Bakersfield, and I tell you I could go my whole life without experiencing them again and be perfectly happy. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but they're just more Kingmans and Yumas. Nothing for me there. The move took me all of a day and a half, and I did it on a pretty amazingly low budget (less than $1K for the van, meals, gas, and lodging) which netted me a good signing bonus. The nicest part was seeing Alison again, even if we had to stay in a not-so-nice place for a couple nights.

The move also meant finding an apartment. I'll be first to say that Alison put in a heroic effort looking for a place in this city. The rental market here is apparently even worse than in Albuquerque, where you have to basically commit to taking a place as soon as you see it. In SF, you have to commit, and you have to have credit reports, references, and all kinds of other documentation ready at a moment's notice. This was kind of a shock to me, and led to quite a bit of running around for her, and a little bit for me. When I got to town, we looked at a total of two places and I encouraged her to agree with me that we should take the first one we saw. Now we live in a huge (by SF standards - 700 square feet for a 1 bedroom 1 bathroom) apartment on Twin Peaks, from which you can see the entire city, the Bay, the ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge, and everything else (on a clear day). Look at the pictures of the city in that article (incidentally, you can see our apartment complex on the aerial photo, just east of the parking area to the north of the two peaks). It's quiet here too, the quietest place I've been in the city yet. The roads are all very steep, and so nobody ever drives through our neighborhood.

It means that my carbon footprint has nosedived. It takes me about 40 minutes to get to work in the morning on the bus and the subway, and about 50 minutes or so on the subway and on foot (up the mountain!) to get home. I have a bus pass now, so I ride all of the buses for free. I have been in the car 5 times since we finished moving into this apartment, which is a bit over a month. I've commuted on public transit, I came home from the airport on transit, and we go into the city to do our shopping, socializing, and eating on transit. I've never, ever lived anywhere so easily accessible as this place. What a wonderful thing.

It means that I am having all kinds of new experiences. I have never lived sniffing distance from the ocean before. In fact, the closest I ever lived before here was Phoenix, which is a far cry yet, climatologically if not proximally. I've never lived somewhere so liberal before (although the passing of Proposition 8 was a pretty crushing blow, and kind of a shock in such a progressive state). Every day I embark on the subway in the morning (and disembark in the evening) in the Castro, beneath a huge gay pride flag. This place is easily the most diverse, most accepting place I've ever lived in, and I'm very appreciative of that.

I hope that this will be a return to regular blogging for me, although I only have a limited number of hours to spend with the wife between work and bed. I had such a long hiatus because my life was in flux, and I hate having to tell everybody that my life is in flux; I'd obviously just rather not deal with it and tell people after the fact.

Finally, it has come to my attention that my mother has located my blog, so everybody cut out the penis jokes and all the childish bullshit, for her sake if not for mine.

Look at the size of that thing! (That's what she said.)

2008-08-09T21:48:00.004-06:00

Some of you (or maybe most of you) that are not around me very much may not be aware that I have recently become very interested in growing my own food. Many great reasons for this, including:

1. Reducing my food miles by placing my food source area adjacent to my kitchen.

2. Knowing exactly what chemicals, etc. go into my food (keeping in mind that I don't have any idea what was put into the soil at this house before we moved into it).

3. Getting my food cheaper than from the grocery store, as all it costs is seeds, manure, and water (which is ridiculously underpriced).

4. When the inevitable apocalypse (zombie or zombie-free) occurs within my lifetime, I need to know how to survive in a post-supermarket world, and being able to grow my own food (I already know how to operate a handgun) will be a great help.

I have two gardens going right now, one of them being a community garden in which we are participating. The other is right outside our east wall, and I have planted the "three sisters" in there, corn, beans, and squash. These crops were traditionally planted together by the locals before imperialist Europe arrived on the shores of New England. I have three kinds of corn (blue, sweet, and pop), two kinds of squash (zucchini and yellow), and black beans. These have all grown quite well, and I'm kind of sad I didn't keep a good pictoral track of its progress up to now.

A couple days ago I was rooting around in my plants a little bit. I've been worried about my squash because I always hear that it's a good idea to hand-pollinate your squash for better success (that's what she said) and I've only been finding one gender of flowers on the plants. So I've thought I was going to be devoid of vegetables all summer. I looked down at the base of the plant though, and discovered the giganticest zucchini ever:

This zucchini measured 11 inches long, and it must be at least 2.5 inches diameter. This rocks. I want to use it soon, but I'm a little afraid of eating the first thing I've ever grown for myself.

I looked around in the garden today, just to try to find some more zucchinis, and saw about three more in progress. I discovered my flower-gender conundrum problem. The flowers I was seeing, which were high in my squash plants, were all female. The male flowers, it turns out, are at the base of the plant, which makes sense since the zucchinis end up resting on the ground. I also saw a bunch of bean pods all over my bean plants, which I had not noticed before. I'm not exactly sure when beans are ready, and the pods don't just come off when I pull them lightly yet. We shall see.

Finally, a picture of me, my zucchini, and my lush, lush garden:

Recycling ABQ 4-6

2008-07-21T15:26:00.006-06:00

I'm way behind on blogging about my recycling-picking-up adventures. I've also been on vacation a bit lately, spending a weekend in the Silver City area and this past week in northern Michigan (my first ever visit to Michigan, it included a trip to the fabled Upper Peninsula, my first ever chance to see a home game of my longtime favorite sports franchise, the Detroit Tigers, and several hours spent picking wild blueberries, among other activities). However, I did some collecting before these trips, and am now getting around to listing them while cleaning the house. I don't remember the dates on these, so I'm just going to list them all at once.

Trip #4: ~1 mile, OSE building to house:
Total of 26 pieces, although this counts as one piece an entire Alibi, which maybe should count as like 30 sheets of paper, as we all know that is what it would have ended up as had I not picked it up.

2 glass bottles
8 aluminum cans
13 plastic bottles
3 pieces of paper

Trip #5: ~1.1 miles, Community garden to house:
Total of 21 pieces

1 glass bottle
3 aluminum cans
14 plastic bottles
2 pieces of paper
1 chipboard box

Trip #6: ~0.6 miles, ATC to house:
Total of 39(!) pieces (my plastic bag become overburdened and started to tear; I had to leave it somewhere, walk home, get another bag, and come back to complete this collection)

18 glass bottles
5 aluminum cans
13 plastic bottles
3 pieces of paper

Total number of pieces so far is 158:

38 glass bottles
31 aluminum cans
67 plastic bottles
6 plastic bags
13 pieces of paper
1 cardboard box
1 tin can
1 chipboard box

Amazing what a holiday weekend (4th of July in this case) will do to a town.

Recycling ABQ 3

2008-06-24T15:37:00.001-06:00

I had to go water the garden today, so I made another walking trip up to my old house at 11th and Mountain here in town. I noticed a lot of stuff on my way up, but decided not to pick it up, rather getting it on the way home. Today I took a plastic bag with me for collection. After doing my thing at the garden, I started collecting recyclables, but took a different route home, stopping at the old house to pick up mail (the postal system is seriously ridiculous here, and it apparently takes a month to start getting your mail forwarded; I have never had this problem during all of my moves in Arizona, where mail starts getting sent ahead pretty much immediately) and chat with the old landlady, then stopping at the grocery store.

On this 1.1 mile trip, I collected a total of 25 pieces:

1 glass bottle
6 aluminum cans
12 plastic bottles
2 plastic bags
3 pieces of paper
1 tin can

Total number of pieces so far is 72:

17 glass bottles
15 aluminum cans
27 plastic bottles
6 plastic bags
5 pieces of paper
1 cardboard box
1 tin can

Recycling ABQ 2

2008-06-24T08:34:00.000-06:00

This morning I walked Alison to the ATC again and continued my recycling-clean-up project. I took a slightly different route, and maybe paid a little more attention, and came up with even more recyclables than yesterday. Today I found a plastic bag on the road, and used that to collect stuff. Today's total was 26 total pieces collected:

3 glass bottles
8 aluminum cans
9 plastic bottles
4 plastic bags
2 pieces of paper

Total number of pieces so far is 47:

16 glass bottles
9 aluminum cans
15 plastic bottles
4 plastic bags
2 pieces of paper
1 cardboard box

Recycling ABQ 1

2008-06-23T15:28:00.001-06:00

I have decided to undertake a new project. This project takes very little extra time out of my schedule, but I hope it will be eye-opening. The premise is this: when I walk around town (which I do much of the time), I am going to begin collecting recyclables that I find on the street. I am going to document how much, what, and when I collect.

I started this yesterday with an eye toward glass. I was walking Alison down to the ATC in the morning, and I noticed two beer bottles, one of them on top of a newspaper box. I decided that I needed to collect these bottles because otherwise they would end up as broken glass all over the sidewalk, as tends to happen; I left them there for the return trip. On my way back home from the ATC, I found seven (SEVEN!) beer bottles in a parking lot, obviously left there by jackass revelers from the weekend. Carrying these all in my hands was a little difficult, but then I found a cardboard box lying next to the curb, as if sent there specifically to help me collect recyclables! I ended up getting home (keeping in mind this is a ~2/3 mile trip) with 21 total pieces collected:

13 glass bottles
1 aluminum can
6 plastic bottles
1 cardboard box.

Perhaps after the weekend it won't be as bad?

My other motivation for doing this is that these recyclables on the street will most likely never get recycled (this is based on intuition, not facts). So I do not collect trash, just recyclables. I also have been coming up with some ground rules for this project:

1. I won't pick up anything disgusting.
2. I won't put myself in danger.
3. I won't pick up glass shards, although large pieces of bottles are ok.

I hope this little project of mine will make downtown Albuquerque a slightly nicer place, and maybe inspire some other people to clean up their own towns.

Thank you, California

2008-06-16T17:03:00.003-06:00

I have a couple blogs from my Oregon trip written, but I don't think I'm ever going to post them. I would have to insert pictures and such, and meh.

Instead, let me take this opportunity to once again congratulate California on being progressive enough to allow for-real same-sex marriage, joining Massachusetts as the only states recognizing full marriages for homosexuals. I hope that other states fall into line and that those states that legally recognize some kind of union (Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, D.C., Oregon, Washington, and Texas) (just kidding about Texas) up the ante soon.

Get this! New Mexico recognizes same-sex marriages granted in other countries! They're like one step above the no same-sex marriage states, and one step below the pro same-sex marriage states apparently. Go middle-grounders!

Philomath is Where I Go

2008-06-02T22:43:00.001-06:00

I am making my first trip to Oregon this week, and I have been approaching it with some trepidation…I’m not sure why. For some reason, I really haven’t been looking forward to this week. The point of my travel is to attend a week-long workshop on temperature sensing using fiber-optic cables. While that likely sounds incredibly boring to everybody else reading this, it’s interesting to me (not the actual physics, mind, just the application), and hopefully I will use it in my research.

This workshop I’m attending (at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in central Oregon, east of Eugene) starts on Monday, but I’ve come up a couple of days early (with a colleague; for the next week, when I say “we” I will be referring to the two of us, unless noted otherwise) in order to meet with on of the gurus in hillslope hydrology, a professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis. My plan was to meet with him, then spend a couple days exploring the coast of Oregon before heading down to the workshop.

My day today began at 3am (Pacific Time), when I got out of bed before my alarm went off to get ready to go to the airport. My wonderful wife got up to drive me to the airport. (Speaking of my marriage, lately I’ve been a very bad husband in a lot of ways. Alison is truly patient to continue to tolerate me. I’ve came to a realization today that, in spite of earlier protestations to the contrary, I really am Michael Scott. The difference between myself and him is that at least he was the one bringing home the money in his relationship. Oh, and I actually graduated from college. And when I tell my jokes, I know they’re not funny. I have made a little poster for myself that says: “Think: WWMSD? (What Would Michael Scott Do?) Do the Opposite.” I hope that motivates me. I have become less and less responsible since I met Alison, and I think it’s because she is so responsible that it’s easy for me to totally rely on her for everything. My faculties in a lot of areas have slipped because of this. I don’t know, maybe it’s something else, but this seems to fit.)

My flight left around 6am to quickly head over to Phoenix. As those of you who read my wife’s blog know, we went to Pittsburgh recently, and I reflected that Phoenix is about the ugliest city to fly into. There is no green anywhere, except on the golf courses. Some little kid who was kicking my chair the whole way knew another kid who was talking about all the dirt. Yeah. Most other places you go (Tucson and Las Vegas being obvious exceptions) at least look somewhat alive when you head toward them. And this is one of the fastest growing cities (and therefore one of the fastest growing water demands) in the country.

No time to do anything in Phoenix, and the food in the airport was terribly overpriced, so I just did crosswords for awhile. The next flight was to Portland, and shockingly this flight was not full. It has been a very long time since I have been on an airplane that was not chock-a-block full of people. And not just a few seats were empty; my row only had two people, and I had traded seats with somebody else, and my original row also only had two people. The row in front of me only had two. It was actually very nice. A pleasant flight, and I got like two and a half articles read, which for me is quite outstanding. We arrived ahead of schedule, but then we had to go to baggage claim, then to the rental car place, then we had to wait for the shuttle, and the rental car lots are actually not really at the Portland airport, so we had to drive awhile. And they “upgraded” me from an economy car to a small SUV (a Hyundai Santa Fe) which I’m sure gets only about 2/3 the mileage. While in the airport restroom, I had the pleasure of getting to listen to somebody’s phone conversation, which they held while sitting on the toilet. At some point the guy’s reception cut out, which made him quite upset. I say, the cell phone companies should have no obligation to provide you with reception inside of a restroom. Phone calls are not so urgent that you have to make everybody around you uncomfortable by considering that you might be blasting a dookie while talking to a fellow businessman.

The drive to Corvallis took about two hours, and it was pretty pleasant. We grabbed Subway on the way, and today was Free Cookie Friday, so that automatically was a spirit lifter. In Corvallis we parked on the campus of Oregon State University and walked for awhile so I could meet this hydro guru. I think it was a productive meeting, but who knows. Afterward we went to a local book store where I picked up a guide to hiking along the coast. We went to dinner at Block 15, a local brewpub, because I am obsessed with the idea that I am a beer snob, even though my palette is not at all refined enough to really identify flavors, or what is actually a good beer, and my memory is so poor that I don’t remember what tastes like what anyway. In fact, if I didn’t take notes I would have no idea what I actually liked. I will not have this problem with the beers at Block 15, however, which I universally disliked. I tried a 5-beer sampler, with their Brown Porter, Trubbled Monk Belgian, Aboriginale, American Wheat, and Golden Glo. The last two were very light, and really had absolutely no flavor. It was almost as if I was drinking tonic. The Aboriginale was extremely hoppy (to the point that it was difficult to finish and made me feel a little nauseated), the Belgian was very strong (in a not-so-good way), and the Porter was so-so. I actually drank the Porter first because I thought it had the least chance of being a beer I would like, and I thought it was only OK…but it turned out to be the best of the bunch. I did admire the fact that the brewery uses wind power, they purchase carbon offsets, and they feed their spent grains to local livestock. So at least they are low-impact.

We grabbed groceries before heading out of town (I asked a lady on the street to direct me toward a grocery store, and she told me how to get to the Safeway…then also told me about the local grocery store (which was unfortunately too far out of the way)…then also told me about the farmer’s market (which was unfortunately not until tomorrow)…what a town! And I bought cherries at the Safeway; one of my life’s goals is to live somewhere where I can grow cherries) and driving toward the coast. We first passed through the town of Philomath, from which this post takes its title (the title is actually a quote from an old R.E.M. song, so I’m sure it was meaningless to 99.9% of the world population). This took awhile, but the road was just beautiful. I like the whole coastal range area…lots of tall forests, although there are also numerous clear-cut scars everywhere. We drove into Newport, then headed north toward Lincoln City. We camped at Beverly Beach State Park, which was quite nice (if a little noisy, since I chose a campsite that was right next to the highway, and also very close to the beach access). After arriving we took a little hike up the beach to Devil’s Punchbowl (a collapsed sea cave) and back, about 2.8 miles total according to the guidebook. It was beautiful, although the wind was quite cold. There were very few people around. The goal was to see the sunset, but the western horizon was unfortunately cloudy. The hike back, we decided to try our luck with hiking above the beach, and ended up walking down a highway the whole way. This was somewhat harrowing, but it was still pretty light out (this being about 9:00 P.M.) so nothing bad happened. Once back to the campsite, we set up tents and I brushed teeth and went to sleep. It feels great to be out camping, even if you can hear the traffic noise all night. Connecting with nature, at least to the degree one can by backing one’s SUV into a campsite and unloading the tent from the back.

For us to read the fine print, you actually have to print it.

2008-05-01T08:52:00.003-06:00

Today is the 5th anniversary of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech, which was delivered from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln. Since that speech, nearly 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq. Today, the administration is doing some backtracking on this subject. They are now stating that the banner (the big one that said Mission Accomplished) was not specific enough, and that the speech and the banner referred only to the mission of that particular carrier, which was just a few miles off of San Diego at the time, returning home from a tour in the Persian Gulf.

"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said 'mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."

First, God forbid that the media brings up the fact that there have been almost 4,000 deaths since our president claimed that major combat operations were at an end five years ago (keeping in mind that we were only involved in WWI for 1.5 years, and WWII for less than 4 years). And second, does anybody really think that the speech referred only to that aircraft carrier? The quote above indicates that the entire misconception is due to the wording on the banner. Let's examine the speech itself, shall we?

Admiral Kelly, Captain Card, officers and sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Americans, major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

Why would he address "my fellow Americans" to tell everybody that the carrier is home?

This nation thanks all of the members of our coalition who joined in a noble cause. We thank the armed forces of the United Kingdom, Australia and Poland who shared in the hardships of war. We thank all of the citizens of Iraq who welcomed our troops and joined in the liberation of their own country.

All of this past-tense formulation ("shared," "joined") certainly indicate that this sharing and joining is not going to go on any more, because it is no longer necessary.

And tonight, I have a special word for Secretary Rumsfeld, for General Franks and for all the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States: America is grateful for a job well done.

I think it is pretty clear that the president was referring to combat operations for everyone when he says, in the first third of his speech, "job well done" explicitly directed at "all the men and women who wear the uniform of the United States." I don't think that Dana Perino can justifiably state that there was an implied additional clause after "United States" that should have been "and happen to be sailors on the USS Lincoln."

The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001 and still goes on.

Victory! Victory in Iraq! OK, seriously, again we are supposed to believe that this was implicitly directed only at this group of sailors?

In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been focused and deliberate and proportionate to the offense. We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th, the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got.

I didn't want to get into much anti-war sentiment in this post since that isn't the point, but does anybody still believe that our invasion of Iraq was "proportionate to the offense" when the didn't actually do anything to us? Our "proportionate" response to nothing is an invasion that leads to the deaths of nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians (from Iraq Body Count)?

Only at the end of the speech did Bush actually talk directly about the sailors on board the Lincoln. The administration has tried to set itself free from the "Mission Accomplished" sign, correctly stating that that particular phrase was never actually used in the speech. But you make a speech that indicates that the military was victorious already, and you hang a "Mission Accomplished" banner in the background, and what do you expect? I have to believe (for my own sense of well-being) that the people that run our country are not actually dumb, and understand the full ramification of what they are doing; in this light I believe that the "Mission Accomplished" banner was there to give the American people something simple to see and identify with so that we would feel good about the war. Instead, the press secretary states that they regret not adding some (what would have been) fine print to the banner. Not buying it Perino, try again.

P.S. I love the implications of the following quote from today's news article, considering Bush's military record:

After being landed on the deck of the carrier in an S-3B Viking 30 miles off the coast San Diego (Ari Fleischer said the president "could have helicoptered," but "he wanted to see a landing the way aviators see a landing"), Mr. Bush appeared in a flight suit to the cheers of the ship's personnel and the glare of television lights.

The environment will thank us, part 3.

2008-04-23T08:46:00.003-06:00

I arrived at school to this comment from KC (on my blogspot version) in reference to the last post:

yeah this sucks. I really liked your analogy to the homework questions. I read that Prius article either yesterday or the day before and the reviews of that and the Civic. I think now if it was my car I would lean toward the Prius, however Bernie doesn't like the look of it...

What kills both myself and my wife about the Prius is that there actually used to be a Prius that did not look so goofy. Check out the original, 2001 version of the Prius. It's no '67 Shelby GT500, but it looks a lot more like other cars on the road.

I of course cannot prove this, but the Prius is so goofy-looking because people want to project the image that they are doing something for the environment whenever they do so. If you had a car that looked like everybody else's, who would know and then, who would praise you? While I am happy that people are buying and driving hybrids, I really wish that they were doing so for the right reasons rather than for image. The hybrid Camry and Accord look normal, and people still buy those, so I of course may be wrong.

The solution, of course, is to live close to your work so you can bike or walk every day. Or take public transit (like Alison) or private vanpooling (like I do). As my good friend KG (not in SF) pointed out, people who buy a new Prius to replace their old car are wasting a lot of resources having a brand new car created. Our culture of disposability is one of the greatest problems facing us today, and getting new cars constantly (instead of retrofitting old ones) is not helping.

The environment will thank us, part 2.

2008-04-22T14:29:00.004-06:00

As the title suggests, this is the second post about the environment on Earth Day (today, April 22); if you missed the first, it's down there somewhere, and I'm sure you are smart enough (being a reader of this here blog) to locate it yourself.

I got sidetracked on the previous post talking about recycling in Socorro. But what made me want to blog today was some exciting news I read today.

The Bush Administration is doing its Earth Day duty and releasing some environmental news. This news is that they are going to raise fuel economy!

Wow! That's exciting! What do you think these new levels will be, considering that we currently have cars that can get 48 MPG city/45 MPG highway under the new EPA rating system? And considering that individuals have modded those very cars to produce a 100 MPG version (with about $6,000 in upgrades)? And considering that these standards do not have to be met until 2015, which is like 7 years away, plenty of time to refine techniques and change assembly stuff and work toward more efficient cars? 35? 40? 50 MPG? It could be done! What will it be?

New Fuel economy standard will be 31.6 mpg

You dicks.

There are a lot of things that really bother me about our president. Not the least of these things is that he unabashedly claims to be an environmentalist, while also constantly proving himself wrong. He's like the boy who cried wolf, except that it's more like Bush is the boy who cried "I'm awesome!" so many times, and it was shown to be a blatant lie, that even if he did something that helped the environment, I would just be completely skeptical. However, I think that it is pretty clear that 31.6 MPG by 2015 is a piddly goal.

But let's not just listen to me. The proof is in the blubbering, so they say. The auto industry has no desire to increase fuel efficiency. Therefore, any real, proactive stance taken toward actually doing something about the ridiculously low fuel efficiency of our vehicles should piss them off, right? Thanks, logic! Well, here's a quote from them:

“These numbers are very challenging. They will stretch the industry to innovate in ways they haven’t had to do in the past and will continue to set us on a course to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new autos,” said Charles Territo, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which represents General Motors Corp., Toyota Motor Corp., Ford Motor Co. and others.

Anything that would actually be helpful should have resulted in something more like:

"Oh my god, holy shit, what are you people doing to us? We're going to lose our houses over this! Won't somebody think of the children?!

Instead, we get "ooooh, that'll be really hard" which is what you would tell your teacher if they wanted to know whether they should add more questions to your homework set. It's not that you couldn't do the extra problems, it's just that you would really rather not because you think that time could be better spent surfing the internet and finding things like this and this.

Note that Ford produced the first Model T back in 1908, and it had a mileage of 13 to 21 MPG back then. There is no reason that we shouldn't be leagues ahead of where we are today. Europe is already ahead of us (keep in mind that we have a lot more automotive engineers than they do), and will institute a 47 MPG requirement by 2012. Of course, in Europe they don't have so many SUV's.

Check out this article entitled "U.S. ‘stuck in reverse’ on fuel economy." Included is this gem:

Adding insult to injury is the fact that nearly two-thirds of the 113 highly fuel-efficient models that are unavailable to American consumers are either made by U.S.-based automobile manufacturers or by foreign manufacturers with substantial U.S. sales operations, such as Nissan and Toyota.

America's "me first" attitude is going to come back to bite it one day. What can we do to change society in time to save it from itself?

The environment will thank us, part 1.

2008-04-22T14:06:00.004-06:00

Today is Earth Day, the one day per year where we acknowledge the giant (approximately) oblate spheroid of rock/ductile rock/magma on which we live. What are you doing for Earth Day? The Earth Science Club here at Tech has a little lunch where they discussed some issues. I think there were about 7 people there when I left (to go to class). Nice idea, although they were not to warm to my suggestion that they should start a community garden for the grad students in an effort to eat more local food.

The City of Socorro has "started" a recycling program here, which basically consists of a company that picks up your recycling happening to move from the East Mountains (east of Albuquerque) down to Socorro. I am dubious that this has been an effort on the part of the City. The recycling company actually calls itself Morning WoodCutters, which, if you are like me and watched a lot of Beavis and Butthead will strike you as either hilariously funny or generally shocking. And to drive home the point that this is not any kind of accidental naming, scope out this picture on the Morning WoodCutters website, which leaves very little to the imagination.

The upshot of the Socorro recycling thing is that you pay $20 a month for MWC to come to your house and pick up your recycling once a month. If you want a one-time pickup (that utilizes the entire truck), this will cost you all of $90. I recommended to those at the lunch that, if they go to Albuquerque once every month or so anyway, it would be much smarter for them to just take their recyclables up there themselves. I guess I should have encouraged the local option for the benefit of those who cannot go to Albuquerque. However, I would have taken less than that per person to transmit recyclables up to Albuquerque back when we lived in Socorro. (By the way, according to the City website it looks like the range of materials that MWC will recycle is the exact same stuff that Albuquerque recycles, leading me to believe that they just dump it off on the same recycling company).

The school is trying to get the Earth Science Club to handle the recycling for the entire campus, which consists of collecting recyclables (plastic bottles and aluminum cans only) from 38 different points on campus and taking them up to Albuquerque. Now, mind that the club is not going to get paid for any of this. I think maybe they get to keep can revenues, but that is unclear. Maybe with MWC now collecting recyclables it would make a lot of sense for the school to shell out $90 per month for its very own recycling runs (I'm pretty sure they spend much less that on flowers every month) and get one of the FacMgmt people to collect stuff. I made this suggestion, we'll see if it actually happens.

I didn't intend to actually write anything about Socorro, and was instead going to be all caustic about the Bush administration, but I guess this will have to be broken into multiple posts...

Baseball and Fireworks!

2008-04-20T20:30:00.003-06:00

This weekend we went to another Albuquerque Isotopes game at beautiful Isotopes Park. They were playing the Nashville Sounds, who I remember watching many times back in the day at Omaha. I went with the wife as well as her "little sister" (she's in Big Brothers Big Sisters of America).

The game started out not-so-hot. The 'topes went down 3-0 after the top of the 2nd, but the home team busted out 10 runs in the bottom of the 2nd. You'd think this would translate to a laugher, but the Sounds actually came back to 10-9 by the middle of the 7th. The final score was 15-10 'topes, and there was a total of 9 home runs in the game, and not a single one came out onto the berm. Several cleared the weird hill in center field, and some jerks actually jumped the fence to get one of the balls. And somehow the park staff didn't do anything about it. Blergh.

The main attraction to going to the game was the fact that it was a fireworks night. The fireworks displays are pretty good for a ballpark display, and the best thing is that, if you are on the berm, the fireworks are pretty much directly over you. It's a wild time; next time I'll try to remember to take the camera and the tripod. And the music is patriotastic! Actually, it's a weird mixture of blind patriotism and classical music, but it's much more fun to make fun of "Proud to be an Amerrcan." We ended up getting the little sister home after 11pm because of all the offense.

The only bad part of the evening was that the berm was packed with children who were running around, screaming, stepping on our blanket, even running into us at times. And stealing other kids' baseballs. But any night at the ballpark is a good night.

Take me out to the ballgame!

2008-04-12T10:08:00.006-06:00

Look! It's Matt! And he's alive!

Yes, I apologize for not blogging at you for the past 1.5 months. I imagine this is my longest drought ever. I just didn't have anything interesting to say (not that that usually stops me). Finally, though, a subject about which I can speak passionately: Baseball!

That's right, last night was the home opener for our beloved local Isotopes, and I, the wife, AW, and BT all bundled up to attend. We sat on the berm, where the team has raised ticket prices 20% since last year (from $5 to $6)! Also, I am extremely sad to report that Isotopes Brewing Company has apparently gone out of business, so no more Slammin' Amber or Isotope Ale. This makes me very, very sad, as these beers were quite excellent (especially considering that the team had no real reason to make a really good beer, since people would buy it anyway for the novelty), and the best beer available at the ballpark (they also have Fat Tire). Certainly the freshest! They were also cheap for ballpark beer, about $5-6 a pint. A trip to the ballpark will not be quite the same any more, and I'll probably no longer buy beer at the park in Albuquerque.

Our ballpark has been recognized by many as one of the nicest in the country, and in the pregame ceremonies (which included our mayor receiving an oversized novelty rent check) one person claimed it was the nicest in all of baseball. Now, we're not going to be visiting PNC Park in Pittsburgh for another month yet, and that's been called the best park in the majors; we'll see.

The theme of the evening was "cold." It was 47 degrees Fahrenheit when the game started, and the sun quickly set. Some of the players were wearing these cold-weather head things like Placido Polanco does. Of course, others were in t-shirts and whatnot. I had a thick fleece over a thinner one, and Alison was even more bundled up:

BT is the only one of the four of us who paid attention to the weather and truly prepared for it. We sat on the berm, as we always do, and I don't know whether this made us colder or warmer. The 'topes did not get off to a very good start, and were down 5-2 after the top of the third. The cold made it difficult to pay attention to the game, and I hadn't been around AW for awhile, so he had to assail me with a couple months' worth of puns in the span of a few hours. I was watching the scoreboard to monitor the major league scores (the Tigers actually won a game!) and the temperature as it continued to drop through the game. 46...45...44. At some point each of us had to get up and walk around for awhile to warm up. AW got some Crown Royal, Alison and BT went to locate hot chocolate (unsuccessfully - the concessioners must have run out), and I went to the warmest place in the park - the gear store. I didn't buy anything, although I was sorely tempted.

After the 5th, it was 6-3 Redhawks and about 44 degrees. AW, Alison, and I were all ready to go home at this point, but BT refused to leave before the end of the game. I guess we all felt emasculated, and stuck it out. I took a picture in the 7th after the temperature dropped to 42 degrees:

We ended up staying until the end of the game. The announced attendance was over 9,200, but there could not have been more than a couple hundred people left at the end of the game, and maybe fewer than 10 on the berm. Go us! The temperature when we left was 41 degrees, and the Isotopes lost their home opener.

Anyway, we were (or I was, anyway) glad to go see a baseball game for the first time this season, and look forward to seeing some more. I have two new major league parks on my schedule this summer (PNC Park in Pittsburgh and Comerica in Detroit), so that will be pretty exciting and blogs are sure to be forthcoming!

Why we don't like Texas

2008-02-29T10:29:00.003-07:00

I just read a story from Newsweek on the polluting prowess of Texas. I was not at all shocked to learn that Texas is the state with the largest CO₂ output. However, the following did horrify me:
"Were the Lonestar State to secede from the union it would be the world's eighth-largest emitter of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, just behind Canada."
also:
"Texas still outpaces the combined emissions of California and Pennsylvania, the states with the second- and third-highest CO₂ outputs."

That's amazing and terrible and irresponsible and...

"Texans epitomize America's penchant for overconsumption, so much so that they've even coined their own phrase for superlarge portions: Texas-sized. The state's 23.5 million residents use nearly 3,000 more kilowatt-hours of electricity every year than the average American and a higher percentage of them drive large, gas-guzzling vehicles."

"[I]t is one of only 15 states without a climate action plan in place or even under consideration."

I can definitely see that Bush belongs in Texas despite his Yalie pedigree. I recently read an article in GOOD about Vermont's desire to secede because of the restrictive hand of our federal government; they want tougher environmental laws, for one thing. That's great, and I think that states (see California) should be able to enact tougher laws if they want to, and that the federal government needs to get tougher too. My worry with the secession talk (and there is some low-level talk in the South) is that southern states are not very likely to enact tough laws benefiting the environment, and will instead likely go in the other direction, making pollution easier. And we are all affected by the decisions of the eighth-largest CO₂ emitter in the world living on our doorstep.

Kids today

2008-02-21T10:08:00.004-07:00

So once again, just listening to NPR and heard this story. Apparently the decline in pretend-type play among children has led to changes in behavior and responsibility, among other things. Read or listen to the story, especially anybody that is or will be a parent.

Sweet hearts!

2008-02-20T14:35:00.002-07:00

OK, so my wife got me some of those sweetheart things (in Spanish, they're Corazones Dulces!) for Valentine's Day/our first anniversary, and I have been looking at the messages because they're generally amusingly pithy. This box is some sort of weird mixture though. There's the impressively current (I'M YRS), the completely neutral (NICE GIRL), the thoroughly passe (PAGE ME), the somewhat passe and completely unromantic (FAX ME), and the just plain weird (PAY DAY). Oh, and the one befitting of the angst felt by teenagers everywhere, the blank heart.
Thanks for the treat darling!

Calling BS on Hillary Clinton

2008-02-20T10:26:00.003-07:00

Let me start this blog by stating that I voted for Clinton in the primary here in NM because she actually talked about what she would do about the problems facing this nation at her rally. But a story from this morning's Morning Edition is making me change my mind. Can I go back and change my vote? I kind of want to now.

Why? Well, I'll tell you. We have this really bizarre and nonsensical primary system in this country whereby a few states (particularly Iowa and New Hampshire, extremely white states) get a huge say in who gets to run for president from each party. I don't think that this is a particularly fair system, and I would like to see it changed somehow. I haven't done any real research on the topic, but I have not seen a viable solution yet. Anyway, this time around a whole lot of states decided that they deserved to be the most important state in the primary process, and moved their primaries forward. This resulted in New Hampshire and Iowa moving their primaries even further forward, until they occurred ridiculously early. When these states (including both Arizona and New Mexico) floated this idea of moving forward, they knew full well that if they moved them too far forward, their delegates would not be counted. Florida and Michigan moved theirs too far forward, and so their primary results are not supposed to count. They did it anyway. And their votes did not count. In fact, candidates were not supposed to put themselves on the ballot. Clinton did it anyway. And shockingly, being the only major candidate, she carried both states (the second most popular choice was uncommitted).

Now that she's slipping further behind Obama, she suddenly wants those votes counted. Here are some quotes. Early on, she gave her reason for putting herself on the ballot as: "It's clear - this election they're having is not going to count for anything. I personally did not think it made any difference whether or not my name was on the ballot."

Now, the day before Florida primary, she said, "I want the voters in Florida to know that I hear them. Hundreds of thousands of Floridians have already votes, so clearly they are taking this seriously, they believe their voices are going to be heard and should be counted, and I agree with them." Sounds suspiciously like she was hedging her bets by putting herself on the ballot to me.

As I said, I disagree with the system the way it is currently set up, but if there are rules, and you know full well what those rules are, and you choose to break those rules, then you should be prepared to face the consequences. This is why I have little sympathy for anybody that gets a speeding ticket (I've gotten one, and paid it), stop sign ticket, etc. The stakes are higher here, of course. Tad Devine says, "If the margin in these two states represents a difference of who's going to be the nominee, it's going to be hard fought and it could be fought all the way through the credentials and the rules committee and to the convention floor itself."

Of course, as will always happen, this has been turned by some into a matter of race. Surprisingly, Rev. Al Sharpton comes down on the side of reason (the side of reason always being my side): "I do not understand how you can say that you're going to have primaries that are not going to be respected, candidates not going to campaign, and then later change the rules [dumb sports metaphor omitted]. That is a civil rights issue." But Julian Bond, Chairman of the NAACP, sees it differently: "Under present rules, these voters will not be heard, they won't be seated, they won't have any recognition, or representation at the Democratic Convention. I'm old enough to have been through these credential fights at Democratic Conventions in '64 and '68 when the issue was in race, and in some ways the issue is race now. A great portion of the voters in both those states are black. They have a right to have their expressions heard and felt." Why does a credential fight automatically turn into a race issue? No idea. What kills me is that if any other state with a negligible minority population, say Minnesota, the exact damn same thing would have happened. The only possible way that this is a race issue is if black people are somehow more inclined to push their primaries way way early, which I do not think is the case.

The upshot of this whole thing is that Clinton is going back on what she said earlier as soon as it will benefit her. Now, I am not so naive as to think that, if he were in the same position, Obama would not be saying the same thing. And maybe with time I will back Clinton again. But it pisses me off that they are being such politicians, frankly. Tad Devine again: "This is a fundamental issue of fairness. For our party, we're holding ourselves out to be the party of fairness, on issues like taxes, on the way people live and their lives. If our own process doesn't appear to be a fair process, we're going to hurt ourselves. We need to figure out a way to make sure that these states are fully engaged in this political process at the Convention, and certainly in the general election. And that's not going to be an easy thing as long as the nomination is on the line." What would be fair? Sticking to the original plan, despite the fact that it hurts the candidate for whom I voted.

Morning Edition mentioned some solutions proposed for this situation. First, we could rehold the primaries, probably the most reasonable of the options, and the one that they term "unlikely." Second, we could split the votes evenly between the two candidates, which would be a BS solution since it would not actually do anything, just adding the same number of delegates to each candidate. Plus, if Clinton would have actually won real primaries in these two states, it would be only fair that she get her real proportion of delegates. Finally, split the votes according to the proportion of the national popular vote that each candidate holds; this won, again, would make zero difference to anything, since if Obama holds, say, 60% of the popular vote nationwide, he would still hold 60% after those two states were counted. I mean, what is the damn point? I suppose this would be the most popular option for those that want to placate Michigan and Florida and not disillusion them with the Democratic Party. I say, if you play with fire, you might get burned.

Do you live in the Southwest?

2008-02-12T11:23:00.000-07:00

If you've somehow not heard yet that you live in a desert, you should read this article from this month's National Geographic Magazine that talks about the present and future water-related difficulties of our beloved West. I don't think any of it was really news to me, as a water quasi-professional, but this is probably the most widely-read (amongst laypeople) publication I have seen take a stab at the issue (ha! pun!). Give it a read and a think. You think tap water tastes bad now? Just wait. Also, the writer talked to a lot of scientists from Arizona and New Mexico whose work I have read or am familiar with.

In other news, we went on vacation and discovered a new and frightening quasi-state we like to call New Texico. We have a joint blog post planned to detail this place, which means it will be published in a terrifyingly unnecessary three different locations.

No shite / Everybody panic!

2008-02-01T10:37:00.000-07:00

From our fearless leader:

I guess that means that it's time to panic.

Weather and politics

2008-01-29T08:56:00.000-07:00

So you know that I'm only going to half-piss off half of you!
This morning, when I woke up before 6 to get to the van, I walked out to the kitchen for some breakfast, I noticed that we got a fairly light dusting of snow overnight, well under an inch. However, the recent fairly warm weather combined with that overnight moisture input to turn Albuquerque into an icy mess. The van did not arrive because nobody got on at the first stop (my advisor said that there was a half inch of ice on the parking lot), so we had to drive a car. We had the radio on in the car (conservative talk radio, but I guess I can't complain about not having to drive myself) and heard that they were not only closing schools due to the light snow, but apparently nobody could drive on the ice as there were numerous rollovers reported, and one of the main northern roads connecting the western parts of the valley (Rio Rancho) to main Albuquerque was closed. There was a three hour wait for tow trucks, and they were asking that, if you were in a minor accident, that you wait for awhile to report it so that you don't tie up the police's time. Crazy.
Also, I read short article today about history repeating itself. Now, of course the author is a raging liberal like me, and so I am more inclined to agree, but the facts are I guess undeniable. Two things kill me about this:
1. If this happened in the past with this same cast of characters, why did we let it happen again? Why do we learn nothing from history?
2. Why the hell have I never heard about this until now? The so-called liberal media didn't bring this to our attention back in 2003. Why? I think that if the American public knew that Cheney and Rumsfeld had already tried to pull the old bullshit maneuver in the past to increase "defense" spending, we never would have gone for it.
Depressing. Have a great day!

Two in a row!

2008-01-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

I think this a pretty accurate metaphorical history of the past decade. Two in a row from Mr. Rowland!

OIC, it was ironic

2008-01-24T21:31:00.000-07:00

OK, so this evening I watched Death Race 2000, a cult classic starring David Carradine (just after Kung Fu) and Sylvester Stallone (in the early stages of his career). This movie is the origin of the "point system" for running over people and things, where you score points for killing people based on their age and gender. Sounds off the wall, right? Well it was, sure.
However, it was also pretty terrible. If you like wooden dialog presentation, shallow writing, and lots of gratuitous female nudity, then perhaps this is the movie for you. I watched the brief "Looking Back" special feature that interviewed some of the people involved in the film (not anybody I had ever heard of), one of them referred to it as a "satirical ironic comedy." Like that's supposed to make it better. Look, Army of Darkness was a satirical ironic comedy, but it was actually well-conceived, unlike this movie. I want my 1.5 hours back.
The only redeeming quality of the movie is that I Netflix'd it, so it didn't cost me anything.

End of an era (eventually)

2008-01-24T11:26:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a little bit the last few weeks about the end of American civilization. We all know it will come eventually; anybody who denies it is just being foolish. The following webcomic by Jeffrey Rowland sums it up pretty well.

I mean, we live in a pretty OK country, comparatively. We of course don't have a pristine human rights record, and there are a lot of laws and quasi-laws/quasi-traditions that I would like to see changed to make us a more tolerant society. Am I proud to be an American? I guess so, but I also guess that if I were born into another country, I would probably be proud to be from there too. Hey Fundies! Isn't pride the number one deadliest sin?

Prepare to be SHOCKED!

2008-01-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

...and maybe even AWED.

As the result of another tidbit I heard on Morning Edition today, I'm writing another angry blog entry today. Curb your enthusiasm, people, I'm only one man.
A group called The Center for Public Integrity released a report called Iraq: The War Card - Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War. I know, sounds pretty exciting! This group meticulously documented 935 (!) false statements by administration officials regarding Iraq in the two years after 9/11, especially concentrated in the months leading up to our invasion. Now I'm sure you could find 260 things I've said in the past two years that turned out to be false (Bush's total). Three differences being: (1) Nobody gives a damn what I say, nor should they, since I am not an elected public official; (2) When I say things that turn out to be false I don't generally know beforehand that they are; (3) The harm that I can do by lying is many, many orders of magnitude lower than that Bush was able to accomplish. Following are a few excerpts from the summary:

False Pretenses
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.

It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.

In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.

..............................

Consider, for example, these false public statements made in the run-up to war:

* On August 26, 2002, in an address to the national convention of the Veteran of Foreign Wars, Cheney flatly declared: "Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us." In fact, former CIA Director George Tenet later recalled, Cheney's assertions went well beyond his agency's assessments at the time. Another CIA official, referring to the same speech, told journalist Ron Suskind, "Our reaction was, 'Where is he getting this stuff from?' "
* In the closing days of September 2002, with a congressional vote fast approaching on authorizing the use of military force in Iraq, Bush told the nation in his weekly radio address: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons, is rebuilding the facilities to make more and, according to the British government, could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as 45 minutes after the order is given. . . . This regime is seeking a nuclear bomb, and with fissile material could build one within a year." A few days later, similar findings were also included in a much-hurried National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction — an analysis that hadn't been done in years, as the intelligence community had deemed it unnecessary and the White House hadn't requested it.
* In July 2002, Rumsfeld had a one-word answer for reporters who asked whether Iraq had relationships with Al Qaeda terrorists: "Sure." In fact, an assessment issued that same month by the Defense Intelligence Agency (and confirmed weeks later by CIA Director Tenet) found an absence of "compelling evidence demonstrating direct cooperation between the government of Iraq and Al Qaeda." What's more, an earlier DIA assessment said that "the nature of the regime's relationship with Al Qaeda is unclear."
* On May 29, 2003, in an interview with Polish TV, President Bush declared: "We found the weapons of mass destruction. We found biological laboratories." But as journalist Bob Woodward reported in State of Denial, days earlier a team of civilian experts dispatched to examine the two mobile labs found in Iraq had concluded in a field report that the labs were not for biological weapons. The team's final report, completed the following month, concluded that the labs had probably been used to manufacture hydrogen for weather balloons.
* On January 28, 2003, in his annual State of the Union address, Bush asserted: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa. Our intelligence sources tell us that he has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production." Two weeks earlier, an analyst with the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research sent an email to colleagues in the intelligence community laying out why he believed the uranium-purchase agreement "probably is a hoax."
* On February 5, 2003, in an address to the United Nations Security Council, Powell said: "What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources." As it turned out, however, two of the main human sources to which Powell referred had provided false information. One was an Iraqi con artist, code-named "Curveball," whom American intelligence officials were dubious about and in fact had never even spoken to. The other was an Al Qaeda detainee, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who had reportedly been sent to Eqypt by the CIA and tortured and who later recanted the information he had provided. Libi told the CIA in January 2004 that he had "decided he would fabricate any information interrogators wanted in order to gain better treatment and avoid being handed over to [a foreign government]."

The false statements dramatically increased in August 2002, with congressional consideration of a war resolution, then escalated through the mid-term elections and spiked even higher from January 2003 to the eve of the invasion.

..............................

The cumulative effect of these false statements — amplified by thousands of news stories and broadcasts — was massive, with the media coverage creating an almost impenetrable din for several critical months in the run-up to war. Some journalists — indeed, even some entire news organizations — have since acknowledged that their coverage during those prewar months was far too deferential and uncritical. These mea culpas notwithstanding, much of the wall-to-wall media coverage provided additional, "independent" validation of the Bush administration's false statements about Iraq.

The "ground truth" of the Iraq war itself eventually forced the president to backpedal, albeit grudgingly. In a 2004 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, for example, Bush acknowledged that no weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq. And on December 18, 2005, with his approval ratings on the decline, Bush told the nation in a Sunday-night address from the Oval Office: "It is true that Saddam Hussein had a history of pursuing and using weapons of mass destruction. It is true that he systematically concealed those programs, and blocked the work of U.N. weapons inspectors. It is true that many nations believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. But much of the intelligence turned out to be wrong. As your president, I am responsible for the decision to go into Iraq. Yet it was right to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

Bush stopped short, however, of admitting error or poor judgment; instead, his administration repeatedly attributed the stark disparity between its prewar public statements and the actual "ground truth" regarding the threat posed by Iraq to poor intelligence from a Who's Who of domestic agencies.

(All emphasis mine.) Am I the only person driven to blind rage by this? They lied knowingly on hundreds of occasions, or at least distorted the truth. The end result of this? Here are some statistics taken from some sort of Liberal Politics website using numbers culled from reports from The Brookings Institute:
- $600 BILLION taxpayer dollars spent on the war, with another $200 BILLION requested this year. (Holy shit! We're in a recession? Seriously? I wonder if each household would want its $4,100 each back right now.)
- 3,927 U.S. Troops killed so far. (Less 18% killed by non-hostile causes leaves 3,220 soldiers killed in combat.)
- Almost 29,000 U.S. Troops injured, 20% seriously
- 30% of troops develop "serious mental health problems" within 3-4 months of returning home
- At least 50,000 to 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed, and maybe as many as 600,000 (for comparison, about 625,000 Americans died during the Civil War, although a full 2/3 of those deaths were non-combat; total combat deaths equalled 213,000 - and we were the antagonist and protagonist).
- Approximately 4.4 to 4.5 MILLION Iraqis displaced internally and to Syria and Jordan.

All of this happened because our administration made a concerted effort to mislead its own citizens. And now they refuse to even make a mistake. I personally want all of our troops out of Iraq A.S.A.P. I realize, of course, that we broke it, and therefore we should fix it. But do the Iraqi people need more of our brand of fixing? Signs point to our recent activities making some improvement, but it has been too long, with far too great a cost of both money and lives, for our continued presence there to be accepted any longer. Yet even the most popular Democratic presidential candidates refuse to state unequivocally that they would pull us out posthaste.

If I had my druthers, my ideal solution would involve a total troop withdrawal accompanied by a public apology from our president for what he has wrought. That would, of course, not bring back any of the almost 4,000 dead Americans, or any of the $600B we've frittered away, but it would at least prevent further waste.

I have a number of conservative friends, but I expect that they avoid my blog like the plague because it probably makes them as angry as I am when I write my entries. But if they read, I'd like their take on this administration, and their reply to my statements.

Maybe I'm just mad because I bought a Mountain Dew out of the machine and it came out goddamn frozen. Who is in charge of these things? It's sitting on my office floor right now in an effort to have some diffuse solar radiation and sensible heat flux help out the melting process.

DeLay: McCain = worst thing evar?

2008-01-21T19:48:00.000-07:00

I heard a brief snippet today whilst riding home on the van that a certain former house majority leader (Tom DeLay) went on a rant on that bastion of independent media, Fox News about the Republican candidate who appeals most to independents and moderates, John McCain. Now, I am not going to do much defending of McCain; in fact, I could write a fairly vitriolic blog about what a phony he is, but that's a subject that would be best left to Alison's energies and angers. No, instead I am going to take this time to make fun of Tom DeLay (awfully french-sounding name, don't you think? Oh, it's irish? Dang.). Go watch the video; I'll wait.

OK. DeLay makes some criticisms of John McCain, and I would like to lead your attention to a few of them (Is this unfair? Should I keep in mind that this statement was not prepared and written down, but was instead ad lib and that he may have said some things that came off a little different from his meaning? After all, I do that constantly. What's that? I was never elected to public office? You make a good point. Touche.).

"John McCain himself killed our ability to drill in ANWR." - I realize that the audience for these comments is not the left, or even the center. But with the recent polar bear news and the administration's efforts to keep them off the ESA, I think that drilling in ANWR is going to become a less and less attractive option to mainstream America. In case you had not heard, the Fish and Wildlife Service decided to delay a ruling on whether or not to post them on the ESA until February 6, which gives the administration enough time to sell off all of the oil leases in the Chukichi Sea of Alaska, which is important polar bear habitat. I wish more people paid attention; this is not a coincidence.

Joseph Lieberman is "one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate." - With the Democratic Party very close to a Senate majority, Lieberman lost his Democratic primary in Connecticut, and, rather than take it like a man, he decided to run against winner Ned Lamont as an "independent" and somehow won his Senate seat back. Lieberman now labels himself an "Independent Democrat" and does not necessarily vote party line. There's nothing wrong with not voting party line, but anybody who refers to Joe Lieberman as "one of the most liberal Democrats in the Senate" is clearly off his rocker.

"I think McCain has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of." - The stupidity of this statement should be self-evident. Let me direct you toward a photo:

Now to the quote again: "I think McCain has done more to hurt the Republican Party than any elected official I know of."
Photo:

Now, even considering the fact that McCain is only a self-proclaimed "straight talker" (Alison would certainly beg to differ, and I agree with her), I love the implication that straight talk (i.e. telling people the truth) is damaging to the Party. This does not surprise me in regards to the GOP. Here's a fun game: can you think of any elected officials who have done more to hurt the Republican Party? I think I can name a few.

The weather in Quito

2008-01-16T23:51:00.001-07:00

My wife is near Quito for two weeks, and as it didn't break the freezing mark here in Abq today (high of 30 degrees F; felt like 21 F), and as it is supposed to get down to 14 F (feels like 3 F) tonight, I thought I'd check into the weather in her area. At the time of this writing, it is a brisk 52 F in Quito, with an expected low around 50 F. Tomorrow's high is to be 62 F. However, it does look like there's a chance of rain pretty much every day. Oh, and the humidity is 100%. At least here, it's a dry cold.

And resolutions too.

2008-01-14T21:47:00.000-07:00

I made some New Year's resolutions this year (I don't usually, since I believe I should have my life together enough that I don't have to use some occasion as an excuse to improve myself), and forgot to mention them in my two posts today. They are:

1. Stop cracking my knuckles. I am worried about the arthritis, and I think I already have it to a certain degree. But maybe I'm just being paranoid...
2. Reduce my sugar intake. After the diabetes scare with my mother right before my wedding last year, I'm a little worried about the future, considering how much Mountain Dew (oh my god, check out that page - "Mountain Dew’s name is a previously-existing euphemism for moonshine, which likely traces back to Ireland (see the Irish folk song “The Rare Auld Mountain Dew”), and has generally been marketed to highlight its potency. It was originally marketed as “zero proof moonshine” and had pictures of hillbillies on the bottle until 1973.") I drank as a child.
3. Make significant progress on my research. I am now 1.5 years in, with not enough to show for it. This semester I need to do lots of field work, and build the base level of any models that need to be made, and actually start writing.

I think there was at least one more, but I cannot remember now. I think that I have done a decent job on the first two. A couple Hershey Kisses per day, soda once in awhile. Less knuckle-cracking, although I didn't go cold turkey of course. It's funny, I've been doing it for so long that I now feel very uncomfortable when I don't crack them. And then, of course, when I give in and do it, it hurts. Research has not been as much of a win for me. I've gotten so little done this past couple weeks, it's pathetic. I've been questioning myself a lot lately on this count, and I don't understand why I just can't seem to focus on work.

Edit: 4. Be nicer to my wife. If you're reading this and don't know her, she's great. Not sure how I'm doing on this one so far, since she's in Ecuador.

Taking the plunge

2008-01-14T12:37:00.000-07:00

I finally spent some (way too much) time today trying to figure out for whom I should vote in the Democratic primary coming up on February 5 (Tsunami Tuesday) here in New Mexico. The Washington Post has a candidate quiz that actually gives the candidates' answers to a questionnaire. This quiz has one extremely mega-major flaw, in that it only provides answers by Clinton, Obama, and Edwards, neglecting my favorite candidate, Dennis Kucinich. Of course, I know that he has no chance, and I may end up voting for him anyway if he's still in the race, because of my quiz results.
Not surprisingly (to me), the quiz tells me that I should vote for John Edwards (29 points) because of a variety of things. Clinton and Obama come in second and third at 16 and 15 points, respectively. If Edwards is somehow out of the race by that point, it appears that there will be no major candidates about whom I am particularly excited; in that case, ol' Kucey gets my vote. Things I like about Kucinich: he wants to impeach Cheney; he wants to form a Department of Peace; he's been against the war in Iraq from the beginning; he wants us to sign onto Kyoto (the ONLY developed nation not to do so now); and he supports same-sex marriage.

Of course, I found a second quiz, which has given me different results, as these things often do. This one includes all of the minor candidates, and is much much faster to do (and therefore probably less accurate). Edwards comes in a whopping 6th on this quiz. The order, with their point totals:
Kucinich (69)
Gravel (54)
Obama (40)
Clinton (39)
Dodd (38)
Edwards (36)
Biden (33)
Richardson (24)
Paul (-6)
Giuliani (-22)
T. Thompson (-22)
McCain (-26)
Cox (-35)
Brownback (-40)
Huckabee (-47)
Romney (-56)
Tancredo (-63)
Hunter (-67)
If you don't know much about the candidates, this should be a good demonstration that Kucinich is the most whacked-out liberal amongst the group. Again, unfortunately he will not get the support he deserves.

Hello....internet.

2008-01-14T08:34:00.000-07:00

Every day I check my favorite blogs to see whether there have been any new posts. This includes my wife's blog, even though I should theoretically know exactly when she writes a new blog, us living in the same house and everything. I mostly do this out of a desire to not do anything worthwhile, which is apparently my life goal. The reason I say this is that I have realized that it's been about 3 weeks since I last posted a blog. Hypocritical, yes. It's not that I haven't had anything to say - that is, anything more to say than I usually do when posting here.
Since I last posted we of course has Christmas (actually, we had like 4 Christmases - we opened stockings on the 20th, opened some presents with Alison's family Christmas morning, opened more presents with my family Christmas afternoon, and finished when KC and BC showed up on Dec. 29). New Year's -- we went to bed before midnight. We had the pleasure of driving home to ABQ on New Year's day; at least there was very little traffic. Oh, I did get to go to a Phoenix Coyotes game with MD in which the Coyotes won in a shoot-out, the first shoot-out I had ever seen (not getting cable -- which really wouldn't help very much).
Since then, not a hell of a lot has gone on. Alison left on this past Friday to spend two weeks in Ecuador on a volunteer vacation with her sister. They're staying at an eco-resort and spending their days building trails or something, she wasn't entirely sure what they would be doing. This is definitely the longest I will have gone since I met her without actually talking to her -- even when I was in Canada for a summer I only spent about 4 days at a time in the field. It's a weird thing to suddenly not have any contact with her, and kind of depressing. I have not gotten enough work done so far with her gone. I've spent some time playing Evil Genius, one of the greatest computer games ever created, and good training for myself and the other horsemen (you know who you are brothers!). I also did some house cleaning last night, taking down our Christmas decorations and such. I went running the past three days in a row, and boy am I sore; this is my effort to be a little thinner when Alison gets back.
Today I surprised myself by actually getting up in time to get to the van and come down to Socorro. Trying to go to sleep last night (not very successfully, as I slept in pretty late on Sunday), I gave myself maybe a 25% chance of actually getting up in the morning. Maybe this will be a good start for me. This week I have to get writing more on a proposal I have to have done in a couple months, as well as doing some GIS work for my research. I also have to apparently get ready for the class that I am apparently going to T.A. this coming semester. Finally, I have a few secret blogging projects in the mental works that I'd like to get firing up.

Two days in the Valles

2007-12-21T11:27:00.001-07:00

This week I spent Wednesday and Thursday up in the Valles Caldera with my advisor. We deployed a few more temperature probes and did some sampling. Mostly we got to hike up a streambed in 1-2 feet of snow with snowshoes strapped to our feet!

I have discovered that my old gaiters do not work all that well. The backs did not stay on my boots, instead resting on my socks, which allowed snow to get into my boots. My feet were therefore damn cold by the end of the first day. Eventually I thawed out. Check out the windblown snow we saw about halfway up:

The second day we hurried up the catchment and did some more sampling up at the top. It was a productive couple of days, and we brainstormed some good ideas for furthering my research. Hopefully things really get moving this winter! I'll hopefully be spending much of the spring (post-snowmelt) up in the Valles.

Welcome, winter weather.

2007-12-14T12:11:00.000-07:00

I got up at 6:12 this morning to get myself down to my vanpool. I usually try to get up at 5:40 (my alarm goes off at 5:30) so I can shower and maybe even eat breakfast. This morning I had to sacrifice both to laziness. I left the house at 6:30, and arrived at the parking lot just a little before 6:40. The van is supposed to pick us up at 6:45, but that time came and went with no sign of a van. This happened once recently, and that time there was only one person at the north stop (I board the van at the second, south stop), and he apparently didn't want to drive because he sat there and waited for a long time before deciding to drive down. He also almost ran us off the road, leading to my first experience driving the vanpool van. But that's another story.
The van never showed up, but a car of usual van-riders did arrive around 6:50 to 6:55. Four of them piled out of a fairly small car. There were two of us waiting at the south stop for the van. Hmm. I decided not to go down to Socorro today because of that, and am instead working from Albuquerque. This fact has allowed me to observe the winter weather happening down here near the Rio Grande this fine day.

7:00 a.m.: When I started biking home, it was overcast and nothing was going on. Right around 7, we started getting an extremely light snow. Very exciting; I haven't been snowed on since last year. That snow steadily increased as I got home and walked Alison back to her bus stop for her trip to work. By the time I got home, a little bit had actually accumulated.

8:30 a.m.: By this time, the snow had stopped completely. We had probably about a tenth of an inch or so of accumulation. I took this picture:

10:00 a.m.: Most of the snow has sublimated or melted away. I figure this is the last of our winter weather today.

11:30 a.m.: The sun is out and shining in through the skylight above me.

12:02 p.m.: Graupel starts, up to pea-sized. At first I thought it was hail because it was hitting the skylight pretty hard. But no, it was just graupel. Large graupel lasts only a few minutes, and turns into very small grains of the stuff.

12:15 p.m.: Graupel stops. Within five minutes, much of the clouds have gone away and the sun is shining again. It looks pretty clear to the west, which is where our weather tends to come from this time of year. Out east looks damn ugly. That's where Alison works. I can't see the mountains at all, so they are probably getting hammered. I hope she can make it home today.

13:37 p.m.: The sky has clouded up again, and there is the lightest little bit of snow falling. Pretty much everything that had collected previously has melted. There was a cat in the yard, but he didn't want to be my friend.

13:53 p.m.: The light snow has stopped again, and the sky is once again clearing up fairly quickly.

14:31 p.m.: Extremely light snow, but the sky is clearing up already.

After that, it cleared, darkened, and cleared one more time. What strange weather. This morning it was 8 degrees in the Valles Caldera, and snowing heavily. We will not be making a trip up there this weekend.

Is there an Arachnologist in the house?

2007-12-14T08:01:00.000-07:00

So about four days ago I was sitting at my desk (yes, this very desk) when my lower right leg started itching a lot. I am terrible at leaving itchy spots well enough alone, so I scratched at it, then discovering that I had four nickel-sized lumps on my leg. They looked and felt like big spider bites. Now, four days later, the lumps have been replaced by angry red circles, and a blister has formed in the middle of each bite. To see a picture, go visit the wife's blog about this subject. If you know anything about spider bites, or know somebody who knows something about spider bites, I would like some free consultation on what might have bitten me. That is all.

Life Calderic

2007-11-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when you watch The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and then spend the next day hiking in the Valles Caldera:

I am substantially uncool.

Good news and bad news

2007-11-03T10:03:00.001-06:00

Let's start with the bad. Pervez Musharraf has declared a state of emergency in Pakistan, and suspended the constitution, as well as taken all non-government stations off of television. Sound like some sort of Military Dictatorship? Wikipedia agrees. Now, our government has an expressed interest in turning dictatorships into democracies, yet we are staunch allies of Pakistan. Sounds awfully two-faced. Some of our other allies: India, Thailand, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, Russia, and Morocco. Some other spots that are not free: Sudan, Chad, China, Vietnam, Russia, and others. We don't do much about situations about these other countries. I assume this is because they are either too large, or they don't have any oil.

The good news is that I got all around Albuquerque yesterday without using a vehicle. Alison went to work, and I decided to take the bus to lunch. I took my $1 and my LG Chocolate and hopped on the #5 that runs from Downtown to the east side of town. It takes just about an hour to get out there, so I did some reading on evaporation and stable isotopes. Once I got off the bus (finally) I stopped at the Subway to get myself lunch, and the Pizza Hut to get some for Alison. We ate lunch outside of her office, then I headed back down to Montgomery to get back on the bus. This time the ride was pretty short. Also, the bus was very quiet because it's one of the new CNG (Compressed Natural Gas) buses. Go Abq! Importantly, the Target and the Wild Oats are both along the route, so I can do pretty much all of my shopping and wife-visiting on this single bus route. The drop off is probably about half a mile from our house, so it will be kind of an annoying slog carrying groceries home, but oh well. These are the sacrifices we have to make to live with minimal impact. Later last night, Alison and I walked downtown to the theater (a 3-mile roundtrip walk) to see The Darjeeling Limited, a Wes Anderson movie. It was a pretty good movie, and I liked the fact that there were no truly likable characters. Go see it and decide for yourself. Another nice thing is that all of the previews before the movie consisted of seemingly intelligent movies; no Fred Claus, or Saw IV, or Spongebob movies, etc. People didn't talk much during the movie either (except for me - I have this annoying habit of having to whisper something to Alison every like 10 minutes).

Why are people so terrible?

2007-11-02T14:26:00.000-06:00

Let's start out with this: I am against the war in Iraq, and I always have been. It is a politically motivated exercise that seeks to secure our access to Middle Eastern oil in the future. Now I believe that the $465 BILLION that we've spent on the war could have been better applied to improve security and, gosh, I don't know, research some alternative energy sources. I thought there would be a big uproar back in September of 2006 when the death toll in Iraq passed that of the number that died on September 11, 2001 (not sure how CNN calculated the 9/11 casualties (Iraq is now up to 3,157 combat casualties), whether it includes people who have developed health problems due to rescue work, and their likely early deaths). That came and went fairly quietly, with few holding it up as an example of the uselessness of our time there (sorry, friends of mine who have been there).

I realize that my personal opinion has no weight on what will happen, but I surely hope that the opinion of over half of America should count for something, and that we should get out ASAP (it is depressing to note that, according to that poll, while almost half of Americans want our troops out in less than a year, only 10% believe that they actually will be out that quickly; the largest bin is 2 to 5 years).

Having ranted that, I am not against our troops. Except the bad eggs, which I hope are the exceptions. They're doing the job they are told to do, and I would certainly be afraid in their situation. Nearly everybody supports the troops, except for a few whackjobs. And those whackjobs are all super leftist liberals, right? Wrong.

In case you missed the news today, a federal jury awarded a Maryland man $10.9 million in damages in his suit against the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas. This group protests outside of soldiers' funerals. Their reasoning? Not disgust at the concept of war, or the futility of the exercise, or anything that actually has anything to do with Iraq, our military, the War on Terrah®, or our general security policies. No, they're protesting a completely unrelated (to anybody sane) governmental stance. Not our slipping liberties; our worsening human rights record; this administration's terrible environmental record; the unsatisfactory response to Hurricane Katrina; etc.

No, the group is protesting at funerals because it believes that the war is punishment for this country's supposedly lax treatment of homosexuals. This being the same country where gay people are obviously held in disdain by most of the populace. The same country where gay people can't get married because it destroys the idea of a family (I think our 50% divorce rate does a fine job of that, thanks). The same country that voted with Iran on an anti-LGBT bill in the U.N. (at least we have a starting point for negotiations with Iran now - hatin' queers!). How much less lax can it get? Worse than treating these people as second-class citizens? Didn't we learn our lesson with black people (and don't give me the "you can't choose to be black, you can choose to be gay" claptrap, Michael Jackson proves you wrong)? I wonder if it is comforting to gay people everywhere that they can rest assured that, one day, they will be accepted by our society, or if it is terrifying that it took black people pretty much an entire century from the abolishment of slavery to an actual governmental approach to make them equals, and that the same may very well apply to the LGBT community.

In any event, the news today was refreshing. I hope that this suit bankrupts the church and their apparent ability to travel around the country at will to disrupt one of three events that should never, ever be interrupted (the other being births and weddings) by undue scrutiny. I just tried to get on their website (www.godhatesfags.com), but it seems to be down. I hope it got flamed. Hate is a terribly strong word to throw around, and my personal conception of God provides no room for it. Nor should a purportedly Christian heart.

To: wife.

2007-10-27T18:11:00.000-06:00

Another post bringing to your attention something someone else did!

2007-10-19T08:28:00.000-06:00

"Look!"
"What?"
"Look!"
"Whoa...what is it?"
"It's..."

Another post bringing to your attention something someone else did!

From the genius webcomic, Overcompensating by Jeffrey Rowland (whom I have met, oh lucky me...I've even seen his brown recluse scar):

Enjoy!

Note: I changed my blog layout because it was too skinny for my liking before. Hope it is not now more annoying than before.

OMG Guys

2007-10-16T12:51:00.000-06:00

OK. I haven't blogged in almost a month for a variety of reasons. I have an opus in the works, and I was going to not blog again until it was finished, but then I saw this:

One would think. If you haven't been introduced to the wonder of I Can Has Cheezburger, consider yourself introduced. Hizzah.

The in-laws visit!

2007-09-17T11:49:00.000-06:00

So this weekend Alison's parents came to Albuquerque from Phoenix to visit us. They arrived at lunchtime on Saturday and stayed until after lunch on Sunday. Lots of driving for little old us. We started out by going to the Plaza for lunch, eating at La Placita Restaurant, where we took my parents when they visited a couple weeks ago. I went with the Enchiladas Ranchera, which translates to three enchiladas of varying ingredients (ground beef, chicken, and cheese). It was OK, but not my favorite thing I've had there. The salsa was spicy today.
After that we went back to the house and decided to go visit the Sandia Peak Tramway, which we had never taken before. It is very expensive ($17.50 per person), but pretty neat. Most of the pictures below are of the tram ride.
Tram car at the base. You can see that the off-duty operators get to ride strapped to the top of the tram car. This is what we in the business call "bat-shit insane."

Picture out the west side of the tram. It was getting on toward late afternoon so the sun is in a bad spot for pictures. There were probably about 20 of us in the car, so we were far less cattle-car-packed-in than we had been in the Funicular in Switzerland.
Picture taken off the east side of the mountains. You're looking down one of the chair lift runs toward apparently a southern tip of the Santa Fe Mountains.
This is one of the chairs on that very chair lift. Alison said that she would never take this lift due to the extreme apparent age of the chairs. For safety there is a chain that you can put across your lap.
A picture of another chair on a different lift from below. We came to the conclusion that these chairs are not meant for discomfort, but rather that they are likely padded in the winter when they're running.
Please leave the flowers! There were very few flowers up here to leave. We did not take this path.
A picture of the Williams family (minus one) above the chair lift. Smiles all 'round.
Another photo down the chair lift run toward the east.
Now if you can't beat Ned to this point, you should really give up.
A photo of a hang glider up on top of the crest. There were about 4 of these up there and they had a big crowd gathered around them.
A photo toward the south from the tramcar on the way back down. This is looking down the west face of the Sandia Mountains. After we came down off the mountains, we drove over to the Chama River Brewing Company just off I-25. We have been here for lunch a couple times before, and it's excellent food. I had a burger and Alison had hummus and sweet potato fries. I also had a beer that I am pretty sure was different from the one I ordered, but it was still quite good. After that we went bowling, which was great fun. I bowled a 152 in my first game, which I'm pretty sure was my best game ever. It would have been even better had I not tossed two gutter balls after my initial strike in the tenth frame. The second game was not so good (115).
Alison bowling. The sweatshirt was quickly removed. After bowling we went home and had a little bit of the peach pie I had made on Friday. That was it for Saturday! On Sunday morning we got up and went over to take a walk on the Rio Grande, going from the parking area on Central down to Tingley Beach and back. After that we went out to eastern Albuquerque to eat lunch at the Olive Garden. This was our second visit there this week, but there's nothing wrong with that. Breadsticks have made a bit of a comeback there, although the ends are still kind of dry and hard. After lunch the in-laws headed out of town and we got back to normal life.

OK, the post was far more boring than the actual weekend. Also, this is my 100th post! But only on blogspot; apparently I have missed 5 posts on myspace...if you still only look at my Myspace blog, this is probably a good reason to switch.

Pie! (Phase One)

2007-09-15T11:14:00.000-06:00

Last night I endeavored to make a pie. This was only the second time I have tried pie making in my life; the first was a pumpkin pie that I made from scratch (as in, I cut up a pumpkin for it - the crust was premade). This time I made the entire thing from scratch, including the crust.

My pie story began yesterday morning when I needed to go to the grocery store. I headed up Rio Grande to La Montanita Co-op Food Market, our local natural grocery store. It's about 2 miles from the house. So I strapped on my backpacking backpack and biked up there with list in hand. When I got there, I discovered that their coolers had all broken overnight, and that everything that should have been frozen was around 70 degrees when workers got there in the morning (except, I assume, the meat and cheese cooler, since they didn't balk when I bought two bricks of cheese). This was hugely disappointing because I was devoid of milk and had been for like a week, and also because these guys were actually cheap for the first time ever.

Thwarted at the cooler, I made some bonus finds in the produce section. At the co-op they have $0.99 bags of produce that they've decided they can't sell in the normal section; things that are too ripe, or slightly damaged, or what have you. I picked up two bags: one that held like five organic red bell peppers (Wild Oats sells these for like $6-$7 a pound) and a couple of yellow squash, which I love. The other bag was full of peaches, red plums, and pluots. The pluots and red plums were not too ripe, but the peaches were (they were leakin' just a tiny bit). But who out there can resist ripe peaches?!

And then there were the bins full of apples. Like major big bins. They were all hail-damaged and going for $0.79 per pound. That would be pretty good for normal apples, but these were local! Sadly, they had a picture of the farmers on the bin, and it was this older couple...I couldn't help but think of how much money they were losing because their crop was damaged; of course, they probably had crop insurance. So with a bag full of gala apples and another bag full of peaches etc. I decided it would be a grand idea to make them into pies.

For our wedding KS and PS gave us the New Best Recipe cookbook, which is a mammoth tome detailing the best way to cook all of the American classics, incorporating science! I relied on this to make my pies. The crust dough, it turns out, is easy to make but it is a pain in the ass to actually turn it into crust. I couldn't get it to work and got really frustrated, but in the end we had a crust that was filled with peach pie filling. I tried some last night and it was actually pretty good! I don't know if it's worth the effort of making the pie crust; the filling was easy. Next time, store-bought crust for me. Next time being when I make the apple pie, which should be awesome.

See below for a couple pictures of the wife making some cinnamon twists out of the extra dough!

Take THAT, nerds!

2007-09-14T09:18:00.000-06:00

I received an e-mail from the old HWR announce list. Those of you who are got-damn nerds will maybe appreciate this as much as I did.

1. Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter = Eskimo Pi

2. 2000 pounds of Chinese soup = Won ton

3. 1 millionth of a mouthwash = 1 microscope

4. Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement = 1 bananosecond

5. Weight an evangelist carries with God = 1 billigram

6. Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour = knotfurlong

7. 16.5 feet of silver in the Twilight Zone = 1 Rod Sterling

8. Half of a large intestine = 1 semicolon

9. 1,000,000 aches = 1 megahurtz

10. Basic unit of laryngitis = 1 hoarsepower

11. Shortest distance between two jokes = A straight line

12. 453.6 graham crackers = 1 pound cake

13. 1 million microphones = 1 megaphone

14. 2 million bicycles = 2 megacycles

15. 365.25 days = 1 unicycle

16. 2000 mockingbirds = 2 kilomockingbird

17. 52 cards = 1 decacards

18. 1 kilogram of falling figs = 1 FigNewton

19. 1000 milliliters of wet socks = 1 literhosen

20. 1 millionth of a fish = 1 microfiche

21. 1 trillion pins = 1 terrapin

22. 10 rations = 1 decoration

23. 100 rations = 1 C-ration

24. 2 monograms = 1 diagram

25. 4 nickels = 2 paradigms

26. 4 statute miles of intravenous surgical tubing at Yale University
Hospital = 1 IV League

Those of you who are got-damn nerds and graduates of the HWR might get an extra little kick out of it to know that The Shut is who sent this out to everybody. So when you read it, the voice in your head should have a stodgy english accent.

Replies and NEWS

2007-09-12T15:16:00.000-06:00

OK so I've been really slack about blogging due to my reunion with my better half and my general lack of free time due to my return to school. But here's a short one. I got two comments on my last post that I'd like to reply to:

lady of leisure said...

could you videotape one of the classes you teach? i would like to see it.

10 September, 2007 06:35

This isn't the kind of school that records lectures. They may have one recorder on campus somewhere. The focus at this school is way not on good teaching.

BernieFondue said...

For someone who is a full-time doctorate student, a TA and baseballholic, when do you find time to read? You have quite a long current reading list...

11 September, 2007 10:07

Oh, I never have time to read; that's why I have such a long reading list! I've gotten through about 40 pages of The Origin of Species in the past week or so that I've been reading it, in two sittings. I wish I had scads of time to read books for fun instead of articles for research. Too bad I wasn't smart enough to study literature.

OK that was fun. This morning I happened across a bit of news out of Russia. Seems they have tested the most powerful ever non-nuclear weapon in the history of ever. Bigger than anything we've created. If people are not concerned about our imminent resumption of cold war-era hostilities, they should start paying attention. Note in the article where it basically tells you that Russia can build up their military technology because oil prices are high. If you did not believe before that alternative energies were just about the most important thing for us to be focusing on, please believe it now. The real reason I linked to that story is because there is a hilarious paraphrase of a quote from a Russian official in it:

Unlike a nuclear weapon, the bomb doesn’t hurt the environment.

If that's not crazy, nobody has any hope for the future.

In other news, I'm thinking of starting another blog so I can feel even more high-and-mighty. I just wish I had time for it.

Breaking the silence

2007-09-05T09:47:00.000-06:00

Wow, it's been awhile since I blogged. Ever since Alison got home I've found myself much less bored, and therefore less apt to look around on the internet trying to find things about which I could feel high and mighty. I am, however, still alive.
We went to Santa Fe (twice!) this past weekend. My parents came to town on Saturday and left Monday morning. They claim that they came to visit me for a certain event; I'm pretty sure it was an excuse to see Santa Fe. We went to a baseball game on Friday with BT and friends, then another on Saturday with my Dad. The Saturday game didn't start out so well, with the Isotopes quickly falling way behind. And it started raining; we left our berm seats to get under some cover. When it got up to 14-4 (Isotopes losing) the game was postponed due to lightning. Not rain, mind, just that the lightning was so close to the stadium that they couldn't have people out on the field. At that point, the rain was still not strong. We drove home through quite a deluge. The game was resumed the next day and the Isotopes ended up losing something like 20-6. By losing the regularly scheduled Saturday game as well, they dropped themselves out of playoff contention. I think they ended up third in their own division after being in first like two weeks ago.

On Monday we went back up to Santa Fe to go hiking with K&PS, which was neat except that I was so exhausted afterward that Alison had to drive back to ABQ. These folks make a mean picnic though. I hucked a 6-pack of beer all the way up the Santa Fe Ski Area. I also got to see my old buddy Monkey, which is always a treat.

So now I am entrenched on the commuter van to Socorro. I went down four times last week, and will probably have to do the same this week. This means that I'm gone from the house for 12 hours a day. I never see my wife. It's bogus. Hopefully the semester will calm down a bit and I'll only have to go thrice a week. However, I am theoretically actually going to be going out to the field this month to do fieldwork for myself! What a rush. This semester I am only taking on class and it shouldn't be a backbreaker, but I am also the T.A. for another class of 21 students. This class has never been taught before, and I am responsible for teaching the lab; this includes creating the lab, writing up a lesson plan, writing up the lab materials, teaching the lab, and grading everything. This turns out to be more work than it sounds like. Yesterday I got to take my class around campus so they could learn how to use a GPS, which like half of them already knew. Good stuff. Next week we might deploy over 50 rain gauges somewhere and then do a rain dance and hope.

Last night I finally finished my book that I was reading, Picture This by Joseph Heller. I've now read Catch-22, Something Happened, Good As Gold, and God Knows by Heller, and enjoyed all of them. Catch-22 is Alison's favorite book ever, and probably my favorite by Heller, although there's something about Something Happened too; if anybody reads this who has only read Catch-22, I would highly recommend Something Happened. Anyway, Picture This, unlike his earlier books, seems to me to have a little less depth of feeling to it; in previous books he could take you from hilarity to the depths of tragedy in mere moments. There isn't the tragedy in this book up until you get to the end. But still it was a good read. Now I'm on to the Origin of Species by Darwin. This one will likely be less easy to read.

Oh boy!

2007-08-19T20:32:00.000-06:00

Alison is scheduled to be home in the next hour. The house is cleanish. Here's a quote from the book I'm reading.

In earlier days Socrates owned enough to do military service as a hoplite, a rank requiring the member to provide his own armor and weapons. In his last days he had little more than a wife and three children. To a friend he estimated that if he found a good purchaser, he thought he could get for all of his property, including his house, about five minae.
“You are living a life,” he once was told, “that would drive even a slave to desert his master. Your meat and your drink are the poorest. The cloak you wear is not only a poor thing but is never changed, summer or winter. And you never wear shoes or tunic.”
“But you must try to see,” explained Socrates, “my belief is that to have no wants is divine.”
He said he felt wealthy when he walked through the marketplace and took count of all of the things he saw there that he knew he could live without.
His attitude toward property is more easily admired than shared.
About the wife of Socrates, Xanthippe, you will find it reported, unreliably (in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers and Xenophon’s Memories of Socraties), that she was ill humored and would search him out in the marketplace where he idled with friends, to pull the robe from his back and harangue him in public because there was nothing at home, not even him. A modest freeborn Athenian woman never set foot outside the house if she could avoid doing so, and it was a signal of the extremity of the want of the wife of Socrates that she did not own a slave to go to the marketplace and do this for her.

Weekend fun

2007-08-16T18:11:00.000-06:00

This weekend I am in the Valles Caldera. Right now I'm in the town of Jemez Springs, but I'm spending my nights in the Valles. SB and BT and many others will be up tomorrow night working on a service project, so I'll get to have fun too.
Any day in the Valles is a good day.

No-kill shelters: worse for animals?

2007-08-13T14:28:00.000-06:00

I think that this news makes it official: everything sucks. MSNBC had an article today that talked about the possibility of no-kill shetlers actually being worse for the animals in them than would be the normal (or "kill shetlers" as I like to call them, starting right now) shelters. Go here to read the article.
The basic problem is that no-kill shelters do not euthanize any of their animals; however, if they continue taking animals they quickly fill up. In some cases they just keep adding more animals until they are overfull, overcrowded, and the animals are living in unhealthy conditions. Can you believe that there are 6-8 million dogs and cats sent to shelters in the US every year? That's ridiculous. If only people would pay attention, they would come to the conclusion that there is a solution whereby we don't have to continue killing defenseless animals:
Get your pets spayed and neutered; if you do not do this, you should not be allowed to have a pet.
Don't buy dogs out of puppy mills; that dog you have could have been a stray that you spared from death.
Better yet, don't buy dogs from breeders at all; would you love your dog less if you didn't know its background?

As the supposedly dominant species on earth it would be nice if we could make an effort to be better stewards of everything.

The...end? (XV, XVI, XVII)

2007-08-13T08:10:00.000-06:00

Or is it the beginning? Alison has had three (!) articles published in the past three days, two of them on Saturday.
The first (XV) is about soot levels in Greenland ice cores from back in the Industrial Revolution. The heightened soot, a product of industrial work in the northeastern US, likely had a warming impact that has long been assumed to be part of a natural warming cycle. Soot warms us up by lowering cloud and surface albedo, causing more absorption of solar energy and less reflectance.
The second article (XVI) is about a small town in northeastern San Diego County that is having severe water shortage issues. If only people nationwide paid more attention to news stories like this they could think "why the hell are we devoting 90% of the water use in a desert to agriculture and golf courses?" Then maybe there would be some water-related reform. Ah, pipe dreams. I love the quote toward the end about the ultraconservative Californians.
The third (XVII) is about how short courses in CPR are just as effective as are long courses. I don't know whether I've ever taken a standalone CPR course, but I've been trained several times in the course of getting safety certifications back in the old consulting days. I guess we always had kind of a shortish course in that case; all I have trouble with is the number of compressions and number of breaths. But I think I remember hearing that the number isn't as important as the correct technique.
This may be Alison's last spurt of articles; she's currently in DC getting debriefed or something on the program, hanging out with her fellowship buddies for the last time (at least for awhile), and doing other things as well! I'm super glad she got the opportunity to do this for the summer, although I've been super unglad that she was gone.

This morning, on the way to Socorro, I finished reading my last Madeleine L'Engle book, Many Waters. This one was somewhat enjoyable, although again I've been vaguely disappointed in this series this time around. Not as good as I had remembered. I talked to SB a little bit about it this weekend on a service project up to Red River (which is a scary scary place, and is literally populated almost entirely by transplanted Texans), and he said that he remembers having read the first three books as a child and really wanting to enjoy the books, but not really being able to. Oh well, the next book is going to be Picture This by one of my favoritest ever authors, Joseph Heller. This book is about the Rembrandt painting Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer; as the painting is created, Aristotle becomes cognizant of his surroundings. As his ear is painted, he can hear, etc. It sounds interesting and I hope I enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed most of his other work so far (which is to say, a lot).

I'm at a tipping point now. I don't know which way I'm going to go but it will have implications on the entire rest of my life. I'm scared of making a decision, and not in my usual way of being scared to make decisions. There's going to either be a continuation or an ending and a new beginning.

Article XIIII + Your Food

2007-08-10T13:16:00.000-06:00

OK, Alison had an article out yesterday afternoon or evening about the endangered Black-Footed Ferret, the only ferret native to North America. Go here to read the article. These guys were one of the first species listed under the Endangered Species Act, and this article deals with one of their last populations. This group was put out into the wild in an effort to reintroduce them to the area, but they decreased in population to 5 in 1997, after which they were given up on. Now there's 220 of the prolific little buggers. What a success! Unfortunately it suggests that species do better when we're not paying attention to them (this is not true).
Also, I am currently listening to Talk of the Nation, and they are having a discussion about the farm bill, and what it does to what we eat, including subsidizing the least healthy calories available; this is why junk food is so cheap, and why poor people tend to be overweight. Way to go gummint! Go here to check it out; you should be able to listen to the discussion soon.

Article XIII + book

2007-08-08T10:24:00.000-06:00

Another new article out today! This one is about how polluted the beaches of southern California are; it discusses the results of the annual beach report. Go here to read the article. Only three days of work left for her. Guess I'd better get on my horse with cleaning the house! Hooray!
Also, I finished A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Only one more book until it's back to some Heller!

Edit (8/9): This article is now also in the travel section. Go here.

Article XII

2007-08-07T09:35:00.000-06:00

Alison has yet another article out today! This one is about increased risk of birth defects among obese mothers. How cheery! Go here to read the article. Alison needs to get together a list of her best articles to send out with job applications. I say all of them are awesome, but she wants to be more selective than that; which ones do y'all think are her best?
Also, I just heard on NPR that the government charges organic farmers more for "farm insurance" because they don't use pesticides. Way to go, gummint! Of course, this one is not necessarily the fault of this administration; organic's been around since before 2001, right?

Article XI

2007-08-06T09:57:00.000-06:00

Look at this! Alison has another article out today. She's had some other articles bumped that are finished, so there should be more soon. Go here to read the article. It is about scientists' findings regarding the cause of the skin disorder Rosacea. Hooray science! Hooray wife!

Best movie EVER?

2007-08-04T23:05:00.000-06:00

OK, maybe not. But still the Simpsons Movie was pretty good. And there were many things that would not be shown on broadcast, which was nice. Went with SB and BT. I tried to bike downtown to not use any gas, but I couldn't locate my bike lights! I am very disappointed and will have to work on that. See below for the Simpsons me. I couldn't find one with the hat forward, but I thought maybe the backward hat was more appropriate than no hat at all!

Important research!

2007-08-04T13:18:00.000-06:00

OK, I was just listening to Whad'ya Know on NPR as I try to every week. They did a segment on a very important new study released by some researchers at the University of Texas on the reasons why people have sex. The list reaches 237 (!) different reasons, from "I was attracted to the person" (most popular) to "I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease (e.g., herpes, AIDS)" (least popular). Take the survey! How fun!

Article X

2007-08-04T11:34:00.000-06:00

Alison had yet another article released today! This one is on oil dispersants (used to clean up oil spills on water) being more harmful to coral reefs than is the oil itself. Interesting stuff! Go here to read it.

If you ain't catholic, you ain't nuthin.

2007-08-03T14:06:00.001-06:00

So this is now a fairly old story, but I kept forgetting to post about it. The Popah declared that Jesus only formed one church and that was the Catholic one. Funny, I don't remember anything about Catholicism in the bible...
Here's a quote:

It restates key sections of a 2000 document the pope wrote when he was prefect of the congregation, "Dominus Iesus," which set off a firestorm of criticism among Protestant and other Christian denominations because it said they were not true churches but merely ecclesial communities and therefore did not have the "means of salvation."

Here's this blog's very first bible quote! (Romans 10:13):

For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved

Funny, nothing about the Catholic church there. As the wife says, the Catholic church is trying awfully hard to decrease their membership right now.

Weekend update

2007-08-02T09:55:00.001-06:00

OK. Here's what went down this past weekend.

Friday: KG took me to the airport and dropped me off to get on my flight. It was very nice not to have to take a bus, but of course was very expensive. To cover it I am going to sell my bass. The flight took an hour, a huge improvement over the like 10 hours it took by bus; however, I was sitting next to a definite spreader, who decided that the armrest was not a real dividing line between the seats, and put his knee on my side. He also used the armrest. Even though I was there first.
I got to L.A. and got myself on the Flyaway bus to Union Station to meet the wife. Every indication on the internet is that this bus costs $3. Alison said that all advertisements indicate that it is $3. So I had $3 in my pocket. When I finally got there, I discovered that it is actually $4. But then if you don't have luggage in the stowage area, apparently you don't get hassled to pay. So for me, it was free.
Having no idea where I was, I had to then discover where Alison was waiting, but it turned into a big debacle because it turns out that Union Station consists of a main station and an east station. Alison was at the main station; I was at the east. Neither of us had any idea. It took a great deal of walking around and consternation before we found each other in a tunnel somewhere. All was forgiven.
We walked to Little Tokyo for an excellent dinner. If I worked near this place like Alison does, I think I would be poor. Poor and fat. After dinner we met up with Alison's friend J at the jazz bar for some drinks. I tried some not-so-local beer (brewed in Paso Robles in central California - somewhere I have actually been!) from the Firestone Walker Brewery, having both the Double Barrel Ale and the Pale Ale. I was fairly ambivalent toward them, especially at 6 bucks a bottle. We also played some darts (real metal-tipped) and some weird short-table shufflepuck that actually had the real shuffleboard triangle design at the ends. After the bar we went to J's house and slept in somebody's bed.

Saturday: We got up in the morning and drove J to her car, then went to Altadena to go on a hike, one that Alison had been to already (to Echo Mountain and Inspiration Point). The hike was 10 miles long, going from Altadena to Echo Mountain to Inspiration Point via the Castle Canyon trail, then back along a different trail. The hike was in the Angeles National Forest. It was very pretty, and for most of the way up we could actually see all the way to downtown, several miles away!
After that we were all hot and sweaty and gross, so we went to the In-n-Out for lunch. This was a drive-through only place, and cars were backed up onto the main road, even though it was past 1:30. What a crazy place. Alison accidentally ordered a veggie burger instead of a grilled cheese, so it was just a burger bun with some vegetables and weird sauce on it. My burger was good though, and for once I actually loved the fries; I think they salted them a lot more than usual.
With full bellies we drove back to Alison's house to shower, then did some searching for a hotel. We located the Glen Capri Motel in Burbank, which was like $65 a night, about the best we could do for a 2-star hotel. We booked online over Orbitz, then immediately headed down to the motel to check in (having nothing really better to do). When we got there, and rang the bell, the dude at the desk was a total ass to us and said that we didn't have a reservation. So we left and I spent the next like 30 minutes on the phone with Orbitz, having the customer service guy recite to me every detail of my reservation for some reason before finally letting me tell him that the hotel did not have our reservation. He called them and sorted it out, and we headed back to check in. Once again, pretty much an ass to us. We got up to our room, and it was not a non-smoking room, which was really annoying. The room itself was pretty OK though, and we didn't want to deal with the desk jerk again, so I just turned on the vent full blast to try to get some fresh air in.
We headed out to Citywalk at Universal Studios to check it out and have dinner. We ate at Panda Inn, which was tasty and had very competent servers. Alison was upset to find out that it turns out that Panda Inn is basically the fancy-schmancy offshoot of Panda Express. Following dinner we walked around for awhile, and did some shopping at Sparky's, a big candy store. Bought some sugary sweets and a rockin' Grumpy Bear alarm clock. It was some good times. After this we went back to the hotel and went to bed.

Sunday: Today we slept in and took it easy. There was a restaurant right next to the motel that looked pretty nice (Cafe Patrick, I believe), so we decided to try it out for brunch. I had the "Carnivore Sandwich" which was a roast beef, along with fresh fruit. The sandwich was okay, but I absolutely loved, loved, the fresh fruit. I want to live somewhere that has fruit. It was awesome.
After brunch we decided to head down to Malibu just for some grins, to drive through the mountains there. The mountains were pretty, although they were regularly marred by mega-mansions that are probably second or third houses for people. We got through the mountains and drove down highway 1 for awhile until we located a beach access spot that wasn't crazy busy and got down to the beach! We walked for a little while until Alison accidentally stepped on a bee and got stung on the bottom of her foot. It was very sad. We hobbled back toward where we had come down to the beach, then sat down for awhile so she could recover.
When we eventually got back up to the car, we drove toward Anaheim to see the Angels-Tigers game. Getting there a little early, we stopped at a Del Taco near the stadium for dinner (to avoid spending the money at the game). This was my first Del Taco experience, and while I appreciated the idea of getting a burrito and fries at the same meal, I was pretty ambivalent about it. Alison likes it so I will be happy to go again some time for her benefit. :) We headed over to the stadium and parked (at $8 it was $7 less than we were charged to park near Dodger Stadium a couple weeks ago), then limped the like half mile to the stadium. Our tickets were the very very topmost row in the stadium, but it still had a good view of the action. The stadium was pretty full, and there were a lot of Tigers fans there, which was pretty exciting. We were also in the shade for most of the game, which was nice (interestingly, we started in the shade, then were in the sun for awhile, then we were back in the shade due to the vagaries of the construction).
My excitement about finally seeing a Tigers game was pretty quickly dashed as they gave up 4 runs in the first, 2 in the 2nd, and 6 in the 3rd to build a 12-0 hole. When we left it was like 12-3 or 12-4. I don't like to leave baseball games early, but I had to get on a bus again. The final score was 13-4 as the Tigers got swept by the Angels. So sad. After watching some Family Guy in the Greyhound station I boarded the bus by 10pm, and got into like the 4th row with a seat to myself once again. The trip from Los Angeles to Phoenix is SO much nicer than the trip in the other direction.

Monday: I slept so poorly on the trip back again, but had breakfast with MD and KG, then went back to my sister's apartment and had a 3-hour nap. Then I headed out to east mesa to have lunch with KG (highly disappointing; the pizza place had changed hands since the last time we ate there) then got the hell out of town. I drove the 60 all the way out to Socorro; if you've never taken this drive you should. It's so much nicer than taking the interstates. Back in Albuquerque around 11pm and exhausted.

That's it, that was my weekend. Since my last book update I have finished two books: The Federal Landscape by Gerald D. Nash and A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle. The first was an interesting book about how the federal government affected the western U.S., both through the ownership of federal lands and the buildup of the military-industrial complex to support the Pacific fleet. Interesting stuff.
The second was the book after A Wrinkle in Time. I read these books many many years ago on my own, and enjoyed them back then. I enjoyed this book much less this time for some reason. I guess that's what comes with getting old. Two more of these books, then I get to start The Origin of Species which I'm sure will be highly stimulating.
I've also decided that (for no real reason whatsoever) I am going to keep track of my media experiences for the next year: all the listings under my "Latest" from beer to movies. Should be completely uninteresting!

Articles VIII and VIIII

2007-07-31T22:43:00.000-06:00

Hello everybody. Alison got an article out today. Go here to read the story; it's on increased abuse rates among women whose husbands are deployed (Army). You may note that this is not an "environmental" article per se. Well Alison's editor has left the Times, so there is not really an operating Environment desk any more, so she's been shunted off to the Health and Science editor for the rest of the summer. This means a marked increase in story volume, as she'll have several more coming out in the near future!
Also, I appear to have missed one that was released back on the 20th. Go here to read it. This one is about complaints on a high-voltage power line that will be carrying green energy in California.

Updates: Soon.

2007-07-31T15:07:00.000-06:00

So I spent last week in the big SV and the weekend in Los Angeles. Lots of driving, many miles on the 'sploder. I'll tell you all about the big weekend at some point in the future. I'm working on decluttering the house, lots of stuff to sell, give away, trade, etc. I worked on books a little bit today. I have a number of books that I have never read, so I have updated my diminishing reading list to add a bunch of things I have owned for a long time, but never bothered getting through (or tried and failed). Had it down to 9 books left, now it's back up to 24. Should be fun.

Aaaaand...done.

2007-07-23T15:09:00.000-06:00

It took me just under 2 days to read a 759-page book, which the wife can tell you is absurd. I will hold back everything until KC has finished the book, and anybody else who asks. Weird to think that there won't ever be another one of these books.
I read this thing so fast that I probably missed a lot. Therefore, I am going to reread the whole series front-to-back, all seven, once I'm through my current reading list. So it's back to the old grind.
Coming Friday: Los Angeles!

Outdoors movie watchin'

2007-07-21T16:56:00.000-06:00

So last night I got together with Arun, BT, and friend R out at the Albuquerque Civic Plaza downtown for the first of five Civic Cinema events this summer. The City is putting on free movies downtown, which is pretty exciting! Did I mention it's free?
The movie last night was the classic Casablanca starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. I had seen this movie once before, when we had a weeklong substitute teacher in high school. What a great movie, I think I enjoyed it more this time around. There will be four more movies this summer: Lonely are the Brave, Some Like it Hot, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and To Kill a Mockingbird. The last is the only one I've seen. I will be gone next weekend one way or another, but otherwise I hope to get to all of these.
Today I got the book and I am running a desperate campaign to avoid spoilers. I have had it for like 1.5 hours and have not yet opened it! Trying to get through another, fairly long article first.

Does anybody else think this is a terrible idea?

2007-07-20T16:00:00.000-06:00

So dubya is going to undergo a colonoscopy tomorrow; I hope it goes well and that he's ok. What I am pretty sure is not going to go well is the temporary promotion of our erstwhile, shotgun-wielding (and not in a rugged, Teddy Roosevelt kind of way) veep, who will be taking over while dubya is under. Now, one thing that I admire about the Republican party is that they have set it up so that there could never be a really serious push to get Bush impeached; they did so by putting somebody in the vice president's office that is so bat shit crazy that he actually believes (and states publicly!) that his office is not part of the executive branch. (Note: this article restores the tiniest bit of my confidence in the current Democrat-run house...but still I am wildly disappointed) What could be worse for American than Bush being president? Bush not being president.
Now, while Dubya is under, he is going to hand over presidential powers to Cheney. How can this not go wrong? This man is the single most power-hungry person in the history of persons, and we're going to suddenly have him in power. With the precedent sent by Bush's use of signing statements, I predict that Cheney will issue some sort of proclamation once he's officially in office that nullifies the section of the Constitution that puts Bush back into office when he is able. A year and a half of Cheney might actually be worse than 6.5 years of Bush. Get ready for the executive branch not being part of the executive branch, a total abolishment of checks and balances, replacement of the Supreme Court justices with various demons and devils (although the Court will no longer have any power), pogroms against the legislative branch, death penalties for any crime except fraud and extortion, the use of gay people as cannon fodder, and sending of atheists into the sea. Just see if it doesn't all happen.
Note: I'm kidding about all of this. Bush had the same procedure done in 2002, and handed power over to Cheney temporarily. Presumably, nothing terrible happened.

Beer + baseball = tonight

2007-07-20T12:44:00.000-06:00

Tonight I continued Social Week by going to TWO different activities.
1) Arun and I headed up to Rio Rancho (and met SB there), which is much further away than should be expected, to attend the 2007 IPA Challenge, put on by the New Mexico Brewers' Guild and hosted here at Turtle Mountain Brewing Company taproom. It was an event where you pay $15 admission and get 3-ounce samples of 8 different beers, then when you cast your vote for your favorite you get a commemorative glass filled with that beer. I would have been more excited if I liked IPAs, but it was still fun. I found out just now that my vote went for the Santa Fe Pale Ale produced by the Santa Fe Brewing Company. Of course, it was a blind taste test, so I only know due to the polling results up on the Brewers' Guild website.
2) After the beer challenge, Arun and I headed down to the Isotopes-Royals game, the last of a four-game set. We were super late unfortunately, for which I feel badly. We met BT and friend there when we finally arrived around the 6th inning. To be fair, of course, this game moved pretty fast; when Arun and I went to the game on Monday, it took a whole hour to get through the first two innings. If that'd happened last night, we would have probably arrived in the fourth inning.
The Isotopes ended up winning 5-1, although the Royals loaded the bases and got the tying run to the plate in the top of the ninth before the game ended. It was exciting (what of it we saw), and I'm very glad that I got to a whopping three of the four games in this set. I never get to see my hometown team so it was a nice time, even though the Royals lost three of the four. No more baseball and money-spending for some time to come, hopefully.

Note: In case you're keeping track, the relations now stand at:
0.5*Awesome - 0.5*Stupid = Tonight - Beer
Stupid + 2*Tonight - 2*Beer = Awesome
Beer = Stupid
I am not sure how I feel about this any more.

Media gamut

2007-07-19T13:13:00.000-06:00

Last night the Wahi came over for some beer, pizza, and a movie. Pizza from Golden Crown Panaderia across the street. The following beers were consumed:
- Industrial Pale Ale by Electric Brewing Company of Bisbee, AZ
- Dave's Electric by Electric Brewing Company of Bisbee, AZ
- Dirty Guera (Blonde) by Nimbus Brewing Company of Tucson, AZ (two of these were drunk)
- Blue Moon by Coors Brewing of Golden, CO
The movie was entitled Pom Poko, an anime from Studio Ghibli. I have wanted to see this for a long time, and opted to stick it down toward the end of my Netflix queue, so that Alison would not be subjected. Glad I did. The movie was pretty OK, but the huge draw was the role that the Tanukis' testicles play in the movie. I don't know how to explain it; read the wikipedia article above about it. It was not funny enough to be a straight-up comedy, but contained far too much Tanuki ball to be a children's movie in the States.

Also last night I finished Oliver Twist. Despite its length (466 pages), I was able to stay interested and engaged in the story the whole time. My first Dickens book, and I reckon I will read more in the future. Now my current book is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which will arrive on my doorstep in two days! I am opting not to start the next book, since I doubt I could get through it in that time, and I don't want to take a break partway through.

Stupid logic

2007-07-18T14:07:00.001-06:00

The bored, nerdy, and/or logically-oriented of you may have noticed that you can combine the titles of the last two posts to come up with the following relationships:

Stupid + awesome = 2*tonight
Awesome - stupid = 2*baseball

I think the hidden meanings there are thoroughly accurate.

Baseball + tonight = awesome

2007-07-18T09:23:00.000-06:00

Tonight a friend and I attended game 2 of the 4-game Isotopes-ORoyals series. This time we avoided the berm, sitting down in the reserved seats on the first base (visitors' dugout) side. We thought it would be intolerably sunny and hot (it hit 101 in the Burque today), but the seats were shaded by the time we got there. The chairs themselves were hot, but it was OK.
So after the weirdness of last night, I was ready for things to possibly be worse (in relation to my rooting for the visiting team). But things went really smoothly; I still clapped when the Royals did good things, and was silent when the Isotopes did. One guy sitting in the row in front of me turned around at one point and asked if we were Royals fans, and I affirmed that I was, and that I had grown up near Omaha. He was not at all upset. If the circle-running guy from the previous night is reading this, this guy's reaction to me rooting for the Royals was the correct one.
The Isotopes were winning 5-3 going into the 9th inning, when they put two Royals on base. I said to my friend that the go-ahead run was at the plate. This guy then proceeded to crank a home run to left-center, putting the Royals up 6-5. The game would end that way, which was pretty exciting for me. So that's two nights, two one-run games, one going to each team. Exciting series, and I can't be upset with the results, even though Omaha lost the first game.
Now I'm in Socorro. Bleh.

Stupid + baseball = tonight

2007-07-16T23:57:00.002-06:00

Tonight the Wahi and I attended the first of a four-game set between the visiting Omaha Royals and the hometown Albuquerque Isotopes. I was pretty excited about this series because I grew up watching the Royals play back when I lived in a suburb of Omaha. The Royals represent a lot to me in terms of my childhood, as does their stadium, Rosenblatt. Even though I don't like the major league Royals, I will always root for Omaha.
The game started at 7:05, so Arun headed over after work and we drove down to the UNM area to eat at Saggios, an Albuquerque pizza institution. It's tasty, as long as you get some extra toppings on your pizza; the plain cheese is a bit cardboardy.
After that we headed to the game and got our seats out on the berm ($5 each, can't beat it). At this time of year, for a standard 7:05 start, the sun is annoying for a little while, but after that it gets just beautiful. Sitting on the grass can wear on you after a few hours, especially if you have a boney butt.
The game started out real slow, with a total of 10 runs scoring in the first two innings; these two innings lasted just a few minutes under an hour. After that the game moved on more quickly, and included a nice, although not stunning sunset.
Now, being a fan of the visiting team, I cheered when the Royals did good things. I would clap when they scored a run, and I raised my voice twice through the 10-inning game to say "Let's go Royals!" I would classify my rooting as wholly unintrusive. And if the Royals had blown out the Isotopes, I would certainly not have rubbed it in, as I have known others to do at games. I try to be fair and nice, things that I know, I know, are not really part of being a sports fan. Apparently my low-level cheering rankled at least one person on the berm.
Toward the end of the game (the bottom of the seventh, to be exact), one of the Isotopes players hit a home run out to left field. This guy sitting near me, who was there with his wife (I presume) and their two young sons (I presume) jumped up, started going crazy with cheering. Nothing too weird there, except that it put them up from 7-5 to 8-5, rather than being, for example, a game-winning home run. However, after that (and this seemed to happen in slow-motion), this guy ran over toward Arun and myself, and actually hustled a circuit around us, ran out from right to left in front of us, then left to right behind us. He then ran back over to his spot with his family (I presume), sat down, and said "Take THAT, Nebraska fans!" I mentioned quietly to Arun that maybe I should disabuse this guy of the idea that they are the Nebraska Royals rather than the Omaha Royals, but decided that would not really accomplish anything. He didn't say anything else to us before or after that throughout the game.
After this point it started sprinkling a little (monsoon season IS upon us), and I must say that it was the single most pleasant and refreshing rain I have ever sat in. So gentle that you don't get wet because the drops that have hit you evaporate away. Cool enough that it is refreshing, but not so cold that it is uncomfortable. Not intense enough to create runoff on the hillside upon which we were sitting. It was so nice, and so beautiful. Of course, this being the Southwest, this gentle rain also caused a mass exodus of a great majority of the 6,700+ people who attended the game.
Now, the Royals scored three runs to tie up the game in the top of the ninth inning to introduce some tension into the contest, and it went into extra innings. Of course, most everybody had left, so not a lot of people got to see the excitement. I was hoping for a home run in extra innings, since nobody else was out there to retrieve it. But alas, no such luck. Instead, the Isotopes won it in the bottom of the 10th by hitting a gapper with a man on 2nd and no outs (or one, I don't remember). The Omaha center fielder did something strange that I don't think I have ever seen in a baseball game before: he didn't bother getting the ball, and instead left it sitting on the warning track where it stopped. No reason to pick it up and throw it in, since the run was in easily.
So as the players all left the field, a fan from a group that had stayed up on the berm decided that, ooh, ball left unprotected, me want. This guy went up to the fence (the right field fence is surely at least 10 feet high, including the chain link fence above the berm), removed his flip-flops, and jumped down into the field. Now, I have seen a number of people enter the field during a baseball game, but never one afterward. This guy jumped down and started running toward the ball. If you've never seen this, you should know that stadium security gets really upset when anybody enters the field of play who is not allowed. So there was a security guard running an intercept course for this guy, and another staffer standing down at the berm fence. The runner got to the ball, picked it up, and started sprinting back toward us. I guess he realized he was in trouble (or maybe he planned this out with his likely-just-as-inebriated friend beforehand), because he skipped climbing the wall to get back to where he had started, and instead chucked the ball up onto the berm, somewhat near us. We didn't at all want to get involved, so we stayed put as the friend and the staffer both ran toward the ball. The friend fell down, and the staffer sort of then slide-tackled the ball, which was a very strange thing to do. The friend recovered the baseball, and the staffer tried to take it back from him, but the friend just kind of ignored him; I guess staffers have no power.
Meanwhile, the first guy had been tackled by security, handcuffed, and turned over to the police. I don't approve of people running onto the field and the encouragement they get from the crowd, but I do like how excited people get when security tackles these guys. And they always pretty much overreact in terms of physicality, but in this case I really, really don't mind. The staffer, still up on the berm, picked up the first guy's flip-flops, and asked us if they belonged to him; I confirmed that they were, indeed, the runner's, my own little "up yours" to that guy. The staffer took them, and I genuinely hope he tossed them in the trash; if you leave something sitting around the stadium, I think it fair to consider it garbage.
Now, this extended family (I assume) was pretty upset, aside from the guy who got the ball, since their kinsman was being hauled off the field in police custody. One lady was throwing up her hands, although to be fair she could have been pissed off at the guy who ran onto the field; somehow I doubt it. Another guy was trying to get into a confrontation with the staffer, basically asking him why it was necessary for security to take down the runner.
I don't like to tell people that they are stupid, because who am I to say? But these folks were stupid. As if it needed to, the team reminds the crowd that they are, in fact, not allowed on the field unless told so. If you break the rules for something as stupid as retrieving a baseball, you deserve to be punished, and I have zero sympathy for you, even if you are hauled to jail. I don't think he was, since I think that I observed the police uncuffing the guy on the field. Doing something that is so likely to end in your being under a pile of law enforcement officers in front of your kids, when you are supposed to be your children's moral educator, is just plain dumb. Next time, think, don't drink.

Best article ever (VI, VII)

2007-07-16T09:52:00.000-06:00

Alison had an article out on Sunday that was the centerpiece of the California section. First, I'll point you toward another article that she helped out with, that was released back on the 5th. I never got to posting about it here.
Go here for the text of the article. It talks about the status of endangered species and the efforts of the administration to gut protections. A few choice quotes:

"The Bush administration has added 58 species to the endangered list, 54 of those in response to litigation. . . By comparison, 231 mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, insects and plants were protected by the president's father, George H.W. Bush, during his four years in office."

"Julie A. MacDonald, a deputy assistant secretary of the Interior who oversaw the endangered-species program, resigned last month after the inspector general found that she had ordered scientists to change their findings, and shared internal documents with lobbyists for agricultural and energy interests."

"To date, the Bush administration has taken 15 species off the endangered list — more than any other administration."

America, how is this OK? I am pissed off at you for voting for this man. A-GODDAMN-GAIN. Where is your righteous indignation? Why do so few cry foul when power over the protection of species is given to those who would rather not have those species protected? If you are interested in this issue (you should be), read Bush versus the Environment by Robert S. Devine. Then get angry and do something!

The new article (the aforementioned best article ever) can be found here. The subject is deaths in the All-American Canal, which runs close to and roughly parallel to the U.S.-Mexico border from the Colorado River west into California's Imperial Valley. Basically, what it boils down to is that the Bureau of Reclamation, which operates the canal system delivering water to various sprawling desert metropoli (rather than allowing it to go to the ocean - you may not know that the Colorado River now barely - or doesn't - flows in in Mexico; quote from the Wikipedia article - "The lower course of the river, which forms the border between Baja California and Sonora, is essentially a trickle or a dry stream today due to use of the river as Imperial Valley's irrigation source. Prior to the mid 20th century, the Colorado River Delta provided a rich estuarine marshland that is now essentially desiccated, but nonetheless is an important ecological resource.") doesn't want to bother with making the canal slightly safer. Read it and, if you live in California, write your Congressperson. Rock the Vote, 41.3% of Americans!

Our house

2007-07-13T10:22:00.000-06:00

Check it out. I Google-Earthed our house last night. Anybody notice anything strange? I think I might do some exploring.

Sorry about the white borders; I wasn't interested enough to get rid of them.

This is what's it's like when it all comes full circle

2007-07-12T12:07:00.001-06:00

I recently wrote about the Bush commuting the prison term of Lewis Libby. Today our erstwhile president gave a press conference, during which he actually called his commutation "a fair and balanced decision". If that's not a shout-out to the administration's favorite "news" service, I don't know what is. See, it all comes full-circle. That is, if you could make a circle by connecting two points.

A fiesta of all-starrish proportions

2007-07-11T21:51:00.000-06:00

Tonight I was treated to the 2007 Triple-A All-Star Fiesta here in Albuquerque. I received a free ticket from good friend the Wahi, who received free tickets to said game via his participation in the trombone group Ambush Brass. See below for an action shot.

After they were done, we went into the game complete with smuggled contraband pocket burrito. Oh Baja. Mmmmmmmm. After introductions of all the players we stood for the playing of the anthems of Canada and the U.S. by that other brass ensemble. A group from the local AFB carried out the most incredibly gigantic flag onto the field, and stretched it out for our anthem. See below.

In case you're wondering (you aren't), we had the Canadian anthem because there is still one team in Canada. Also had the flag up next to the berm. You can just see in the picture below the hill in center field at Isotopes Park.

Now, if you're a casual sports fan (I being likely the most rabid sports fan that ever reads this stuff), you may not understand the joy that is Minor League Baseball. I started out going to Omaha Royals games in beautiful Rosenblatt Stadium, also home of the College World Series. Anyway, being a minor league baseball team, the Isotopes have to do all kinds of weird stuff to draw in an audience. One of the things they do in every game, aside from Orbit's dancing, is the Chili Race. Red chili vs. green chili vs. taco. I always cheer for red. Red is behind in the year's race, of course. See below for an action shot from tonight's race.

Now the isotopes apparently thought it would be a good idea to give away terrible noisemakers to the entire crowd. I first knew of these things a few years ago, when the Angels beat the Giants in the world series (2002); they also caused worldwide anguish with their damn rally monkey. See below for a shot of the Wahi with the Bam Bams.

Isotopes park is quite beautiful. Not as nice as Rosenblatt, but this one is hard to beat. We usually try to sit out on the berm in right field, but the view from the lines is quite nice. A great view of the Sandia mountains past the right field fence. See below.

Finally, in case chili races and a specially ambiguous mascot aren't enough for you, they decided that they would bring in BirdZerk, apparently a group that is trying to fill the void left by the Famous Chicken not being there. Rather than being entertaining, they achieve some sort of impressionistic mascotism, which floats in a vague realm between interpretive dance and modern art. Included in the group was a character called "Harry Canary", a take-off on broadcasting personality and noted drunkard Harry Caray. He led us all in the singing of Take Me Out to the Ballgame during the 7th Inning Stretch, then came out and danced. See below for an action shot.

All-in-all, a great time. The Pacific Coast League lost the game 7-5, which is unfortunate because the Isotopes and the O-Royals are both in the PCL. At least the Mud Hens are in the IL and helped with the wind (netting the MVP trophy). Glad I got to go, and special thanks to the Wahi and Ambush Brass for paving the way.
Coming soon: More.

This movie be rated arrrrrr.

2007-07-11T14:17:00.000-06:00

Note: Credit where credit is due: the title is from a Simpsons episode.

I have a lot of things to blog about, especially re: my week out of state. I'll start with the fact that, during this week, I finished the book Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Not the first book by him that I've read. It was very good, and I got through it quickly. While it is a good book, it loses some points for bringing such things to us as this and this and this and this. This is all very ironic to me, considering how badly the pirates are actually painted in Treasure Island. I cannot for the life of me understand why people popularized pirates.

Now I'm on to Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. This is, amazingly, my first ever Dickens book, and I am thoroughly enjoying it as well. Hopefully I can get it done in 10 days, when Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will magically apparate on my doorstep.

By the by, both of these titles are available on Project Gutenberg, a site that posts the text of books that have passed their copyright date. You can read old books like this absolutely free. I'm not sure whether the construction and shipping of the actual books is worse or better than having your computer on long enough to read them, but it's something to look at.

Update, quickly

2007-07-09T20:26:00.000-06:00

I'm in the big SV. Maybe I'll blog why, maybe not. I doubt you really care all that much. L.A. was great, maybe I'll blog about what we did, maybe not. Alison has pictures, and I don't; I have internet, and she doesn't. What to do?
I'll leave you with this, which is pretty much the funniest thing I've read recently. Just the last panel.

Note: If you don't know who Yakov Smirnoff is, this will be significantly less funny to you.

The Blind 29

2007-07-02T18:04:00.000-06:00

I was going to write about last night's wedding, but was instead thrown into a rage over a bit of news I just heard. Apparently, our fearless leader has really gone out on a limb, and commuted Scooter Libby's jail sentence. I've written about this case before, and was not at all surprised by the news today. Not surprised, but still angered.
The facts:
- Libby still will have to pay a $250,000 fine
- Libby is on probation for 2 years
The surmissions (by NPR, not me):
- Libby's reputation is ruined
- Libby will not be able to work as a lawyer again
The following quote from Bush's statement on the matter:
"The reputation he gained through his years of public service and professional work in the legal community is forever damaged," Bush said. "His wife and young children have also suffered immensely. He will remain on probation. The significant fines imposed by the judge will remain in effect. The consequences of his felony conviction on his former life as a lawyer, public servant and private citizen will be long-lasting."
My reply:
Tough shit. $250,000 would be a lot of money for someone like you or me (assuming you're like me, economically). $250,000 is a lot of money for someone like Libby too, to be sure, no pocket change. But when you make $170k per year (I have assumed an approximately similar per-year raise rate), it's certainly much easier to take. Especially when you have worked as a top lawyer for years and years.
He's going to lose his ability to practice law? Oh no! Of course, considering that he was hired by the conservative think tank Hudson Institute in January of '06, this along with the previous salary thing are probably not that big a deal. (Fun Facts aside! Google hudson institute libby. The first link is to a Hudson Institute staff bio page that is, shockingly, now blank, except for Libby's title at the top, "Senior Advisor." You can bet the farm that anybody working as a Senior Advisor for the Hudson Institute is making a boatload more money than you or I. Another Fun Fact, if you click on the second link in the google search, you get to the Hudson Institute's press release about hiring Libby. He is not listed in their staff directory (despite still having a blank page under their staff bios), but even better if you search for "Lewis Libby" on their webpage, you get 0 results! They are actually covering up the fact that he works for them.)
Furthermore, I am pretty sure that as a direct result of his actions, a certain Ms. Valerie Plame can never again work in her goddamn chosen field. And, unlike the case of Mr. Libby, where he won't be a lawyer again because he was found guilty by a jury of his peers of a number of crimes, Plame was brought down because her husband was a little too critical of the administration for their liking; I don't think anybody denies this. Plame was a victim of the administration's croneyism; in another way, so was Libby.
The speculation is that, what with Bush's poll numbers so low (29% - worst since Tricky Dick!), he had to do something to appease what is left of his base, the real neo-cons ("The neutrality and factual accuracy of this article or section are disputed" I bet they are!). Gotta get Libby out of jail to stop the leaking boat. Well, I for one hope that it doesn't work. Keep your 29%, you douchebag, but I expect that the 5% that were on the fence on that approval poll will now firmly be in the "disapprove" category.
Somebody deserves to go to jail for what happened. I think it criminal that this guy was pardoned.
I know that I have a number of conservative friends, although they may have stopped reading this blog about 25 liberal rants ago, but if they look at this, does anybody think this president character is on the right track? Does anybody approve of anything he does? Inquiring mind wants to know.

The REI stampede

2007-06-30T12:58:00.001-06:00

So today was the Scratch-n-Dent sale at the REI. Started at 9am, but the flyer says "Come early & form a line". Unfortunately, I couldn't find a photo of the Albuquerque REI that fully shows the layout. I got there at 8:55, and there was a line all the way around the building and down the sidewalk outside. They opened the sale at 9, and it probably took 10 minutes for my spot in line to wind into the sale. When I got in, I descended into a pit of anger, sweat, and mistrust. I was in the sale for half an hour wandering around, and bought four things: a folding table that was missing a pretty integral part, some gaiters from Outdoor Research that are missing a metal hook, a pair of socks that are too small, and a pair of pretty well-used trekking poles from REI that had a strap broken; that one I fixed. Ended up costing me $40.
It was a really strange experience. There must have been a couple hundred people in there, in a real small area. They had bins of stuff that you couldn't even get to because there were so many people crowded around. And there were a lot of people who seemed to be buying several of something; four thermarests, five pairs of shoes, etc. Pretty sure those'll be up on E-bay soon.
There's more sale tomorrow, but I've got the big wedding to go to tomorrow, which should be really exciting. I'll give a report.

Article 5, more

2007-06-29T09:48:00.000-06:00

A new article is out by the wife. Go here to check it out. I just noticed that (at least online) they've got her in the classified section. Go read the article, and you will see why this is a terrible place to put this article. Who is more likely to troll the classifieds? ATVers, or environmentalists? I say the former.

Also, I found at least part of a good quote from Vladimir Putin. I don't like Putin, I believe that he has had critics killed, and that he's actively pursuing a renewal of cold war conditions. But he said the following (translated of course): "Anyway we didn’t drop nuclear weapons on a civil population and didn’t drop chemicals over thousands of square kilometres as happened in Vietnam." I agree that it's hypocritical for Bush to pull some kind of "holier than thou" stance toward Russia. The international community should put the pressure on; I wish that the UN were stronger so it could pressure us and them into shutting the hell up.

You, sir, are a racist.

2007-06-28T18:05:00.000-06:00

If you're like most Americans, you don't really care what goes on in DC. So you may not know that the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, limited school districts' ability to use race as a factor in school admission. Why should you care? I mean, you're (probably) white so this (probably) actually makes things easier for you. I'm white, so this would make things easier for me if I ever actually needed to apply to a school ever again (which I don't) (although there are woefully few american-born minorities in hydrology anyway). You should care because we it is unjust, and I believe it is at heart a racist view.
Just consider this view, from one Roger Clegg, who appeared on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer this evening. Go here to check out the transcript of the conversation. But I want to point you toward a particular passage from the interview:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Just quickly, are you trying to pretend that racism doesn't exist?

ROGER CLEGG: Absolutely not. Racism does exist. We've made enormous progress, and I think that anybody who thinks that we haven't is delusional, but racism still exists.

Define "enormous." A member of the Ku Klux Klan made a run for president in 1988 and 1992, and held several offices in Louisiana. One of the most popular radio hosts in America believes that black people shouldn't get to swim. In one poll, 49% of black people said that racism is "a serious problem." But I guess it's a hell of a lot easier to say that we've made great strides if you're a successful, middle-aged white man.

But the best way to fight discrimination is not by piling more discrimination on top of it, not by creating new victims of racial discrimination.

Black people have had a terrible time for the past couple centuries, and, as white people, it is our fault. The Native Americans are having an even worse time, and, yes, that is also our fault. We did terrible, unconscionable things. Human rights violations on scales rarely seen. I don't understand why we don't consider it our duty to make things right for these people. Instead, we complain about bullshit like reverse racism, ignoring the fact that, if another group had done these terrible things to us, we would probably be pretty angry at them, and wary as to their intentions toward us. We once officially (and then unofficially) considered black people "less than." Now we expect them, despite extreme issues of poverty, incarceration rates, job discrimination, and political underrepresentation, to get themselves up to our economic, economic, and social level without help. I watched the All-American Presidential Forum on PBS tonight, and Dennis Kucinich said something that gave me a laugh: "They tell you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, then they steal your boots." You hold a person's head underwater until they're too tired to get back out, then you expect them to save themselves. What have we done for them to give them the skills to get out of their situation? Nothing. The best way to fight discrimination is to give people the tools to improve their situation, and that includes giving them priority for schools admissions, as well as giving the poor free health care, improving job placement and prison rehabilityation, and reforming our drug policies. My favorite thing that Clegg says in that last line is that giving minorities entrance priority is equivalent to "piling [on] more discrimination" because we all know that the only people being descriminated against are white people. He actually believes that white people are in danger of becoming less dominant because WE ARE BEING DESCRIMINATED AGAINST.

The best way to fight discrimination is by enforcing the laws that we have on the books against discrimination and by helping impoverished people, who come in all colors, but regardless of their skin color.

No, the best way to fight discrimination is to make all the racist people non-racist, but that ain't never going to happen because people are people. If blacks are at a greater disadvantage due to "unofficial" discrimination, should we not try to counteract that to make life fair and just?

If there are poor kids or kids who are not getting a good education, help them improve their schools, but it should be done for all of them, regardless of their skin color, whether they're white or black or brown or yellow.

Yes I agree. But you are deluding yourself if you actually believe that wealth and race do not go hand-in-hand. I bet that middle class and rich people would also be upset if you started changing your admissions requirements to give poor people preference. Justice is facing the consequences of your past actions; in our case, it is holding people down because of their race, and justice (and ethics, and morals) dictates that we do what we can to help them out.

Alison sticks it to the Man

2007-06-28T09:02:00.000-06:00

New article up today about Army plans to expand a proving grounds in southwest Arizona by annexing adjacent BLM land; to read, go here. I will monitor the link to make sure it doesn't break.

Also, I finished my collection of Philip K. Dick short stories last night, and have started on Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Yeah that's right, I never read it before. 11 books left in the stack.

I love it

2007-06-27T08:40:00.000-06:00

Courtesy of Jeff Rowland. Visit his site, read his comics, buy his stuff.

The Valles Caldera

2007-06-26T11:17:00.000-06:00

Gather 'round, children, and I will rap at you about my field area (provided my research ever gets off the ground). Most of you have never been there, but it is like hella beautiful. I'll stick a bunch of pictures at the end for your ocular pleasure. The Valles Caldera National Preserve was formerly a ranch held by the ubiquitous (in New Mexico anyway) Baca family. In 2000 the gummint bought it, and it is now semi-open public land.
The Valles is a caldera that formed 1.5-1.1 million years ago as the result of massive eruptions (600 cubic kilometers) from the magma chamber beneath. See below for an aerial photograph (hard to decipher, I know) of the caldera. The roundish feature is the rim of the caldera, and all the flat-looking areas within are meadows. The mountains in the middle of the caldera are the resurgent dome, which the link above talks about.

I've now been here a number of times, and I just can't get over how beautiful it is, especially with a little snow blanket on it. Enjoy some pictures below; hopefully, I'll soon have some more current ones from the upcoming months!

Oh, I have more at home from non-winter. Maybe I'll put some up later.

Article 3, more

2007-06-26T09:14:00.001-06:00

Alison's third article is out at the times. Go here to check it out. I have determined that the Times is schizophrenic about when it will let you look at a particular article without being registered, so I will post a link to another website when somebody else reprints it.
I just noticed that the only thing I blog about anymore is Alison's journalistic endeavor. That's because I've done nothing latewwwly with my life, other than work. My current schedule has me waking up at 5:45 am (alarm starts at 5:30, although since I am always freaked out about missing the alarm, I tend to wake up several times to check to see what time it is...this morning, at 1am and 4am at least), eating breakfast and fixing lunch, leaving at 6:15-6:20, biking 15 minutes to the van stop, waiting for the van to get there at 6:45, then riding to Socorro, where we arrive around 7:55 (although the driver today was a speed demon and we were here by 7:45). I then get hungry by 9am, snack at 10, and graze for the rest of the day. Back on the van at 5:05 or 5:10, and get back to the van stop around 6:20 to 6:30. Hope that my bike is still there. So far it has. Bike home, get there around 6:45-ish. This schedule makes me tired; mornings are my natural enemy. Also, I think my plants resent being in the house by themselves all day with no cooling; thank goodness for adobe, at least. Bike lanes are short to nonexistant here; at least I miss rush hour as it stands. Downtown is strangely deserted both when I bike to the van, and when I bike back. I've never been in a city that was like that.
In other news, I will be out in LA visiting Alison the weekend of July 8th. This will entail getting to the Greyhound station on the afternoon-evening of July 5 (Thursday), bussing overnight to arrive noonish in LA, then leaving LA on the evening of July 9 to arrive back in Abq on July 10. This will be my first >1 hour experience on a Greyhound, and should be a thrilling adventure. I'll be sure to post all details.

Article 2

2007-06-22T08:49:00.000-06:00

Alison's gotten a second article out at the times. Go here to check it out. Hopefully the link lasts. Alison is embarassed by this one because of its brevity. A little bird tells me, however, that there may be another article coming out very soon that makes up for the shortness of this one in spades.

Edit: It's 4p.m. in New Mexico and I already can't get to the article. Here is another link to it, that hopefully will last longer. I can only trust that topix.net was faithful in its reproduction.

Hoo boy.

2007-06-19T21:19:00.000-06:00

So I'm currently watching Frontline on PBS. The episode tonight is titled Endgame. It's about the steps we took that got us into the mess we're in now. Now, I started writing this because I heard a great quote by dubya that I wanted to get right, but I can't find it anywhere. This was a quote from early in the was, something to the effect of the life of the people of Iraq is an example to the other peoples of the Middle East of what it is like to live in a free country. That considered, I'm sure that nobody will ever want to live in a free country again, what with conditions there being what they are.

Here's a pretty apt quote:
Free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction.
George W. Bush
Fact: The United States has more than an order of magnitude more active nuclear warheads than any other country on Earth other than Russia.

Book Report

2007-06-18T12:59:00.000-06:00

So I finished Flow my Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick last Friday on the van ride up to the Burque. It was a very impressive book, and only the second novel I've ever read by him (the first being Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the book on which the great movie Blade Runner is loosely based). By far the majority of stuff I've read by him consists of short stories (a book of which I have started next). It's interesting to see the contrast between his short fiction, which does not need to carry a focus for very long, and his novels, which suffer a little from his inability to do so. Part of the problem may also be that he was such a prolific writer that he could never spend much time on anything. Just speculation. Great book, and I would highly recommend it. Very trippy.
Anybody keeping track might notice that I have now taken seven books off my reading list since its inception a while back, and I'm down to 12. Of course, a bunch of the remaining books are very long, but maybe I'll get through my list this year and not have a stack of books waiting; I can't remember the last time I was in that situation. This will all be complicated by the upcoming release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which will likely be the greatest book ever written, and after which I can give up reading words rather than be in a constant state of disappointment. Seriously though, I don't know of any other book that could be released that would supersede my list; I will read it as soon as I can get my hothands on it.
Reading another Dick book, aside from allowing for all kinds of Dick jokes shared with a good friend of mine, always gets me thinking about how anonymous this guy is. He wrote more than 45 novels, and about 121 short stories during a writing career that spanned from 1953 to 1982, when he died at age 53. He won the Hugo Award in 1963 for Man in the High Castle, and also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1974 for Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (which I just read). With the most recent release, 9 of his stories have been turned into movies:
Blade Runner - 1982 - Novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Total Recall - 1990 - Story "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale"
Confessions d'un Barjo - 1992 - Novel Confessions of a Crap Artist
Screamers - 1995 - Story "Second Variety"
Impostor - 2002 - Story "The Impostor"
Minority Report - 2002 - Story "Minority Report"
Paycheck - 2003 - Story "Paycheck"
A Scanner Darkly - 2006 - Novel A Scanner Darkly
Next - 2007 - Story "The Golden Man"
While that's no Stephen King kind of number, it's still pretty impressive. Take a gander at this guy's stuff if you never have.
Internet tomorrow maybe! How exciting!

Edit on 6/19 (yes I have internet now):
Re: comment
Pff, presence in the Library of America catalog doesn't dispel anonymity. I mean, who's ever heard of Samuel Menashe or Abraham Lincoln?