Wait for the shake!

I recently got an email from the campus police about earthquakes. Was that what those were?!? This is the Oakland-Bay Bridge nearly 20 years ago. I was living on the peninsula in October of 1989. Now that was an earthquake. I have pictures of the Marina in San Francisco and the I-80 freeway in Oakland here someplace.

I feel pretty good today. I've had two whole nights of sleep and I've managed to eat something three days in a row!

Has anyone heard that bodies are being dug up on the FLDS compound? Some people believe that the boys were killed to eliminate competition with the adult men for wives.

Yi-Fu Tuan, Dominance & Affection and the FLDS

I've put this reading off for long enough, mostly because I don't have the right answer. And I've concluded that I don't even have a good answer and likely never will. I'm not a pet person and if I were, my choice probably wouldn't be a cat. But my wife and I wound up with this cat. I've taught her 'fetch' and 'shake hands' and occasionally she will 'speak' on command. When she goes outside, she is on a leash. The cat is thoroughly dominated. On the other hand, the cat has never missed a meal and her sole function seems to be converting expensive cat food into cat hair and cat turds. If she were free, she could reach her full potential as a cat. Provided of course that she weren't killed by a car or a coyote or she didn't die of disease, starvation or freezing. That is how I see the FLDS. The government could save these poor benighted women even if they don't realize that they need to be rescued. We could take so much pride in empowering those who managed to survive the predators and starvation. In fact, we don't need the government to solve our problems. Lets break out torches and pitchforks and go destroy the monster ourselves! Picture Dale Barlow limping through the compund saying "Thancthuwawy! Thancthuwawy! If this is being done to "protect the children", I wonder how a 416 kids from here would fare in terms of pregnancy, clothing, adequate food,etc. and whether their responses would be that different if they were asked the questions the FLDS kids are being asked? I think we often have things backwards. If a man fathers a dozen children with half a dozen women and abandons them all he gets a starring spot on MTV. If he takes responibility for all of them, he's a monster. Wilt Chamberlin brags of having bedded tens of thousands of women and he's a hero. Pee Wee Herman practices the ultimate in safe sex and he goes to jail. We select Presidents based how they look and pick Miss America because of how she will solve the world's problems. We used to take LSD to make the world look weird. Now we take Prozac to make it look normal. How did a nation so backwards ever manage to become a superpower?


J. B. Jackson's piece on the Four Corners and trailers makes me think of Slab City. This would be a fascinating place for a thesis. If I were (much) younger and single, I'd buy a van or a ratted out motorhome, a lap-top, a good digital camera, take a year from school, and head off to Slab City for a season. I'd want to know who these people were, why they were there, where they came from, where they went when they left... I'd like to know who made the rules and who enforced the rules. I'd wonder about the social and political hierarchy of a culture like that. If only I were the higher education type.
Anyway, why do we look down on people who live in trailer parks? "Drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park..." We don't sneer at people who live in trailers. We don't. There is a "campground" on Rock boulevard that fills with trailers in the summer but doesn't carry the stigma that a trailer park in Lemon Valley carries. The people in the campground or for that matter, Slab City, are "vagabonds" and "gypsies". They aren't permanent. The trailer park is. The trailer park is the rural counterpart to the urban housing project. The denizens are trapped by social and economic conditions but the person towing the trailer isn't trapped anywhere.


I finally got around to reading the Meinig piece. It raises questions as to what role the church played in how the colonization was done. i. e., did the Catholic belief in confession and penitence determine that the Spanish assimilated the natives while the Protestants segregated? Interesting but I take issue with the article for a number of reasons. First, he selects his imperialism. Russian expansion into Siberia is included, but the same practice in Poland is excluded. An unwary reader could get the impression that only the West ever colonized. He calls the return of the Iberian peninsula to christian control as a "reconquest" but says that non-christians were usually never more than a minority anyway. Really? The history I learned says otherwise. Finally, Meinig excludes Japanese imperialism. Japanese imperialism was a major reason the U.S. ended up in Southeast Asia. And for someone of a certain age, my age, why America got involved in Viet Nam is a very important question.

Icebergs have some interesting shapes.

And some interesting uses

The icebreaker breaking ice

Ready for a night flight
What you see at night.

The highest red and white lights are the ship's mast. The row of red lights is the hangar. The semi-circle below that is the flight deck. Aim for that. The white light at the bottom is the stern. Everything else is freezing sea water.

Events in Eldorado, Texas bring to mind Mark Twain's comments on polygamy in Roughing It.
"Our stay in Salt Lake City amounted to only two days, and therefore we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the workings of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter. I had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly and pathetically "homely" creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, "No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence."

Cuzco, Peru

Christchurch, New Zealand (They thought I looked weird.)

Orca, Ross sea, Antarctica

Black Browed Albatross, Ross sea, Antarctica

Polar bear, Arctic ocean

My introduction to Alaska was working on the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

OK. Time to do some writing. I think I've mentioned that I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer and I didn't do much to dispel that impression in class on Wednesday. Helene and I were asked several questions and I managed to not give a good answer. To the question "What was the purpose of the Panopticon piece?" I would say that it is a warning that technology has become so available that it can be misused by anyone at any time and that nothing is being done to control the misuse. My response to the second question, "Is it wrong for parents to use this technology to monitor their children?", I would say "No!" A parent (and I said I'm not one) has not just a right, but an obligation to monitor their children. Anyone fool enough to turn a child loose in a public place while they go off on other pursuits should be neutered before they can reproduce again. And in an age where both parents often have to work full time to support a family, that GPS technology allows them to monitor the child in a way my parents couldn't and didn't need to. Not that I was that reliable, but my mother didn't work outside the home until after I had a driver's license. She had the time and ability to check on me without losing her job. I don't think that Dobson's geoslavery is any more "slavery" than driving to or calling a location to check on a child.


Other thoughts that have been rattling around this skull....Molotch is wrong! even if I hadn't read The City as a Growth Machine, he'd still be wrong. Molotch is a "neo-marxist" and marxism, whether neo, retro, paleo or any other sort of marxism is a failure. I have both experience and geography on my side on this. As far as the essay, yes, "elites" decide how the city will grow. The alternative would be what, use a lottery and have a planning board comprised of a brothel owner, a religous fundamentalist, and half a dozen winos? That would be an interesting city... Or maybe a planning board of nothing but neo-marxists? You'd have a city with the charm and beauty of Stalin-era East Berlin and ringed with gulags to limit growth. Cities grow. London, Paris, San Francicso, they all started out as villages and they grew into places with museums, theaters, sporting events, bookstores and other kinds of things missing in small towns. Elites make things the way they want but they also want nice things. I'll take Washington D.C. over Leningrad anytime.


And speaking of being wrong, Collapse by Jared Diamond was a pretty good book but after reading What’s Your Consumption Factor? I kind of wonder how balanced Collapse really is. Collapse postulates that societies collapse not because the population outstrips the available resources but because the ruling classes squander the resources on themselves, like the Maya, or that the cultures refuse to adapt to changing environments like the Vikings in Greenland. My problem with Diamond is that he points to the west's unequal consumption (probably correct) but the unequal productivity of the west is almost never mentioned. A farmer in the U.S. consumes 32 times what a farmer in the developing world uses and also produces much more. At the beginning of the semester the term "measuring the immeasurable" was used. Much of what the west produces with its unequal consumption can't be measured. That productivity creates wealth which allows a scientist to spend twelve hours in a lab doing research instead of plowing a field trying to grow enough food to feed his family. When a cure for malaria is finally found, it won't come out of Darfur State or Mogadishu U, it will come from the overconsuming West.


And Nabhan... I liked the book and it's really hard to argue with fresh food. In Sitka I'd often start my morning by putting on a wetsuit and snorkeling for abalone and scallops. Fresh abalone rolled in italian bread crumbs and fried in a little olive oil is hard to beat and frozen seafood is now a disappointment. I still eat seafood, it's just not as tasty. Anyway, Nabhan briefly mentions that agriculture is work. Producing enough food to feed several people for an entire year is brutal, low paying work. It's not like growing a few squash plants in the satellite dish or a couple of tomato plants in planters on the patio. He is also convinced that a communal, agrarian society is an ideal lifestyle. About thirty years ago a guy named Pol Pot thought the same thing. The cities of Cambodia were emptied. At gunpoint by soldiers. Anyone too old or sick to perform manual labor in the fields was executed. Anyone with a education (apparently people get uppity when they've been educated) was also murdered. The low estimate is three quarters of a million Cambodians killed to create the society Nabhan advocates.

Den lille havfrau
(The Little Mermaid)
Copenhagen harbor, Denmark

I've been pretty lax about blog entries lately. I've been thinking, I just haven't been writing. I'll get my thoughts in order and do some writing then. For now I'll post some of my other images.

Reno hot air balloon races.

Red Bull airplane racing.

Reno air races opening ceremonies.

Moubray bay, Antarctica.

Adelie penguin, Cape Adaire, Antarctica

A bald eagle in Sitka, AK.

I love digital cameras. They don't work for everything. For slow or immobile objects like Moubray bay or the hot air balloon races film can't compete but for anything moving above a moderate speed, they don't work as well because of the time it takes to scan the object. But any film images I take are scanned into a digital format. Unfortunately my digital camera seems to be on the blink.


Someone mentioned going on a trip to Davis Monthan Air Force Base in their blog. I had the great fortune to fly as part of an H-3 helicopter aircrew from Sitka, AK to the "boneyard" many years ago. We fleww down the west coast of Canada and the US to North Bend, OR then turned east and flew over Crater lake and on to Reno. From there we flew south to Las Vegas and down through Death Valley. From Death Valley we turned east again and flew down the Grand Canyon. From there we headed south to Davis Monthan to deliver the aircraft. From the wet, pine covered forests of the Northwest to the saguaro covered hills of the Southwest, it was a trip that stands out among many that I got to make. I also had the great misfortune to fly as part of an H-3 helicopter aircrew from Sitka, Ak to the "boneyard" many years ago. As the turbines spooled down at tthe the boneyard, I realized that this machine had flown in some of the most vicious weather imaginable, had (If I remember right) been part of the Prinsendam rescue, had delivered Santa to remote Alaskan villages, and had carried countless mariners to safety, and with the chocks now tucked under the wheels, it had now become scrap metal.