'Too Busy To Hate'? My @$&!

I'm off to Atlanta today, to visit the new arrival, my sister Maureen's new baby Avery (See Sept. 4 posts for pictures). It's been almost a year since I've seen my parents, my brother and my sisters, so I'm very happy about that. It'll be so good to see them--we really don't get together often enough.

What I'm not happy about is the travel it takes to get there. I love to travel, but dear God do I hate flying. What's worse than getting stuck between a huge fat guy and a screaming baby for three hours, crammed into a seat built for a 6-year-old while some stranger reclines the seat in front of you so he's basically resting his head in your lap? Actually, I can think of something worse than that--being stuck at an airport for three hours. But I guess it can't be helped.

One other thing that can't be helped is that my sister and her family live in Atlanta. I don't want to make too big a deal out of this, because I know my family thinks I'm too negative in this regard, but Atlanta is without a doubt my least-favorite large American city. They've taken the joyless strip-mall culture and congestion of L.A., gotten rid of the beautiful beaches and constant sunshine, added boatloads of humidity and a weird superiority/inferiority complex, and plunked the whole thing down in the middle of Georgia of all places. Plus Ted Turner lives there. I'm going to be with family and that's the most important thing, but man, I sure liked it when Maureen and her family lived in Miami. I mean, if you have to fly across the country anyway, you might as well be close to South Beach and Key West.

My great dream is to get my whole clan together out here in God's Country. But as long as I'm living in the Fortress of Solitude and it's whopping 500 square feet, I think that's pretty unlikely.

'The Hammer' Gets Nailed

Sorry, I know that's the most obvious pun imaginable, but this is just too good to pass up. DeLay says he's a doe-eyed innocent, and that it's all a frame up by the prosecutor, nothing but a big conspiracy. Now where have I heard that before...? Oh yeah, EVERY SINGLE DAY I GO TO WORK!!!

Call of the Wild

First of all, I have to apologize for the lack of promised pictures from our trip up to Truckee and Tahoe Saturday. It was just laziness on my part; though we had a great time, I just never thought to pull out the camera. You'll have to trust me when I tell you that it was a fantastic Fall day up in the Sierra. I'm also happy to report that Melissa's mother and I actually share very similar tastes when it comes to certain things. For example, we both seem inordinately fond of rustic furniture, wildlife art and other mountain-living decor, much to Melissa's horror. If only mother and daughter had more in common taste-wise.

Speaking of wildlife, Sunday afternoon Melissa and her Mother went shopping, and I decided to go see a movie I've been meaning to get around to for some time now: Grizzly Man, the brilliant German director Werner Herzog's latest non-fiction effort. It's a documentary focusing on the life and death of Timothy Treadwell, a self-appointed guardian of Alaska's grizzly bears, or at least those individual bears who live in a particular portion of Katmai National Park. The location strikes both me and apparently Herzog as odd since bears in a National Park should be pretty well protected already. Treadwell--not his given name but a name he gave to himself while concocting a new personality, which at one point came complete with fake Australian nationality and a laughably bad accent--spent thirteen summers in the portion of Katmai in and around the area he called the "Grizzly Maze" on a section of a never-named river who's annual salmon runs attract large numbers of massive omnivorous ursines. In the fall of 2003, at the end of his thirteenth season in the bush, tragedy struck when a bear killed both Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huguenard, a woman who had spent the last two or three summers with him at his remote campsite.

Let me first say that I did not find this to be a great movie, at least in terms of entertainment, but this is mostly due to my own personal reaction to Treadwell. At the heart of this film there is definitely a fascinating and tragic story of a complex, perhaps mentally unbalanced individual who found meaning in an all-consuming crusade (one that was certainly controversial and perhaps wasn't really even necessary in Alaska, where brown bear populations are apparently quite healthy), but frankly the film gives far, far too much time over to it's quirky, narcissistic protagonist's rambling, disjointed, self-aggrandizing video monologues.

Treadwell must have made hundreds of hours of these recordings during his summers in the bush, and while he clearly felt he was doing monumentally important work and he strongly believed in his cause, it was also clear that he was greatly amusing himself much of the time, and at other times battling his own personal demons with stream-of-consciousness tirades. These babbling rants quickly grew tiresome to me. Some examples: Treadwell lectures the camera on the proper way to behave in the presence of grizzly bears, even though as far as I could tell he had no formal education or training in the subject; he weepily professes his eternal love for a dead fox cub in a scene that was so hyper-emotional that I found it unintentionally funny; He screams invectives and curses wildly into the camera to berate his perceived human enemies, which in his mind included everyone from poachers to the National Park Service; He muses at length as to why he has a hard time maintaining relationships with human females, and how much easier his life would be if he were gay; He stews in his tent, angrily demanding that God send rain to facilitate salmon runs because his bears, whom he calls by cute anthropomorphic names, are starving. At some point all the navel-gazing and the over-the-top professions of love for his animal-subjects just became too much for me. Of course the footage of the bears and other Alaskan wildlife was compelling and the wild scenery was breathtakingly beautiful, but at about an hour into the movie I sort of started to wonder whether this guy really merited a feature-length film about his final days. I really mean no disrespect to Treadwell, Huguenard, or their cause (one which I agree with in principal, if you care to know), but in watching the film I did not find Timothy Treadwell to be someone that I would be particularly interested to get to know.

That does not mean, however, that the film does not raise certain interesting questions. The more I learned about this guy, the more I started to wonder if perhaps I hadn't heard this story before. Then it hit me; there were some real distinct similarities between Treadwell's story and that of Christopher McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp, the young man who's story was the subject of Jon Krakauer's 1992 book Into The Wild. Krakauer is better known for writing about a doomed expedition to climb Mount Everest in his later book Into Thin Air, but it was the earlier book that so caught my attention in the summer of 1999, when I spent the season between my second and third years of Law School working for the state criminal division in the bush community of Bethel, Alaska. The trip that summer brought on in me a mild obsession with all things Alaskan, and I eagerly snapped up ever bit of information I could on the subject, including Krakauer's fascinating book.

Like Treadwell, McCandless was a young man with a fairly normal upbringing that did not hint at the strange fate that would befall him. Like Treadwell he could be arrogant and off-putting at times, and his reckless choices and lifestyle seemed to vex and even anger some people out of all proportion (I found Treadwell annoying, but the film makes it clear that more than a few people who didn't seem to know him personally nevertheless actively hated his guts). Despite this, both men seemed to have had a way of charming many of those in their immediate sphere.

The similarities run even deeper. Both Treadwell and McCandless seem to have held the modern world in contempt, and each turned his life into personal, one-man battle against what they saw as the corrupting, destructive forces of civilization. Each changed his name and made a show of renouncing material possessions and rewards, taking on completely self-created new identities, actions I can only interpret as some sort of attempted purification. Both ultimately found the pull of the Alaskan wilderness irresistible, and both found that wilderness to be an edenic refuge from the modern world which they were so uncomfortable with. And both were ultimately killed by that beautiful but utterly indifferent wilderness; Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed by one of his beloved bears, and McCandless apparently died after eating a poisonous seed pod.

There were, of course, important differences between the two. Treadwell made his battle much more public than McCandless: around 1990 he apparently anointed himself the protector of the bears and began spending every summer observing, recording, and living among them full time and completely (well, almost completely) without human contact. But in his off-season he established a still-active organization called Grizzly People, spoke to schoolchildren about bears free of charge, and even appeared on the David Letterman show--a clip from his appearance is in the movie, and in it Dave, in a creepily prophetic moment, asks Treadwell if we will one day hear that he has been killed by one of his bears.

McCandless, on the other hand, sought no publicity and had no over-arching cause other than his personal quest to renounce the advantages of his upbringing and find a blank spot on the map to disappear into. In the summer of 1992, while hitchhiking his way from Fairbanks south toward Denali, he simply asked a driver who was giving him a ride to stop the vehicle, and he walked off into the woods by the side of the road carrying only a rifle and the most meager of supplies. He lived in the bush for four months, hunting for his food and living in an abandoned school bus that he simply happened to stumble upon. From what I can recall (it's been six years since I read the book) he did not suffer from Treadwell's overly romantic view of nature as a place of tranquility and order--I definitely recall that he killed and ate a number of animals, something I doubt Treadwell would ever have done. But despite their differences, the similarities in their stories remain intriguing to me.

Is there simply a type of individual who finds himself or herself so unable to accept the artificial world of modern society that he or she is inevitably pulled toward the wild corners of the world? I think that while most of us would never take things to the extreme and perhaps absurd ends that Treadwell and McCandless did, I would be willing to bet that most of us have at least some understanding of where the urges that drove them come from. Deep within most of us there exists an understanding that we have built, for our convenience and comfort, a thin surface-world of brick and mortar and asphalt that exists on top of the natural world that actually sustains us. The reasons we have done this make perfect sense; the natural world, while nurturing, is also cold and brutal and completely indifferent to us. We have used our over-sized brains to built a civilization that has, for the most part, allowed us to stop worrying so much about finding food and sheltering ourselves from the elements and avoiding predators. These are all, most people would agree, good things.

But inescapably, I think we also know in some dark, subconscious place that the natural world was our first and, in a sense, our truest home. While we have gained immeasurably from the establishment of human civilization in that we no longer need concern ourselves with survival on a day-to-day basis, we have also lost something a little less tangible but no less real. While the modern world of lengthy communtes and desk jobs does feed our bodies, it often fails miserably to fill our spirits. There is a certain emptiness to our modern lives, lives in which all of our physical needs are met but in which our most basic human needs (community, a sense of purpose, an understanding of our role in the universe) usually go tragically unmet. All manner of people attempt to fill that emptiness with all manner of things, from religious fanaticism to unapologetic hedonism. In my mind, many of the destructive behaviors that people engage in come from a simple yearing for meaning. And for some, the answer to the search for meaning spurred by the spiritual emptiness of the modern world is a complete and total renunciation of that modern world. I wonder, did Treadwell and McCandless simply feel the ache from this void more acutely than the rest of us?

Most people find a way to make peace with that spiritual void one way or another. We look for meaning wherever we can within the safe confines of the world that presents itself to us, and otherwise simply learn to distract ourselves. But I think there are a few individuals, like McCandless and Treadwell, for whom such a compromise will never be satisfactory. For better or worse (usually worse), they just cannot live in a world that doesn't give them the meaningful life they require. So they recreate themselves, and attempt to recreate their relationship to the world.

Perhaps I'm reading far too much into these stories. Even I myself am not entirely sure that I buy the idea that Treadwell was some kind of modern-day shaman. Just watch the scene in the film where he becomes practically orgasmic over discovering poop from one of his bears; no man who can get that excited about bear shit can be said to be playing with an entirely full deck. Maybe the guy was just plain nuts. But the way I see it, guys like McCandless and Treadwell are, at heart, simply people who won't compromise, won't live in a world that they find unacceptable. Maybe they are crazy. Or maybe those of us living in our condos and trudging to work every day have just allowed a certain part of ourselves to die quietly of in exchange for the security of modern society.

The Triumph Of Multiculturalism

Melissa's mother is visiting this weekend. We made the mistake last night of trying to go out to dinner at Ichiban, a Japanese Steakhouse in Harrah's. This was a mistake because it brought us right into the heart of chaos that is Street Vibrations (an event which oh-by-the-way is already blamed for three deaths and numerous smaller accidents so far this year). We weren't able to get a table until about 9:30, after most of the accountants and dentists playing out biker fantasies had gone wherever it is they went for the night.

The chef who came to cook the meal at our table (you know, like they do at Benihana) was not actually Japanese, but a Mexican guy named Francisco. Is it wrong of me to have thought that this seemed unusual? For the record, it wasn't the fact that he was from Mexico, but the fact that he wasn't Japanese that seemed odd to me--I would have felt it to be just as strange if the guy had been Anglo. But I suppose neither situation should seem unusual. As a newly out-0f-the-closet Socialist (see the previous post), I do love the idea of multiculturalism. Heck, why not have a Hispanic chef at a Japanese Steakhouse? I mean, it's a big win for diversity in the workplace, isn't it? He kept jokingly referring to Sake as 'Tequila', which struck me as funny for some reason.

Anyway, today we're doing what you always do with a guest visiting Reno; driving up to Lake Tahoe. If the weather is nice (which looks doubtful right now) we'll have some pictures.

I'm A Socialist--Who Knew?

I just took this political orientation test at OK Cupid. Take a look at my test results:

You are a Social Liberal (68% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (15% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

I'm a little bit flabbergasted. I knew I was politically left-of-center, but yeesh! I guess I can't dispute the results, though; nothing on the internets could possibly be inaccurate. For the record, I've never considered myself a Socialist; I'm a strong believer that Capitalism is inherently flawed but nevertheless the best socio-economic system yet designed for and by human beings, perhaps because they are also inherently flawed. I just feel that corporations and other monied-interests, like any other disproportionately powerful and corruptible institution (i.e. government agencies, religious institutions, etc.) must be watched like a hawk and, when necessary, restrained from trampling all over the lives and livelihoods of the less powerful. Above all else, the thing I have never been able to understand about conservatives--at least the ones who have ever had to work for someone else--is how they can so fear and resent a powerful government, yet they seem to so blithely believe that the Enrons and Wal-Marts and (say it with me, kids) Halliburtons of the world really have the common man's best interests at heart.

The Chutes

The paperwork arrived in the mail a few days ago, my ID photo has been taken, and now all I'm waiting for is the snow, which with luck may come around the middle of November. For the first time in my life I actually own a season pass to a real ski hill, and I'm giddy as a schoolgirl waiting to use it.

Take a look at this:

That's Mount Rose's signature black diamond and double-black diamond terrain, ominously known as "The Chutes." AND IT'S THIRTY MINUTES FROM MY FRONT DOOR! THIS IS WHERE I'M GOING TO BE RIDING ALL WINTER!!! Suddenly I don't feel as bad as I did a few days ago about Summer coming to an end.

Hope You Don't Need To Drive Anywhere For The Next Few Days

Happy Feast of Mabon, fellow Pagans! Yes, it's Fall again, and here in the Truckee Meadows that means just one thing; time to inconvenience everyone who lives in Reno by shutting the city down and turning the whole thing over to Harley enthusiasts. Just to warn you; if you don't live near or regularly visit Reno this post probably won't have any relevance to you, but hey, it's my blog.

Now I have to walk a fine line here, because Melissa's father is himself a Harley enthusiast. I know some of them, probably most of them, are actually pretty decent folks. But this week and particularly this weekend in Reno is Street Vibrations, and already the aggrivation of having thousands of bikers descend on my fair city is too much for me, especially in light of the fact that traffic downtown (where I live) is already a snarled mess because of all the construction projects. Add to that the shutting down of a major section of Virginia Street all week to make room for vendors and you've got the recipe for a giant clusterf***. But worse than that is the noise. Imagine a B-17 bomber running it's engines 10 feet from your bedroom window day and night for three straight days and you will have some idea of what the noise from this event is like. Plus, a lot of these guys ride like complete idiots. Last night I was coming home from the gym and I stopped at a light on Arlington Ave. in front of The Sands. Two guys on bikes were in front of me, and when the light turned green they gunned their engines and took off down the street, which is a 25 mph zone, at maybe 50 or 60 mph. One had to swerve and the other had to slam on his brakes to miss running over a couple of guys who were (legally) trying to cross the road in a clearly-marked crosswalk up the street.

Summer in Reno is a never-ending cascade of festivals designed to bring in enthusiasts of various types who will, it is hoped, fill the hotels, eat in the restaurants, and gamble, gamble, gamble. These events range from the relatively innocuous to the substantially annoying in terms of their effect on the lives of those of us who actually live here. Street Vibrations seems to be the most disruptive of these. I'm very familiar with the justifications for these events: they bring lots of money into the city. While that may be true for some people (none of that money ever winds up in my pocket, but never mind), I feel that Reno would be just fine without gearing so much of our civic existance toward events that shut down streets, congest traffic, severely tax our resources, create tons of garbage and bring in lots of lowlifes who treat this city like their own personal vomitorium. Reno is a fantastic place to live--great climate, world-class recreational resources, good quality of life. Instead of gearing everything in this city toward separating out-of-town visitors from their cash, why not focus more on building an even better community for the ever-increasing number of people who actually call this place home? I'm not saying we should get rid of these festivals entirely; to an extent, they're part of what makes Reno, well, Reno. I'm just saying maybe it's time to start thinking of this place as a great city in it's own right, and less of a destination for visitors just looking to party. It's just a thought.

Meditation on Tuesday

When my alarm went off this morning I was in a deep sleep and it took me a few seconds to get my bearings. In a dreamy haze I struggled to process the nagging thought that there must have been a reason the little red digital clock near my bed was making that horrible noise. Then it hit me like a punch in the gut: Tuesday.

In my mind there's no doubt that it's the worst day of the week. Wednesday is Hump Day (insert Beavis and Butthead-like laugh here) and Garfield hates Mondays, but neither of those days comes close to the existential emptiness that is Tuesday. On Monday there is at least still a residual feeling of leisure and relaxation from the weekend, and by Wednesday you're back into the nose-to-the-grindstone, mindless routine of the work week. But Tuesday, Tuesday is nothing but a long, dark night of the soul that feels like it will never end.

Perhaps I'm feeling a little depressed and/or anxious because here in the Sierra you can just feel the summer slipping away. The Pagan in me wants to relish the coming Equinox, but the spoiled twelve-year-old in me is just pissed off because I haven't made it to Yosemite yet this summer. The warm months are so fleeting in the mountains, and this year was especially tough because winter seemed to last until about the end of June. And even now, in late September, the night air has a chill that was not there a month ago and the days grow shorter and shorter.

And yet there is still time. The weather will be warm and sunny today. It would be a fantastic day to be fly-fishing Lake Davis, or perhaps riding the South Fork of the American River, or maybe just hiking up in the Desolation Wilderness. The possibilities are endless.

But I'm not doing any of those things. I'm going to spend today sitting in a windowless office and listening to the hum of fluorescent lights. Because today is Tuesday.

Fremont Cannon Comes Back To Reno

How can you not love the excitement of college football, especially a rivalry game? Nevada and UNLV doesn't have the annual national implications of Oklahoma-Texas or Ohio State-Michigan, it doesn't have the life-or-death ferocity of Alabama-Auburn, the pagentry of Notre Dame-USC or the magnificent history of Army-Navy, but it is a college football rivalry, and on a cool autumn night that's enough.

I've lived in Nevada on and off for five years now, but this was my first University of Nevada football game. Although it is a Division I school, no one is going to mistake Nevada for a big-time football program. The stadium is embarrassingly small, seating about 25,000 people; there are high school stadiums in Texas that seat more people. The P.A. system is completely inaudible during the game. The scoreboard seems old and often has a hard time keeping up with the action on the field. The concession stand in the south end of the stadium ran out of beer in the FIRST QUARTER last night. But the atmosphere was electric and the game was terrific, and that made up for everything else.

The winner of the Nevada-UNLV football game takes home the Fremont Cannon, a replica of the howitzer General Charles C. Fremont brought into Nevada while exploring the territory in 1843; according to legend he was forced to abandon it in a Sierra snowbank. The winning school gets to paint the cannon in its school colors. Until yesterday it had been five years since the University of Nevada had gotten to paint the cannon Wolfpack blue.

The game was close thanks to good defense and a tendancy on the part of both teams to miss scoring opportunites; Nevada's kicking team missed an extra point and had two field goals blocked, and UNLV managed to have two touchdowns called back for offensive penalties on two consecutive plays. A late Vegas touchdown made the final minutes interesting, but in the end Nevada's line play and defense were enough to pull out the win.

It seems a little odd that Nevada plays it's biggest rival in the second game of the season, but you'll hear no complaints from me. When the final seconds ticked down and the Nevada student section charged onto the field to celebrate the win and forcibly take possession of the cannon, well, you couldn't help but get caught up in the moment. What a great time college football is.

Fore!

Yesterday the online magazine Slate ran this article, which I found really interesting. It's a comparison of the divergent tracks in popularity taken over the last few decades by the two great country club sports, golf and tennis. The opposing fates of these two sports are something that I've wondered about for quite some time now.

Like most American men, I like to play golf when I can. I would be willing to bet that golf is one of the few sports that Americans actually like to play more than they like to watch on TV (much as I like golf, it is excruciatingly boring on television). Also like most American men, I haven't seriously played tennis since I was a teenager--I'm 32 now--and can't name a single male player who would rank in the world's top 20 besides Andre Agassi, and I know him only because he's been around for 20 years now.

When I was a kid there seemed to be two sports that all suburban kids in America were playing, sports which had never reached a wide audience in this country, but which in the late 70's and early 80's seemed poised to ensnare an entire young generation: Soccer--"It's the sport of the future in America, and it always will be"--and tennis. It seemed like every kid played one or the other or both. Soccer's perpetual inability to capture more than a niche market in the U.S. has been written about to death and is subject enough for it's own post (so save your comments, daniel), but these days it seems hard to believe that around 1979 tennis appeared poised to join football, baseball and basketball in the pantheon of sports Americans really care about. I can remember going to tennis camp as a kid. Once, when my family lived in San Antonio, my mother took me to see an exhibition match featuring John MacEnroe, and I was thrilled. My family, like most families I knew of back then, owned several tennis rackets that although rarely used, were a sign that in those days tennis was something that average people actually went out and did. It doesn't really seem that way anymore.

Golf basically did not exist in my childhood and adolescent world, although I did play a couple of times when I was a teenager. Golf always seemed to reek of privilege and elitism, a pseudo-athletic pursuit for rich, middle-aged fat men. I never really enjoyed playing it until I was in college. How could something be a sport if you could suck on a stogie while doing it?

But somewhere along the line things changed dramatically. I was somewhat shocked a few years ago to realize that golf had transcended it's upper-crust history and managed to become a sport of The People, the sort of sport you're not surprised to turn on the TV and see Tony Soprano or Hank "King of the Hill" Hill playing.

The Slate article postulates a number of theories as to why these two sports, both of which carry histories that speak to leisure-class privilege, have come to such different fates. The most prominent seems to be that in attempting to reach as wide an audience as possible (regardless of the social class of the surrounding neighborhood, a great many public parks in this country contain tennis courts in various states of decay) tennis lost much of it's mystique and became something anyone who owned a racket and a canister of tennis balls could do, while golf maintained it's aspirational allure. But I think the answer is simpler than that; I think tennis requires a lot of hard physical exertion while golf is more like a mildly competitive walk in the park. Put another way, tennis is hard work, and golf is just a good time.

Just for fun a couple of years ago I tried to play tennis with a friend at the gym we belonged to. This may sound odd, but I had forgotten what an absolutely insane amount of running back and forth tennis entails. I'm in decent shape, but I was exhausted after a single game--and keep in mind, you have to win six or sometimes seven games to win a set, and three out of five sets to win a match in men's play. It's no wonder to me that tennis players seem to age so quickly and burn out so fast.

Golf, on the other hand, only becomes more enjoyable as the years go by. It's a chance to get outside in a beautiful setting, walk around at a casual pace, spend time with/harass and cajole friends, practice what is actually a deceptively challenging game, and wind the whole thing up with a beer in the shade. What a great way to spend a summer afternoon.

I certainly have nothing against tennis--it's great exercise, and not entirely un-entertaining to watch when played well. But if I had to chose one of these two sports to spend a precious day off playing, well, to me that isn't really a choice at all.

Camel Races

Just by the by, here are a couple of pictures from last weekend's Camel Races up in Virginia City. As you can see, the races also included emus and ostriches.









Clicking on the pictures should give you a larger version. I can't honestly say I was terribly impressed with the Camel Races. The crowd was pretty sparse, as you can see, and basically it was five minutes of entertainment packed into two hours. But it was a nice day up in the Virginia Range, and I always like visiting the Comstock, so it wasn't really a wasted day. Plus, it had been about a year since I've had a decent Indian Taco (or, as the sign said, and "Iandian Taco"):

That's Mount Davidson, popularly called Sugarloaf Mountain, in the background with the white "V" on it. Virginia City was built on Comstock Lode silver and was once Nevada's major city; if you ever watch Bonanza, Virginia City is the town Pa Cartwright and the boys are always going to. Today there's not much left besides the inevitable bars and trinket shops, but there's an awful lot of history up in those dry mountains.

Strange as it may seem camels actually have something of a history in Nevada and the West as well, but as with so much of Western History the myth is usually much more interesting than the real story. The bottom line seems to be that these animals never proved to be terribly useful in the cold, rocky, mountainous deserts of the Great Basin.

Oh, I should mention that there was one other excellent benefit to driving up to Virginia City for the camel races, and that was the chance to appreciate this vendor's tribute to the greatest hero in American military history, Elvis Presley:

Yes, that's a tasteful black-and-white picture of the "young Elvis" emblazoned on Old Glory. I think that pretty much says it all.

Blog Spamers Suck

Okay, "comments" like this, which appeared in my last posting, are really starting to piss me off:

Hi, you have a wonderful blog here! Without doubt I will return for another look ! I have a low cholesterol foods site. It just about covers everything that tallies with low cholesterol foods matters. If you have got the time, your are welcome to come and check it out.

Obviously it's just spam. The original "comment", which I deleted, contained a link to a website that at first appears to be informational, but which is actually just advertising. Now I don't mind disagreeable or even offensive comments. I don't mind being called an idiot. But it bugs the hell out of me when these spamers use my site for free advertising. I don't want to alter my 'comments' sections to stop this sort of thing, but I may have to because I'm now getting two or three of these a week.

UPDATE: Almost the minute I originally published this post, this "comment" appeared:

A fantastic blog. Keep it up. Don't miss visiting this site about how to buy & sell everything, like music on interest free credit; pay whenever you want.

That does it: I'm making comments more restrictive by adding word-verification. My apologies if this inhibits anyone who wishes to leave a real comment.

Bush Admits Responsibility; Hell Expecting Record Cold Front

So the unthinkable has happened; George W. Bush has conceded that as Chief Executive of the federal government of the United States, he is ultimately responsible for "serious problems" in the "response capability" of that government.

I personally applaud this move, even though to me it is a rather transparent attempt to stop the massive hemorrhaging in his poll numbers (some polls put his approval rating in the high 30's, which is approaching the level at which only the serious Kool-Aid drinkers are still giving him the thumbs-up). There's actually some pretty descent precedent for this; think Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs, or Ronald "mistakes were made" Reagan and Iran-Contra. I think even Bill Clinton's belated admission to an "inappropriate relationship" with a certain pudgy intern helped him a little in the eyes of the public, even if he didn't really have any choice but to come clean--if I remember correctly (I'm too lazy to research this right now), he left office with approval ratings around 60 percent; W can only dream of numbers that high at this point.

It has to be noted, however, that this sudden humility marks an almost 180 degree turn for Bush. Harry Truman, the Democrat who led the country to final victory in World War II, was fond of saying "the buck stops here." By contrast, up until today the Bush administration's response to questions about its clueless response to Katrina has been "hey, don't play the blame game--oh, and it's really the fault of local Democratic leaders." This has been the M.O. of the Bushies from day one. No matter how glaringly obvious, they simply never, ever admit to a mistake or take any responsibility for anything that goes wrong. Intelligence failures led to 9/11? C'mon, no one could have predicted that and you're unpatriotic for even suggesting it, plus it was Bill Clinton's fault. No weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Well, we all know that the whole thing was always about bringing freedom to the Iraqi people anyway. A needless war continues two and a half years after 'Mission Accomplished'? Don't worry, the insurgency is on its last legs. Unbelievably high gas prices? Blame China, and anyway those oil companies have to keep up their record profit margins somehow. Torture at Abu Ghraib? Its just the fault of a few bad apples, so shut up and Support Our Troops. For five years now, the administration has lived by the words of John Wayne in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon: "Never apologize; it's a sign of weakness."

While I am personally glad to see the leader of this country actually owning up to an obvious failure, I can't help but wonder if this, and the speech he's planning to give on Thursday in New Orleans, will have the expected effect. Those who dislike him are probably not going to be won over by a mea culpa at this point; most of us have been too thoroughly alienated by him over the last five years. But I have a hunch that he just might run afoul of a few of his stalwart supporters with this new course of action.

Having spent most of the last ten years living and traveling in very rural America (i.e. Yerington, Nevada; Coeur d'Alene, Idaho; etc.), I have had many occasions upon which to ponder the oft-noted phenomenon that Bush and the Republicans' most rabid supporters tend to be the very people who suffer the most at the hands of his deregulating, union-busting, laissez faire policies; working class white men who live and (when they can find it) work in rural and ex-urban America. There are a lot of theories as to why this is. Thomas Frank wrote a fantastic book based on the theory that right-wingers have pulled a phenomenal hoodwink on middle America, convincing them to turn their populist rage against a shadowy cabal of liberals who "really" run the country and "mock our values", with the only real effect of this upside-down populist uprising being conservative economic policies that make life even easier for the corporate over-class and much harder for the millions left to fend for themselves. I think Frank is definitely on to something, but I think that ultimately it's simpler than that; pardon my language, but I think way too many guys in the country have come to the conclusion that voting Republican has something to do with their dick.

It seems to me that in the minds of a lot of my fellow white guys, Republicans are the party of man's men, the party for self-reliant stoics who either improve their lives through means of their own or else accept their fate without complaining. To Joe Six-Pack, Republicans are the party that kicks ass and asks questions later (if at all) and never, ever, ever apologizes, even if the whole world can see that its made a mistake or two or nine hundred. In other words, Republicans are the "real men", draped in the flag and personally endorsed by Christ the Screaming Avenger. Introspection is for sissies and Frenchmen. Democrats? They're the party of gays and college professors and uppity women who don't shave their armpits. Ultimately, I think that what attracts a lot of men to Bush and his ilk is the fact that they are the administration that simply doesn't admit mistakes, even when those mistakes are glaringly obvious. Up to now Bush and his cronies have exhibited an almost pathological inability to see any of their actions as bad moves in hindsight, and I think a lot of people (white men in particular) love him for that. It's so very easy to confuse obstinacy with strength.

So we'll see if this new, vaguely contrite Bush plays well across the country. I tend to think it won't, but I am glad to see that at last he's taking a little bit of responsibility for his actions.

Dawn Patrol

This morning Melissa and I got up at 1:30 a.m. (yes, you read that right) to cover the Great Reno Balloon Race. More accurately, Melissa was covering the event for the media outlet that Melissa works for, a media outlet that will offically remain nameless but a quick glance to the 'Links' section will probably give you a hint. I went along for moral support, and just for the heck of it.

I can probably safely say that this was the first and last time I'm getting up at 1:30 a.m. to help cover a balloon race. The weather was unseasonably cold and rainy this morning. Because of the moisture, most of the events were abbreviated or cancelled outright. The two balloons above did participate in what is called the "glow show", but honestly once you've seen a few balloons lighting up in the pre-dawn darkness, you've pretty much seen them all.

The Great Balloon Race is one of those things that sort of heralds the end of summer around this neck of the woods. The only thing left at this point is Street Vibrations, and then it's the long slide into Fall.

Lagniappe

As a side note to all the terrible news coming out of there lately, and if you're interested (and I know, only me and maybe five other people on earth find this sort of thing intersting) click here to read a great article from Slate.com about how on earth people from New Orleans got to talking the crazy way they talk. Many years ago, on the first of many visits to that fantastic city, I was stunned to find that most of the people who were from there did not sound Southern at all. The closest place I could relate this completely unique accent to was Brooklyn. I know, it sounds crazy, but talk to just about anyone who grew up in Metairie and you'll see what I mean.

Mt. Rose

As the Summer winds down, the days are getting shorter and the nights are noticeably cooler. I can't help starting to think about the coming winter. I've been snowboarding for seven years now, and this end-of-summer jonesing for powder is starting to become an annual ritual for me. Even though the ski season is still at least three months away (and probably more--winter is often late in arriving to the Sierra, and anything before Christmas is considered a gift from the gods) I'm already giddy.

I'm especially excited because at long last I'll be buying a season pass this year. Like most people who ski in Reno I'm going with the Mt. Rose pass, which is available this month for a mere $300. Rose is basically Reno's municipal hill because it's only about 30 minutes away and has great terrain. Rose is great, but I have to admit that next year I'm hoping to upgrade to Northstar, or if I manage to win the lottery between now and then, Squaw Valley.

Freshmores Rule!

This morning I got the following message in the 'comments' section of the 100 Things About Me post that I have a permanent link to on the upper left.

Anonymous said...
I stumbled across this blog tonight after reading my firm's blog on updates post-Katrina. As a result of skimming this post, I'm pretty sure I went to college with you...were you at the Hill in 91 to about 95? In the "freshmore" class? If so, you're the 3rd of that group to go into law that I know of. I was there, but in that former incarnation of my self, I was a bit on the painfully quiet side. Congrats on being on the "good" side of the law, and not being a corporate shill like myself.

You hit the nail on the head anonymous, I am a proud Spring Hill freshmore (notice I don't say "former" freshmore--like the Marines, there ain't no "former" freshmores), class of '95. I'm actually a little surprised and happy that more of us didn't become lawyers. Let me know if any positions open up over there on the Dark Side. And tell me your first name anonymous, I just might remember you. After all, the Hill was not a very big place.

Fantastic Opportunity Missed

I happened to walk out onto the observation deck of the Fortress of Solitude and lean over the railing today, and I was met with the view on the right. It's a god's eye view of a barbeque. My homeowner's association is always having little get-togethers like this on the building's fourth floor deck right below my eighth floor unit, but usually only those 65 and over (which seems like about 75% of the building) ever seem go. The thing that struck me is that if I had ever had a view like this when I was, say, 12 years old, oh boy would I have had all sorts of ideas for projectiles that would liven the whole event up considerably. Never before and probably never again will such an incredible free-fire zone ever present itself. Click on the picture for a bigger version and you'll see what I mean; it's a target-rich environment out of a B-52 pilot's wet dream. But I'm 32, and even the simple idea of a loogie into the potato salad wasn't seriously contemplated. Man, am I getting old.

Rib Cook-Off

This is Melissa and Me at the Rib Cook-Off in Sparks this past weekend. Kudos to my friend Steven, connoisseur of all types of meat smeared in sauce, for taking the picture. Going to the Rib Cook-Off was what I did instead of going to Burning Man; the food was better, and it didn't cost over $300 just to get in.

You will no-doubt notice that Melissa is wearing a newly purchased pink cowboy hat. As it so happens, this hat has been discovered to have magical powers. I would tell you what they are, but as it happens they are a little, ah, off color. They will therefore have to remain a mystery since if it is nothing else, the internet is a family-friendly medium.

Who Lost New Orleans?

I know I'm not breaking any new ground here, but that's the question that has to start being asked. I've refrained from recriminations and Monday-morning-quarterbacking for a few days now, and I still think that with people still suffering and dying in the streets right here in America it may not yet be the time to start fighting about who's to blame for the almost universally-recognized inept government preparation and response. But questions are going to have to be asked at some point, because one thing has come jarringly into focus; the United States has learned very little of practical value from the attacks of September 11.

I'm no expert but it seems to me that a terrorist setting off an atomic bomb in a major American city, or some other equally horrible scenario, would have many of the same effects--rendering the area at least temporarily uninhabitable, knocking out communications and power, sparking the need for mass evactuation, etc.--and if what happened in New Orleans is any indication, we are absolutely not ready. Clearly, there is no plan. Let me repeat that: Four years after September 11, the federal government of the United States of America, led by the man who was re-elected because (among other things) 51% of the population felt he could protect us from terrorism, obviously has no plans to deal with the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack or a major natural disaster. After days of embarrassment the feds seem to have finally gotten off their butts, but for the most part the administration and their apologists' idea of leadership seems to be to try to find a way to shift the blame to local officials. Not too impressive, cowboy.

I Just Can't Help Myself

Okay, last last last picture of Kira and Avery for a while, I promise. But you gotta admit, this one is too cute for words.

The New Addition

Pictures have come from Atlanta of Avery, my sister Maureen's new baby. The Picture at left is Kira, Maureen's three-year-old, holding the new arrival. I have other pictures that are even better, but for some reason they aren't loading correctly, so this will have to do for now.

I have a lot to say about the mess on the Gulf Coast, but I feel so happy about the new baby that I don't want to mix these two subjects. For now, we're just going to be happy that Maureen and Michael have a healthy baby girl.