messiestobjects

The Bottomless Desert Puppy Well of Death Valley Cuteness

Talk about going back to the well, right? I made my first trip of the year back out to Death Valley last week, and my old pal, desert puppy, was waiting.

He really strutted the cat walk for me this time, too. Desert puppy walk? Coyote walk?

Yawning looks more threatening in the wild.

So does... whatever that is. Creepy. So ok, as usual I took a lot of pictures, and desert puppy was super cute and obliging and at one point his old pal raven even showed up. But I don't really want to insert inane commentary between every single picture so without further ado, enjoy the coyote and raven show.

Albert Einstein's Dead Letter Mailman

It's been awhile, but my doctor finally gave me the green light to go back to work. I've already had a couple of short local trips, nothing too exciting but it's nice to be on the road again. A couple of weeks ago, Julie and I went down to Maryland for a job where we had some nice dinners and a nice relaxed time. Nothing of note but I did get this shot at a statue park on Solomon's Island which showcased what happens when idle wealthy housewives have nothing better to do with their time, and think they know what art is.

I also just had a job at Fort Dix. Huh huh. But I got to swing by Princeton University and check out 112 Mercer Street, the home of Albert Einstein when he lived in Princeton. Very exciting.

While I was there, the mailman was doing his rounds and he stopped me while I was taking a picture and jokingly said that he didn't think I was allowed to take pictures of that house, that the CIA would jump out from behind some bushes and arrest me or something. I laughed at this statement for some reason and said that I thought it was a National Historic Landmark. He conceded this point but said that the lady who lives there gets crazy with people who invade their privacy, as kids often knock on their door thinking they can get a tour or something. I'd known it was a private residence and assured the mailman that I had no intention of doing anything other than snapping a quick photo. He then told me that he just the day before got a letter for Albert Einstein addressed to the house, and that it drove him crazy when that happened because, you know, damn kids. Plus he had to fill out a deceased mail recipient form or something like that every time. Look, here he is delivering mail there!

Old Photo News, Because I'm Still A Denizen Of The Couch

National Geographic accepted another photo of mine for their stock website! It's not a huge deal, as there are like millions of photos there and a surprising amount of them are kind of crappy, but hey. Prestige is prestige. This one:

One of my favorites, too. If you want to see it on their page, go to nationalgeographicstock.com and search the photo number: 1432908. It's one of those deals where I can't link directly to it for some reason. 

In case you didn't catch it before, the other photo they'd accepted from me a ways back was this one:

You can search it on the site by the photo number: 1401257. The photos are listed under two different photographer names, messiest objects & Michael H Williams, though I've no idea how that happened. I only have one account with them. Oh well.

I Juxtapose The Salton Sea With A Depressed Mood I'm Having

It was hectic holidays this go-around, but I thought it might finally be time to get back to the Salton Sea. Behind Salvation Mountain lies Slab City, an RV community for nomadic hippies. That's my only picture; I liked the community bulletin board but I don't really feel comfortable just going around shooting people trying to go about their lives, no matter how weird it seems. I suppose I'll never make a good cultural photographer.

I headed over to the Salton Sea itself; a vast inland body of salt water which is drying up at an alarming rate, apparently, leaving behind salt caked beaches.

To be honest, after spending all morning at the massively fascinating Salvation Mountain, this was more of a rest stop for me. It was creepy enough to keep me shooting, but my mind was elsewhere.

And my mind is elsewhere now. A lot's happened in the month since I was here, and I'm posting these mostly just to get them off of my pending shelf.

I guess I'm feeling a bit out of it at the start of 2012 because I'll be taking a few months off of work, and I'm sad that I won't have any travels to post about in the meantime. I broke myself on Christmas Eve.

I was playing Manhunt Dodgeball with the niece and nephews, and I have no idea how it happened but I found myself writhing on the concrete basement floor in pain. I'd torn my acl and broken my hand.

So I may or may not be getting hand surgery today, depending on how the doctor thinks my hand is healing, and I'm getting surgery on my knee in a couple of weeks. They're going to put a cadaver tendon where my acl used to be. Zombie knee. I'm going to name it Ted. I'd introduce you, but Ted's dead baby, Ted's dead.

We were supposed to go to Thailand in February to hang out with my friend Scott, who teaches Scuba. We were going to sit on the beach, drink and tell our significant others funny and embarrassing stories about each other, and scuba dive.

So that's off now. Hopefully we can still go later this year, but we'll see. It'll be hard to take these two unplanned months off from work and then turn around and ask for more time off. Anyway, that taken with Obama signing an abhorrent document into law while everyone was partying on New Year's Eve which allows the military to detain any American citizen indefinitely on the suspicion of terrorism, evidence and trial be damned, and it's shaping up to be a depressing start to 2012.

I don't believe in all that Mayan prophecy jazz, because it would require a complete lack of critical thinking on my part to do so, (If the Mayans could predict the future, why did their entire culture disappear? Why do scientists who actually study Mayan writings keep saying "Duh, it's merely a cyclical calendar which is due to reset this year, but they weren't actually predicting the end of anything other than the calendar itself!"?) but some sort of world changing, eye-opening event this year sure would be nice. It's really astonishing how fast the American end-game is approaching.

One Man's Obsession Is Another Man's Salvation Is Another Man's Lunacy... Probably The Same Man

I was back in San Diego for another class, for another week. I was online trying to figure out what to do with myself during my free time (a common work problem for everyone, I suppose) and I stumbled across a thing called Salvation Mountain while researching the Salton Sea area.

Out in the middle of nowhere is a hill. And one day in the distant past, a crazy religious nut named Leonard Knight wandered by and decided to paint it. Actually, much of it he built with adobe clay and straw, and then painted over top of it. He's been bricking, baling, and painting this place every day since 1984. He estimates that he's used well over 100,000 gallons of paint.

You might think, given my history of anti-religious rants, that I came out here with the intention of being condescending and smug about such a massive, insane ode to religious fervor. Surprisingly, especially to myself, the fact that it was a huge glob of toxic, colorful paper-mache out in the middle of the desert was the irresistible draw, and the thought that it was dedicated to a God and a religion with which I disagree vociferously barely registered.

Also, the opportunity to take pictures, as always, completely overshadowed any thought of religion the whole time I was there. I often feel a sort of physical disgust when I go into lavish European or Salt Lake City cathedrals, for example, but that was not present here at all. Salvation Mountain is bizarre, it's insane, it's folk art, it's baffling, but it is not asinine in the same way that official religious locales are.

There are several broken down old vehicles scattered about, and it's obvious that in his off days Leonard was still under a compulsion to throw paint on whatever he happened to be sitting near. The image in his head of his love letter to God was obviously an obsession; up there he's painted a 2D representation of his vision. And down here, he apparently thought the desert needed a boat.

On the side of a painted tractor, I'm guessing that some visitor left these here as stiletto fuck-me shoes don't seem to fit in with his ideas. But it makes a nice contrast.

Ok, one last scope photo... before we go into the rabbit hole. In case you haven't picked it up from the photos, the mountain seems to be painted in a sort of waterfall motif, where the blue and white lines are the water representing God's flowing Love, I suppose.

There is a path going up the front of the mountain, which you are encouraged to tread along.

It's yellow. I'm supposing that's to represent the streets of Gold in Heaven. Or perhaps he's just showing some playfulness...

Yup, playfulness. A technicolor child's dream of Heaven, perhaps.

Sea anemones? But even if Leonard thinks that there are sea anemones on the path to God, the amount of attention to the details of his vision combined with the dedication of giving his entire life to the project are astounding.

Looking out upon his works.... And I was perhaps unduly fascinated by this next shot, having always wondered what the edge of the Universe might look like, or the other side of a painting or a mirror. In Leonard's Universe, it stops right over the lip.

So right next to the mountain is another project. He has created a hollow hill of hay-bales, propped up by trees and interspersed with old car windows. Front view:

Approach view from the top side:

Rear view:

And inside is a warren of painted bales, trees, and pictures. It's bonkers.

Did I think we were entering the rabbit hole before?

Pictures can't really convey what it was like to walk through here.

But I sure did my best.

When I couldn't take any more shots down tunnels, I pointed my camera upwards. It. Just. Never. Stops.

And then I would find more tunnels.

I spent about 2 or 3 hours at Salvation Mountain, taking shots almost non-stop the whole time. I can't begin to express how many pictures I'm actually sparing you from. It's odd how one loony-bin's obsession can become yours that way.

Here is an adobe cave he built for himself to live in; a nice place to escape the heat. Only he never moved in, opting instead to stay in his trailer because he couldn't not paint the hell out of everything he did.

Here's a random clatch of his sea anemones I found off to the side somewhere, for example.

So remember how I said I came without smugness or condescension? Well, that blissful state of photgraphic being was briefly shattered near the end of my stay. The whole time I was there, I was so in awe of the visuals, and obsessed with capturing them, that I hadn't really paid any attention to the words he was writing in paint. Until I went out and around for one last round of shots and I started way back out, by the mailbox.

Erm... poor choice of wording there Leonard. Maybe that's how it's written in the Bible, but some paraphrasing might have been beneficial. All this does is make me think that you wanted Jesus to violently prison rape you. Granted, I'm sure I'm more dirty minded than you, and I have been watching HBO's OZ on dvd lately, but you've got to think about your audience, after all.

The smugness and condescension went away fairly quickly though. I may be infantile about certain things but I have learned that remaining infantile beyond the shock moment is probably unhealthy.

The problem though is that once I started paying attention to the words, that's all I could see, and it admittedly became more difficult to ignore my anti-religious feelings.

At any rate, to distract my self from getting too snarky, I wondered what paint on the ground looked like up close after baking out in the California desert sun for years.

I took a seat at the makeshift viewing area before leaving, and found yet another photo op.

And one last distance shot, because I. Just. Can't. Stop.

Hundreds of photos, and I kind of wanted to go back at night and get some more in different light. But I didn't. If I'm back out that way again, then maybe. But with this post I'm glad to get this mountain of obsession out of my system.

It's All About The Little Differences

I was in San Diego for a week and on one of my days off, naturally I headed down to Tijuana Mexico. There's not much to see there, but I wanted to get a real Mexican taco and some cheap prescription medication. Specifically I was looking for a topical creme (none of your business!) that even with a prescription here in the land of the medically fleeced is wicked expensive. Also I was thinking of picking up some prescription strength ibuprofen because the constant long flights criss-crossing the land of ridiculously high medical care costs can get tedious in my lower back and ass-bone area.

These are pretty much the only pictures I got in Tijuana, but I have more border town follies to tell. Luckily, I also visited the Mount Palomar Observatory while in Southern California and there's not much to tell about that trip so I'll punctuate my Mexican tale with those pictures instead.

So randomly, I chose one Mexican pharmacy out of hundreds; a tiny corner shop that I liked the look of. I went in and the proprietor introduced himself as Federico. I asked him if he had my topical creme (shut. up.) and he did, and then I asked him about my ibuprofen. He had it of course but it was a bit expensive for me so I opted not to get it there and maybe shop around a bit first.

So as I was purchasing the topical creme Federico pulls up a bottle from behind the counter and asks me if I like Tequila. I stutter for a moment but what is one supposed to do in such a situation? I say well sure, who doesn't? So we do a shot of tequila together. I then sputter a bit with the tequila shivers, but it's actually pretty smooth stuff and I enjoy my shot. I say well that's mighty nice of you Federico, thank you very much. He says hang on hang on, want another?

So we're hanging out for a while, chatting about this or that, doing shots of tequila in this pharmacy over the counter in broad busy daylight and I think, "Mexico is different." Then he asks me why I wanted the prescription strength ibuprofen for and I explain to him about my lower back pain and all of that. So my new friend ducks down under the counter again and pulls out a large blue pill and hands it to me with another shot of tequila and says to try this one out. I of course take it because I trust this mad chemist completely, for some reason (I'm guessing it had something to do with the tequila but I suppose we'll never know for certain). "What is it?" I ask, putting down my empty shot glass. "Vicodin my friend," he says. "Wonderful," I reply.

I had sprained my foot jogging on a hotel treadmill earlier and I quite forgot about it during my afternoon in Tijuana. I had the nicest time, walking about, buying a cup full of salty pomegranate seeds from a street vendor. I got my taco and a cerveza too, and they were delicious and I felt very good and nice.

My job in San Diego was on a Navy Base, and the next day I was talking to one of the Navy guys in the class telling him about my trip to Tijuana and he got all weird on me. He said "You went to Tijuana?!" And I was kind of like uh, yeah why not? It's like 15 minutes down the road, what's the big deal? And apparently the big deal is that the military has forbidden servicemen to go into Mexico while off duty because of all the drug cartel related violence down there. He was telling me how people are getting killed there all the time, or kidnapped, even American bystanders and I was thinking huh, I'm glad I went and had such a nice relaxed time there without knowing about all of that.

Oh Give Me A Home, Where Buffalo Roam, Where Ranchers And Photographers Play

And for the final leg of my Salt Lake City trip, I headed up to Antelope Island State Park which is in the middle of the Great Salt Lake itself. I didn't see any antelope, but there was a whole mess of Bison. I love how the above photo turned out; It's an HDR and everything came out blurry except the American Buffalo because it was so windy that I had a hard time keeping the camera steady through three exposures. I have a weird affinity for blurry pictures anyway, so this was really a bonus. I did get a clear one, and here it is but I like the blurry one way better.

I really wanted to go for a swim, and I didn't even care that it was windy and cold. But the beaches were closed and anyway it seemed like the lake was at low tide or something..? I'd have had to walk through about 100 yards of mud before getting to the water, and I was simply not prepared for that. Sigh. But here's the causeway you drive on to get to the island.

Yeah, fascinating. I like the vanishing point though.

Caught a bison checkin' me out.

They're so strange looking, like they're wearing a fur stole or the hide of an enemy they totally head-butted to death. I drove up to a nice viewpoint over the island. Got some landscape shots.

Neat. I like the next one also though because I caught some mist coming off the lake and the Sun looks cool through the clouds.

There's a bison ranch on the island too, where you can go and check out more bison. And the ranchers who are also an odd-looking species.

When I got there they were busy herding the buffalo down these chutes until they could pin 'em one by one in this metal boxy thing in order to tag 'em or give 'em a vaccine or whatever crazy ass thing it was they were doing.

I got a couple of fairly typical shots of them running away from the scary man-people.

Sigh. I need a better telephoto lens, dammit.

Check out this scary monster.

Whew, the nice bison got away from that nasty beast.

And that's it really. I had a great time bopping around the island, obsessively changing out my lenses a million times because whichever one I was using was never the right one but you know, that's the nature of being an amateur photgrapher. I was stalking this one buffalo as he was grazing, and it was only after I got home and looked more closely at my pictures that I realized I may have been in any danger. This one really must be sick of the tourists; that is a mean mean eye.

"I Don’t Know Why People Are So Keen To Put The Details Of Their Private Life In Public. They Forget That Invisibility Is A Superpower." - Banksy.

"People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you're not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.

You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.

You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don't owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don't even start asking for theirs.

Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It's yours to take, rearrange and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head" - Banksy

"The Art we look at is made by only a select few. A small group create, promote, purchase, exhibit and decide the success of Art. Only a few hundred people in the world have any real say. When you go to an Art gallery you are simply a tourist looking at the trophy cabinet of a few millionaires..." - Banksy

After checking out the aspens, I drove down into Park City, Utah. I almost decided not to even stop in town because from the road it sort of looked like a typical cutesy American main street chock-a-block full of quaint shops, which depresses me. So many American towns sell themselves as Historic or as a good tourist destination when in reality all that they have to offer is a short stroll past shop windows and Galleries full of crap. However, the Sundance Film Festival is held in Park City every year, so I figured there might be something worth seeing. I parked on a hill, walked down some steps that led to an alley which exited out onto Main Street Park City. And just as I was getting to the end of the alley, before I even really caught a glimpse of the town, I did a double, triple, quadruple take at the above work of graffiti on the wall. I recognized it immediately as a Banksy! Well, and not just because the locals framed it with a big BANKSY nameplate, neither.

"The human race is an unfair and stupid competition. A lot of the runners don't even get decent sneakers or clean drinking water. Some people are born with a massive head start, every possible help along the way and still the referees seem to be on their side. It's not surprising some people have given up competing altogether and gone to sit in the grandstand, eat junk food and shout abuse. What we need in this race is a lot more streakers." - Banksy

Needless to say, I stood around that corner for about a half hour taking shots, not even really noticing that my assessment of Park City as yet another whimsical trade street was otherwise entirely correct in my desire to use it as background.

"You're mind is working at its best when you're being paranoid. You explore every avenue and possibility of your situation at high speed with total clarity." - Banksy

Although I love Banksy's work, embarrassingly it was a bit of time before I came down off of the high of discovery to actually think about the meaning of the piece very deeply. I mean, my initial assessment was that it was a sort of anti-film industry statement and I left it at that. Then when I'd gotten off a few shots and calmed down a bit, I started to feel a bit stupid as I began to suspect that the joke was on me and my need to photograph everything, and that's the type of mania that Banksy was lampooning. I got a little shy and surreptitiously looked around to make sure that the locals, who were probably in on the joke by now, weren't laughing at me. Nothing too overt, but a girl walked past and I swear that she snorked at me.

"We can’t do anything to change the world until capitalism crumbles. In the meantime we should all go shopping to console ourselves." - Banksy

Then I decided that I had better study it more closely. I slowly began to realize that maybe it was more of a comment on places like Park City; People find a beautiful bit of nature and WHAM! Ruin it by plunking down a town full of boutique shopping, ski slopes, spas, gigantic resort hotels that resemble Hogwarts and a million vacation houses which, due to the non-stop real estate frenzy, wind up all facing and contemplating each other, thus destroying the open natural beauty that had made the area a popular destination in the first place.

"People say graffiti is ugly, irresponsible and childish. But that’s only if it’s done properly." - Banksy

Feeling satisfied that Banksy wasn't necessarily having a laugh at my expense and being happy with my pictures, I wandered through town for a bit casting internal aspersions on the stupid snorking girl and continuing to contemplate the piece. One thing that Banksy is right about for sure; seeing a work of art in context is much more thought provoking than seeing it on a wall in a highly secured building, or in a book. I imagined that there was a reason he chose to paint that particular piece in a town where the rich and famous gather in obnoxious droves every year to celebrate themselves. I eventually decided that perhaps it was a comment on art and celebrity in the media, how in the race to put something under the microscope and on film for exploitative purposes, you destroy what may or may not make it valuable. Then I saw some photographs of aspens in the shop window of a gallery. I "ooohhhed" and "ahhhed" in the privacy of my hypocritical head, and went in to see. Inside is where I learned about aspens, and also that the reason that Banksy had been in town was for the opening of his film "Exit Through The Gift Shop". He street arted the place up, and then later on the locals framed it with pride for him. I'm not exactly sure what Banksy's current stance on permanently framing his work and hanging his name on it is, but I suspect he has complicated emotions about it. The gallery attendant told me of another small piece that Banksy had left behind (and also locally framed), and where to find it.

"I'd been painting rats for three years before someone said "that's a clever anagram of art" and I had to pretend I'd known that all along." - Banksy

He's famous for his rats. They're a bit of a trademark; better than a tag, really. At any rate, by the time that I left town, I'd decided that the main piece could probably mean any or none or all of the things that I went through thinking it might, which is the great thing about seeing it live. Though the Banksy book that Julie has will always be one of my most treasured rat books, isolated on the page I got much less highly dignified contemplation out of his hundreds of great pieces than I did from seeing that one where it was meant to be seen.

"Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can’t even finish my second apple pie" - Banksy

The only other thing in town that tickled my fancy was an advert for a certain beer in a bar window. Normally I wouldn't have cared much, but being in Utah, with the Mormons and all, I was compelled.

"I used to tell everyone I met to be an artist..... I don't do that any more." - Banksy

I'm A Damn Tree-Photohugger. Don't Like It? Kiss My Aspen!

About a 30 minute drive to the East of Salt Lake City is Park City, home of world class skiing and the Sundance film festival. So of course I had to go check it out. I got sidetracked once I got there though, and found myself driving around some mountain tops, narrowly avoiding car crashes and running off of cliffs as I stared out at these amazing trees. I of course stopped and took several pictures without knowing what they were, but thinking that they were some kind of birch tree.

I found out later that day that they were Aspens. I have this thing that I do when I travel where I try not to find out too much ahead of time about the places I go, other than the basic landmarks and attractions to watch out for. I like to see things with fresh eyes and as few preconceptions as possible. Often after I've seen something on a trip, I'll look it up later and find out all the history and details about it Ex Post Facto. Usually this works out fine for me as really, for example, I don't need to know every little particular about why the Mormons built the Temple Square, or it's history, in order to take pictures of it and appreciate it for what it is; My brain retains information about places much better when I have recent first hand experience and a subsequent interest in the subject.

In this case however, I rather wish I'd known about Aspens before going. I'm fairly happy with my tree pictures here, but I probably would have spent more time tramping about the woods and tried to go more in depth with photos had I known the deal. Aspens are like, the raddest trees ever. The incredible thing about them is that what you're looking at is not a grouping of individual trees, but a single root organism with multiple extensions coming up out of the Earth, a vast system which looks like individuals above ground.

In fact, the oldest, largest, and heaviest known organism on Earth is an Aspen grove known as Pando (Latin for 'I Spread') located in the Fishlake National Forest in south-central Utah.

I didn't have time to head down there, but if I ever get another job out that way I just might make the time for it. At any rate, the Aspens were gorgeous and inspiring enough to make me get out of my car on top of a cold windy mountain road and spend not a little time snapping shots without even knowing what they were. That should tell you something even if the pictures themselves don't. I took a load of them as usual, but I'll stop with just these next four. They're all the same photo obviously, but with different RAW and HDR techniques applied.

As usual I had trouble deciding which I like best, and it's a short post about trees anyway so, why not throw 'em all out there. I'll get to Park City itself in the next post.

I Get A Little Salty In The City With The Mormons

Lately I've been splitting up posts about single trips into multiple posts, each showcasing a different leg. It allows me to have more blog content, stretching a very thin blog out to respectable proportions. However in reality my real reason for doing so is that now that I'm all into HDR photography, I take about a bazillion photos and have a serious issue with being able to cull them properly. Anyway, Salt Lake City! This is the Salt Lake Temple, home lair of the Mormons or Latter Day Saints or whatever they want to call themselves. Silly buggers.

But I will say that in some small way, walking around Temple Square pleasantly reminded me of walking through some small European town, what with the grandiose religious architecture and people walking around speaking gobbledygook. In Europe of course, the gobbledygook is merely another language which I don't understand. Here it was English, but spoken in a freakish religious dialect completely alien for all of that. I had fun telling a couple of pretty young Mormon girls who tried to bother me while I was taking pictures that I'm an atheist, and that their beliefs are based on nil evidence and a thorough brainwashing. This is the Mormon Assembly Hall.

I mean most religion-speak is nonsense, but next to the Church of Scientology, The Latter-Day Saints take the prize for wackiness without even counting the insanity of that whole golden plate thing. Check this out:

I mean, to a sane person, this reads as batshit crazy. But even looking at it within religion's own internal "logic", why did God have to restore the authority of Baptism? Given the baptismal habits of all of the other practicing sects of Christianity, it doesn't seem as though such authority was ever lost from the Earth. This is the statue in full.

Two guys go off in the woods, see John the Baptist, and found a religion. Man, I see stuff in the woods around my house all the time! Just this morning Jesus and I were all like, kicking back on a stump and smoking a bong. He told me to tell everyone that marijuana was the new sacrament of his coming reign, and ye shall recognize your brethren by the sign of "peace-out, man". Of course, you probably don't believe me, but why on Earth did anyone fall for these con-artist's similar bullshit?

Again, nonsense. If the power of God is manifest, shouldn't people be able to uh, notice it? That's kind of what manifest means. I belong to the priesthood of Messybastards. The power of reason is manifest in all my actions and therefore God has chosen me to lead the world in it's fight against the descent into madness. Can't you see the halo of God's atomic logic hovering over my head? Well, you just don't believe strongly enough, so you're going to the fiery nuthouse in the ground.

The main thing about these statues that gets me is the authoritarian motif. You're supposed to trust con artists like Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery because they are getting authority all conferred up on them by the wonky ghosts of ancient spiritual leaders. Says who? Says the con artists. And you know what? Even if any of those Ghosts appeared to me, and tried to confer authority on me, I'd tell them to take their little 2-inch authorities and shove them up their asses. I don't want their permission to tell people how to live their lives; I'd much rather people used their own brains to figure things out than just accepting the say-so of anyone, including mine.

So yeah, I suppose an anti-religious rant was inevitable. But I was pretty jazzed to go to the Mormon Tabernacle. Not that I'm a huge fan, but their music is pretty. Though I'm not sure what Exxon has to do with anything...?

There was a guy playing the organ, so I hung out for a while. Not a very ornate Tabernacle, but giant organs are cool.

The Mormons have the largest Genealogy library in the world. I went in to see if they could find my family roots in Europe, but when I told the confident library docent the story of how my great great great grandfather was a stowaway on a Portuguese ship who changed his name to Williams without ever revealing his real name to his family in the New World, his confidence slipped a bit. When I told them that my other ancestor was a horse-thief who named his oldest son after the judge who didn't hang him during the decade where all the census records burned in a fire, they gave up. Guess I really have to embrace this whole disreputable vagabond thing; seems to be a family heirloom. Here's the Salt Temple at night.

The rest of Salt Lake City was fairly uninspiring. It actually looks like a cool city to live in though. The surrounding mountains are pretty and there's stuff to do. And there are bars so it's not really a dry city, despite my misconceptions. Plus, the Mormons make up only a small portion of the population these days. Anyway like I said, I had a couple of other legs to my SLC trip so there's more to come.

On The Importance Of A High Fiber Diet

So this is one of those place holder posts which as someone with a bit of OCD I feel compelled to do since I've never let so much time go by without posting. Feel free to skip it; it only exists in service to my completion mania. It hasn't been a slow month, but I've been travelling to some places which I've already been to a bunch of times, and were also never very interesting to photograph in the first place. So rather than allow my 6th blogiversary to go by without a post, I'm going to post some pictures of the pumpkin carving party.

That Christian pumpkin is really horrified by the Satanic pumpkin, but them's the breaks on Halloween.

Anyway, it's been a super Autumnal Autumn. Our Anniversary kicked it off, and we've gone apple picking like 3 times. We may have overdone it a bit, but eating like 5 apples a day really, uh, cleans one out.

Mount Wilson Observations And Coronal Messy Ejections

Stuck in LA for three days because of mass flight cancellations due to Hurricane Irene while Julie is at home alone filling the bathtub with water and battening down the hatches, and what do you do? You find the coolest thing in LA and go there. The Mount Wilson Observatory is up the road past Pasadena, high up on top of Mount Wilson overlooking the city and as George Ellery Hale surmised in 1904, a really good spot to put an astronomical telescope or two.

This of course was before LA was a smog and light-polluted blight on the planet and, due to the natural inversion layer there which causes the temperature of the air to increase with height, was a doubly good spot as a side effect of the inversion is that Mount Wilson hosts some of the steadiest air in the country. I suppose the reason this is good for astronomical observations being that stars twinkle less and you can get a better look at them. The inversion also happens to be a major cause of smog, as it traps the noxious gases and helps keep them there, but whaddyagonnado.

But in 1904, the smog and the light pollution were not an issue and as a result some very important Astronomy was performed here, and I love to pay homage to historic scientific sites. As per my hit or miss luck with such things, I happened to arrive on the day when they conducted the very first ever paid tour of the Observatory, and as a result was among the first of the public ever to be conducted inside the building housing the 100-inch Hooker telescope, pictured in the first photo on top, but we'll get to that in a bit. Now this is a picture of a picture on display in the small museum there that tickled my funny bone:

If you are familiar with the Astronomical bestiary, you will know that pictured above is not in fact a nebula, spiral or otherwise, but a Galaxy as noted in the smaller print underneath. This picture was taken, printed, and on display here at Mount Wilson at a time before Astronomers knew about Galaxies! That killed me. They thought it was only 10,000 light years away, when in fact it is now known to be about 23,000,000 light years away, and 100,000 light years in diameter. We've come so far in just one century in our understanding of the size and scope of the Universe.

The above picture was taken inside of the 150 foot tower, (the one in the middle in the 2nd picture of this post) which is in fact a solar telescope that is still in use. As part of the first paying tour group we were allowed inside to meet an astronomer working on it, and to see some real time sun activity.

I couldn't set up my tripod in such tight quarters so this is not the clearest picture I could've got, but that is the sun, as reflected onto the viewing plate directly through the lens and 150 feet of tower. Now, I could be sensationalistic and say that those are actual sunspots that we got to see, but the fact is that what you can't see in the picture is that those spots are on a small piece of paper which he put down next to the actual, much smaller sunspots which we were able to see but which the brightness of the sun has washed out in the photo. He did this as an exercise in comparison; the big ones you can see are a copy of the largest spots ever observed at this telescope, and the ones not visible in the photo were the actually occurring at that moment, and were the size of the Earth. So those spots you can actually see there are in reality tens of times larger than our whole planet.

They had a couple of walls of this kind of Data in there, and I love that stuff. One other thing about sunspots; relative to the rest of the surface of the sun, they are much cooler and therefore appear to be black, shining far less brightly. In reality they still range in temperature from about 2727–4227 °C and would still burn the fuck out of your eyes if the sunspot light was isolated. One photo on the wall caught my attention as an example of what you can do with a little planning and a really really good telephoto lens, or an astronomical camera advantage.

Love it! What a cool photograph. They also had some other very interesting pictures hanging on one wall. Apparently Einstein and Hawking both visited on various scientific errands.

So that's how star hunting is done in LA, for real. Messiestobjects style. And so last and best was the 100-inch Hooker telescope. Obviously it's quite large; the 100-inch refers to the size of the lens. This is the building it's housed in.

In we went and up some stairs and voila, scientific glory.

Using this telescope, this fabulous beautiful piece of machinery, Edwin Hubble discovered that those Nebulae were in actuality Galaxies. Rather than oddly shaped clouds of dust and gas, they were in fact gigantic, amazing whirling structures of stars, millions and billions of stars. Structures of a size to rival what we thought previously to be the size of the entire Universe, all there was, our own Milky Way. And once again, our own personal size and place in the cosmos was reduced, yet our understanding of it made more unimaginably awe-inspiring.

This is also where Hubble and an assistant discovered the redshift, the indication that our Universe is expanding rather than static as Einstein had hoped. More than many other such places I've visited, standing underneath this historical object really gave me a glimpse of the scientific endeavor and it's awesome sense of the joy of discovery.

At any rate, it was awesome, but I still had three more nights and two full days, stuck in that helLA hole. So I decided to get out. I went down to Palm Springs, got a nice little hotel, sat in a salt water pool and jacuzzi, and ate a bunch of good food. I took no pictures because it was a dreadfully dull place and is a good example of the occasional downside of my job.

'Going In Circles' Would Be The Name Of My Travel Show

Well I finally had a job last week. Don't get me wrong, it was awesome being home for a month, being with my family, working out, gathering and cutting wood for the winter. But I definitely appreciate the balance in my life of being domestic then being on the road then being domestic then being on the road, etc. etc.

My work was actually in Ridgecrest, California. Normally I'd fly into Las Vegas and drive through Death Valley, and I was actually looking forward to it as it's one of my favorite drives and I haven't been out that way yet this year. But then I noticed on the map that if I flew into LA instead, I'd drive right through Mojave on the way to work.

Mojave Air & Space Port is of course the home of Scaled Composites, who are famous for being the design team behind SpaceShipOne, the craft which won them the Ansari X Prize for being the first company to successfully launch a privately funded, manned space flight.

And there it is. Actually it's a replica, which irritates me. The original is hanging in the Smithsonian's National Air And Space Museum right next to the Spirit of St. Louis. I was there a few years back and saw it, but it seems like it should be at Mojave, the site of it's triumph.

The other thing that irritated me is that if it's a replica, why do they shut it in a glass tomb that you're not allowed to go in? Hard to get a decent picture on a sunny day. I guess I can console myself with the HDR shots that make reflections look somewhat arty, where no art credits are deserved.

I took the 5 dollar tour of the airfield. There was no other space related stuff that I saw out there, but I saw Scaled Composite's work hangar, though it was closed. They are currently working on SpaceShipTwo in there. Which will be test flown at Mojave until it's ready for its first commercial spaceflight. Which will take place at Spaceport America in New Mexico. Which is currently under construction where I went and blogged about a few months back. It's the circle of messiestobjects, man.

Exciting, right? But what was cool about the tour is that the airport actually serves as a dumping ground for planes. Whenever airlines want to retire a plane or just store one somewhere for a while, Mojave is one of the places they do it at. Their HUGE plane yard was full of old wrecks, planes used for spare parts, and planes on sabbatical. It was totally wild and a photo shoot there would yield some fascinating gains, no question. But I wasn't allowed to take pictures, it was screamingly frustrating. Apparently the airlines don't like pictures of wrecked planes and whatnot circulating around out there because they feel its bad for their image, which is silly of course. However you know how they won't show movies on planes about bad things happening to planes, so they are famously touchy about that stuff after all.

I snuck that one photo after the tour from the road with my telephoto, which tells you nothing about how awesome the place really was. Those are resting planes, you can't even see the junkers unless you're deep in Mojave airport territory. One really fun thing about the tour: there was this couple who were on it with me and the guy was a huge plane nerd. He recognized all the different types and was ohhing and ahhing and saying stuff like "Check out that old 7blah blah something 7 fuselage just lying there! Awesome!" or "Man, I haven't seen one of those engines in years!" And his wife, who was less technically savvy was nonetheless as weird about it as he was. She was into them for different reasons: "I love those old USAir planes! I prefer the old color scheme to their new one." Or, "Oooh! There's an old Continental! Those are my favorites" (She declared those old Continentals to be her favorites at least 4 times) Or, upon seing an old Aloha Air (which no longer exists) plane; "Wow, look at the artwork on that tailfin! It looks so 70's, very groovy!" It was hysterical, but I couldn't laugh because they were very serious about it. It was like they were birdwatching and going nuts over the plummage.

Anyway, after Mojave, and on my way back to LA after completeing my work in Ridgecrest, my flight home on Saturday morning was cancelled due to Hurricane Irene. It took me hours to get someone at the airline on the phone to reschedule, and by the time I did the earliest they could get me home was Tuesday. Stuck in LA for 3 days! LA kind of sucks. I'll get to that in another post.

Sommerflaute Is What It's All About

We've hit an odd Summer lull at work and I've been off for a few weeks, and a few more to come. Luckily, there was an episode of The Hollow Geographic in my yard this morning as a young Buck came wandering through to break up the monotony.

I thought I'd also post a few 3rd stringers from the couple of months I spent in and out of New Mexico. This is a shop window in Roswell, though I don't know to what kind of shop it belonged; this is all they had on display.

And Sunspot, NM is high on a mountain overlooking the White Sands range. On the way out there I took some of those breathtaking-to behold yet pointless-in-a-photo shots of the valley.

See those white sands way off... eh. Here's a telephoto at least.

Speaking of Sunspot, I went there a second time because the first time I'd gone I got there after 5pm and the visitor's center was closed, so I wasn't able to get a magnet for my fridge. I collect magnets at US travel destinations. Shut up, it's better than collectible spoons. Also, I was able to go inside of the Dunn Solar Telescope building, so it was worth it.

They keep it very dimly lit in there, so I had to tripod and open-shutter it. But telescopes is neat. Plus, I got to watch some of the Solar Astronomers hard at work to understand solar behavior in order to, among other reasons, better predict major solar events which could massively disrupt many electromagnetic-based technologies here on Earth.

While Shopping In El Paso For Weapons To Murder Your Enemies With, Why Not Stop In At P.F. Chang's?

Adverts at Airports in military towns for weapons contractors always give me the heebie jeebies. Huntsville, Alabama is actually worse, but I got bored waiting for my baggage in El Paso.

Happy Independence Day!

Ahh, the fat of the land.

Roswell Does NOT In Fact End Very Well, Futurama.

"The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble." - Ellen DeGeneres

Third trip to New Mexico is the charm! Roswell, baby. Actually it wasn't all that. I mean, it's cool to be able to say that I went, but other than the UFO Museum and Research center, there's not a lot going on there.

Not that, as a town, they don't embrace the hell out of their notoriety. Visitors are, after all, welcome.

The whole town has crap like that all over the place. Alien head lampposts and see the mailbox?

They need to take a little more pride in their place in history.

But what kills me is that the UFO crash didn't even happen at Roswell, rather 30 miles North closer to a town named Corona. But the military base where the investigation went out from was in Roswell, so there you go.

The museum was... well full of things like this. There is a LOT of reading material in the research room, but who has time for all of that when you're just using up some free time on a work assignment? Hell, who has time for that unless you're totally obsessed anyway?

Not that I'm not intensely curious. But I'm in the camp of people who don't really think that any information that is available to the public can point with any certainty to anything, well, for certain.

I've just finished reading that new book on Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen, and nothing in it made me feel any differently. It's an excellent book, well written and full of information about Area 51 that I didn't know before, including the U2 and OXCART spy plane dramas, but her conclusion about what the Roswell incident was about is a bit... well all she's doing is telling us what some guy who used to work there told her what he was told it was.

Which, if you've read anything about the book online, you'll know is that it was a technologically advanced hover saucer piloted by surgically altered retarded children (altered by none other than Joseph Mengele himself) sent by Joseph Stalin as both a psy-op to induce panic in America and to send a message to Eisenhower that he had wack Nazi technology at his disposal too, so what up?

She calls this a simpler, more Occam's Razor-like explanation than an extra-terrestrial crash landing, but I'm not so sure about that. This explanation leaves a lot of other questions; if Stalin had such advanced hover technology back in '47, and was able to penetrate American airspace with such ease, why wasn't this technology used again or since? I'm not sure that we could have won the cold war if they were that far ahead of us in stealth technology.

Anyway, I'm not saying I believe it was an alien crash. More likely it was something we were working on, and every bit of cover and disinformation ever released about it is just that, including very probably Annie's findings. One disturbing thing she says in the book is that the real reason Area 51 has been kept so secret all these years is because atrocities in the name of National Security have been going on there since the 50's, including human experimentation. I suppose the people involved would rather the public speculated endlessly about Aliens and/or Joseph Mengele than consider for a moment that a US Government-sanctioned continuation of Nazi experiments might be going on. In fact, I much prefer to believe that it is Extraterrestrial in nature.

Knowing what we know about how the corporate-controlled military-industrial complex of a government that we have operates in public, however, I shudder to think what the reality is about how they operate in private.

They're not the Aliens man, we're the Aliens.

Oh, Write Of Me, Not "Died In Bitter Pains," But "Emigrated To Another Star!"

Who knows what myriad colonies there are
Of fairest fields, and rich, undreamed-of gains
Thick planted in the distant shining plains
Which we call sky because they lie so far?
Oh, write of me, not "Died in bitter pains,"
But "Emigrated to another star!"

- From Helen Hunt Jackson, "Emigravit" (1886)

So as promised, the high point of my second work week in New Mexico. Spaceport America. Funny story. Funny sad, not funny ha-ha. I was actually signed up to do the tour with Follow the Sun Tours during my first week in New Mexico, on Friday May 13th. Which was the very first tour they were ever going to do of the place. They called me the night before to say they had to cancel, because I was the only one signed up for the tour. My heart broke a little on that day. I begged them to let me pay extra for the privilege of being the first paying tourist of what will become the World's first private Spaceport, because how cool would that be?! But, no go. They asked me if I wanted to reschedule for Saturday, and still be in the first tour group as they had people signed up for that one, but I was flying home and couldn't do it. So that, grandkids, is how your irascible 'ol granpa was cheated out of his itty bitty spot in history. But I knew I'd be back in a week or two, so I rescheduled for that and settled for just being one of the early tourists, who probably get no historical recognition but still get to say "We were there, before everyone in the world wanted to be there."

Indeed, we were there before they were even finished constructing it! This is a view of the approach to the Spaceport, what will one day very soon be the main entrance. Where those who are wealthy enough to pay Sir Richard Branson and his company, Virgin Galactic, for the $200,000 ticket will arrive for their trip to sub-orbit on SpaceShipTwo. Sigh. Once upon a time, I was flush enough to afford a trip to the very edge of space on a Russian Mig-25 jet just outside of Moscow, but this particular ride will be out of my price range until prices come way down. Doublesigh.

This is a testing pad for vertical launch and hover landing models, I think. The tour guide wasn't allowed to stop or let us out of the vehicle while in this area apparently, so I was trying to snap shots through the window while being bounced about on gravel roads as he was giving the tour spiel so I didn't really catch everything. But yeah, the pockmarks in the concrete pad are from rocket testing. I don't know why there are rocks on top. Paperweights?

In the foreground is what will one day be the Spaceport Operations Center, and in the background, the side of the Spaceport. Here's a better side view:

They did let us get a bit closer, naturally. Here we all are, wearing our fashionable construction site tour-wear in front of the gaping entrance to the hangar which will one day house spaceships.

Spaceships! Hahahahahaha! I will come back one day, so that I can see them.

Ok, here come a few more shots of the hangar area.

See how the side facing the runway has mirrors?

Yes well, if you know me at all, you should be able to see what's coming next.

That's me in the mirror there! Standing on the entrance to the runway! Waving!

It's going to be a very pretty building. One of the cool things about touring the Spaceport during its construction phase is that we got to poke around in areas that will not be open to the public once it's open for business, such as the runway, obviously. Very soon, they will cease allowing tourists to walk out onto the runway.

Spaceport runway points! The Spaceport, by the way, is located right next to a portion of El Camino Real (The Royal Road), which was a major trade route between northern New Mexico and Mexico City from 1598 through 1882, until a railroad was built parallel to the Real in order to make the 6 month journey, well, take a bit less time. And now, the runway of the Spaceport has been built parallel to both of them. A very literal symbol of technological progression, and a striking one at that.

Unfortunately when I asked if there were any plans, even very remote plans, to build an airport near Spaceport America, I got a definitive no. There are lots of good reasons for not building an airport, including ecological issues and a nearby no-fly zone over White Sands testing range which rivals the White House's no-fly zone, but what I interpret this fact to mean is that Spaceflight at this location will always be a rich fucker's club. They did not plan this public Spaceport to ever be public enough that you can hop on a commuter from Chicago, Newark or LA to get here, and then flea-hop a quick 45 minute space ride over to Dubai or Sweden, where there are plans to build connecting spaceports. So as exciting as visiting a real live Spaceport was for me, it is only the itty bittiest of baby steps towards a future where spaceflight is as common as air travel. Still, it's more exciting than your typical Sunday drive.

Interlude: Observing The Observatory And Wandering The White Sands

On my free afternoon I headed out past Alamogordo to Sunspot, New Mexico. There is a secluded community of solar scientists there, and one of two missions for the National Solar Observatory. It was neat-o.

The other mission of the National Solar Observatory is at Kitt Peak in Arizona, where I got to go a couple of times last year. Unfortunately I got to Sunspot after the visitor's center was closed, but I was able to walk around outside and snap a few shots anyway.

This is the Dunn Solar Telescope, and it looks spooky in black and white. I framed it with the sun right behind it because I'm all apropos like that.

And the obligatory myself-in-the-mirror shot, of course.

After my science pilgrimage, I drove back to Las Cruces, stopping off at sunset in the White Sands for a few shots.

I wasn't quite in time for actual sunset, but a sandstorm was rolling in and it looked so cool these people started dancing. I think that's what they're doing. Those are dried up Yucca plants in front. I have two other nearly identical pictures of this scene, but I like them all.

I'm not good at choosing between similar pictures sometimes. I like the people dancing in the first one, but in the second I like the way the Yucca is in the middle of the sunset colors. In the next one, well it looks like some sort of romantic stock photo. Yuchsh. But still, I like it.

I stuck around a bit so I could find a Yucca plant that had live flowers because they're really neat looking, and I wasn't disappointed. Got three shots of this one, too.

They're a bit grainy; it was dark, windy, and sand-stormy so I had to have enough exposure to light the subject, but not so much that it blurred the plant because of the wind. Difficult. The graininess comes from using a high ISO, but whaddyagonnado? I like the way they turned out anyway.

See? Pretty Yucca flowers, and wavy sand.

I'll get to the high point of my trip in the next post, promise.

Get Back On That Rocket And Make Me Some Trinitite, Boy!

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner."

-Omar Bradley

So on my second work trip to New Mexico, I wanted to hit the outdoor missile museum at the White Sands Missile Range again because I hadn't taken the shot I really wanted to get the first time. So on my way in to work I gave it another shot. It's really striking how appropriate it is that the base of a giant rocket testing facility is situated right in front of the Organ mountain range. The missile display rather mirrors the mountains, don't you think?

I'm guessing that was intentional, but who knows. At any rate, it struck me ominous every time I drove by the mountains. It's as though they've been waiting all of their geologic lives for someone to come test big pointy phallic payloads of destruction at their feet.

So I keep getting really stuck thinking about the duality of the space rocket/ death missile theme going on all over New Mexico. The technology is mostly the same, but the application is as different as annihilation and salvation. And the birth of both aspects of the technology happened right here. (Actually, most of the original work happened over at Fort Bliss, but it's practically the same base as White Sands; they're adjoining) I guess there's not much to say about it, I just keep coming back to that fact in my circular thoughts.

"Hey son, check out this big ass gun. We killed a buncha commie nazi jerk-offs with this bad boy!" "Wow, Dad! Nazi jerk-offs!"

To be fair, I have no idea if that was the actual conversation. I just think it's weird to bring your kid to a museum dedicated to high tech killing machines. Maybe, like me, he's troubled by this aspect of technology and wants his son to see the park in a philosophical sense. Forgive me if my expectations for the typical American family are rather low in this regard. At any rate, they also have an inside museum which I didn't get to the first time. This next batch of photos are probably tedious, but I'm just a bit riveted here and I think they're interesting.

I like the fact that the sound effects guy from the original Star Wars flick donated a Darth Vader helmet for letting him record some sound effects there. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but why not a light saber or a spaceship model? Was he subtly commenting on the evil of fetishising death machines? Actually a Death Star model may have been more appropriate in that case, but perhaps that would be too on-the-nosey. Or, most likely, it means nothing other than, "Hey, I got this extra helmet lying around. Here you go, thanks for helping me out." But I like the symbolism there whether it was intentional or not. I mean, look at this thing; it could be the model for a death star right?

That's a model of the original A-bomb tested at Trinity. Here's a closer up of the information on the wall above it.

Such a weird period in history. Did you know that the explosion of the Nuclear bomb created a new type of mineral? Trinitite. Hard to come by for your rock collection.

They also had this duck and cover display. I'm not sure if the museum was mocking its own historical propaganda here or if they're still trying to put a serious face on it, but I feel like mocking it. Mock mock mock.

And imagine being stuck in a bomb shelter for 20 years while waiting for the radiation levels go down to a safe level with these military provided sanitation kits. Bomb shelter crapping is a complicated business.

Well that's that for now. I did more stuff but once again I've taken so many photos that I'll save it for another post.

Oh The Merry Merry Month Of May, When Random Photos Ruled The Day

May was a busy month, obviously. It really made up for a slow start to the year. I went back to New Mexico for a second work trip but before I get to that there were a few miscellaneous items that I want to catch up on. I had a job just outside of LA in between the two NM trips and before I flew home I visited an old High School friend who works for CBS. Anjali gave me the backstage tour and when we ran across the Wheel, I snorted a little bit. I didn't know I was such a Price is Right nerd, but I did spend a lot of time watching that show when I was a kid so, I guess it's kind of legendary. Anjali kindly accommodated my not-so-inner geek. Afterwards we went to some industry party that was going on; some friends of hers who own a sound studio were throwing a casino night.

When I sat down at the poker table and was apparently asking stupid questions, they asked me if I even knew how to play and I told them yeah, I've played Yahtzee. I didn't get to stay long; had a plane home to catch. But I learned that some of those LA stereotypes are waaaay ON base. On our way to the party we walked through the Farmer's Market by CBS and some pasta seller tried to pitch Anjali a terrible idea for a TV show. And then at the party when people realized I wasn't in the business, they gave me some pretty hard "who is this bumpkin?" looks... that may have been fish out of water anxiety though, to be fair, because everyone was actually pretty nice. It was really fun.

Also in May, the above photo got picked up by National Geographic for their stock photo page! It's not a BIG deal as they have like jillions of photos on that site, plus I don't have a High Res version of it, having snapped it with a disposable camera and I seem to no longer have the original photo, just the scan I made of it so all they got was a low res digital version which they have made available for free because no one will pay for such quality. But still, cool. If you want to see it on the stock photo page, go to nationalgeographicstock.com and then type 'Chiemsee' in the search bar, mine should show up in there somewhere.

And now I just have a couple of leftover shots from the first week in New Mexico of various signs I ran across. Above is the New Mexico State Road 2001; it is a very short road that leads up the hill to the International Space Hall of Fame. I kind of have to think it's a gimmick. Somebody pushed someone to get that road appellation put there.

New Mexico has some pretty existential road signs. Gusty winds may exist. They might not, who knows?! Wind is invisible so it may be the aether. No no, I get what they really mean; that it might be supergustywindy so drive with caution. It's just an odd way to word it. Maybe in Pennsylvania here we should change our signs to say "Icy Roads May Exist. They might not, if it's Summer, but they might."

A sign on the way in to the White Sands Missile Range, with the Organ Mountains in the background. Doesn't really need further comment. And that's pretty much it for my leftover photo salad. As I said I just got back from my second New Mexico trip and I'll have more on that soon. In the meantime, here's a leftover flash forward sign shot.

Yet Another Very Large Array Of Photos Of The Very Large Array, This Time At Sunset

And so after leaving the Las Cruces area, I drove the four hours back up to the San Agustin plains, and got there just in time to catch some sunset photos of the VLA. The cold opener above is an HDR I tried out and they aren't supposed to come out looking like that, but I really really like it.

I got some Plains life in just before the sun set. That deer above was headed straight away from me, so I shot him. And these cows, too.

There is nothing like standing out in a gigantic plain in the middle of nowhere with a tripod and some radio antennae at sunset.

That movie 'Contact' was filmed in part out here, and there is a scene where Jodi Foster is looking out over a canyon, with the radio dishes behind her. Yeah, that's Hollywood stupidity. There is no canyon; I looked. I hate that. Why do they always feel the need to amp up things that in reality need no amping up? If you want the VLA in your movie, film it as it is. It doesn't need a canyon to be awesome.

But HDR doesn't hurt! Actually, taking HDR shots at sunset is a tricky business. Weird colors kept popping in that aren't in any of the original bracketed photos. This next one is not HDR, but it almost looks like it is. I'm learning that not everything needs such embellishment, myself. And also how hard it is not to embellish, sometimes. Maybe I should go easier on Hollywood.

I really like this next one; there's two small line gaps in the dish where the setting sun shines through them, and echoes the reflective train tracks quite nicely. I like the continuity of theme in that; the radio signals from space track down into the dish, and get carried along the train tracks back to the receivers that interpret them.

Ok that's probably not how the signals actually get sent to the receivers, damn you Hollywood! You've corrupted the way I interpret things with your need to visualize everything dramatically! But still. Pretty.

And yes, I really like tonemapping. Sometimes the accidental byproducts are neat, such as green radio dishes. At any rate, remember when I said that there is nothing like standing out in a gigantic plain in the middle of nowhere with a tripod and some radio antennae at sunset? Well, that's nothing compared to doing it at night.

Unfortunately, the moon was really bright that night, and I had to work hard to get any stars in the photos at all.

Damn moon. At one point I tried taking a ten minute exposure, but that didn't really bring out any more stars either. Still.

You'll notice the dish is pointing at a different angles in different photos. They moved them to point at different parts of the sky every so often. I tried to get a shot that captured the motion in an interesting way, but it kept catching me by surprise. This is the best I could do.

At one point, a couple of guys with a mexican accent drove out to where I was in a dirty pick-up and told me I had to leave because the astronomers don't like it when people hang out by the dishes at night. Hope I didn't mess up any of their work! But still, I couldn't leave without at least attempting a laser light self-portrait.

Rockets And Missiles; Salvation And Destruction In The New Mexican Desert

So picking up where I left off, after leaving the VLA I headed down to Las Cruces for work. Actually, I stayed in Las Cruces but my job was in the White Sands Missile Range, just over the mountain pass 20 miles or so. Inside the base, about 100 miles north of where I entered it, is the Trinity site where the first nuclear bomb was tested. It's open twice a year for the public to tour, unfortunately one of those times did not coincide with my visit. There is a museum on base though.

An open air display of many of the missiles they've tested there over the years. What about the Bomb you ask? Here's one. You might recognize it from it's stint on that long con of a TV show, LOST. It's called the Fat Man.

Sobering. I mean, it could have actually had a plot, and then it would have been a great show, but they made their cowardly writing choices, and all we were left with was that fat bloated sorry excuse of a bombed TV show. Bomb... right, sorry, got sidetracked. At any rate, as fascinating as a "museum"consisting of a yard full of devices designed solely to exterminate as much of the human race in one shot as possible is, I did run across something a little more interesting.

I don't know if you'll be able to read that so here it is, cropped.

I would guess that they were trying to insert this into the Roswell narrative somehow, but the "first firing date" of 1966-1967 is well after the alleged UFO Crash near there so it's a clumsy attempt in that case, especially since it also seems to have abandoned the "weather balloon" story but then why bother mentioning Roswell at all? I sort of suspect that it's a bit of a psi-op, or perhaps the military folk at White Sands actually simply have a sense of humor. We'll never know, because I'm sure a sense of humor in the military is classified information.

So out in the middle of the base, just off of the public highway that runs through it, is the White Sands National Monument. It's a vast sea of sand dunes composed of white gypsum crystals, where the military base took it's name from.

Got a picture. The sand really is very white, and because it's gypsum it stays cool to the touch even at midday in a very hot sun. I walked around barefoot for a while, it was nice.

But you know, sand is sand. I drove on to Alamogordo where they have the International Space Hall of Fame, which is not sand, and which is dedicated to the less destructive aspect of rocket technology. It's always fascinated me how the two aspects of rocket science so perfectly represent the potential destruction or salvation of the human species. The ones designed for killing are meant to fly only high enough to get over their target before crashing back down in fiery armageddon, while the ones designed for exploration are meant to keep going up and up until they escape the insanity of local politics. The other more interesting thing about this inherent symbolism of rocket science is that we humans are ourselves the architects of the instruments of our own destiny, whichever way it goes. If there is ever a day of Heavenly Judgment, raining fire on us from above, it will be of our own design.

Having said that, they all crash in the experimental phase. This is a crashed V-2 rocket, designed by Werner Von Braun for the Nazis before he came over to our side. They also had a moon rock at the museum, showing that sometimes rockets do get to where they're supposed to be going.

I got to hold it thanks to an amateurish bit of trick photography. I also hit on one of the pretty scientists that worked there. She was all wrapped up in her work though. "Hey baby, can I have a job?"

One of the other museum guides who worked there was a guy named Viggy who had worked on the Hawk missiles from their inception over at Fort Bliss in Texas. He was obviously proud of that so I asked him to pose with his rocket for me.

The only other interesting thing going on at the Space Hall of fame was that Ham, the first chimp in space, is buried there. I paid my respects.

After leaving the Alamogordo area, I headed back to White Sands for work, and from there I made my way back up to the VLA for some more shots before flying home. But I'll leave it here for now.

The Very Large Array Is An Array Of Very Large Radio Antennae, Arrayed Over A Very Large Baseline On Top Of A Very Large Plain

This is the Very Large Array, in New Mexico. I had a job in the south of the state last week for five days, so I flew into Albuquerque and proceeded to head straight for the, uh, very large array of 27 independent radio telescope antennae for a visit on my way down. Get ready for many, many shots.

I didn't get there until the evening, after the visitor center was closed, but I headed over anyway to try and get some night shots. It was windy, cloudy, and cold.

So I did my best, but even with a tripod it is difficult to get clear shots in such weather at night. Black & white helps; makes things look intentionally arty, or summ'at.

HDR could even only do so much for me. But it works. However, my prize for the night came about completely accidentally. I was trying to take some long exposures, hoping to get a few stars in through the clouds (didn't wind up getting any), and I was testing different settings for them to see if I could get it to work (I couldn't). But after I'd got back to my dingy hotel room in the tiny New Mexican town of Magdalena and went through my photos, I saw that with one 30 second exposure I'd caught a meteor shower!

I certainly did not actually see the shower while taking the picture, but the exposure revealed it. I'm not sure how that works but, there you go. My regret of course is that it's such a dark, noisy picture. Had I left it exposed just a bit longer, or used a better ISO... anyway. I tried messing with it to make it look better, and this is the best I could do.

Still noisy, and I honestly can't decide which of the two is any good. But still, meteor shower points! What's weird though is that the expected meteor shower from the tail of Halley's Comet hit Earth and peaked on May 6th, whereas I took this photo on the evening of May 10th, so I'm not sure what it is we're looking at, unless it's just a random shower that nobody predicted, and nobody knew about, because I can't find any mention of news for a May 10th shower. Maybe it's just some Halley leftovers.

At any rate I got up early the next morning and headed the 20 miles back to the VLA. There are 27 (according to Wikipedia) or 29 (according to my admittedly faulty memory) independent radio dishes arrayed about the vast Plains of San Agustin, over a distance of three 13 mile tracks set in a single large Y-shape. The dishes are frequently moved from close together to spread completely out, depending on the configuration they need. Last week, they seemed to be spread completely out, making it difficult to get shots with multiple dishes in them.

But with a telephoto lens and a little determination, I did my best. How do they move them you ask? Why, by specially designed train cars of course. There's this whole process which they explain in a video at the visitor's center, and it's pretty fascinating but if I revealed everything, why would you ever want to visit the VLA yourself?

There are two of those dish transport vehicles, and they always seemed to be moving about on some mission or another. But I like this shot because it gives you some perspective on how large the dishes actually are. Just imagine a little guy standing in the man-lift there and you'll see what I mean. Plus, it's nice to have some color in one of these shots. The Plains of San Agustin (as in the winds are a'gustin'?) are beautiful, but fairly large and colorless. At least during the day, anyway.

So okay having said that, here are the obligatory HDR shots.

And I tried to get all clever with the next one. There's a balcony on one of the buildings that they don't let you go in. The stairs are on the outside, so they do let you walk up to get a slightly higher view, and there is a large window which acts as a one way mirror so that you can't see in. But it allowed me to experiment further with HDR.

As Julie noticed, in our mirror Universe, people smoke. In our mirror near-twin Universe, they do not. Also, the dummies who smoke are so primitive that they need handles to open doors. And I just like this next one. The fluorescent lights behind the mirror make it look like the dish is shooting death rays.

Well that's all I got on that morning's trip; I had to head down to Las Cruces for work. There's only so much free time on my work trips, after all. Sigh. But don't worry, I had to fly home from Albuquerque (which brought me past the VLA again!), and the area around Las Cruces held a few surprises as well, so there are more pictures to come. But this post is long enough and I got other stuff to do. I'll post some more junk later. Meanwhile, check out 'ol Radiohead, here.

An Atheist Rant Which Those Whose Hands Are Over Their Ears May Wish To Avoid.

"Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people."

-Doris Egan, House M.D., The Right Stuff, 2007

I haven't done a nice long insane rambly sea ranty in a while, and tonight I inexplicably find myself in the mood. Perhaps being stuck in Fort Bragg for three weeks in a row where there is nothing much to photograph has something to do with it, but perhaps also I can lay the cause on the doorstep of religion, my favorite whipping post.

For those of you who are facebook friends of mine, this is no surprise; other than my photo of the day, about all I've been doing over there is posting links to anti-religious videos, blogs, and news items. I've been feeling up for a fight lately. The problem is that my adversaries, those who put authoritarian belief in front of rational discourse ain't got much fight in 'em. You can't have a dialogue with those people because they haven't got a brain to stand on. Perhaps that is not fair; they do actually have brains but they've been quite thoroughly trained not to use them. I should know, I used to be a member.

In order to believe in the existence of God, any God, one must have faith. Faith is the belief in something for which there is no evidence. Fine. When I wipe my bottom after disposing of bodily waste, I use the first knuckle method. Since you will never witness this yourself, you'll have to trust me that it's true. You might not even know what the first knuckle method is, but what's important here is that it exists. I know, because I made it up. BELIEVE me when I tell you, I've felt it's presence. So you see, I have belief in certain things which can only be witnessed by an individual on a personal basis. However, if you choose to ignore my account of my VERY personal ass-cleaning method, I'll completely understand. In fact, if you want to pretend I never said it, so much the better. That's exactly how I feel about your god damned religion.

So, by expressing a belief in God, for whom there is no evidence, you've put yourself in an awkward position. More awkward than the first knuckle method in fact, difficult as that may be to imagine (don't imagine it!). You've aligned yourself with those who wish not to believe in reason. Reason, of course, is the primary tool of the mind. But this is the nature of faith, the very definition of it. "Set aside your reason, saith the lord, and believeth in this shit in this book right here. And do this not by your own impulse, but because these dudes who got that book from some other dudes, who are now dead, tell you it's the truth." Can you feel the presence of the lord in that logic? Amen!

I must say that my own progress towards rationality has been long and hard. I believed, and the illogic of the Lord did not sustain me. I searched for the Lord, and did not find him. Instead I found some used book store philosophy which slaked my thirst better than vitamin water for a time, until that too became as coca cola. Then, after discovering Carl Sagan and Joseph Campbell, I settled into a comfortable agnosticism where science was the only possible language of God, if he existed. I spent a while there, but all it took was a logical argument by a friend I've never met to convince me of the liberating joys of atheism.

If there is one thing I've learned from all of this, it's that one side will almost never convince the other. An atheist speaks the language of reasonable discourse and the religious speak the language of authoritarian "knowledge". An atheist can be convinced to change his mind on a subject through strongly reasoned logic and hard evidence, and a theist can be convinced by an impassioned emotional plea and hypnotic crowd techniques. Never the twain shall meet, as reason and faith go 'round and around and around.

One of the most overused and incorrect arguments against atheism is that one is simply switching a belief in God to a belief in no God. This is a false understanding of the situation. Atheism, in it's strongest sense, is a lack of belief. Were actual, hard evidence to come to light that God truly existed, atheists would still not become believers-in-God, they'd become knowers-of-God. In other words, we don't believe in an all-knowing deity for the same reasons we don't believe that thunder is really Thor going bowling. Because it's nonsense and there is far more evidence against religious dogma and a creator than there is evidence for it. In fact, there is NO evidence for it.

When I was a member of the Christian cult, there was a lot of talk about "knowing God" and "feeling his presence" and "answered prayers". I always wondered why, as fervently as I prayed to Jesus and as badly as I wanted to be on the side of Heaven, why did I never feel or sense those things? Why did Jesus talk to the crazy old cat lady, or the Pastor who had an affair with his daughter's best friend's Mom, or the self important and exceedingly boring old usher guy, but never to me? I was earnest, I was in need, ready to be called to battle in the old "Onward Christian Soldiers" sense.

Finally I figured it out, when I reached a certain age and began to fumblingly learn how to utilize the logical part of my brain. None of those people feel or sense those things. They want to, they try to, they convince themselves with certain self-hymnotic techniques that they do feel them, and then they go to church and Praise Jesus or Allah or David Koresh or Fred Phelps loudly in order to continue to convince themselves and those around them that they are one of God's chosen. It was the biggest scam in history, perpetuated mostly in ignorance by it's own victims; the true meaning behind my favorite fable, The Emperor's New Clothes.

It's A Beachball, It's A Ufo... No, It's SUPERMoon!

I need a better telephoto lens. Sigh. Even at it's closest point to us in 18 years, the moon is still too far away. So I'm thankful for modern cropping technology.

Better, but not perfect. Zooming in only increases the size, not the quality of course. There are a jillion better moon pictures out there, but I'm trying to take opportunities to practice night photography whenever I can.

Plus, I need something to post every once in a while. Here's a filtered moon shot I took that kinda looks like the BP logo. Bad moon!

Backyard Attractions & Photographic Actions

So not having any real exciting trips to remote locations coming up, I of course had to hit my back yard and house to practice my new HDR technique. My neighbor's barn is the closest structure to my house. The best time for multi-exposure shots 'round these parts is during the evening.

Not very spectacular shots in and of themselves, but grading out the light produces some beautiful effects huh?

My cat wandered into one of the shots, wondering what the hell I was doing and stared at me long enough to get in two out of three AEB shots in low light. Cats have scary concentration.

Tone mapping in Black & White has its advantages too. I couldn't decide which one I liked better.

Reflections are easy and fun, and proper tone mapping makes them even more-so. That little statuette is a replica of those giant statues in Afghanistan that the Taliban blew up. Jerkwads. I got it at a yard sale for a buck; figured that was a good way to make up for not getting the chance to see the originals, ever.

Puppy! She protects our house from squirrels and runs from bears. (Monster! She yelps as she pounds on the door to be let back in) That path of ice is my route to the woodpile.

In Like A Rocker, Out Like A Lamb

February was a slow month. This time of year usually is. The only trip of note I went on was to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri. Just off the highway between Fort Leonard and St. Louis in Fanning, MO on route 66, is the world's Largest rocker. Wheee-hoooo.

I didn't go into the taxidermy studio. If I'd had that kind of time, I would have gone back to the St. Louis Gateway Arch again. Oh well, next time.

However I have some exciting photo geek news. I've discovered how to merge shots of different exposures. I've known it was possible for a while, so very occasionally in the past I'd take Auto Exposure Bracketed shots (AEB) in the hopes I could figure out how to merge them one day. I never really did until recently, and sad to say I never did have the forethought to take very many AEB shots. No idea what I'm talking about? Let me explain. These next three shots of a scene in Death Valley National Park were taken as AEB; three shots of the same frame at different exposures:

And with the correct software, they are merged together to look like this!

It takes the best light from each object in the photo and puts 'em together for what is called a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image. This is an especially useful tool for instances where the light on the subject that you're photographing is just too disparate. As you see in the first three photos, when I exposed for the detail of the basalt rock, the sky and background get washed out, but when I tried to expose for the background, the basalt gets blacked out. One such common occurrence in photography are indoor shots with windows during the daytime. If you want to see what's outside as well as what's inside, HDR rules. My Den:

You'll notice that the HDR images don't look quite as sharp as a regular photo; they almost look painterly. That's just a detailing option you can use in the software. It can render the image more normal looking as well, it's just a preference. Here's my HDR Den, more normal:

I like the painterly look. It makes my less interesting photos look more interesting. Someday I hope to take an AEB photo that is interesting in and of itself. I'm excited about the software, so hopefully it will happen. In the meantime, here's another AEB shot I took way back on a Sacramento California trip.

"Astronomy Compels The [Mind] To Look Upwards And Leads Us From This World To Another"

Guess where I went again? And this time I brought my tripod. One aspect of my job that I very much appreciate (one aspect among many) is how I am able to return to the same place more than once. With some assignments it's not the greatest, but getting to return to Napa Valley, Death Valley or Kitt Peak on multiple occasions way more than makes up for multiple Nowhere, Indiana or the occasional Harrisburg, PA types of assignments. I like going some places many times because each time I go, I notice something different or have a new experience, and I get to know that place a bit better. Also, when I am somewhat familiar with where I'm going, I can make more adequate preparations.

Several things about my second visit to Kitt Peak totally ruled. As I said, a) this time I was prepared and brought my tripod, b) it was a much clearer night than on my previous visit, with no clouds or moon out, which makes the stars extremely bright and multitudinous and c) it was less windy and a bit warmer (though still quite desert-at-night chilly) and so they opened up a different telescope for us to use this time. So all around it was a totally different experience than before. The telescope we used this time was more or less the same as the other one (pictured above), except this one was housed a bit further up the hill in a flattop observatory rather than a domed one. The flattop style would have been quite dreadful on a windier night, open to the elements as it is, you see.

That flat part to the left, hanging over the red light, is the roof; it's been rolled back from the cylindrical observatory on the right. We got to see some really awesome stuff this time around. The middle star in Orion's sword stands out in my memory mainly because while it looks like a single star to the naked eye, it's actually four newborn stars surrounded by clouds of gas and dust cast off from their birth. It was quite lovely. You can see Orion in the next picture. That really bright star just above the roof-line of the Observatory is Sirius, the brightest star in the sky and only 8 light years away, and Orion is just above it, the next brightest stars in the picture being his sword. It looks like I also caught a faint shooting star, between Sirius and the telescope. Or maybe that's an airplane, who knows. I bet Astronomers really hate airplanes.

Oop, there's another one. It's a meteorite, it's an airplane, no! It's a...! Well, no it's got to be one of those two things. You decide.

I also got to see something that is apparently very difficult to see in most places due to light pollution. Kitt Peak is far away and high enough from any major city that the night sky just pops, more so than I've ever seen but less so than people could see from anywhere only 100 years ago. I know that last picture rather looks light polluted from the ground, but that's mostly just a quirk of shutter exposure. At any rate, what we were able to see was the Zodiacal Plane. It's the plane in which all of the planets orbit the sun, and the reason it's see-able is that the millions of leftover particles and gases that are trapped in the same orbit from which all of the planets emerged reflect a faint light. The really bright star just above the robot-looking weather sensor thingy is actually Jupiter, and you can see how the sky is brighter just around it.

I also got to see the double star Almach, The Eskimo Nebula, the star cluster M44 with hundreds of tiny blue stars, the cigar galaxy M82, and our docent even showed us how to find the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye. And of course, the only other thing which my camera is actually capable of taking a picture of, the Milky Way.

Although I did get this picture of Jupiter early on just around sunset. I was just playing with settings on my camera when I took it, and it's totally dull and would never make the cut in a million years except I just happened to shake my camera in just the right way to give the planet its self-referential initial.

Hee hee. Anyway, one thing I didn't mention in my first Kitt Peak post was that at the end of the evening, around 10pm, they have to lead us in a caravan down the mountain because you're not allowed to turn your headlights on as they would interfere with the Astronomers doing real work at the observatory. Parking and taillights are fine because they are not luminous enough to have an effect on the telescopes. So as they were gathering us up to go this time, I realized that I'd forgotten my tripod bag back in the flattop observatory. So while everybody else drove down the mountain, I got to wait behind for the docent to come back so he could let me in to get my bag. While I was waiting, I got a nice shot of the parking lot and everyone's taillights as they queued up and drove off. Now I'm not saying that I forgot my bag on purpose, I'm just saying that it worked out rather well for me.

So another awesome night at Kitt Peak all around. I really hope I get to go at least one more time because aside from all of the astronomical learning, I figured out a thing or two about taking night sky pictures which I didn't know before and I'd like the chance to try them out further. At any rate I'll leave you with my final picture of the night; when I got all the way down to the bottom of Kitt Peak I stopped to take a final shot which I thought was poetic, and sad.

"O Krampus! My Krampus! Our Fearful Trip Is Done...

...The whip has weathered every whack, the prize we sought is won;
The beer is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady march, the Krampus grim and daring"

-A Krampusization of the first verse of 'O Captain! My Captain!' by Walt Whitman

And so we come to it at last, Krampus fest 2010! For anyone who has been wondering just what the hell Krampus is, and why I've been making such a fuss over it for the last several posts, hopefully this one will explain our love for it. The last time I was at Krampus was in aught 6, so it was really great to hit it again at long last. Here's a distant glimpse of a pack of demons led through the lower part of town by St. Nick as they make their early house calls.

Krampus fest is awesome. In a nutshell, on every 5th of December many small mountain villages from the area around Berchtesgaden send a Krampus delegation consisting of a band of demons led by the village's St. Nick stand-in. St. Nick will usually have a couple of little girls dressed as angels following close to his side, ringing small chimes to warn of their approach. The demons come in a few different types. Some wear simple furs with a furry dog-face looking mask, and carry whips. Some wear furs with a more elaborate wooden hand-carved demon face mask, sometimes with cowbells strapped to their backs, and carry whips. And others are covered in straw, usually with the wooden masks, always with the cowbells strapped on their backs, and carry whips.

The delegations converge upon Berchtesgaden for the official Krampus opening ceremony. It was really crowded during the daytime this year, so we were unable to get close to the square where they had it, but I've seen it before so I can describe the gist of it. Basically what happens is that St. Nicholas, in an effort to make the human race behave more admirably than is it's wont, meets up with an old friend of his, a shady character named Knecht Ruprecht. St. Nicholas asks to borrow the demons that are under Knecht's control for two days and nights, that he might lead them into battle for the souls of children. The German Bundeswehr, a military outfit, supervises the handing-over ceremony. If negotiations go smoothly they promptly escort Knecht and themselves out of town, essentially handing control of Berchtesgaden over to the demons of St. Nick for the duration.

This is where it gets scary. So in order to wage war against the sins of mankind, St. Nicholas orders the demons to begin their rampage. Krampus demons, being demonic, are able to sense the sinful. Sniffing out their own kind, as such. They know if you've been naughty, and when they find you, they use the combined psychological warfare tactics of being damned scary looking, their towering Bavarian farmer-like sizes, and the maddening sound of the cowbells of hell in order to make you flee in terror. And when you flee, that's when they chase you, and use the whips.

You see they're no Disney whips, this is a serious business. They whap! you pretty hard with those things on the back of the knees or thighs, and it stings. The purpose of the whipping is to beat the sins out of you. St. Nicholas, being the kind saint that he is, wants to be able to give the little German children presents on Christmas morning and the only way to insure that he doesn't have to leave anyone out is by punishing them for the past year's sins first. It's quite an elegant system, if you think about it. No coal in the stockings, or wooden shoes or however they do it there. No child left behind. Whap!

It starts off fairly tamely in the late afternoon. The crowds of onlookers are thick, and the demon packs roam about town in fairly orderly fashion, whacking the occasional bystander who sticks out from the crowd a bit too much. The Krampus fest coincides with Berchtesgaden's Christkindlemarkt, so there are plenty of places to stop and grab a gluwein or a beer and some wurst or spätzle while shadowing a particularly fun bunch of demons. There's even a bit of time to... do... some... window... shopping?

Erm... I love it. I'm not sure if little armless goat/tree boy here has anything to do with Krampus, but for him to just sort of appear in a wood carver's window amongst other more standard shop fare is fairly indicative of how awesome Berchtesgaden is. Is he supposed to be vomiting twigs? Anyway. As the night carries on, things get a bit rowdier. The demons get drunker and start hitting harder, the crowds get thinner, and those who stay get numb from both the cold and the whippings. And drunker.

Gluhwein comes in those nice little mugs. The above scene is a demon showing a rare bit of selective craftiness. He'd reached over John there to grab the mug of gluhwein from the young lady in order to lure her away from the table, where he proceeded to whip the tar out of her. I sort of can't believe she fell for it, but she was pretty young, after all. Very young, John. [Ahem.] Shows you they do in fact know who needs a good whipping.

You may have noticed that the hands and arms of the demons are covered in a greasy soot. They tend to rub their hands over the faces of their victims, leaving a sooty hand-print. I'm not sure exactly why; logically I would guess they do this so as to leave a message for the other demons that this one has been taken care of, move along, but I haven't noticed that the demons leave previously-marked victims alone any more than anyone else. Indeed, sometimes it seems as though the mark is given to single out those who need more attention than usual, and may end the night having been beaten several times.

Young women in particular do seem to get singled out more often. But if I explore this thought it leads into uncomfortable examinations of German sexuality and the whole town seems to view this behavior as a healthy and normal outlet for the youth once a year so I suppose we'll leave it at that as no harm, no foul. Or rather; not too much harm other than a slight stinging and a few morning after bruises, no foul.

Creeeeepy. But then, this isn't supposed to be charming. It is an ancient tradition and despite the rather gleefully dark connotations of the whole thing, is actually religious in nature. As such, there are certain aspects of Krampus that should be taken seriously which, I am ashamed to admit, in my younger and more vulnerable years I did not realize. Pretty much anything goes at Krampus but the main thing is that during the festivities, the demons are in charge. It is not appreciated when some wise-ass American stands up to them. I know that sounds crazy; I mean look at these guys, who would have the nerve to stand up to them anyway?!

Well it happens. Some stupid drunk American thinks he's braver than most people and flits about, trying to steal a whip, or simply standing in the middle of the road forcing a confrontation just to display how unafraid of getting a whap! behind the knees he is. Sometimes the demon ignores him, but often, especially the later it gets, said dumb-ass American finds himself on his back on the cobblestones after having been the victim of a running tackle and shoved 15 feet through the air across the road. And then group-whipped repeatedly. Usually the victim is too stupid to realize this is a severe reprimand of his behaviour and instead mistakes it for "all in good fun". Sheesh.

One of the greatest of the worst-kept secrets of Krampus fest in Berchtesgaden is the Goldener Bär, (The Golden Bear) a solidly good German restaurant with an Italian restaurant upstairs. If you sneak through the Goldener Bär, then sneak upstairs, there is a balcony which overlooks a hidden courtyard behind the building. And in this courtyard is a sort of staging/pow wow/rest area for the Krampus demons. It is a very long, exhausting two days for these guys, dressing in heavy costumes and running around all day whipping people and ringing bells. They need the occasional break to rest up, drink some beer, howl like demons, and party it up on their own. And of course a place for me to get some good shots. Here St. Nicholas is basking in the worship of his demons.

And then, just to prove he's no prude, St. Nick instructs them to let the howl-down begin!

Austria has this brand of chocolates named after Mozart. They are dainty little bon-bons, and cardboard cutouts of Mozart displaying a box of them are ubiquitous in the Alps. Apparently, Krampus demons thought Mozart needed a good whipping this year. Off with his head!

And this seems a little dangerous to me but hay, if a demon needs his nicotine, I for one am not standing in his way. (misspelling intended, haw haw!) A flaming straw demon would have been pretty scary anyway, and I was ready, if disappointed, with my camera.

The balcony overlooking the courtyard is really a great spot. Next time we go I will try and borrow someone's video camera so I can catch all the action. The cowbells from hell, the chanting, the howling, the demonic singing. I love it! One of the demons needed to use the demon loo and came up and was trying to get by us. I think he scared Nimmer a little.

But at the end of the night, even demons need to tone it down and kick back a bit. Even from the demon pow wow, a rest in a normal pub with some human friends is occasionally needed.

As for myself, one of my favorite places to rest my whipped buns and weary feet with a beer is upstairs, at that Italian restaurant I was telling you about. They serve good European style pizza and of course wonderful German beer, but most importantly it's very warm and not usually too crowded. So Gerald, Julie and I took a break up there for some quiet replenishment when some of our friends came in for a quiet rest of their own!

The above photo was taken with Julie's camera by a demon, and believe it or not it was their idea! I don't think any of us had the courage to ask for a photo but it turns out this was a really friendly pair. They just came over and plopped down next to us and began a half-hour or so of friendly chat. Of course, they didn't speak much English and my German is minimal, but it was educational nonetheless. Julie took this one.

The demons were obviously friends. The one you've seen here is a giant Bavarian man, and would be extremely intimidating even without the getup. His friend was a much smaller man, and they made an amusing pair. Julie got this fantastic photo as well.

The smaller demon allowed Julie to try on his mask. I can't believe she asked him if she could; I was still terrified of them. Perhaps I have too many preconceptions about Krampus Nacht to be able to separate the guys wearing the masks from the traditions they represent.

When I tell people about Krampus, I get very mixed reactions. Some people think it sounds like the coolest thing ever but more often, people just think it sounds stupid. "Why would you want to let a bunch of scary men in costumes whip you?! You're weird and a little gay, dude." That always surprises me. It's an experience like none you'd ever be allowed to have in the States. I mean, people like the idea of running with the bulls, or going to that crazy tomato festival. This is along the same lines as those but much more fun in a way more primal.

Notice I got greased on the top of my head. I think they like to take advantage of such a landing deck when they can. Anyway, I hope I've managed to get across why Krampus is awesome and not stupid and a little gay to anyone reading this who might be new to the whole thing.

So that was Krampus 2010. It was awesome, and really great to see my friend Nimmer again and meet his girlfriend and his friend John, and it was great to have Gerald along as well; he was one of the few who thought it sounded awesome the first time he heard about it so it's nice to see it get appreciated. It wound up being a really fun group of people. I was bummed that other Krampus companions of years past were unable to make it, but maybe next time. However the best thing about Krampus this year was being able to share it with Julie, who has had to listen to me yammer on about it and Germany for the last 4 years and finally got to see for herself. She had a really great time and now when I yammer on about it, she can join in. She and I stayed in Berchtesgaden for two more days after Krampus in order to recuperate from three weeks on the road and a nasty bug. I'd never done that before but A) Berchtesgaden is a near ghost town after the fest and B) the perfect place to decompress at the end of a Honeymoon. The hotel Bavaria had a Turkish bath and sauna in their private spa room, and we took full advantage. And two more delicious German dinners at the Goldener Bär are nothing to pass up. Well, until next time, may visions of gluhwein and whip-bearing demons dance in our heads.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Night, I Hate To Go And Leave This Pretty Sight

And now... we have arrived. I want to sing poetry for Munich, that's how gay for it I am. My favorite city in the whole wide world. We got off the train from Nürnberg and I was able to begin extolling about the pure awesomeness of the city to Julie right there in the best train station in the world (The München Hauptbahnhof). They serve a slow-roasted half-chicken there, fondly referred to by the old AFRC-E gang (Armed Forces Recreation Centers-Europe. Sorry, I'll try not to parenthesize too often) as cheap chicken. Because it's the most delicious thing you've ever eaten and it only cost like 5 bucks. As we'd planned all year, we met a friend from Chiemsee for some cheap chicken there. Well and for Krampus, but cheap chicken first. Jeff Nimmer brought along his girlfriend Beth and his friend John, and we began our traditional meeting day. Cheap chicken at the bahnhof, then a walk down to the Marienplatz.

The last two pictures are of the New Town Hall, because it's only just over 100 years old. It faces the Marienplatz, which is what they call the main square of Munich, but it seems like every town and city in Bavaria has a Marienplatz also. But the one in Munich is definitely special. I love that building. From there we hit a few other of our favorite spots; Dahlmyer's, the tomb of Bavaria's unknown soldier, the Viktualienmarkt. Stop for a Gluhwein here and there. We skipped the traditional bacon cheeseburger at the Irish Pub as this time around as we were all coming from the States and no one was craving one. This year it's delicious, comforting German food all the way. Then it was back to the Hostel for a nap before the evening festivities.

Munich is the best city in which to begin any European travel in order to beat jet or train lag right off the bat. Arrive, stay awake as long as you can before napping for no more than two hours, at which time it's easy to make yourself get moving again because you do not want to miss an evening out at one of Munich's many awesome beer halls, (if you've only got time for one beer hall, it of course has to be the Hofbrauhaus) and a liter of beer (called a mass , pronounced moss) or three. I've heard Americans say that they don't like the Hofbrauhaus because it's too touristy, that they'd rather hit the Augustiner Haus or the Paulaner Haus, but I say that just goes to show you how little they understand Munich. You'll hear many different opinions of course, but from years and years of careful research I believe that I understand something about Bavarians; The social life of a Bavarian is all about Beer, good food, Beer, good cheer, Beer, and a big crowd of people to drink beer, eat good food, and sing good cheers with. They're like Hobbits that way. The Hofbrauhaus is full of tourists, but it is also full of Bavarian regulars who enjoy their tourists and are happy when guests come to visit. Not all Bavarians like tourists of course, but would you rather sit in a beer hall where the locals are ignoring you, or would you rather get drunk with a cheerful Bavarian? It's all personal preference, I suppose.

One of the great things about Bavarian beer halls is that tables are not private. If there's an empty space on the bench, expect for it to be filled by almost anyone. A drunken lederhosen-garbed Bavarian, a group of drunk Australian girls, a group of drunk Spanish guys, a North Carolinan matron and her daughter just off the plane, or a Bavarian gangster rapper. And you can also expect to be super best drunken friends with all of them before they leave the table. At any rate, by the time you leave, you will have no problem staggering back to your hostel and getting a good night's sleep, to awaken refreshed and on German time! You probably won't even be all that hung over either thanks to the Bavarian beer purity laws of 1516. Julie took this picture on our "walk" home from the Hofbrauhaus.

So that morning, we met another friend at the München Hauptbahnhof. I'm always trying to convince people about the awesomeness of Germany and how much fun Krampus is, and it's the rare individual who both believes me and takes me up on the invitation. Gerald had just flown in and he'd missed the traditional Munich meeting day, but was just in time to catch a regional bahn with us down to the town of Bernau, which is on lake Chiemsee where Nimmer and I onced lived and worked. Here's a shot which will likely only mean something to any Chiemseers who happen to be reading.

We froze our asses off on the ferry ride out to the Fraueninsel, a small island on the lake which has a convent founded in 782 and the tiniest, cutest little town you ever did see. Here's a stock postcard I'd pulled off the internet a while back; I never did get any aerial shots of my own.

We ate many sausage sandwiches and drank much gluhwein there at the tiniest, cutest little christkindlemarkt there that you ever did see. That tiny little island was packed though; I was afraid the weight of the crowd would sink it. We went back to the mainland and met an old Bavarian friend, Florian, at the bar he owns (the above pictured Bernauer Stub'n) for a few drinks, and then back to our rooms at Frau Hermann's place.

Our view from the rear balcony in our room at Frau Hermann's the next morning.

It's always bittersweet to tour the old stomping grounds. I love it there so much and I love to revisit, but it never lasts long enough and far too soon it's time to leave again. That morning we hopped on the train down to Berchtesgaden, where the Krampus festivites were to begin that afternoon. I love riding on trains through Bavaria... it's the most magical place on Earth. This is what the train ride usually looks like.

Passing by countless picturesque Bavarian towns which make you wish you'd been born and raised in such simple beauty. (If you're gay for Munich, then you're gay for Bavaria. That's just how it goes, I'm afraid.)

Berchtesgaden is the most amazing place though. A mountain village, nestled deep in the Bavarian Alps. You've already seen my shot of the Watzmann, but have you seen Berchtesgaden building art? It's magnificent. Did you know there were Bavarians at the crucifixion? I bet you didn't. We call him Helmut. Paying our respects to him is one of the first things we do upon arrival in Berchtesgaden. Say hello to Helmut. Hallo!

Here's the Hotel we stayed at. It's called The Hotel Bavaria, and is under new management since the last time we came. It is now run by a super awesome Bavarian couple, Wolfgang and Pietra, and their son Andre.

They didn't know that we'd been in town many many times before, and upon our arrival they warned us with very concerned looks on their faces to be careful if we went up the hill into town because there was this crazy local festival going on and it gets a bit rowdy. We grinned merrily amongst ourselves. Once we assured them that we knew all about Krampus, they let us in on a secret; a group of very special Krampus demons would be hitting the courtyard at the Hotel Bavaria early in the evening. A group of one of the oldest Krampus packs in the area were apparently hiking all the way down from some tiny mountaintop hamlet and making their first stop there, so we were welcome to join them in the courtyard for gluhwein mit schuss and cakes! So as my final Krampus teaser before the actual Krampus post, here are three shots of the beginning of the festivities. Here a Krampus demon asks a terrified littled boy if he's been good this year, as St. Nick and a little angel look on approvingly.

Krampus demons are especially fond of terrorizing young ladies. They were sort of passing this girl around like a football as she was screaming bloody Deutsche murder, but later when I looked at the pictures I had snapped she appears to be, um, enjoying the attention. Ah, Krampus.

And finally, the leader of the pack howls to the air, calling his demons to battle. The battle for the souls of wicked little children and young girls, and any man, woman, child or animal who stands in the way. Let the bell ringing and the whippings begin!

And to help with the anticipation, perhaps a teaser video of a Krampus demon bell-ringing pow wow behind the Goldener Bär restaurant.

Glückliches Neues Jahr! Wilkommen Auf Deutschland!

After Paris, I finally returned to the Fatherland. There is something special about crossing the border into Germany; I feel finally at home. Nürnberg is a nice easy train ride from Paris. We'd arrived at night, in the middle of a big snowstorm. There had been a couple of delays, but I was so happy to be traveling on Deutsche Bahn again that I didn't mind at all. This is a nice blurry shot of us about 5 minutes after being outside that night. I was using my small pocket camera and didn't realize the date stamp was turned on. Grr.

Nürnberg is the home of the largest, cutest damned Christmas Market (Christkindlmarkt) of all time. In Germany they are ubiquitous this time of year, and this was Nürnberg's 175th annual market. 175th. I've been to Nürnberg several times, and have yet to get a decent picture of the market. I'm not sure exactly why that is, except that I may be too busy enjoying it to bother trying too hard with my camera. They sell all kinds of delicious holiday treats like Lebkuchen, Wurst, and gluhwein along with various other staples such as Christmas ornaments, hats, gloves, candy, liquor, and good, solid, practical German cheer.

Nürnberg is also home to the Albrecht Dürer Haus. He was a very famous 16th century artist. This is the Albrecht Dürer square.

See the rabbit? That's one of his sculptures. Let's take a closer look.

Are those human toes? And demon baby rabbits? Dürer was kind of a nutjob. But then again so are all those mid-millenium religious artists. It doesn't seem like something that came out of the 16th century, does it? More like that H.R. Giger guy who designed the Alien.

Anyway, Nürnberg is a small town. To be savored more than photographed, apparently. Julie had her birthday there, where I totally scored points for best birthday party location ever. We there began our week of eating delicious German food with spätzle, nürnbergerwurst mit sauerkraut, and good thick beer with twice the alcohol content of American and including Bavarian State-mandated pure beer ingredients. And we took a break from the snow and cold to see the latest installment of the Harry Potter franchise at an original language version cinema there. Good good times.

So that's that. It was awesome. I'm getting all excited just reliving my time in Germany, so imagine how happy we were to actually be there. I will retire there one day, I swear. Here's the next Krampus teaser pic. The mountain is called the Watzmann, as viewed from our hotel balcony in Berchtesgaden. At the bottom of the shot you can see some Krampus demons jogging through the streets of town on their way toward the evening festivities.

They're a bit hard to see. If you click on the picture you can view it in a larger format (that's true of all the pictures I post, by the by) or, I'll post a bonus-bonus Krampus teaser shot of a closer-up. The bells, the bells!!

"All I Wanted Was To Connect My Moods With Those Of Paris. Beauty Paints And When It Painted Most, I Shot." -Ernst Haas

Despite popular belief, Parisians are not, in fact, all assholes. Every Parisian we interacted with was lovely. It wasn't my first time there either; it was my third visit to Paris and I've found that to be true each time. I think that the reason that so many Americans seem to think Parisians are jerks is because Parisians are actually quite friendly and accommodating, and as a result they lose patience really fast with people who do not return the same courtesies. Americans are typically known in Europe as rude and oblivious travelers, though in fairness I don't think we mean to be. But, and obviously I'm stereotyping us here, our habit of not trying to understand the customs or the languages of the places we travel to is fairly considered to be pretty asinine. There are cultural and geographical reasons for our seemingly built-in xenophobia and obtuseness, however when leaving your home and entering another's, it's not unreasonable for the host to expect a little understanding that things are done differently there and that while it may be their duty to make us feel welcome, it's our duty to try and fit in.

So that's our lecture for today kids. God I'm getting preachy in my old age. Aw who'm I kidding, I've always been preachy. ANYway, obviously after hitting Barcelona Julie and I night trained it up to Paris. As I said I'd visited a few times before, but Julie hadn't and as it is quite a lovely honeymoon destination, we hit that. We were there for three days. What can I say about Paris though? It's a beautiful city, with a crap ton of cool stuff to do. You might find it odd that after having said that, I pretty much only have pictures of the Sacre Coeur church to post.

There's a good reason for that. Paris was bloody cold. Actually from here on out, the rest of our trip was bloody bloody bloody bloody cold. It wasn't often that I had the gumption to pull my camera out of the bag. But the Sacre Coeur has a special signifigance for Julie and me. She's had a painting by Maurice Utrillo of a street scene on her wall in her bedroom for many years; It had belonged to her Nana and she'd always loved it. She would stare at it and wish she could enter the painting and go there, but she never knew what or where it was. Not until I once had occasion to see the painting myself whereupon I said to her "Hey, that looks like the Sacre Coeur in Montmartre, Paris. I've been in that exact spot. Cool picture."

It's possibly a little more commercial in that spot nowadays than it was in Utrillo's day. But still a cool looking scene. So of course this was one of our most important must-do's on our honeymoon. Julie said it was quite surreal to stand in this spot after all those years of staring at it and wishing she could go there, but perhaps she will wish to comment more on that herself. At any rate, of course we went back there at night when shops were closed and no one else was out, mostly because it was snowing and was bloody bloody bloody bloody cold. But very attractive.

We did do other stuff in Paris of course. But posting photos of paintings in the Louvre is rather dull. There were still a crap ton of people in the Mona Lisa room. Probably the same ones who were there last time I was there. However we did pass by proof that all of the paintings there are fake stand-ins. They train 'em right there, during normal business hours!

We also passed a window which had a really nice view of Montmartre, so I pulled out the 'ol telephoto lens.

And a bit more tele, please.

Another very, very important aspect of Paris was the food. You can not go wrong in Montmartre. We hadn't had the greatest food luck in Lisbon or Spain; the Tapas were kind of nasty. I think we just picked bad places somehow though. But everything we ate in Paris was awesome. That stereotype is absolutely true. Julie sated a yen for Foie Gras and I sated a yen for Creme Brulee, along with many other italicized satiations and some great wine. The only bad experience was at this one trendy fondue place. The fondue was delicious, but the restaurant itself was a bit unpleasant. It was tightly packed with squealing young foreigners, Julie was forced to stand on the table to get over to her seat where she became quite literally booby-trapped for the evening, and in a final indignity they served their passable house wine in baby bottles which is exactly where I drew the line. I immediately took the lid off as I have a snobby attitude toward wine which tastes of rubber nipple.

Julie apparently does not. She's much more fun than I am.

I'm not really sure what exactly the gimmick was supposed to be. So then Parisians may not all be assholes, their food may be all kinds of awesome, but they are also kind of weird sometimes. Anyway, we also hit Notre Dame and the Eiffel Tower, of course. And the catacombs. Gotta hit the catacombs. Because miles of human bones deep underground are cool.

Two-headed ogres live down there.

And that's pretty much our Paris trip. I left stuff out, such as the five story spiral staircase we had to climb three to four times a day, and the unforced evacuation of the Louvre which we did not participate in, or the Christmas concert in Notre Dame, but really those are just details which are better kept between ourselves.

One post closer to Krampus! Sorry it's taking so long to get there. Busy time of year and all that. Here's the next teaser pic.

More Travel Chanties: Oh Sevilla, Barcelona, Alhaaaaambra, España! You Were Fun But Now It's Over, Dreadful Sorry, Clementine.

We took a night train from Lisbon to Madrid. I've been on night trains in Europe before, and once from Cairo to Aswan, Egypt, and they are awesome. You get a bunk bed room with a sink. You hang out, drink some wine or whatever, pass out. Then you wake up at your destination well rested and ready to sightsee. For some reason, the Lisbon to Madrid night train wasn't so restful. I mean, we did everything right; we had a private room and a bottle of genuine Porto bottled Port Wine. (Which we learned was invented by the British in the Portugese city of Porto. They didn't like Portugese wine, so they mixed it with Brandy and voila!) Maybe I'm just getting... well certainly not older. I'm the same age I always was. Maybe just out of practice.

At any rate, all we saw in Madrid were train stations as we attempted to find a way down to Seville. They don't make it easy, the damn Spaniards. But we made it, and spent a night. We didn't like the tapas, but the old Cathedral that looks a bit like a mosque in the last two pictures was pretty. We opted not to pay the overpriced entrance fee to check out the interior, however. How's that for hard-hitting travel journalism?

This was a museum which we also didn't go in to, but I dig the lion device over the archway. Hey, we were still a bit jet and train-lagged, and we were just glad we had the energy to wander around town at all at this point, ok? So after Seville, we got an early morning train to Granada.

Again, still exhausted, and Granada was extremely stressful and confusing at first. But after hauling our packs onto many buses and over many hills, we finally found what we were looking for, the Alhambra.

To be honest, I'd never heard of the Alhambra before Julie convinced me that we had to go see it if we were going through Spain. I feel a bit confused by that now; it's like never having heard of the Louvre, or the Roman Colliseum. How does that one go under one's radar? Washington Irving lived at the Alhambra for a time and wrote a book of tales about it. And I'll be embarassingly honest once more; at first I was a bit cranky, and did not enjoy walking around it. My excuse? Again, train-lagged and we had hiked over a lot of hills already that day, and the place is HUGE.

But you can't stay cranky for long with these kinds of sights. On the one hand, the place is awe-inspiring. An aggregate of palaces and gardens, constructed by various conquerors of contrasting empires over a period of centuries. On the other hand, my inner proletariat was outraged once again by the excesses of the wealthy at the expense of the subhuman working class.

But at some point you just have to let the rage go and enjoy the views.

Or not, you know. Bitterness is a good frame of reference for the traveler. And either way, it IS beautiful. It's not like I want to visit the shanty towns of South Africa as a sightseer, or even the poorer districts of Granada. Bloody rich people.

If I seem conflicted, it's because I am. You can't walk around this planet without a healthy dose of confliction. I despise the overly wealthy, not because they're wealthy but because they seem to spend their lives and their wealth making sure that the mass of humanity gets screwed, but of course when you travel as an American, one realizes that I am overly wealthy compared to much of the world. Which is kind of sad and makes me even madder. And then I try to put it all out of my mind and just enjoy the trip.

So you know, Travel for the self-loathing! I oughtta work for Carnival or Disney. At any rate, the Alhambra was really wonderful to see. But the best part of the day was dinner. After hiking back down into the main district of Granada, I found a Doner Kebap place! Doner Kebaps are the Turkish version of Gyros and are way awesomer. They are all over Europe, but I have yet to see one in the States which is crazy. You could make a small fortune if you opened a Doner stand. One last view of the Alhambra, and then it's off to Barcelona.

We spent a few days in Barthelona. That's how they pronounce it. It's a really neat city, with loads of the usual city life kinds of things. Nightlife, sidewalk cafes, museums, etc. Our first night there though, we hit the Gaudi stuff.

Gaudi was a religious nut, and judging by his architecture at least partially insane. But you know, that's a good combo for art. They started building the Sagrada Familia cathedral in 1882, and it is still under construction, to be completed in 2026. That's freaking crazy right? But it really is an amazing looking building.

And honestly, it also looks a bit demonic. Like a big church made out of flesh. Maybe that's why I like it.

We also checked out his Casa Mila, which is awesome but I feel like it falls a bit short of his vision. I don't understand why all of the windows aren't desgned the same way as that big one on street level. The webby soap-bubbly like pattern of the door frame is awesome, and the other windows are all just, square.

The next day we hit the Picasso museum, once again at Julie's prompting. And I have to say, it did it's job. I'm a convert, I like Picasso's stuff now. I didn't really care about him much before, though I always thought that his attempts to render the idea of actual three dimensional vision rather than two dimensional representation of the third dimension onto canvas was rather awesomely nerdy, if a bit inherently flawed as a concept. But being in a room full of his weirder stuff is definitely one of the few times in my life where I actually felt wonderfully affected by art, because I'm not normally big on paintings and sculptures and such. But, you're not allowed to take pictures of his paintings, dammit.

We spent a lot of time in Barcelona just walking around and enjoying the atmosphere. I have loads of pictures but they're mostly touristy, so I'll leave off with this one.

And that's it for Spain. One post closer to Krampus! Speaking of which, here's the next teaser pic I promised.

Hey Hey, Ho Ho, We've Got To Portu-Go! ...And Other Fun Traveling Chants

Well it's been a great Honeymoon. We're on the final day or so of it, and we're taking some much deserved down time so I thought I'd get started with the posting and the pictures and the blathering. We landed in Lisbon, Portugal what now seems like a really long time ago. One branch of my family comes from there and I'd always been curious to see it. Above is a shot of what I like to imagine was the last sight of Portugal which my Great-Great etc. grandfather/uncle (however that all works) saw as he left for the New World. And below was Julie's and my first view of Lisbon, Rossio Square. We arrived here at about 6 in the morning, looking for our hotel.

As far as first views go, it was pretty weird. But cool weird, not icky weird. The water in the fountain is actually quite pink, which only added to the weirdness.

But so apparently some people who were protesting NATO had dyed the water, well not blood red but I assume that had been the intent, overnight just in time for our arrival. We thought it was supposed to be that way and were kind of wondering why people were giving us funny looks as we took a bunch of photos. We only realized later, when the cranes arrived to aid in the removal of stickers from off of the statues and people with trucks and hoses came to clean out the fountain, that something was up. Hey, we were slow on the uptake because overseas flights really take a lot out of you. That's a NATO sticker over her mouth there. I guess we thought it was supposed to be that way, or whatever.

As it turned out, after much doorbell ringing at buildings that were not in fact hotels but dwellings of sleepy and angry Portugese residents, our hotel had great view of this square, and the big obligatory European castle on the hill. So, cool.

Lisbon is a really neat city and we had a great, if bleary-eyed and jet-lagged time. There is a lot of tile work there. Most of the older buildings were covered in decorative tile, or tiles with scenes.

It was really pretty. There were a lot of stairs and hills involved, and many scenes like this as well.

Especially in the Alfama district, which is a famous area due to it's charming yet exhausting Moroccan-like medina nature. A warren of stairs, hills, junky shops, cool bars, and welcome bakeries with great espresso and port wine.

There was this elevator tower back near the Rossio disctrict that is some sort of national landmark. I mean it's pretty and everything, and we totally went up in it, but I'm not really sure what the point of it is except to charge unsuspecting tourists 5 Euros to get in when there is a perfectly short and easy set of stairs right around the corner that takes you to the exact same spot. That might seem confusing based on the below photo, but there is a bridge that leads from the rear topside of the elevator right over to the hill, which you also can't see from the front here.

Anyway, at least we got a nice sunrise overview of the city.

The obligatory European castle on the hill wasn't much to look at, being obligatory, but also, being obligatory, we hiked on up there. Got a few shots from the heights. This here is a view of the harbor, and a canon, and that's a submarine out there just passing by. Ah, small countries.

And there appears to be a smaller version of Brazil's famous Christ Redeemer statue here, right across the harbor from the obligatory European castle. I didn't bother to try and find anything out about it, let alone try to get to it, but that's why telephoto lenses are great. If you really care, I do know it's called the Cristo-Rei, is probably based on the more famous Brazilian one, (Paris did the same thing; they have a mini Statue of Liberty that I have pictures of somewhere, probably over on my ancient smugmug site) and that there's a wikipedia entry on it. And here's a picture of it.

This here is just one of those photos that, when you see it, you have to try and capture but it never turns out as cool as you'd hoped it would. There were a bunch of kitties hanging around the castle top.

I saw something at the train station that you would never see in the US (as opposed to all of those other things in Europe that you'll never see in the US, like obligatory castles and socialism, apparently) and it makes me sad. But seriously, how awesome is a book vending machine?

On our last night in Lisbon, I decided that we had to hit one of those crazy Fado clubs all the Portugese kids are raving about. Fado is a traditional style of music that involves soulful lamenting, decrepit old guitar players, bluesy-lookin' bass players, and sexy or suave young singers.

Fado apparently literally means 'fate', and they have a bunch of places in the Alfama district where they pile you in for an evening of meals with courses split up by sessions of Fado during which the waiters will shush the hell out of you if you talk or make noise or, seemingly, attempt to eat too loudly. Each session of Fado brings in a different singer, but the band stays the same. It was fairly romantic and scored me some points, which I needed to shore up on for the coming days of relentless night train travel.

So that was Lisbon. I've left out a few details, including a few about Port Wine (Which was invented in Portugal, in the city of Porto) and funny language gaffes, but I don't have photos for those and this is, after all, now pretty much only a photojournal and not a venue for my ranting and longwinded story telling. Ah, evolution.

Currently, Julie and I are still in Germany recovering from a bout of Krampus and sinus infection, but in the most luxurious way possible. More about those obviously interesting topics later. But since I took a crap ton of pictures at Krampus this year, I thought it might be nice to end the posts leading up to it with teaser photos which aren't among the ones I will likely be posting as part of my final analysis. So until next time, here are some of my favorite Krampus mask woodcarver's offerings for this year.

I Went As A Proctor, I Went To The Mountain, I Looked Through The Eyepiece, I Drank From The Coffee Urn

Kitt Peak was. Awesome. I had done Tombstone the previous day in what was originally supposed to be my only free time after a job in Fort Huachuca, but I couldn't get a plane out until Saturday so Kitt Peak was my overstay day two destination of choice.

Cartoon cactus! Kitt Peak National Observatory is about a 2 hour drive West of Tucson. It is the home of 26 telescopes, the largest array of them anywhere in the world. Included among them are one radio telescope dish which is a member of the VLBA (Very Long Baseline Array), the largest solar telescope in the world, and the first telescope used to search for near-Earth asteroids that could possibly strike us one day.

It was a holy pilgimmage. Only better, because the sense of holiness at the top of this mountain felt like something real, something tangible, and not simply mass superstitious willfull delusion. (That needs a better word; is there a word that describes The Emperor Wears No Clothes syndrome? Mass delusion, hysteria, or hypnosis don't really cut it because we need something to connotate the willfullness of it.)

There is always a very real sense of excitement when one visits such places, places where the advancement of the human race has occurred, is still occurring, and will always occur as long as there are those who use their minds rather than their emotions to peer into reality. Or at least engage in the attempt.

It's a feeling of utter joy and freedom, something I never did feel as a member of a certain religion. Perhaps, in light of my previous paragraph, I ought not to use the word 'feeling'. Obviously I don't mean that emotions are evil; though they do lead one into error quite handily, especially during investigations. One should feel one's emotions, take pleasure in them, even use them in any form of expression you might choose, but never be guided by them.

Well enough of traveller's philosophy. Suffice it to say, I prefer a big metal telescope on a mountaintop to a guru any day.

So getting back to the details of my pilgrimmage; having a whole day and night until my departure from the desert around Tucson, I decided to take part in the evening observation program which they offer nightly. It was awesome. First they take you on a brief sunset tour of a few choice spots on the peak.

Then they let us into one of the working telescope domes for a brief lecture and demonstration of stuff. You know, sciencey stuff.

But the absolute high point was of course actual observation. We got to play with one of the telescopes. A dinky one to be sure, as far as Kitt Peak scopes go, but certainly a more powerful one than I've ever had the opportunity to use before.

We got to see moon craters, a binary star system, and Jupiter's cloud bands. it was pretty freaking sweet. In the advanced observing program for amateur astronomers, they let you use their digital telescope cameras to take and keep pictures of stuff that you choose to look at. But that program costs like $500 and is a sleepover so, not in the cards for me on this trip. (Or should I say, not in the STARS for me on this trip? Yuk snort! No, no I guess I shouldn't.) Next time.

I also got to sit around and take cool night photos while other people got a turn at the eyepiece so, win win all around. I took a metric ton of these, but I'll spare you and post only the money shot.

And that's pretty much it. It was quite a hushed evening, meditative even; there's a stillness on an astronomer's mound at night, even among a group of other stargazers, that has to be experienced to be appreciated, hence all of my holy comparisons.

There was an infrared camera inside, and I couldn't resist a parting shot of myself in the monitor. Creepy right?

And now I am currently on my Honeymoon! You know, with that girl I married. It's been a great trip so far, but I just wanted to get these Kitt Peak pix up before the onslaught of European photos begin.

You Tell 'Em I'M Coming, And Hell's Coming With Me, You Hear? HELL'S COMING WITH ME!!!

It's the famous Tombstone coin-op pony! I went to Sierra Vista, Arizona for work this week. There was a mix up with our contract at Fort Huachuca there, and to make a long story short I wound up staying in the area for two days longer than I should have. So, making the best of a bad situation, I visited the towns of Tombstone and Bisbee on overstay day one.

Yet another entry in my surprisingly long-lived fascination with shadow-self self portrait portaits. Well, I suppose this new obsession of mine will die when I stop visiting such insanely sunny places. Insunly, heh huh.

Let me just say here that Tombstone, the actual town, is a bit... well it's a kitsch hole. I'll spare you the shots of the main street, which are full of shops selling genuine cowboy boots, hats, and sweatshirts with a delightful Old West flair. But I really love the Kurt Russell movie, so I'm still ecstatic to check it off my list. These guys put on a little reenactment for visitors at 14:00 every day. I got there just in time. I'm a lucky lucky little boy. I thought it would be a quick little gunfight. I mean, that's what you always hear about the OK Corral gunfight, right? That it happened quick. Well, did I call this a reenactment? More like a Passion Play. 45 damned minutes, sitting in the sun watching local theatre. Well all's well that ends well, anyway.

Bisbee is a really interesting little town. Bit of an artsy liberal haven in the middle of all those Border Patrol checkpoints. One of the students at my Fort Huachuca class recommended it to me. Very nice town to have a nice turkey avocado sandwich for lunch in, but I wouldn't have posted any pictures here except that I was walking up the street and I saw this.

Ah, sculpture! Wait, what is that shirtless bronzed railroad working man... is he..? As he stares at the Church? Nah, this needs closer investigation.

Oh, yup he is. Holding a railroad spike. Just as I suspected.

Anyway, on overstay day two, I hit the world famous Kitt Peak Observatory! But it's late; I'll get those pictures up on another post, some other day. You can't wait, I can tell.

Messiestobjects: Going Places So You Don't Have To- Or, Nothing, Haybales, And Toejam

A shadow-self self-portrait portrait in the Geographical... well you can read the sign. I was in Minot, North Dakota for work again, and I had some extra time so I drove an hour East to Rugby. The drive was monotonous. I can't believe people live out there. It's a vast cornfield of nothing. Nothing and haybales.

Nothing, haybales, and toe-jam. They seem to be proud of that. This is the local diner where I ate lunch (without the side of jam, thank you no) and which has the monument to The Center of it All in their parking lot. The obelisk is abutted by the flags of the U.S., Canada and Mexico. And wagon wheels.

Not much going on in the center of it all, really. And actually, the Geographical center of a continent is rather hard to pinpoint, and there is no official center. Rugby just happens to be within the 16-mile radius of the area where the center may actually reside. It's sort of unofficially accepted to be the center by the U.S. Geological Survey, and that poor diner needed some business. Close enough for government work, literally. Ah-merica.

So yeah, not the most fascinating of places I've been to. It's been a slow month. But I do have a trip to Arizona coming up, and then we're off for a honeymoon in the lands of our ancestors, culminating in a festive Christmas holiday of whips and gluhwein. So you'll be seeing me there.

All Rallied Up For Sanity

For the first time ever, I posted my photos and comments on facebook before blogging here about it. So here are the bad jokes again. Suffer. My sister threw me the biggest birthday party ever, with 1/1228th of the US population in attendance!

Julie picked me up at the Baltimore airport on 10-29 and we drove down to College Park, Md and spent the night. Got up early, met my sister Katie, her boyfriend Drew, and a college friend of theirs named Patrick. Got on a sardine can Metro and headed to the rally.

It was packed! We squeezed our way forward as far as we could, but we only could make it to the first monitor section, and could barely see the monitor. But we could hear just fine.

I love this one. The cop car was beeping, booping, and edging people out of it's way, and I wanted to time the sign placement just right.

Most of the mass crowd experiments that the Mythbuster guys did were kind of tedious from where we were, but the wave one was pretty cool. So was the seismic stomping but that was harder to capture in a photo.

My back was getting sore from all the chickens-in-a-coop standing, so I had to kneel down for a break.

This is the crowd waving to Cat Stevens. Or rather Jusef Islam as he calls himself now. That's right, John Stewart had CAT STEVENS sing 'Peace Train'! It was actually beautiful, and the crowd was kind of mass touched, you could feel that. But Stephen Colbert interrupted the song for a gag involving Ozzy Osbourne, and I actually got really angry about it. Pissed, actually. And I'm sure I wasn't alone. Why on Earth would you get Cat Stevens to sing and then cut him off for a stupid gag?! Shameful. They let freaking Kid Rock sing his whole song, and that was pure torture.

I feel really happy that I went. It was no Woodstock or anything, but it was really, really refreshing to see that smart, sane, polite people will show up for an event like this, in 3 or 4 times the numbers of those who would show up for a Beck rally. It made me feel like maybe the US isn't totally unredeemable, which I'm sure was John Stewart's intention. I've been feeling quite down about the state of affairs for quite some time, angry and shocked that there are so damn many willfully ignorant, racist homophobic idiots both in postions of power and among the general populace of the US. It's great to see that people who are more intelligent than FOX NEWS viewers could actually be in the majority. Or at least, not as much in the minority as it usually feels. If you haven't yet listened to John's main speech, his moment of sincerity, I highly recommend it.

I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be the flying spaghetti monster. The clean-up crew guy just looks happy because he doesn't have much work to do, picking up after such an orderly crowd.

A Post rally we-were-there shot.

A parting shot.

"She's Deeaad! Wraapped In Plaaastic!"

The Dansbury Depot in East Stroudsburg burned down! Well, like a year ago. But they'd finally decided to move the old building last week, and preserve it. For the history. So I stopped by a night or two before the move to get some nice night shots of what was left of it.

Why would any sane Stroudsburger do such an odd thing, you ask? Well, there's this photo club in the area I'm trying to break into, and this is a photo project they've been working on ever since it became clear that the Depot was going away. Big Dipper! 
So I submitted a bunch of these, but the kind lady in charge said I could post them independently if I wanted to. So here's a few of my favorites. The reddish colored photos, like the one above, are unphotoshopped. Except to shrink and tag them, of course. The bluer photos, like the next one, are those with which I messed in order to bring out the more vivid colors of the night. Big Dipper! 
I have another reason for being fond of the Dansbury Depot, even if it's a bit of a stretch to justify a photo shoot or a blog post or even a mention; It was my family's first stop in East Stroudsburg when we moved to the area in '89. For those of you who are not familiar with the area, no we did not arrive by train. It's an old train station that had been converted into a resaurant.

That's all I can come up with, I think, to talk about The Dansbury Depot. So one last shot. It's the same as the first, but I used a built-in effect from photoshop on it. I don't normally like those effects, because any artiste can push a button on a computer. Plus it can get time-consuming and I'm lazy. But I wanted to wrap the Depot in plastic before they shipped it off, so there you go.

Is Death Valley An Appropriate Blog Subject For My Final Post As A Bachelor? Or, Odd Timing But I Love You Baby!

 

It's always a struggle, trying to figure out which picture to start off a post with. It's the first one that all three of my regular occasional blog-checkers see, so it's an important choice.

  As you can see, I had yet another job in Ridgecrest, California (My eighth! I totally just looked it up), and yet another drive through Death Valley, and for only the second time I ran into Desert Puppy! 
This time instead of carjacking me, he was just hanging on the side of the road and I noticed him in time to stop and say hey. I pulled onto the shoulder, which turned out to be soft sand, which my car totally got stuck in. Took me like 15 minutes to dig myself out and pile enough rocks under the tires to scooch back onto the road. Desert Puppy just hung out and cocked a quizzical ear at me the whole time. I threw him a date, we're totally bff. 
He didn't seem to mind me getting in real close for some shots so, of course I did. I figure the next time I run into him we'll be cool enough that I can sneak him into my car and bring him home. 

I also had a bonus this trip; I saw a tarantula in the wild! The wild highways of Death Valley! So of course I screeched to a halt and played Goofy traffic cop.

I can't believe that none of the people who passed me wanted to stop and see this shit. It was awesome. Tarantulas in the wild are so much more alive than caged tarantualas, you know what I mean man? Yeah you do.

I'm not about to step on him, I swear. I just wanted to see if he'd go after it. He didn't, but neither did it deter him. Brave little toaster, there.

See? He's fine. He even creeped off into the sunset.

Rhode Trip To Nostalgia!

  I was able to go to Newport, Rhode Island last week for a few days for work. I think it's only been a few posts since the last time that I declared my love for my job. So I'm due.

I really love New England anyway, and it's been the one major hole in my work travel, so I was really excited to get this one. Newport is only about four or five hours from my house, so I drove and brought along Julie and the puppy for some seaside town fun. 

There's not really a whole lot there, sightseeing wise. The great thing about New England is more the smells and the ocean and the culture. And Newport is a very New England town. I don't like seafood, but I do like the way it smells. At least, I like the way it smells when in a seaside town. Weird right? I think it's all that good salty fresh air.

Well I was born and raised in Massachusetts by a descendant of Portugese fishermen, stowaways, and Boston horsetheives, and I worked in an Alaskan fishing town for two salmon seasons so perhaps it's the smell of nostalgia for me. But Julie has a thing for lobster so we were able to satisfy both of our seafood kinks quite well.

Newport is actually a very rich town though, with a ton of mansions. It's kind of crazy. I didn't take pictures because, as beautiful as the architecture of the Rich can be, something inside of me is a bit snobby and offensive when it comes to the idea of photographing anything that musty old American money thinks of as important. I think it's the jealousy. It's a hang-up, I'm aware of it. But there was a big fancy annual boat show in town the weekend we were there, and I managed to get a picture of that, at least.

Ack! Dammit Colorado, Don't Spring Up On Me Like That!

Went to Colorado Springs for work a few weeks back. They have this big mountain there. I hiked like a madman to the top... ok, no really I drove. It's a big mountain.

No guardrails. Steep cliffs. I think driving up was the braver way to go, quite frankly. Check out this completely unnecessary sign.

After the grueling drive, they have a nice photo-op reward for us gas-pedal hiker's achievement. And I got tired of waiting for people to move out of the way of it.

As a consolation for my lack of hard work and mountaintop crowding, I went off and made it look more lonely at the top.

At the bottom of Pike's Peak is a town named Manitou Springs. They have the Cripple Creek dulcimer shop there, and my Dad plays the dulcimer so I got a few shots for him. Apparently it's a famous shop, among those who dulce.

And in Colorado Springs, they have this place called The Garden of the Gods. There's a whole buncha pretty rocks there.

I like how this one kind of looks like some sort of giant bird-man glaring down at those guys like he's contemplating whether to peck at them or not.

A shadow-self self-portrait portrait.

A regular old-fashioned self-portrait.

And it was a fun surprise to stumble across this thing there. I didn't know that's where the famous Balancing Rock is.

Another shadow-self self-portrait portrait. I may have stumbled across my latest photo obsession here.

And there's this place called the Manitou Cliff Dwellings, where some Pueblo Indians by the tribal name of Anasazi used to live. Kind of Flintstone-looking.

But this is what kills me about America. Interesting place, interesting history, would make a really neat photo. Not to mention that it might be made into a nice quiet spot in which to contemplate earlier, more primal ways of living. So what do we do? Charge you $10 to see it (and that little row of cave condos right there? That's all there is to see) and then pave right up to it and park all of your utility vehicles right in front of it, and have a gigantic and unnecessary tourist restaurant and Kokopelli blocking your view! Screw the history, we Americans love us some Kokopelli represent.

My Travel Dustbin From June, part 1; Yosemite & Vancouver

The thing about America's National Parks is that while they tend to have breathtaking scenery, unless you're attacked by a bear or something there's very little to say about your trip.

Sure I could tell you about how I almost ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere due to my insane ocd proclivity not to want to stop at a gas station unless I have less than a quarter tank of gas left (and this happens to me frequently, unsurprisingly), but it's not really story telling material.

The other thing about America's National Parks is that pictures rarely do them justice. Especially if the taker isn't Ansel Adams. But I keep trying anyway. As you can see I really got into practicing my slow shutter shots. Difficult without a tripod.

I was away from home for 12 days in June for work; I had a job in California and then I flew directly to Seattle for a job in Tacoma. I was able to hit Yosemite National Park, Mono Lake, Vancouver British Columbia, and Mount Rainier National Park. These pictures are from Yosemite, obviously. I figure I'll get to the others in another post because I take too dang many photos as it is, and this Yosemite brings out the worst in photographers.

I only had a day in Yosemite really, so I tried to hit the important spots but it seems like there is an infinite supply of amazing vistas I probably missed out on.

I spent the night in Yosemite Valley at a place called Curry Village. They had these sort of semi-permanent tents which you weren't allowed to bring food into because apparently there's a Yogi hiding behind every tree. Yogi Bear I mean, not a hungry Yoga practitioner. They didn't let you leave food in your car either, because bears frequently carjack for food. They had these bear-proof bins outside every tent instead.

So I ate my figs and drank my wine in the dark, uncomfortably perched in the middle of tent row on top of a metal box behind a tree in my Half Lotus pose.

Also, tent walls are thin. I don't think I've ever in my life been closer to wanting to commit infanticide than I was that night in Yosemite Valley.

When I was younger I was more willing to put up with such nonsense. In fact I stayed in a nearly identical tent one night in Kruger Park in South Africa and to me at the time it didn't get better than that. But to be fair I slept really well that night, without a screaming baby accompaniment.

One other thing about Yosemite that I found to be irritating was simply how many cars and people were there. It's probably the busiest of the National Parks I've been to. They've built it to be extremely tourist-friendly, a high volume capacity infrastructure. Fast Nature for the masses. Luckily for me, I guess.

As far as my quick ride up to Vancouver from Seattle goes, the reason I threw it in this post along with Yosemite is because I didn't really get any pictures there. It was rainy, I didn't have a lot of time, and I was uninspired. I find it difficult to take vista shots of cities unless they're either A) extraordinary or B) I'm in the mood. And I didn't really feel like being in a city that day so I didn't have the opportunity to get any good walking around shots. However I did head out to North Vancouver to take a hike at Lynn Canyon. They have a suspension bridge over the canyon. Got a picture. It was a nice hike.

The Scuba Diving Was Great, But I Didn't Get To Try The Water Boarding

So I lied about not using that joke again. Screw it, I needed a title.

Anyway I don't know if you knew this, but I spent ten days at Gitmo for work recently. :) This here is a painting of an American flag and a Cuban flag in friendship on Guantanamo Bay. I found this over by the Guantanamo Bay Windward Point lighthouse on Gitmo, a historical landmark. Boy times sure have changed.

Here is the lighthouse and what I presume are some of the boats which Cuban refugees made it to Gitmo in back in the day.

And here's the lighthouse barely seen from further down the coastline. There are big gangly cacti all over the place.

One of the guys who drives me back and forth from the airport whenever I leave home for a job was in the Navy in the 50s and was stationed at Gitmo for a little while. He told me they used to hop on a train into Havana when they had leave time. Damn. I would have loved to have hopped the fence and gone to Havana, but you know, we're not allowed to have any commercial business with Cuba any more. And there's this big fence, with landmines. Which makes the butt of this Cuban cigar I found on base quite mystifying.

Gitmo is not what I expected though. It's a small self-contained city, like most American bases I suppose, and could pass for any American suburb if you leave out the iguanas running around everywhere. The housing is very 50's suburb lookin', actually. They have a shopping center, a laundromat, a car rental, a hotel, a McDonald's, a Subway, a public library in which I overheard a conversation between the librarian and a little old lady librarian from the High School library about the dearth of quality books in the schools. They even have a Girl Scouts Camp!

They have a huge Gym Complex including a really nice weight room (embarrassing to go lift weights with a bunch of giant military men but I persevered), a football field and track, baseball diamond, batting cages, skate park, & bowling alley, they had an outdoor movie theater where they show first-run movies every night for free...

I watched 'Green Zone' and 'Hot Tub Time Machine' there. Both very interesting experiences. Hot Tub Time Machine was pretty dumb, but I found myself laughing and enjoying it quite a bit. It's hard to resist the enjoyment of a good fecal matter joke in a stadium full of raucous Navy guys. I'd forgotten what seeing a comedy in a crowded theater could be like. And Green Zone... well that night the theater was fairly quiet, but surprisingly there seemed to be quite a few people there who appreciated the message. I had seen it already of course, but I was very curious to see how people who lived on a base notorious for the controversial and legally shady detention of prisoners would take a film about the recent war built on lies. The more time I spend among the military, the more I get the sense that our government is at war with itself. There are factions and factions within factions. Watching that particular movie in that particular place probably has something to do with that sense, of course. But I'm not talking about partisan bickering or political sides. I tend to feel that the Republicans and the Democrats are actually on the same side, and everything else is just a show. I think it goes on on a deeper level, and that there are sides we don't even know about.

I just can't resist those big lizard shots. I loved watching them just lumber through the outdoor seating area at Starbuck's while people blithely ignored them. (Yes, they have a Starbuck's too.) I'd be all like, "Do you guys see that?! Huh? That's a big damn lizard, just walkin' here!" And they'd be all like, "Whatever." I was hoping that this guy would actually go in the ladies room so I could wait and get a shot of some poor woman running out and screaming. No such luck.

Gitmo also has wind power! There are four of these guys on top of the tallest hill on base, but apparently only one of them is working right now. I went and stood under the one that was working, and let me tell you I wasn't expecting to have an experience like that. There is nothing like having 100 foot tall metal fan blades of death whoooomp whoooomp whoooomping directly over your head.

But you know, there are a lot of places on Gitmo where you are not allowed to take pictures. Like this one.

I was told that I was welcome to take pictures anywhere on base unless I saw one of these signs. Hopefully, taking pictures of the sign won't get me in trouble. But they do a good job of helping the people who live and work there keep the darker side of Gitmo out of sight and out of mind with all these distractions. I couldn't even figure out where the prisons were until after I'd been there for like a week, although to be fair I suppose I wasn't going out of my way too much. But on my second Scuba dive, we went out to a beach where there was a prison up on the hill, and there weren't any signs posted there so... 

Yes, they have scuba diving there too. I got to go on a couple of dives in Guantanamo Bay. Boo-yah.

It was pretty nice diving but we didn't see too much that was very interesting. A moray eel, a stingray. Here's a Gitmo Starfish.

I also got to figure out what ever happened to the Scooby Gang. Guess they stuck their noses into one too many mysteries and got their vehicle confiscated.

Scuba dooba doo!

Anyway, forgive my bad joke. But that's about all I have from that trip. It was pretty cool to get to go and see it firsthand. Not an opportunity most people get and believe me I'm aware of how cool my job is. Hopefully I can get back there one day to get my Advanced Scuba Diver license.

If It Weren't For The Fence, I Could've Sold This As A Dino-Battle

I thought I would go ahead and post this little vignette I witnessed while in Guantanamo Bay since it's going to be another week or so before I can post the rest of my Gitmo pix and junk.

Two Iguanas! One big, one slightly bigger! A battle for territory, or a chick Iguana, or who knows what! Both will survive! But one will be slightly more bloodied than the other! Who will it be? The face-off commences!

I'm In Cuba, But Oddly Enough, It Feels A Bit Like Being On An American Base.

Hi! That's me there, in Cuba! There isn't much to look at here at GITMO, but here's what I have so far. This was my first photo op after landing, as I waited for the ferry to take me over to the main side of the base. 

I have an interesting tale about my flight to GITMO actually, but I want to wait until I can get the pictures off of my phone, which I won't be able to do until I get home. Well ok it's not that interesting; I flew in a really really small plane and got to sit in the co-pilot seat, therefore getting a spectacular night view of the super long bright fence around the base. No photos of that though, unfortunately. Phone cameras are limited. But here's a shot of downtown GITMO, with a McDonald's and a church and everything.

Well I told you there wasn't a whole lot that was picture-worthy around here. I will try harder in the next week or so, promise. Here's a picture of the bay though. In case you wanted to know what it looked like.

And here's a Coast Guard ship, in the Bay. Two for one! 

There are a whole bunch of Iguanas running around here. I saw two of them today alone. This guy was just hanging out in the back yard of my hotel.

And thank you telephoto lens.

Interesting fact: Here at GITMO, Iguanas have more rights than some humans. Iguanas are an endangered species, and under American law, anyone caught harming one can be charged, fined, imprisoned, yadda yadda. A base-wide speed limit of 25 mph is strictly enforced for this reason. But you know, there are those people in that prison somewhere around here who are harmed all the time, so I hear. There are no American Laws or speed limits in the prison cells, sadly. An odd dichotomy.

Ducks! On A Pond! Douglas Firs! I'm Thinking Of Investing In A Small Piece Of Property Here, Which I'm Sure Will Be Reasonably Priced.

And they say you can never go back. Well maybe not, but you can sure hit the same co-ordinates and then dream that you're back.

And return customers based in Seattle sure doesn't hurt, either. Gave me a chance to go for an early morning hike.

The North Pacific smells like Eden. When you're deep in those woods, anyway. I just know I'm gonna get lost in those woods again tonight, Doc.

And while I was lost in those woods, I also found some other old dream haunts of ours. Big Log!

Sheriff!

Pete!

That would be the sheriff's station and the Packard Sawmill, seen from unusual angles. There was a real world cop there guarding the place from rabid Twin Peaks fans whom I attempted to reassure that I was not, in fact, one of them. When he didn't believe me I had to sneak into those woods again for some guerrilla shots.

Roadhouse! And from the more familiar angle:

And Bookhouse! Boy.

So, excellent day for dreams.

An Inevitable Post, Given That You Know I Had To Have My Say About Green Zone

  So Green Zone. I can't really speak to the larger events which this movie tries to condense into a cohesive plot-line, although I have read the book it was based on and even did a blog post on it a while back. But politics aside for the moment, I think that this movie nails it in the details.

My favorite scene is when Matt Damon, after some intense action out in the chaotic streets of Baghdad, walks out behind the Republican Palace which we were using as the US "Embassy" to meet his CIA contact by the swimming pool. The look on his face and on his men's faces is perfect. Utter confusion, as though they were wondering, "did we pass out and wake up back in the US somewhere?" That disconnect was spot on and is something I not only experienced in the Green Zone but witnessed on not a few members of the armed forces' faces in that very spot. Not that I was really ever "in the shit", but it was a pretty unreal place and having spent some time out in downtown Baghdad, the Green Zone (officially called The International Zone; Green Zone was "local" slang and I myself always preferred to call it the Interzone) was undeniably a real-life study in stark contrast. Employees of the DoD hanging out and sunbathing in speedos and bikinis, drinking beer and carrying on as though they were trying to really be in Key West, while a half mile away on the other side of mortar walls was a city in pain and disaster at every turn. That to me was what the film captures best all around, and specifically so in this scene.

The other thing the film did really well was the set detail. The embassy pool looked exactly right, as did the Saddam International Airport. The flyover shot of the Green Zone was perfect, from the Hands of Victory monument and the Iraqi Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the Republican Palace itself.

I even thought I saw my old camps in that shot, though I could have mentally added them in myself. I wonder if they used real footage there or if it was a digital recreation... either way, it looked excellent.

Another detail which I felt was right on was the sort of haphazard occupation of the Palaces in the Interzone. People would just sort of make their sleeping areas wherever there was a corner, their belongings strewn on the sides of hallways, working and living areas side by side, neo-cons in suits and soldiers in uniform, contractors and DoD employees in pocketed cargo pants and shirts all rubbing shoulders. Incidentally, on certain later occasions there were also three very out-of-place Stroudsburg rejects walking those halls wearing their rock-n-roll T-shirts (I think Jeff had a Lou Reed and Scott had a White Stripes. I may have had a ripped Pixies T-shirt at the time) and feeling like we were surrounded by pod people. Especially at lunch time when we'd sit together reading the Stars and Stripes and made fun of the daily propagandist idiocy in a dining hall otherwise full of neo-cons. We really didn't fit in there.

As for the politics of the film; a lot of critics are saying that the film has a heavy liberal bias, is anti-conservative and anti-war. Well, I don't really know when being anti-war became a bad thing, but the film anyway isn't really anti-war. The Matt Damon character is a soldier, and understands why the war was necessary... until it becomes clear that the reasons for the war were lies. He's assigned to a unit that is to search for Saddam's WMDs, which of course we all know by now never existed. It is an anti-conservative film, if by anti-conservative you mean that it's against being lied to by the Neo-cons so that we'd get behind their war like so many patriotic parrot heads. So then also it has a liberal bias, if by liberal you mean a person who dislikes having been tricked into committing murderous devastation upon a city for the sake of the Bush-Cheney agenda. It makes no claims per se on what their real agenda may have been, other than a closing shot of an Iraqi oil refinery. I myself don't really believe that this war was about Iraq's oil, or at least not only about their oil. I think what they wanted was probably a bit more far reaching than that, but until we can put those crooks on a stand, we may never really know.

One of the dumbest criticisms I've seen about the film is that it's not a new message. That we all know by now, even the Republicans, that we were lied to and that there never were any weapons of mass destruction to be found, and that this film doesn't add anything to the story and is really unnecessary. That's stupid. It's a movie, and as such all it needed to accomplish was to put the viewer inside the story it's trying to tell. If you can still make a movie about WWII, you can certainly make a movie about the invasion of Iraq without having to justify yourself beyond that criteria. As for whether or not it accomplishes that agenda, it's hard for me to say. I certainly feel like it's a complete success of a film, but that's because it only had to remind me of what it was like to be there, whereas I can't say that it succeeded for people who have never been to Baghdad or the Green Zone. Maybe it was too confusing and fast. But speaking as someone who lived there for a few years, it's the best movie I've seen yet depicting that time, that place.

The book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, does the job much better, factually and politically speaking. The film is supposedly based on this book, but I'd have to say only very loosely. The book spends a lot more time on the day to day life of the Green Zone's ruling class and their disastrously ignorant decision-making, whereas the movie is trying to condense everything that happened into a nice streamlined plot with a good guy and a bad guy. I feel like this really worked on a visceral level, but unfortunately left it open to the very valid criticism of "making it all up". We all know there was a great WMD lie, but it was probably not one single dickish neo-con general who hatched it up on his own, and I feel like the CIA was largely complicit in allowing the great lie to happen in the first place, even though the first major break in the ranks came from the CIA Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay when he announced that he'd seen no evidence of WMDs after being in theater for less than a year. If there were any good guys in the Green Zone attempting to expose the lie, (and the book does talk about a few of them) they were largely ignored, marginalized, and were not involved in many, if any, heroic action sequences. At least not that we're aware of. In fact, my favorite early whistle blower, Scott Ritter, was a UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq before the war who went on any news show that would have him in the run-up to the war and plead with America to listen to him because there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! Unfortunately he dropped off the radar pretty quickly due to inappropriate sexual conduct on the internet, and that's what happens to people who dare to speak out. (Although apparently now there is some damning video of him out there, so perhaps it wasn't merely a politically motivated discrediting move after all. We'll see.)

In any case, If you're looking for a detailed description of the insanity of the Iraq Invasion and subsequent occupation, read the book. If you're looking for a good action flick with shaky-cam and more reality than a Bourne movie via a brief exposure to what it may have been like in the Green Zone in 2003, see the movie. It's very good.

My San Diego Mission Of Religious Decommission

San Diego. Eh. I don't see what all the fuss is about. I had a job there for 7 days the other week. Julie lived there for a short time after college, so I used some miles to bring her along to give me a tour of her old stomping grounds. The thing about San Diego that sucks is that it's ALL highway. Want to go a couple of blocks away for dinner? Get on the highway. Not because it's a shortcut, but because the only roads are highways. But one thing we found that was super cool in San Diego was the Geisel Library on the San Diego campus of the University of California.

Cool right? Because he once said that if he were to ever design a building that it would look like that, it is named in honor of this guy:

The human, not the cat. You know, that one there with the hat. We happened to be there on the good Dr.'s 106th Birthday, and they had a few of his sketches on Display.

Apparently they were also going to have their annual birthday party for him out in front of the library, with punch and pie, but they canceled that this year due to some racial incidents that have recently plagued the University. It apparently began with the Compton Cookout, a frat party where guests were supposed to come dressed as racial stereotypes, and then someone put a KKK hood over the Dr. Suess statue's head, and then someone hung a noose in the library. It's all very weird and I don't understand it. I thought that California was supposed to be a bastion of tolerance? For different types of people at least, as long as they drive a hybrid, are vegetarians, and recycle, etc etc... Well I guess I was myth-taken. Between their unusually deep economic troubles, their recent vote against equal rights for homosexuals, and now this, I'd have to say that things are going downhill over there, and that's a bad sign for the rest of us, shall we say, less plastic liberals in the country. (Not to mention what's happening to public education in Texas; not that it's a surprise as such, just that every day our once great nation gets weirder and weirder and more willfully ignorant, and it's happening at an alarming rate. Dollhouse.)

All I can say is, if you're going to cancel the birthday party of the man who wrote 'The Sneetches' and 'The Butter Battle Book', well, the terrorists win again. I mean the racists! The racists win again. Whatever. Same thing. Bad people scaring good people into reacting ineffectually. (Thanks for stealing my thunder by the way, Miss Luongo. :)

Well anyway. We took a drive up the Pacific highway, which is "one of the good ones"... highways, I mean. Obviously. We stopped on an oceanside cliff in La Jolla.

Paragliding is cool. My friend Dirk, when we lived in Germany, used to snowboard all day, then strap on his paraglider and fly down to the river where his VW Van (which he called his toybox) was waiting with his kayak, and he'd kayak down the river into town. One of his less insane friends of course usually had to help him out with the logistics of that of course.

The last adventure of ours of note, besides lunch on Laguna Beach and a corona in Tijuana, was our visit to San Juan Capistrano. There's some famous mission there. You know, a church built by missionaries back in the early days of westward expansion for the purpose of bringing God's word to those stupid heathen Native Americans.

And how best to make these savages understand that God means business?

 Why stand around and be all holier than they while making them do all the laundry, of course! And then make them build the building that honors your God through slave labor!

That will teach those stupid dumbbrain injuns to not have ever heard about Jesus. Everyone knows you can not teach an injun to be holy except by showing 'em how, with ancient European holy martial art; holy-shit-I'm-so-holy-stance!

I especially love how the present day mission museum was ashamed enough of these dioramas to shove them in a back corner that I was super lucky to find but not enough to, you know, get rid of them.

So what did I learn about the San Juan Capistrano Mission?

That priests love being in authority over children of ALL ethnicity. And are very holy fucking creepy about that fact. Isn't that right, Pope Friendly? Seriously! Look at this guy! He is the best Pope ever, because he gives the creepy shivers like no other! Hey Pope Child Molester! I have a funny religious joke for you: What do you call a pregnant virgin? A fucking liar!