messiestobjects

A Ruminous Bandersnitch

    It's been a busy year, including banner trips to the Mile High City, Dublin, Alaska, and New Orleans. School kept me hella busy on top of work, and my blog pays the price. I took a lot of math classes this year, which left me without fun school papers or class arguments to post. But on the bright side, math no longer intimidates me. In fact, I've discovered that I'm actually pretty good at it. The secret, which I heartily ignored in my high school days, is to apply yourself. Who knew?

        Julie and I went out to the Starlight diner in Allentown to meet her college friend for an annual cookie exchange. Overhead was this massive flock of birds. They seemed to be flying north, but maybe they were just milling around. It made me think of something I'd read that said that, before the Europeans got here, massive flocks of birds were an extremely common sight. The pictures don't really convey the size of the flock, but I'd never seen so many in one formation.

    Nature has gotten a bit more removed in the present day, encounters with it more unusual. Not to sound like some hippie douchebag. But it was pretty cool.

    In the New Year, I'm looking forward to more cool trips—including another upcoming New Orleans-for-fun-trip—and finishing up my Associates degree with a 4.0. Also, I need to decide whether to go into deeper debt for my Bachelor's degree. The problem with online classes is that there are very few options; I haven't found an online Bachelor's degree that's anything other than a general liberal arts sort of thing or a too-specific-field sort of a thing that I'm not really interested in. I sort of would like to continue in the maths and sciences, but there don't seem to be any colleges that offer those online. Decisions decisions.

Why Is My Compass Pointing At The Ground?

    Alaska! My job rules. I had a job in Anchorage, and of course I padded it with a few extra days. First, Julie and I took a ride up north, through Denali park. Above is the typical scenery on that drive.

        Mount McKinley as seen from the town of Talkeetna, which supposedly inspired the town in Northern Exposure. We ate reindeer sausages there. I'm posting these a bit out of order as we stopped here on the way back from up north, because McKinley is a major feature of Denali National Park. Here it is from inside the park.

    Alaska is really really big. Julie had read about some hot springs up by Fairbanks, and so that was our destination for the night. Fairbanks is about an 8 hour drive from Anchorage (no stopping in Wasilla!) and Chena Hot Springs was about an hour further than that. I think that time stretches along with the land in Alaska, because I've done 9 hour drives before but holy crap, that was a never-ending drive. It was all beautiful though.

    Chena Hot Springs Lodge. Looks kinda dumpy, smells like sulfur... awesome place though. We spent the night. It's way out in the middle of nowhere and has natural hot springs, obviously, that are full of minerals and 150 degree spring water. A good long soak was the perfect ending to an Alaskan time warp drive. They have their own little airstrip there, where at night you can hang out and watch the northern lights.

    Northern lights! Big Dipper! We were a bit worried about our chances of seeing them because they say you should give it at least three nights when planning a visit in case of cloudy weather and whatnot. We had one night, and it was clear as a bell out. Whew!

    My first few shots were kinda crappy, but luckily I'm an obsessive-compulsive picture taker when something kicks my synapses in the tush. The lights got better and I improved my technique as the night went on.

    It was ridiculously cold. But we didn't care. We braved the runway and the freezing degree night with great fortitude... and a bottle of Tullamore Dew. Holy shit we got wasted watching the lights. We didn't even know it until later when we went inside for a break to warm up a bit. It was so cold and the view was so amazing that we didn't feel it, and it was so dark we couldn't actually see how much we were drinking... we'd been sipping it like lukewarm gluhwine to stay warm. Once we actually did warm up a bit, it was like we'd fallen into some kind of living painting.

    I took hundreds of these of course, but I'll try and pare it down a bit. That's a shooting star up there, headed straight for that crazy inter-dimensional portal.

    And that's an annoying plane that got in my shot, or some kind of spaceballish spaceship!

    And another one, along with some annoying other photographer shining his stupid red light so he could see something stupid on the ground. Asshat. It does sort of all add something to the photo, but I wish I could have seen this particular configuration without all the extra noise. By the time I was able to bulb another shot off, the lights had of course altered, as they do.

    Still pretty cool. Speaking of northern light movement, it was pretty spectacular. Mostly, they undulated rather slowly, like clouds, and if you're watching them the movement seems glacial but if you look away for a moment and look back they may be in a very different configuration. Except for this one time: there was a spread of green and red lights high up that sort of looked like a curtain, not moving much, and then suddenly as we were watching, they TOTALLY SHIMMERED, really fast too, like the curtain was moving to open or close. It was wild. We were totally enthralled until a guy from mexico who was visiting decided to inform us that "they were better last night." Hey asshat number two, are you trying to make me anti-immigration or something?

    Last one. Different angle, but I like the way it looks like the woods are on green fire. I have so many more and they're all awesome. The next morning we got up, perhaps still a tad drunk, and once again found that a nice soak in a natural hot spring is a wonderful cure-all. Then we made the drive back down south. Took a detour in Denali. That was crazy. Everything in Denali was closed and we needed gas. We made it to the little town of Denali and luckily the gas station was open... barely. There was nothing left on the shelves of the convenience store and a girl came running out with a box full of products, shoved it in the back of a truck and ran back in while another guy came running out with another box. It was like armageddon. They said that it was the last day they were even selling gas... Winter Is Coming! Anyway, we made it and spent the night in Talkeetna, then headed down to Anchorage for work. Here's Anchorage from our hotel.

    Then I had to actually go to work. Ho hum. But then, after work, we had a full day before catching our red-eye home, so we drove down the Seward peninsula! Beautiful scenery, amazing vistas, blah blah blah. We stopped at the Exit glacier just outside of seward, and read a helpful info-graphic before hiking up to it.

    Wise advice that's surprisingly applicable to many situations... pretty much if anything starts to eat you, you should fight back!

    Just the tip of the glacier. Pretty nice.

    Hiya!

    Much bigger than it looks from up close.

        Then we stopped in at Seward for lunch. This was the view from our lunch table.

    And the view from our passagiatto.

    And that's pretty much it. We were apparently in Alaska at the wrong time of year to see wildlife, which we we were bummed about because we didn't see any moose... until we got to the airport!

Who Caused The Causeway? The Natural Forces Of Giant... Geology.

    Three months late is better than never, as the saying goes. I just got done with a brutal Summer semester. But here are my Northern Ireland pictures from my workation there back in May. Julie and I drove up North so we could see some countryside and the Giant's Causeway, which is rock that was formed into hexagonal plinths by a volcano plug millions of years ago, and which those quirky Irish like to imagine was built for really big giants who needed a road that led down from a towering cliff into the bottom of the ocean. Giants got business down there.    

    See? The Giant's Fossilized Poopies. I took a higher exposure shot to really make the edges pop. The hexagonal shapes are identical to those that form The Devils Tower in Wyoming. But way closer to the ground.

    And the Giant's Bogies.

    They even had a People's Causeway...

    I wish we'd had more time to really explore Ireland, but only having the one day outside of Dublin, we chose to see the one famous site and just enjoy the scenery. But we spent a good long time wandering around the causeway area. Got up on the surrounding cliffs and got some scary above shots.

    I was sad that I couldn't get any of those desolately beautiful shots of the causeway that you always see online... damn tourists. We were like sea lions on a rock, scarpering all over the place getting in the way of the hundreds of shitty tourist cameras.

    Here's some Irish scenery though. No people.

    They have shitty tourist traps in Ireland too. I really kind of thought that it was only Americans that did that. "Hey, pay 10 euros to walk over a little rope bridge!" "TAKE MY MONEY!"

    Although the scenery was quite beautiful of course. But still.

    We pretty much spent the rest of the day driving on the left side of the road or in run-down Irish pubs drinking Guinness and eating... food that spanned from just ok to gross. Seriously, I love the idea of most Irish dishes, who doesn't like meat and potatoes? But somewhere in the process, something often gets lost. I don't know how else to describe it. I think that's why Guinness is so popular over there. Really cuts down on the food tasting.

The Thoreau Society of Unironic Opportunity

    You know, for all of Thoreau's talk about getting back to nature and living the simple life, I really think he would have wanted people to enjoy all the shopping that his home at Walden Pond had to offer.

    Walden Pond in the Autumn. It was really beautiful, but Julie got to enjoy it more than I did. I had a job near Concord, MA, and it involved a six hour long exam so I didn't get a whole lot of free time. Julie got to jog around the pond, check out the house where 'Little Women' was written, and generally just get her Transcendentalist mojo on.

    A replica of Henry, staring at his hand, outside a replica of his cabin at Walden. Sigh. I sort of hate myself for needing to take pictures of this kind of stuff. Immediately after the Concord job, there was a gig in Boston that I was able to conveniently pick up. We had a free day in between, so we went to check out Salem. What could be cooler than Salem in October, amirite?

    aaaaand that about sums up Salem. Totally kitchy town, lots of middle-aged ladies dressed up in witchy outfits tittering in some sort of domesticated nerdgasm, dragging around their husbands who seemed to be unable to stop themselves from rolling their eyes around a lot. It was really, really silly. Did not live up to my childhood memories of going there. I'm really fascinated by the Salem witch trials too, and I feel like the wrong lesson is often taken away from them. People tend to point to that episode as a lesson in hysteria, but I think that the finer point is that it was a lesson in what happens when church and state are not separate. Which seems obvious but, people like to glide over that aspect.

    This is called the Witch House because it is the only piece of Salem left that was around at the time of the trials, and probaby because it looks all gothic, sort of. Some religious nutjob judge or other lived here. Kind of a weak tourist trap, really. We also went to the Boston aquarium, which also did not live up to my childhood memories... things look a lot smaller to me now than they did in those days. Got a picture of a space alien jellyfish.

Oh, Canada. You're So Damn... Damn.

How many of my posts have begun with "I had a job in..." or variations thereof? At any rate, last month I had a job in Washington state, on Whidbey Island to be precise. Whidbey Island is a lovely place, but to hell with that. I was there to work. The good stuff came up during the two days I had off. Julie came along with me for the fun of course, and so we took a couple of ferry rides and found ourselves in Victoria, British Columbia! Pictured above as below is the iconic harbor view of the Empress Hotel. I guess it's pretty or something.

The big red tree is a Madrona tree. They were everywhere from Whidbey Island to Canada. I am developing a thing for trees with pretty colors. Anyway, we didn't ferry the car all the way to Canada, so we had roughly 24 hours to hoof it around town. The harbor area is like one of those Richard Scarry kids' books; it's so freaking cute you want to strangle a puppy or something. The inner harbor, consisting of downtown, houseboats, promenades, and general touristy orgasmology, is apparently the only official seaplane port in North America.

It is also one of the most-walkable cities anywhere ever of all damn time because it's so damn precious. But just in case you get tired of circumnavigating the harbor to get from cute point A to point cute B, they have various taxi boot, er, heh heh, taxi BOAT services for your convenience.

I stopped taking pictures of gimmicky street buskers a long time ago, because invariably when you see one that you think is awesome, original, and hilarious, you soon discover that in fact it is only the latest trend, and you'll begin to see the same gimmick everywhere you go and people who take tourist pictures of "oh my gawsh isn't that CLEVER?!" buskers wind up looking like complete idiots. I got burned by those damn statuesque buskers that way back in the day. Those chumps are everywhere, including Victoria. Having said that, here's the coolest busker I ever saw.

I took a few pictures of him that technically had better composition, but there's something about his jaunty dark-sidey pose and flippantly flapping cape that make this one my favorite. So here's the same picture blacked and whited up because I can't decide.

 So town was cute, food was delicious. They have this thing called Poutine... it's essentially just cheese and gravy fries but they use cheese curds instead of meltish provolone or mozzarella and it's pretty awesome. They also have a fried dough thing they like, but they do it with garlic instead of sugar and it's awesome too; Lungosh. Anyway, to make sure that we did something besides eat local oddities and take pictures of next-year's busker has-beens, we decided to go for a morning boat ride.

OH MY RANDOM-FLUCTUATIONS-IN-THE-FABRIC-OF THE-UNIVERSE! JAWS is gonna eat that boat! I tried to get his autograph but I've been drinking and this isn't really going anywhere funny.

So it's really an Orca. There are a bunch of whale-watching outfits that set up shop around Victoria harbor that take you out on various types of boats in an effort to see killer whales. They weren't extremely positive about our chances of seeing one that day because it had been about three days since they'd had any indication that any Killer Whales were paying any attention to the finer points of their contracts. So we opted for what is known as a zodiac boat: I guess various Navies use them in order to transport one or nine navy dudes somewhere fast. We wanted to sit in the front so we'd have the best view, and our zodiac pilot thought it was funny, because people who sit in the front of these things get slapped down on the water pretty hard about every three seconds.

That's a competing Killer Whale watch zodiac boat. It's funny; when we were trying to decide which company to go with, all of them said they had the best guides and pilots and highest Orca-sighting stats, but when someone spotted T-103 (the designation for our particular lone Orca), the dudes piloting the zodiacs for all the different companies got on the cb radio and told each other where it was at, and pretty soon about 6 zodiacs and 2 or 3 deluxe whale watching boats (without the slap-happy bows, and offering hot chocolate and bathrooms) all showed up to get in my way. So they're all in cahoots and their propaganda is mere marketing, is what I'm saying.

Trailer park Orca! Well that's the best shot I got of him. He was totally on the hunt, and not interested in the slightest in doing any fabulously picturesque leaps for us. Pretty cool though. After we got tired of the awesome wonders of nature and blah blah blah, our zodiac pilot took us to a secret spot that only he knows about and that no one else knows about and yeah yeah yeah right buddy. Anyway, harbor seals!

This next guy was trying to be sneaky, and in the process solicited some d'aaaawwwws!

There was also an eagle. I'm starting to get tired of seeing Bald Eagles every damn where we go. If we got 'em in Pennsylvania, so what if they got 'em in Canada?

Well that's Victoria for you. All cutesy and naturey, and pretty at night too.

That's B.C. parliament. We had a day in Seattle before we flew back home, and other than getting to hang out with an old Garmisch friend, I decidedly have nothing much to say about Washington. I mean, we were excited because pot's legal there now, but turns out it's not officially legal until December or something. So no over the counter for us. Not that I'm particularly interested in partaking; I'm more just curious about whether or not I'll go insane and start snorting broken glass and heroin if I start a life of the pot addiction, you know?

The Prison Of Modern Life

    It's gotten to the point where a trip to California doesn't get it's own blog post any more. I think that may mean that I'm getting to be a grumpy jaded traveler. Alcatraz? Humbug. Desultorily snap a few photos, move on. I was in the San Francisco area for two weeks in a row. Alcatraz seriously made me grumpy.

    Oh looky, a notorious piece of American History! "Isn't it fascinating?", the boat and tour guides insist. A prison! Where some famous criminals were incarcerated like so much animal meat. Yay America! Bah.

    I admit, I was drawn to go see it by all the hype. "You gotta see Alcatraz while you're in San Fran, it's famous!", pop culture insists. But of course, once I paid my 20 bits and took the boat ride, I realized that I had just spent money to go see a bunch of rotting old buildings which once upon a time housed nothing but human misery and I am somehow supposed to believe that it is a worthwhile expenditure. "We don't know exactly which cell was Al Capone's but hey look, they're all the same!"

    Al Capone, the "Birdman" of Alcatraz... these are a part of some sort of mythic pantheon of America's recent rough-and-tumble past. But you know what? They were murderers and thieves, and our answer was to treat them like animals rather than men. Isn't it cool? Isn't it fascinating? Isn't prison worth preserving? America, fuck yeah.

    Escape from Alcatraz! You can see the Golden Gate Bridge through the door in the bay there, even though it's really red, not gold. My drive down to the Big Basin Redwoods State Park was much more pleasant.

    Big, giant, man-eating trees! Well, big giant trees, anyway. And gnarly. The shots I took of me standing in front of this next one--in order to show the scale--turned out pretty lousy. But if I were standing in front of it, my head would come up to just above where those two little nubbins hanging down from the big knob in the center of the photo are.

    Ohmygod, they really are man-eaters! Standing inside of a big tree is neat-o.

    This next tree is called the Father of the Forest. Probably because it's really big. Like, really really big.

    And this last tree is called the Mother of the Forest, although they placed the sign that tells you so on the face opposite of it's most distinguishing feature. I wonder why?

    Anywho, my job was actually situated in Menlo Park, which is in Silicon Valley. Our client was SRI, the Stanford Research Institute, who not only sent the very first communication ever over the "internet" back in the 1969, but is essentially the grandfather of Silicon Valley itself, being responsible for encouraging students (when it was still a branch of the University, and had not yet been pinched off as a private company) to open computery-type businesses in the area... And they hired us to teach them how to get certified in some computer program. My job is pretty cool sometimes. So, I got to see a bit of where the modern era began, although the area isn't much to look at. It's all big buildings with locked doors and security guards because they're busy inventing big important world-changing technology there all the time, and no they don't have time to give you a tour. Go away now please. Humph. But I did find an Easter Egg.

    No, me being grumpy in front of facebook is not the Easter Egg. Although hey, pretty meta, right? If the tree on the left was a bit more rounded, it would look like the facebook thumbs-up icon is being shoved up someone's butt. Ha! But no, the Easter Egg is what's behind the facebook sign. Apparently, facebook leased or bought their corporate headquarters building from Oracle, who own a piece of Silicon Valley history.

Vitamins B(ald) & E(agles) Are Recommended By Crying Chief

    Eagles! Four of us drove up to Lackawaxen, PA several weeks ago to hit a spot where the Lackawaxen River meets the Delaware River on the New York border and bald eagles like to congregate. For the fish. It wound up being pretty exciting because I was thinking about how, growing up in the 70s and early 80s, the word on the birds was that they were disappeared, very rare, nearly extinct. To actually see them around now is exciting and probably worthy of some sort of American Indian quote about soaring hearts or summ'at, but no. We saw about seven of them. My pictures are lame though, because I need a better telephoto lens. Mine is cheap-o. Also, that's all I have to report. So the rest of this blog will be other bad bald eagle pictures, and a response I had to write for English class last year on an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. Yup, I'm scraping up the dregs.

    Michael Pollan artfully defines “food” as anything your great-great-grandmother would recognize as such, and his point is that in modern times the industry has drastically altered our perception of what qualifies as real food. Pollan says that part of the reason people have a difficult time eating real food is that when you walk into a grocery store the “most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.” He has a decidedly sneering attitude about such health claims, and with good reason; in 1977, George McGovern “prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called ‘Dietary Goals for the United States’… calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products.” The red-meat and dairy industry bellowed, and this very practical advice was drowned out. In Pollan’s view and in mine, the food industry has since waged a campaign of misinformation about American health.

    In 2007, at 35 years old, 5’ 11” and 220 lbs., my doctor told me my cholesterol was high and wrote a prescription for Lipitor. Concurrently I had seen a specialist about my arms frequently going numb during sleep and was told that I had pre-carpal tunnel syndrome, meaning that it wasn’t full-blown and not too late to fix it with arm braces and some other types of treatment. I had a brief conversation with myself at that point that went something like this: “Self, you’re 35. You’re falling apart. You’re too young for this shit.” I decided that I needed to get in better shape. I never filled the Lipitor prescription because of my personal conviction that it is a junk drug, meant to treat a symptom but not the actual problem. I never wore the arm braces because I couldn’t bear the idea of starting down that path towards riding a jazzy with a big-slurp in Wal-Mart. I got a gym membership and lost 35 pounds in about a year. I slowly began changing my diet to whole foods, which became easier the more I exercised because I didn’t want to ruin a good workout with empty calories. I also started getting into vitamins.

    Pollan believes that separating individual vitamins and nutrients from food is missing the forest for the trees. I agree with this to an extent in that I strongly believe that vitamins are not a substitute for healthy food. However, since I began taking natural, non-synthetic vitamins in addition to my healthier diet and exercise, I haven’t had a single cold. I have felt a bit run-down on occasion, which I strongly suspect were cases of my body fighting off what would normally be some such common sickness. I did get bronchitis once, but it only lasted about two days which is unusual for such a normally debilitating condition. While I could attribute this to exercise and healthy eating, and I’m sure that’s a part of it, I know plenty of people who eat well and exercise and yet still get regular illnesses.

    While my evidence for the health benefits of vitamins is anecdotal and hardly scientific, I am wary of ending my vitamin regimen as Pollan, while offering much sage wisdom, had little in the way of science in his opinions on individual vitamins to offer either. My own feeling from reading various sources is that today’s farming practices have reduced the amount of minerals and nutrients in our soil, therefore reducing the health benefits of even the most naturally grown whole foods, which is why I feel that supplementing a healthy diet with natural vitamins is still important.

    Pollan seems to fall into the same trap that he warns us of, asking that we take so-called scientific studies done by nutritionists with a grain of salt and yet at the same time citing a study that says “in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers.” The error in this stance lies in what he leaves out; that many such negative vitamin studies are done using synthetic vitamins. Synthetic vitamins have been shown in fact to be very bad for you, however when the naturally occurring forms of these vitamins are used in more honest studies, no such negative health consequences are found. Therefore it seems obvious to me that the hype surrounding the supposed danger of vitamins is simply more misinformation from the industry.

Nostalgia And Speculative Fiction Go Hand-in-Tentacle

    Still a very slow work period. It's getting on in 2013, and no trips yet. Things are looking up though: I have a few jobs coming up, so we'll see. In the meantime, here's another post in my series of school papers interspersed with old photojunk. This time the pictures are from the ski town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the German Alps, where I lived from 1997-2000. Hover over them for delightfully nostalgic descriptions. The paper in question is my English II final, where the assignment was to take any three short stories that we had read from our text and compare and analyse them. I chose 'The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,' which I'd already written a paper on so, yay. Easy. Also, Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut and The Lottery by Shirley Jackson. If you intend to read this post—and I don't blame anyone at all who doesn't want to—and you haven't read any of them, then you ought to follow the links and read them first. Otherwise reading my paper will be even more painful than it has to be.

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Zen And The Art of Speculative Fiction

    Speculative fiction is an extremely broad genre. In researching the term online, I found many essays which attempt to define what it is and what it isn’t. I even found one person who thought that the film ‘JAWS’ could be considered a member of the genus, but I disagree with that on the grounds that a world in which everything is exactly the same as in ours with the exception of a ludicrously giant man-eating shark who has a taste for beach bunnies is hardly an imaginative or insightful enough scenario to earn the title of Speculative. Horror, yes. Fiction, fine. Speculative, no. So here is the definition I’ve found that I most agree with:

    Speculative fiction is a world that writers create, where anything can happen. It is a place beyond reality, a place that could have been, or might have been, if only the rules of the universe were altered just a bit. Speculative fiction goes beyond the horror of everyday life and takes the reader (and writer) into a world of magic, fantasy, science. It is a world where you leave part of yourself behind when you return to the universe as we know it, the so-called real world. Speculative fiction defines the best in humanity: imagination, and the sharing of it with others. (Bowlin)

I would add two things to Bowlin’s definition. First, I would say that while Speculative fiction (Spec-fi) may frequently go “beyond the horror of everyday life,” it equally as often dives right into it, delving human nature for insights both illuminating and shocking. Thus I would say that the essence of good Spec-fi is that it tweaks reality in order to reveal a previously hidden aspect of it. Second, I would make the distinction that although writers of science fiction, horror, and fantasy regularly dabble in Spec-fi, not all sci-fi/fantasy/horror stories qualify as Speculative and not all Speculative necessarily has to belong to one of those genres. Perhaps Spec-fi became a genre in order to award distinction to those stories from each of those categories that aimed for something higher than mere escapism, though some would argue that important science fiction writers were aiming that high all along.

    The three short stories I will talk about are such speculative fictions. ‘The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas’ by Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Harrison Bergeron’ by Kurt Vonnegut, and ‘The Lottery’ by Shirley Jackson each describe an undignified aspect of human nature. They have each chosen to illustrate these aspects through the useful lens of dystopian societies. In ‘Omelas,’ Le Guin uses a science fiction world as her setting. In ‘Bergeron’ Vonnegut uses a society vaguely set in the future, which is also a staple of science fiction. The world of ‘The Lottery’ is less definable. It could be our world, if not in the present day then in the near past, except that the eponymous social event is so horrifying that it doesn’t really seem to have a place in any known society similar to the one that it otherwise portrays. It could therefore be a science fiction world, or a far post-apocalyptic world, or perhaps even simple allegory, similar to the hellish night of Young Goodman Brown who had a vision of the secret, sinister natures of his neighbors in the Puritan village of Salem. In any case, the inventive nature of the lottery itself in a setting that is still somewhat familiar more than qualifies the story as speculative in nature.

    ‘Omelas’ is a deep story which hints at many ideas, but as I wrote in a previous paper I believe that Le Guin uses the device of a captive child, kept in squalor and degradation, abused and friendless, as a symbol for the dark psychotic id at the center of humanity’s collective consciousness. The story seems to say that although the face we put on for each other in public may be one of civilization—the love of peace, the arts, humanities, progress, and everything positive and hopeful about it—behind it all is the wretched animal at the center of all human endeavor, the monster within ourselves that we try to ignore, but can’t. In the end there are several different ways that one can look at the people who choose to walk away from Omelas after contemplating the child, but the suggestibility of the imagery there only confirms that Le Guin is a master storyteller who has succeeded at making the readers ask themselves what it all might mean, and forces them to look inside themselves for the answers.

    ‘Bergeron’ is perhaps the most pointed, least allegorical of the three. Vonnegut wrote it as a way of taking a certain philosophy to its logical extreme—the idea that natural advantage is unfair and leveling the playing field for everyone in every activity is the way to bring about equality. For example, my young nephew plays in his district T-ball league. The league organizes the players such that every player gets to bat, during each inning, no matter how many outs are accumulated. I found it absurd because T-ball to begin with was meant to be an equalizing force for young children learning the physical aspects of baseball. When I was a young boy I played in little league and we had great derision for the new T-ball league that had just begun for younger kids. But even then, T-ball was played with otherwise regular baseball rules—three outs per team per inning. Perhaps younger kids needed help learning to hit before swinging at live pitches, but they were never too young to start learning and dealing with the rules of the game. Unlimited hitting and playing were for practice, not game day.

    Fast forward to the present and they’ve dumbed the sport down even further. According to Teeballusa.org, here are some of the most Harrison Bergeron-like rules: “There are no walks or strikeouts. Every player bats and plays in the field. An inning is over when all the players have batted once. Scores are not kept for the younger players” (T•BALL USA Association). The rationale for all of this is that it is supposed to build self-esteem, so that everyone can feel like a winner and have a chance to play. The problem, of course, is that life isn’t a game of “organized fun” like that. All that these rules are really doing is preparing children to be unable to deal with failure and teaching them how not to strive to be better; it’s easy to play and pointless to play harder when everyone is a winner.

    Vonnegut takes this kind of trend into a future where everyone must be equal so that no one feels bad about themselves. ‘Bergeron’ shows how when the playing field is leveled, even for those unqualified to play, you wind up exemplifying the lowest common denominator. Different people are talented in different ways, and if you force everyone to be equal in every arena, not only will individuals never find out what they are best at, they will also never know that they are truly bad at something and thus be forced to explore other, better options for themselves. The possible heights of human achievement are thwarted forever in this manner.

    ‘The Lottery’ is a metaphor for blind slavishness to tradition. Jackson is skewering the bovine mentality of the mob that perpetuates certain myths and traditions, beyond the point where they are logical or relevant to the present time. She does this by taking what appears to be an ancient fertility rite—human sacrifice meant to secure a bountiful harvest from the gods—and places it in an inappropriate time period where once again the logical extreme exposes the inherent absurdity of the philosophy in question. The villagers don’t seem to fully understand the purpose of the lottery, except as a vague idea from a saying that seems to have slipped from common usage. A line spoken by one of the characters implies the forgotten nature of the adage, which in turn hints at the fertility aspect of the lottery. “Used to be a saying about ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’” This illuminates for the reader the general uncertainty regarding the tradition. The villagers in truth only continue participating because “there’s always been a lottery.”

    My personal take on the story is that she is talking about the folly of religious tradition; a system of belief based on ancient “holy” books written by goat herders who knew less about how the world works than most second graders do today. People and communities still slavishly devote their lives to the outdated traditions of these religions, and they usually do not truthfully understand where these traditions came from, nor why or how they arose in the first place. Considering the vast gap in time and culture between when they originated and now, it is a wonder that anyone still considers the reasons for them to be valid. However, both the nature of belief itself and the human tendency to blindly observe tradition as illuminated by Jackson help to explain the phenomenon. It is possible though that the story could be lampooning any number of other bizarre traditions. Jackson uses the Spec-fi device to expose the irrationality of this tendency that people have to instinctively follow the strictures of society while abandoning critical thought. The organized annual murder of a neighbor may seem extreme—it is unlikely that in reality any such tradition could carry on into the present day—but it does make a striking argument about the idiocy of maintaining rituals simply for the sake of tradition. There is nothing wrong with examining them more closely to determine if they are actually still relevant in modern life.

    The aspect of human nature which each of these stories reveal through a speculative twisting of reality are truths which are not always simple to talk about in other formats. Trying to make the point in a thesis statement that unexamined traditions can be harmful to society, for instance, might need an entire book of material including exposition, facts, and references. But Spec-fi has the unique ability to cut through the empty talk in favor of tradition by using reducto ad absurdum to illustrate its point. By taking real ideas and putting them in an organized setting, reality is exposed. This is how science and philosophy test their hypothesis: by pulling a test subject or idea out of its element and subjecting it to different experiments in order to discover its boundaries.

    Speculative Fiction, then, is the literature of abstract concepts. It is the preferred storytelling method of philosophers and scientists. It is reading material for those who wish to understand something larger and more insightful about everyday experience. It is also material for communicating complex or heretofore invisible truths in a symbolic—i.e. brief and profound, manner. It differs from most forms of literature in that it isn’t trying to tell a story about a time and a place, a person or an event, per se. It instead—at its best—is telling a story about a way of looking at the world.

    Some of these truths may be ugly. But that only makes them even more imperative to communicate. If the Vonneguts and Jacksons of the world don’t thumb their noses at moronic human behavior, and if the Le Guins of the world don’t expose the beasts at the bottoms of our wells, then these dark aspects of humanity will remain unexamined. Only in investigating them will we learn how to overcome them within ourselves. Speculative fiction is a uniquely Zen-like literary format. In altering the nature of reality for a brief moment, like a Zen slap, it teaches the reader something about unaltered reality. It is for this reason that I say that Speculative fiction has a place among the highest forms of literature, and is uniquely capable of communicating big ideas to empty heads.

 

Works Cited

Bowlin, David. greententacles.com. March 2002. http://www.greententacles.com/articles/5/26/. 12 December 2012.

T•BALL USA Association. teeballusa.org. 2012. http://www.teeballusa.org/rules.asp. 12 December 2012.

 

Wowies And Owies On The Hawaiian Island Of Maui

    Maui! We had essentially two days there, after saying a tearful aloha to Scott and Sarah, and we decided to head straight for the Road to Hana. It's a 52 mile stretch of road that took us both days to navigate because it's narrow, hella switchbacky, traverses 46 single-lane bridges that were built in 1910, and is all covered in amazing rain forest bordered by precipitous drops into the ocean. The first thing we stopped for, besides a coconut, were the painted trees.

    They are called Rainbow Eucalyptus trees, and apparently came from Australia. There is a small grove of them just off of the early part of the road.

    Trippy right? I don't have a whole lot to add... we just hung around a while and took pictures. Green, red, yellow, sometimes purple stripes of bark. And a stream of rainbow light!

    You can see the ocean from pretty much any hilltop in Maui. Rainbow tree and ocean. Now I know why people like it there.

    One last trippy tree. I wanted to lick the bark. I abstained, but I need you to know that it was difficult.

    Another attraction along the Road to Hana is the black sand cove. Pictures of sand, and beaches, and water are dull, I know. But black sand! I had to try. We swam and snorkeled.

    A rest stop we bathroom-breaked at had rikki-tikki-tavis! What do you calls 'em... Mongooses. Mongeese. Apparently they're a real problem. They eat all the endangered species on the islands, because there's no King Cobras around to battle heroically with.

    Cute little monsters, aren't they?

    There are a number of waterfalls and natural swimming pools everywhere in the jungle, and we stopped at a couple for swimmies. Just like in LOST, that horrible show that still yet made me envious of island life. See the bald backfloater in its natural element.

    We spent the night in a tree house! No electricity. We picked up some grilled chicken off the side of the road to go with the bottle of wine we bought.

    I mean, we didn't just pick it up off the ground. There was a guy. With a dirty pick-up and a grill. But we did eat some weird crazy fruits off of trees throughout the day.

    Above was our view from the bed, through the very necessary bug-netting. The mosquitoes were... voracious. But let's not dwell on that.

    There's something very nice about sleeping in a tree house in a jungle on Hawaii. Happy Anniversary! Grilled road chicken and wine in bed while the bugs dashed hungrily at us from outside the netting was fun.

    And the morning view was pretty sweet too. Then we made our mad bug-avoiding dash to the car and got back on the road. We went to see Charles Lindbergh. The toy plane is pleasing.

    He's buried in a quiet little church yard...

...with a fantastic view.

    There were horsies!

    And weird trees!

    Actually, there were weird trees everywhere. I have a lot of weird tree pictures. But I figured that after the Trippy Trees, enough is enough. Okay last one, because it's like a portal to Hobbiton or something.

    We stopped at a random beach on the way back for a nice swim. There weren't many people there so it seemed perfect. And it was... big waves, clear water, lots of fun. Until we almost died when we got caught by an effing strong current and were dashed over some lava rocks. Got a good scrape on my zombie knee, dammit. We made it out after some minor struggling and were all like, "whew, haha!" But as we were leaving, we saw this sign which of course we hadn't seen upon our arrival.

    And that's Maui. It was nicer than I expected. I'd never have made the effort to go to Hawaii if it hadn't been for Scott being there, so I'm glad it worked out that way. Julie and I had a really nice 2nd Anniversary. Wow, I really set the bar a bit too high for only a 2nd. How in hell's bells am I supposed to top that?

On The Island State, Every Night is Great--Oh Every Night Is Date Night In Hawaii

    We finally got our power back after 9 days, and I have just got caught up on all my school work. Oy what a month. So the above photo is an overview of Honolulu from the top of Diamond Crater. Julie and I hiked up it on our first morning in town. It was really hot. The island of Oahu is amazing, except for all the people. It really illustrates how the tourist industry is adept at turning a beautiful place into an ugly mess. Don't get me wrong; there are plenty of unsullied beaches and beautiful drives and amazing vistas, yadda yadda yadda. But the urban development and masses of crowds in inappropriate places is especially jarring because of it.

    That's the problem with being a critical tourist though. By definition there is a healthy dose of hypocrisy in such statements. If it weren't for the tourism industry, I'd be out of a hobby. I just wish that Americans could be less... crass and destructive about the whole thing. The below photo is of one of those secluded areas.

    It's the place where Scott and Sarah almost got eaten by that wave from my last post, and also apparently the crash site from LOST is around there somewhere. But we didn't go looking for it because jesus, what a crap show that turned out to be.

    Nice vista, baby! So mostly our trip to Oahu consisted of driving around and chatting with Scott and Sarah. But of course we also hit Pearl Harbor. Sarah's dad took us out there for the day. We went to see an airplane museum somewhere. I'm not really a fan of military museums, but airplanes are neat.

    I just find the fetishizing of weaponry to be... odd. Don't misunderstand, I find certain aspects of military history and technology to be fascinating, but people who think America is great because we're awesome at killing people is a strange consequence of our national identity.

    Pearl Harbor is odd that way all around. There was a lot of self-righteousness about our getting attacked there, and it was definitely a horrendously sneaky and duplicitous attack on the part of the Japanese. But we act as though it were totally unprovoked, as though we would never do the same, and as though we were totally innocent bystanders of WWII up until that point.

    The fact is, we were economically meddling in world affairs and the Japanese knew they had to take us out of the game if they were to solidify their hold on certain resources that they needed. There are other reasons that are wrapped up in various forms of Nationalism and Japanese Identity, but that was the economic reality. That doesn't make us right or wrong to be outraged, it simply means that it was a world war, and tactics demand certain actions.

    We ourselves bombed the shit out of civilian areas of Dresden, Germany later in the war with similarly vague justifications. I find it morally dubious to "never forget" Pearl Harbor and 9/11, apparently unjustified attacks against us, while there are no such sloagans in the US for Dresden or Nagasaki, apparently unjustified attacks in which we were the immoral aggressor. The above and below pictures are of the sunken USS Arizona.

    Bubbles of oil still percolate to the surface from the ship. I tried to photograph one but really, a zoom of a little black ball-bearing in green water is a bit dull. Here's the floating memorial for the Arizona that they boat you out to. As far as memorials go, it's a pretty nice one actually.

    So that was our day at Pearl Harbor. Tora! Tora! Tora!

    The other major event from our Oahu portion of the trip was scuba diving. Scott and Sarah are Dive Masters, I have my Open Water Diver and have scuba dived (dove?) in Germany, Croatia, Thailand, Florida, and Guantenemo Bay, Cuba. Julie, however, had never done it before and so scuba was a must on the bucket list. Sarah hooked us up with a dive shop in Waikiki.

    And oh what the hell: Not a very flattering shot of me, but look, we dove with Daniel Craig!

    The dive itself wasn't the most amazing dive I've ever been on, but it was still pretty sweet and it was fun to see Julie flop around under water during the very normal adjustment period. She attacked it with courage and aplomb however, and by the end of the day was pretty damn good at it.

    You Scuba! Nice wristbands, Olivia Newton John.

    Tandem Scuba. We saw sea turtles, but Sarah didn't have the camera down on that dive. It was cool though, it was a turtle cleaning station, where they go to hang out and let fish eat accumulated gunk off of their shells. It was pretty.

    Aww. I totally took a picture of them making out down there with her camera, but they didn't send me that one. I guess they were afraid I'd publish it on my world-renowned blog or something. As-if!

    The thing about posing for pictures whilst scuba-diving: don't exhale! Ah well. Live and learn. Scott's like a zen scuba master down there on the left. So that's all I really got on Oahau. It was a lot of fun and of course it was great to hang out with my friend after not seeing him for like, 5 years now. Hopefully it won't be another 5 years.

    It was Julie and my 2nd anniversary while we were there, and I had some spare miles still so we used them to take a quick 2 day trip over to another Hawaiian island before heading home. Next post: Maui!

An Atheist In Ken Ham's Court

    There is a sign on the entrance to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky that tells you that they reserve the right to remove from the property anyone who wears offensive clothing, among other things. Well I braved it anyway, and ran into no problems for the duration of my visit. I suspect that when deeply religious people (of the type who might visit the Creation Museum) see written words their first impulse is not to read them. Avoid knowledge at all costs! Such seemed to be the case on the day I was there, at any rate. To be fair, there was a preponderance of Mennonites, who are likely more used to ignoring what people's T-Shirts might say.

mu·se·um

[myoo-zee-uhm]

noun. a building or place where works of art, scientific specimens, or other objects of permanent value are kept and displayed.

    So right off the bat, the Creation Museum fails to meet the requirements of actually being, you know, a museum. All that is there are dioramas of Bible scenes, and placards which lay out the anti-science of Creationism. Also, they have a huge dinosaur fetish. In the old days, Creationists denied that dinosaurs ever existed. They used to say that dinosaur bones were deliberately placed by God to test our Faith. Well, they must have finally conceded that this would make God a huge asshole, and so to quite a large extent the Creation Museum is a Christian Apology, where they are now saying that dinosaurs are in the Bible, and that Fossils actually prove that the Bible is true. This is a popular reverse-position tactic used by Christian Apologists all throughout history, and it was entertaining to see the results of the latest Christian Backpedalist thinking.

    There is this whole thing that they keep saying there that the conclusions that people come to change depending on what point you start your assumptions from. They divide the only two possible starting points, apparently, between "Man's Word" and "God's Word."

    This is an example of the kind of "scientific specimen" they have there. They list certain scientific ideas, devoid of context or explanation as though it's insane to "believe" in the "priesthood" of Science, and right next to it they list certain vaguely congruous Biblical ideas, devoid of any context, evidence, or logic other than Biblical authority itself.

    So God is apparently Popeye now. Sorry, cheap shot, but goodness gracious. I yam what I yam. At any rate, what they've done here, right from the get-go, is to set up a false equivalency, a straw man argument that carries them through their twisted line of logic. Before I explain the false equivalency, allow me to digress on that point. When you go to a real museum, which is full of actual specimens and scientific conclusions arrived at through careful examination of evidence, the museum is usually an open floor plan. You can go from room to room, willy-nilly, and decide what section you want to peruse as your own whim takes you. This is because real evidence supports itself, it can stand on its own and is supported by other evidence from other disciplines, or at the very least remains uncontradictory. The creation museum, interestingly, is physically laid out as a single, twisty road which you follow from beginning to end in order to be exposed to certain ideas at proper moments. They start you off with faulty assumptions and build on them from there, until by the end of the walk you are asked to accept as the Creation-version of truth some pretty outrageous claims, and you hopefully ignore the contradictory and hypocritical statements they've fed you along the way. We'll get to that stuff.

    So back to the false equivalency. This whole "Man's Word" vs. "God's Word" business. It reveals a severe lack of understanding of what science actually is. Science is NOT man's word. It IS man's understanding of nature, as revealed through observation, experiment, the cataloging of verifiable fact, and the careful consideration of facts in conjunction with each other based, yet again, on further experiment. We arrive at scientific conclusions based on THINGS THAT ACTUALLY CAN BE MEASURED by other people, even people from different cultural, religious, or linguistic backgrounds, and they will all arrive at the same answers because physics always works the same way under similar conditions, in all places. Science is not just some dudes getting together and making shit up based on fancy. So calling science "Man's Word" sets up a false idea in the minds of the gullible. In reality it is "Nature's Word" vs. "Bible's (written by many different people, from goat farmers to pubescent scribes, who had less idea of what was really going on in the world than most 2nd graders do today) Word."

    "But because we never have all the evidence, different scientists can reach very different conclusions, depending on their starting assumptions." ARGH. This is just stupidity. The scientific method actually rules out starting assumptions. Experimenters have all manner of ways to eliminate Confirmation bias from their results. Is it always successful? No. Scientists actually can come to incorrect answers, yes. BUT, that is why science demands rigor, repeat experimentation, and PEER REVIEW before it will ever accept any particular idea from any particular scientist. If Richard Dawkins, a very respected biologist and champion of the modern atheist movement, came out and said that he had discovered evidence that Christian's brains were smaller than atheist's, the scientific community would not accept it as a fact just because he said so. They would say "That's preposterous. Prove it." And no one would accept his claim as fact until he could verifiably demonstrate it. Which of course he couldn't, because it's a lie I just made up. And it shows that if even someone like Dawkins made an erroneous claim, it would still not become scientific fact, because science does not allow false ideas to remain once evidence proves them wrong.

    This, however, is an example of the type of evidence that Creationists require and the type of reasoning they use. Atrocious, just atrocious. They think they've proved that the world is 6000 years old by adding up the ages of the sons of Adam in the Bible. This right here is the poster-child poster for what this museum is all about. A literal interpretation of the Bible and unquestioning trust in its authority, and a severe misunderstanding of science.

    And hopefully, you never will hear this in school. This is the garbage that they want taught in public education.

    This, for instance, is an outright lie! "Scientists are puzzled how so many finch species could arise?" NO THEY'RE NOT! They know exactly how. Natural Selection. Oh but wait, later on in the museum you want to talk about Darwin's Finches?

    So HERE NOW they are saying that Natural Selection (or as they are trying to rename it "created kinds", which are studied by a type of creation pseudo-scientist called a "Baraminologist") is now acceptable! Just like dinosaur bones, Creationists are finally coming around to the idea of Natural Selection, but it is still not proof of Evolution, they say. So in the previous picture, they say that Scientists are puzzled by finches, when in reality they are not because Darwin, Natural Selection; the many-finch problem SOLVED over a hundred years ago. Boom, lie. And in this one they are saying oh well, natural selection as told in the Bible is perfectly reasonable! Gah! Do you see the mental disconnect? Do you see how they take what they want, use it when they want it, and discard it when it is not convenient for a different argument they want to make?!

    "There is not enough time--even in billions of years" for man to evolve from microbe. This again is, if not exactly a lie (though it is), at the very least a simple bold statement with no context, and no evidence presented either way. ABSOLUTELY there is enough time for a microbe to evolve into a man... in the 3.5 to 3.9 Billion years that scientists think it may actually have taken. Again, this reveals the stupidity of creation scientists. They cannot conceive of a billion years, so therefore evolution could not have happened.

    Going back to Natural Selection, which apparently creationists now concede as true (though note the subtle switch from "Man's Word" to "man's opinion"); The fact that in our own minuscule lifetimes we can observe natural selection occurring in various species is a compelling argument for much larger changes occurring over much larger stretches of time. Simply saying "There is not enough time" is meaningless. How do they know there is not enough time? They are happy to add up all the sons of Adam, after all, why don't they want to add up the time it takes for natural selection to occur, and apply that function from 100 years to 3.5 billion years? There is definitely enough time. Also they are saying, again apropos of nothing with no facts or evidence, that mutation does not have the ability to create new genetic information. IDIOT, that's what mutation IS. A mutation IS a change in genetic information. Since that is what it IS, it most certainly HAS the ability to be what it IS. Fucking infantile word games with these people.

    So... because poison dart frogs aren't naturally poisonous, this is evidence that the Garden of Eden actually existed? What about Rattlesnakes? Black Widows? Scorpions? Jellyfish? Pfeffer's Flamboyant Cuttlefishes? This is cherry picking one instance to back up your argument while ignoring all other instances which contradict it, and is known as Confirmation Bias. And in any case, the "evidence" of the Poison Dart Frog is evidence of nothing except that Poison Dart Frogs can synthesize their poisons from the alkaloids in the food they eat in the wild. In no way does this "evidence" in any way prove or even imply that someplace named Eden existed, though it doesn't stop them from trying to imply it anyway.

    Biblical diorama of Adam fucking a sheep from behind in the garden of fuckin'. "Holy Me, Adam, knock that shit off! I said name them, not rape them! Man, I need to give you something to fuck. Go to sleep, will you? Even though I created the entire Universe out of nothing, I need your rib to create just one more thing. You dirty sheep-fucker."

    Adam: "Awwwww yeah. Thanks God, but you know, the sheep didn't make so many mouth noises. Maybe this woman-thing ought to be subservient and silent, hey? Hmm, apples."

    Anyway, another big thing in the Creation Museum, obviously, is a literal interpretation of the Wholly Babble. They had this urban section dedicated to the dangers of what happens when culture abandons scripture. This was a 7-fucking minute video of a kid fidgeting in church. They claim that when a literal interpretation of the Babble is given up in exchange for liberal Christianity, the damn kids lose respect for religious authority and, you know, do drugs and whores and fidget in church and stuff. The real point Ken Ham wants to make here is that when you stop terrifying children with the real, literal possibility of hellfire and damnation, because actual science has shown that it's totally, ridiculously impossible for the Bible to be literally true, that they will no longer respect his religious authority! Wah! This actually is evidence of the authoritarian nature of religious control, and nothing else.

    "The Big Bang is just a theory! Scientists don't have all the evidence, they're just guessing! Man's Word! I mean, Man's opinion! Oh wait, we can't find any timber from Noah's Ark, which should definitely still be there if the Flood only happened a few thousand years ago? WELLLLL, we can't be sure that the Ararat in the Babble is the same Ararat as the Ararat in Turkey! The Earth's crust was probably unstable! Guess, obfuscate, theory! BUT DAMN YOU TO HELL, THE BIBLE IS LITERALLY THE TRUTH YOU FUCKIN' HEATHEN!" Now see, here is where an actual museum might have, say, some actual timbers from Noah's ark, or a leg to stand on.

    Nope. Some nice models though, with a subtle reminder that all you damn unbelievers are gettin' they asses left behind. And oh, wait, perhaps some more apology and supposition?

    "With a jug maybe like this, Noah's family could simply... With a cage system similar to this one, Noah's family could simply..." In other words, we don't know shit, because there is no evidence that anything in the Bible ever happened, but we're going to twist science to mean what we want it to mean, abuse English to say what we want it to say, and attack facts as mere suppositions and imply that suppositions are facts until your head is so fucked you won't think straight 'till Sunday, when we can fuck your brainhole in Church, too.

    Oh yeah. And Dragons. They had this whole movie about how even though every scholar on earth regards dragons as mythical, that the fact that they are such a prevalent myth means that Dragons actually existed... as dinosaurs. PROOF OF DINOSAURS AND HUMANS, LIVING TOGETHER, THEREFORE BIBLE. BITCHES. That was pretty much when my head exploded, and the Lord forced me to reveal my inner four-eyed demon, and I had to run before the Christians pitchforked me.
So that was my Creation "Museum" adventure. At its conclusion, I had to admit that it is in fact a museum, if not in the way its creators intend: A museum dedicated to human stupidity and willful ignorance. 2 Peter 3:3-6 - ³ Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,⁴ And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.⁵ For this they willingly are ignorant of, that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water:⁶ Whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished: I love that they highlight 'willingly Ignorant.' Oh how they twist and twist!

The Bible mentioned me!

Area 48... Area 49... Area 50... Area 51! Ready Or Not, Here I Come!

    So leapfrogging back over the last inexplicable post, remember when I said that we go to Europe for castles, history, sexy accents and beer, and that they come here for the amazing landscapes, New York City, sexy accents, and... um. Definitely not the beer? Well, Death Valley has a castle for those of us who can't go to Europe whenever we want, and in case Europeans get homecastlesick. On our way out the next morning (after a fabulous night in the 50s-fancy Furnace Creek Inn thanks to a room upgrade) we hit Scotty's Castle.

    Scotty was a con man who convinced some rich dude to invest in his non-producing gold mine, and the rich guy built the place so he could be near his investment. By the time that the gold mine fell through and Scotty had disappeared, Rich Dude had discovered that the desert was good for his health, so he stayed.

    Interesting place, but not so interesting that we wanted to pay $30 to take a tour. We left Death Valley and took the sceneic drive back to Las Vegas, revisiting a cool place I went to once before...

    Yup. That small outpost of humans just outside of Area 51, Rachel Nevada. In fact the long route from Death Valley goes north, east, and then south for about 300 miles and circumnavigates the gigantic military installation which houses Area 51 as well as the Tonopah Test Range where if you look at it from google maps, you can see the hundreds of gigantic craters left from the nuclear bomb tests they were doing all throughout the 50s.

    The road that travels along the north end of Nellis Air Force Base, State Route 375, is known as the Extraterrestrial Highway.

    Of course we stopped in at my favorite American diner, the Little A'Le'Inn, for lunch. Damn fine cuppa coke, alienburger, and shoestring fries.

    On the last occasion I visited Rachel, I was stopping in at the Inn when this crazy ass Donnie Darko-lookin' storm rolled in out of nowhere, and I got a cool shot similar to this of this tow truck and Inn sign out front.

    After lunch, I chatted up the employees and asked them if they'd mind if I published the shot, if I ever had the oportunity. There's this whole thing about property releases that the sign in the photo necessitates. So the owner, Pat Travis, was in and she came out and asked to see the picture. I pulled out my laptop and showed it off:

    And she said she'd sign a release on the condition that I send her a copy to hang in the diner! She may have simply been being polite, but she does have a lot of stuff hanging on her walls in there so there's a good chance that any future visitors will see my picture in there. And in any case she signed the back of a card for me so, it's a win-win.

    From there, Julie and I headed over to Area 51.

    The famous black mailbox. It's funny because lore had it that it was some sort of secret drop-off box for Area 51, when in fact it's just a mailbox for a local rancher named Steve Medlin. He has had to take extreme measures to make it secure because people keep vandalizing it; he's repainted it since the last time I was here.

    And then the 5 or 7 mile dirt road journey to the anti-climactic border of Area 51.

    I have this juvenile glee for taking pictures of signs that say photography prohibited, and then pulling out my zoom lens for close-ups of seeeeeecret things. Like this strange alien-shaped spy device looking down on us from a hilltop.

    Or these creepy guys in this creepy truck looking down at us through creepy binoculars from a creepy hilltop.

    Rumor has it that if you step one toe over the border into Area 51, these guys will rush down and arrest the fuck out of you and take you to a local county jail, where you have to pay a $500 fine. Kind of not so scary... If I had a bunch of money and I wanted to risk losing my job I'd seriously consider making a break for it, just for laughs. I've been cuffed by military types before; it's more funny than intimidating.

The Vacation That No Recent Eye Surgery Patient Should Go On, Really

    Julie got Lasik surgery! Actually, it was PRK, a custom job, which gives you better vision (better than 20/20, apparently!) but takes longer to heal post-op. The Doctor said that it was very important to keep her eyes really moist for at least a month in order to heal faster. So two weeks after surgery, we celebrated by going to the hottest, driest spot in North America! When I took the below shot, 116 °F was the highest temp we'd come across yet, but we later saw it get up to 122 °F. Sort of reminded me of the good 'ol days in Iraq.

    I had my 20th-ish trip to Ridgecrest, CA for work last week, and I can honestly say that I have not gotten tired of the 5 hour drive from Las Vegas through Death Valley. We'd made the decision to have Julie come with me before the surgery, thinking that it would be a great visual feast for new eyes.

    And it was! That's Badwater Basin, lowest point of land in North America and Julie's first glimpse of the beauty of Death Valley. Oh sure, her eyes were red, swollen, blurry, and she had to keep a constant flow of eyedrops dropping to battle the heat and dryness that made the clothes you were wearing contantly feel like they'd just come out of the dryer 2 seconds ago, but to the best of my abilitity to discern the quality of her sincerity, she wholly believes it was worth the discomfort!

    Zabriske Point. It was nice to have Julie along for several reasons, but one of them was that it's been a long time since I stopped to inhale the moistureless dust, other than the occasional surprise visit with desert puppy... I've gotten more into HDR photography since then, and so it was nice to sort of re-tour Death Valley with her new eyes and some new camera techniques. We spent the night at the swanky Furnace Creek Inn near here thanks to a room upgrade.

    More Zabriske Point. According to Wikipedia, the philosopher Michel Foucault called his 1975 acid trip at Zabriskie Point the greatest experience of his life. I can see why, it's really a great spot. Another favorite is the Artist's Pallet drive.

    It's about a three mile one-way loop drive which starts up there, and drives through those technicolored hills. The best time to hit it is during sunset, and we were a little early so we did the loop twice, which turned out to be perfect.

    A Charlie Brown Death Valley! I like the zig-zag that the ground makes with the mountains. Nearly every point along the drive offers a great photographic opportunity...

    ...and in the above photo, the road literally comes to such a point! I love it when a vanishing point plan comes together.

    This is one place where you should definitely pay attention to the squiggly road signs.

    Road boobs! And I remember futilely attempting to capture the way the scrub lights up like little fires in the sunset the first time I was here a few years back, and I feel like this picture captures that a little bit. So yay!

    Death Valley is just huge, and monothematic, and at the same time every bit of it has its own unique perspective to offer. I felt like this picture sort of got that idea. Maybe. Anyway I like it. You can click on it to make it bigger, maybe that will help.

    The eponymous Artist's Pallete. I posted this one with the tiny little French family in it to help with perspective. There were a lot of Europeans bumping around the valley. In fact, I heard only one or two Americans speaking the whole time we were there. Makes sense though: Europeans are horny for the US National Park system. It's the main reason that many of them visit our country. We go there for castles, history, sexy accents and beer. They come here for the amazing landscapes, New York City, sexy accents, and... um. Definitely not the beer, anyway.

    The sunset show is almost over, but I like the yellow that popped mid-range here.

    And that's sunset in Death Valley folks! Anyway, I have more stuff to post about the trip but this post is long enough and that's a good place to stop for now. Here's my parting shot of Julie and I in sepia at Zabriskie Point overlook, eyedrops in tow.

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.

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.

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'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.