30 Catalogia

My close friend who I often jokingly refer to as my close friend, hips me to the weirdest catalog ever: The Orvis Catalog. It has "moon boots" that will cause your knees to disintegrate into powder if you weigh over 120 pounds ( a mark I passed at my 7th month in utero). It has shoes you can smoke, which the funny folks at Orvis admit are "more breathable than cotton canvas" presumably even when breathed through a pipe. And it has the scariest Xtian toy ever, the Speaking Good-Night Prayer Lamb

"When squeezed, this incredibly soft chenille plush lamb plays a bedtime prayer that goes: "Now it’s time to say good night. Sweet dreams fill my world with light. Angels are waiting from above to bless me and everyone I love. Amen.""

But best of all, it has the "the Priest won't get me now!" trousers.

The frilly packaging is just a cruel tease!

Duchess of terrace never grew up
I hope she never will
Broken down TV sits in the corner
Picture's standing still
Standing still

I am now older than dirt.

Golden Girls in Golden Canyon	Dunes off of 190
View up from Golden Canyon	More Dunage
Cowboy and Indian make Peace in Badwater Basin	Salt Crystals
Badwater Basin	Rock Engulfed in Salt
Badwater Pond	Scotty's Castle

27 Saturday Afternoon: Rule Number One of the Desert

We wanted to see the sand dunes. Some of the flightier of our company wanted to cavort nude amongst them. We decided to hit the dunes from the back side because we thought that it would be a bit closer from the backside. <Insert ridiculous and obvious "backside" joke here>

We forgot rule number one of the desert - distances are longer than they appear.

It turned out to be more like 3 or 4 miles. When we got to the sand dunes we saw many wondrous things, many of which were sand. One other was this wacky couple (for the delicate reader I am using a photograph in which you can't tell that:

a) the woman is bare-chested
b) the woman is the hairy-chested one
c) the guy is pretty hairy chested.

After a few moments at the top of the dune, taking stock of how close the freeway we hadn't parked on was, and how close the freeway we had parked on wasn't, I suggested we get to scooting.

This suggestion didn't get much play. I think the others thought I only wanted to leave because my beer was empty and they still had some.

Anyway, about 20 minutes later, we did head off down the dune. It is a lot easier going down than going up.

We traveled along the desert floor and the sky started going out and the dust started coming in. At first we thought someone up the valley was racing around in an AWDV and kicking up sand. That delusion lasted about 15 minutes until the the sand came alive and the light went dead.

This was my last snapshot before the deluge hit us.. then I put the camera away so that it wouldn't get sand in everything.

In minutes we were being whacked by 45 mph winds and more sand than our exposed orofices could conveniently contain. Visibility dropped to about 50 yards and when we turned around to look for the couple we were traveling with, they were gone (turns out the were taking soft-porn pics on the last bit of sand dune.)

We had forgotten rule number one of the desert - never separate from your group.

After about 3 seconds of this, my lovely companion's mind fell to the desert floor and was rolled away by the wind. Lovely Companion (LC from now on) who can't tell left from right even if told which side right is, suddenly became an expert on that.. and on wind .... and on sand consistency .... and on turning red and freaking out. LC developed a rather annoying habit of repeating the following phrases:

"it's softer than it should be" (a phrase that should never be uttered for the chance that insecure men are about)
"we need to go right"
"the wind changed direction"
"this isn't the way we came in"

then LC would start drifting off to the right as though I wouldn't notice it.

LC had broken rule one of the desert - don't panic!

I stopped and explained my less than brilliant plan several times.

1) The wind would continue blowing down the valley from our left (if we kept heading to the road(s)).
2) It didn't matter if we were on the softer dunes above the hard lands since the soft dunes were 'above' the hard lands and the connector road - we'd just hit the freeway instead of the dirt road. So either way we'd end up on a road we had already been on.
3) The wind had not changed direction (I could tell because it was still the left side of my face receiving a dermabrasion that would have cost me a pretty penny in a salon)
4) Right was really the only direction in which there wasn't a road.
5) Once you start turning one direction it's hard to stop. In geometry we call that a spiral. In the desert we call that "tiring."
6) LC's obvious fear that we were going to die was silly... we were within a mile of a road and we could hunker down at any time and wait til daylight. We were perfectly safe unless we got wet/flooded.

Then the rain started. Really. Rain in Death Valley. Not enough rain to knock down the sand, but it was enoough to make me think about water in general. Like about the water we had left with our friends who were no longer traveling with us. We were waterless.

We had broken the first rule of the desert - we had not brought water.

And the water that was dropping on us was not going to get into our bodies, it was only going to soak our light clothes. And the light clothes were all we had as we had broken rule one of the desert - we had not brought clothes suitable for changeable weather conditions.

Finally, after a choice expletive (which LC claims not to remember) which knocked some sense into LC, we held hands and walked on. About a half our later we came to a road and, seguing neatly into the second part of my (now) brilliant plan we turned left. And after swallowing several cubic feet of airborne desert, we finally found our car. We turned on LC's car lights, LC honked the horn and I walked out until I could barely see carlights and hollered.

But our companions had followed a plan much like ours (without the "one member of the party goes Carrot-Top" thing) and they walked right in. We went to our various hotels, showered, and had a lovely dinner in the lobby of the Death Valley Inn (the lobby part is another story entirely).

We were happy to be alive.

We had learned rule number one of the desert Stay in the Hotel Bar

This year we decided to pretty much ignore Thanksgiving and it turned out far better than your average Thanksgiving. Since none of us had family events to go to we missed the traditional Thanksgiving spectacle of burnt turkey, televised football, and drunken abusive relatives "settling" (If by settling you mean "re-opening") old fights.Somewhere in the time leading up to Thanksgiving it occurrred to me that there was a different way to look at the Thanksgiving thing - It wasn't a family holiday, it was a four-day weekend! So on the Wedensday night before Thanksgiving, at the unlikely time of 9:30, we headed off towards Bakersfield California (on our way to Death Valley). The trip was slightly marred by a head-on collision on highway 152 which held us up for an hour or so as traffic was down to one lane and traffic direction had to be alternated so neither direction would back up too badly. We were relatively lucky to be close to it; anyone 20 minutes behind us or more is probably still there waiting. I took a terrible shot of the accident as we passed it. The ride beyond that was boring, which is just how you want it. Highway 5 was a bit crowded by holiday traffic, but we made Bakersfield before 2 am. We passed out in untidy heaps in a room at the Bakersfield Marriott.

The next day was Thanksgiving and we headed into Death Valley. We were the first of our party to arrive and we handed the nice lady at the kiosk our reservations (Under the name "Lee" for one of our Korean friends). To our surprise our friends had booked two campsites, 18 and 19. We drove in, grabbed a site and waited for our friends to arrive. Traditional things took place - the pitching of the tent, etc...

As often happens with arrivals, our friends arrived and we got to the serious business of camping. Eddie opened the beer.

One of our group did something I had never seen before, started a fire with one piece of cardboard and one piece of kindling. I scoffed when she started, but the fire took off way faster than I could ever have anticipated, and roared all night.

We ate, drank, and took photos, many of which unnacountably feature bottles of beer.

I blame Eddie.

Dinner, in our only nod to the holiday, included turkey legs and pumpkin pie for desert. We cooked over the open fire, and everything was precooked, so it was more like reheating. Paper plates and disposable utensils and we also avoided most of the clean up. The stuffing did suck. All in all I think we all agreed that this had been the best thanksgiving we'd celebrated in quite some time. Taking it outdoors and making it a smallish event, only a part of a much bigger holiday plan seemed to take all the stress out of it. Well, except that we were about to have visitors, and not cute little four-legged ones..

Stagger Lees

About halfway through diiner an enormous group of folks came to our campsite and started yelling at us for "stealing" their site. From "hello" to outright screaming in about 3 seconds flat which is surely close to the world record. I talked to them briefly, but whoever their alpha male was had worked himself up into such a frenzy that I'm not sure he heard most of what I was saying. He stomped off to his enormous family and chattered at them in Chinese. We had no real desire to fight about anything, so we asked if we should just pull our smaller tent from one of our campsites and give it to them. They accepted this ungratefully and so two of us unstaked our small tent and dragged it into the front campsite. As we sat around continuing to eat drink, we figuerd out what had gone wrong. I asked the person who had registered for us how many campsited she had reserved, and she said one. Then, musing, and aware that our pissed off campers were Chinese, she wondered if their last name was also Lee. It was. The confused woman at the front kiosk had given us two campsites because both parties were named Lee and the campsitees were adjacent. Next time we will use a non-ethnic name like "Smith" or "Jones." We talked to the other party, who were still pretty aggrieved, and peace reigned in the (Death) Valley. We ate until the flames died down a bit and spent the rest of the evening attempting to melt beer-bottles into pieces of art. Mostly without success..

Later that night a coyote made a short visit to our camp, but I was the only one to see it and, finding no food, it slunk off to the next campsite.

I'm off to Death Valley, so there will be more bad photos next week.. Thanksgiving makes me so happy that I wondered what will happen in the field of sporting riots when the idiot who threw the beer in Detroit discovers his new weapon, the urine-collecting stadium "pal". If he's hit by that, Ron Artest should just about go beyond whatever insane is. The idea a fan could collect urine all game is one that no one should ever have had.

Like arena bathrooms aren't bad enough.

Happy T-day.

Be nice to an Idian.

Lake Michigan is flammable?

Disgusting Rich F*cks Vote (with their money) Republican

Seinfeld Sucked.. mostly...

More ridiculous pictures from the seaside..

18 In the Land of Southern Evil

No more pretending now the albatross is dying in its nest
The company is killing me, the worst trying to ruin the best...

Down in Anaheim next to the home of the mighty mouse. At a conference.. a big one that brings together several organizations which span my work. So it's nice to sit outside the bar and watch people wander by until I recognize someone who I used to work with. We get to talk over old times and discuss slights both real and imagined. We each walk away wondering how the other let themselves go so badly.

The whole scene is made even more surreal by the fact that we share convention space with an international fitness convention: A large contingent of desperately fit and desperately over-tanned (of the "slather-on" variety) men and women who do unusual things like drop and do pushups in the hallways.

A couple of interesting things that I notice:

• When age encroaches, men's hair grows greyer as women's hair grows darker.
• The more expensive the suit on the administrator, the less likely they know how to use technology (excluding PowerPoint, and even then, since their secretaries put the presentations together they have only learned to click the mouse)
• Only I am aging gracefully ;-)

16 More Pictures of Things Republicans Would Like to Destroy... and a new fun spammer thing...

Hmmmm... a couple of months ago I noted an increase in interesting spammer names here and here... This seems to have died down. But now I'm getting more interesting subjects...

My boy Philip Zliw (C- for name) sent me an email titled, "Enjoy your lifetime with Individual Increment Internal Secretion." And the weird thing was that the more I thought about an "Individual Increment Internal Secretion?" The more turned on I got, and the more I thought I might enjoy my lifetime.

I await further posts from my new friend Philip.

And, because I'm off to LA soon, more pics of my last trip to Mendocino.

15 More Dumb Bush Voters - How the Trailer-Trash voted.

So, down here I showed how lower levels of education, poor health, and inability to make money seem to be associated with voting for Bush. Now I have a new metric - I call it the "trailer-trash tell." The trailer-trash tell seems to work best at the end.. the "top" 16 states for mobile homes all went Bush, and the "top" 11 states not burdened by mobile homes all went Kerry. As I continue to look at these stats, it becomes clear that the Democrats have completely lost the slack-jawed yokel vote.

They will have to do something to win it back.

Perhaps marry their sisters?

14 Vacation Snaps!

Went to Mendocino to forget all that is evil. Had a ball. Stayed in a place called "llamas and lodging" just south of Fort Bragg. Relatively inexpensive and while not as stuffed full of "character" as many local lodgings in the Mendo area, I am sure I will go back.

Took some photos.. and here are four..

9 When the Intarweb Goes Bad

I understand what an online recommendation system is supposed to do.

Because I read it here (caution, PDF.. but very important since it was presented at the 13th World Wide Web Conference in New York City. Which is also why we shouldn't care that the author brutally changes tense in the middle of his sentence):

The objective of all web-based recommendation systems is to provide online customers with services, products, and information targeted or customized for their personal need(s), and does it in real-time interaction.

Sing 365 may have the least relevant "recomendation" feature in all of the mighty intarweb. When I go to Amazon the books they recommend have some relationship to the book I'm looking up.

I was looking for lyrics from an Elvis the Prophet song and the lads at Sing 365 came up with the list at the bottom of today's scrap. Elvis, like him or loathe him, is a bit of a wordsmith. The BACKSTREET BOYS? 50 CENT? They can't freaking write.

RAMMSTEIN writes in freaking German.

And RASCAL FLATTS? Did they pick these guys because their record company has "lyric" in its name ("Lyric Street Records")? These idiots wrote the song "walk the llama." What in the world could lead you from Elvis to any of this? The list looks randomly chosen.

Anyway, here's what they gave me in total ----

Surprisingly?

I'm not that interested.

8 Run To the Hills

Which is what I did this weekend. Soda Springs and Jackson CA. Two killer places to hang out. On Saturday night stayed at the National Hotel, which oddly does not have a website. Great bar though, Got some photos as well..

3 Why Bush Won

Because the stupid, poor and unhealthy voted for him. Below are some raw rankings of median income for a 4-person family, infant mortality, and 4-year degrees. All are ranked from best to worst (and all drawn from 2002 Census numbers), and all seem to be associated with a candidate. The dumber, sicker, and less economically viable you are, the more likely you are to have voted for Bush. So the losers are picking our president? Darwin is worried!

It also makes me wonder why the Dems, supposedly the party of 'helping' the afflicted, have lost these votes?

Anyway, here are the associations (in extra-wavy format!):

Tomorrow? Update on the speaker -> table project! (I know, it's a damned lie!)

1 My Walk Home

A crummy start to the month. Started getting sick last night and felt it this morning. Worked a couple of hours and decided to walk home while I was still well enough. Grabbed the small camera and the 16 meg card and walked and snapped a few photos as I went (obviously, click on the link!).

Cityline.jpg	Got to the top of the first hill on the way and snapped this long-distance shot of the San Jose skyline. As it has been rainy recently, and was windy today, there wasn't too much smog.
volunteer.jpg	The rain has also created volunteer lakes in all kind of open fields. This one has been taken over by ducks who were quite fearless.
berries.jpg	Mmmmmmm... delicious poisonous berries! And tragically it's the day after Halloween!
lmex.jpg	This just reminded me of scenes in markets in Mexico. Not sure why.
lmexbich.jpg	Then, when I got closer I saw that "Bich Loan" was also in business. I wasn't quite sure what service a place with that name might provide.
Officers.jpg	And no trip is complete without the man oppressing someone. Seems like an awful lot of cop cars (there is an additional one you can't see) for one apparently compliant middle-aged man in a sedan.
sticks.jpg	Then there were the sticks. I liked how these looked and plan to go back with a decent camera to take some more shots.

Tomorrow? Update on the speaker -> table project!

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