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CONTENTS

NOTES: transcribed
Summertime, Officially:
6/27, 6/26, 6/25, 6/24, 6/23, 6/21-22
Circa Central Sierras:
6/20, 6/18-19, 6/15-17, 6/14, 6/13

ACCOUNTS

JOURNALS index

MayaHo #2 (2005)

MayaHo #1 (2003)

Go2 Newsletter

SkeptiLog: Sightings

Desert Rat News

Eat It! Food News

RECENT STUFF:

Coati Works website

SkeptiLog updates

Rambling Down-Ridge

Reality or Whatever

Alien-Eating Checklist

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SONGS: Again, Again

A Hot Programmer

I Never Tried 2 Hurt You

GOOD HITS:

MC Escher home

Real Pulp Fiction

Andrei Codrescu

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4x4s and Ecocide

Too Much Adventure

MaxiMog system

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'Spengler' writes

20th Century Wars

The Bible Fraud

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WOODY WOODY LIFE
(from a guest book)

Sunset Mag on Bisbee
(InfoPlease: Bisbee)

SacBee: Machu Picchu
(find: Machu Picchu)

We're back from Mexico-Guatemala-Honduras. We haven't left for the Arctic Circle yet. We are in a holding pattern. NOTE: This is not a bLog so you don't have to read it upside down, except for the CONTENTS list.

Monday 13 June 2005 - Greater Volcano again

All primitive peoples lead miserable, unhappy, cruel lives, most of which are spent trying to kill each other. The reason they live in the unpleasant places they do, like the middle of the Brazilian jungle, is that nobody else will. —Margaret Mead

Today we drove Aunt Ginnie down to Jackson for medical appointments and lunch at Perkos. As we left, a very pregnant deer waddled across the road. When we returned, young bucks nosed around. [Old bumper sticker: I LIVE WITH FEAR AND TERROR EVERY DAY / BUT THEN I TAKE HER TO PERKO'S CAFE]. Another full day well spent.

Route: Our house to Ginnie's house, to the medical office. to WalMart, to the medical office, to the drugstore, to Perko's, to one post office, to the drugstore ,to another medical office, to the drugstore, to another post office, to Ginnie's house, to Sharon and Fred's unfinished house, and back home. Whew.

On Highway 88 in Jackson we see a sign: "THE ARK DINER - Best food in town - There's NOAH place like it!" But whatever you order, you get two of everything, right? No elephant steak for me, thanks.

Tuesday 14 June 2005 - at home, afternoon

Days of driving are always so tiring. Even doing Jackson yesterday wore us out, so we crashed early and are up late today, prepping a dinner for Bobbie tonight. And tomorrow we go to Folsom and Sacramento again, early til late. Don't expect much on Thursday

Meanwhile, a few days ago I tried to find an exact quote (now I forget why) by Arthur Koestler describing Johannes Kepler, so I've been rereading THE WATERSHED, excerpted from THE SLEEPWALKERS (which I'll get to next), whilst also going through SCIENCE AND SOCIETY in the 16th and 17th centuries by Alan Smith. All of which I got to as a byproduct of reading Stephen Jay Gould's THE HEDGEHOG, THE FOX, AND THE MAGISTER'S POX back in Taxco and which will lead next to Edward O. Wilson's THE FUTURE OF LIFE, which is a follow-up to a Wilson book that Gould critiqued extensively. Everything connects, eh?

But I digress. The quote I roughly remembered and looked for and found is: "He was too sane to ignore reality, but too mad to value it." That one has stayed with me for years, decades. I try to adopt it as my own motto. Am I successful, or do I value reality too much?

So why read all this stuff about old old science? Well, it's easier than keeping track of new science. And it's interesting, especially Koestler's accounts. And there are great pictures in the Smith book. And because I came across a recent review of Owen Gingrich's THE BOOK NOBODY READ which refutes Koestler's contention that Copernicus' revolutionary went unnoticed. And because current political news sucks. Doesn't take much to trigger me. eh?

Friday 17 June 2005 - peripatetic in plaid

Politicians are like rats. What they steal for themselves is miniscule compared to what they destroy getting it. —Unknown

WEDNESDAY: 12-hour fasting for a blood test (in Folsom); then Tasha (in Sacramento) flaked out; so we bailed, stayed home, did our stay-at-home stuff. I'm editing pictures. For the blood work and the meeting (where we'll try to flog some Mex-Guat goodies), we'll try again tomorrow.

THURSDAY: 15-hour fasting -- delayed by having to replace four tires (US$438) that we wore out on the last trip -- and we have to return to Jackson tomorrow to have the brakes fixed -- so we finally got to Folsom, where it's time to BLEED ME AND FEED ME! We called Tasha and she flaked out again, so 1) enough with her, we'll sell on eBay, and 2) we got to spend the rest of the day reloading the pantry. More samples at CostCo, ymmm...

FRIDAY: T'other day, Bobbie left us a couple publications of interest, a SacBee piece on going to Machu Picchu, and a Sunset Magazine article on Bisbee -- we know almost everybody mentioned in the latter. (See Good Hits for links and My Nüz for Bisbee etc news & links.) Otherwise, we did the brakes. Wow. Um, don't forget to respond to emails from Marsha & Barbi & Jodeana.

Sunday 19 June 2005 - weekend edition

SATURDAY: A long day of shooting pics of fabrics and jewelry to sell on eBay or somewhere. No, it's not easy — doing huipiles means STOOP LABOR, laying stuff out on a covered carpet just right, squatting and squirming in the floodlight. Larger pieces we hold up on the porch to photograph whilst the mosquitoes swarm. NOTE: Write a book with short chapters called A DAY WITHOUT MOSQUITOES. Do NOT satirize A DAY WITHOUT MEXICANS. Oh yeah, the appraiser called about our old prints; he knows nothing about them, sez to go to SF and ask some pros. OK.

Check with:
Bonhams & Butterfield, SF
Harvey Clar's, Oakland
ArtCyclopedia

SUNDAY: Had to reshoot some of the jewelry, especially the bright silver stuff. Polished silver is devilishly difficult to photograph. It helps to have a light box (I don't), white backdrops (no room here), the digital camera having a large monitor plugged in (ours is stored somewhere), etc. Best I could do was put on a white shirt and hold up large sheets of blank paper. I want to never do this again. And now I get to build another website.

Monday 20 June 2005 - the last day of spring

Convictions cause convicts. —Dr Timothy Leary

(Transcribed from tape)   Today, a whole lot of coding going on. And thumbnail-making. I've got the structure of the goodies website done, call it COATI WORKS, with a picture of coatimundis, et cetera. Tonight I'll finish getting all the pictures in place. Then Maureen gets to write the descriptions and plug in prices. And then we get to figure out how to get people to give us money. Guess I'd better research PayPal a little more.

Reading a book review (via A&LD) and some lines from Vonnegut prompts me to write a Guide to Truth and Reality for Total Morons. Now, reality is pretty easy. Reality is whatever bites your ass. Reality is what stays there; if you try to ignore it, it doesn't go away. Of course we need rules to distinguish between Real Reality and Virtual Reality, but I've already dealt with that (click here).

Truth is a bit trickier, unless we require that statements purporting to be true must be verified, validated. I can't really hold for either relative truth or absolute truth. If someone says, "This is true," I'd say, "Prove it." Or I'd just nod and smile and slowly back away. On the relative end, truth is a lie that you live by. And as for absolutes, who can say?

Truth, unlike reality, can be readily partitioned. We don't demand "reality, and nothing but reality," because reality is fairly integral, seamless. It's hard to break off or mask a portion of reality. Truth can easily be sliced apart, one fragment taken out of context and presented as the whole story. Just a sliver of truth; that's a lie.

Of course I've already dealt with Jain multivariate logic (click here). So my Guide to Truth and Reality for Morons will either be a short work with deep references, or a pile of self-plagiarism. Good. Now I can go on to something else.

Back to the COATI WORKS website: it occurs to me that every item listed on one of the index pages is going to need its own subpage with image windows and a full description and links to a method for buying it. Therefore I must research the payment method soonest. Good thing we're starting off with the huipiles and fabrics; going thru all the jewelry is going to be tedious. And Maureen thinks we should sell a bunch of the nice Indian rings I don't wear; but I think we'll need a ring sizing rod before we can do that. Should look at eBay to see how rings are presented.

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Rambling down the ridge. It's a warm evening. The sun is still above the western horizon. The flowers say it's late spring; the game in the baseball field says it's early summer. Roosters crow, players and fans yell. It looks like the blue-jerseys-and-tee-shirts team versus the black-jerseys-and-tee-shirts team. And nobody much knows how to throw or catch or field. But that probably doesn't matter. Half the players are out of uniform too, and that probably doesn't matter. Not much in the way of a crowd. More players than fans. WOOP, correction: I see a few more fans so they're about even.

Time to head back. Only the upper third or quarter of these tall sugar pines are getting any sunshine. A few electric lights are coming on but those are more markers than serious illumination. Sitting under these trees, there's the little upcountry branch library cabin -- some meeting of old farts going on inside. There's the upcountry veteran's hall, nothing happening there. The upcountry sherrif's office, deserted.

A round of boos and yells from the ballfield now -- who did what foul thing to whom? The birds don't care. I don't care. The mosquitoes finding and feeding on me don't care. The flowering madrones and dogwoods don't care. The cedars and firs and pines and oaks don't care.

It's a good evening to be walking around outside, looking off the ridge to distant valleys and ridges, only smeared a bit by Great Valley haze. I'm not working on theories or scenarios or design paradigms, not now. Just smelling the manzanita and mountain misery and whisps of car exhaust and leaf-burning smoke.

Some of the folks in this subalpine suburb are out in their driveways with power tools, slicing thru objects a bit sturdier than paper-towel rolls.

I pass a one-acre corral on a 35-degree tilt, pines sticking up throughout it. Deer on the far side. In years past there were horses in the corral; I'd stop and talk to them, they'd trot over to listen. The place has sold and now the fence is starting to droop and decay in places -- maintenance deferred. Makes it easier for the deer to get in, they don't even have to jump. Even the smell of the horses is gone, pungent in the past, evaporated now.

There's more and more development, house-building, land-clearing, east of the ridge and uphill towards the Sierra Nevada highlands and crest. Land and house prices around here are getting obscene. We've only been here about three years and our property value has probably doubled. I imagine before long, that corral will be cleared and subdivided and improved in its way. Not that I can complain; we're caught up in the same machine.

Further down the road, a doe with a couple of fawns ducks for cover behind a small old RV.

And now just the upper fractions catch any sunlight, lit green dongles against a opalescent sky, before I'm shrouded again by the conifer canopy. Yapping, fairly restrained dogs remind me that I'm not welcome here. The burn at the old spider bite on my left thigh reminds me that the nerve damage is permanant and I'm not getting any younger.

And it tells me that this nice walk was long and vigorous but a little more than my limit, unless I want to start carrying a folding stool for these strolls. I can't depend on roadside resources; there's no public domain here, everything's private property except for that little county enclave where I turned around. There's a weather-beaten paint-scoured concrete giraffe by the edge of one yard; that wouldn't be too comfortable. There's benches and logs for seating back down by the ballfield, and a few fairly level stumps off side roads, but nothing worth reserving.

Not too many years ago I dreamed of walking the Pacific Coast Trail, or at least major stretches of the California portion. A light pack, a good dog, a credit card, The dog is dead and I don't know if there are enough stumps scattered along the route for rapid recuperation. I keep that dream in mind; it's not in the forefront but it's there, like Tinkerbelle in a Disney delusion. (End of tape transcription)

Wednesday 22 June 2005 - Greater Volcano again

There is nothing more extraordinary about an atheist living a virtuous life, than there is about a Christian leading a wicked one. —Pierre Bayle

MONDAY: Last day of Spring. It's already documented — scroll up a few screens or just click here. Hmmm, I'm rather succinct when I jot notes or keyboard directly but I tend to blather on into the tape recorder.

TUESDAY: First day of Summer. Another stroll down the ridge, another day of keyboarding. Nothing much about being productive. Maureen can't talk. And now she has tinnitus.

WEDNESDAY: Second day of Summer. More keyboarding, a shorter stroll, and I responded helplessly to an old problem of altered justice (more on that later). Refining COATI WORKS.

Thursday 23 June 2005 - the same old same old

MORNING: Maureen's sudden-onset tinnitus is driving her nutz; we'll dash off to Kaiser-Folsom again after noon. Meanwhile, we've reworked our sales scheme — I'll finish building the site, then we'll post everything on eBay, which means we'll be able to do other things while the auctions run.

Yesterday I mentioned "an old problem of altered justice." Looking thru my old emails, I found one from Palm Sunday that I hadn't noticed. (Note: details deleted to protect the aquitted.) The writer asked:

Subject: [CTRL] Skeptic News - Wednesday #1

I was wondering if you are the moderator for the forums that appear specifically in this page - [pre-2000 SkeptiNews posting on CTRL elist]

My name is mentioned in an article and I hope to have it removed since the information is now inaccurate (the conviction alluded to was set aside by the court in November of 2002).

If you are not the appropriate person, could you direct me to the correct moderator?

I thought about it, and did some googling, and I responded:

Hello Xxxxxxx:

I'm sorry for the delay in responding to this. When you sent it I was in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, and iNet connexions were sporadic. Back in the states now, I'm just getting to some old email messages.

No, I am not now nor have I ever been a moderator at CTRL. At one time I was a guest editor there (without moderation priveleges), and I originated that SkeptiNews posting from [year] that you reference below. I gathered news that was available at the time and posted it in the SkeptiNews format.

I am glad to hear that your conviction was set aside. Correcting misjustice can often be painfully slow. But correcting misinformation on the Net may be totally impossible. Material published on elists and Usenet is irretrievable.

SkeptiNews postings were distributed via a number of mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups, both by myself and by readers who forwarded the posts on their own. Copies of each posting undoubtedly still exist in the archives of each mailing list and of the many newsgroups that I and others sent them to, in the mirrors of those archives, and Fnord only knows where else.

Even were I able to edit that one SkeptiNews posting in the archives of the one elist I 'own' (and I can't), that would do nothing about the multitudes of other copies still existing on servers around the world.

I'm no longer a member of CTRL; its website is www.ctrl.org and it looks about as vicious as ever. I have no way of knowing just which elists and newsgroups that posting was sent to. The best I could do is to send a message to my elist, referencing that [year] posting, and stating that your conviction was overturned. I don't know if you would want further attention brought to yourself. It's your call.

I sympathize with your plight, but once the iNet cat is out of its bag, it STAYS out. Welcome to the New World Order, where old information never goes away. Good luck.

Y'all remember this: anything that's ever been posted online about you is still there somewhere, whether it's right or wrong. I read recently on BoingBoing of a study of data aggregators, firms that compile and sell personal and background reports on individuals -- like those reports that potential employers get on job applicants -- which found that the error rate was 100%. Yup, EVERY SINGLE REPORT had an error, up to and including the person's gender. Online personal information is largely garbled gossip, accelerated.

EVENING: Maureen' tinnitus is probably viral and related to her diminishing laryngitis. The Folsom drive was hot and boring but not as rushed as usual. Done too many times, it all becomes invisible, but still exhausting. So we'll go to Reno next week.

Friday 24 June 2005 - time marches on & so do we

MORNING: I just received an email thanking me for linking to The Science Fiction Cook Book from my Eat It! (click here) website. This has prompted me to add a section to my classic page, the new section being an Alien-Eating Checklist (click here) which I'm sure you'll all find informative and useful.

And another email:

"Are you Christian? Are you Single? We have the solution for you! At WhereChristiansMeet, you can meet like-minded Christians that are also single! This isn't an ONLINE dating site full of fake profiles! These are REAL PEOPLE just like you."

How do they know I'm not a phony people?

If I dared respond to the spam. I'd reply: No, I'm neither Christian nor Single, nor have I any intention of becoming either. I think that breeding Christians is fraught with peril, judging by what the breed (real or not) has done to the planet. I'd rather breed Dobermans, but not personally — no animal husbandry for me, it's illegal. No cross-breeding of Christians with Dobermans, either. The prospect of such progeny is frightening.

EVENING: Another noonish stroll down the ridge; not hot enough to go jump in the cousins' pool. More keyboarding (me) and tax-figuring (her). Her voice is fading again, probably tied to the tinnitus. Should we go to Death Valley to dry her out?

Another email, from neighbor Carolina in Bisbee. Main Street is getting a new sewer so all the traffic runs in front of our houses, raising much dust. With complaints, the city sent some water trucks. And:

"We've been having some monsoon-like rains. YIHOO! The dust on the bushes was unbelievable! ... We skipped Gay Pride. We aren't gay, and the only other choice is GAWKER, so we stayed home. We could hear sounds of revelry from town tho."

Thus does Bisbee march into its bright future, with rain and revelry.

FUTURE: Ah, the future. I recently read a piece on Civil War re-enactors, and remembered an argument about cultures, those focused on the past versus those focusing on the future. (Apparently nobody really like the present.) Beware of too much preservation and sentimentality, goes the argument, for thou shall be devoured by the future-watchers. Ah, but the past is so quaint, and the future ain't, at least not as it's often visualized. From dreams of sterile utopias to raw disfunctional cyberpunk nightmares, the future never looks as good (or as bad) as it actually turns out to be. Almost all futurists get it wrong; maybe the rest are just lucky. Well, I can be pretty sure that there's no coonskin cap in my future.

Saturday 25 June 2005 - another day at home

You can always trust the Americans to do the right thing, after they have exhausted all the other possibilities. —Winston Churchill

Another day of keyboarding; another stroll off the ridge to a narrow snowy-mountain overlook and down to the meadow (gold course); a bad CostCo pizza; and we've almost finished the dried apricots. My last blood test says, less dried fruit and more dried nuts. Ironic?

I finished the COATI WORKS index pages; the detail pages should be easy. And I've written the openings for three short books. Now I need time to work up the rest. Maybe next weekend, or maybe in Manitoba.

Sunday 26 June 2005 - are we having fun yet?

MORNING: I fixed Maureen's camera, the one she munged back in Antigua Guatemala (click here) before we left for Copan Ruinas. You think that's easy? It's a formerly-state-of-the-art miniature digital and it had nasty dents in the top around the power-control-shutter buttons. It would power up, the lens assembly would go through a few in-out cycles, then it would shut itself off. Bother. Long out of warranty, factory service would cost more than a new camera.

So I looked carefully at the sucker, found a tiny glasses-repair-kit screw­driver, and took that Sony DSC-P10 to pieces. Pushed stuff around and somehow it worked until I put the case back on, then it acted as before. Ah, the case was deformed around the lens assembly, which caught on the obstructions. So, bend the case into a reasonable facsimile of roundness, reassemble — only one screw was lost and its holes don't line up now anyway. Slap a piece of electrical tape over the gap and call it good. Saved us a couple hundred bucks, eh?

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-11:46 AM:   EARTHQUAKE!   Quite noticeable here in the central Sierra Nevada mountains. It lasted maybe 12 seconds. No damage, just a long low rumbling and shaking. What are the location and strength?

-12:01 PM:   I got to the USGS site (click here) and found that it was a magnitude 4.8 shake, epicenter 5 miles NNW of Tahoe Vista, that's the north end of Lake Tahoe, maybe 90 klicks / 60 miles straight-line from here. I dunno how common Tahoe quakes are. Perhaps I'll find out.

-12:36 PM:   The SacBee has a story about the light quake outside Truckee [note: registration required — login as root / password] that mentions a sharp jolt with continued shaking. Nothing about rarity.

-LATER:   Here's the same story from the SF Chron, no registration needed. More via Google news. Another subscription site says clocks stopped in the vicinity. Otherwise, no damage. And that's about the end of that excitement; back to our usual sloth.

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EVENING: Don't worry, something will happen. It usually does. Have you ever noticed that, no matter that every individual event is infinitesimally improbable, stuff happens anyway? Wow. But enough of that. Back to our stories as they slowly grow and mutate:

I'm re-reading MESSI@H by Andre Codrescu, not quite as bloody as THE BLOOD COUNTESS but almost as much fun. Whilst re-reading Vonnegut I had a terrible urge to write down or mutate various lines from the book, such lines to be slyly incorporated into songs. Don't know if I can do that with Codrescu — well, maybe just a little, but nothing else.

Click here to see what happens next.

MORE-TO-DO LIST:

Drill a hole in the wall, run a net cable to Maureen's desk. (Probably not) Order a Sony lap­top battery? Get the little DVD burner working. Build Guat-Mex store site and post items to eBay. See if Maureen's camera can be fixed. Prep the recumbent bikes for the trip north. Edit & post trip pics. Organize or maybe sequester my game notes. In MUSIC, set up an index for CW (cowboy-west­ern) songs. Link my old songs to their jour­nal pages. When we go to Reno, return STP pants.