It's just me ripping off M. C. Escher.
But there is one great big problem, which is that though we've lived in The Prudent State* for over three years now, we don't really know beans about the guy. He was already in his last term when we got here, so we never had to evaluate a campaign of his – and to be quite honest, we haven't really noticed him doing much of anything over the past few years. (His wife, on the other hand...) This could be considered a Good Thing, and perhaps may win The Sack** a good portion of the King Log vote in the campaign ahead. I was frankly a bit surprised when he tossed his hat in the ring; it seemed like an un-Iowan bit of hubris.
Anyway, we can't tell you any more about him than you yourself can read at the blogs of those Iowans who actually pay attention to such things: Here is a good place to start.
UPDATE: Well, I guess I am behind the curve... The Sackman does seem to have gotten some attention in blogland, though I'm not sure it's the sort of attention I'd want to have. Still, what can you expect with a name like "___sack"?
Visiting his website, I'm struck that he doesn't seem to have much of a platform. The front and center (and, as far as I can tell, sole) issue on the site is the "Vilsack Resolution", which is all about declaring opposition to any escalation of the war in Iraq. His overall master plan appears to be a modified Murtha, i.e., pulling U.S. troops out of southern and central Iraq and redeploying into the Kurdish regions of the north.
There's definitely a conscious appeal to the netroots crowd. In fact, the website seems to be directed primarily at the young and well-wired. Vilsack (ok, some ghost writer) says, "Before launching my full campaign website, I've started using some of the most popular social networking sites to meet new supporters."
- YouTube
- MySpace
- Party Builder
- DailyKos
- MyDD
Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Vilsack!
*No, that's not the state nickname, but it probably should be. "Hawkeye State"; what the hell is that? Consider the state motto: "Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain". How much more dishwater can you get? Not for Iowans the stubborn skepticism of "The Show-Me State", let alone the in-your-face belligerence of "Live Free or Die"; more like "mess with us and we will empanel a committee to present you with a petition of our grievances."
**Few people call him that – yet.
Somewhere between Escalon and Manteca the car's odometer rolled over 100000.
Being out in the wilds was off the agenda for the next five or six days, so we relaxed the anti-bear rules, and snacked on whatever trail food we had left over. I downed one of the Starbucks Frappucino drinks we had bought several days before, when we weren't sure if we could find caffeinated beverages in whatever remote Sierra valley the next dawn would find us in. Gads, like drinking melted coffee-flavored ice cream. Ick.
The smog was thick enough that it blocked out the coast ranges pretty much all the way up the valley. Eventually Mount Shasta appeared, but only as a whitish smudge just above the horizon that would have been mistaken for a cloud, except that it didn't move.
We arrived at Redding. We spent many minutes roundly cursing Redding's layout of interstate exits and access roads, but the daughter finally got her long-delayed Red Robin dinner. (Apparently there's some famous bridge or other in town, but we were too annoyed by the effort it took to find the damn restaurant to bother doing any exploring.)
The next day, up past Shasta, through the Klamaths, the Siskiyous, down into the Willamette valley at Eugene. The air is a little cleaner here, but the coast ranges are stil bearly visible, and as the valley widens the mountains recede into the gunk. (One of the defining characteristics of the trip, so far, is that aside from the very first day, there have always been mountains visible around us, somewhere.)
When we get to the Portland outskirts, neither the Cascades nor Mount Hood are visible at all; we search for them in vain on the eastern horizon – normally, they are clearly visible – as we sit in a big traffic jam just south of the Wilsonville bridge.
We have family business in Portland, so no parks, or wilderness, or pictures. But Yellowstone, Grand Teton, and Badlands are still to come.
Given their appearance, it's not surprising that they are made out of the same hard, monolithic granite as El Capitan itself.
The Cathedral Rocks form one side of a small subsidiary creek drainage. The sides and mouth of this valley have been sliced off by glaciers, leaving behind the classic example of a "hanging valley". Bridalveil Creek runs down the valley, and falls about 600 feet over the cliffs at its end. It's a fairly pathetic trickle in August, though.
The prominent knob to the right of the falls is the Leaning Tower. A more impressive picture of it (it really is "leaning") is here. I didn't know anything more about it than that, but poking around on the Internet I discovered that a fairly well-known rock-climbing guy, Todd Skinner, was killed in a fall while climbing it a few months after we were there. (Given the dangerous nature of the sport, it's interesting that most of the fatalities in Yosemite last year were hikers venturing off-trail in the wrong places, rather than rock climbers.)
One last glimpse of El Capitan as we headed down towards the heat and smog of the Central Valley. Stockton, here we come!
After another bear-free but unpleasant night in Curry Village, we loaded up the car and headed west. We passed both Upper and Lower Yosemite Falls:
The valley floor was calm, but wind at the higher elevations swept the plume of the upper falls back and forth across the rock face.
Further down the road, we noticed a bunch of people standing in a meadow, all looking upwards towards a point somewhere above us. I pulled over, and walked out to see what they were looking at.
(Parenthetical photographic note: This picture epitomizes the Yosemite Picture Problem in that it is both clichéd and inadequate. Clichéd, because probably every single person who has ever stood in El Capitan Meadow has taken this exact picture; inadequate, because it does not even come close to imparting the immense size and physical presence of El Capitan. It is so big. For example, If you stood the Sears Tower up next to it, the building would only reach approximately half-way up the rock face.)
One of the watchers volunteered that they were observing some climbers working their way up the rock. With binoculars, we could make them out, packing up their previous night's bivouac on top of El Cap Towers, the knob of rock about halfway up the exposed portion of the cliff, just to the right of the "nose". (I tried to find them in the full-blown version of the image, but couldn't – they're just too small to show up.) Climbing El Capitan generally takes climbers two to five days, though somebody's done it in less than twelve hours. Here is a description of one climb; here's another (with pictures!). We watched for a few minutes, but there isn't a whole lot that's exciting about watching someone break camp, so we moved on.
But despite eluding my gaze in the last couple of days, tonight I looked out the office window in forlorn hope - and there was Comet McNaught hanging in the sky! Luck was with me - I had started my watch a few minutes earlier, but the sky was still too bright; I went to attend to a chore, passed the window on my way upstairs, and there it was. At first I pessimisticallly thought I must be looking at a contrail mockingly arrayed near the comet's predicted location (my eyes aren't what they used to be), but binocs and sharp-sighted offspring confirmed my good fortune. Brief though it was - within a minute the comet was concealed by a streak of cloud, and though it re-emerged on the underside quickly, it was soon consumed by the ashy haze at the horizon, despite a mad dash up the road to a site with a better view of the horizon. But for the couple of minutes I had it, it was bright, distinct and very comet-y! Perhaps fortune will smile again before it swings around the sun, and, after that, before it heads out for Sol's frontier.
(And to keep the comet gods from withdrawing favor, I will confess that I have had good fortune with comets. I did see Halley's - spectral cotton ball requiring the use of a telescope though it was last time 'round - and we had a magnificent view of Hale-Bopp from the comfort of our front yard on Guam. So I'll stop whining, already.)
There's plenty wrong with blogging: the fanboy kiss-assery; the me-too-ism; the wholesale adoption of clunky, unimaginative catch-phrases; the military "experts" whose firsthand experience under fire amounts to having yelled "You sunk my battleship" at their cousin in the rec room; the blogs that are nothing more than too-eager auditions for party hack employment; the rush to denounce unseen movies, unread books -- and to publicize outrageous incidents that turn out to be figments of someone else's imagination.
*(AKA, "Why provide content when other people can do it for me?")
**I am not so dim as to not realize the fact that this very post could be construed as an example of "me-too-ism". I can handle the irony; can you?
The following morning, I looked it up on IMDB. Ah, yes. "Léolo", that was it. Shudder. Hmmm, the IMDB crowd seems to like it – a 7.3 out of 10 rating. "The most magic of magic realism." "Devastating masterpiece." "Brilliant, beautiful, wistful black comedy." "Best Film of 1992." Etc. Piles of awards won. Apparently, "In 2005, TIME named Léolo one of the 100 best films of all time."
Well. What do I know? Okay, the first five minutes or so are pretty good, but it goes steadily downhill from there.
Maybe the core problem is something else I realized recently – I don't really like movies. Sure, there are individual movies that I enjoy, but they are rare and far between – for the most part, movies just don't do anything for me.
Oh, sure, when I was young and bored, and had time on my hands, and was looking for companionship, movies were very useful. I will never deny their utility in social interaction. But as an art form, to be enjoyed just for themselves? Feh. If I tried, I could probably name ten movies that I would consider actually owning on DVD, fewer that I would consider to have had a noticable and long-term impact on my life – none, in fact. 99% of Hollywood's output could slide into oblivion, and I wouldn't even notice. (I suppose the industry does keep a lot of otherwise idle hands gainfully employed, so I suppose it is on the whole a Good Thing.)
Now that I think of it, most of the few movies that I really like are comedies. I'm not sure why that is – maybe the cinematic reed is too weak to support much more without seeming over-puffed and full of pretention. Those few don't fit into any category that I can think of, though the likelihood of enjoyment is increased (though not guaranteed) if Monty Python is involved.
Mmmm, "Life of Brian". I could watch that forever.
(Moira here): But Kurosawa. You like Kurosawa. As do I. But you and I share the same attitude to movies. I like ripping yarns, I like movies that are beautiful to look at (and will tolerate otherwise uninteresting movies if they are visually seductive), and I like to gaze upon beautiful people (or non-beautiful people with compelling faces), dull or trite though the vehicle may be.*
Kurosawa fulfills all those requirements in spades. Even when the movies are less than excellent (Rhapsody in August, Dreams), they are wonderful to look at. The only reason I've ever been tempted to indulge in a huge honkin' vulgar plasma TV is for the purpose of watching Ran in all its glory in the comfort of my home, whenever I please.
But otherwise, movies? Eh, shrug. Movies to me are often just an irritatingly passive experience. In reading, you have to co-create the fictional world. (I do that with opera recordings, too - I can't understand the librettos, so I just make up stories for myself to go along with the music. Bet you didn't know that Turandot is set in the western Pacific during World War II, did you?) Movies are just given to you, and what is given is often unsatisfactory. As David says - pretty thin reeds unable to bear the pretensions of the maker.
I'm pretty snotty about comedy, too. Popular laff riots rarely make me laff riotously, with some rare exceptions: Life of Brian, Spinal Tap, Fawlty Towers, Christopher Guest's stuff, The Office (original Brit version). Certain genres of physical comedy - the stuff that has its origin in Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton or whoever winching a piano into an upper story for 20 minutes running and in the process dropping it onto the pavement approximately 5,000 times - just irritate me to the point of murderous rage. (This may be genetic. My father had that reaction to I Love Lucy, and so do I.)
*That's another minor reason I have little interest in movie-going: with an exception or two, there seems to be little dazzle and dash in the looks department in Hollywood these days. I usually have no idea who the people on the cover of the check-out stand magazines are, but my aren't they a bland little lot of scrunchy-faced interchangeable blonds/blondes. That's why I like a lot of foreign movies - not because the product is necessarily better, but because they (Bollywood, China, what have you) seem to have higher standards of pulchritude now.
(Moira out)
Geologists have been busy little beavers mapping out the boundaries of the many slightly-differing kinds of igneous rock in the Sierra; this map gives an idea of the complexity of the situation in the Yosemite Valley area. (For the Yes, we are So Geekly! file: we have a jigsaw puzzle of a slightly older version of this map.)
The Park visitor center has some good displays describing the differences between tonalite, diorite, granodiorite, and plain old granite. But to be honest, from a distance they all look pretty much the same – massive, dense, salt-and-pepper rocks – and for the non-geologist what really distinguishes rock formations at Yosemite is less their specific ratio of alkali feldspar to plagioclase, and more how jointed and fractured the cooled plutons became. Once the glaciers got to work on Yosemite, joints and fractures were weak spots that allowed the ice to shear away greater quantities of the less-consolidated rock, leaving the more monolithic formations behind and leading to the spectacular current landscape.
(I discovered, on doing some checking, that El Capitan is in fact made up of honest-to-God granite, contra McPhee, quoted here. He was right about Half Dome and Yosemite Falls, though.)
A good introduction to the geology of the Valley can be found here.
(We're keeping this notice at the top for a few days so our vast readership doesn't get disoriented. New posts below.)
I'll confess it right off – the real purpose of this post is to show off this picture. The interplay of light and shadow, the vivid skin of the orange, the accidentally precise spiral cut of the zester... anyway, these really are the best damned cinnamon rolls we've ever eaten, and I made them Monday morning for the new year.
First off, make the dough. We use a bread machine, and a slight modification of a recipe that came with it:
- 1 egg, plus enough water to make 1 1/3 cups
- 4 cups bread flour
- 1 1/2 tsp salt
- 1/4 cup sugar
- 1 stick (yes, that's one stick, i.e., 1/2 cup) butter
- 2 tsp yeast
(N.B.: all measurements approximate after this point – you have been warned!)
The next morning, roll the dough out into a roughly rectangular shape, about 5 mm. thick. Melt approx. 2 tablespoons of butter (Yes! More butter!), and pour it over the dough, sreading it as evenly as possible with a knife or brush. Mix together 1 tbsp cinnamon and 1 tbsp confectioner's sugar, then sprinkle over the buttered dough (we use a tea strainer to disperse the cinnamon-sugar mixture evenly). Cut the dough parallel to its short axis into strips about 2 cm. wide (we use a pizza wheel). Roll each strip into a tight spiral, and place on a cookie sheet. Cook in a 325 ° oven until brown and done, 15 - 25 minutes.
While the rolls are cooking, blend about 1/4 cup confectioners' sugar and milk into a glaze. It should be thin enough to spoon over the rolls. Add the zest of about 1/4 an orange (like in the picture). Blend it all together. Once the rolls are out of the oven, spoon the glaze, including the orange peel bits, over the rolls.
Makes about 16 decent-sized rolls. V. tasty. Probably not something to eat on a daily basis.
“It is typical of the US to ignore the global context in which this is taking place.”
I can just hear Dr. Schuklenk, in a Basil Fawlty-ish voice – Typical! Just typical! But maybe with a name like Schuklenk, at a Scottish U., he wouldn't sound much like Basil Fawlty at all.
Via Mr. Sullivan.
Iron Horse "Vrais Amis" 1993. Ummmm, interesting, kind of. Is sparkling wine supposed to keep for 14 years? Pretty golden color, but heavy and not brutal enough for our tastes. (God, I'm so witty!) Not much of a sparkler – initially, I was afraid that the bottle would be completely flat. I wouldn't get it again. Moira didn't really care for it at all, and made me drink most of the bottle.
UPDATE: Moira finally identified what this tasted like to her – carbonated cooking sherry.
UPDATE THE SECOND: Could not, in the end, finish the bottle. This is a severe indictment.
Next, Vollereaux Brut. An unknown (to us) honest-to-God champagne. Tasty, much more complex and interesting, a distinct chalky aroma[1], loads of bubbles. Moira has been drinking it while I write this, must go back and get fair share.
[1] Personally, that's one of my favorite characteristics of champagne. Your mileage may vary, etc.
