Our friends the walking encyclopedias explain it all to us (1 2 3 4). I don't anticipate any replies from my congressional delegation but if I receive any I will post them as responses to the original entry. Based on past experience, any replies are likely to be gibberish anyway but it would be good to put them in the record, for what it's worth. ( Read more... )

No more snow at lake level. The lake is cold! Perhaps just a tad warmer than Lola Montez was last week. A hot day though. One person canceled because of possible thunder showers. We just had some in Reno over the last few minutes. It hasn't cooled things down much.

( Week in review )

Run-of-the-mill pics from Loch Leven. Fairly uneventful hike. Around ten people expressed an interest but there were five of us. A couple of patches of snow on the trail at the top, but I've been through worse. It might even clear up by next week now that the weather is supposed to heat up again. I'm guessing that the Lola Montez hike next week ( Read more... )

A hike with a ghost--or some kind of mystery. I have seventeen signatures on my sign-in sheet. But I consistently counted eighteen people on the hike, not counting me of course, and not counting one person who couldn't start with us but caught up with us at Emerald Bay. Whatever the number, most of them were restless enough to be on the move. I ( Read more... )

Well, what to say about The Buttcracker 3: The Resurrection: A Parody in the Spirit of the Ridiculous Created by the Brüka Ensemble? The title says it all. The humor is based partly on cross-dressing and other strange costuming and really weird dance numbers set to the music of the Nutcracker. It's fun, though I have to say a bit silly, too. I'll ( Read more... )

Hiking season is winding down for me but I still had a great time hiking up to Jamison Lake. Quite a difference from the peak of the summer. Almost nobody on the trail or at the lake. The big exception was seven mountain bikers coming downhill as I was leaving. I don't know where they were but apparently they were supposed to head back up toward ( Read more... )

Keeping mind and body fit in other ways:


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Obama is himself a commodity, the most telegenic political commodity since Kennedy. One that suits American style capitalism best this particular historical political moment. He is a useful illusion, the same as George W. Bush was a useful illusion. What is the difference between George Bush managing the country through media performances and Obama ( Read more... )

Given how many Big Issues are being thrown around in Angels in America like confetti--AIDS, the Reagan years, the Rosenberg case, Mormonism, the fate and promise of America, acceptance of homosexuals in society, religious prophecy--it comes as no surprise that although one begins to expect a grand unification theory to be presented, a clear-cut one ( Read more... )

Barack Obama has now, in just a year’s time, become the single most inept president perhaps in all of American history, and certainly in my lifetime. Never has so much political advantage been pissed away so rapidly, and what’s more in the context of so much national urgency and crisis. It’s astonishing, really, to contemplate how much has been ( Read more... )