Oh, Boulder.....

[ursus_arctos]

Having lived here nearly two weeks now, I still think Boulder is awesome. That said, some of its residents are....interesting. Here are some of the better Boulder moments I've noticed so far

Comments

[nixzusehen]

Hey, in Portland you get the stop and wait, but never a honk. We'll just sit and try to wave you through 'til our hands fall off.

I do sometimes wish I had gone to Boulder instead. And congrats on the funding!

[ursus_arctos]

The irony is how many Penn State connections I'm beginning to see in what I'm doing here. I'm TAing an intro cart class, in which we're not only using Cindy Brewer's textbook (not surprisingly), but also labs that Cindy apparently developed along with Babs Butterfield. (One of which involves mapping Portland---I may have to submit a few to you for evaluation!) And that's not even getting into the fact that I'm only now starting to wonder about the political ecology of the American West....

[nixzusehen]

They're pretty hard to avoid, it's true. Cindy and Babs do a lot of collaboration. And yah, Cindy's been using the Portland stuff for a long time (a lot of people do because for quite a while it was one of the highest quality datasets out there. However, I got my hands on the D.C. data recently and was *really* impressed.)

Hmm... political ecology of the american west. Well, obviously James McCarthy did some related work (D'oh!) See "States of Nature and Environmental Enclosures in American West". Also Paul(?) Walker at U Oregon. More up your history-biased lines, try and pick up a copy of "The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River" by Richard White - it's a great read. I'm also thinking of that one paper we read in 500 "How Did Colonialism Dispossess?" by a guy I can't remember but who was from UBC.

FWIW, I think the water struggles of the West are ripe for interpretation through a PE perspective. Anyway, I'm supposed to be working right now...

[satakieli]

Hah. I would say "Oh, Boulder," with you, but the organizer of my (sadly now defunct) Shakespeare group did a cleanse where he ate nothing but clay, apparently, for five days. Some of these spiritual diet things remind me of nothing so much as the peculiar ritualized fasting one frequently encounters reading hagiographies, though I'd bet most modern practitioners would be offended by the comparison.

[ursus_arctos]

Not to say that other folks in other places don't do goofy alternative medicine/spirituality, just that the drugstore cowboy made an interesting juxtaposition. If he'd been a bearded hippie type, or a stereotypical granola girl (both fairly common around here), I probably wouldn't have noticed.

Here's another "Oh, Boulder" moment: a few blocks from my place, there's an "integrative pharmacy"---apparently a place that both stocks homeopathic remedies and the wares of Bristol-Myers-Squibb. I more or less can understand that. But a block from there is an "alternative law" practice that has me baffled.

[nixzusehen]

Geophagy is a pretty well known phenomenon, though I have a hard time imagining how that's "cleansing" - but then I think all of those "cleansing" things are just stupid hippie bunk.