BOSTON – A federal judge Thursday rejected a last-minute bid by conservative groups to block the nation’s first state-sanctioned gay marriages from taking place in Massachusetts next week.
The line to get married forms on the far left in Provincetown – get ready, set, go! Run like the wind, couples in love, and get hitched while the hitchin’ is good!
And yes, so far my own marriage is still not threatened one little bit by the marriage of gay persons. So there, nyah.
We got to Salt Lake yesterday afternoon after driving up through the desert and mountains from Moab. The big wind was still blowing and there were branches down and stuff flying all over. We managed to get to dinner with Timmy and Frank, because Tim was leaving the next morning for a convention. We did much damage to a lot of sushi, much to the wonderment of our family, who stuck to shrimp tempura.
Today we mooched around at Mom’s and ran a couple of errands before meeting with our friends Jim and Jane at a place called the Salt Lake Pizza and Pasta Company. In my salad days it was the old Pine Cone, where I used to cut out for lunch in high school and bring back large takeout containers of coffee and drink it just outside my German class, so the aroma would drive my (ahem) non-coffee-drinking teacher buggy. However, now it’s a very nice pizza and pasta joint, but with a large number of screaming babies and breastfed (!!) toddlers. Nonetheless, it was a fun time and much food was eaten. Then Jim and Jane hopped on his Vespa (which had non-working lights and a seat bolt that fell off) and met us a block away at the Maggie Moo ice cream joint. I had 2 scoops, naturally. How could I not? I could get them to moosh together “cinnamoo” and chocolate mint.
I had pasta, beer, goat cheese and ice cream. Not a good combo. I’m feeling a bit El Bloato at the moment. We are DEFinitely hitting the health club regularly from now on.
Tomorrow’s agenda: more mooching around, more eating, possibly some hot tubbing, and of course, eating. We’re in the “decompress” mode of the vacation. Friday morning, very early, we leave to bomb back across Wyoming and part of Nebraska, hoping to make it to the same comfortable place we stayed in Grand Island. Oh, and tomorrow I think we may be seeing the Hollister’s new house and new boyfriend. Fun for some (us, prolly not him).
We spent the day at Arches National Park; after our exertions hiking out on the slickrock to see the Upheaval Dome area the day before, we were moving slower and somewhat painfully, so we took an “easy” day driving around part of the park and taking short spur hikes to see arches and interesting rocks. At one point we got into an area just off the road called “Sand Dune Arch” and luckily we had it to ourselves. It’s in an area of long, thin vertical fins of red sandstone, and there’s extremely fine red sand (or rock dust) underfoot. I was wearing Tevas and decided against putting my boots on, because the sand felt so soft and cool. The arch was only about a quarter of a mile from the road, so we walked in. The trail leads through a narrow slot entryway – when there’s sand on it the dark red sandstone is really slick.
Once we got in there, the light was incredible. It just glowed and bounced around. Everywhere I looked the stone flowed around us. It was warm in there but not that sheltered, because as it happened a big wind was coming from just the wrong direction – right down the narrow channels of stone. It was quiet and we were the only people in there. Everywhere we looked, there was something interesting happening with the shapes and the light and the textures. We both just prowled around, shooting whatever we saw and seeing new angles all around.
Finally we struggled up a very short, easy slope (damn fine sand, that) and found the arch. It was small and almost cozy and personal in a way. It was our arch for the moment, so we wandered around getting acquainted with it.
At least one of these images will end up getting printed out and framed, but I haven’t decided which. I really liked the sculptural feeling and of course the light bouncing off the back wall was nice, and different from the usual “blue turquoise in a coral necklace” look of the other arches shots I got that day, with blue sky showing behind orange stone. Of course, that color contrast is pretty too, but I like the diffuse look of these.
I liked these fallen chunks of conglomerate, too. You can see smaller stones embedded in them, and this one seems to cast off those stones in a pattern around the base as it erodes. David joked that we’d been transported to Mars. I suppose it would be funny to run a radio-controlled toy Mars Explorer up to the base of this one, but the place was so starkly beautiful that the joke would be in questionable taste.
I liked the background rocks and the grouping, too. In this one you can see tiny little ridges of cross-bedding – miniature sand dune layers from long ago.
It was a really neat place and I took more pictures and could have stayed longer, or hiked farther into the slot canyons. David liked it, too. However, the wind kept increasing. It was like being in a really, really big exfoliation chamber, in fact… the sand was everywere and constantly blowing in our eyes and up our shorts (and not in a good way). We decided enough was enough and we didn’t want to risk the stuff blowing into our cameras (I had to change cards at this point, not a good thing to do in blowing sand) so we walked back out. I was sorry to leave – it was a neat little place. As we got through the narrow entrance I passed a German guy on his way in with a big camera and told him he’d love the light in there. We chatted for a bit and then headed for the car… just as several cars rolled up and disgorged a motley band of folks that looked ill-prepared for running around in the desert. It was a good time to get away – our little mini-canyon retreat was about to be made hijjus with humanity.
Earlier in the morning we stopped off to see a few arches – we’d hiked all the way out to the famous Delicate Arch on a previous trip and weren’t up to that one, so we went to some of the “close in” ones. This one was at the end of a short trail past blooming cacti and other flowers, with lots of the “cryptobiotic” soil that Arches and Canyonlands are famous for.
The soil contains microorganisms that form dark, ruffled mats on the surface very slowly, with delicate buried fibrous structures that can be damaged with a single footstep that it can’t recover from for decades. At every trailhead, there are signs warning park visitors to stay on the trails and not to step into areas where the cryptobiotic soils are visible – or indeed even if they’re not visible, since they form so slowly. There’s some lightly cryptobiotic soil below the blue flowers in this image – I think the flowers may be some kind of lupine, but will have to look at them with book in hand later. The crypto soils are the darkly ruffled areas below the plants – you can even see that there’s just bare sand around the fallen yucca stem, so that when it fell it must have damaged the soil a bit. There were other areas where I saw what must have been very old cryptos – they were very dark and thick. This was in areas far from where humans would be likely to walk, far from any trailhead or point of interest that draws the average member of the traveling public.
And as always, evidence that many people are stupid.
Via Neat New Things:Library Journal – The Case of the Disappearing Article
On March 2, 1998, TIME magazine ran an article on the public’s reaction to President Clinton ordering air strikes against Iraq. “Selling the War Badly” had a sidebar by George Bush Sr. and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft. Titled “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam,” the sidebar, an excerpt from their book A World Transformed, laid out the reasons Bush decided not to send forces on to Baghdad in the 1991 Gulf War. This passage gives the gist:
Trying to eliminate Saddam…would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well…. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
The article remained on TIME’s web site until spring 2003, shortly before the current President ordered the attack on Baghdad to begin. “The Memory Hole” (www.thememoryhole.org), a web site devoted to preserving “lost” information, reported the article’s removal from the TIME site and posted a scanned version of the original. I was sure that the American Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee (or some such group) would raise a stink, but I didn’t see anything. So, this fall, I began looking into the matter myself.
It appears to have been partly oversight and partly a question of web rights for articles excerpted from elsewhere, but the disappearance at such a sensitive time was troubling. Greiner did a little digging and was most troubled by the fact that TIME magazine couldn’t really answer his questions about the removal of the article in the first place. He goes on to say:
The continued confusion about web rights has a direct effect on researchers. TIME removed the piece, H.W. Wilson removed it but maintained a link to another site, and Gale and EBSCO kept it. FirstSearch had it under a different name. Doing a search? Better use all your resources.
Via Joi Ito:
A week after a scandal broke involving photos of American troops torturing Iraqi prisoners, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, & Root is pulling the plug on private electronic communications with the folks back home, apparently at the request of the Department of Defense.
Uh, oh, I’ve been reading ginmar for a while and was wondering what the fallout might be for her after the photographs of prisoner abuse story broke. It’s nothing to do with her unit, but the issue of boots in the field having access to “non-military” channels of communication (in order to post personal reports or opinions, or upload personal photos) was bound to come up.
On another website weeks ago I ran across a photoblog community that featured several military members who had been continuously posting photos from Iraq… including one from a member who had been killed in the last month or two. I think there’s about to be either a whole lot less of that coming out of Iraq, or a hell of a lot more. I hope ginmar manages to keep some kind of lifeline to the outside world open.
If the majority of boots on the ground lose all or most of their Internet access, there will be hell to pay. Hell. To. Pay. It’s one of the few things that works for them (when they can get access) to help them get through the daily grind of grunt work, grime, and all-too-frequent “Oh, shit” moments of terror.
I didn’t plan it this way, honest. I didn’t know the wildflowers would be so beautiful this time of year in the desert. I mean, I know in a general way that they’re supposed to be beautiful in Arizona, but I’d never heard anyone raving about Colorado and Utah wildflowers before now. They were so beautiful in Mesa Verde that I ended up buying a wildflower field guide before leaving the park, and they were pretty as we drove up through southern Utah to Moab. Today we went to Canyonlands National Park, and they crowded the roadsides. These are silver lupines, and another yellow flower I haven’t found in the book yet, across from the Islands in the Sky visitors’ center.
We headed on into the park and decided to just drive the roads and wait to be amazed – and amazed we were. We went first to Upheaval Basin trailhead and walked as far as we could out along the overlook trail until the trail markers petered out and started to be placed randomly on the slickrock in various directions. We eventually found some steps cut into the rock (probably by the CCC) that went down toward a staircase between two rock walls, then climbed up over the slickrock and up some more steps – sorta sporty, that – and finally up to the right onto a big dome of stone that overlooked the upheaval area. The whole place looked like a gigantic stone souffle that had suffered a cataclysmic failure. You could see distorted strata (stone layers) below the thick red sandstone. There were several theories about what caused it; one was a salt dome that got squeezed upwards through a weak spot in the overlying rocks, then eroded away and collapsed under the weight of the overburden; the other was some sort of above-ground meteor strike. There’s some dark stone in the center that sure looks like a lava or magma intrusion of some kind.
We had lunch at the picnic area after taking many pictures (and talking to Steve on the cell phone) and had a nice chat with some people from Oxfordshire – later we noticed what had to be their vehicle while we relaxed in the shade and ate our sandwiches. They seemed to be having a good time – even the “mule,” who was carrying all the water. They had evidentlyh stinted on washing their car for a while, no doubt saving the water.
Then we went to Grand Overlook on a whim, when we thought we were on our way out of the park. Everywhere we turned, there was a gorgeous view.
Really, there are so many images (we’ve taken hundreds of pictures) will have to wait to be picked over and culled for the galleries they’ll eventually reside in, but I wanted to get some of them “up” for viewing.
We didn’t go to each and every view pullout, but we stopped at most, and walked the rim trail for a ways at Grand Overlook and chatted with a ranger about conditions. Then near the exit road, we stopped one last time near the Neck Spring trailhead and encountered a couple of funny things; one of them was a view of a jeep road that looked exactly like the ones in the Roadrunner cartoons, and the other was a friendly Frenchman who was overwhelmed by the views. We stood and watched a white SUV negotiate the road far below, headed to some campsite or on an adventure tour, and the Frenchman exclaimed “(something explosively fricative) fou!” Then he turned to me and made the universal sign for “that guy is totally INSANE” by whirling his finger next to his temple and said “I’m sorry, in French we say ‘fou!” I laughed and agreed “Oui, c’est fou! He’s crazy, eh? Tres bien!” or words to that effect. There’s a tiny white square on this road that represents a rather large vehicle. YMMV, but that looked totally INSANE to me. We shared the international symbol for laughing our asses off at such lunacy. That was good fun.
When we got back to the hotel, the only thing we could possibly do was jump in the pool and cool off. Tomorrow we think we’ll drive some of the unpaved roads in the area in search of some more rock art to photograph.
We’re staying in Moab one more night. There’s so much to do here and we decided it was worth it. Not only is the scenery devastatingly gorgeous, there’s pretty good food to be had – I think there must be a lot of foodies that relocated here for the recreation and stayed to start restaurantes.
Last night we ate at the Center Cafe which turned out to be a little oasis of good food, wine, and ambiance off of the main touristic drag. Tonight we tried the ultimate test of a town’s cuisine; we went to the local Chinese restaurant. And it was good – very good Chinese food – with typically huge portions so that we really could have ordered just one entree.
We didn’t do too badly for lunch, either; we had a decent turkey sandwich with a big slab of jalapeno pepper on it at a picnic table n the shade of a pinon tree at the Upheaval Dome trailhead in Canyonlands National Park.
More on that in a bit. At least we’re hiking a lot and walking a lot to try to work all the food off… but I think the food is gaining on me. 😉
You know, for a hotel/motel that seems to cater to the outdoorsy/mountainbike/cool dude demographic, there sure seem to be a lot of screaming kids and barking dogs. There’s a big deposit for pets in the room, which someone seems to have paid, and I’m not sure but I think the screaming kids and barking dog are all in the room next to us, which adjoins ours and thus has no soundproofing to speak of owing to the connecting door.
All I’m saying is there’s a whole lot of squabbling, screaming, and barking going on. David says they’re in one of the suites that has a kitchen. Damn, I should have asked about other types of rooms when I called in to book.
Well, they seem to be settling down to a dull whine… I will be ever vigilant for noise incursions the rest of the night, though. Constant vigilance!
Okay, this was worth the scary adventure that got me to this point. This is Cliff Palace, most famous of Mesa Verde’s ruins. It’s reached by what I suspect is a deliberately difficult approach path consisting of metal stairs going down, then funky handcut steps in the stone set in narrow rock channel, then by climbing a ten-foot ladder. These physical obstacles overcome, the reward is being able to stand where people lived 800 years ago and wonder where they went and why they left. The archeologists are working out the whys and wheres now; it appears they migrated south and became the ancestors of the Pueblo peoples. But they left beautiful buildings in stone that glows a soft salmon pink, even in shadow. How could they bear to leave such a beautiful place?
Continue reading
I’d add photos now, but don’t have time to crop them down to a manageable size to upload.
We’ve hiked a lot in the past couple of days; yesterday we headed to the Bear Lake trailhead in Rocky Mountain National Park and hiked to Alberta Falls, where we met a couple that were setting up a virtual geocache. We chatted with them about that for a while, then tried to go on to Mills Lake, but there was too much snow on the trail. As it was the trail was mostly snowcovered to Alberta, so we were pooped and called it a half-day. Then we drove over, on a naturalist’s recommendation, to an area behind the town of Estes Park called Twin Owls. There’s a historic old ranch back there, and the trail access is at the back of it, so we wasted time looking for the trailhead until we realized it was inside the MacGregor Ranch property. It’s maintained as some kind of history museum by the state, apparently. We hiked along the lower edge of the rocks and tried to spot eagles and hawks, but no luck. I think I saw a bald eagle in RMNP on the way in to Bear Lake, though. It was high in a tree with a good view of some hunting grounds, so I’m pretty sure I saw what I thought I saw.
Puddy tat.
Anyway, then after all that hiking we went to the Mary’s Lake Lodge chalet restaurant for filet mignon — oh, momma that was some good eating — and there was a great view, unfortunately obscured by people eating in the tavern section, who got a better view than we did! They sponsor live folk music on Fridays… it would be fun on a return visit to work it so we can be in Estes Park for Friday and Saturday nights, because we missed a lot of fun things by arriving on a Sunday.
We’ve got about 300 megabytes of photos so far. Be afraid. There’s going to be a lot of it printed out in large formats and framed, too. And then there’s the redrocks country yet – more hiking, more pictures, more eating.
We’re meeting up with Arne, Jenni and Liam tonight for dinner “in” and ice cream “out,” and this should be fun.
We’ll probably have to buy a big, big bottle of Tylenol soon; we’re going through it fast.
Tomorrow is Timmy’s birthday – happy birthday, Tim!!
Tomorrow is also a long, long driving day, and probably no internet access (the crowd goes wild) until we get to Moab 3 nights later.
And so now I’ll bid adieu from this funky little Internet cafe in Boulder, which features typical Boulderites, not to mention a very nice red Lab who likes people a lot.