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.
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…