Here's what a flash flood looks like on a USGS graph:




That's right, the flow went from about 14 to about 140 cfs (cubic feet per second) almost instantaneously. Margretta has photos. Upload photos, ho-bag!

So a good round of Spot-the-California is generally easier on TV than in movies because of lower budgets, but sometimes it is so blatant it's distracting. I just need to vent:

Okay, whoever picks locations for The Office. When Micheal goes out into what he repeatedly claims is the "great Pennsylvania wilderness," he is clearly in a redwood forest. Do you really think we cannot spot the difference between an Appalachian deciduous hardwood forest and dry Sierra conifers? DWIGHT IS SPINNING HIM AROUND NEXT TO A GIANT SEQUOIA. IT'S LIKE CLAIMING YOU ARE IN NEW YORK AND SHOWING THE EIFFEL TOWER IN THE BACKGROUND.

Rant over. For now, anyway.

[Addendum Rant: also, in this one episode of Bones, they claim to be in a small town somewhere in Washington, I think, but then show background stock footage of Telluride (southern Rockies), Half Dome (Yosemite National Park, California) and the Watchman (Zion National Park, Utah). Do people really A) not recognize any of these landmarks and B) think that white granite with redwoods and red sandstone with cottonwoods occur in the same town? Jeez.]

Ah yes, I used to be much more a creature of the open road, the little winding highway, the driving topless through the Mojave because I'm almost out of gas and don't want to run the AC, the stretching my legs on the bridge over Marble Gorge, the setting up my tent in a field of rabbitbrush golden in the sunset, the finding weird diners to eat waffles and coffee and gossip with the locals, the soaking in beautiful rough music the runs in time with the flow of the landscape, the Zen state of no-thought that comes with a long drive.

In recent years my road trips have been ample, but not if the meandering adventurous type; they've been closer to long commutes, blasting from New Orleans to Moab in two days, from Moab to Petaluma in one. Not really the road trip experience, as they provide little time for adventure or delight.

So I am really hoping it works out to do a road trip integrated with my board meeting in Montana, and then with Zack's wedding in Berkeley. Oh, the places I'll go!

For extremely long wishful photo essay:( Read more... )

Current Mood: hopeful

I find this much more amusing than I probably should:

You might be a redneck Jedi if...

1. You ever said the phrase, "May the force be with y'all."
2. Your Jedi robe is camo.
3. You have ever used your light saber to open a Boone's Farm.
4. At least one wing of your X-Wings is primer colored.
5. You have bantha horns on the front of your land speeder.
6. You can easily describe the taste of Ewok.
7. You have ever had an X-wing up on blocks in your yard.
8. You ever lost a hand during a light saber fight because you had to spit.
9. The worst part of spending time on Dagobah is the dadgum skeeters. [testify!]
10. Wookies are offended by your B.O.
11. You have ever used the force to get yourself another beer so you didn't have to wait for a commercial.
12. You have ever used the force in conjunction with fishing/bowling.
13. Your father has ever said to you, "Shoot, son come on over to the dark side...it'll be a hoot."
14. You have ever had your R-2 unit use its self-defense electro-shock gadget to get the barbecue to light.
15. You have a confederate flag painted on the hood of your landspeeder.
16. Although you had to kill him, you kinda thought that Jabba the Hutt had a pretty good handle on how to treat his women.
17. You have ever accidentally referred to Darth Vader's evil empire as "them damn Yankees."
18. You have a cousin who bears a strong resemblance to Chewbacca.
19. You suggested that they outfit the Millennium Falcon with redwood deck.
20. You were the only person drinking Old Crow on the rocks during the cantina scene.

...or this can be part of my ongoing project of eating borderline foods so as to increase my tolerance to bacteria.

AP--"COMMACK, N.Y. – The investigation into a nationwide salmonella scare over pistachio nuts spread Thursday from a California nut processor to its sister plant in New York, where inspectors last month found cockroaches and rodent droppings."

I ate about half a pound of pistachios yesterday. I should maybe check the news more often.

Man, Joss Whedon apaprently didn't learn from working with Fox on Firefly. Report on Dollhouse:

"...Then the show premiered to mixed reviews and so-so ratings. The ratings still aren't that blockbuster. And now, creator Joss Whedon promises that the next couple of episodes are going to show more of the vision that he has had for the show from the start (before FOX got involved and told him how they wanted the opening episodes to be)."

I remember him being all, "Oh, Fox and I have worked out our issues, it's not going to be like it was with Firefly." Ahem. Even though I love Firefly now, I barely watched it when it was on, because they started with a blah episode instead of the one Whedon wrote, put in on Friday nights, then kept dicking with the time. Whedon needs to go work with the scifi network or someone that will give him creative freedom.

On the other hand, the second-to-last episode was a noticeable uptick in quality. Am about to watch the latest. And I am not biased or marketing victim in this case, because I noticed it was much better before I heard Joss was talking up that point. It really was better.

Me and my incoherency are going to watch TV now.

This is what happens when I start messing around with iMovie at work:

http://www.wildlandscpr.org/blog/video-consequences-aggressive-orv-ads

So, I was looking at some photos of the Great Depression online as part of a project, and found an old student photo essay on the period. Here are the captions for the first few photos:

The trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange just after the crash of 1929. On Black Tuesday, October twenty-ninth, the market collapsed. In a single day, sixteen million shares were traded--a record--and thirty billion dollars vanished into thin air. Westinghouse lost two thirds of its September value. DuPont dropped seventy points. The "Era of Get Rich Quick" was over. Jack Dempsey, America's first millionaire athlete, lost $3 million. Cynical New York hotel clerks asked incoming guests, "You want a room for sleeping or jumping?"


Police stand guard outside the entrance to New York's closed World Exchange Bank, March 20, 1931. Not only did bank failures wipe out people's savings, they also undermined the ideology of thrift.


World War I veterans block the steps of the Capital during the Bonus March, July 5, 1932 (Underwood and Underwood). In the summer of 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression, World War I veterans seeking early payment of a bonus scheduled for 1945 assembled in Washington to pressure Congress and the White House. Hoover resisted the demand for an early bonus. Veterans benefits took up 25% of the 1932 federal budget. Even so, as the Bonus Expeditionary Force swelled to 60,000 men, the president secretly ordered that its members be given tents, cots, army rations and medical care. In July, the Senate rejected the bonus 62 to 18.

Philipinos cutting lettuce, Salinas, California, 1935. Photographer: Dorothea Lange.
In order to maximize their ability to exploit farm workers, California employers recruited from China, Japan, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Mexico, the American south, and Europe.


Farmer and sons, dust storm, Cimarron County, Oklahoma, 1936. Photographer: Arthur Rothstein.
The drought that helped cripple agriculture in the Great Depression was the worst in the climatological history of the country. By 1934 it had dessicated the Great Plains, from North Dakota to Texas, from the Mississippi River Valley to the Rockies. Vast dust storms swept the region.

But a damn fun waste of time. These are from a couple of superhero generators on websites. I am designing alter egos. I got the websites from gyttja, whose superheroes are going to form a desert liberation army with my superheroes.

So, a friend pulled a Grand Canyon river permit in the lottery for next spring, and we'll be on the river for 25 days. FUCKING A.

I will be rowing my boat, which I am still trying to decide what to name--the top candidates so far are the Utah Phillips (after one of my heroes) and the Death and Glory (a reference to some juvenile pirates from the Swallows and Amazons series).

Anyway, I've been thinking about this obsessively for a week now, accosting people I barely know on the the street to tell them about it. The night before last was very windy, big gusts buffeting the house and making the bamboo fence rattle, and I couldn't go to sleep between that and thinking about the Grand. When I finally did, I had a dream where I was in my whitewater canoe, which is rather hard to maneuver, and was about to run Lava Falls (the biggest rapid on the Grand, Class 10). I started out all nervous, but when I dropped into that first wave everything snapped into place, and I ran the haystacks and ledges effortlessly, perfectly coordinated with the canoe and the paddle, with the flow and crash of the red sandy water. I think this is an omen.

Anyway, here is a great set of photos that a friend on mine took on his Grand trip two years ago, about the same time of year we will be going:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/desierto/sets/72157594406125202/show/

Current Mood: grateful

Either there are Firefly nerds at NASA, or they didn't know what they were getting into. Vote!

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/name_ISS/index.html

Look at this, HELL yeah:




I have officially switched to Chacos, and I aint takinem off. Except that I'm in Oregon at a law conference, so yes shoes now, but not when I get home.

I am at a motel watching Stephen Colbert's tribute to Vikings.

Spoilers if you're not up to, let's see Episode 4x13. I haven't seen tonight's (Feb 20) or last week's (Feb 13). I want my theories on record before I find out anything else, because it's more fun that way.

( Read more... )

The best mockumentary ever is finally up on YouTube:

So, the head of the Utah Senate is pushing a proposal to make all bars and restaurants in Utah scan your driver's license anytime you order a drink. The information about how many drinks you've had--beer, wine, whatever--would be kept permanently in a state database, available to law enforcement and to all bars and restaurants.

This proposal moves from being just bizarre to being incredibly creepy when you consider that nearly all of the state legislature, county commissioners, and law enforcement personnel in the state are Mormons, who are not supposed to drink. So basically there would be a statewide database of the drinking activities all non-Mormons and jack Mormons, that the local sherriff's deputy or any of his buddies could check up on anytime they wanted. For those of you who have never lived in a place run by one authoritarian religious organization: this is very scary.

The state legislature is reacting to the annual post-Sundance-Film-Festival call to stop making everyone buy a "private club" membership at restaurants before they can order non-beer drinks. The Lege's Mormons have apparently decided to show the Gentiles how much they despise outsider opinions by coming up with a proposal cracking down harder on alcohol consumption.

article in the Salt Lake Tribune: ( Read more... )

Current Mood: angry

As if there was not enough awesomeness right now, we got this over the weekend:

11th-Hour Ruling Blocks Utah Oil and Gas Leases

By FELICITY BARRINGER
Published: January 17, 2009

A federal judge on Saturday blocked oil and natural gas exploration on tens of thousands of acres of federal land in Utah, saying in an 11th-hour decision that the Interior Department had not done sufficient environmental analysis, particularly of how air quality might be degraded.

The decision by the judge, Ricardo M. Urbina of Federal District Court in Washington, granted a temporary restraining order sought by seven environmental groups to prevent oil and gas companies from taking possession of leases they had purchased Dec. 19.

The Bureau of Land Management could have cashed the checks from the winning bidders on Monday; at that point the leases would have become final.

The number of tracts available for lease in Utah had been reduced by the bureau late last fall after the National Park Service objected to plans to lease hundreds of acres near Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park.

But the scaled-back proposal still included land within sight of the parks, as well as land in and around Nine Mile Canyon, an area with well-preserved pre-Columbian rock art.

“Because of the threat of irreparable harm to public land if the leases are issued,” Judge Urbina wrote, “the balancing of equities also tips in favor” of the environmental groups that brought the lawsuit.

Heidi McIntosh, a lawyer with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, one of the groups that sued, said in an e-mail message, “The judge’s order saves some of the most spectacular landscapes in the nation — lands within a stone’s throw of two national parks — from being turned into oil and gas fields.”

Kathleen Sgamma, the government affairs director of the Independent Petroleum Association of Mountain States, said the decision was “a setback for energy security.”

“We feel adequate analysis and protections were in place,” Ms. Sgamma added

Current Mood: jubilant

I just discovered that High Country News, a Western regional newspaper out of Colorado, profiled one of my river-runnin,' beer-drinkin' homies:

Name: Travis Kelly
Age: 54
Hometown: Moab, Utah
Occupation: Graphic artist / cartoonist
Motto: Cartooning is better than the usual artist job: "Would you like ranch or vinaigrette on your salad?"

Travis Kelly’s Main Street office in Moab, Utah, is a cluttered mess. His vivid oil paintings line the walls; months of newspapers tower in piles near the door. There are cases of canned beans and dry noodles stocked under a drawing table, and cartoon proofs hang haphazardly from every surface.

A tall man with a dapper moustache, soft Southern accent and ever-present wool cap, Kelly has interests as scattered as his workspace. At 54, he is an avid river runner, hunter and philosopher, not to mention an enthusiastic fan of professional football. He has written numerous scripts and a screenplay, and his radio play, Utah Alamo, was produced live on Moab’s KZMU Community Radio station. But cartooning is what drives Kelly, allowing him to comment in his own way on the current state of the nation and the West.

Practicing his “self discipline of half-cartooning, half-writing,” he intensely follows local and national news, letting current events “percolate in his subconscious.” The cartoons that emerge tackle subjects as various as cell phone use, roads through wilderness, Western boomtowns and the oil industry.

This wasn’t always Kelly’s lifestyle. He grew up near Fort Worth, Texas, and worked for five years in Dallas at ad agencies and magazines. “I hated it,” he drawls. He always yearned for a life outside the big city, so he left to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts in Tucson, Ariz., and eventually heard the call of Moab. Here, at the dawn of the millennium, he started his graphic arts business and eventually moved into a school bus. Yes, a school bus.

“I wanted to live the romantic myth of the starving artist,” he explains, “but I also wanted to make a point about local sustainability and self-sufficiency.” The bus, outfitted with solar panels, sits on a patch of land next to the Colorado River. Primitive as it may sound, the bus has sleek interior wood beams, a full kitchen and a riverside solar shower among the tamarisks. Kelly even has a dance floor, set up over the desert sand, just in case.

Kelly has lived here for five years, spending his time drawing, reading and listening to international broadcasts on his short-wave radio. He eschews cell phones, utility bills and running water, for the “synergy of the isolation factor.” “I wanted to leave a very small environmental footprint, not be held hostage by skyrocketing rental and mortgage rates, and, artists have always lived where the rent is low.”

Though Kelly’s cartoons appear weekly in the Four Corners Free Press, based in Cortez, Colo., he draws many of them for his own fulfillment, electronically sending proofs to his loyal fans and friends. He posts a weekly editorial cartoon on his Web site, www.traviskelly.com. His work has not gone unappreciated: The Society of Professional Journalists, Colorado Chapter, gave him Mark of Excellence awards in 2006 and 2007.

But Kelly doesn’t spend all the time chained to his computer. Taking a break from a marathon drawing session, he sneaks up onto his office roof for a view of downtown Moab – and a quick cigarette. “An artist’s work is never done,” he quips as he contemplates the next frame of his cartoon.

Erika Jones calls Moab, Utah home, though currently lives and works on the North Coast of the Dominican Republic.

EXHIBIT A:
"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labor, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral color when it is committed by ‘our’ side ... The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."

-George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism"


EXHIBIT B:
National Weather Service
Maximum and Minimum Temperatures
MOAB CANYONLANDS FIELD, UT, United States

In the 24 hours preceding Jan 05, 2009 - 01:53 AM EST / 2009.01.05

Maximum
Temperature
F (C)
19.0 (-7.2)

Minimum
Temperature
F (C)
-9.0 (-22.8)

For those of us who don't want to puzzle this out, that means that the Moab airstrip recorded a high of 19 and a low of MINUS 9 yesterday. Brrrr. No wonder I had to leave off building my house as soon as the sun went behind the canyon rim. It's the first time I've been colded out of building, even though it requires moving around. I need to get some insulated work gloves.

Radio Moab looks like it could be a sitcom 'Southern Exposure'

At KZMU the town's persona shines through

By Christopher Smart

The Salt Lake Tribune
Posted: 01/02/2009 10:51:00 AM MST

Moab » If this iconic southeastern Utah town is both enchanting and quirky, then its local radio station, KZMU FM, is a good mirror of the place.

Reminiscent of Northern Exposure -- the 1990s CBS TV series about an eccentric Alaska town and the radio station that measured its pulse -- Moab's off-beat persona comes out in music and banter at 106.7 FM.

Call it Southern Exposure -- powered by a slew of solar panels and 80-some-odd volunteers.

Station manager Jeff Flanders, a.k.a. "The Guy Next Door," actually lives next to the KZMU studios. His year-round uniform is baggy Hawaiian-style swim trunks and a T-shirt. He's been known to show up in nothing more than a bath towel when gremlins invade the station's 500-watt signal.

"It's a miracle this place even exists," he says. "You don't go into towns of 8,000 people and find public radio."

KZMU likes to bill itself as Utah's only all-volunteer air crew.

Other low-power community-based FM stations, like Salt Lake City's KRCL and Park City's KPCW, began with mostly volunteer staffs. But those ventures have increased their budgets and numbers of paid personnel over the past two to three decades.

KZMU, by contrast, went on air April 2, 1992, and still manages to operate on $100,000 a year. That does include five part-time, paid employees. But they don't get benefits.

Flanders is one. Another: Christy Williams, the program director, who, clad in a red beret and colorful wrap, looks like she just bopped in from Off-Broadway.

She calls herself a "communitarian," stays in touch with star charts, and, when prodded, might offer spiritual advice.

"Living in Moab affects you, and you become like the place," she says. "It would be a waste of what the intimate [radio] medium can do not to go all they way with volunteers."

The station's music director, Glenn "Barefoot" Peart, is the serious side of the team. He wears rings on his toes and is barefoot even with 3 inches of snow outside.

Peart spends his days sorting through mountains of CDs that arrive at the station, weeding out the bad stuff from the rest.

"I'm a music-listening machine," he says. "That's my job."

But it's the volunteers, like disc jockey Heather Sudbury, who determine what gets played and who give the station its down-home, warm-fuzzy ambience.

She takes the radio handle "Red Coyote" and, on her Thursday afternoon show, plays everything from Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros to African Blues by Tinariwen.

"I even have fans in Finland," she says brightly, referring to the station's on-line webcast.

Spontaneity is the name of the game at KZMU. On a recent afternoon, Mississippi bluesman Kent Burnside stopped by the studio on his way to Telluride, Colo., via Denver. The guitar player "smoked" through a 30-minute set on Rick Austin's rock and blues show.

Austin, a big Burnside fan, is known to strum his own guitar and jam with the CDs he plays on air. Like many in this little -- but cosmopolitan -- burg, he stumbled across Moab a decade ago and never left.

But it's on Fridays around 11:30 a.m. when strangeness hits its stride. Donny Kiffmeyer and his brother, Joe "Fast Eddy" Kiffmeyer, seize the mics to host "Trading Post."

The show, ostensibly set up so callers can buy and sell appliances, old trailers, furniture and the like soon devolves into something like the Smothers Brothers -- or is it the Marx Brothers? -- with zingers and noisemakers. Callers phone in jokes along with their sale items, and pandemonium reigns.

Williams concedes the station is a little too Bohemian for some Moab residents.

And it's true, at a local breakfast joint, you might hear commercial country/western music wafting over your eggs and bacon, rather than KZMU.

But out in the car, you can switch on 106.7 and catch "DJ Shay" Wright -- a self-described hillbilly from Georgia -- playing his own collection of 1930s- and '40s-era folk and blues from so-called jug bands.

"They're looking down from heaven and smiling," Shay says of the long-dead musicians, "because they're finally getting played on the radio."

Current Mood: cheerful