Was not eaten by bear

And here's the bear to prove it.

Iris at the mouth of Wolverine Creek.

Her brother didn't eat me, either. There was plenty of salmon instead.

Yukon enjoying a pink salmon.

The scenery was spectacular.

Fall colors along Resurrection Pass Trail.

A mountain vista near Portage Glacier.

A front-row seat to Prince William Sound.

So was the local color.

The saloon-styled facade of the Diamond M Ranch. And yes, that's a red British double-decker bus in the back.

The crowded Whittier harbor.

Unexpectedly, a perfect 50's-style ice cream parlor in Sterling.

Especially the graveyards.

The Russian Orthodox church in Ninilchik, with its picturesque picket fence and graveyard.

A jungle of graves.

Athabascan spirit houses in the graveyard of another Russian Orthodox church in Eklutna.

The wildlife was abundant.

A kittiwake on the shore at Whittier.

Sea otters at the end of the rainbow.

A juvenile bald eagle.

Nice flora, too.

One of the few wildflowers still blooming at the end of the season.

Still Life With Mushroom.

Another firey floral find.

An ice age was ending.

Exit Glacier, steadily receding.

The path to romantic, windswept Byron Glacier.

Bits of Blackstone Glacier falling off into the sea.

I saw everything I said I wanted to see -- whales (smooth white belugas spotted from an airplane at the mouth of Beluga River), glaciers (see above!), mountains (everywhere), salmon (on my plate and in my luggage as well as in the claws of bears) and bears (see above. Also, a young black bear that was not photographed, frightened my traveling companion, and thrilled me). I also met loads of interesting people: there was the forestry services worker and his buddy who challenged us to pool; the independent-minded woman at Indian Mine who queried us on our politics and shared her views on God, family, Sarah Palin, antibiotics and the Federal Reserve; the circle of sport fishermen and hunters who told riveting adventure stories around the campfire; the Russian Old Believer who cooked us dinner, poured us tea, put us up and shared her world; the gregarious, salty fisher captain and his engineer who bought us drinks and told us about a harrowing life at sea; and plenty more. And there was all the overwhelming nature and wildlife. Moose, hawks, ducks, eagles, sea lions, seals (including the curious one that followed my kayak for some time, to my delight), porpoises (including the one that spooked the seal and finally scared him off), otters, red squirrels, foxes, jellyfish, gulls, geese, swans, cormorants, magpies, and ravens.

It was a good trip. Maybe I'll tell you about it sometime.

Alaska ho!

Last year I won free airline tickets in a raffle at the firm's Christmas party, so today Ladysusan and I are off to Alaska for two weeks in search of breaching whales, melting glaciers, snowcapped mountains, tasty salmon, and friendly bears. Thanks to the magic of scheduling, posting will continue uninterrupted in my absence.

In the event that you see two more posts published and then nothing, feel free to assume I was eaten. Otherwise, I'll be back in two weeks...with pictures!

Curiosity

Down the street from where I live, between the Mexican grocery/take-out and the site of a former failed restaurant, was a curiosity shop.

"RARE BOOKS - FINE ART - ANTIQUES - GIFTS" read the lettering along the front of the building. There was a swinging sign over the door: "BROOKLINE GALLERY". Every morning the owner would decorate the sidewalk with an assemblage of old nightstands, antique chairs, stacks of baskets, colorful hanging cloth, strings of bells, Chinese straw hats, wooden statues, strange masks, and other curious objects to entice and invite. At the door, where an old-fashioned jangling bell would announce your entry, you would be greeted by the owner or an assistant with a basket of fortune cookies, which it was not possible to refuse.

The owner himself was fittingly eccentric, although there is probably a more severe medical term to describe his behavior. With his relentlessly friendly demeanor, he would instantly latch onto anyone who set foot into his shop, catching unwary browsers quite off-guard. You had to go in prepared to engage him and let him show what he had to offer, so that rather than feel pestered as you tried to look around on your own, you could instead participate in a kind of dramatic spectacle. Trying to ignore the shopkeeper was like trying to sit down and read at the circus -- difficult, frustrating, and completely missing the point.

So you step into the shop of wonders, smile and tear at the plastic of the fortune cookie offered to you, and greet the owner as he comes over to you, beaming. Dimunitive and balding, with a monastic ring of white hair clinging to his temples, he wears an overly formal dove-gray suit and round, wire-rimmed glasses. He asks you how you are, and what you're interested in, trying to draw information out of you. If he gets anything he can use, he'll excitedly lead you from point to point in the shop, proudly showing off anything vaguely related to the subject. When he discovered I had an interest in French, I was taken to the meagre collection of very old French-language books; 19th-century prints and lithographs of French subjects, bearing legends and captions in French; old cassettes of French chanteuses and other more obscure Gallic genres; and other collections of things I can't even recall, as he hopped from place to place like a small bird.

The owner has a son, a tall, sensible, capable-seeming adolescent on whose broad shoulders care for his batty father has evidently come to rest. As I followed his father around the shop, the boy followed us both, rearranging things his father had pulled out to show me and urging him repeatedly to come upstairs (they live in an apartment on the second floor) and eat his soup; it was long past lunchtime, it was getting cold, and he had reheated it twice already. But the shopkeeper was far too excited with his customer to think of soup, until at last the son brought it down to him and he paused long enough to stand and eat it, offering commentary all the while as I took advantage of the respite to browse on my own.

The front room of the shop was crowded with curios and artifacts of dubious value, though interesting to look at: Chinese jades, Egyptian sculpture bookends, miniature Buddhas, chiming medicine balls, Russian nesting dolls, incense burners, carved tobacco pipes, ceramics, listing baskets of all shapes and sizes, postcards, dreamcatchers, costume jewelry. To one side was a narrow room, like a back hall or storage space, lit by a bare lightbulb, containing racks of flowing, colorful Indian clothing and batiks, and the collection of monstrous African masks, which lined the walls and leered down in the small space.

The next room is where the prints, framed and unframed, were kept, wrapped in plastic sheaths and filed in large bins. None of the images was more recent than the turn of the century, and they depicted mostly battlefields, architecture, landscapes, cities and street scenes, men dueling, women in large dresses, and horses and carriages. Around the room were also folded stacks of ornate, heavy cloth, pricey rugs and hangings, which also decorated the walls and lay thick in overlapping heaps on the floor.

The last room, which gave out onto a little square courtyard garden to the side of the shop, a riot of wildflowers and weeds orbiting a discolored reflective gazing ball, contained shelves of books, very old, brown-paged volumes on all kinds of obscure subjects, bargain-bin reject stuff. Old, but not old enough to be precious, just outdated and smelly; obscure, but not enough to be novel, just irrelevant. Etiquette manuals, European history, Impressionist painters, gardening. Isolated volumes of multi-part series. Their supreme value lay in creating a sense of atmosphere for this strange little shop -- too many good ones, and it would be too much book and too little curiosity.

When I came to the giant, glass-cabinet, wood-topped counter with my purchases -- I'd found a couple of slim French volumes worth taking, after all -- the delighted shopkeeper produced a giant ledger-book to record the transaction and scribbled out a receipt for me on little slip of paper, figuring out the tax by hand, this man from another time. I was escorted to the door with grins and thank-yous and other effusive sentiments as I departed. How much could they really manage to sell, after all? Is this strange man independently wealthy, I wondered, is this shop just some sort of hobby? He and his son do most of the work themselves. Despite the occasional hollow-eyed high-schooler standing at the door with the cookie basket, there was always a help wanted sign in the window, and who could manage to work in this place, anyway? It must take a special kind of person.

Last week, I passed by and noticed with a start that the swinging sign was gone, the sidewalk bare of treasures, and the window empty save for a two-liter soda bottle, some jars, and other refuse, and a paper sign taped to the glass: "FOR RENT".

Linlithgo -->

This is the mysterious, strangely alluring sign I routinely pass while driving north on Route 9. I have never heard this place spoken of, nor spotted it on any map -- my only knowledge of it comes from this single green and white sign which is posted at the terminal end of a lonely-looking road winding away from the crest of a particularly steep hill along Route 9, midway between Tivoli and the Rip Van Winkle Bridge.

I have wondered, idly, about Linlithgo. To me, the name evokes some imaginary place out of an extravagant sixteenth-century flight-of-fantasy -- a utopian city-state, a fabled land of youth or gold, a quaint, savage island somewhere beyond the setting sun, a paradisical, prelapsarian garden of singing birds, ripe fruit, and careless nudity, a whimsical, upside-down country populated by midgets or giants or dog-headed men.




What reminded me of this was an excellent article in the latest issue of Strange Horizons, "The Ten Stupidest Utopias!" More in-depth and profound than the title suggests, the article discusses and critiques a number of important classic utopias, from More's foundational text to Plato's Republic, the cyberspace of William Gibson's Neuromancer, and Charlotte Perkins Gillman's peculiarly Amazonian Herland.
Via Bookslut.

And as I recently mentioned, there is some great stuff, particularly the loads of beautiful images (such as the above), in the Utopia expo (French version) at the BnF.

Linlithgo...

It really is Gorges

Well, I just got back from yet another visit -- and yes, I did go west again -- this time to see LadySusan in Ithaca, where she's settling in and about to begin life as a grad student at Cornell. It was good to see her again after the summer, as well as my cat Sidney, whom she's just adopted. The visit was great, except for the bit where I left my wallet at home and was turned away from a couple bars and refused alcohol for the duration of my stay. This also scrapped our plans to visit a local winery, which we had been very much looking forward to.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was that in one of the many little bookshops that line the Ithaca Commons, we came across the Brick Testament book, which was a neat find. (Interestingly, the book is rather cleaned-up -- many of the most risqué panels from the website are omitted.) Reading the introduction, I realized that I had mischaracterized the project in my earlier post. The creator, "The Rev." Brendon Powell Smith, is not actually a reverend at all -- he's an atheist -- and the purpose of the site is much more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek than I believed. It's not religious at all, which goes a ways toward explaining the tone of the narration. So there you go. Should have been paying more attention. The site is now even more highly recommended.


reading: Gregory Maguire, Lost
saw: Firefly; The Black Adder

music: "cooltunes" mix, curr. "The Egypt Journey Part II" from the Shade - Wrath of Angels soundtrack
beverage: Twinings English Breakfast tea

More Super Smile Time Vacation Pictures!!!!

Part II: Destinations


One of the many games we saw. This was roughly where we sat for almost all of them.


The Hooters in Florence, KY where we got our free wings. We find it amazing that people take families to Hooters. They have high chairs.


Don't they look delicious?


Gratuitous Grand Canyon pictures.


Mine look the same as anybody else's.


Except that they have our backs in them.


The vacation resort friend's house where we stayed.


With a hot tub.


What a great trip.

I have a couple more good photos, but I'm mostly avoiding posting ones with people in them, so these are really all that I have to show. They're kinda boring, now that I think about it. But what kind of vacation slideshow would it be if I showed interesting pictures?

Happy Fun Time Vacation Photo Slideshow

Part I: On the Road

I'm going to sit you down now and make you look at pictures from my recent cross-country roadtrip. Yes, I am!

(Note: This is unrelated to the Nevada trip discussed in the previous post! Those pictures will come soon. These are the belated photos from the big roadtrip last month.)


The scenery while driving through somewhere. California, I think.


A picturesque sunset. Probably also California.


Big ol' cross in Indiana. One of two or three that we passed purported to be the largest in the country.


Florence, y'all. Kentucky.


At Sonic, the drive-through burger joint, somewhere in Oklahoma. An all-American experience. Pretend the car isn't German.


The Oklahoma sky, after a storm. The storm pictures themselves were all kind of ruined by the law school guide book sitting on the dashboard, which reflected prominently in all the shots.


The open road.

Next time: Destinations.

Home from the range

I didn't get a chance to announce it, but that past five days' silence from me has represented my latest jaunt, this time a trip to visit family out in Nevada. My father was born and raised there on my grandparents' homestead, but I've only been out there once before, many years ago. This time there was a lot of my family there to celebrate my grandparents' 55th anniversary, and I got to meet one of my aunts, most of my cousins (3 out of 6) and all my second cousins (7) for the first time ever.

The terrain out there is amazing, quite unlike the New York sprawling towns and thick forests I'm used to. They live out in the middle of the desert, where going anywhere involves taking long drives through the hills and over mountains. You can see from one end of the valley to the other, endless stretches of empty desert with occasional ranches and farms. One day we took my grandfather's truck and went boonie crashing on the dirt trails and sometimes off of them, bouncing along to the top of Bald Mountain (named for the barren peak above the tree line), which was only a distant blue peak on the horizon when we started out. From the microwave station at its peak we could see the mountains and valleys all around us -- Mason Valley, Smith Valley, the ranches and towns, and Walker Lake. The view was incredible. Another day we went out (on paved roads this time) to Wilson Canyon, where you can walk along the dry wash and pick up big chunks of petrified wood from the sand. We saw lots of wildlife on our outings: two distant herds of wild mustangs, an indistinct white spot that may have been a mountain goat, ring-tailed lizards, several jackrabbits, and a whole flock of chucker, big, gray, turkey-like birds that we scared out of the canyon and running up the hill in a noisy squawking pack.

We took my dad's new telescope and went stargazing one night on the old homestead, out in the desert far from the town where the sky is dark and magnificent and full of stars. The Milky Way is big and bright and clearly visible -- it was quite a treat to see, as here it is only faintly perceptible on the best of nights. We looked at Venus before it dipped below the horizon, star clusters and nebulae, and Jupiter with a few of its moons. The moon was not out before we packed up, alas. And we brought along marshmallows, but couldn't have a campfire because of the dry weather for fear of setting the desert alight.

Our last night I requested that we go out to a Basque restaurant my father had told me about -- apparently there are a lot of Basques living in the area, and they have several restaurants where they serve traditional family-style meals. The place was simple and not very fancily decorated, but I like the way they serve a set meal where all you pick is your entree -- they bring a bottle of wine out to the table and serve soup (some kind of chicken soup with little pasta dots), bread, salad, a delicious rice and meat dish, then your choice of steak, fried chicken, lamb, or prawns (the entree was actually the weakest part of the otherwise great meal), followed by ice cream (almond praline) and coffee, all for a pretty reasonable price. I've never had Basque before, and it was a pretty nice experience. One for which, of course, we had to drive a couple hours over hills and mountains.

That pretty much sums up my vacation. It was a great trip, following so soon on the heels of another great trip...but I'm sure I'll stay put for at least a little while now. And if I do go somewhere, I'll try to go some direction other than west.

Pictures, of course, to follow much later...naturally I don't have them yet. But I do have my road trip pictures now, which I shall post very soon.


reading: Terry Pratchett, The Truth; Charles de Lint, Newford Stories
saw: parts of Gladiator and Dinotopia

music: cooltunes mix, curr. Jem, "They"
beverage: peach Twisted Tea

Connections

First, I'd like to welcome all the 2 Blowhards readers who were pointed here by Michael Blowhard's kind recommendation. It's wonderful to see some new faces in here. Thanks for coming by, do have a look around.

I feel very connected right now. Yesterday I took a trip down to New York to meet up with fellow blogger Maktaaq, who was visiting for a few days. I was delighted to discover that she is as charming and engaging in person as she is on her excellent blog. We visited a some cafes, boutiques, and pastry shops near Washington Square, strolled around, and had a very nice time. Afterwards I visited with a friend of mine who lives down in the city and whom I don't get to see nearly often enough.

I made the trip following a long overnight shift at work the previous night. I got home at 7 am, crashed for a couple of hours, then got up and took a train into the city to meet Maktaaq at 6. I ended up taking the last 11:58 pm train home, and on the ride back called work to discover that my shift for the following day was not 12:00 or 12:30 as I had thought, but at the ungodly hour of 7 in the am, a mere five hours in the future. I made it home and into bed around 3:30, only to have to crawl out of bed some two and a half hours later. Feeling terrible and not nearly up to working, I pleaded with my supervisor to be sent home as soon as someone else could come in, which I was two and a half hours later. I staggered gratefully home and collapsed into bed until almost six in the evening. My time sense is now quite thoroughly screwed up from all this, but at least I am well-rested and feel much better. All in all, the trip to New York was certainly worth the kink it's put into my schedule.

So. Onto the day's links.

There have been a lot of interesting articles on Scientology out there lately, with all the publicity about the goings-on of Scientology devotee Tom Cruise and new initiate Katie Holms. Salon is having a "Summer of Scientology" (odd choice of title, really -- it sounds like some kind of festival), a 4-part series of articles examining the pseudo-religion in depth: "Missionary man", about Cruise and his active role in promoting the Church; "Stranger than fiction", a review of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics that started it all; "The press vs. Scientology"; and "Scientology's war on psychiatry". All good, informative, and scary reads.

Slate also has an interesting article about Hubbard himself.

There's a deep chasm between the erudite, noble Hubbard of Scientology myth and the true identity of the church's wacky founder. To those not in his thrall, Hubbard might be better described as a pulp science-fiction writer who combined delusions of grandeur with a cynical hucksterism. Yet he turned an oddball theory about human consciousness—which originally appeared in a 25-cent sci-fi magazine—into a far-reaching and powerful multimillion-dollar empire.

Read the rest here.

The New York Times has an article about the laser-tattooed fruit that will soon be hitting shelves.


"When a Man Dies in a Sex Act with a Horse -- What's a Reporter to Do?" An article at Editor & Publisher talks about how some stories are just tough to cover tastefully.

An Ananova Quirkies news item tells the story of a family of Australian farmers who declared their land an independent country.

A thread at a WetCanvas! forum shows what happens When Graphic Artists Get Bored.

Moodgrapher is a nifty site with its fingers on the world's pulse, charting its collective mood as expressed by the shifting emotions of livejournal users. Their recent analysis of the effects of the London bombings is striking.


reading: Diana Darling, The Painted Alphabet; John Gardner, In the Suicide Mountains; Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
saw: Fight Club; Firefly; Beverly Hills Cop
playing: Seiklus, a fabulous game from innovative designer clysm -- more on this later

music: my "cool music" mix, curr. Moby, "Another Woman"
beverage: Twinings Prince of Wales tea

Miss me?

Back from the road trip, which was more or less a blast. Very eventful. Some not so great bits -- it's hard for four people to spend three weeks in constant company, on the road crammed into a tiny Jetta for hours at a time, and all remain friends -- but despite the unpleasantness near the end, it was a wonderful vacation.

We drove across the country, from New York to Long Beach, CA and back. We went to visit our friend T, whose large white-stucco house on the peninsula is practically a vacation resort with a guest room and bath, sauna, and hot tub, and a prime location between two beaches, the bay on one side and the ocean on the other. This was my first ever visit to the west coast; it took me days to get over the palm trees.

Some highlights:

First night out, staying with a friend of E's in Philly. Went to our first game -- one of the main purposes of the trip was to hit up ballgames around the country (this was also the first baseball game I'd ever seen) -- and afterwards met Sarge, a friend of our host, who treated us to drinks in the amazing 400-bottle Irish bar located off the living room of his parents' house. The antique bartop is apparently a relic from a tavern in Valley Forge once frequented by George Washington and his men. Sarge serves 'em strong, and when we returned home, J, overcome, lay in the parking lot of the apartment complex and rolled around and puked until the cops showed up a few hours later and encouraged us to try harder to get him indoors.

After the Reds game in Cincinnati, we visited a Hooters in Florence, KY where they offer ten free wings to every ticketholder if the Reds score more than 10 runs. We gorged ourselves on greasy free wings, had our pictures taken with the obliging Hooters waitress (they're trained to bend over for photos in order to show off their cleavage -- it's amazing), and drove as far as the banks of the Mississippi, where E puked it all up.

Unfortunately, there was little to no vomiting for the duration of the trip, although it had been agreed that each of us should puke at least once. K and I managed to refrain, although the saltwater we swallowed in the ocean waves nearly did us both in.

Broke down at a Wal-Mart an hour out of Little Rock, AR at four in the morning, and had to be towed back to wait for six hours at a VW dealer while it was fixed. They kindly drove us to a Cracker Barrel for breakfast, where we fooled around with the toys in the shop, and played giant checkers and Mad Libs while we sat in rocking chairs on the porch.

Saw the Grand Canyon, and hiked a ways down it in one sunny, sweaty interlude away from the car. Magnificent.

On one perfect day in LA, we woke up to watch an LA car chase live on the news, then felt the rumblings of a brief earthquake. In more regional weather, we also got to see a baby proto-tornado during an impressive storm we drove through in Oklahoma.

On the way back from Long Beach, we visited Las Vegas, which was more fun than I would have believed a few years ago. The two spots K and I have had tentative plans to visit have been Montreal and Vegas, which he campaigned to convince me was a great place with cheap lodging, food, and entertainment. I resolved to give Las Vegas a shot, but I doubted we'd ever make it out there. I still have trouble believing that we made it all the way to Vegas before ever visiting Montreal, which is only a few hours away.

They say that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I will say that I did enjoy it quite a bit and was pleasantly surprised. We stayed at the Sahara and the Tropicana, and visited most of the major hotels on the strip. K and I made modest amounts of money playing poker, blackjack, and roulette (I learned and stuck to blackjack, and was surprised to win eight dollars on nickel slots), and J lost a fair amount of money at the tables and accidentally bought a $200 shirt to wear to dinner.

Drove back through Utah and Colorado, which were spectacular, despite growing tensions in the party. We ended up having to cut our trip short, skipping Chicago and Washington and blowing through St. Louis without seeing the city or the game. We got back a few days early, frustrated and exhausted, but it was still a hell of a trip.

Pictures to come soon, I hope.


reading: Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation; Ben Bradlee, A Good Life; all the issues of Harper's and The Week accumulated in my absence
saw: Batman Begins; Ice Age; a documentary about Evel Knievel; parts of Vegas Vacation, The Core, and White Men Can't Jump; episodes of Firefly (I can't wait for Serenity!)
playing: Oregon Trail (it's been a frequent topic of conversation lately...I just downloaded the game and an emulator out of nostalgia)
game of the day: The Fridge, a crazy, cute game where you play an egg roaming around the kitchen on an epic quest.