AH, CURST, CURST CLEVERNESS!
I have already taken my lumps for sic'ing the Squawkers on the Sewer King; as I stood out in the messy drizzle that can't decide whether it is rain or snow, hauling mightily on the canvas of the chamber's 14x14 tent, my cell phone rang.
"You have a Valentine's Day greeting," my Enabling Assistant proclaimed on the other end, with an ominous snicker.
And so the Squawkers launched into, what else, "Rock of Ages" over the phone.
Curse the cleverness of whomever deduced that I was reachable after all; I thought I had timed it all perfectly: nail the King, abscond into busy work outside the city limits, and then just wait out the afternoon. Curses!
But I still think I came out ahead. After all, they called from the Empire of Hardware, which means the Sewer King had to listen to them twice. In a row. And the second time, he even had to pay for it.
Some days it's great to be me.
Friday, February 14, 2003
WEIRD ENOUGH
Readers often ask me if the stuff I print on this website is really true. Can one person’s life possibly be this weird? Am I demented? Where can they get some of whatever it is the Sewer King, the Lord Macklebrains and I have all been accused of smoking? Etc.?
And how weird does something have to be before I’ll write about it.
Oh, anything will do, really. Sometimes, even just lunch.
But what a lunch!
I lunched today with the kooky, kooky core of the Saratoga club of Soroptimists International, who rightly discovered many years ago, along with FTD and Godiva and Hallmark, that Valentine’s Day is money in the bank if it is exploited correctly.
Enter the Sweetheart Squawkers, a group that, were it not composed mostly of sweet little grey-haired (or almost grey-haired) ladies and the odd certifiable medical bombshell (our own dear Dr. Di and her assistant, Mrs. Sketch, definitely qualify in this category), would certainly be prosecutable under RICO. For a mere five dollars American, anyone in town can aim them like a guided “musical” missile at anyone else in town for a special V-Day serenade, which serenade will continue unabated until the recipient also pays the crew five dollars American.
This isn’t exactly the Saratoga Community Choir, either, folks, though in terms of sheer goofy exuberance many of these girls could perhaps qualify for honorary membership in the Propeller Beanie Club (a.k.a. the tenor section).
Since I am of the disposition to patronize this group quite a lot on Valentine’s Day (a holiday I otherwise loathe, of course) – I sent them to both the Sewer King and his brother the Oracle last year, and wound up playing a lusty game of Squawker Ping-Pong with the Sewer King – they graciously invited me to lunch, to help them giggle and plot and, well, practice.
My Enabling Assistant was there with... oh god... the horror, the horror!... a Casio SK-1 keyboard. I know that one of the medical bombshells traditionally deploys a clarinet, but she was unable to lunch with us... And then there was My Own Dear Personal Mother and our Walking Partner... who both had combs and wax paper.
And were trying to figure out how to play them without getting the lip buzz of their lives.
And giggling.
And trying again.
And finally developing the knack for the placement of the wax paper, the proper tautness of the grip on the comb, the volume at which to hum. A great deal of work went into this.
So now that I know what’s coming, I deeply, deeply regret the fact that I have egged them on so very enthusiastically again this year.
And I hope that the Sewer King will someday find it in his heart to forgive me for being subjected to, what else, “Rock of Ages.”
Readers often ask me if the stuff I print on this website is really true. Can one person’s life possibly be this weird? Am I demented? Where can they get some of whatever it is the Sewer King, the Lord Macklebrains and I have all been accused of smoking? Etc.?
And how weird does something have to be before I’ll write about it.
Oh, anything will do, really. Sometimes, even just lunch.
But what a lunch!
I lunched today with the kooky, kooky core of the Saratoga club of Soroptimists International, who rightly discovered many years ago, along with FTD and Godiva and Hallmark, that Valentine’s Day is money in the bank if it is exploited correctly.
Enter the Sweetheart Squawkers, a group that, were it not composed mostly of sweet little grey-haired (or almost grey-haired) ladies and the odd certifiable medical bombshell (our own dear Dr. Di and her assistant, Mrs. Sketch, definitely qualify in this category), would certainly be prosecutable under RICO. For a mere five dollars American, anyone in town can aim them like a guided “musical” missile at anyone else in town for a special V-Day serenade, which serenade will continue unabated until the recipient also pays the crew five dollars American.
This isn’t exactly the Saratoga Community Choir, either, folks, though in terms of sheer goofy exuberance many of these girls could perhaps qualify for honorary membership in the Propeller Beanie Club (a.k.a. the tenor section).
Since I am of the disposition to patronize this group quite a lot on Valentine’s Day (a holiday I otherwise loathe, of course) – I sent them to both the Sewer King and his brother the Oracle last year, and wound up playing a lusty game of Squawker Ping-Pong with the Sewer King – they graciously invited me to lunch, to help them giggle and plot and, well, practice.
My Enabling Assistant was there with... oh god... the horror, the horror!... a Casio SK-1 keyboard. I know that one of the medical bombshells traditionally deploys a clarinet, but she was unable to lunch with us... And then there was My Own Dear Personal Mother and our Walking Partner... who both had combs and wax paper.
And were trying to figure out how to play them without getting the lip buzz of their lives.
And giggling.
And trying again.
And finally developing the knack for the placement of the wax paper, the proper tautness of the grip on the comb, the volume at which to hum. A great deal of work went into this.
So now that I know what’s coming, I deeply, deeply regret the fact that I have egged them on so very enthusiastically again this year.
And I hope that the Sewer King will someday find it in his heart to forgive me for being subjected to, what else, “Rock of Ages.”
Thursday, February 13, 2003
IN CASE ANYBODY IS INTERESTED...
There's some good news on the Legislature's web site. One of those bills I'm always on about, HB 91, creating a sales tax exemption for the purchase of agricultural implements, made it out of the Senate Revenue Committee today and is on the Senate's General File.
Thanks to everyone who wrote to the committee members. But it's not done yet. Keep calling and writing, everybody.
There's some good news on the Legislature's web site. One of those bills I'm always on about, HB 91, creating a sales tax exemption for the purchase of agricultural implements, made it out of the Senate Revenue Committee today and is on the Senate's General File.
Thanks to everyone who wrote to the committee members. But it's not done yet. Keep calling and writing, everybody.
APOPHENIA
Once in a while, the world outside that I left behind when I returned home to “Brigadoon” still manages to intrude into mine. Usually it does so in very weird ways that leave me pinching myself and suspicious, or confused and bleary-eyed, or peeking over my shoulder every few minutes to see if David Lynch is hiding behind a curtain, directing the scene.
This morning before I set down to beaver away some more at the chamber’s web page, I took a moment to peek at one of the many online magazines I sample at odd intervals throughout the day (this, probably, explaining much of why the intrusions of the real world come at such odd intervals, in such precise and tiny bites, and are, on the whole, so weird: I am choosing to let the real world in via controlled bursts, choosing the sources, and I have very odd and esoteric taste in sources) and saw an interview with one of my favorite living authors, William Gibson, he whose 1984 novel Neuromancer rocked my little 14-year-old world and taught me to see it in terms of data flow, cutthroat technological innovation, cultural melange...
Gibson has published a new book, Pattern Recognition and my first shock was realizing that the fact that he has written a new novel was news to me. My second was that he’s no longer extrapolating current trends into a sci-fi future. My third was learning that Gibson, who, while one of the original writers (along with Vernor Vinge) who coined the term “cyberspace” in his fiction, has long been a noted non-computer user of the Oracle’s caliber, is now keeping a blog, just like me (well, sort of)! My fourth was that I was being seduced into apophenia - or, actually, seducing myself into apophenia (for actually whenever one is seduced, it is the self seducing the self, seeking excuses for engaging in behavior or thought patterns in which one wanted to engage anyway, and not in any way the actions of another agent triggering the behavior), “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things” as Gibson defined the word in his interview.
Gibson’s last couple of books have dealt, in some ways, with this phenomenon, which I have noted at odd times in this here blog when I catch myself becoming fixated on what appear to be leitmotifs for a day, a week, an event. Gibson has foreseen this as a species-wide tendency in his creation of characters who have uncanny, intuitive knacks for finding patterns in vast accumulations of data from which they can extract all kinds of useful knowledge; one character, cyberspying on a minor celebrity’s shopping and media consumption habits, suddenly deduces that she is about to commit suicide, even though he’s never met her, for example.
I’m not quite there yet, but I have today found myself plunged right into the soup. And it’s hard not to see it as weird or meaningful, when Gibson is talking in his magazine interview about how Cornell boxes of various kinds keep turning up in his fiction (at one point in his third novel he even has a slightly crazed Artificial Intelligence constructing them in an orbiting space station) and then a few hours later, in another stray moment, reading a completely different magazine with a completely different slant on things I find myself reading a brief “Hit and Run” reference to an appreciative retrospective on, who else, Joseph Cornell that appears in another magazine and so of course I go and read the retrospective because I’ve always liked Cornell anyway (fun and funky to learn, in reading that article, that I’m not the only one who looked at Cornell’s boxes and thought of one of my favorite poets, fellow New Yorker Hart Crane. Now, of course, I feel stupid for having felt like the only one, but before I hit the nodal point of that article, I didn’t realize just how natural and obvious that connection really was!)...
A few hours later, taking a break from bean counting and answering the same freaking question six times an hour – no, folks, I’m sorry, there are no motel rooms left in Saratoga for the chariot races – I hit upon a different article in a different magazine, one in defense of being a less than perfect housekeeper (which definition anyone who has visited the Unabomber Cabin unannounced would bestow on me in a New York minute), and here’s this woman going on and on about how much more interesting it is to have a car that friends of mine tend to call a “white trash storage shed,” how debris within it, left undisturbed, becomes kind of a time capsule, and oh my God, I’ve been making Cornell boxes all along!
Of course, we all are, whenever we deposit a bit of trash in a wastebasket in a room we don’t use much, or put the less important papers on our desks aside on the “stuff I’ll get to someday” pile, or put our grandfather’s weirdly eclectic mix of valuable antiques and stunningly pointless junk onto a bookcase shelf, so this is really nothing radical, but there it is, anyway.
Apophenia.
William Gibson’s new book. Cornell boxes. Cornell’s career. Messy houses. Messy cars. Cornell boxes.
I’m just waiting now for William Gibson to come back.
Probably, I’ll just make that happen by reading some more of his blog.
Once in a while, the world outside that I left behind when I returned home to “Brigadoon” still manages to intrude into mine. Usually it does so in very weird ways that leave me pinching myself and suspicious, or confused and bleary-eyed, or peeking over my shoulder every few minutes to see if David Lynch is hiding behind a curtain, directing the scene.
This morning before I set down to beaver away some more at the chamber’s web page, I took a moment to peek at one of the many online magazines I sample at odd intervals throughout the day (this, probably, explaining much of why the intrusions of the real world come at such odd intervals, in such precise and tiny bites, and are, on the whole, so weird: I am choosing to let the real world in via controlled bursts, choosing the sources, and I have very odd and esoteric taste in sources) and saw an interview with one of my favorite living authors, William Gibson, he whose 1984 novel Neuromancer rocked my little 14-year-old world and taught me to see it in terms of data flow, cutthroat technological innovation, cultural melange...
Gibson has published a new book, Pattern Recognition and my first shock was realizing that the fact that he has written a new novel was news to me. My second was that he’s no longer extrapolating current trends into a sci-fi future. My third was learning that Gibson, who, while one of the original writers (along with Vernor Vinge) who coined the term “cyberspace” in his fiction, has long been a noted non-computer user of the Oracle’s caliber, is now keeping a blog, just like me (well, sort of)! My fourth was that I was being seduced into apophenia - or, actually, seducing myself into apophenia (for actually whenever one is seduced, it is the self seducing the self, seeking excuses for engaging in behavior or thought patterns in which one wanted to engage anyway, and not in any way the actions of another agent triggering the behavior), “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things” as Gibson defined the word in his interview.
Gibson’s last couple of books have dealt, in some ways, with this phenomenon, which I have noted at odd times in this here blog when I catch myself becoming fixated on what appear to be leitmotifs for a day, a week, an event. Gibson has foreseen this as a species-wide tendency in his creation of characters who have uncanny, intuitive knacks for finding patterns in vast accumulations of data from which they can extract all kinds of useful knowledge; one character, cyberspying on a minor celebrity’s shopping and media consumption habits, suddenly deduces that she is about to commit suicide, even though he’s never met her, for example.
I’m not quite there yet, but I have today found myself plunged right into the soup. And it’s hard not to see it as weird or meaningful, when Gibson is talking in his magazine interview about how Cornell boxes of various kinds keep turning up in his fiction (at one point in his third novel he even has a slightly crazed Artificial Intelligence constructing them in an orbiting space station) and then a few hours later, in another stray moment, reading a completely different magazine with a completely different slant on things I find myself reading a brief “Hit and Run” reference to an appreciative retrospective on, who else, Joseph Cornell that appears in another magazine and so of course I go and read the retrospective because I’ve always liked Cornell anyway (fun and funky to learn, in reading that article, that I’m not the only one who looked at Cornell’s boxes and thought of one of my favorite poets, fellow New Yorker Hart Crane. Now, of course, I feel stupid for having felt like the only one, but before I hit the nodal point of that article, I didn’t realize just how natural and obvious that connection really was!)...
A few hours later, taking a break from bean counting and answering the same freaking question six times an hour – no, folks, I’m sorry, there are no motel rooms left in Saratoga for the chariot races – I hit upon a different article in a different magazine, one in defense of being a less than perfect housekeeper (which definition anyone who has visited the Unabomber Cabin unannounced would bestow on me in a New York minute), and here’s this woman going on and on about how much more interesting it is to have a car that friends of mine tend to call a “white trash storage shed,” how debris within it, left undisturbed, becomes kind of a time capsule, and oh my God, I’ve been making Cornell boxes all along!
Of course, we all are, whenever we deposit a bit of trash in a wastebasket in a room we don’t use much, or put the less important papers on our desks aside on the “stuff I’ll get to someday” pile, or put our grandfather’s weirdly eclectic mix of valuable antiques and stunningly pointless junk onto a bookcase shelf, so this is really nothing radical, but there it is, anyway.
Apophenia.
William Gibson’s new book. Cornell boxes. Cornell’s career. Messy houses. Messy cars. Cornell boxes.
I’m just waiting now for William Gibson to come back.
Probably, I’ll just make that happen by reading some more of his blog.
Tuesday, February 11, 2003
GETTING OUR ROCKS OFF
“Holy sh*t, it’s bigger than I thought!”
“Mmm... Much more magnificent in person!”
“That’s a big ***ing rock.”
No, no, no, get your minds out of the gutter, dear readers. I’m actually talking about a rock. As in bones of the earth, pre-dirt, giant hunks of granite and lichen that poke out of the soil like icebergs in the North Atlantic.
And, Titanic-like, my Co-Conspirator In Everything (aka, of course, The Sewer King) and I have struck a doozy, though it’s still anybody’s guess if this Rock of Ages will sink us. As it stands, it’s become rather an unhealthy obsession with the pair of us, turning us into wild-eyed maniacs at the mere mention of the construction project on the Snowy Range Road, bridges, digging, playgrounds, anything, really that could be connected by even the wildest leaps of logic (and the pair of us are quite capable of those) to the general, Platonic ur-idea of rocks and thus to “Our Rock.”
“Have you seen it?” we demand of anyone who is dumb enough to trigger this Pavlovian reaction in us. “That rock, that beautiful rock, that hugewonderfulgorgeousworldclassrock sticking out where they’re carving out a section to straighten the road after the bridge?” (pause to wipe drool off our chins, to smooth down hair that has stood up on end, to shift back onto the chairs or barstools abandoned in our excitement to discuss The Rock).
Oh, Sweet Pan-Fried Jesus, we’ve got to have that rock. We know right where to put it, smack in the middle of Kathy Glode Park for the little tykes to climb all over in place of those giant truck tires that leave said tykes well vulcanized at day’s end, to the dismay of mothers everywhere. It would look magnificent there, remarkable, a monument to what this town was, is and could be (or could not be, if we don’t find a way out of our current economic mess... that rock could be all that is left of us, someday) and to its Creator, and yes, I, the Manichaen, the heretic, invoke the Creator in glory as I contemplate this rock.
Choirs of angels sing in soaring harmonies as one beholds this rock. A shimmering, blinding ray of sun has been specially assigned to pierce the clouds and illuminate this rock’s glory.
And we want to move it to town.
All of this is, of course, old news to our coffee buddies, our friends and neighbors and relatives and lackeys.
But this week, we stopped flapping our jaws, realized we’re the only people who really care about this project, and decided to see what we could do about it.
Can it be removed whole and entire or will LeGrand Johnson, the prime contractors widening the road out there, have to blow it to smithereens?
Once it’s removed, can it be transported to town (some 15 miles)?
Once it’s transported, how do we get it laid in at the park (at least the Sewer King, being in truth the king of all manner of things hydrological, geological, and paralogical, knows where the sprinker system runs underneath the park’s soil)?
Our coffee buddies finally convinced us that they didn’t know. Our Minister of Fun has stopped returning our calls. Our contractor buddies tap their foreheads at each other at the mere mention of our names*
So today, my CCIE and I climbed into his truck and went out to harass the people whose job it will be, ultimately, to deal with this gorgeous behemoth.
I had caught one of the sub-contractors at Happy Hour the night before, and he had promised to introduce me to the Big Boys today, so it shouldn’t have been a complete surprise to the nice young men in clean white coats who are coming to... I mean, the guys widening the highway.
Shouldn’t have been, but probably was.
Still, the nice foreman from LeGrand Johnson was very nice to us, hardly cracking a smirk at all as we outlined to him our grand, King Ludwig-like scheme for The Rock, and dutifully headed up the road a piece to contemplate the thing directly.
Hence the bits of dialog which begin today’s blog entry. See, my partner and I had only before glanced longingly at it from within the pickup. It really is bigger in person. A lot bigger.
According to Contractor Man, it may well weigh 300,000 pounds!
That’s a lot of granite.
And that’s only if we are actually seeing most of the rock. If it truly is iceberg-like... if it truly is... underneath that soil which surrounds and partly covers it may be more stone than was used to build the works of Ozymandias, King of Kings, in which case, Contractor Man will have to drill little holes in it, shove in big pieces of dynamite, and we shall have to look upon them and despair.
But while there’s rock, there’s hope. We haven’t bothered everyone there is to bother just yet. We know people who know people who have truly formidable equipment. And we are persistent, yes, and patient.
And it’s probably going to be a couple of months yet before the contractors have to do anything with the thing. Probably.
So, nobody’s safe for months yet. Months. Or more.
And regardless, we’ll be telling his grandchildren about this rock. I may write poems about this rock. It shall go down in local lore or we will die trying to put it there.
Go see it while ye may.
*Authorial postulate
“Holy sh*t, it’s bigger than I thought!”
“Mmm... Much more magnificent in person!”
“That’s a big ***ing rock.”
No, no, no, get your minds out of the gutter, dear readers. I’m actually talking about a rock. As in bones of the earth, pre-dirt, giant hunks of granite and lichen that poke out of the soil like icebergs in the North Atlantic.
And, Titanic-like, my Co-Conspirator In Everything (aka, of course, The Sewer King) and I have struck a doozy, though it’s still anybody’s guess if this Rock of Ages will sink us. As it stands, it’s become rather an unhealthy obsession with the pair of us, turning us into wild-eyed maniacs at the mere mention of the construction project on the Snowy Range Road, bridges, digging, playgrounds, anything, really that could be connected by even the wildest leaps of logic (and the pair of us are quite capable of those) to the general, Platonic ur-idea of rocks and thus to “Our Rock.”
“Have you seen it?” we demand of anyone who is dumb enough to trigger this Pavlovian reaction in us. “That rock, that beautiful rock, that hugewonderfulgorgeousworldclassrock sticking out where they’re carving out a section to straighten the road after the bridge?” (pause to wipe drool off our chins, to smooth down hair that has stood up on end, to shift back onto the chairs or barstools abandoned in our excitement to discuss The Rock).
Oh, Sweet Pan-Fried Jesus, we’ve got to have that rock. We know right where to put it, smack in the middle of Kathy Glode Park for the little tykes to climb all over in place of those giant truck tires that leave said tykes well vulcanized at day’s end, to the dismay of mothers everywhere. It would look magnificent there, remarkable, a monument to what this town was, is and could be (or could not be, if we don’t find a way out of our current economic mess... that rock could be all that is left of us, someday) and to its Creator, and yes, I, the Manichaen, the heretic, invoke the Creator in glory as I contemplate this rock.
Choirs of angels sing in soaring harmonies as one beholds this rock. A shimmering, blinding ray of sun has been specially assigned to pierce the clouds and illuminate this rock’s glory.
And we want to move it to town.
All of this is, of course, old news to our coffee buddies, our friends and neighbors and relatives and lackeys.
But this week, we stopped flapping our jaws, realized we’re the only people who really care about this project, and decided to see what we could do about it.
Can it be removed whole and entire or will LeGrand Johnson, the prime contractors widening the road out there, have to blow it to smithereens?
Once it’s removed, can it be transported to town (some 15 miles)?
Once it’s transported, how do we get it laid in at the park (at least the Sewer King, being in truth the king of all manner of things hydrological, geological, and paralogical, knows where the sprinker system runs underneath the park’s soil)?
Our coffee buddies finally convinced us that they didn’t know. Our Minister of Fun has stopped returning our calls. Our contractor buddies tap their foreheads at each other at the mere mention of our names*
So today, my CCIE and I climbed into his truck and went out to harass the people whose job it will be, ultimately, to deal with this gorgeous behemoth.
I had caught one of the sub-contractors at Happy Hour the night before, and he had promised to introduce me to the Big Boys today, so it shouldn’t have been a complete surprise to the nice young men in clean white coats who are coming to... I mean, the guys widening the highway.
Shouldn’t have been, but probably was.
Still, the nice foreman from LeGrand Johnson was very nice to us, hardly cracking a smirk at all as we outlined to him our grand, King Ludwig-like scheme for The Rock, and dutifully headed up the road a piece to contemplate the thing directly.
Hence the bits of dialog which begin today’s blog entry. See, my partner and I had only before glanced longingly at it from within the pickup. It really is bigger in person. A lot bigger.
According to Contractor Man, it may well weigh 300,000 pounds!
That’s a lot of granite.
And that’s only if we are actually seeing most of the rock. If it truly is iceberg-like... if it truly is... underneath that soil which surrounds and partly covers it may be more stone than was used to build the works of Ozymandias, King of Kings, in which case, Contractor Man will have to drill little holes in it, shove in big pieces of dynamite, and we shall have to look upon them and despair.
But while there’s rock, there’s hope. We haven’t bothered everyone there is to bother just yet. We know people who know people who have truly formidable equipment. And we are persistent, yes, and patient.
And it’s probably going to be a couple of months yet before the contractors have to do anything with the thing. Probably.
So, nobody’s safe for months yet. Months. Or more.
And regardless, we’ll be telling his grandchildren about this rock. I may write poems about this rock. It shall go down in local lore or we will die trying to put it there.
Go see it while ye may.
*Authorial postulate
Monday, February 10, 2003
HEH HEH HEH...
So after a weekend of celebrating an apparent victory – the House of Representatives passed HB 296 on the first reading, and approved Rep. Latta’s amendments – and Winter Carnivaling (registration tent for the nordic ski races, one of many unofficial assistants at the Sewer King’s craps table at the casino night*, slogging along on my skis through the poker run), I came to work Monday feeling my oats.
A web search for the internet home of Recreationists of the Bow, a group dedicated to preserving all current uses of the Medicine Bow National Forest (but especially motorized recreation), turned up some interesting stuff that got me thinking more seriously in the direction a lot of my pals have as far as what to do about the current economy-wrecking Draft Management Plan for the Medicine Bow National Forest.
The tools and techniques of an opponent are often as effective against that opponent as against oneself. The stump humpers have proven themselves masterful litigators and petitioners (though pretty shitty scientists, on the whole), and we are going to have to become so as well.
So, as I clicked over to a silly and emotion-fraught petition to “Save the Bow” I saw that a perfect tool for this was easily available: a website called, what else, ThePetitionSite.com that is run by an organization called Care2, which, as you might guess from the name, is, well, Stump Humper Central.
Hey, I can do this, too! I don’t know ultimately how effective e-mail petitions really are in getting results, but if one side is using that tool, the other side ought to as well, to provide balance in the universe if for no other reason!
So, I made a silly and emotion-fraught petition of my own, emphasizing that the current management program has already put more than 200 people out of work and that the new plan in its current state poses an even greater threat to the livelihoods of some really nice people who actually love this particular forest way more than a bunch of college kids who’ve never even been to Wyoming do, and submitted it.
There is, however, something slightly ominous called an “approval process.” Someone from Care2 is going to “review” my petition and let me know if it is “acceptable” within a few days. Hmm. Big skeptical eyebrow raising, this.
I’m now taking bets on whether my petition makes the cut or not. What are the odds? Better ask the Sewer King.
*A deeply deceptive experience, that craps table: I am known far and wide as a person who will never in her life be able to rely on luck. If an element of chance is present in an activity, I fail it every time. But somehow, somehow, I was “hot” on the dice playing SKC (Sewer King Craps, which differs from regular craps in a few important respects, because the Sewer King was trying to run the whole table by himself AFTER a hard day’s skiing and so some of the finer points – like what pays “two for one” and what pays “30 for one” – tended to get ignored until we crapsolytes caught on to the basic stuff like the pass line). Blazingly hot. Nobody ever bet against me. I won a million dollars and hardly ever lost anything. Terrifying, terrifying stuff.
So after a weekend of celebrating an apparent victory – the House of Representatives passed HB 296 on the first reading, and approved Rep. Latta’s amendments – and Winter Carnivaling (registration tent for the nordic ski races, one of many unofficial assistants at the Sewer King’s craps table at the casino night*, slogging along on my skis through the poker run), I came to work Monday feeling my oats.
A web search for the internet home of Recreationists of the Bow, a group dedicated to preserving all current uses of the Medicine Bow National Forest (but especially motorized recreation), turned up some interesting stuff that got me thinking more seriously in the direction a lot of my pals have as far as what to do about the current economy-wrecking Draft Management Plan for the Medicine Bow National Forest.
The tools and techniques of an opponent are often as effective against that opponent as against oneself. The stump humpers have proven themselves masterful litigators and petitioners (though pretty shitty scientists, on the whole), and we are going to have to become so as well.
So, as I clicked over to a silly and emotion-fraught petition to “Save the Bow” I saw that a perfect tool for this was easily available: a website called, what else, ThePetitionSite.com that is run by an organization called Care2, which, as you might guess from the name, is, well, Stump Humper Central.
Hey, I can do this, too! I don’t know ultimately how effective e-mail petitions really are in getting results, but if one side is using that tool, the other side ought to as well, to provide balance in the universe if for no other reason!
So, I made a silly and emotion-fraught petition of my own, emphasizing that the current management program has already put more than 200 people out of work and that the new plan in its current state poses an even greater threat to the livelihoods of some really nice people who actually love this particular forest way more than a bunch of college kids who’ve never even been to Wyoming do, and submitted it.
There is, however, something slightly ominous called an “approval process.” Someone from Care2 is going to “review” my petition and let me know if it is “acceptable” within a few days. Hmm. Big skeptical eyebrow raising, this.
I’m now taking bets on whether my petition makes the cut or not. What are the odds? Better ask the Sewer King.
*A deeply deceptive experience, that craps table: I am known far and wide as a person who will never in her life be able to rely on luck. If an element of chance is present in an activity, I fail it every time. But somehow, somehow, I was “hot” on the dice playing SKC (Sewer King Craps, which differs from regular craps in a few important respects, because the Sewer King was trying to run the whole table by himself AFTER a hard day’s skiing and so some of the finer points – like what pays “two for one” and what pays “30 for one” – tended to get ignored until we crapsolytes caught on to the basic stuff like the pass line). Blazingly hot. Nobody ever bet against me. I won a million dollars and hardly ever lost anything. Terrifying, terrifying stuff.
Thursday, February 06, 2003
MATCHING, SCHMATCHING
As I mentioned yesterday, I am paying particular attention to a couple of bills currently under consideration in the Wyoming State House, HB 264 and HB 302, both of which are intended to set aside a chunk of the state’s Permanent Mineral Trust Fund for helping communities become “business ready” in the current jargon.
Each bill creates a fund, to be administered by the Wyoming Business Council as a grant program to allow towns like ours to make significant investments in their own economic development on a physically tangible, brick-and-mortar basis, and it’s high time something like this was made a reality. I’ve been studying economic development almost since the day I came back to Wyoming, and the realities of it are harsh and inescapable: businesses who are seeking to relocate have been trained to expect facilities that are in “move-in” condition. If they have to wait around for something to be built... if they have to pay to have something built or renovated... if they have to go through the giant flaming hoops of permits and easements and utilities development themselves, they’re not going to come. They’ll go where this work and the financial burdens accompanying it have been done for them. And there are, dear readers, cities and counties and economic development corporations all over this company who have and will do it for them.
Our new governor, Dave Freudenthal, knows this all too well, which is why one of his significant campaign pledges – and yes, I’m talking about the very one which finally decided me to become a supporter – was the very program HB 264 and 302, in their slightly different ways, would implement.
So what’s the difference between these two bills?
The two significant issues are the amount of money to be set aside to start this program, and whether or not the towns and counties who will apply for grants under this program will be required to put up matching funds in order to secure the money.
Now, it’s not the amount that concerns me so terribly much – 302 has a dollar amount of $15 million, which is chapter and verse Governor Freudenthal’s original proposal, while 264 currently has only $5 million (I say currently because I know Rep. Latta and some of my other friends in Cheyenne are planning to submit an amendment to bump this figure up to $10 million) – although I would naturally be happy to see more money in the original pot because that just means there’s an opportunity there to help more communities. Saratoga has taken a huge hit this year, but there are lots of other towns in Wyoming who are facing hard times because of the drought, the brain drain, the Forest Plan, etc.
But this matching issue is a bad, bad deal, folks.
Think back to two years ago, when you were hearing a lot of your local elected officials and other cranks complaining about a little thing called legislative de-earmarking.
See, before the year 2000, a certain percentage of state mineral royalties, gasoline taxes, etc. was earmarked for local governments, to help equalize those local governments’ abilities to deliver basic services to the residents they serve. Every single town in Wyoming has a basic responsibility to its citizens by state law, custom, and the Social Contract, to provide things like potable water, sewer, police and fire protection, emergency medical care, safe streets and bridges, etc. And there are bottom-line, fixed costs associated with these whether a town is serving 2000 or 10,000 people.
But all local governments are not created equal when it comes to their abilities to raise the revenue needed to pay for all of this stuff. Different towns, different counties, have different property values (on which property taxes/mill levies are based), different ways of digging money out of the ground (Campbell County is sitting on all that CBM; Goshen County... grows some cheap crops), different visitor bases and different business communities, which means different levels of sales tax income.
Enter earmarking, a way for the State of Wyoming, which is bringing in significant revenue from all over the state, to help level the playing field and make sure that everyone gets the basics no matter where in Wyoming he or she lives.
But in 2000, the Wyoming State Legislature were looking at about a $125 million shortfall (largely because of severence tax reductions they themselves had granted, and, too, because there wasn’t a lot of mineral auditing going on, something else GovDave is fixin’ to try and fix) and started looking around for what could be done about it. Cutting spending on state level stuff, of course, was not desirable to them. So they decided on de-earmarking those revenues that were supposed to be guaranteed to local governments and school districts.
[And, to soften the blow and delay its effects a little bit, they generously bestowed a one-time “rainy day” payment on each affected local government according to the size of the population served (Saratoga got a whopping $208,000)]
Now, de-earmarking didn’t out and out take that money away from local governments and school districts, it just removed the requirement that a certain portion of those revenues go there. If the legislature so chooses, it can still share that money with us, and it is, after a fashion, but...
Oh, there’s always a “but”!!!
But... now when we need money for a water project, or a building project, or to buy a new firetruck or ambulance, or whatever, we have to go begging to the state bureaucracies for it. Usually, we have to write grants. And usually, we have to put up matching funds in order to receive these grants.
Trickle, trickle, trickle.
Now, making matters worse, with an ever worsening economic climate (really, the only people in Wyoming who are doing well are the people who brought their own money from other states, and a few very well compensated minerals workers and the like. The rest of us are flipping burgers, running cash registers, and ranting on web pages because we can’t afford the paper and printing costs to become real pamphleteers) most of the cities and towns already hurting and reeling from this also received another blow when the 2000 census figures came in.
Saratoga, for example, lost nearly 300 people between 1990 and 2000.
And remember, our share of state and county sales tax, fuel taxes, cigarette taxes, etc. is based on, yes, population.
So those revenues are going down, down, down, too.
(And we’re not even in the same league as poor Riverside, down something in the neighborhood of 33% of its population, but still trying to run the same basic infrastructure it did when there were officially more than 80 residents!)
So, dear readers, especially those of you who are or are personally acquainted with Wyoming legislators, how the hell are we supposed to come up with even more matching funds, when the communities who need the help proposed by HB264 and HB302 most are the ones who are also feeling de-earmarking and population loss the most?
Longtime LIANT readers know what’s coming next. A call to action.
My sources tell me that HB264 is due to come to the House floor either today (Thursday) or tomorrow (Friday). Rep. Latta, as I said, is going to propose amendments to make it more effective and worthwhile. Folks, support for these amendments is needed.
I haven’t heard back from our own Representative, but Latta sounds pretty sure that Mr. Bucholz is with him on this.
But there are lots of other House members out there who need to hear from YOU, folks. The program these bills would create could be an important part of Saratoga’s effort to pull itself out of its current economic slump and begin recovering from our loss of the mill, but it ain’t going to happen without help.
HERE is the legislator e-mail list for the 2003-04 legislature. They all have computers now, and a lot of them have demonstrated to me over the last few days that they really do read their e-mail, and respond.
Send some messages their way, while there’s still time, folks.
If you don’t have time to bug all of them, here’s a few key people that need a little persuading on the matching issue (click on the name to send a message):
Pete Illoway
Fred Parady
Kurt Bucholz
As I mentioned yesterday, I am paying particular attention to a couple of bills currently under consideration in the Wyoming State House, HB 264 and HB 302, both of which are intended to set aside a chunk of the state’s Permanent Mineral Trust Fund for helping communities become “business ready” in the current jargon.
Each bill creates a fund, to be administered by the Wyoming Business Council as a grant program to allow towns like ours to make significant investments in their own economic development on a physically tangible, brick-and-mortar basis, and it’s high time something like this was made a reality. I’ve been studying economic development almost since the day I came back to Wyoming, and the realities of it are harsh and inescapable: businesses who are seeking to relocate have been trained to expect facilities that are in “move-in” condition. If they have to wait around for something to be built... if they have to pay to have something built or renovated... if they have to go through the giant flaming hoops of permits and easements and utilities development themselves, they’re not going to come. They’ll go where this work and the financial burdens accompanying it have been done for them. And there are, dear readers, cities and counties and economic development corporations all over this company who have and will do it for them.
Our new governor, Dave Freudenthal, knows this all too well, which is why one of his significant campaign pledges – and yes, I’m talking about the very one which finally decided me to become a supporter – was the very program HB 264 and 302, in their slightly different ways, would implement.
So what’s the difference between these two bills?
The two significant issues are the amount of money to be set aside to start this program, and whether or not the towns and counties who will apply for grants under this program will be required to put up matching funds in order to secure the money.
Now, it’s not the amount that concerns me so terribly much – 302 has a dollar amount of $15 million, which is chapter and verse Governor Freudenthal’s original proposal, while 264 currently has only $5 million (I say currently because I know Rep. Latta and some of my other friends in Cheyenne are planning to submit an amendment to bump this figure up to $10 million) – although I would naturally be happy to see more money in the original pot because that just means there’s an opportunity there to help more communities. Saratoga has taken a huge hit this year, but there are lots of other towns in Wyoming who are facing hard times because of the drought, the brain drain, the Forest Plan, etc.
But this matching issue is a bad, bad deal, folks.
Think back to two years ago, when you were hearing a lot of your local elected officials and other cranks complaining about a little thing called legislative de-earmarking.
See, before the year 2000, a certain percentage of state mineral royalties, gasoline taxes, etc. was earmarked for local governments, to help equalize those local governments’ abilities to deliver basic services to the residents they serve. Every single town in Wyoming has a basic responsibility to its citizens by state law, custom, and the Social Contract, to provide things like potable water, sewer, police and fire protection, emergency medical care, safe streets and bridges, etc. And there are bottom-line, fixed costs associated with these whether a town is serving 2000 or 10,000 people.
But all local governments are not created equal when it comes to their abilities to raise the revenue needed to pay for all of this stuff. Different towns, different counties, have different property values (on which property taxes/mill levies are based), different ways of digging money out of the ground (Campbell County is sitting on all that CBM; Goshen County... grows some cheap crops), different visitor bases and different business communities, which means different levels of sales tax income.
Enter earmarking, a way for the State of Wyoming, which is bringing in significant revenue from all over the state, to help level the playing field and make sure that everyone gets the basics no matter where in Wyoming he or she lives.
But in 2000, the Wyoming State Legislature were looking at about a $125 million shortfall (largely because of severence tax reductions they themselves had granted, and, too, because there wasn’t a lot of mineral auditing going on, something else GovDave is fixin’ to try and fix) and started looking around for what could be done about it. Cutting spending on state level stuff, of course, was not desirable to them. So they decided on de-earmarking those revenues that were supposed to be guaranteed to local governments and school districts.
[And, to soften the blow and delay its effects a little bit, they generously bestowed a one-time “rainy day” payment on each affected local government according to the size of the population served (Saratoga got a whopping $208,000)]
Now, de-earmarking didn’t out and out take that money away from local governments and school districts, it just removed the requirement that a certain portion of those revenues go there. If the legislature so chooses, it can still share that money with us, and it is, after a fashion, but...
Oh, there’s always a “but”!!!
But... now when we need money for a water project, or a building project, or to buy a new firetruck or ambulance, or whatever, we have to go begging to the state bureaucracies for it. Usually, we have to write grants. And usually, we have to put up matching funds in order to receive these grants.
Trickle, trickle, trickle.
Now, making matters worse, with an ever worsening economic climate (really, the only people in Wyoming who are doing well are the people who brought their own money from other states, and a few very well compensated minerals workers and the like. The rest of us are flipping burgers, running cash registers, and ranting on web pages because we can’t afford the paper and printing costs to become real pamphleteers) most of the cities and towns already hurting and reeling from this also received another blow when the 2000 census figures came in.
Saratoga, for example, lost nearly 300 people between 1990 and 2000.
And remember, our share of state and county sales tax, fuel taxes, cigarette taxes, etc. is based on, yes, population.
So those revenues are going down, down, down, too.
(And we’re not even in the same league as poor Riverside, down something in the neighborhood of 33% of its population, but still trying to run the same basic infrastructure it did when there were officially more than 80 residents!)
So, dear readers, especially those of you who are or are personally acquainted with Wyoming legislators, how the hell are we supposed to come up with even more matching funds, when the communities who need the help proposed by HB264 and HB302 most are the ones who are also feeling de-earmarking and population loss the most?
Longtime LIANT readers know what’s coming next. A call to action.
My sources tell me that HB264 is due to come to the House floor either today (Thursday) or tomorrow (Friday). Rep. Latta, as I said, is going to propose amendments to make it more effective and worthwhile. Folks, support for these amendments is needed.
I haven’t heard back from our own Representative, but Latta sounds pretty sure that Mr. Bucholz is with him on this.
But there are lots of other House members out there who need to hear from YOU, folks. The program these bills would create could be an important part of Saratoga’s effort to pull itself out of its current economic slump and begin recovering from our loss of the mill, but it ain’t going to happen without help.
HERE is the legislator e-mail list for the 2003-04 legislature. They all have computers now, and a lot of them have demonstrated to me over the last few days that they really do read their e-mail, and respond.
Send some messages their way, while there’s still time, folks.
If you don’t have time to bug all of them, here’s a few key people that need a little persuading on the matching issue (click on the name to send a message):
Pete Illoway
Fred Parady
Kurt Bucholz
Wednesday, February 05, 2003
THERE ARE SOME DANGEROUSLY SEXY...
...New features on the Wyoming State Legislature's web page. And they are newly cause for concern for Your Humble Blogger.
Just now, I was consulting this page to check up on a few bills in which I am interested (those being HB 264 and 302, which concern an effort to implement Governor Freudenthal's economic development idea of pulling $15 million out of the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund for a grant program to help Wyoming towns and cities improve their business development chances, about which, if I know me, and I do, more anon), I happened to notice that there is a whole new realm of presentation attached to the Bills Index.
I'm talking about those little old "Fiscal Notes" you can click on next to the other information about each bill.
These are prepared by the Department of Revenue (click on a Fiscal Note, any Fiscal note, and you can even see which bureaucrat did the analysis) and show that bureau's expert analysis on each bill's implications for the state government's finances. Looks pretty nifty, doesn't it? Might help that huge passel of freshman legislators, especially, make some better-informed decisions, mightn't it?
Ah, but as ever, the devil is in the details.
For example: There is a measure, House Bill 91, that would create a sales and use tax exemption for agricultural implements (i.e. tractors, balers, etc.), which even my dear friend the Oracle, who assures me on a daily basis that he is the most conservative person I know, supports heartily, as do I*
Take a look at HB91's Fiscal Note. It appears to show, in stark and scary terms, that if HB91 were passed the state would lose a little more than $1 million a year in sales and use tax.
Of course, what it doesn't show is anything even remotely acknowledging what money all of us, not just the state government, lose when people skip across the border to save a few bucks on taxes. That is, I'll grant you, hard to quantify, but think of it in the common terms we all know, how "one dollar spent in the community turns over at least seven times before it leaves." When a fella heads down to Colorado to buy a tractor, all that money he is spending to buy the thing (and gasoline to get there... and lunch for the trip... oh, and as long as he's there, why not get a sack of groceries... or a lottery ticket?... how about stopping for another meal? maybe a little movie?)... turns over in Colorado.
In other words, that projected loss of $1 million a year in state revenue doesn't tell the whole story. How much are we all, as a people, losing by adhering to the status quo?
These questions need to be considered, folks. The legislature is voting on this issue (and many others, of course) right now. House Bill 91 passed the House this week (with some shocking no votes... this should have been a no-brainer, guys!) and is on the way to the Senate. Your input, dear readers, can still help.
Fight the power. Or something.
*This may seem odd for two tremendous fans of Sam Western's PUSHED OFF THE MOUNTAIN, SOLD DOWN THE RIVER, a tome which takes Wyoming rather severely to task for coddling its ag producers in various absurd ways, but that tome also advocates bringing our state and its policies in line to maybe share in a little of the stunning prosperity all of our neighboring states (note for the geographically challenged: Wyoming borders Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, and Utah) - all of which have a sales and use tax exemption on ag equipment. Which, yes, class, sends a whole lot of ranchers and other implement buyers out of state to do their shopping. Is this looking inward? Is this grassroots business development? NO. It's leaving the bung out of the barrel and letting more of our resources pour across our already hideously porous borders.
...New features on the Wyoming State Legislature's web page. And they are newly cause for concern for Your Humble Blogger.
Just now, I was consulting this page to check up on a few bills in which I am interested (those being HB 264 and 302, which concern an effort to implement Governor Freudenthal's economic development idea of pulling $15 million out of the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund for a grant program to help Wyoming towns and cities improve their business development chances, about which, if I know me, and I do, more anon), I happened to notice that there is a whole new realm of presentation attached to the Bills Index.
I'm talking about those little old "Fiscal Notes" you can click on next to the other information about each bill.
These are prepared by the Department of Revenue (click on a Fiscal Note, any Fiscal note, and you can even see which bureaucrat did the analysis) and show that bureau's expert analysis on each bill's implications for the state government's finances. Looks pretty nifty, doesn't it? Might help that huge passel of freshman legislators, especially, make some better-informed decisions, mightn't it?
Ah, but as ever, the devil is in the details.
For example: There is a measure, House Bill 91, that would create a sales and use tax exemption for agricultural implements (i.e. tractors, balers, etc.), which even my dear friend the Oracle, who assures me on a daily basis that he is the most conservative person I know, supports heartily, as do I*
Take a look at HB91's Fiscal Note. It appears to show, in stark and scary terms, that if HB91 were passed the state would lose a little more than $1 million a year in sales and use tax.
Of course, what it doesn't show is anything even remotely acknowledging what money all of us, not just the state government, lose when people skip across the border to save a few bucks on taxes. That is, I'll grant you, hard to quantify, but think of it in the common terms we all know, how "one dollar spent in the community turns over at least seven times before it leaves." When a fella heads down to Colorado to buy a tractor, all that money he is spending to buy the thing (and gasoline to get there... and lunch for the trip... oh, and as long as he's there, why not get a sack of groceries... or a lottery ticket?... how about stopping for another meal? maybe a little movie?)... turns over in Colorado.
In other words, that projected loss of $1 million a year in state revenue doesn't tell the whole story. How much are we all, as a people, losing by adhering to the status quo?
These questions need to be considered, folks. The legislature is voting on this issue (and many others, of course) right now. House Bill 91 passed the House this week (with some shocking no votes... this should have been a no-brainer, guys!) and is on the way to the Senate. Your input, dear readers, can still help.
Fight the power. Or something.
*This may seem odd for two tremendous fans of Sam Western's PUSHED OFF THE MOUNTAIN, SOLD DOWN THE RIVER, a tome which takes Wyoming rather severely to task for coddling its ag producers in various absurd ways, but that tome also advocates bringing our state and its policies in line to maybe share in a little of the stunning prosperity all of our neighboring states (note for the geographically challenged: Wyoming borders Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, and Utah) - all of which have a sales and use tax exemption on ag equipment. Which, yes, class, sends a whole lot of ranchers and other implement buyers out of state to do their shopping. Is this looking inward? Is this grassroots business development? NO. It's leaving the bung out of the barrel and letting more of our resources pour across our already hideously porous borders.
Monday, February 03, 2003
MOSTLY TRUE
The Sewer King has given me kudos for producing a "mostly true" account of yesterday's events.
And so I am conscience stricken, and must 'fess up so that I might sleep tonight the sleep of the just, the sleep of the untroubled soul, the sleep of the mostly accurate chronicler who has done her humble duty and done it well.
I didn't really make those witty geometrical allusions.
And the King doesn't really look that much like the Roadrunner when he skis off into the distance. More like a cat burglar on skis; I always have to fight the urge to check his pockets for ill-gotten booty after each adventure.
Poetic license. Poetic license, my dear readers.
The Sewer King has given me kudos for producing a "mostly true" account of yesterday's events.
And so I am conscience stricken, and must 'fess up so that I might sleep tonight the sleep of the just, the sleep of the untroubled soul, the sleep of the mostly accurate chronicler who has done her humble duty and done it well.
I didn't really make those witty geometrical allusions.
And the King doesn't really look that much like the Roadrunner when he skis off into the distance. More like a cat burglar on skis; I always have to fight the urge to check his pockets for ill-gotten booty after each adventure.
Poetic license. Poetic license, my dear readers.
ADVENTURES IN APPLIED PHYSICS
So, my ski partner, known to LIANT readers also as The Sewer King, got tired of my having to turn back early every Sunday because I kept developing dauntingly hideous and painful blisters on my heels no matter what combination of socks, moleskin and bandages I applied as prophylactics, and furthermore, got tired of my also occasionally having to turn back because my “trailpacker” skis were not stiff enough or thick enough to keep me up on the really deep snow he prefers to muck about in.
His solution? Stick me on some different skis, skis with different bindings, skis that would a) require the acquisition of different boots and b) support me better in the gnarly deep snow, etc. etc.
Fine. Great. Fabulous. It is pretty embarrassing to be the one lagging behind, and limping on skis is bad for the body as well as the dignity, and trying to free onself from the mess when one has sunk hip deep into the snow with a big pair of skis on burns up energy that could otherwise be spent going the extra mile.
But oooohhhh... I didn’t know from embarrassing until yesterday.
Just to give you a hint of the flavor, I present an encapsulation of a typical verbal exchange between my cloacal ski partner and myself from our latest Sunday outing.
SK: OK, you’re going to have to really dig your skis into the –
YHB (wobbling and sliding like Bambi on the ice): YELP!
SK (gently mocking): Yelp!
YHB (getting back up again with much effort): Grunt.
SK: OK, really dig that ski in. Here, perpendicular to the fall line...
YHB: There’s a fall line? Looks like a whole fall plane to me... YELP!
SK (gently mocking): Yelp!
Collie of Folly: Lick, lick, lick.
YHB: Molly, not now. (Finally hauls herself back up just to get out from under the barrage of doggie kisses).
SK: OK, now really PLOP down that ski. OK, lean hard into it. Look! You’re standing!
YHB: YELP!
SK (gently mocking): Yelp!
Etc.
You see, before yesterday, I’d been tooling around on a pair of touring skis, made, as the Sewer King sneered, for farting around on very groomed, well-maintained trails in Colorado. These skis have style (my dear partner forgets, methinks, how he originally admired them on our first outing last December. “Those are some good looking skis,” he remarked then as he loaded them and the Collie of Folly into his pickup), and, more importantly, serious traction, so I never even had to execute the dreaded “herringbone” maneuver when heading up hills, and didn’t have to pay much attention to my technique at all. But... therein lay my downfall.
A very sloppy skier I was, I now realize.
Very sloppy.
As I realized immediately when I bound my new NNNBC boots to a pair of SK’s backcountry skis and fell down. And fell down again. And again. Even though the ground was level and I had shown no previous signs of inner ear disorders or other problems with balance. It had even been, oh, at least six hours since I’d pounded back my last glass of the cooking wine at the Minister of Fun’s house.
No, this was all physics. As in the importance of downward pressure and exquisite balance to provide the friction that my flimsy trailpackers had led me to take for granted in the three or so years I’ve been skiing as an adult but these other skis, skis coated in weird, sticky wax and a bit skinnier than my others, did not in and of themselves provide.
The watchword of the day, repeated like the refrain of some borderline-obscene Anglo-Saxon campfire song by the Sewer King, was “PLOP.”
If there is any slope at all, I learned, I would continue to yelp in freaked-out amazement as my skis slid right out from under me until I learned to PLOP – plant each ski very decisively into the snow, leaning slightly forward and putting all of my strength and weight into that plopping motion and plopping for keeps. And when the slope was at all challenging, my poles must go behind me to prop me up and keep me stable.
All of this is, as I’ve said, a bit more work than I was used to. Fortunately for me, I’m stubborn as hell, and so with only about twelve hours of patient encouragement from the Sewer King, shivering in the cold of an approaching snowstorm because he dresses to allow for the warmth of serious exercise and not for standing around in crappy weather watching someone fall down a lot, at last I managed to stay upright, crowing in triumph and yelling at my dog to stop nudging me in the knees because it wasn’t really that funny to make momma fall, was it?
Then it was time to (GASP) start trying to make actual forward progress, and once again I found I’ve been doing it all wrong. But here’s the thing: when I started doing it right, the movement felt so much better, so much more graceful and closer to being effortless kind of like... kind of like the way my partner looks just before he zooms off, Roadrunner like, around the corner and beyond the horizon.
Oh, wait, I can do it too! Sort of! As long as I pay attention and concentrate on the new, correct movement, and don’t slack off into the lazy old movement. But that, too, was easy, because the penalty for slacking off was immediate: the slacking foot and ski would slip backwards, my leg would snap back and I would teeter on the brink of falling (again, yelping amusingly) and feel like a perfect ass.
What’s that? What’s he saying to me? OK, try it without poles. Carry the poles uselessly in one hand and skate along... it really is like skating! Much more so than the old way, in the old boots, on the old skis. Oh, it feels good, gliding along, whistling a happy tune between the backslide-induced yelps... but then... but then...
The first real slope. It’s not long, and I would have trudged easily up it on my trailpackers (if they didn’t betray me and sink me hip-deep into the snow) but now... now... time for the ultimate PLOPstep, and heavy work for my arms and shoulders because a) the poles become crucial for balance as I try correctly to place my skis and b) the poles are even more crucial for pulling myself up out of the snow after I’ve slid backwards a few feet and fallen down with a resounding... PLOP.
I therefore wound up working harder than I’ve yet done on one of our outings this winter, and skied a shorter distance than I’ve done since our first day out, and my muscles as I type this Monday afternoon are quite sore, but I’ve yet to wipe the silly, happy grin off my face... not just over the bliss of blister-free feet (though that is bliss indeed), but also over the memory of feeling I might finally get this ski thing right.
The Skiwer King now thinks maybe I would have been better off, that most people would be better off, learning the whole thing on slick backcountry skis from the get-go, comparing such to the practice of teaching a kid to drive on a stick-shift vehicle; you have to learn everything, can’t rely on any crutches of technology or convenience, and master techniques that will always serve you well no matter how harsh or marshmallow-y the conditions.
(Of course, my walking buddy remarks, by the same analogy, it’s best to throw someone into the English Channel during a seastorm to teach him to swim... but that’s maybe taking analogy to extremes)
I say better late than never... and know myself well enough to know also that when I was younger I would not have had quite the right stubbornness and patience to keep falling and rising and sticking my tongue out at my even more patient pal, who finally taught me to ski after all.
So, my ski partner, known to LIANT readers also as The Sewer King, got tired of my having to turn back early every Sunday because I kept developing dauntingly hideous and painful blisters on my heels no matter what combination of socks, moleskin and bandages I applied as prophylactics, and furthermore, got tired of my also occasionally having to turn back because my “trailpacker” skis were not stiff enough or thick enough to keep me up on the really deep snow he prefers to muck about in.
His solution? Stick me on some different skis, skis with different bindings, skis that would a) require the acquisition of different boots and b) support me better in the gnarly deep snow, etc. etc.
Fine. Great. Fabulous. It is pretty embarrassing to be the one lagging behind, and limping on skis is bad for the body as well as the dignity, and trying to free onself from the mess when one has sunk hip deep into the snow with a big pair of skis on burns up energy that could otherwise be spent going the extra mile.
But oooohhhh... I didn’t know from embarrassing until yesterday.
Just to give you a hint of the flavor, I present an encapsulation of a typical verbal exchange between my cloacal ski partner and myself from our latest Sunday outing.
SK: OK, you’re going to have to really dig your skis into the –
YHB (wobbling and sliding like Bambi on the ice): YELP!
SK (gently mocking): Yelp!
YHB (getting back up again with much effort): Grunt.
SK: OK, really dig that ski in. Here, perpendicular to the fall line...
YHB: There’s a fall line? Looks like a whole fall plane to me... YELP!
SK (gently mocking): Yelp!
Collie of Folly: Lick, lick, lick.
YHB: Molly, not now. (Finally hauls herself back up just to get out from under the barrage of doggie kisses).
SK: OK, now really PLOP down that ski. OK, lean hard into it. Look! You’re standing!
YHB: YELP!
SK (gently mocking): Yelp!
Etc.
You see, before yesterday, I’d been tooling around on a pair of touring skis, made, as the Sewer King sneered, for farting around on very groomed, well-maintained trails in Colorado. These skis have style (my dear partner forgets, methinks, how he originally admired them on our first outing last December. “Those are some good looking skis,” he remarked then as he loaded them and the Collie of Folly into his pickup), and, more importantly, serious traction, so I never even had to execute the dreaded “herringbone” maneuver when heading up hills, and didn’t have to pay much attention to my technique at all. But... therein lay my downfall.
A very sloppy skier I was, I now realize.
Very sloppy.
As I realized immediately when I bound my new NNNBC boots to a pair of SK’s backcountry skis and fell down. And fell down again. And again. Even though the ground was level and I had shown no previous signs of inner ear disorders or other problems with balance. It had even been, oh, at least six hours since I’d pounded back my last glass of the cooking wine at the Minister of Fun’s house.
No, this was all physics. As in the importance of downward pressure and exquisite balance to provide the friction that my flimsy trailpackers had led me to take for granted in the three or so years I’ve been skiing as an adult but these other skis, skis coated in weird, sticky wax and a bit skinnier than my others, did not in and of themselves provide.
The watchword of the day, repeated like the refrain of some borderline-obscene Anglo-Saxon campfire song by the Sewer King, was “PLOP.”
If there is any slope at all, I learned, I would continue to yelp in freaked-out amazement as my skis slid right out from under me until I learned to PLOP – plant each ski very decisively into the snow, leaning slightly forward and putting all of my strength and weight into that plopping motion and plopping for keeps. And when the slope was at all challenging, my poles must go behind me to prop me up and keep me stable.
All of this is, as I’ve said, a bit more work than I was used to. Fortunately for me, I’m stubborn as hell, and so with only about twelve hours of patient encouragement from the Sewer King, shivering in the cold of an approaching snowstorm because he dresses to allow for the warmth of serious exercise and not for standing around in crappy weather watching someone fall down a lot, at last I managed to stay upright, crowing in triumph and yelling at my dog to stop nudging me in the knees because it wasn’t really that funny to make momma fall, was it?
Then it was time to (GASP) start trying to make actual forward progress, and once again I found I’ve been doing it all wrong. But here’s the thing: when I started doing it right, the movement felt so much better, so much more graceful and closer to being effortless kind of like... kind of like the way my partner looks just before he zooms off, Roadrunner like, around the corner and beyond the horizon.
Oh, wait, I can do it too! Sort of! As long as I pay attention and concentrate on the new, correct movement, and don’t slack off into the lazy old movement. But that, too, was easy, because the penalty for slacking off was immediate: the slacking foot and ski would slip backwards, my leg would snap back and I would teeter on the brink of falling (again, yelping amusingly) and feel like a perfect ass.
What’s that? What’s he saying to me? OK, try it without poles. Carry the poles uselessly in one hand and skate along... it really is like skating! Much more so than the old way, in the old boots, on the old skis. Oh, it feels good, gliding along, whistling a happy tune between the backslide-induced yelps... but then... but then...
The first real slope. It’s not long, and I would have trudged easily up it on my trailpackers (if they didn’t betray me and sink me hip-deep into the snow) but now... now... time for the ultimate PLOPstep, and heavy work for my arms and shoulders because a) the poles become crucial for balance as I try correctly to place my skis and b) the poles are even more crucial for pulling myself up out of the snow after I’ve slid backwards a few feet and fallen down with a resounding... PLOP.
I therefore wound up working harder than I’ve yet done on one of our outings this winter, and skied a shorter distance than I’ve done since our first day out, and my muscles as I type this Monday afternoon are quite sore, but I’ve yet to wipe the silly, happy grin off my face... not just over the bliss of blister-free feet (though that is bliss indeed), but also over the memory of feeling I might finally get this ski thing right.
The Skiwer King now thinks maybe I would have been better off, that most people would be better off, learning the whole thing on slick backcountry skis from the get-go, comparing such to the practice of teaching a kid to drive on a stick-shift vehicle; you have to learn everything, can’t rely on any crutches of technology or convenience, and master techniques that will always serve you well no matter how harsh or marshmallow-y the conditions.
(Of course, my walking buddy remarks, by the same analogy, it’s best to throw someone into the English Channel during a seastorm to teach him to swim... but that’s maybe taking analogy to extremes)
I say better late than never... and know myself well enough to know also that when I was younger I would not have had quite the right stubbornness and patience to keep falling and rising and sticking my tongue out at my even more patient pal, who finally taught me to ski after all.
Thursday, January 30, 2003
THE THOUSAND-EYED GODDESS
I usually leave the job of stating the obvious to those media entities that get paid to do so, but an important truth seems to have fallen by the wayside in our little valley in recent months, and so I find myself forced to remind everyone that...
...If something sounds too good/weird/unlikely/impossible to be true, then it probably is not true.
Is that really so hard to grasp?
So difficult to comprehend?
Or maybe it sounds... too good to be true?
The Greeks were right to depict Rumor as the goddess with a thousand eyes and a million tongues, but they didn’t go far enough with that.
The Goddess Rumor has a thousand very, very near-sighted eyes, a million ears with severe and daunting ear wax problems, and a thousand thick and cleft and otherwise deeply impaired tongues. Regard her not as an authority to be feared or respected, but as a creature worthy of your deepest pity and compassion, like a sick old dog that keeps trying to attack a table leg, thinking it the offending limb of a vandal or burgler trying to invade the family home.
Scary economic times like we’re facing, when we’ve taken it in the shorts in so many ways and are poised, if we sit here and continue to do nothing about the Forest Plan and other delights, to get creamed even worse, do not bring out the best in us as a polis even before the bullshit factory cranks up.
And it only gets worse if we don’t remember to take the output of said factory with all of the seriousness it deserves, a.k.a. none at all, most of the time.
If it sounds at all plausible, by all means investigate it and see if it’s true. Is there physical evidence? Documentation? Horse’s mouth testimony?
But for pity’s sake, if there’s none of that, shut the hell up and find something constructive to do with all of that worry and angst and air. The Forest Plan beckons. Oh, and we’re probably going to war. Remember the outside world, people? There’s a president and a Congress out there who do.
I usually leave the job of stating the obvious to those media entities that get paid to do so, but an important truth seems to have fallen by the wayside in our little valley in recent months, and so I find myself forced to remind everyone that...
...If something sounds too good/weird/unlikely/impossible to be true, then it probably is not true.
Is that really so hard to grasp?
So difficult to comprehend?
Or maybe it sounds... too good to be true?
The Greeks were right to depict Rumor as the goddess with a thousand eyes and a million tongues, but they didn’t go far enough with that.
The Goddess Rumor has a thousand very, very near-sighted eyes, a million ears with severe and daunting ear wax problems, and a thousand thick and cleft and otherwise deeply impaired tongues. Regard her not as an authority to be feared or respected, but as a creature worthy of your deepest pity and compassion, like a sick old dog that keeps trying to attack a table leg, thinking it the offending limb of a vandal or burgler trying to invade the family home.
Scary economic times like we’re facing, when we’ve taken it in the shorts in so many ways and are poised, if we sit here and continue to do nothing about the Forest Plan and other delights, to get creamed even worse, do not bring out the best in us as a polis even before the bullshit factory cranks up.
And it only gets worse if we don’t remember to take the output of said factory with all of the seriousness it deserves, a.k.a. none at all, most of the time.
If it sounds at all plausible, by all means investigate it and see if it’s true. Is there physical evidence? Documentation? Horse’s mouth testimony?
But for pity’s sake, if there’s none of that, shut the hell up and find something constructive to do with all of that worry and angst and air. The Forest Plan beckons. Oh, and we’re probably going to war. Remember the outside world, people? There’s a president and a Congress out there who do.
Friday, January 24, 2003
LOOK WHO FINALLY CARES!
I promise that sooner or later I'll stop being so pissed off, but another person has made the official LIANT shit list, for being the ultimate Babsy-Come-Lately to the Saratoga pity party.
I refer to no less a person than Representative Barbara Cubin, our favorite Congresswoman from Wyoming.
Or her press secretary, at least.
OK, disclosure time: Part of why I'm cranky is that today was supposed to be my day off as compensation for the very long hours I worked to bring you the 2003 Saratoga Ice Fishing Derby, but instead I spent most of it in my office anyway, because my enabling assistant's dog managed to get hit by a car, and both dog and EA are too distraught to make public appearances.
SO ANYWAY, I will leave it to you, dear readers, to decide if I'm overreacting to the message that greeted me on the chamber's answering machine this A.M.:
In brief, Babs' press secretary (or a lackey thereof), "Joe" saw on TV last night that something seems to be happening with our local sawmill that doesn't sound too good, and he would really like, on Babs' behalf, to get details on that, on what's happening and why and how it's affecting us (HELLOOOOOO????) for some newspaper columns and the like that Babsy Baby might like to write.
In other words, her staff has finally deigned to notice that we're in a bind here, and sees in it potential to make some political hay picking on the pro-NAFTAites and the Forest Service, holding us up as your poster children.
Of which I shall surely be one, as I am to appear this very evening on the KTWO Wyoming news giving my two cents on what's next for us in Saratoga and trying really hard not to blubber (I got to thinking about how many of my friends who are leaving, and also about certain assholes who have never, ever spoken to me on the matter but have somehow concluded that I don't give a shit about those people who are going to have to leave, and couldn't help but look a little pathetic, I guess) about "a tripod with only two legs."
God, I hope "Joe" doesn't see that.
I ask again, where were all of these people last year, when we actually asked for their help?
I promise that sooner or later I'll stop being so pissed off, but another person has made the official LIANT shit list, for being the ultimate Babsy-Come-Lately to the Saratoga pity party.
I refer to no less a person than Representative Barbara Cubin, our favorite Congresswoman from Wyoming.
Or her press secretary, at least.
OK, disclosure time: Part of why I'm cranky is that today was supposed to be my day off as compensation for the very long hours I worked to bring you the 2003 Saratoga Ice Fishing Derby, but instead I spent most of it in my office anyway, because my enabling assistant's dog managed to get hit by a car, and both dog and EA are too distraught to make public appearances.
SO ANYWAY, I will leave it to you, dear readers, to decide if I'm overreacting to the message that greeted me on the chamber's answering machine this A.M.:
In brief, Babs' press secretary (or a lackey thereof), "Joe" saw on TV last night that something seems to be happening with our local sawmill that doesn't sound too good, and he would really like, on Babs' behalf, to get details on that, on what's happening and why and how it's affecting us (HELLOOOOOO????) for some newspaper columns and the like that Babsy Baby might like to write.
In other words, her staff has finally deigned to notice that we're in a bind here, and sees in it potential to make some political hay picking on the pro-NAFTAites and the Forest Service, holding us up as your poster children.
Of which I shall surely be one, as I am to appear this very evening on the KTWO Wyoming news giving my two cents on what's next for us in Saratoga and trying really hard not to blubber (I got to thinking about how many of my friends who are leaving, and also about certain assholes who have never, ever spoken to me on the matter but have somehow concluded that I don't give a shit about those people who are going to have to leave, and couldn't help but look a little pathetic, I guess) about "a tripod with only two legs."
God, I hope "Joe" doesn't see that.
I ask again, where were all of these people last year, when we actually asked for their help?
Thursday, January 23, 2003
MAYBE MORE THAN 25 POUNDS…
So, as several members of our local Soroptimist Club are faithful LIANT readers, they graciously invited me to heat up the oil and help them boil our District Forest Ranger. OK, maybe boil is a bit harsh, but they did hope to grill him on some of the finer and scarier points of the Forest Plan…
What he said was not quite as interesting as what he didn’t say… For instance, when he was asked (by My Own Dear Personal Mom) if the closure of the Louisiana Pacific mill here in Saratoga was factored into the Plan’s calculations regarding “loss of forest-related jobs” (stated in his nifty Power Point presentation to be “insignificant”), he, um, err, changed the subject.
He also said the Forest Service “needs mills” to buy and use the trees removed in the management of our forest, but neglected to say which mills were needed, or if this Important and Interesting Fact was in any way part of last month’s deliberations between the Forest Service and the two companies (formerly) interested in buying LP-Saratoga.
And he didn’t say who was going to process what few trees are allowed to be removed. The Log Fairy, perhaps.
He also didn’t know a bleeding thing about these little “sub-nievian” voles that are being used as “indicator species” for deciding the fate of snowmobile use in the Snowy Range, mimicking the behavior of…pretty much everyone who is just asking us to take his or her word for it that snowmobiles “impact” these voles (betraying, as always, a shocking disrespect for the English language in using “impact” as a transitive verb, but as that sin is widespread within and without government circles, I can’t directly fault him for that, though I still had to snort at it. Call it a reflex. I’m only human).
Nor did he have much to say on the subject of doing business locally, after I shared with him his agency’s PR problem in that regard (our two largest remaining employers in the Platte Valley are the Forest Service and the school district, neither of whose employees are often seen shopping in our local grocery, hardware or other stores, but would most certainly have Frequent Shopper Cards at WalMart if such things existed) and encouraged him to encourage his employees to use Carbon Bucks to prove me wrong, if indeed I was wrong on this Important and Popular fact.
Meanwhile, the last long went through our mill this very morning, and my neighborhood is eerily silent without the mill’s low hum, occasional industrial creaking and cranking, and all of the other oddly soothing sounds that lulled me to sleep each night, a constant aural reminder that at least some aspect of our local economy flourished still.
No more, no more.
Now, I can’t lay this entirely at the Forest Service’s door; this is also a NAFTA issue (Canadian lumber flooding the market at impossibly cheap prices is what finally drove LP to sell off its lumber division in the first place), but I also can’t praise this agency and it’s hangers-on and tale-bearers for going out of its way to help keep this vital sector of our economy functioning, either.
I was alarmed by one other thing: When I brought out the foot-thick excretion and thumped it on the table at lunch, our guest speaker eyed it and remarked that even THAT is not the entire plan.
At least, as I remarked when the luncheon broke up, the Forest Service is doing its bit to support the paper industry.
Too bad it wasn’t a paper mill that closed down today.
So, as several members of our local Soroptimist Club are faithful LIANT readers, they graciously invited me to heat up the oil and help them boil our District Forest Ranger. OK, maybe boil is a bit harsh, but they did hope to grill him on some of the finer and scarier points of the Forest Plan…
What he said was not quite as interesting as what he didn’t say… For instance, when he was asked (by My Own Dear Personal Mom) if the closure of the Louisiana Pacific mill here in Saratoga was factored into the Plan’s calculations regarding “loss of forest-related jobs” (stated in his nifty Power Point presentation to be “insignificant”), he, um, err, changed the subject.
He also said the Forest Service “needs mills” to buy and use the trees removed in the management of our forest, but neglected to say which mills were needed, or if this Important and Interesting Fact was in any way part of last month’s deliberations between the Forest Service and the two companies (formerly) interested in buying LP-Saratoga.
And he didn’t say who was going to process what few trees are allowed to be removed. The Log Fairy, perhaps.
He also didn’t know a bleeding thing about these little “sub-nievian” voles that are being used as “indicator species” for deciding the fate of snowmobile use in the Snowy Range, mimicking the behavior of…pretty much everyone who is just asking us to take his or her word for it that snowmobiles “impact” these voles (betraying, as always, a shocking disrespect for the English language in using “impact” as a transitive verb, but as that sin is widespread within and without government circles, I can’t directly fault him for that, though I still had to snort at it. Call it a reflex. I’m only human).
Nor did he have much to say on the subject of doing business locally, after I shared with him his agency’s PR problem in that regard (our two largest remaining employers in the Platte Valley are the Forest Service and the school district, neither of whose employees are often seen shopping in our local grocery, hardware or other stores, but would most certainly have Frequent Shopper Cards at WalMart if such things existed) and encouraged him to encourage his employees to use Carbon Bucks to prove me wrong, if indeed I was wrong on this Important and Popular fact.
Meanwhile, the last long went through our mill this very morning, and my neighborhood is eerily silent without the mill’s low hum, occasional industrial creaking and cranking, and all of the other oddly soothing sounds that lulled me to sleep each night, a constant aural reminder that at least some aspect of our local economy flourished still.
No more, no more.
Now, I can’t lay this entirely at the Forest Service’s door; this is also a NAFTA issue (Canadian lumber flooding the market at impossibly cheap prices is what finally drove LP to sell off its lumber division in the first place), but I also can’t praise this agency and it’s hangers-on and tale-bearers for going out of its way to help keep this vital sector of our economy functioning, either.
I was alarmed by one other thing: When I brought out the foot-thick excretion and thumped it on the table at lunch, our guest speaker eyed it and remarked that even THAT is not the entire plan.
At least, as I remarked when the luncheon broke up, the Forest Service is doing its bit to support the paper industry.
Too bad it wasn’t a paper mill that closed down today.
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
SHORT AND SWEET AND SOUR
Where the fuck were all of these geniuses a year ago when there was still time to pursue all of these brilliant schemes (which all boil down to whining to the governor and Wyoming's congressional delegation) for "saving the mill"?
Oh yes. Without even the gumption to pursue the bandwagon upon which they are jumping only now, they were waiting for it to trundle past their homes so they could embark at their leisure.
But by all means, yes, continue bitching and making inaccurate accusations at one another. We are most entertained.
Where the fuck were all of these geniuses a year ago when there was still time to pursue all of these brilliant schemes (which all boil down to whining to the governor and Wyoming's congressional delegation) for "saving the mill"?
Oh yes. Without even the gumption to pursue the bandwagon upon which they are jumping only now, they were waiting for it to trundle past their homes so they could embark at their leisure.
But by all means, yes, continue bitching and making inaccurate accusations at one another. We are most entertained.
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
TELLING MBNF FOREST PLAN FACT #1
All I have seen so far regarding the towns living under the long dark shadow of the U.S. Forest Service's PROPOSED REVISED LAND AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PLAN is contained in the following paragraphs, and contains some interesting omissions therein:
Social and Economic Environment
"More than half of Wyoming's population lives in the vicinity of the Medicine Bow National Forest. The state capital, Cheyenne, population 50,000, is 50 miles from the Supervisor's Office and 30 miles from the Forest boundary. Populations of other Medicine Bow area communities are: Laramie, 27,000; Casper, 50,000; and Douglas, 5700. The state's only four-year university is in Laramie, and most of the population of Colorado's Front Range lives within several hours of the Medicine Bow. Interstate 80 crosses the Forest; in fact, the Medicine Bow National Forest and its ranges are the Rockies are the first mountains encountered on I-80 by westbound travelers from population centers in the Midwest. Interstate 25 is nearby and is within sight of much of the Laramie Range."
Notice a few towns that have been omitted from this list? Any idea why?
WE'RE NOT EVEN A BLIP ON THEIR RADAR SCREENS, folks! Not even worth mentioning, even though it's OUR economy more than anyone else's that is being affected by this plan.
Cheyenne, Cheyenne made the list because, of course, that's where all the big bureaucrats are.
Laramie? Where all the Friends of the Bow are, and the University that shelters them.
Casper? Where the rest of the bureaucrats are.
Douglas? Well, they had to name something close to Thunder Basin National Grassland, which is technically part of Medicine Bow National Forest.
Saratoga, Encampment and Riverside don't even exist, so far, in this plan. Of course, I'm not done reading it and they may throw us a bone somewhere in the small print, but...
Interesting, no?
More to come, dears, more to come...
All I have seen so far regarding the towns living under the long dark shadow of the U.S. Forest Service's PROPOSED REVISED LAND AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PLAN is contained in the following paragraphs, and contains some interesting omissions therein:
Social and Economic Environment
"More than half of Wyoming's population lives in the vicinity of the Medicine Bow National Forest. The state capital, Cheyenne, population 50,000, is 50 miles from the Supervisor's Office and 30 miles from the Forest boundary. Populations of other Medicine Bow area communities are: Laramie, 27,000; Casper, 50,000; and Douglas, 5700. The state's only four-year university is in Laramie, and most of the population of Colorado's Front Range lives within several hours of the Medicine Bow. Interstate 80 crosses the Forest; in fact, the Medicine Bow National Forest and its ranges are the Rockies are the first mountains encountered on I-80 by westbound travelers from population centers in the Midwest. Interstate 25 is nearby and is within sight of much of the Laramie Range."
Notice a few towns that have been omitted from this list? Any idea why?
WE'RE NOT EVEN A BLIP ON THEIR RADAR SCREENS, folks! Not even worth mentioning, even though it's OUR economy more than anyone else's that is being affected by this plan.
Cheyenne, Cheyenne made the list because, of course, that's where all the big bureaucrats are.
Laramie? Where all the Friends of the Bow are, and the University that shelters them.
Casper? Where the rest of the bureaucrats are.
Douglas? Well, they had to name something close to Thunder Basin National Grassland, which is technically part of Medicine Bow National Forest.
Saratoga, Encampment and Riverside don't even exist, so far, in this plan. Of course, I'm not done reading it and they may throw us a bone somewhere in the small print, but...
Interesting, no?
More to come, dears, more to come...
Friday, January 17, 2003
HIT AND RUN...
OK, raise your hand if you are currently plagued with hilarious visions of twelve bundled up, slightly toasted ice fishermen engaged in a stumbling, bumbling, moderately violent, Thunder Road-like footrace from the shores of Saratoga Lake to the Chamber's brand spanking new tent, beating each other off with hand-cranker ice augers, golden rainbow trout tucked under their arms.
Anyone? Anyone?
Well, I'm used to being a majority of one.
Yup, it's ice fishing derby time again, and in a fit of sheer schnapps-inspired madness last year, we decided to add a new prize category, which we dubbed "bounty fish." A secret variety of fish not normally found in Saratoga would be introduced, in very small numbers (12), and the first one of these brought in to the headquarters tent during derby hours would win $500, the second $250, and any more that came in would be worth $50.
In other words, if you catch one of these babies, haul ass to the tent.
To try to prevent, or at least drastically minimize, sneaky cheater types from bringing along examples of their own to try to pass off as something they caught in our lake, we kept what kind of fish it would be secret until the last minute, then spammed everybody with images and descriptions of the quarry.
Hence the above described scenario, currently on constant repeat in my mind's eye. I can just see it happening at, say 7:05 a.m. tomorrow, just as we're up and out and open for business.
Blood may flow. Egos may be bruised. Prats may fall.
There's still time to join the fun, by the way. We'll be selling tickets throughout the tournament out there in the tent.
You can do it, too; it's not a show!
OK, raise your hand if you are currently plagued with hilarious visions of twelve bundled up, slightly toasted ice fishermen engaged in a stumbling, bumbling, moderately violent, Thunder Road-like footrace from the shores of Saratoga Lake to the Chamber's brand spanking new tent, beating each other off with hand-cranker ice augers, golden rainbow trout tucked under their arms.
Anyone? Anyone?
Well, I'm used to being a majority of one.
Yup, it's ice fishing derby time again, and in a fit of sheer schnapps-inspired madness last year, we decided to add a new prize category, which we dubbed "bounty fish." A secret variety of fish not normally found in Saratoga would be introduced, in very small numbers (12), and the first one of these brought in to the headquarters tent during derby hours would win $500, the second $250, and any more that came in would be worth $50.
In other words, if you catch one of these babies, haul ass to the tent.
To try to prevent, or at least drastically minimize, sneaky cheater types from bringing along examples of their own to try to pass off as something they caught in our lake, we kept what kind of fish it would be secret until the last minute, then spammed everybody with images and descriptions of the quarry.
Hence the above described scenario, currently on constant repeat in my mind's eye. I can just see it happening at, say 7:05 a.m. tomorrow, just as we're up and out and open for business.
Blood may flow. Egos may be bruised. Prats may fall.
There's still time to join the fun, by the way. We'll be selling tickets throughout the tournament out there in the tent.
You can do it, too; it's not a show!
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
WHAT'S IT GOING TO TAKE...
...To convince you people that there is, in fact, ice on Saratoga Lake? And plenty of it. Honestly. Really. Umm... what do you think is holding up the skiff of snow currently falling not-so-gently on our heads?
I'll repeat it again, for those of you who care. There is between eight and 14 inches of ice on the lake. Just go look HERE to see some PROOF!
I give up. I'm going home. I've got journalists to shepherd around town tomorrow. They're finally interested in the fact that the saw mill is going kaput!
...To convince you people that there is, in fact, ice on Saratoga Lake? And plenty of it. Honestly. Really. Umm... what do you think is holding up the skiff of snow currently falling not-so-gently on our heads?
I'll repeat it again, for those of you who care. There is between eight and 14 inches of ice on the lake. Just go look HERE to see some PROOF!
I give up. I'm going home. I've got journalists to shepherd around town tomorrow. They're finally interested in the fact that the saw mill is going kaput!
Tuesday, January 14, 2003
25 POUNDS OF CRAP
Like so many of us here in the valley, I have been, since the day I moved back here in late 1999, vaguely and yet very much aware that your U.S. Forest Service had finally turned its baleful, Sauronian eye upon our little valley and its surroundings (for we are surrounded on three sides by the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest) and realized it was high time they Did Something About Us.
I felt the ominous shudder behind the words “Draft Forest Plan” like all of you, but like all of the other hobbits in the Shire, here, I just let the shudder pass as something presaging a greater evil than ever I would be able to fight and went about my hobbit business, voting for a third, even a fourth time to go ahead and buy that goddam ozonator for the water plant, already! here and cooking up another hare-brained popcorn party there and fighting off various nasty little microbes that kept trying to take up residence in my tonsils. In other words, I simultaneously had bigger and smaller things to worry about, and let the shades of the Forest Plan pass like so many storm clouds that, after all, tend to blow us off on their rain delivery routes. No rain, no rain, that was my problem - are we gonna need to buy water from Cheyenne to keep our (necessary!) showers running? But Forest Plan?
And now it’s here. The Forest Plan. Announced to the general public in a cute, innocuous little newspaper circular, printed, no doubt, on environmentally friendly recycled paper in soy-based blue and green ink and sharing with us that the mighty Forest Service (originally started, please remember, by Theodore Roosevelt to help the country cope with a possible timber shortage, not to keep those nasty loggers from ever cutting down timber again) had chosen the helpfully titled “Alternative D” as its guiding blueprint for how it was going to “manage” the timberlands around us.
For the record: I did, in fact, write a letter personally in support of the “Recreationists Alternative”, which came to be known as “Alternative C”, and also wrote to support this proposal on behalf of our chamber of commerce. The Town of Saratoga, of which I am an elected official, has also made its preference for the Recreationists Alternative known to the Forest Service through the long planning process. For those not familiar with this proposal, I’ll quote a summary from the Recreationists of the Bow web page:
“This Alternative would modify the current Land and Resource Management Plan by increasing emphasis on recreation. The Management Plan would address sustainable multiple-use recreation and apply management tools to address the needs for each recreational activity. Vegetation, wildlife habitat and watersheds would be actively managed for forest health. Inventoried Roadless Areas would be managed as semi-primitive, multiple-use, Backcountry Recreation Areas. All current recreational opportunities on the forest would be maintained with winter and summer uses being managed as separate entities. No new Research Natural Areas (RNAs) or Special Interest Areas (SIAs) would be proposed. No new Wilderness Areas would be recommended for designation.”
So my prior mea culpa in this essay is not entirely accurate; I have written and I have sort of casually kept one facet of a mosquito’s eye on the process. I do not, however, fool myself that I’ve actually had any impact on that process. It’s just too big.
So it was with a heavy heart and the knowledge that I do, in fact, have easy access to a dolly that I headed up to the Brush Creek Ranger District Office just outside Saratoga (heretofore chiefly a source, for me, of aggravation at that agency’s refusal to hook into city water and sewer, and to allow any lines for same to cross its property) to pick up my copy of the Draft Forest Plan.
I didn’t quite need a dolly, but I will say that I am now the proud owner of more wood product, in the form of paper, than the total volume of stud lumber produced at our (soon-to-be-closed!) (largely because it can’t get access to enough timber to be a viable business anymore!) sawmill here in Saratoga yesterday.
OK, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but honestly, I couldn’t help snorting a bit when I hefted the load of materials, maps, executive summaries, outlines and appendices which, printed on letter-sized high quality copy paper, measures nearly a foot thick! Some private paper mill that owns its forests in Maine probably did very well out of this Forest Plan publication...
Note I have yet to comment upon the contents thereof. Nor shall I for a few days at least, as I have only begun to sift through the layers, trace through the diagrams and tables (with shockingly wide margins on all of the pages; one would think this agency had set out to produce a set quota of pages whether the material warranted it or not!) (OHHHHHHH... You don’t think? Surely... They wouldn’t have done this for... for... intimidation value, would they?) (Oh, just slap me silly for even suggesting such a subversive and heretical notion. Just don’t burn me at the stake - wouldn’t want to sacrifice any partially burnt, sick or beetle-infested trees just to get rid of my carcass, would you?).
But rest assured, gentle readers, Your Humble Blogger, who has no life and no other purpose but to entertain and enlighten you (and maybe occasionally piss you off), will eventually get through this thick, squishy, brown, smelly document and will doubtless have a thing or two to say about it when she’s done.
Incidentally, should you want a gander, the thing is available, in PDF form, online at: http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/mbr/resourcemgmt/mbrevision/plan.shtml. Click HERE for a hot link. Beware, though, if you have low bandwidth. OY!
And should you care to add your voice to the chorus of last-minute protests, there’s a chance in Saratoga on Wednesday, Feb. 5 from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Fireman’s Hall, and on Thursday, Feb. 20 from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Encampment Town Hall.
(And yes, I know I've used horribly inflammatory and impolitic language in describing a process, the final result of which I've not yet read, but I've already seen the fruits of bits of it, and they are all wholly rotten, if not singed, if not beetle-infested, if not maggot-ridden, if not entirely foul and unwholesome like the innards of a road-kill rabbit not yet picked clean by the vultures)
I’m sure the USFS will be so glad to see you.
Like so many of us here in the valley, I have been, since the day I moved back here in late 1999, vaguely and yet very much aware that your U.S. Forest Service had finally turned its baleful, Sauronian eye upon our little valley and its surroundings (for we are surrounded on three sides by the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest) and realized it was high time they Did Something About Us.
I felt the ominous shudder behind the words “Draft Forest Plan” like all of you, but like all of the other hobbits in the Shire, here, I just let the shudder pass as something presaging a greater evil than ever I would be able to fight and went about my hobbit business, voting for a third, even a fourth time to go ahead and buy that goddam ozonator for the water plant, already! here and cooking up another hare-brained popcorn party there and fighting off various nasty little microbes that kept trying to take up residence in my tonsils. In other words, I simultaneously had bigger and smaller things to worry about, and let the shades of the Forest Plan pass like so many storm clouds that, after all, tend to blow us off on their rain delivery routes. No rain, no rain, that was my problem - are we gonna need to buy water from Cheyenne to keep our (necessary!) showers running? But Forest Plan?
And now it’s here. The Forest Plan. Announced to the general public in a cute, innocuous little newspaper circular, printed, no doubt, on environmentally friendly recycled paper in soy-based blue and green ink and sharing with us that the mighty Forest Service (originally started, please remember, by Theodore Roosevelt to help the country cope with a possible timber shortage, not to keep those nasty loggers from ever cutting down timber again) had chosen the helpfully titled “Alternative D” as its guiding blueprint for how it was going to “manage” the timberlands around us.
For the record: I did, in fact, write a letter personally in support of the “Recreationists Alternative”, which came to be known as “Alternative C”, and also wrote to support this proposal on behalf of our chamber of commerce. The Town of Saratoga, of which I am an elected official, has also made its preference for the Recreationists Alternative known to the Forest Service through the long planning process. For those not familiar with this proposal, I’ll quote a summary from the Recreationists of the Bow web page:
“This Alternative would modify the current Land and Resource Management Plan by increasing emphasis on recreation. The Management Plan would address sustainable multiple-use recreation and apply management tools to address the needs for each recreational activity. Vegetation, wildlife habitat and watersheds would be actively managed for forest health. Inventoried Roadless Areas would be managed as semi-primitive, multiple-use, Backcountry Recreation Areas. All current recreational opportunities on the forest would be maintained with winter and summer uses being managed as separate entities. No new Research Natural Areas (RNAs) or Special Interest Areas (SIAs) would be proposed. No new Wilderness Areas would be recommended for designation.”
So my prior mea culpa in this essay is not entirely accurate; I have written and I have sort of casually kept one facet of a mosquito’s eye on the process. I do not, however, fool myself that I’ve actually had any impact on that process. It’s just too big.
So it was with a heavy heart and the knowledge that I do, in fact, have easy access to a dolly that I headed up to the Brush Creek Ranger District Office just outside Saratoga (heretofore chiefly a source, for me, of aggravation at that agency’s refusal to hook into city water and sewer, and to allow any lines for same to cross its property) to pick up my copy of the Draft Forest Plan.
I didn’t quite need a dolly, but I will say that I am now the proud owner of more wood product, in the form of paper, than the total volume of stud lumber produced at our (soon-to-be-closed!) (largely because it can’t get access to enough timber to be a viable business anymore!) sawmill here in Saratoga yesterday.
OK, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but honestly, I couldn’t help snorting a bit when I hefted the load of materials, maps, executive summaries, outlines and appendices which, printed on letter-sized high quality copy paper, measures nearly a foot thick! Some private paper mill that owns its forests in Maine probably did very well out of this Forest Plan publication...
Note I have yet to comment upon the contents thereof. Nor shall I for a few days at least, as I have only begun to sift through the layers, trace through the diagrams and tables (with shockingly wide margins on all of the pages; one would think this agency had set out to produce a set quota of pages whether the material warranted it or not!) (OHHHHHHH... You don’t think? Surely... They wouldn’t have done this for... for... intimidation value, would they?) (Oh, just slap me silly for even suggesting such a subversive and heretical notion. Just don’t burn me at the stake - wouldn’t want to sacrifice any partially burnt, sick or beetle-infested trees just to get rid of my carcass, would you?).
But rest assured, gentle readers, Your Humble Blogger, who has no life and no other purpose but to entertain and enlighten you (and maybe occasionally piss you off), will eventually get through this thick, squishy, brown, smelly document and will doubtless have a thing or two to say about it when she’s done.
Incidentally, should you want a gander, the thing is available, in PDF form, online at: http://www.fs.fed.us/r2/mbr/resourcemgmt/mbrevision/plan.shtml. Click HERE for a hot link. Beware, though, if you have low bandwidth. OY!
And should you care to add your voice to the chorus of last-minute protests, there’s a chance in Saratoga on Wednesday, Feb. 5 from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Fireman’s Hall, and on Thursday, Feb. 20 from 3:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Encampment Town Hall.
(And yes, I know I've used horribly inflammatory and impolitic language in describing a process, the final result of which I've not yet read, but I've already seen the fruits of bits of it, and they are all wholly rotten, if not singed, if not beetle-infested, if not maggot-ridden, if not entirely foul and unwholesome like the innards of a road-kill rabbit not yet picked clean by the vultures)
I’m sure the USFS will be so glad to see you.
Saturday, January 11, 2003
THE OPUS CONTRA NATURAM
Oh, my dear readers, I hardly know where to begin. Do I lead off with the stunning revelation I had last night at the Rustic Bar, that Viagra is, in fact, the Philosopher’s Stone, that mystical substance sought by the alchemists of yore for its mystical property of turning lead into gold?
Ah, there’s no place like the Rustic for philosophizing: Socrates himself would have been at home there, and indeed my companions of Friday evening often employed his Method in the midst of trying to settle such disputes as what are the true hallmarks of civilization? We wound up with a list of five things as we chirped in our cups: 1. The development of the ability to inhibit defecation, 2. The discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, 3. Soap and sanitation, 4. Fire, and 5. Duct Tape. To which, as the discussion turned to more prurient matters, we added Viagra, the crowning achievement of the century just passed. There you go: the six things that make us human, that separate us from the apes. O glory!
But I digress, as usual.
My mind now is occupied with yet another crowning glory of civilization: the ice fishing shanty, a stunning, home-built example of which was added this very hour to the toybox at Fort Sherrod. Seems a good friend of My Own Dear Personal Dad got a schnazzy new one for Christmas and now no longer needs what MODPD and his newest Partner In Crime (husband of my fellow novelist and walking buddy and the newest member of my coffee group, to boot!) have already christened The Yellow Submarine – lo, they are busy even now deciding with what sort of artwork they will ask Sketch to adorn it when he customizes it for them.
For yellow it most certainly is, a tiny yellow sheepwagon of an ice fishing hut, furnished inside in a grand style, with a built-in propane stove and stovepipe, built-in seats, shag carpeting, a sound system a comfy mattress… Oh wait, I’m thinking of my ex-fiance’s van, never mind.
My Own Dear Personal Mom, for her part, is busy wrestling in her mind with the geometry that will come into play when MODPD tries to fold and stuff his massive frame and form into that little bitty shack, and then share it with another person.
For hours at a time.
On the ice.
After dragging it god knows how far.
But, of course, all things are possible with Budweiser and schnapps, aren’t they? As long-time LIANTies may doubtless remember, I spent quite a lot of time in an ice fishing shack last winter, on a voluntary basis, even!
Purely for research purposes, of course, as my very first day spent snugly tucked inside, watching “the movie screen” in the floor and puffing on a cheap cigar and downing too much Dr. McGillicuddy’s, brought to me another one of those revelations for which I am fast becoming famous: that the sport of ice fishing is man’s ultimate triumph over nature.
Think about it: outdoors, biting wind, freezing cold, a bleak, pitiless expanse of ice and snow, glittering fiercely in the first rays of the rising sun, but indoors, indoors, separated from the elements only by a thin skin of neoprene or something, people sit in their street clothes, basking in the warmth of a propane heater (propane should maybe be added to The List, but the list is getting a bit long, don’t you think?), drinking, smoking, spilling smelly fish attractant all over themselves (and let me tell you, the perfume thereof lingers: my ice fishing buddy of last winter was terribly fond of trying to sneak up behind me to make me jump, but I could always whiff him coming) and staring down a little hole in the ice, jiggling a piece of plastic up and down, up and down, waiting for a fish to come, oblivious to nature’s fury outdoors… Rejoicing in all six of humanity’s greatest accomplishments… well, except maybe for #6, but then again, who really knows what goes on in those huts in the early morning sun or late at night by the light of a Coleman lantern?
But then again, who wants to know?
Oh, my dear readers, I hardly know where to begin. Do I lead off with the stunning revelation I had last night at the Rustic Bar, that Viagra is, in fact, the Philosopher’s Stone, that mystical substance sought by the alchemists of yore for its mystical property of turning lead into gold?
Ah, there’s no place like the Rustic for philosophizing: Socrates himself would have been at home there, and indeed my companions of Friday evening often employed his Method in the midst of trying to settle such disputes as what are the true hallmarks of civilization? We wound up with a list of five things as we chirped in our cups: 1. The development of the ability to inhibit defecation, 2. The discovery that fermentation produces alcohol, 3. Soap and sanitation, 4. Fire, and 5. Duct Tape. To which, as the discussion turned to more prurient matters, we added Viagra, the crowning achievement of the century just passed. There you go: the six things that make us human, that separate us from the apes. O glory!
But I digress, as usual.
My mind now is occupied with yet another crowning glory of civilization: the ice fishing shanty, a stunning, home-built example of which was added this very hour to the toybox at Fort Sherrod. Seems a good friend of My Own Dear Personal Dad got a schnazzy new one for Christmas and now no longer needs what MODPD and his newest Partner In Crime (husband of my fellow novelist and walking buddy and the newest member of my coffee group, to boot!) have already christened The Yellow Submarine – lo, they are busy even now deciding with what sort of artwork they will ask Sketch to adorn it when he customizes it for them.
For yellow it most certainly is, a tiny yellow sheepwagon of an ice fishing hut, furnished inside in a grand style, with a built-in propane stove and stovepipe, built-in seats, shag carpeting, a sound system a comfy mattress… Oh wait, I’m thinking of my ex-fiance’s van, never mind.
My Own Dear Personal Mom, for her part, is busy wrestling in her mind with the geometry that will come into play when MODPD tries to fold and stuff his massive frame and form into that little bitty shack, and then share it with another person.
For hours at a time.
On the ice.
After dragging it god knows how far.
But, of course, all things are possible with Budweiser and schnapps, aren’t they? As long-time LIANTies may doubtless remember, I spent quite a lot of time in an ice fishing shack last winter, on a voluntary basis, even!
Purely for research purposes, of course, as my very first day spent snugly tucked inside, watching “the movie screen” in the floor and puffing on a cheap cigar and downing too much Dr. McGillicuddy’s, brought to me another one of those revelations for which I am fast becoming famous: that the sport of ice fishing is man’s ultimate triumph over nature.
Think about it: outdoors, biting wind, freezing cold, a bleak, pitiless expanse of ice and snow, glittering fiercely in the first rays of the rising sun, but indoors, indoors, separated from the elements only by a thin skin of neoprene or something, people sit in their street clothes, basking in the warmth of a propane heater (propane should maybe be added to The List, but the list is getting a bit long, don’t you think?), drinking, smoking, spilling smelly fish attractant all over themselves (and let me tell you, the perfume thereof lingers: my ice fishing buddy of last winter was terribly fond of trying to sneak up behind me to make me jump, but I could always whiff him coming) and staring down a little hole in the ice, jiggling a piece of plastic up and down, up and down, waiting for a fish to come, oblivious to nature’s fury outdoors… Rejoicing in all six of humanity’s greatest accomplishments… well, except maybe for #6, but then again, who really knows what goes on in those huts in the early morning sun or late at night by the light of a Coleman lantern?
But then again, who wants to know?
Monday, January 06, 2003
(HIGHLY SPORADIC) LIANT BOOK CLUB ENTRY
Baudolino
By Umberto Eco
(New York: Harcourt, Inc. 2002)
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
With every book of Umberto Eco's that I read, fiction or non, my impression that he and my tall-tale-telling great-great grandfather, "Old" Sherrod, are quite kindred souls grows stronger.
I reach this conclusion because, as in my ancestor's life, there is a pervading theme in several of Eco's novels in particular, in which a small group of overeducated ne'er-do-wells sit down together and have a laugh at the expense of their lessers by creating an intellectually respectable but nonetheless bullshit-laden confabulation that winds up causing trouble for all. It's the entire plot of Foucault's Pendulum, in which three employees of a publishing house paste together an amusing version of the Plan of the Templars out of the half-baked theories they pull from a hundred crackpot manuscripts submitted for publication. Two of the "conspirators" wind up dead and a third is hunted and haunted to the very end of the story by some of the very same crackpots he has mocked, who have come to believe that he has the true secret of the Templars and thus a means of ruling the world.
Baudolino takes this theme a little farther. Baudolino, a peasant's son with a gift for the gab that even I must envy – he picks up new languages within days, and within weeks can sell flood insurance to Saharans in their own speech – is adopted by the Holy Roman Emperor as an honorary son and is educated in his court until finally he is sent, fatally, to Paris, where he meets students with even stranger backgrounds and wilder imaginations than he. Charged at his patron's brother's deathbed with finding the legendary kingdom of Prester John (a Christian king, rumored to be descended from the Magi who visited Christ in Bethelehem, who was believed throughout the Middle Ages to rule over a fabulous land in the East beyond "the Three Indias) but embroiled in the emperor's struggles with the Pope and many Italian cities, Baudolino despairs of finding Prester John until he hits upon the idea of inventing him anew.
There ensue many amusing scenes in which he and his student buddies eat hashish (of course one of said student buddies was once a captive of the Old Man of the Mountain, and was nearly made one of the hashashim!), scribble away, and concoct a fictitious letter from Prester John to the emperor that could help put that pesky old pope in Rome in his place. The fellows outdo themselves in their invention of fabulous creatures, scenes of peace and plenty, and architectural design and decoration, until, in perhaps the funniest part of the book, Baudolino is ready to throttle someone who even uses the word "topaz" in his presence.
Of course this same band of foolishly inventive students, in rather a silly plot twist, wind up traveling themselves to find Prester John, which is kind of where, for me, the novel starts to fall apart: up to this point, it has been a fun historical romp as Baudolino engages in court politics, the laughable beginnings of what would someday be the Sorbonne, the founding of the city of Alessandria/Caesaria in Lombardy, and the on-going debate over whether or not Prester John is anything but a fairy story.
With the departure from Constantinople, though, the novel gets bogged down, at times just a dull travelogue, its romance and humor gone, at other times really dull as Eco indulges himself way too much even for my funky tastes in a seemingly endless argument between two characters over the existence of the vacuum. Eco here seems to be trying to bring back the amusing "school of comparative irrelevancies" schtick from Foucault's Pendulum (in which the three leads amuse themselves making up ridiculous subjects for an imaginary university; I know I would get a huge kick out of "Urban Planning for Gypsies," to say nothing of "Crowd Psychology in the Sahara") in direct and minute form, but the result is painful rather than pithy.
Furthermore, taking, it would seem, pages right out of C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eco drags us into the non-existent kingdom of Prester John itself, and we spend more than a year with the heroes as they live among one-footed "skiapods", "blemmyae" who have no head but whose faces and mouths adorn their chests, other, similarly freaky creatures, and a whole passel of eunuchs who run everything and perpetuate the fiction that somewhere far away Prester John himself is in control.
This section had the potential to be much more amusing than it was, as A) Prester John's kingdom turns out to be a real shithole, a city of monsters – each species of which subscribes to a different Christian heresy and never tires of sharing it – who have never mastered the use of metal and whose cuisine is beyond awful, and B) Prester John's heir presumptive has himself been raised on tales of the fabulous WEST from which Baudolino, et al, have come, and is eager to hear more about the fabulous riches, the walls of topaz and chalcedony, the unimaginable beasts, etc. I'm still pinching myself that Eco didn't go absolutely banantas with the ironic possibilities here, but the idea is no sooner mentioned than cast aside in favor of yet another tiresome court intrigue subplot I'm not even going to bother summarizing here.
The overall motif here is that Baudolino, a prodigious liar whose whoppers wind up coming true in various bizarre ways, himself no longer knows when he is fibbing and when he is telling the truth, and the narrative I have outlined here is, weirdly, conveyed in a time-honored fashion – a tale told to a would-be chronicler long after the fact, when the principles are supposed to be dead or disbursed* – so at the end we are supposed to be left uncertain how much suspension of disbelief is being required of us as readers. We are already expected to swallow a lot – here's this peasant boy, made a ministrial of Barbarossa himself, intimate correspondent to the emperor's wife, etc., but that is, after all, part and parcel of every historical novel. Are we or are we not, though, supposed to believe in the skiapods, the blemmyae, the hypatia, the basilisk?
We are, and yet we are not. As modern readers with at least some education (the opening passages, written in an entertaining polyglot in Weaver's translation of English, German, Latin and Greek, are sure to deter the more casual sort of reader), we know that these marvels never existed, but I think our sympathies are meant to be bound up with the chronicler to whom Baudolino is telling his story, for whom the possibility of a lizard whose gaze kills on sight is as likely as a race of women philosophers with the hindquarters of goats. Didn't Herodotus, the "Father of History," fill that history with second-hand accounts of (my favorite) giant fuzzy ants that mined gold on command? Yup.
And maybe it's as a medieval Herodotus that we are meant to take Baudolino, though that, unsatisfyingly, makes us smug know-it-alls laughing at the simpletons who did not see through his patter. This is sure to turn off the historal novel crowd, who turn to these books out of admiration and wistfulness and not in the spirit of mockery, though a certain loyal cadre of Eco fans (of which I am one, though I am not proud of it) who actually do get a charge out of 20-page-long debates over the vacuum or long yet trenchant narratives about the Nestorians will still like Baudolino, though it pales in comparison with Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose.
The later book, by the way, is also briefly re-created here when Eco inexpertly drags in a mystery sub-plot just before the departure to Prester John Land and then drops it until Baudolino has caught his chronicler up on everything and the story must go forward. No tension about whodunnit is ever created, though, and so this device is, alas, rendered intolerably lame, nowhere near the sublime and creepy historical mystery in the monastery which earned Eco his original fame as a novelist.
Some writers have dozens of good books in them, and Eco is one of these – if you count his compulsively readable essay collections, his semiotics texts, and his amazing look at America's cult of copies, Travels in Hyperreality, but I'm sad to say that his novels still really number only two.
* This narrative style, too, is clumsily implemented, as the direct dialogue between Baudolino and his chronicler, in which he speaks in the first person, is mixed in willy nilly with the typical "omniscient" third person narrator throughout.
Baudolino
By Umberto Eco
(New York: Harcourt, Inc. 2002)
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
With every book of Umberto Eco's that I read, fiction or non, my impression that he and my tall-tale-telling great-great grandfather, "Old" Sherrod, are quite kindred souls grows stronger.
I reach this conclusion because, as in my ancestor's life, there is a pervading theme in several of Eco's novels in particular, in which a small group of overeducated ne'er-do-wells sit down together and have a laugh at the expense of their lessers by creating an intellectually respectable but nonetheless bullshit-laden confabulation that winds up causing trouble for all. It's the entire plot of Foucault's Pendulum, in which three employees of a publishing house paste together an amusing version of the Plan of the Templars out of the half-baked theories they pull from a hundred crackpot manuscripts submitted for publication. Two of the "conspirators" wind up dead and a third is hunted and haunted to the very end of the story by some of the very same crackpots he has mocked, who have come to believe that he has the true secret of the Templars and thus a means of ruling the world.
Baudolino takes this theme a little farther. Baudolino, a peasant's son with a gift for the gab that even I must envy – he picks up new languages within days, and within weeks can sell flood insurance to Saharans in their own speech – is adopted by the Holy Roman Emperor as an honorary son and is educated in his court until finally he is sent, fatally, to Paris, where he meets students with even stranger backgrounds and wilder imaginations than he. Charged at his patron's brother's deathbed with finding the legendary kingdom of Prester John (a Christian king, rumored to be descended from the Magi who visited Christ in Bethelehem, who was believed throughout the Middle Ages to rule over a fabulous land in the East beyond "the Three Indias) but embroiled in the emperor's struggles with the Pope and many Italian cities, Baudolino despairs of finding Prester John until he hits upon the idea of inventing him anew.
There ensue many amusing scenes in which he and his student buddies eat hashish (of course one of said student buddies was once a captive of the Old Man of the Mountain, and was nearly made one of the hashashim!), scribble away, and concoct a fictitious letter from Prester John to the emperor that could help put that pesky old pope in Rome in his place. The fellows outdo themselves in their invention of fabulous creatures, scenes of peace and plenty, and architectural design and decoration, until, in perhaps the funniest part of the book, Baudolino is ready to throttle someone who even uses the word "topaz" in his presence.
Of course this same band of foolishly inventive students, in rather a silly plot twist, wind up traveling themselves to find Prester John, which is kind of where, for me, the novel starts to fall apart: up to this point, it has been a fun historical romp as Baudolino engages in court politics, the laughable beginnings of what would someday be the Sorbonne, the founding of the city of Alessandria/Caesaria in Lombardy, and the on-going debate over whether or not Prester John is anything but a fairy story.
With the departure from Constantinople, though, the novel gets bogged down, at times just a dull travelogue, its romance and humor gone, at other times really dull as Eco indulges himself way too much even for my funky tastes in a seemingly endless argument between two characters over the existence of the vacuum. Eco here seems to be trying to bring back the amusing "school of comparative irrelevancies" schtick from Foucault's Pendulum (in which the three leads amuse themselves making up ridiculous subjects for an imaginary university; I know I would get a huge kick out of "Urban Planning for Gypsies," to say nothing of "Crowd Psychology in the Sahara") in direct and minute form, but the result is painful rather than pithy.
Furthermore, taking, it would seem, pages right out of C.S. Lewis's Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eco drags us into the non-existent kingdom of Prester John itself, and we spend more than a year with the heroes as they live among one-footed "skiapods", "blemmyae" who have no head but whose faces and mouths adorn their chests, other, similarly freaky creatures, and a whole passel of eunuchs who run everything and perpetuate the fiction that somewhere far away Prester John himself is in control.
This section had the potential to be much more amusing than it was, as A) Prester John's kingdom turns out to be a real shithole, a city of monsters – each species of which subscribes to a different Christian heresy and never tires of sharing it – who have never mastered the use of metal and whose cuisine is beyond awful, and B) Prester John's heir presumptive has himself been raised on tales of the fabulous WEST from which Baudolino, et al, have come, and is eager to hear more about the fabulous riches, the walls of topaz and chalcedony, the unimaginable beasts, etc. I'm still pinching myself that Eco didn't go absolutely banantas with the ironic possibilities here, but the idea is no sooner mentioned than cast aside in favor of yet another tiresome court intrigue subplot I'm not even going to bother summarizing here.
The overall motif here is that Baudolino, a prodigious liar whose whoppers wind up coming true in various bizarre ways, himself no longer knows when he is fibbing and when he is telling the truth, and the narrative I have outlined here is, weirdly, conveyed in a time-honored fashion – a tale told to a would-be chronicler long after the fact, when the principles are supposed to be dead or disbursed* – so at the end we are supposed to be left uncertain how much suspension of disbelief is being required of us as readers. We are already expected to swallow a lot – here's this peasant boy, made a ministrial of Barbarossa himself, intimate correspondent to the emperor's wife, etc., but that is, after all, part and parcel of every historical novel. Are we or are we not, though, supposed to believe in the skiapods, the blemmyae, the hypatia, the basilisk?
We are, and yet we are not. As modern readers with at least some education (the opening passages, written in an entertaining polyglot in Weaver's translation of English, German, Latin and Greek, are sure to deter the more casual sort of reader), we know that these marvels never existed, but I think our sympathies are meant to be bound up with the chronicler to whom Baudolino is telling his story, for whom the possibility of a lizard whose gaze kills on sight is as likely as a race of women philosophers with the hindquarters of goats. Didn't Herodotus, the "Father of History," fill that history with second-hand accounts of (my favorite) giant fuzzy ants that mined gold on command? Yup.
And maybe it's as a medieval Herodotus that we are meant to take Baudolino, though that, unsatisfyingly, makes us smug know-it-alls laughing at the simpletons who did not see through his patter. This is sure to turn off the historal novel crowd, who turn to these books out of admiration and wistfulness and not in the spirit of mockery, though a certain loyal cadre of Eco fans (of which I am one, though I am not proud of it) who actually do get a charge out of 20-page-long debates over the vacuum or long yet trenchant narratives about the Nestorians will still like Baudolino, though it pales in comparison with Foucault's Pendulum and The Name of the Rose.
The later book, by the way, is also briefly re-created here when Eco inexpertly drags in a mystery sub-plot just before the departure to Prester John Land and then drops it until Baudolino has caught his chronicler up on everything and the story must go forward. No tension about whodunnit is ever created, though, and so this device is, alas, rendered intolerably lame, nowhere near the sublime and creepy historical mystery in the monastery which earned Eco his original fame as a novelist.
Some writers have dozens of good books in them, and Eco is one of these – if you count his compulsively readable essay collections, his semiotics texts, and his amazing look at America's cult of copies, Travels in Hyperreality, but I'm sad to say that his novels still really number only two.
* This narrative style, too, is clumsily implemented, as the direct dialogue between Baudolino and his chronicler, in which he speaks in the first person, is mixed in willy nilly with the typical "omniscient" third person narrator throughout.
Friday, January 03, 2003
STILL NOTHING NEW!
Apologies, all, three days into the new year and still no posts from me, and this isn't going to be one, either. It's a busy, busy time of year - I'm up to my eyeballs in RSVPs for the annual dinner, demands for up-to-the-minute information on the thickness of the ice on Saratoga Lake for our upcoming fishing derby, chariot race plans, and invoicing. It happens.
I'd stay late to write more, but the other token punk/libertarian in the valley (I discount the Sewer King and the Oracle from this number only because they were born too early to regard our music as anything but noise) awaits me at his bar in Riverside, whereat we will drink an overdue toast or two to the memory of Joe Strummer. 2002 was a rough year for punk, with two Ramones gone and now Mr. Clash. So it goes.
And then there's a real funeral to go to tomorrow, for one of the last of the old-style nice guy cowboys. I'm talking, for those locals who are still confused, about Pat Shields. The funeral has been reportedly set for 2 p.m. tomorrow at the high school, but I have since learned it's actually at 11 a.m.
Poor sweetie. I miss him already.
And I'm sure he'll forgive me if I still have "London Calling" running through my head while we all say good-bye. We lost these two people just a few days apart, and they both meant something to me, after all.
Apologies, all, three days into the new year and still no posts from me, and this isn't going to be one, either. It's a busy, busy time of year - I'm up to my eyeballs in RSVPs for the annual dinner, demands for up-to-the-minute information on the thickness of the ice on Saratoga Lake for our upcoming fishing derby, chariot race plans, and invoicing. It happens.
I'd stay late to write more, but the other token punk/libertarian in the valley (I discount the Sewer King and the Oracle from this number only because they were born too early to regard our music as anything but noise) awaits me at his bar in Riverside, whereat we will drink an overdue toast or two to the memory of Joe Strummer. 2002 was a rough year for punk, with two Ramones gone and now Mr. Clash. So it goes.
And then there's a real funeral to go to tomorrow, for one of the last of the old-style nice guy cowboys. I'm talking, for those locals who are still confused, about Pat Shields. The funeral has been reportedly set for 2 p.m. tomorrow at the high school, but I have since learned it's actually at 11 a.m.
Poor sweetie. I miss him already.
And I'm sure he'll forgive me if I still have "London Calling" running through my head while we all say good-bye. We lost these two people just a few days apart, and they both meant something to me, after all.
Monday, December 30, 2002
WE INTERRUPT THIS HOLIDAY DRIVEL...
To rant about a current controversy in the news, one with its origins in Saratoga but one which, surprise, surprise, has yet to appear on the pages of Saratoga’s newspaper for reasons somewhat unfathomable but nontheless prevailing.
I’m talking about our second-most senior officer on Saratoga’s police department, a woman my own age whom I myself persuaded to join the force because she had (and still has) so many of the qualities that make for a good cop: bravery, common sense, equanimity, a respect for procedure, people skills and vision, whose profile suddenly got much higher when she had to use force to subdue a suspect in several car thefts a few weeks ago.
The particulars of the case don’t particularly matter; a young man, against whom there appears to be quite a lot of damning evidence, got caught, and laboring under the laughably mistaken delusion that he had a right to pick which officer arrested him, he fought off the one who nabbed him. It being her job to bring in bad guys even if they’d rather not come along, she fought back somewhat.
The rest is all under investigation, a matter of hearsay and speculation for the time being. The only reason it is even in the papers is because the suspect’s mother decided to raise a fuss and alerted the press. This sort of thing happens often in other places; it’s unusual here only because of its rarity in tiny little towns like ours.
Whatever the outcome, names are being dragged through the mud, reputations damaged irreparably; even if every single person, suspect, co-defendants and cop, is eventually found blameless, not everyone will receive that information. It’s a known fact that readership of a story and its follow-ups declines over time and not everyone who read the initial splash will bother to pay attention to the ripples.
Labels have been bestowed, and there’s little to be done about that.
What’s interesting about all of this is, of course, the dialogue it has inspired, some of it amusing in its predictability and complete lack of consequence, some of it disrespectful, some of it respectful, some of it very, very pointed in the wake of my colleagues’ and my recent decision to give raises to the five patrol officers on the street in an attempt to keep them from leaving for higher paying jobs elsewhere, as one of our officers so recently did.
The usual questions of why we need five officers (which I discussed in some detail in my July 25 entry, A LITTLE MATH PROBLEM), how we justify a police chief who never patrols and who acts solely as an administrator (much more difficult, but I will say this for him: he managed to tighten and tinker and switch amongst line items within his own departmental budget to fund the salary increases his officers recently received), and, of course, my personal favorite, why do we need police officers at all.
That last question always gives me a chuckle, betraying as it does a level of sloppy thinking and self-centeredness that one only can chuckle at, lest it drag one down to truly terrifying depths of despair at the utter hopelessness of the human race.
See, at bottom, everyone believes that laws and rules only apply to other people. My speeding 95 miles down the highway through a construction zone isn’t dangerous, but by all means, bust that other guy. I can handle a pickup truck after downing a fifth of Jack Daniels, but that gal down the bar from me sure as hell can’t. It’s okay for me to put an outbuilding on my residential property without a house, but that guy’s is so ugly you’d better fine his ass, etc.
Of course, the same people who insist we don’t need cops, or need fewer cops, or need purely ceremonial cops, are the very ones who howl for municipal blood if the knuckleheads next door burglarize the house over the holidays or if the neighbor’s dog poops once too often on a prized and cared-for lawn or some drunken maniac whips around the corner in the night and trashes a parked car.
You can’t have it both ways, folks.
And being a cop is a nasty, nasty job, right up there with lawyering in terms of the built-in hostility from others that comes with the role, and as my father and so many others have observed, the extremes of mind-numbing tedium and heart-pounding excitement, with nothing in between... “90% boredom, 10% sheer terror,” my father said of his years on the Wyoming Highway Patrol.
For the Saratoga Police Department, I’d adjust those figures to 99% and 1%, respectively.
And since any kind of action at all is unusual, such action immediately becomes a public obsession, even if someone’s mommy isn’t whining to the press.
But I digress.
The important thing here is to bear in mind that we do not, yet, have all the facts (and that includes Your Humble Blogger; council member though I am, I am not privy to all that much more than you are, and have authority only as one of four persons who make up a governing body. I exercise little power as an individual; I am not the mayor).
Rushing to judgment is exactly the wrong thing to do here, as is hastening to tinker with the entire structure of the police force.
Wait and see.
To rant about a current controversy in the news, one with its origins in Saratoga but one which, surprise, surprise, has yet to appear on the pages of Saratoga’s newspaper for reasons somewhat unfathomable but nontheless prevailing.
I’m talking about our second-most senior officer on Saratoga’s police department, a woman my own age whom I myself persuaded to join the force because she had (and still has) so many of the qualities that make for a good cop: bravery, common sense, equanimity, a respect for procedure, people skills and vision, whose profile suddenly got much higher when she had to use force to subdue a suspect in several car thefts a few weeks ago.
The particulars of the case don’t particularly matter; a young man, against whom there appears to be quite a lot of damning evidence, got caught, and laboring under the laughably mistaken delusion that he had a right to pick which officer arrested him, he fought off the one who nabbed him. It being her job to bring in bad guys even if they’d rather not come along, she fought back somewhat.
The rest is all under investigation, a matter of hearsay and speculation for the time being. The only reason it is even in the papers is because the suspect’s mother decided to raise a fuss and alerted the press. This sort of thing happens often in other places; it’s unusual here only because of its rarity in tiny little towns like ours.
Whatever the outcome, names are being dragged through the mud, reputations damaged irreparably; even if every single person, suspect, co-defendants and cop, is eventually found blameless, not everyone will receive that information. It’s a known fact that readership of a story and its follow-ups declines over time and not everyone who read the initial splash will bother to pay attention to the ripples.
Labels have been bestowed, and there’s little to be done about that.
What’s interesting about all of this is, of course, the dialogue it has inspired, some of it amusing in its predictability and complete lack of consequence, some of it disrespectful, some of it respectful, some of it very, very pointed in the wake of my colleagues’ and my recent decision to give raises to the five patrol officers on the street in an attempt to keep them from leaving for higher paying jobs elsewhere, as one of our officers so recently did.
The usual questions of why we need five officers (which I discussed in some detail in my July 25 entry, A LITTLE MATH PROBLEM), how we justify a police chief who never patrols and who acts solely as an administrator (much more difficult, but I will say this for him: he managed to tighten and tinker and switch amongst line items within his own departmental budget to fund the salary increases his officers recently received), and, of course, my personal favorite, why do we need police officers at all.
That last question always gives me a chuckle, betraying as it does a level of sloppy thinking and self-centeredness that one only can chuckle at, lest it drag one down to truly terrifying depths of despair at the utter hopelessness of the human race.
See, at bottom, everyone believes that laws and rules only apply to other people. My speeding 95 miles down the highway through a construction zone isn’t dangerous, but by all means, bust that other guy. I can handle a pickup truck after downing a fifth of Jack Daniels, but that gal down the bar from me sure as hell can’t. It’s okay for me to put an outbuilding on my residential property without a house, but that guy’s is so ugly you’d better fine his ass, etc.
Of course, the same people who insist we don’t need cops, or need fewer cops, or need purely ceremonial cops, are the very ones who howl for municipal blood if the knuckleheads next door burglarize the house over the holidays or if the neighbor’s dog poops once too often on a prized and cared-for lawn or some drunken maniac whips around the corner in the night and trashes a parked car.
You can’t have it both ways, folks.
And being a cop is a nasty, nasty job, right up there with lawyering in terms of the built-in hostility from others that comes with the role, and as my father and so many others have observed, the extremes of mind-numbing tedium and heart-pounding excitement, with nothing in between... “90% boredom, 10% sheer terror,” my father said of his years on the Wyoming Highway Patrol.
For the Saratoga Police Department, I’d adjust those figures to 99% and 1%, respectively.
And since any kind of action at all is unusual, such action immediately becomes a public obsession, even if someone’s mommy isn’t whining to the press.
But I digress.
The important thing here is to bear in mind that we do not, yet, have all the facts (and that includes Your Humble Blogger; council member though I am, I am not privy to all that much more than you are, and have authority only as one of four persons who make up a governing body. I exercise little power as an individual; I am not the mayor).
Rushing to judgment is exactly the wrong thing to do here, as is hastening to tinker with the entire structure of the police force.
Wait and see.
Thursday, December 26, 2002
FAMILY IN FLUXX
Caveat lector: This is probably going to be my
Worst.
Blog entry.
EVER.
Because I’m still recovering from the hilarity that was Christ-X at Fort Sherrod.
The day started off as most modern Sherrod family Christ-Xs might; my cell phone ringing and rattling and vibrating itself right off the table as the Collie of Follie (actually, now, more appropriately designated the Corrie of Forry after we watched “A Christmas Story” one too many times on Christ-X Eve. Those of you who know this brilliant film, really the only proper Christ-X film ever made, unless you count “Blazing Saddles” and “The Frisco Kid”, know why her designation has been changed. The rest of you... oh, there’s no hope for you unless you get a copy and watch it. Go. Now. You are forbidden to gaze at any more of my pixels until you do. Quit cheating. Go watch the movie, you fools!) barked at it.
I stumbled from my relatively newly-established bedroom (the Big Room at the Unabomber Cabin having finally gotten too cold even for Your Humble Polar Bear Blogger to sleep in) to retrieve the phone before the Corrie of Forry carried it off and dropped it into the toilet or something, and answered it.
Of course it was My Own Dear Personal Mom. Of course.
And of course I was late for Santy Claus. The family was gathered merrily under the tree, merrily hungry, and merrily waiting for me, tapping their merry feet, checking their merry watches, merrily asking MODPM where the hell was I, already.
Morry the Corrie of Forry, too, was anxious to head Over the River and Up the Hill, having fallen completely in love with my Own Dear Personal Sister, a dog junkie of rare quality, here in town for a holiday visit.
Were Morry and MODPS Pyramus and Thisby, the wall would not have survived ten minutes. The person whose hand represented the wall would have had it licked away like a salt block on one side, and clawed to ribbons on the other. Or something.
And so began a typical Christ-X, much, I am sure, like all of yours: opening presents, gasps of thank yous, 20-minute pauses while the new gadgets MODPD bought for MODPM had to be assembled and explained by the family techno-geek (that would be Your Humble Blogger, surely getting some payback for childhood toys that came with “some assembly required”)... then a big, carbohydrate-laden breakfast and then, what else but...
Many, many hours of Trading Spaces, of course. Perfect, non-ideological holiday fun; running a 24-hour marathon of this show is a stroke of genius on the part of Discovery Networks as diverse families large and small can gather in front of the small screen and bury past resentments, future anxieties, lingering commercial-generated distress (MODPM still has a twitch from overexposure to that STAPLES commerical in which a demented older lady apologizes for all the year’s she’s inflicted hand-knit gifts that she’s worked all year to make on her loved ones. Far better to give stupid gadgets that will be technologically obsolete before they’re completely unpacked from the styrofoam) and food comas, united in their hatred and derision for the choice to put moss on a bedroom wall or paint absolutely everything in a living room either silver or hot pink.
At least that tides folks over until the football starts. But, as I’ve already shared with LIANT readers, I’ve suffered enough pigskin-generated emotional damage for one season. Thank god the skiing is still good. I think.
Things took a turn for the bizarre after supper, as MODPD settled into the recliner to watch yet more football. Even MODPS, who is possessed of greater fortitude, resilience and other laudable qualities vis a vis football than I, thought maybe she’d had enough, and so she, MODPM, and YHB sat around the kitchen table and stared at each other for a bit, our supply of small talk mostly exhausted, until MODPM made the fatal suggestion...
“Well, what kind of three-hand card game could we maybe play?”
Immediately these words had flown out of her mouth than YHB flew into a moderate tizzy.
You see, back in March I took some time off after the Great Corn Pop-Off and headed to more civilized climes for a marathon D&D session with old friends, a big-screen viewing of the first Lord of the Rings film with Buzzmo (the man whose wedding I almost missed in July), and a pilgrimage with Buzzmo to Games Plus, where, knowing my Saratoga friends are way too cool to actually play anything more complicated than poker, I managed to refrain from buying any D&D, Call of Cthulu, Car Wars, or other games (though of course I had to get some spiffy new dice).
But then I came across the Cheapass Games section, where I found both “Kill Doctor Lucky” (almost a prequel to CLUE, players are trying, desperately, to kill a man named Doctor Lucky, who is, as one might suspect, rather hard to off) and “Captain Park’s Imaginary Polar Expedition” (in which players race around “London” trying to gather up various props and forgeries to use to prove they had made an expedition to the North Pole without ever actually having left home) too ludicrous to exist.
And then...
I saw it.
An innocent looking little card game called FLUXX.
What the hell, it’s just a few bucks, and it looks amusing, I thought.
And there it sat, upon my return home, sitting pristine, wrapped in cellophane in its little box, on the edge of one of the many bookcases that grace the Big Room at Kate’s Landing, until MODPM made her fatal Christ-X utterance.
I raced home and grabbed the game, vaguely remembering that it’s supposed to be a bit challenging – it was given a special award by MENSA in 1999 – but figuring if it sucked we could always just play Spades or Cribbage.
I had no idea those MENSA people had such fabulous senses of humor!
Though I gotta wonder if they realized how much fun that damned game is when the players thereof have all been sampling heavily from the Booze that Santa Brought.
But really, some of you are no doubt asking, what game isn’t extra fun with BTSB?
Or, in other words, what’s so great about FLUXX?
It starts off with deceptive simplicity, the game does. Draw one card, play one card, each turn. You could say it’s like UNO, but you wouldn’t be able to say it for long.
UNO has but one goal, you see: get rid of all of your cards.
FLUXX has about 40 goals, judging from the number of GOAL cards in the deck. At any given point in the game, the aim of the game may be to get ten cards in your hand, to have “death and taxes” showing in your meld, or to have “love” and ONLY “love.”
Plus the rules are always changing; there are in the deck about 40 RULE cards that, when played, supersede the original “draw one, play one” rule. Suddenly the rule may be “draw five, play one” or there may be a sudden hand limit of 0 cards in hand.
You can maybe get a sense of the silliness that may ensue already. What happens if the GOAL of the particular game being played is to get and keep ten cards in your hand, but the hand limit is zero?
Drink and giggle, giggle and drink and wait until someone plays another GOAL card.
There can be a lot of silly, split-second strategy involved; I won one game by playing, first, a card changing the rules so that each person’s turn now required her to play four cards (thus extending my turn quite a bit), then, a card called “steal a keeper” (KEEPERS being the “death,” “taxes,” “love” cards, etc.), which allowed me to steal the “death” card from MODPM, then a new GOAL card that said the aim of the game was now “death and taxes”, and then laid down the KEEPER I had drawn at the start of my turn, which was, of course, “taxes”.
You probably had to be there, to watch the puzzled, shocked, annoyed, wounded and eventually apoplectic looks that crossed and recrossed the faces of my near and dear (including the Corry of Forry, who frequently nosed her way in to investigate despite her obvious humor impairment, and my wary father, who had to endure all of the women in his life nearly spitting with laughter every time he came into the kitchen to freshen his drink. We couldn’t get him to play for some reason).
Anyway, my family and I are now hooked, and I plan to spread this game like a new gospel. So, dear readers, brace yourselves, if you are personal friends of mine, and if you’re not, well, go read about the game on the wunderland website and think about giving it a try.
Caveat lector: This is probably going to be my
Worst.
Blog entry.
EVER.
Because I’m still recovering from the hilarity that was Christ-X at Fort Sherrod.
The day started off as most modern Sherrod family Christ-Xs might; my cell phone ringing and rattling and vibrating itself right off the table as the Collie of Follie (actually, now, more appropriately designated the Corrie of Forry after we watched “A Christmas Story” one too many times on Christ-X Eve. Those of you who know this brilliant film, really the only proper Christ-X film ever made, unless you count “Blazing Saddles” and “The Frisco Kid”, know why her designation has been changed. The rest of you... oh, there’s no hope for you unless you get a copy and watch it. Go. Now. You are forbidden to gaze at any more of my pixels until you do. Quit cheating. Go watch the movie, you fools!) barked at it.
I stumbled from my relatively newly-established bedroom (the Big Room at the Unabomber Cabin having finally gotten too cold even for Your Humble Polar Bear Blogger to sleep in) to retrieve the phone before the Corrie of Forry carried it off and dropped it into the toilet or something, and answered it.
Of course it was My Own Dear Personal Mom. Of course.
And of course I was late for Santy Claus. The family was gathered merrily under the tree, merrily hungry, and merrily waiting for me, tapping their merry feet, checking their merry watches, merrily asking MODPM where the hell was I, already.
Morry the Corrie of Forry, too, was anxious to head Over the River and Up the Hill, having fallen completely in love with my Own Dear Personal Sister, a dog junkie of rare quality, here in town for a holiday visit.
Were Morry and MODPS Pyramus and Thisby, the wall would not have survived ten minutes. The person whose hand represented the wall would have had it licked away like a salt block on one side, and clawed to ribbons on the other. Or something.
And so began a typical Christ-X, much, I am sure, like all of yours: opening presents, gasps of thank yous, 20-minute pauses while the new gadgets MODPD bought for MODPM had to be assembled and explained by the family techno-geek (that would be Your Humble Blogger, surely getting some payback for childhood toys that came with “some assembly required”)... then a big, carbohydrate-laden breakfast and then, what else but...
Many, many hours of Trading Spaces, of course. Perfect, non-ideological holiday fun; running a 24-hour marathon of this show is a stroke of genius on the part of Discovery Networks as diverse families large and small can gather in front of the small screen and bury past resentments, future anxieties, lingering commercial-generated distress (MODPM still has a twitch from overexposure to that STAPLES commerical in which a demented older lady apologizes for all the year’s she’s inflicted hand-knit gifts that she’s worked all year to make on her loved ones. Far better to give stupid gadgets that will be technologically obsolete before they’re completely unpacked from the styrofoam) and food comas, united in their hatred and derision for the choice to put moss on a bedroom wall or paint absolutely everything in a living room either silver or hot pink.
At least that tides folks over until the football starts. But, as I’ve already shared with LIANT readers, I’ve suffered enough pigskin-generated emotional damage for one season. Thank god the skiing is still good. I think.
Things took a turn for the bizarre after supper, as MODPD settled into the recliner to watch yet more football. Even MODPS, who is possessed of greater fortitude, resilience and other laudable qualities vis a vis football than I, thought maybe she’d had enough, and so she, MODPM, and YHB sat around the kitchen table and stared at each other for a bit, our supply of small talk mostly exhausted, until MODPM made the fatal suggestion...
“Well, what kind of three-hand card game could we maybe play?”
Immediately these words had flown out of her mouth than YHB flew into a moderate tizzy.
You see, back in March I took some time off after the Great Corn Pop-Off and headed to more civilized climes for a marathon D&D session with old friends, a big-screen viewing of the first Lord of the Rings film with Buzzmo (the man whose wedding I almost missed in July), and a pilgrimage with Buzzmo to Games Plus, where, knowing my Saratoga friends are way too cool to actually play anything more complicated than poker, I managed to refrain from buying any D&D, Call of Cthulu, Car Wars, or other games (though of course I had to get some spiffy new dice).
But then I came across the Cheapass Games section, where I found both “Kill Doctor Lucky” (almost a prequel to CLUE, players are trying, desperately, to kill a man named Doctor Lucky, who is, as one might suspect, rather hard to off) and “Captain Park’s Imaginary Polar Expedition” (in which players race around “London” trying to gather up various props and forgeries to use to prove they had made an expedition to the North Pole without ever actually having left home) too ludicrous to exist.
And then...
I saw it.
An innocent looking little card game called FLUXX.
What the hell, it’s just a few bucks, and it looks amusing, I thought.
And there it sat, upon my return home, sitting pristine, wrapped in cellophane in its little box, on the edge of one of the many bookcases that grace the Big Room at Kate’s Landing, until MODPM made her fatal Christ-X utterance.
I raced home and grabbed the game, vaguely remembering that it’s supposed to be a bit challenging – it was given a special award by MENSA in 1999 – but figuring if it sucked we could always just play Spades or Cribbage.
I had no idea those MENSA people had such fabulous senses of humor!
Though I gotta wonder if they realized how much fun that damned game is when the players thereof have all been sampling heavily from the Booze that Santa Brought.
But really, some of you are no doubt asking, what game isn’t extra fun with BTSB?
Or, in other words, what’s so great about FLUXX?
It starts off with deceptive simplicity, the game does. Draw one card, play one card, each turn. You could say it’s like UNO, but you wouldn’t be able to say it for long.
UNO has but one goal, you see: get rid of all of your cards.
FLUXX has about 40 goals, judging from the number of GOAL cards in the deck. At any given point in the game, the aim of the game may be to get ten cards in your hand, to have “death and taxes” showing in your meld, or to have “love” and ONLY “love.”
Plus the rules are always changing; there are in the deck about 40 RULE cards that, when played, supersede the original “draw one, play one” rule. Suddenly the rule may be “draw five, play one” or there may be a sudden hand limit of 0 cards in hand.
You can maybe get a sense of the silliness that may ensue already. What happens if the GOAL of the particular game being played is to get and keep ten cards in your hand, but the hand limit is zero?
Drink and giggle, giggle and drink and wait until someone plays another GOAL card.
There can be a lot of silly, split-second strategy involved; I won one game by playing, first, a card changing the rules so that each person’s turn now required her to play four cards (thus extending my turn quite a bit), then, a card called “steal a keeper” (KEEPERS being the “death,” “taxes,” “love” cards, etc.), which allowed me to steal the “death” card from MODPM, then a new GOAL card that said the aim of the game was now “death and taxes”, and then laid down the KEEPER I had drawn at the start of my turn, which was, of course, “taxes”.
You probably had to be there, to watch the puzzled, shocked, annoyed, wounded and eventually apoplectic looks that crossed and recrossed the faces of my near and dear (including the Corry of Forry, who frequently nosed her way in to investigate despite her obvious humor impairment, and my wary father, who had to endure all of the women in his life nearly spitting with laughter every time he came into the kitchen to freshen his drink. We couldn’t get him to play for some reason).
Anyway, my family and I are now hooked, and I plan to spread this game like a new gospel. So, dear readers, brace yourselves, if you are personal friends of mine, and if you’re not, well, go read about the game on the wunderland website and think about giving it a try.
Monday, December 23, 2002
WELL, THE SNOW WAS GOOD…
Such was our only comfort, our only joy yesterday afternoon as we watched a certain football game between a team that will remain nameless because this is my website and I’ll not profane it and our own ill-starred regional favorite, whom I can now simply name “The Donks.”
Before settling in to witness the horror, my ski buddy and I had had a magnificent morning on the trails outside Encampment. Long my favorite place to ski anyway, yesterday the Bottle Creek trails were, and I do not exaggerate, perfect. Good, cold weather (though not so cold as today, when the air itself froze and crystallized and made downtown Saratoga look like the interior of a snow globe with extra glitter), a bright, clear, achingly blue sky, and immaculate, untouched, light and powdery snow, snow made for cross country skiing, snow that couldn’t stick if it tried, snow that could be compared to that sand on particularly desirable beaches that is “like flour.”
Snow it’s a pleasure to slice through on skis, even if one is slogging uphill most of the way (ever the contrarians, my buddy and I had to take our favorite trail backwards).
Snow into which those skis completely disappear as they sink down, but snow that never weighs down the feet or packs on to the skis or boots.
Snow that clings only to the wool of one’s sweater when she loses her balance and falls (only the second foray this year, and I missed the season entirely last year), not at the gnarly turn where the trees are, not at the bottom of a downward slope, but just at a careless moment when she was busier gawking at the view of the North Fork of the Encampment River than in paying attention to her still-precarious balance.
And because my ski buddy and I were recently also choir buddies, the least Christmas-y of our recent songs ran pleasantly through our minds… Snow had fallen/Snow on snow/Snow… on snow.
It was an easy thing to cling to, this memory of snow, and cling to it we did as we watched one of the most horrible football games since, well… since the last time these two teams met. On Monday night. In front of millions of people. And the Donks stank up their home field.
And so it was, again at coffee this morning, when an impertinent staffer at our coffee hole periodically emerged from the kitchen to which she had been banished (a disloyal Benedict Arnold of a fan of that other team, she is) to ask, again, “What was that score last night again? Oh yeah.”
“At least the skiing was good,” we chanted under our breaths and tried not to pout.
But then the dam burst as I sat, vulnerable and a little careworn, in the living room of my Own Dear Personal Parents and found Frank Gambino, of K2 television infamy, enumerating, in grotesque detail, every single possible scenario under which the Donks could still make the playoffs. As he chanted them out, two Pittsburgh losses, one NY Jets win, one Tampa loss or tie, blah blah blah I felt I was being subjected to the worst performance of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” since I found myself trapped, many years ago, in Newark International Airport on an evening much like this one while a buzzard-like flock of evil mutant carolers circled round and round, drenching us all in vomitous holiday cheer while the airline lied to us about when we’d be released from our torment.
Never again. Never again.
And it is still possible that the Donks could continue onward, it is. Some of the scenarios Gambino listed off for us are almost plausible. But, and I imagine I am not alone in saying this, I’m to the point where I’d really rather not see them in the playoffs. I’m to the point where, yes, maybe I’ve had enough football for one season and it’s time to, yes, maybe think about something else for a while.
Because, though yea and verily we took comfort in the quality of the snow and the skiing we had just experienced as the game unfolded in its bumptious idiocy, it was, truth be told, small comfort.
We could have stayed on the trails instead of rushing home to watch that $%&@#ing game.
Such was our only comfort, our only joy yesterday afternoon as we watched a certain football game between a team that will remain nameless because this is my website and I’ll not profane it and our own ill-starred regional favorite, whom I can now simply name “The Donks.”
Before settling in to witness the horror, my ski buddy and I had had a magnificent morning on the trails outside Encampment. Long my favorite place to ski anyway, yesterday the Bottle Creek trails were, and I do not exaggerate, perfect. Good, cold weather (though not so cold as today, when the air itself froze and crystallized and made downtown Saratoga look like the interior of a snow globe with extra glitter), a bright, clear, achingly blue sky, and immaculate, untouched, light and powdery snow, snow made for cross country skiing, snow that couldn’t stick if it tried, snow that could be compared to that sand on particularly desirable beaches that is “like flour.”
Snow it’s a pleasure to slice through on skis, even if one is slogging uphill most of the way (ever the contrarians, my buddy and I had to take our favorite trail backwards).
Snow into which those skis completely disappear as they sink down, but snow that never weighs down the feet or packs on to the skis or boots.
Snow that clings only to the wool of one’s sweater when she loses her balance and falls (only the second foray this year, and I missed the season entirely last year), not at the gnarly turn where the trees are, not at the bottom of a downward slope, but just at a careless moment when she was busier gawking at the view of the North Fork of the Encampment River than in paying attention to her still-precarious balance.
And because my ski buddy and I were recently also choir buddies, the least Christmas-y of our recent songs ran pleasantly through our minds… Snow had fallen/Snow on snow/Snow… on snow.
It was an easy thing to cling to, this memory of snow, and cling to it we did as we watched one of the most horrible football games since, well… since the last time these two teams met. On Monday night. In front of millions of people. And the Donks stank up their home field.
And so it was, again at coffee this morning, when an impertinent staffer at our coffee hole periodically emerged from the kitchen to which she had been banished (a disloyal Benedict Arnold of a fan of that other team, she is) to ask, again, “What was that score last night again? Oh yeah.”
“At least the skiing was good,” we chanted under our breaths and tried not to pout.
But then the dam burst as I sat, vulnerable and a little careworn, in the living room of my Own Dear Personal Parents and found Frank Gambino, of K2 television infamy, enumerating, in grotesque detail, every single possible scenario under which the Donks could still make the playoffs. As he chanted them out, two Pittsburgh losses, one NY Jets win, one Tampa loss or tie, blah blah blah I felt I was being subjected to the worst performance of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” since I found myself trapped, many years ago, in Newark International Airport on an evening much like this one while a buzzard-like flock of evil mutant carolers circled round and round, drenching us all in vomitous holiday cheer while the airline lied to us about when we’d be released from our torment.
Never again. Never again.
And it is still possible that the Donks could continue onward, it is. Some of the scenarios Gambino listed off for us are almost plausible. But, and I imagine I am not alone in saying this, I’m to the point where I’d really rather not see them in the playoffs. I’m to the point where, yes, maybe I’ve had enough football for one season and it’s time to, yes, maybe think about something else for a while.
Because, though yea and verily we took comfort in the quality of the snow and the skiing we had just experienced as the game unfolded in its bumptious idiocy, it was, truth be told, small comfort.
We could have stayed on the trails instead of rushing home to watch that $%&@#ing game.
Friday, December 20, 2002
THE REWARDS OF VOLUNTEERING
It’s not every day I find myself quoting Hoppusai, the underwear stealing pervert/martial arts master of Ranma 1/2 fame (if you don’t know who Ranma 1/2 is, you probably don’t want to), but I know of nothing else more appropriate to say about the fruit of this morning’s labors besides:
What a haul! WHAT A HAUL!
I’m so happy that I don’t mind the dust in my bra, the lingering smell of natural gas, age, and god-knows-what-else that clings to my clothing, the time I spent freezing on the top floor of Saratoga’s weird little airport terminal or squeezing my way up and down the tight, narrow little spiral staircase that takes one there.
What was I doing sneezing and wheezing in the accumulated junk of the ages crammed into said airport terminal, one might ask?
Once upon a time, there was a wealthy, eccentric, rather anal man who, in his day, had his fingers in even more pies than Your Humble Blogger, if you can believe that. He has been mayor of Saratoga several times, he’s run the airport board, the planning commission, oh goodness, I don’t even know what all.
And now he’s down for the count, essentially, no longer residing in Saratoga, ailing in some warmer clime (Arizona, I suspect) and not involved really at all in our affairs, except in that, well, he left a lot of stuff behind in the airport terminal.
A lot of stuff.
It’s kind of like dunging out the chamber office all over again, really. Except the equipment is even more archaic – one could found a small but devastatingly complete museum of 1960s communication and security technology with what we found in just one corner of the upper storey, for instance.
There were boxes and boxes of outdated office supplies, rolls of adding machine tape, address labels imprinted with his name and address, sheets and sheets of ledger paper. There were huge metal desks largely useless in the age of computers because, of course, they’re ergonomic nightmares even if one is simply going to sit at them to write, let alone if a computer terminal and keyboard were placed on one.
An ancient photocopier that still uses thermal paper... well, I can’t mock that overly, as my office still uses a thermal fax machine... which, incidentally, is why one always hears me sigh heavily whenever he says he’ll fax me something...
But none of this is part of the haul that has me so excited, so delighted, so benighted with joy.
Good lord, the old man was a HORIZON collector!
And what is HORIZON, most of you are now asking?
Long before there was a Smithsonian magazine, or Civilization or American Heritage, hell, probably before there was an Art News, there was HORIZON, a monthly publication that combined all of these interests and more, an omnivorous masterpiece of a periodical that rightly assumed its readership wanted to know about more than one thing. My favorite issue of same, for example, has a detailed look at “Saint Paul and His Opponents” in the same slim volume as a look at “Land: An American Dream in Crisis” and at the paintings of Rousseau and an essay by Anthony Burgess, of all people, about the Brothers Grimm.
Oh, it’s one of the wonders of the 20th century, this magazine which had its heyday about three years before I was born (though it did keep publishing until 1977). It was the secret ingredient in many a dazzling term paper I wrote in junior high and high school; it awakened in my 12-year-old brain even greater curiosity than said brain was born with, about subjects that I otherwise would not have encountered, even growing up amongst Saratoga’s High Elves, until college or later, things like Qabballa, the Wellesleys, Chinese calligraphy, the bizarre world views of Noam Chomsky, Hieronymus Bosch and Alvin Toffler.
But these magazines were dear to me long before I discovered their contents.
Before they were obscure references in my book reports, before I quoted them amongst the Beach Boys lyrics in my economics papers for poor, dear Mr. Nerland, they were among my first toys!
HORIZON, you see, published in hardcover.
The resulting volumes were a little larger than ordinary magazines in width and height, and were maybe a quarter-inch thick.
Combined with the astonishing variety of Legos, building blocks, toy animals and other crap at the disposal of My Own Dear Personal Sister and I, HORIZON magazine was tailor-made to bring out the architect in both of us.
Oh, the elaborate, multi-level dollhouses she and I made for her Tonka people and my Playschool animals! It would take us the better part of the afternoon to agree on a floor plan, construct and furnish the house, and play in it for... oh, about ten minutes or so before the fading twilight announced the coming of Our Own Dear Personal Dad, who strongly disliked hearing my mother’s histrionics when he tripped over or trampled her beloved magazines. Far better to clean everything up before he got home.
(Here, by the way, is one of the chief measures by which I say with such conviction that my mother was meant to be a mother, while I was not: I could never, ever bring myself to allow any children, mine or no, to build little houses out of my HORIZON collection!)
It should suprise no one to learn that my mother’s collection of these precious magazines was among the first things I “liberated” from her home when I set up housekeeping for myself in Saratoga.
And now, today, this morning, I acquired more of them!
And so, the only cloud over my near-incoherent joy is the knowledge that I still, as I type this, have several hours yet to go before I’m free to bring the box into the Unabomber Cabin at Kate’s Landing, open it, and compare that dear old man (really; I always rather liked him, but now I find I like him so much more for learning this about him!)’s collection with my own.
I’m pretty sure that he had a lot of the volumes I’ve been missing.
WHAT A HAUL! WHAT A HAUL!
It’s not every day I find myself quoting Hoppusai, the underwear stealing pervert/martial arts master of Ranma 1/2 fame (if you don’t know who Ranma 1/2 is, you probably don’t want to), but I know of nothing else more appropriate to say about the fruit of this morning’s labors besides:
What a haul! WHAT A HAUL!
I’m so happy that I don’t mind the dust in my bra, the lingering smell of natural gas, age, and god-knows-what-else that clings to my clothing, the time I spent freezing on the top floor of Saratoga’s weird little airport terminal or squeezing my way up and down the tight, narrow little spiral staircase that takes one there.
What was I doing sneezing and wheezing in the accumulated junk of the ages crammed into said airport terminal, one might ask?
Once upon a time, there was a wealthy, eccentric, rather anal man who, in his day, had his fingers in even more pies than Your Humble Blogger, if you can believe that. He has been mayor of Saratoga several times, he’s run the airport board, the planning commission, oh goodness, I don’t even know what all.
And now he’s down for the count, essentially, no longer residing in Saratoga, ailing in some warmer clime (Arizona, I suspect) and not involved really at all in our affairs, except in that, well, he left a lot of stuff behind in the airport terminal.
A lot of stuff.
It’s kind of like dunging out the chamber office all over again, really. Except the equipment is even more archaic – one could found a small but devastatingly complete museum of 1960s communication and security technology with what we found in just one corner of the upper storey, for instance.
There were boxes and boxes of outdated office supplies, rolls of adding machine tape, address labels imprinted with his name and address, sheets and sheets of ledger paper. There were huge metal desks largely useless in the age of computers because, of course, they’re ergonomic nightmares even if one is simply going to sit at them to write, let alone if a computer terminal and keyboard were placed on one.
An ancient photocopier that still uses thermal paper... well, I can’t mock that overly, as my office still uses a thermal fax machine... which, incidentally, is why one always hears me sigh heavily whenever he says he’ll fax me something...
But none of this is part of the haul that has me so excited, so delighted, so benighted with joy.
Good lord, the old man was a HORIZON collector!
And what is HORIZON, most of you are now asking?
Long before there was a Smithsonian magazine, or Civilization or American Heritage, hell, probably before there was an Art News, there was HORIZON, a monthly publication that combined all of these interests and more, an omnivorous masterpiece of a periodical that rightly assumed its readership wanted to know about more than one thing. My favorite issue of same, for example, has a detailed look at “Saint Paul and His Opponents” in the same slim volume as a look at “Land: An American Dream in Crisis” and at the paintings of Rousseau and an essay by Anthony Burgess, of all people, about the Brothers Grimm.
Oh, it’s one of the wonders of the 20th century, this magazine which had its heyday about three years before I was born (though it did keep publishing until 1977). It was the secret ingredient in many a dazzling term paper I wrote in junior high and high school; it awakened in my 12-year-old brain even greater curiosity than said brain was born with, about subjects that I otherwise would not have encountered, even growing up amongst Saratoga’s High Elves, until college or later, things like Qabballa, the Wellesleys, Chinese calligraphy, the bizarre world views of Noam Chomsky, Hieronymus Bosch and Alvin Toffler.
But these magazines were dear to me long before I discovered their contents.
Before they were obscure references in my book reports, before I quoted them amongst the Beach Boys lyrics in my economics papers for poor, dear Mr. Nerland, they were among my first toys!
HORIZON, you see, published in hardcover.
The resulting volumes were a little larger than ordinary magazines in width and height, and were maybe a quarter-inch thick.
Combined with the astonishing variety of Legos, building blocks, toy animals and other crap at the disposal of My Own Dear Personal Sister and I, HORIZON magazine was tailor-made to bring out the architect in both of us.
Oh, the elaborate, multi-level dollhouses she and I made for her Tonka people and my Playschool animals! It would take us the better part of the afternoon to agree on a floor plan, construct and furnish the house, and play in it for... oh, about ten minutes or so before the fading twilight announced the coming of Our Own Dear Personal Dad, who strongly disliked hearing my mother’s histrionics when he tripped over or trampled her beloved magazines. Far better to clean everything up before he got home.
(Here, by the way, is one of the chief measures by which I say with such conviction that my mother was meant to be a mother, while I was not: I could never, ever bring myself to allow any children, mine or no, to build little houses out of my HORIZON collection!)
It should suprise no one to learn that my mother’s collection of these precious magazines was among the first things I “liberated” from her home when I set up housekeeping for myself in Saratoga.
And now, today, this morning, I acquired more of them!
And so, the only cloud over my near-incoherent joy is the knowledge that I still, as I type this, have several hours yet to go before I’m free to bring the box into the Unabomber Cabin at Kate’s Landing, open it, and compare that dear old man (really; I always rather liked him, but now I find I like him so much more for learning this about him!)’s collection with my own.
I’m pretty sure that he had a lot of the volumes I’ve been missing.
WHAT A HAUL! WHAT A HAUL!
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