Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

“woke” is the new caravan.

He really is that stupid.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

The fight for our country is always worth it. ~Kamala Harris

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

This chaos was totally avoidable.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Not all heroes wear capes.

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Travel

Medium Cool – Travel!

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Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in.  We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.

Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered.  We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.

What do you do to get the feel for the local culture when you are traveling?  When I say “traveling”, I don’t care if it’s it’s the state next door, the county next door, or traveling around the world.

Is it the food?  Museums?  Shops?  Cultural events?  Wandering through neighborhoods?  Talking to random people in the street?

If it’s the food, I hope it doesn’t look like this!

Medium Cool – Travel!

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Random Travel Humor Wee Hours Open Thread

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Been on the road for a week—a nephew’s destination wedding in Bavaria.  That’s been a lot of fun; this part of the world is as beautiful as I remember from a family trip fifty years ago (sic!); the food is excellent; and the tourist culture of the area is pleasant and welcoming.  So all good.

Plus, in the rather fancy hotel in which the wedding itself took place, I rediscovered the joy of a proper sauna, made all the more wonderful by the discovery of what it does (palliatively at least) for my recently diagnosed osteoarthritis.  (See that fifty year interval above…)

But as far as the jackaltariat is concerned, though, it’s the moments of the absurd that seem worth sharing.

This was the keeper…clearly, someone in the south German hotel snacks industry has a wicked sense of humor:

Random Travel Humor Wee Hours Open Thread

As a lagniappe…

Who’s a good plastic doggo?  You are! (From the Lego store in Munich):

Random Travel Humor Wee Hours Open Thread 1

All right you insomniacs…

Over to you.  This thread is so open it’s agnostic about the Oxford comma.

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Life Update, Tokyo Edition

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Flying to Japan is easy. You just take 15mg THC, 6mg melatonin, and 600mg gabapentin, and by the time you wake up from your coma, it’s a regular four-hour flight. At that point I played some Return to Monkey Island, read some Excession by Iain M. Banks (and my god I have not had this much fun with a space opera in a while), disposed of the contraband, and deplaned. I was momentarily detained at customs but only because the agent’s visa printer broke. Now it’s our first full day, which as I recall is the most painful, so, that will be fun.

I haven’t had a vacation in a while, so I am super excited to be here. At the risk of sounding like too much of a hopeless weeb–I’ve traveled a lot, I’ve been around, I know where my favorite place is, so why bother going anywhere other than my favorite country? So here I am. I actually started learning Japanese, too, so I can kinda sorta read the most important stuff; I’m roughly as literate as a six-year-old, though my production is a long way off.

Life Update, Tokyo Edition 1
Today’s breakfast

We have a very empty itinerary. Just the usual suspects–Tokyo, Hakone, Kyoto, Osaka, Tokyo again. Super open to suggestions if anybody has any! It’s my fourth time, so I’ve done some of the Obvious Stuff, but there’s so much that I can safely say there’s lots more Obvious Stuff to do. My list is mostly shopping, and hiking (Takaosan, open to more ideas). I want to get a non-export model Seiko, some more jeans, Tears of the Kingdom, a bunch of the amazing Biore Aqua Rich sunscreen that AOC is obsessed with, whimsical cat collars, a yukata for my mom, some whiskey for my dad, and a bag to put it all in. The exchange rate is crazy in our favor (~¥130/$1) so this is gonna be great.

On the home front, the landscapers finally installed our front landscaping, so our contract with the builder is now complete. We have a two-story elm tree, a nice maple, a flowering pear, and a bunch of shrubs. Still need to set up the side yard, so I’ll just have to do that when I get back. I will be sure to write up all my misadventures–and if anybody has advice for planting in Denver, we have everything from scorching full sun to mostly full shade to deal with. Gardeners have recommended Japanese maples, Arborvitae, Japanese rose, mountain laurel, hydrangeas, Japanese yew… I swear all the Japanese varieties were recommended unprompted… still need some ground cover and vegetables.

Oh, Samwise needed a couple teeth out, the poor guy (resorption), but he’s doing a lot better now. He’d been pretty timid and cranky, which I’d chalked up to the move, so it’s good that I had him in for a dental cleaning. Thank god insurance covered it–cat dentistry costs almost as much as human dentistry, wow! They’re both doing great and even get along sometimes.

It feels silly to say this what with how objectively good my life is but it feels like things have really come together. I’ve had a fair bit of latent anxiety for the last year and a half but it seems to have abated. Which is good, because I have a lot of work to do! I’m angling for a promotion and my friend and I are buckling down on the video game we’re making. It’s a point-and-click adventure/dating sim set in the Lovecraft universe. You play as a student at Miskatonic University who is surrounded by assorted demigods and madmen and monsters; you have to solve a mystery and (optionally) fall in love. We just contracted with an artist for characters and backgrounds, so it really is happening. Hopefully. We’ll need a bit of scratch to actually afford all the art, so look out for a crowdfunder later this year, if I may be so bold.

So yeah! Vacation time. I’ll be sure to send some postcards from the road.

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On The Road – ?BillinGlendaleCA – Orion

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Welcome to the new On The Road! It’s been a long time coming, and I’m excited that we’re back.

I’m still deep in the moving/unpacking process. To explain the long time this is taking – I’m moving two houses (my mother’s and mine) into my newly-purchased home. And my house has 1.5 houses worth of stuff from our inability to throw things away combined with my mother-in-law’s stuff we inherited. So it’s not as simple as “put everything in a box” – in some cases, we have three, even four, of an item, but they aren’t together. So as we pack things or reveal things to be packed, we often have to put an item aside until we can get to the other house to group similar items.

Coincidentally, I now live right near a feature called Red Rocks.

And now onto Bill!

I’ve made a couple of trips up to Red Rock to take advantage of it’s dark skies this past month. The first trip I concentrated on the Orion nebula, a wide shot of the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxies, and a wide shot of the Orion nebula complex. I was quite unhappy with the later and returned to reshoot it(with a wider 30mm lens). I also wanted to shoot a narrow shot of the Triangulum galaxy but the battery on my sky tracker ran out of juice. On the way back though Mojave the CHP had blocked off the road for a truck carrying a very long, eh, something to the Mojave Spaceport.

Technical Note: The two Orion photos have the notation “LRGB Processing”, this method of processing a photo separates the luminosity and the color in a photo and processes them separately.

On The Road - ?BillinGlendaleCA - Orion 3
Red Rock Canyon State Park, CANovember 5, 2019

Star Trails at the Red Cliffs.

When I shoot at a place with an interesting foreground, I’ll set up one camera and shoot star trails. They’re easy to shoot and due to the relative lack of air traffic at Red Rock, easy to process as well.

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On The Road: Finishing Up

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Good Morning Everyone,

 

Today we’re finishing up HinTN’s long-lost, then re-sent submissions from an amazing trip to Utah. So far, it’s been wonder after wonder, and I know you’ll just love today’s offering!

But…this brief resurrection of On The Road is now over, and so OTR will return when the new site launches.  When it does, please use the new form that will be available on the new site to make submissions. As soon as I have one, I’ll begin the new On The Road.  One issue with the new form and site is that the old OTR content will not be edited to look like the new OTR stuff, so layout, etc. will be very different. It looks good and works well, clean and simple – I can’t wait for the first submission and post!

That plus my moving is why I’m fine with having a hiatus – there will be a clean break between old and new content and layout, etc. and I don’t have a lot of time for the next couple of weeks. I’m still mid-craziness, though things are getting better by the day.

 

Continuing the series from HinTN.

 

 

The only one from Dead Horse Point State Park.

Dead Horse Point – Colorado River View from Ryans Bench

Dead Horse Point State Park is a small slice of the hugeness that is Islands in the Sky, but it is especially beautiful in its overlooking of the Colorado River. This photograph is from the location of a bench placed in honor of a young man who loved these lands, worked at the park, and died much too young.

 

 

And then there’s Arches NP. Wow, just WOW!

The first of five from Arches National Park.

Arches – North and South Arch

This is more or less what I thought Arches was going to be about, but I was delighted to discover how much more there is to this small park.

Arches – Sand Dune Arch

Sand Dune Arch was located in an enclosed space reached by passing through a narrow defile. Sand collected in the space, creating a beach you could sink your bare feet into satisfyingly cool sand and kids could play underneath and on top of the arch itself.

 

Arches – Broken Arch Across the Desert

Emerging from the beach at Sand Dune, the trek across the desert to Broken Arch beckoned with this vista.

 

 

Arches – Arches in the Making Part 2

One of the most interesting aspects of being in Arches, indeed in all these parks, was the immediacy of the vastness of geologic time. Both water and wind work ever so slowly and inexorably on the seemingly immutable land. These “arches in the making” were exemplars of this work.

 

Arches – Landscape Arch and its Replacement

It was a brisk one hour round trip out to Landscape Arch, which in geologic time is probably not much longer for this world. Luckily, it has a replacement close to hand. If you look closely you can see how it’s growing wider.

Also too, Moab was a delightful town.

 

Wow, just wow. Utah has amazing geology and I’m so thankful you could share some of it with us. In the late ‘oughts, I did a couple of solo roadtrips from Colorado into Utah. Out West, I just love to drive and see, just see everything. So I went to Arches and did a couple of brief, hour hikes and took some (not so good!) photos and saw enough of Canyonlands to know I wanted to go and really explore and spend some time. Since then, I’ve learned of lots of interesting remains in Canyonlands, things left over from explorers, outlaws, hermits, Native tribes, etc. You could spend a lifetime exploring its entirety just on the geology, flora, and fauna, but with archaeology added, it really should be on folks’ “don’t-miss” list.

 

Have a great day, Halloween, and related holidays. I hope the Great Pumpkin is kind to you and yours.

It’s comforting that my mother died on All Soul’s Day/Dia de los Muertos. I’ve been a light collector/fan of Day of the Dead artwork, sculptures, and figurines for over 20 years now, but this year everything is packed; pre-Christmas, decorating isn’t a priority right now!

 

On that note, OTR shall return with the new site, take care, all!

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On The Road: Another Day

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Good morning, everybody and Happy Friday!

Today we continue with some fantastic submissions from HinTN that I’d lost but have been re-sent. We’ll continue Monday, and that may be it until the new site. I very much wanted to run these as the last ones before my hiatus so I’m so glad HinTN reached out and re-sent them to me – I felt horrible being unable to retrieve them, and am thankful for gracious people.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

 

These are from Canyonlands NP.

Canyonlands – Green River Overlook

Canyonlands NP and Dead Horse Point SP share the same space near Moab, UT Dead Horse Point is tiny; Canyonlands NP is huge. It has three contiguous but very distinct areas, all of which overlook from various elevations the confluence of the Colorado and Green Rivers. We only got to visit Island in the Sky, which shares space with Dead Horse Point State Park. The view south over the Green River is amazing because the drop from the overlook to that tableland is about 1,000 feet. Then wherever the water ran the land is just carved away into the drainage for the Green River.

 

 

Canyonlands – View through Mesa Arch

This photo looks east through the Mesa Arch, over the Colorado River to the Lasale Mountains.

 

Canyonlands – Jeep Trip Hammer Formation

We took a jeep trip at Canyonlands, too, and along the way we saw more of Thor’s Hammers.

 

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On The Road: A Brief Return!

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Good morning, everybody!

 

This is a brief return of OTR. These are pictures I’d hoped to run a few weeks back, so I’m glad to finally be able to run them. I will continue tomorrow and Monday, and we’ll see how  things stand then.

The move is going well, but slowly. It’s a complicated situation but the end is in sight and normal life should re-commence in a couple of weeks.

Without further ado, enjoy the pictures and the day!

 

These are a continuation from HinTN, long-overdue thanks to yours truly losing them and then access to my old email. The delay is 100% my lame-ass fault.

 

These are from Capitol Reef  National Park.

Capitol Reef – Approach from Boulder Mountain

 

As you drive from Bryce to Capitol Reef NP you cross Boulder Mountain, which affords a first look at the area around Capitol Reef.  It is primarily a long geologic feature called the Waterpocket Fold, a huge sandstone formation that runs north and south to the west of the Henry Mountains.

 

Capitol Reef – Arch in the Making

 

The park is so big that we took a four hour jeep ride just to try and get a sense of the land.  Of course we saw a nascent arch.  They are everywhere in this area when you start looking.

 

 

Capitol Reef – Petroglyphs

 

The park includes a very hospitable river bottom with lush grasses and fruit

 

 

I just love seeing petroglyphs, it’s an amazing way to touch mankind from ages past. Looking at them you can almost see a bare arm scratching on the walls during a smoky, boring night or rainy day.

 

Have a great day, everyone. We’ll return to Utah tomorrow!

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