Wilderness Ain't All Wild Flowers

This recent news story reminds me of the occasional tragedy that happened on the front range. A small child wanders off into the wilderness and is lost to humanity (including, most tragically, the child's parents). In Colorado, the culprit was usually a mountain lion. In Oregon - I don't know.

Anyway, my sympathy goes out to the distraught mother, father, siblings, and extended family. To have your kin extinguished by the wilderness seems a particularly cruel and random fate.

..So sad. ...So sad.

MF

Down by Law is a really good movie

This week was a period of NetFlix reckoning for me. I made the mistake of adding a burst of movies involving Tom Waits and that impulsive act finally nipped me in the ass. This week I was visited by the ghosts of Tom Waits past. Namely: Brahm stoker's Dracula, Mystery Train, and Down By Law. Of the three, I apparently saved the best for last. Down by Law kinda caught me by surprise. Apparently the writer and director, Jim Jarmusch, can actually pull a mildly interesting PLOT out of his ass (who knew?). I took a cue from the Bob Belini character and jotted some fragments that struck me as notable:

• ...You're valuable time (when speaking with people make sure you slip this in in a way where they don't know if you're being sarcastic or not).
• "It's a sad and beautiful world" (an artsy phartsy phrase but what ever).
• ...bad mood... (this is the universal excuse. As in - yeah I killed your cat but, I was in a bad mood.)
  
• "Mr. Almighty Hot Shit.
• "White limousine" (Detroit's equivalent to sayin': "my shit don't stink")
  
• "Out of the car, asshole".
• As far as I'm concerned, you don't even exist. Not at all. Got it? (man, that's a pretty good put down.)
• New York and New Orleans are the only two cities in the United States that can be considered separate countries. (this is a paraphrase of the directors remarks on the bonus tracks. Still - pretty foreboding considering this statement was uttered before Katrina or 9/11.)

I'm not an engineer - Reason Number 67

Changing the wiper blades on my car is the mental equivalent to solving three sides to a rubix cube. No, seriously, Holly usually has to do this.

(image from Popular Mechanics)

Geekin' Hard

OK, so this post is gonna make me seem like a Giant Geek.

I have to build a stock of continuing education credits as part of the certified professional soil scientist thing (I need forty hours in two years I think). This is kind of new to me, so I'm trying to get a jump on things and figure out how much of this I can do without actually going to $600 conferences (or whatever the going rate for these things is). I can get up to 10 or 20 credits just by reading journal articles. The nice thing is that I'm real close to OSU and they have plenty of journals to choose from.

So, one of the weekly e-mails that I get is from the National Academies and it mentioned a soil science related workshop. I went out and retrieved the headline paper related to the workshop and read it as my first CEU credit. It was called Advancing the Frontiers of Soil Science Towards a Geoscience and contained very little practical information about cleaning up a petroleum spill in the oil field, figuring out how to make synthetic Hanford groundwater, or some of the other challenges that confront me from time to time. In the paper, somebody is making a noisy case for introducing yet another hyphenated discipline into the field. Anyway, the paper had all sorts of BIG IDEA topics that I suspect academic proposal reviewers would eat up like girl scout cookies.

The take away point for me: Sometimes the scope of a scientific discipline is only limited by the boundaries placed upon it by the practitioners - its all about the conception of soil science by the people that do it. Soil Science used to be an applied science about making crops grow better. Now it has evolved and works in the environmental arena (my emphasis), and is starting to take on global climate issues.

It was published in an issue devoted to Hydropedology: Bridging disciplines, scales and data (When I asked Holly to pull the paper, she exclaimed "who ever heard of Geoderma". Beats me.). It looked like it had all sorts of good stuff in there for someone who is looking at soil/water interactions. For example: Soil moisture patterns in a forested catchment: A hydropedological perspective.

Anyway, by now it should be apparent that this post is simply a way to make a couple of readers that I know are out there aware of some stuff out there in the literature (literature that I have no business reading, I think) that might or might not be of interest.

At this point I will stop pretending to be a grad student. Go check out Kenny Roby's new album called the Mercy Filter. This guy was from the Clemson, South Carolina area and rocks harder than you.

What have I done?

With a couple of clicks of a mouse's button, this blog is now retooled to accept comments from any John Q Public out there (at least I think - somebody better test it and git back to me).

I also changed the default style template, cause our monitor at home is starting to fade to black. It was gettin' hard to read/see the text. (Anybody know a deal on the fancy new flat screen jobbies?)

Anyway, it looks like all the links were stripped from the old one. We will have to rebuild.

Why all the sudden activity? Simply because I had a surprising inquiry about the blog from some folks. I had no idea anyone was still looking at it.

Sickest Shit Ever

sickest shit ever... http://www.slate.com/id/2139026/?nav=tap3

Well, maybe not as sick as the Gestapo.

That is all.

MF

John Henry is one of the best songs ever.

In the interest in resuscitating a near-dead corner of the internet, I'm going to devote this long-overdue entry to my simmering [what's a milder word for obsession?] with the song John Henry.

...Not sure what got me going on this, but I've been accumulating several different versions of this song from different artists. For me, the song is just about one of the best American songs around. Its' got the man-versus-machine/man-beats-machine/man-dies-from-exhaustion storyline that really resonates with the kids these days. [Kind of like an early folksie version of the Matrix or the Terminator - only without all the suck-ass sequels]. John really pokes a finger in the eye of technocrats, so the theme is timeless. Its' even got a side story about his woman who also takes-names-and-kicks-ass. Given the right interpretation, the whole story plays itself out on top of a hard-driving train-inspired rhythm and melody. What more could you ask of a song?

Anyway, so far I've put together a collection of this song performed by:
- Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. …came across this song while a DJ at WUVT. These guys tear it up.
- John Cephas and Phill Wiggins. …two great contemporary (aka living) piedmont blues artists from Virginia that play the same instruments as Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry (guitar and harmonica), but a smoother delivery.
- Doc Watson. Not bad, perhaps a bit too laid back for me, but that's just Doc Watson's delivery. This guy has one of the mellowest deliveries around - he could turn a Napalm Death tune into a lullaby.
- Paul Robeson. …not sure what to make of this one. Very formal. Sounds like a funeral. Still, this guy is kind of a legend. ...got it from the Corvallis Public Library.

The deliveries are pretty contrasting.

In Time (the Revelator), Gillian Welch doesn't take on the song explicitly, but her Elvis Presley Blues incorporates its elements and links them to the Elvis very creatively.

I kind of want to keep diggin and find the best version out there...

…They've also begun killing poultry up in the mountains, in the border areas…

We live in strange times right now. NPR had a story about bird flu in Iraq on All Things Considered this evening. I only caught part of it on the drive home from work, but that one phrase, by Ivan Watson, really caught my attention. He was describing part of the Iraqi government's initial response to finding human deaths due to bird flu in the Kurdish part of their country.

The phrase is packed with elements of barbarism and cruelty (although admittedly a mild form of barbarism). I imagined killing fields for dead chickens and chaos at the fringes of society - at the borders and up in the hills (The only problem is that things are way more chaotic in the center of the country). Anyway, Hunter S. Thompson couldn't have said it better himself.

Yeah, I know - stupid post. So what, maybe you got something better to say.