Washington State Road 94, near Silverton.

I originally set out to go to the North Cascades Highway, but got off the interstate for a burger and decided to stay off and head east. I ended up in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, which, it should be noted, gets a TON of recreational use during the summer.

I also originally set out to take a lot of pictures, but I ended up not taking many. Places easily accessible from the road are usually crammed with people, and I wasn’t equipped for hiking. I turned off onto a dirt road (Road #4065) because it had one of those little ‘take photos over there’ signs. Unsurprisingly, there was literally no place to turn out off the road that wasn’t full of people.

However, I did get to the trailhead for Sunrise Mine Trail, which extends up into a lovely valley. And which the forest service says is one of the most difficult trails in the region. (Gains 2400 feet in 2.6 miles.)

Due to the need to dodge campers, and the fact that I was driving through a forest (can’t see the mountain valleys for the trees..), this is the only picture of note that I managed to get, and it’s not that good:

It’s either Morningstar or Sperry Peak.

A nice drive in the mountains, but not much good photography. Ah well. I suffer.

On the way back, I found the answer to the question: “Why do they call this town Granite Falls?”

Via Jerry Kindall:

Daddy Long-Legs, an example of whimsical engineering if ever there was.

A couple weeks back I had a lovely thrift store find: A LaserDisc player. Remember LaserDiscs? They’re like giant CDs designed to store movies. They’re as big as the old vinyl LPs, and it takes up both sides to store a whole movies’-worth of data on them. So during the middle of the movie, you have to turn over the disc.

My landlord has a LD player, and it’s here in the house. It’s a rather sucky one, or maybe it just needs cleaning, but it’s lacking in picture quality. I know this because when I first moved here, I bought a LD at Half-Price Books to play on it.

That LD was (and still is) ‘For All Mankind,’ which is a remarkable movie. It’s one I’ve been wanting to find for a long time. It’s the only movie I’ve ever been to the premiere for, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; some astronauts were there, and Al Reinert told about how great it was making the movie.

The movie was shot on location in space. It’s about spaceflight as the Apollo astronauts experienced it. It’s edited together from raw NASA footage, with interviews and source audio telling the story.

My friend Robert used to joke about sci-fi movies being “Shot on location… IN SPACE!” and here it’s really true.

Anyway, the point here is that I found a new LD player (well, new to me), and the story here is that the very night I found the player, I also found a used book store with a lot of dirt-cheap Hong Kong action LaserDiscs. So last night I fell asleep to the first half of ‘Butterfly And Sword.’

‘Butterfly And Sword’ is a really beautiful martial arts movie, but the plot makes no sense at all. The plot usually suffers in this genre, but this particular plot literally makes no sense at all, even allowing for the language barrier. And that’s OK, since it’s all just spectacle anyway.

And, also, since it’s a nice pre-dream dream to be having while vegetating on the sofa.

sean asks why I love trashblog.

The reason is that I have a deep and abiding love of discards and detritus.

Back in the days when I lived in Houston, I would semi-obsessively collect things from the street. Not just anything, but things that were somehow poigniant or beautiful or ironic. The theme I kept with the longest was lugnuts, especially chrome ones.

Somewhere in my storage unit, there’s a wooden box about the size of a shoe box, and it’s mostly full of lugnuts. I’d be wandering around downtown Houston, or wherever, and I’d see one and pick it up. Once I was in Sparks, Nevada, on my way to Burning Man, and I saw four identical lugnuts in one spot; obviously someone’s car needed immediate mechanical attention.

It isn’t until you start noticing lugnuts everywhere that you really appreciate their importance, diversity, and, dare I say, beauty.

A face only a mother could lug? This is one I found the other day while walking across Lake City Way. I see lugs in the street from time to time, but resist the urge to pick them up, since I have enough crap in my life already. For some reason I grabbed this one.

Here’s some other road crap I keep, because it was given to me:

It’s a metal number sign, and it had the card stuck in the corner fold when they found it. Somehow it ended up with me. The suck part is that I can’t remember who gave it to me; it’s one of two or three people, and I can’t remember which. It’s been sitting in a box in the storage unit for a really long time.

So do I throw it away? Or do I hang it on the wall as art?

Oh, and there’s also the tale of the mystical Eazy Cheeze which I got a lot of mileage out of, but that’s another ‘blog entry.

Anyone who’s known me for more than, say, 5 years will instantly understand why I love trashblog.

I’m also looking at Zazzle.com, thinking they have their shit together. Have any of you kind folks used them?

I’m amazed at the amount of stuff in the ‘throw away, sell on ebay or at Half-Price Books, or give to charity’ pile. This is from going through my storage unit a few boxes at a time and either consolidating boxes or just tossing all the crap that’s in them.

Some of them have, like, a handful of old receipts in them. For real. I wonder what the hell I was thinking at the time. And then I think: Maybe someone broke into my storage unit, pulled a box out of the middle of the stack, stole all the stuff in the box, left a handful of receipts, and put the box back.

Or not.

But the point here, I think, is that I got to the boxes of books, and I found the courage to put a lot of that stuff in the ‘get rid of it’ pile.

Once upon a time, I was perseverating on Aldous Huxley, so I ended up with most of his novels. A whole bookshelf’s-worth. They’re all going away now. I’m keeping the Harlan Ellison stuff, despite the fact that he was another perseveration, because he’s actually good, and much more relevant to my life now. Not that I’ll re-read them all any time soon, however.

I have a first edition of Huxley’s ‘Island,’ but with no dust jacket, and damaged with soot. I found it in a free pile somewhere. ‘Island’ is one of my favorite books, but I’ll never read this sooty edition. So do I go to the trouble of finding out if it’s worth anything? Do I restore it somehow, remove the soot, find a scan of the dust jacket I can print out to make it at least seem a little bit desirable? Do I try to get on ‘Antiques Roadshow’ just because of this crummy book?

Indecision. It’s what kills the momentum, and is the reason I need a storage unit in the first place.

I shaved off my goatee.

My goatee never was very large, and always got too scruffy too soon. I’d run the 1/2″ clippers through it and tame it into shape, but even then it always grew sideways. Meaning it never actually looked like I had trimmed it.

I’d had the goatee for at least a decade. Back when I had long (LONG) hair, I discovered that people didn’t mistake me for a woman if I had a goatee. There was one guy behind the counter at McDonald’s who said ‘Yes, ma’am,’ saw the goatee, and said, ‘Oh, sorry. Didn’t see your goatee.’ And that’s when I became a guy who had a goatee, rather than a guy who might keep his goatee.

But the long hair is gone (transformed, I am told, into a wig for chemo patients). Now I have a buzz cut, because it’s so easy to maintain without having to go to the barber or stylist, or whatever term you use for such people nowadays.

Yesterday I walked into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and realized that I needed to trim my goatee. And during the time between that realization and getting the clippers out of the hall closet, I decided to cut the whole thing off and enter the manly, macho world of stubble. (Anyone who knows me knows that the thin caterpillar’s-worth of goatee is the only place where my beard actually grows.)

So ZAP. It’s gone. And in the aftermath, as I looked at myself in the mirror, I realized something else about myself: I have a double chin.

Crap.

Linkage:

Now it’s time to chill out.

Tasty news product.

Iraq: What Went Wrong? (Linked from here so I’ll remember to read it tomorrow.)

RetroPhoto has lots (that is, lots) of information about the photographic technologies of our ancestors.

I was looking around on eBay at photographic fine prints, and found this lovely piece, and wondered what platinum contact processing was, and now I know, thanks to RetroPhoto.

…which links to Tom Millea‘s web site of astoundingly beautiful platinum process images.

There’s also some pictures of the 20×24 (that’s *inches*) camera that Polaroid chose not to put much effort into.

I’ve been reading Maureen Dowd, who SimonTemplar quotes here. It’s an article worth reading.

I’ve held the opinion that the Bush administration (hereafter referred to as ‘BushCo’) was a bunch of evil people who are pretty good at chess, who could never get elected to hold the kind of power they needed to rule the world, so they got Bush to be their figurehead. And by chess, I refer of course to hatching schemes that display competence in the realm of geopolitics.

Now, the main problem for me, trying to figure out if I’m right or not, is that they might be better at chess than I am. That is, what kind of strange and brilliant plans might they have that I’m simply ill-equipped to understand?

When I look at all that’s happened in Iraq and the so-called war on terror, I see what looks like total incompetence. BushCo has dropped every ball. They didn’t take terrorism seriously, and 9/11 ended up happening. They got bad intel and invaded Iraq over false pretenses, and then they fucked up the occupation. If the new sovereign state of Iraq ends up being Islamist (and I predict it will), then Osama Bin Laden will say, ‘Thank you, BushCo, you predictable motherfuckers!’

Every US piece on the chessboard is pinned or blocked. We’re not in check, but there’s simply very little we can do to move forward. This looks like a middlegame played by an amateur.

But consider: If you’re going to be pinned down in a war on terror, you might as well be pinned down with your military over the second largest oil reserve on the planet. That’s why the Texas Oil Mafia has been hot to invade Iraq since the 90s. And I think the real reason for the invasion can be boiled down to this: If we invade, we’ll likely end up controlling the petro-economy there.

This is also where the partisan game comes into play. BushCo knows it can’t win this game before November, so we’re stuck in a holding pattern. Anything BushCo does to make the situation better overall helps KerryCo win the game next time. And if KerryCo doesn’t win, then BushCo just goes ahead and does what it was going to do anyway.

So from every angle, it’s in BushCo’s best interest to let things deteriorate to some degree. That way there’s a crisis to be solved by the ‘known known’ BushCo, there’s a reason to keep US military forces there to ‘keep the peace’ (which will happen, despite the dual-use nature of that military), and partisans can continue to argue over who supports the troops more, rather than discussing important issues like whether or not Bush is competent to be President.

This isn’t some conspiracy theory mumbo-jumbo, this is simply what the pieces look like on the board. It also assumes that BushCo really is competent at chess, which, as stated earlier, is more and more in question with every passing day. If anyone in the BushCo sphere is paying attention to what’s going on, then someone up there sees that this is the case.