Because of the way the web works, while I was checking out the link to the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, I ended up at the Washington State Tourism web site, which confronted me with an image of a two-masted sailing ship in front of a mountain range made gold with the sunset. So it turns out the ship is the Lady Washington, a volunteer-oriented sailing vessel that wanders around spreading goodwill and cheer. Furthermore, she’ll be on a public sail from Kirkland tomorrow and the next day, 1800-2100. Anyone want to go?

And from that tourism website, I found the WA scenic byways web site. And now I simply must go drive the Swift Water Byway.

A little less than a week ago I went with some friends to Goldmyer hot springs, for the second time this summer.

I rented the vehicle, so I drove. Unless you have a 4×4, you really want to rent a vehicle. I got a Subaru Outback, which isn’t exactly a monster truck, but it has the clearance and all-wheel drive.

What’s funny about this is that it was three guys, myself included, and two women. The two other guys have seriously sublimated control issues. I do, too, but I was driving this time, and when I’m not driving, I respect the fact that someone else is.

So there was lots of ha-ha-ha joke-about-Homer’s-driving type stuff, and more than one or two condescending statements that weren’t even disguised as jest. They’d complain that I was going too slow. They’d complain that I was going too fast. They’d tell me not to stop and look at things, and tell me to stop so they could look at things. This is the guys, mind ye. The women were perfect gentlemen.

I love to drive. If I had a car with an infinite gas tank, I’d drive across this great big continent to every corner without stopping. I love navigating from place to place, time zone to time zone on the pavement, and pothole to pothole off. I’m good at it, too. Don’t diss the driving simply because you’re not the one at the wheel.

Anyway.

We went to the springs and hung out. The water in the cave seemed extra hot, and the cold plunge seemed extra cold. There were other people, but it was OK. I’ve found that once everyone’s naked, there’s a certain set of barriers that are removed, literally and figuratively, and it’s easier to relate.

Places like Goldmyer amaze me, because what bubbles out of the ground is an opportunity for a certain kind of intimacy or closeness that doesn’t exist other places. You have to go out in the mountains, nearly to the ridge of the range, and open yourself up in the most complete way possible before you can find others willing to take the same risk. So don’t diss the driver, because that’s where I’m taking you.

After a long, hard day of sitting around in a pool of hot water, breathing in lithium-charged water vapor, it was time to head back to the car. One of our party came up with the idea of following the road further up the valley towards the headwaters. The road is set to be closed in the next few months, and it might be the last opportunity we had to drive up there, so we did it.

Beautiful views, natch. We got to the literal end of the road, to a trailhead for the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area. The Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie gathered momentum to the south, and a lovely trail to the north wound up past a pile of boulders, through an old growth forest, over a tiny bridge over a tiny creek, and off to who knows where.

Well, it turns out that if we’d gone just a little farther up that trail, we’d have been at the Hardscrabble Lakes. Helas.

Anyway. Now I’m consumed with the desire to hike all those trails through all those mountain valleys. Naturally, however, I’ve spent the past week here at home, doing nothing of note.

None dare call it theft. That’s ‘billion,’ with a ‘B.’

Senators Ask Where $8.8 Bln in Iraq Funds Went
By Sue Pleming

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – At least $8.8 billion in Iraqi funds that was given to Iraqi ministries by the former U.S.-led authority there cannot be accounted for, according to a draft U.S. audit set for release soon.

The audit by the Coalition Provisional Authority’s own Inspector General blasts the CPA for “not providing adequate stewardship” of at least $8.8 billion from the Development Fund for Iraq that was given to Iraqi ministries.

The audit was first reported on a Web site earlier this month by journalist and retired Col. David Hackworth. A U.S. official confirmed the contents of the leaked audit cited by Hackworth (www.hackworth.com) were accurate.

I asked what people liked to see here, and some folks said they liked geeky stuff and photography stuff. Well, here’s some geeky photography stuff:

I spent a bit of time playing around with Lynkeos, which looks promising for what I want to do (stack images and do math on them). I loaded in a few 5-meg image files, though, and it subsequently RAM-swapped and ate up all my hard drive space. It was designed by a guy who wanted to stack tiny images retrieved from his homemade webcam/Newtonian telescope contraption (which he says has a focal length of over 3 meters, which I think is kind of cool).

But some more searching led me to: VIPS, which is an LGPL/GPL application that is described as a combination of Excel and Photoshop. You give it a bunch of images and then define mathmatical relationships between them. Apparently major museums are using it to… Well, I don’t quite understand everything they’re using it for, but could a painter in, say, the 1600s ever in his wildest dreams imagine that his painting would sit before a huge contraption that collects digital color information at 20 pixels per millimeter so that people all over the world can see it over the internet? VIPS links to this huge contraption, so no doubt they’re using VIPS to stitch the sections of captured painting back together in the computer.

Meanwhile, in Houston…

My friend Brett is in a band called Slapshifter, and they’re having their EP release party at Rudyard’s this Saturday. He sent me an email about it, even though I’m two time zones away. I asked him this question: “I sure would like to hear the EP, though. Is it hey-we’re-havin’-fun pop or I-want-to-kill-your-momma rock?” I ask, since he’s equally capable in both genres.

He replies: “As for your classification question, we’re a “we’re havin’ fun killing your momma poprock” kind of band with enough blues thrown in to keep the toothless drunks at the bar from leaving. [..] It’s kind of like The Sundays meets Black Sabbath.”

This from a man who’s very, very close to being a PhD. Rawk awn!

Speaking of which, here’s Brett’s old band, Joint Chiefs, from back in the days before there was such a thing as a Clinton presidency, with ‘Rigged.’ Brett does the rap in the middle, and is playing the Chapman Stick, meaning, the bassline is his. Warning: You’ll hear naughty words.

James says he’s comforted by my continued obsessions over things no one cares about, and I’m grateful for the gratitude.

But I’ve also been re-thinking my concept here on xanga. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is that I want to express here. If you’re a fan of any particular thing I seem to do with some regularity, please nominate and vote in the comments section below.

Update: I appreciate all the feedback. I don’t really know what to change, if anything. I keep thinking I’ll get more disciplined and focused about something, and center my ‘blog on that, but I think discipline and focus belong to realms where the effort will be rewarded in cold hard cash.

politics

The Coincidence Theorist’s Guide to 9/11

I’ve only made it about a third of the way through, and I’m already pissed off. Oh well. Time to think about rainbows and kitty cats.

But before that, I must link to Patriotboy, and again to The Rude Pundit, because they’re working along similar vectors.

My only complaint about those similar vectors is that sarcasm puts off all but the choir you’re preaching to. It’s an automatic waste of any persuasive value your information might have had if you express it thusly:

Rodney Paige, Secretary of Our Leader’s Ministry of Propaganda, Youth Division is delighted to report that the voucher movement is a splendid success. One way to destroy the Godless communist atheistic Christophobic public education is by siphoning off their tax-dollars to fly-by-night fads, the more expensive the better, such as charter schools. And now, the results are in and the charter schools have taken in more than 600,000 students that would otherwise be exposed to liberal teacher-unionists. Charter schools are instead run by private corporations, who understand Jesus’ admonition that the invisible hand can’t manage a vineyard as well as a no-bid sweetheart deal.

Not that I’m really complaining, and, as I’ve said, I’m sick of seeing everyone play nice while the fascists kick their heads in, but it sure would be nice to see this information repackaged, and I’m too lazy to do it.

You know, I’m getting really sick of hearing about all the loyalty oaths and such required to attend Bush’s campaign rallies. I mean, I’m not sick of hearing about the loyalty oaths; I want to hear more about those, because it means other people will hear about them, too. What sickens me is that no one has infiltrated. No one has set up a concerted effort to round up hundreds of people to go to Bush/Cheney events and be publically turned away while cameras are rolling. No one has gone ahead and signed the loyalty oath and then gone in and raised a ruckus (polite or otherwise) anyway.

I think that the Bush/Cheney campaign managers should learn that it’s a stupid thing to keep potential voters away from the candidates unless they swear fealty. And the best way to teach them is to mock them mercilessly.

So mock away! It’s laughable, so LAUGH.

Boing boing has this article about a web site devoted to pho shops.

‘Pho’ is Vietnamese brothy noodle soup. The article I’ve linked to explains how to pronounce it, and that reminded me of when I lived in the Little Vietnam area of downtown Houston:

My housemate went to the pho shop down the block one time, and ordered ‘foe.’ The waiter brought him a cordless telephone handset. Another time, I went there with him, and even though I ordered chicken pho, they brought me tripe, all buried under the noodles so I wouldn’t notice until I’d eaten a down to that point. Darek bit down on a pebble that had been placed in his bowl. Yay racism.

And speaking of other blogs… You know what makes me happy? The Rude Pundit makes me happy.

Rudy Rucker

Joy of Hacking

Coding a simulation forces a programmer to ponder unexpectedly many issues. God is in the details. One might go so far as to assert that a person doesn’t fully understand something until they’ve written a simulation of it — a precept which has the perhaps too übergeekly corollary that non-programmers don’t fully understand anything!