The continuing saga, brought to you here because I want to write it down somewhere.

Today I did a few things to the van. I replaced Temperature Sensor II (which history will probably show didn’t really need replacement, but it’s an $8 part), finally put a new bolt on the throttle assembly (I was using zip ties. It’s two bolts, and only one was missing, so it’s not like it was going to fall off), and replaced some of the vacuum hoses.

There are two vaccum hoses that I dealt with: The one going to the fuel pressure regulator, and the one coming off (or is that going on) the throttle assembly. I had some hose, but it was just ever-so-slightly too big. Zip ties to the rescue! I cut the hose to length, and then tightened the ends with small zip ties before slipping the hose on. If you tighten before installation, you can really torque it. Zip ties are a close #2 only to duct tape.

The temp sensor is a little round thing about the size of a quarter, as thick as $1 in quarters. It’s silvery shiny and flat on one side, and has an attractive blue electrical connector on the other. It’s protected from leaking by a rubber grommet around the outside. To install it, you find the thermostat housing, pull out a locking pin, pull out the old sensor, fumble for the new one while coolant spills out, and then put the new one in as quick as you can. Then you replace the locking pin, re-connect the wire, and pray. Of course, it probably would have done better to pray beforehand.

There’s a story with the new throttle bolt. I got on the bus to go get lunch and this stupid bolt at the NAPA place. Only after I got there, I discovered that they were moving, and thus, closed. I wandered down the street to the Schuck’s Auto place, and they, too were in the middle of reorganization of some sort. I had to go be annoying twice just to get someone to sell me a few dollars worth of bolts and washers; they were all diligently stocking and re-stocking. So diligently that they refused to even make eye contact with me.

The result of all this effort: Not much better, but replacing the throttle bolt messed up the throttle idle sensor switch adjustment, which I’ll go back out and destroy tomorrow. The last time I adjusted it I about went insane… You have to loosen a tiny screw and then twist another screw until you hear a click, and then re-tighten the first screw. Except that by re-tightening the first screw, you change the adjustment, so you have to allow for it. And of course you’re doing this while bent over the engine, with two little tiny allen wrenches (did I mention they’re hex-head screws?) under a layer of machinery.

And for all of you out there googling away, here are some relevant search results: 1986 Vanagon Wasserboxer water-cooled 2.1L why do I do this to myself?

I want to point out that Gadling.com has yet another overview of a topic I find interesting: Plastic washing around the Pacific ocean. Apparently someone at Harper’s wrote a story about it, so they’re writing a story about the story.

My previous posts about the gyre…

The flood of XTC ephemera continues. Melbourne, 1980.

The punk Beatles.

Stock Exchange Of Visions.

View short videos of thinkers on topics, vote thumbs-up or thumbs-down on their vision.

The problem is that it’s most of what I’m seeing here isn’t visionary. It’s all mere prediction. Still interesting, though, and easy to digest and process.

As always: Begin with Vandana Shiva.

On a related note, perhaps check out The Long Now Foundation, in particular their Long Bets project.

I’m looking at Wrangel-St. Elias and Glacier Bay National Parks on Google Earth, and I’m thinking I want to go there. Take a ferry up to Skagway, drive over the Yukon Pass, make a loop to Anchorage, or maybe Seward, and take the ferry back home.

The problem is that there’s so much to see in Alaska.

Kobuk Valley National Park draws my attention, simply because it’s so devoid of people. Sand dunes in central Alaska. Who’d have thought? But where there’s glaciation, there’s silt and sand. And this lovely description:

Expect high winds throughout the year and short, mild, cool sunny summers. Experience 24 hours of daylight for one month and a long, severe, harsh, extremely cold winter with about one hour of daylight by December 1. The area receives 10-12″ precipitation annually.

[..]

You’ll find no roads, no gift [shops], and no parking facilities within the park. Trails don’t exist; neither do campgrounds. Not even the park headquarters or visitor center are within the park. Both facilities are in Kotzebue, Alaska – an airplane ride away.

Kobuk Valley’s visitor isn’t your average tourist. They tend to be skilled backcountry explorers familiar with surviving potential high winds, rain, and snow — and that’s in the summer months. Winter visits are recommended only to outdoorspeople experienced in arctic camping and survival techniques. The ranger staff can provide valuable information on conditions and logistics for first time travelers.

On the other hand, Gates Of The Arctic National Park is accepting applications for their artist in residence program. All you have to do is keep up with a ranger, give at least one piece to the NPS, and speak publically about your experience. They’ve also got good birding.

However, I think the closest I’m going to get to that region any time soon is Vancouver Island.

I recall being outside a suburban house, and there were birds in the sky, silhouetted in the twilight. They weren’t very high up, just above my head. One was carrying a spire and weathervane, the kind you’d see on top of a Victorian mansion. The other… I grabbed it out of the sky. It grabbed me back; its wings were hands.

My wife… Or at least the woman came out of the house and wondered what I was doing, and I showed her the bird made of hands. “Hands. It’s made of hands.” She didn’t understand; birds aren’t made of hands. “Here, look.” And I showed her, but then we were looking to where the birds had been flying.

The end of the pine forest suburban street expanded into a clearing of rolling hills. Bright, late-afternoon sunlight bathed the scene. The sky was full of the sun, as if the Earth had switched places with Mercury. There was a building at the foot of the hill, and we went it. I say ‘we,’ but who were we? Who was I with? I don’t know.

The building was a sort of play place, like Chuck E. Cheese, but no food. The walls and floor were blue, with a pattern of the logo of the place. And they moved. Part of the premise of this place was that you could put money into slots in various weird machines, like arcade games, but not really. You’d put the coin in the slot in a certain way, and the machine might give you a prize if you were skillful enough. The floors and walls moved in small jerks, just to mess up your coin-dropping technique and add challenge. There were children running around trying to get their prizes, and their parents looked on, talking among themselves.

I found a machine that was sort of like a doll house. I climbed in and looked for the coin slot, but there was none. A little girl pointed out that it was broken. Emerging, I realized I had been at war, and the company around me would never get the prize. There were four of us, with long brown wool overcoats covering our dress uniforms. There was dust and fighting, and the oppressive sun was our enemy. Of the four of us, there was one who was obviously doomed. The other three of us were always seperate from him, even though he was our buddy. Other soldiers would dive into the bright light, absorbed by it, taken beyond to something promising. Something we didn’t really need to fight. We stood in the hallway of this weird blue game room on the jerking floor, looking at each other, not sure how to proceed.

This is, by the way, a recurring dream I’ve had for years. The hand-bird is new, though.

Dreams unfold and re-assemble for me. They riff on themselves and sometimes remix, with recurring sections interspersed with new parts. Dream interpretation books talk about single symbols as being important, but for me whole narratives involving multiple symbols get juggled around, like subroutines of a computer program.

I also believe that, through some mechanism yet to be understood, dreams are (or at least can be) cooperative. Meaning, groups of people can dream together, and not necessarily by consent. I think the hand-bird was someone else having a very interesting experience in their dream world. As soon as I pulled it out of the sky, it became less like a living thing and more like a prop. Its dreamer switched to a new narrative, away from the story of the hand-bird chasing the other bird (which, in their experience, might have been a car chase or a conversation or who knows what). In my dream, I was left with the form but not the essence.

So. More dreams. Is the bit above the line more or less dream-like than the few paragraphs you just read? Which is more muddled and confusing?

Summitposts.org’s page on the Wallowa Mountains. Focuses mostly on Eagle Cap Wilderness, but also lots of interesting geology.

I’m not interested so much in the peaks as much as the alpine meadows and nearby Hell’s Canyon of the mighty Snake river.

OK. I can’t pass this up, because it’s just so hard not to.

Via Christian Science Monitor:

January 18, 2007 at 1:30 p.m. EST
Report: Cheney rejected Iran’s offer of concessions in 2003
A former US senior official says the offer was very close to what the US currently wants.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
A package of concessions offered to the US by Iran in 2003 was very close to what the US is now asking from Tehran. The BBC reports that Iran offered, among other things, to end support for Lebanese and Palestinian militant groups and to help stabilize Iraq following the US-led invasion. But a former US senior official told BBC’s Newsnight program that the package was rejected by Vice President Dick Cheney’s office.

One of the then Secretary of State Colin Powell’s top aides told the BBC the state department was keen on the plan – but was over-ruled.

“We thought it was a very propitious moment to do that,” Lawrence Wilkerson told Newsnight. “But as soon as it got to the White House, and as soon as it got to the Vice-President’s office, the old mantra of ‘We don’t talk to evil’… reasserted itself.”

The BBC reports that in exchange for the above concessions, along with making its nuclear program more transparent, Iran wanted the US to “end its hostility, to end sanctions,” as well as to disband an Iranian rebel group based in Iraq and repatriate its members. [..]

The goal of the Cheney/Bush administration is to cause chaos. No one believes me when I say so, despite evidence such as this.

I’m a huge fan of XTC, and a huge fan of Andy Partridge. And here’s an interview with him about his Fuzzy Warbles CD collection. Talking about his early recordings and some stuff about the process of songwriting and production.

Panorama-gallery.com. They don’t do stitched panos, just film shot through various wide format cameras.

I was looking for markets for panoramic images, and came upon James Blakeway, who wasn’t a photographer but just started selling posters out of the back of his car on the beach in LA. Now you simply can’t avoid his name if you start looking for pano posters. According to his web site, his most popular posters are the ones of auto racetracks and sports stadia. I guess people think it’s cool to connect with those things through posters.