Tommyjournal

Tommyjournal archive October 2007

Tuesday 30 Oct 2007 1 comment

Wayne Geiger, a 23-year-old soldier from my town, was killed by an IED on October 18. He was the first member of the US armed forces from Inyo County to die in Iraq.

People came out to the main streets of all the towns in the valley on Saturday morning to attend a funeral motorcade. I didn't know Wayne or his family personally, but I went to town and stood with friends to mourn his passing. My favorite dog stood quietly at my side.

The procession included a group of motorcycles from Patriot Guard Riders, who say about themselves

Our main mission is to attend the funeral services of fallen American heroes as invited guests of the family. Each mission we undertake has two basic objectives.
Show our sincere respect for our fallen heroes, their families, and their communities.

Shield the mourning family and their friends from interruptions created by any protestor or group of protestors.
We accomplish the latter through strictly legal and non-violent means.

I don't know how often the Riders have to take on that latter task, but there were no protests or interruptions on Saturday. I saw several friends on the street who I know do not support the war, but people set their differences aside and showed their respect. That kind of decency is part of what I like about small town life. The Riders say that the welcome they received in Inyo County this weekend (including donated motel rooms and food) was unprecedented.

Friday 26 Oct 2007 2 comments

After 72 hours of life with my canine friend, I'm spoiled. If I ever get a dog of my own, this one will be a hard act to follow. She's tractable; I only have to say "no" once to get her to stop doing something. She's smart; when we went scrambling on the rockpile across the street, she got ahead of me and knew most of the route I was going to take before I showed it to her.

It would be suboptimal to leave a dog of this breed alone for eight hours a day. She is too intelligent, she needs something to do. It seems like most of the smartest breeds are active breeds. The intelligent yet quiet dog--the dog with the temperament of a Zen master--may not have been bred yet.

Thursday 25 Oct 2007 2 comments

I got stung by a scorpion for the first time today. He (she?) was hiding in some clothes that I grabbed to wash.

It felt kind of being stuck by a pointy object, kind of like a bee sting, and also had a kind of electric feel to it. The pain went away in a few minutes.

I escorted the scorpion outside, with no hard feelings. I was just glad that he stung me and not my house guest.

Wednesday 24 Oct 2007 1 comment

I have a canine house guest this week. She's lying on the floor next to me as I write this.

She minds me like she's known me for years. She comes when I call. When we went for a walk in the desert around sundown, she ran ahead of me and off the trail to look around, but whenever she'd get about 100 meters in front of me she'd stop and look back to check in. In short, she behaved just as you would want.

She likes to sleep with her head on something. Along with the dog, I was lent a pillow that she's used to. She preferred a pile of my clothes to the pillow.

She's 2½ years old, past the stage where she used to chew things. She hasn't disturbed anything in my house. She doesn't get on the furniture. She is just about everything I could want in a dog. I'll be sad to give her back at the end of the week. She belongs to a friend of mine.

I apologize for not having pics to show you, I have been a laggard about getting a digital camera. I guess that's a comma splice; ever since I read this, I've been self-conscious about commas I've written.

She's a Queensland Heeler (a.k.a. Australian Cattle Dog). I weighed her this morning: 18 kg.

She's not sitting next to me any more; I finished the vegetables I was eating while blogging. So far, the one downside of having her around is that I'd prefer not to have someone coveting my food as I eat. But she does have the manners to just lie there and look at you, she doesn't whine or try to steal your food.

Saturday 20 Oct 2007 comment?

In the 20^th century, you didn't need to write the first two digits of the year on checks, as they were already printed:
check 1993

But since 2000, I haven't seen any part of the date preprinted on checks:
check 2000

I wonder why. Do they not bother printing 20 on checks because they know 20 can't add the coolness to checks that 19 used to?

I saved a bunch of stuff (receipts, tickets, ...) with 2000 dates, because years like 2000 (or, if you prefer, MM) don't come around very often.

And because dates like 31 Dec 1999 don't come around very often, I saved this:
spider 1999

I like how one of the spider's legs extends over onto the selvage.

Friday 19 Oct 2007 2 comments

A letter to the editor in today's NY Times:

Re "Honoring the Dalai Lama" (editorial, Oct. 18):

Not only do I wish that the Dalai Lama's lifelong dedication to nonviolence and tolerance might rub off on those rushing to embrace him in Washington, I also wish that the Dalai Lama had used this moment to address our disastrous war in Iraq.

Gretchen Kronenberg
Belmont, Mass., Oct. 18, 2007

The Dalai Lama's lifelong dedication to nonviolence is illustrated by this excerpt from a 1993 interview:


interviewer:	I once read that as a little boy in Lhasa, you liked war toys.
Dalai Lama:	Yes, very much. I also had an air rifle in Lhasa. And I have one in India. I often feed small birds, but when they come together, hawks spot them and catch them -- a very bad thing. So in order to protect these small birds, I keep the air rifle.
interviewer:	So it is a Buddhist rifle?
Dalai Lama:	[Laughs] A compassionate rifle!

In other words: It's okay to shoot those who I have decided are the bad guys. Leaders routinely use the same kind of rationale to justify the choice to wage war.

Using an air rifle against hawks may be small potatoes, but it illustrates his thinking--and the Dalai Lama has operated on a large scale as well. He and thousands of Tibetan guerrillas were backed by the CIA in resisting the Chinese. From that 1993 interview:


interviewer:	In Tibet, from the late 1950s until the early 1970s, one of your brothers was involved in leading a guerrilla movement against the Chinese. In fact, the guerrillas were supported by the C.I.A. How did you feel about that?
Dalai Lama:	I'm always against violence. But the Tibetan guerrillas were very dedicated people. They were willing to sacrifice their own lives for the Tibetan nation. And they found a way to receive help from the C.I.A.

I'm always against violence. But the Tibetan guerrillas were very dedicated people. That's politician-speak.

I am not making light of China's conduct with regard to Tibet. I am only saying that the popular image of the Dalai Lama as having always been nonviolent is a misperception. And although he describes himself as a "simple Buddhist monk", the Dalai Lama knows how to use some pretty crafty language.

His web site tells us that "His Holiness is not necessarily vegetarian"--the same His Holiness who said it was a very bad thing for hawks to prey on another animals.

Wednesday 17 Oct 2007 comment?

This morning I added a bolt to a climbing route. The climber who'd established the route died earlier this year (from drugs, not from climbing) and had left the route unfinished. I borrowed a hammer drill (thanks JD) and brought along an extension cord and the UPS that's normally between my computer and the wall socket. It dished out enough power to run the drill, barely. That granite is tough.

Before I pressed the UPS into drilling service, I got out the instruction manual to see how many watts it was rated at, and to read and ignore the directions that say it's intended for use with computer loads only.

Along with the instructions, I found the product registration card. (I seldom send those in, as the law says you don't have to in order for your warranty to be good.) I resent being asked the kinds of questions that are on registration cards. This one asks about my income, my level of education, and whether I or the spouse (that I can't have) enjoy participating in any of 51 different activities. I don't know why a power supply manufacturer would care whether I enjoy activity #24 (Avid Book Reading) as opposed to activity #25 (Bible/Devotional Reading). Some things are just mysterious.

This was the first climbing I'd done in a month; I'd been giving my shoulders a break. Just climbing the one route today left my shoulders unhappy. My climbing days may be history.

Tuesday 16 Oct 2007 4 comments

I saw my doctor yesterday. We spoke about (among other things) my faulty shoulders. He said the shoulder joint was well adapted for our predecessors who walked on all fours, and is less well suited for what we do with it. That takes some of the mystery out of why mine are so fucked now.

There may not be a lot that can be done to improve the condition of my shoulders. I said I was more or less resigned to the fact that I'm not young any more. My doctor said that as gay men, we tend to resent that our bodies don't work like they did when we were nineteen. I asked, "You mean straight men don't?" and he said no, not as much anyway.

Nineteen. Nice number.

There was horrendous wind around Mojave when I drove home today. Mojave airport reported winds of about 50 MPH. I can attest that there were gusts as well.

The Highway Patrol blocked off route 14 at the north end of Mojave. I asked them what my options were; they said to wait. I walked to a restaurant. The roadblock was still in effect after I'd finished having lunch.

I remembered a bypass that I'd found a few years ago after encountering a freight train stopped athwart the highway in Mojave.

I neither admit nor imply that I did anything today that might have been illegal. But I do imagine that route 14 north of Mojave must be a delight to drive on when you have the road all to yourself.

Sunday 07 Oct 2007 comment?

From a recent entry in guitarist Robert Fripp's online diary:

I have just turned down a likely $150,000 licence on a KC track. This was for use by a tobacco company, to encourage young people to smoke. Beer & cigarettes pay some of the highest fees in sponsorship, advertising, licensing.

As an example of the opposite end of the spectrum of balancing one's own gain versus the greater good, there is spam. A spammer is currently impersonating me, i.e. sending bulk email with spoofed return-to addresses that use my domain name. I get a return-to-sender email each time the spammer tries to send to a bad address; these are flowing in at a rate of about 10 per minute. This has happened before, usually it lasts for a few hours before the spammer moves on to impersonating someone else. This episode started yesterday and continues unabated; the spam appears to be coming from a server in Hungary, and consists of exhortations to visit web sites (hosted in China) that offer penis-enlargement snake oil.

Speaking in Davos, Switzerland in 2004, Bill Gates said, "Two years from now, spam will be solved." If only.

Thursday 04 Oct 2007 2 comments

From an article in The Financial Times last month:

We are now at the equinox, the moment (0951 Greenwich Mean Time on September 23 2007, to be precise) when day and night come into balance everywhere on Earth. For the next three months, as the southern hemisphere tips towards the sun, this changes until the North Pole is starved of light and the South Pole gorges itself, and then everything slowly swings back again.

Isn't this just amazing? Despite all the world's other injustices, everywhere gets the same amount of light over the course of a year. But near the poles it's either famine or feast, whereas, at the tropics, night falls daily with a rather dreary predictability.

Close enough. The Earth's orbit isn't perfectly circular; for now, we who live north of the equator enjoy a summer that lasts ever so slightly longer than the summer down under. But as the Earth is closer to the sun in January than it is in July, summer sunlight is more intense in the southern hemisphere.

India is currently the most significant part of the world with a half-hourly time zone -- five hours behind Greenwich. This has a curious advantage for British journalists there worrying about deadlines, because you can get GMT by the simple trick of turning your watch upside down (trust me, it works).

"trust me, it works"-- as if you should trust information in an article that also says IST is five hours behind Greenwich. (It's 5½ hours ahead.)

The watch-upside-down trick does work, if you take into account the hour hand being off by 15 degrees. E.g., 3:40 upside-down isn't immediately recognizable as 10:10, as the hour hand will be before the 10 position.

(I couldn't resist using 10:10 in an example.)

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