Trip around the neighboorhood

There's something kind of neat about flying over your home country.

Not like in a jetliner though - those are too high, too insulated, too distracting.

No, it has to be a little plane. Just fabric and tube and one purring prop dragging you through the air.
Low enough to be still be a part of the earth below you, even as you're travelling above it. There's an intimacy and an odd sense of context that just... has to be experienced.

So when last weekend, Miss D called me up and asked if I wanted to collect on that ride she'd been promising me, the answer was SOOOO very much yes!


From the bouncing geek dice tied to the frame to the beautifully open cockpit, her plane is a joy.

So fun. :)

Off to Palmer!


There's one ripply mountainface that always stands out to me whenever I pass it.

My... was it my second summer here? ... I attended a traditional music camp on the lake at the base of it. From the camp, that mountain was a gentle presence always with us whereever we walked. From above, the lake that was such a quiet comfort to canoe on seems a puddle.

.

Eventually we made it to Palmer, and had a wonderful chat with the lady running the radios. We briefly considered the use of their ginourmous orange 70's loaner car to get into town (I gotta car that's as big as a whale...) but decided to just walk.

Poked about town a little, had coffee, than back to the strip. On taking off, we saw a few more wonderful creations of human ingenuity lined up on  the ground. Ain't these cool?

After that, we swung over to the glacier for some flightseeing before going home. The colors... again, I fear I and my camera have failed to get anything close to the color of those glaciers below us. The ice cracks into thousands of ridges and crevasses - and inside those crevasses the ice takes on an almost... neon blue. Sometimes they're covered with fresh snow and it just looks like an undulating field. These crevasses were mostly open. Either way.... you do not want to have engine trouble over country like this.

At the base of the glacier, it calves off chunks into water. Those chunks float on the glacial melt lake, collecting against the mountain base like giant bath toys.

One of the things about Alaska is the scale the sights you'll see. Remember a couple years ago almost to the day I mentioned a trip where we "listen[ed] to the cascade of waterfalls miles distant - themselves hundreds of feet high, but only distant white scratches in [our] binoculars"

Well this is that waterfall. I ..um... think. It looks like a tiny little rivulet in the picture. Trust me... it's not. :)

The weather kept us from continuing and and cutting over, so when we'd had our fill of the sights we turned back for home.

As we got near, running in that familiar corrider between the front range of mountains and the highway, I started looking for the spot I'd pooped out last week on my walk. I'd made it surprisingly close to my final "best case" destination I saw, and was honestly surprised by just how much ground that route looked like.... but yeah - making it to the river's not quite in my limits yet.

It sure brought home the old Alaskan bush pilot advertisement though - "Fly an hour or walk a week."
That sounds about right, 'cause just a few minutes later we were rolling into final for the airport near home. 

INCREDIBLE day.



So yeah. If you get a chance to fly on Air D - definately take her up on it.

If you're nowhere near Miss D though, you have another option. Call up your local flight schools and arrange an orientation flight. I won't say it's cheap hiring a flight instructor for an hour or two, but it's less that you might think, and you'll experience your hometown in a way you simply can't imagine from the ground. As life experiences go, it's a couple hours you'll never forget.

And you'll be doing your little part to keep civil aviation going.


Careful though.. you might find out you like it. ;)

Alaskan Summers

A dear friend once passed on to me the observation that "every city tells you what it expects of you."

The infrastructure, the businesses, the community celebrations - all come together to tell a story, and ask you to be a part of it. "Some places tell you to be smart," he says, "others to be successful, or innovative..."


And Anchorage? Anchorage I think tells you to be outside. The wild is relished here.

And so - outside we went.

A friend and I have been way too long since our last chat, so we took it on a hike up the side of one of the hills facing the inlet down south of town. Gorgeous day, and amazingly beautiful scenery.

This time I was taught to recognize columbine and yarrow. The latter was particularly interesting. I'd heard of its usefulness as a poultice or cuts and such before, but hearing it called "our echinancea" opened up a whole other aspect to its use I hadn't heard of.

More particularly - some things just can't be learned from books, I think. No matter how many herbals you might look at, no matter how good the photos - there is simply no substitute for a friend setting you down on the ground and saying "touch this. It is such-and-such." The touch, the small, the essence of it just doesn't fit in pages well.

What a treasure good friends are.




On with the day. I hope yours is well.


Oh - the trip back? The inlet was breathtaking. The sun shone the clouds onto the water to make a glowing silver pool in the inlet. The tops of the clouds were a luminescent creamy orange, like the first glow of iron in a forge as the metal comes to life.

I knew I couldn't hope to capture that with a camera, but I could at least make a hook for my memory to latch onto in some future day, so that someday when I remember my summers in Alaska I remember this.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!!

that is all. :)

Give me a child until ...

So in the midst of an otherwise delightful little book from the early 20th c. on storytelling, I find this gem. Context is thus - snake is out for some sun, and slithers into the palace. Courtiers freak. The prince kills the snake. Snake's wife comes to find her husband, and sees his body. She declares blood for blood, and that night slithers around the Prince's neck, insisting on her right to make the Princess a widow, as the Prince has widowed her.

The king, seeking a just solution, calls in the wise men of the court, and our storyteller continues -

They asked all the judges, but none of them could tell the law of the matter. They shook their heads, and said they would look up all their law-books, and see whether anything of the sort had ever happened before, and if so, how it had been decided. That is the way judges used to decide cases in that country, though I dare say it sounds to you a very funny way. It looked as if they had not much sense in their own heads, and perhaps that was true.
p. 218, The Art of Storytelling,
Marie L. Shedlock. text

Notice the technique there?

Pick something you don't like in your culture - in this case, equity under a uniform law -  and just call it funny. Don't bother to explain why it's been around three thousand years, if you've even bothered to think it out. Just call it silly.  And most of all, make certain to frame the sentence in such a way that it says - "look at this silly thing. Why, you're so much smarter than those silly grownups doing that, aren't you? You're such bright children."

Note this is a piece designed to be orally performed, so you're also adding social pressure to nod and say "yes, teacher!"

Exemplars and legends I get - we need our heroes. But this technique just seems so.... snidely underhanded it gives me the squicks.

I swear... if I'm ever graced with kids, I'll eat dandelions and squirrels before I leave 'em in the hands of strangers for eight hours a day.

grrrr.

The Road Goes Ever on and on...

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

William Blake, Proverbs of Hell

So time had come to at least give the walk thing a try. I wasn't ready for a full historical type trek, so what I carried was a mix of old and modern. The end effect was probably a woebegotten soul fallen out of the 1960's... but if I waited until I had everything perfect, I'd never step out the front door.


Onward!


So. Stuff. No firelock, but as my role models tend more to Alan a Dale than Natty Bumpo, the fiddle wasn't *not* coming. I didn't have any period carriage, so I just tied a sash around the case I had. Certainly heavier than I'd like, but the fabric was wide enough it worked okay. The bedroll with a single oilcloth, a leather satchel holding my water, an overshirt if I needed it, and a notebook. All the various necessaries for an emergency overnight went in the little leather shoulder pouch.


The route... well I didn't quite make the best-case end point I was hoping for, but... looking at the map I'm thinking about 9 miles each way.

Yeah, misjudged things a *little*.  It's been a (far too long) while since I've done any serious walking, and I wanted to find my "comfortable" and "pressing hard, but okay" range.

I um.... found them.

I thought I was doing pretty well at my turnaround point, but my "okay I can stop now I've had my fun" moment came when I was about halfway home. The next three miles were unfun but not bad - the last two fair torturous.

A Marian Mule I am not.Was so not up to building a fort when I got home - much less hauling three times as much weight! :)



Still.. very educational.


Lessons in no particular order -
1. Hat. I had a modern bush hat, but would have loved an extra few inches of brim to keep the sun off. Under woods it wouldn't have mattered so much, but in high sun even what I had was a godsend.

2. The "high and close shot pouch" model of necessary bag doesn't work so well with a woman's blouse. I didn't notice it at first, but by about mile 7 it was digging into the skin of my neck enough to be uncomfortable. I suspect hunters wearing such things over collared men's shirts wouldn't notice it at all. I haven't decided how to resolve this.

3. The inch-wide braided leather straps on my book satchel weren't *nearly* as bad as I was afraid, so far as cutting into my shoulders went. Granted that bag had hardly any weight in it for all its bulk, but it still worked much better than I would have guessed. Still, the construction of it's heavy enough I think I'll be replacing it eventually - at least for this purpose.

4. I had one bundle too many. Some kind of consolidation is in order. I don't know what yet. That said, some kind of "easy to drop things in" bag for forage and tinder would have been handy a couple times.

5. The bedroll rode surprisingly comfy. It makes a nice armrest slung over one shoulder, and being able to draw those ties in or let them out for different carriage positions makes it easier to stay balanced and rested over the course of the day. By about mile ten, I'd adjusted it so that the strap was over one shoulder, on the outside of my arm, so instead of pulling down it was pulling into my shoulder from the side. That worked pretty well.

6. One of the things I tossed for weight reasons when I set out was food. That wouldn't have been a problem on a day trip, but there was a point it looked like the weather might turn and I'd have to settle in for a bit - or possibly the night. That would have sucked without dinner. Bad bad walker!

7. As above, re cordage. Could have improvised okay with the oilcloth, but it would have been a pain.

8. If you're along a road, and you're a redhead with a fiddle under your arm -  always always smile and wave to tour buses and military convoys. The former get another quirky Alaskan story to take home,  and the latter, well.. anything to break the monotony, right? :)



Was fun. Would do again.

 ... after I heal up a bit more. You folks who marched like this all the time? I am so impressed with you. :)

Mea Culpa - and Civics 101

So earlier this week I said "One party might have drawn the lesson from Thucydides, another from William James, but..." 

Well I was wrong. I'm still very much a sophomore in all this, and grabbed the wrong name out the jumble in my cranial attic. It wasn't Thucydides I wanted, it was Polybius.

Now, so... that's fixed.


But why Polybius?
What was important about that guy?

Well - here we go. Remedial Classics for those of us who didn't get it in school and are just now taking the time to learn it ourselves -

So. Remember Thermopolae? Molon Labe, Hot Gates, 300, all that?
Well yeah, as you know, it happened. Minus Gerard Butler in a leather speedo (*sigh*) - but it happened, more or less. So anyhow, the Persians keep coming after that. Big war. Athens destroyed, eventually lots of little city states band together and kick out Persia.

At this point, we have a sort of "Greek NATO." Over the next generation or two, Athens sort of morphs from a "first among equals" member of a mutual defensive pact to a de facto imperial power.

(Why are you looking at me like that? What?)

So, enter Herodotus. "Father of History" - he's one of those "tell us who we are" guys. Think Athenian Mark Twain. Herodotus goes off on this tour all around to dig into just who these Persians they've been fighting *are*, and where they come from, and what made them who they are. Not incidentally, he warns the Athenians to be careful about expanding so much in their own defense they  become an empire like one they just fought off, and in so doing lose the freedoms they just fought so hard for.

(What?!!)

Anyhow, Herodotus. We're at about mid 400's BC.*

He repeats a story attributed to the old Persian king, c, 520 BC. After some power squabble, the leaders of the winning faction are sitting around on horses, talking about what sort of government to institute. One says democracy. One says aristocracy. One says monarchy. They all give their reasons.

 Remember, this is a time where this sort of question is seriously talked about.

"the nature of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and the advantages and inconveniences of each," says our own John Adams, "were as well understood at the time of the neighing of the horse of Darius as they are at this hour..**"

Democracy leads to mob rule, implicitly violating the rights of the minority - not to mention wild instability. Aristocracy is more stable, but prone to power grabs as aristocrats elbow for the primo spot. Monarchy is the most stable of all, assuming a good monarch - but a bad monarch is a nightmare.

So... the Persian cabal decides monarchy.
(Then they decide who gets to be king. Another story for another time.)


Eventually they become an empire, start knocking on the Hot Gates, and we pick up our thread with the Greeks.


Now.

Let's advance the clock a bit, through the end of the 400s and the 300s BC.

The Greek experiment in democracy has risen spectacularly, but has sputtered out in the wake of the Peloponnesian War. (Remember that part about Athens becoming a de facto Imperial power? Sparta didn't take that too well. The war was long, and devastating. )

Democracy got a seriously bad name, Phillip of Macedon comes to power, his son Alexander just ranged over the whole wide world, and now it's pretty common to think something along the lines of "well... I guess I'm sitting fair pretty now... but I don't really have a voice anymore. Is that good or bad?"

If you've ever heard Victor Davis Hanson talk about "therapeudic" drama or instruction instead of deep responsible Issue Talk - this is the period he's riffing off of. Think living on a diet of sitcoms, but knowing your grandparents or great-great grandparents used to listen to PBS and go to town meetings and have elections that actually mattered.


Now  - the Roman star is rising about the time the Greek/Macedonian one was going to hell. We're coming up on 200 BC.

The Romans have just spanked Carthage, effectively taken control of the western Mediterranean, and the Greeks are saying "What happened? Who are these guys?"

Enter Polybius - a Greek hostage staying with a Roman family. He grows up in the culture of just-post "Carthago Delenda Est" Rome,  so he sits down to write Histories.




Polybius says basically "hey, these Romans are on to something. They've managed to work out a way to get the best parts of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy all working together in a single system. 

They have a monarch in the consuls.... an aristocracy of old Patrician families in the Senate... and a democratic voice in the Tribunes. It's messy.... but it looks like it's working pretty well."


If that sounds vaguely familiar, well... there's a reason for that. :)



And that's why Polybius came up last week.




Okay, time to go play. Happy weekend!


















=============
* You can take your "Common Era" PC BS and shove it. We ride unreconstructed in these parts. :)

** John Adams, "A Defense of the American Constitutions" 1787

Beyond the Beyond

American geeks of a certain age may remember a certain science fiction television show.

It had everything.

It had nazis. It had robots. It had rock and roll. It had furry barbarians on motorcycles. It had a fairy tale, and it had a dangerous tropical paradise.


As a kid, it struck me as a science fictiony version of Narnia, and I loved it.


Like so many treasures from childhood though, it's one that should be approached with care. Some things really are best left wrapped in fuzzy memories instead of being dragged back into the light.

Still, a dear friend who shared those vague memories with me was willing to sit through a couple bootlegged episodes of it last weekend.

O
M
G

It is so horrifically bad it is awesome.
There's even fanfic of it out there...so very, very wrong. :)

On a completely unrelated note, here's your 1980's brainworm for the day -



I think they must have used this song prior to figuring out water boards. It just.... hangs there. In your brain. Over and over. Driving you mad... so... so mad.




.... though Trace and Gina did it better. ;)

Context

Time is a slippery thing.

I can't speak for you, but I know when I'm reading a history I sometimes have to force myself to remember that then was not now. To my modern eye, a Hogarth or Singleton painting looks sweet and romantic.

I squee over a kettle, tease out details of a fiddle bow or apron, admire the ornamentation. But if I'm not careful, I find myself slipping into the Ren Faire approach - underneath the costume simply must be another 21st century American mind.

I might know perfectly well that it's not true, but the human mind I think tends to assume its own experience is universal.

And so I get to assume all the stable comforts of my modern life, colored with an overlay of green fields and pre-industrial villages. It seems so quaint and simple - so romantic.

A simpler world. A simpler time. Simpler problems than this modern world.


That's how it was, right?



Right?



Recently, I ran across this piece of modern wisdom in a comment section -

What seems true is this: 9/11 changed the way we must interpret our Constitutional guarantees. While we need to relearn how to live dangerously ..., we collectively have a responsibility to ensure public transportation is safe. We must engage in it just to do business anymore ....

Ah. Yes.

Pretend with me if you will, that it is 1791.


The ink is drying on the Bill of Rights. It was a tough fight to get the Constitution ratified - not a few folks vehemently rejected it as an aristocratic power grab. As - lets be honest - in many ways it was. It took those twelve (really) amendments to get the compromise through.

So.

1791.

According to the last census, the population of our squabbling former colonies is confined to a fairly narrow band along the Eastern seaboard. Population density in most of that area is less than that of modern Idaho. The last war was so exhausting that large parts of our militia were "entirely disarmed" according to Jefferson, weapons becoming so scarce they were requisitioned for the regulars.


The economy was shattered during the war. The Continental Congress had authorized the printing of so much money the dollar had become practically worthless.

Seven years ago, the Treaty of Paris was ratified. Among the conditions was that the British evacuate their fortifications along the back country.


They have not done so.




Over the next decade, the new Federal government will careen back and forth between uneasy alliances and quasi-wars with the two dominant superpowers of the North Atlantic, France and England. We are still weak from the Revolution, and open war with either will crush our experiment before the eagle's feathers are even dry. All the monarchies of Europe have a vested interest in seeing that happen.

All the while, the settlers on the far side of the Appalachians naturally find themselves trading down the Mississippi, and are being drawn farther into the Spanish orbit.  This dominance lasts so long that a full fifteen years later the spectre of intrigues - some Spanish-funded - in the old southwest is still a credible threat.


Hemmed in on all sides, in the midst of all these existential crises, we fight each other.


Four years ago a Revolutionary War veteran managed to raise a plebian army over a thousand strong, and marched on a Federal arsenal.

This year Hamilton's Whiskey Excise tax is passed. On 9/11 of this year, we'll see the tar and feathers come out again. Another rebellion is brewing as we speak.


Now.


That is the world in which the Founders wrote

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amidst an array of existential threats within and without, the Founders held tightly to all those Enlightenment Whiggish ideals - local militia, constrained search powers, decentralized power.


WHY?




This is what I think.

Some was the power of tradition of course - but that was not all.

Contrary to some modern punditry, I think the Founders were in one way very much like the Fabians of the last century. One party might have drawn the lesson from Polybius, another from William James, but the fundamental understanding was the same -


Rules make Men.


The entire rat cage of rewards and punishments in which we live our lives shape us. We are all creatures of habit, the animal portion of our nature every bit as inclined to stick to a beaten bare path as any whitetail. What we are allowed to do, and what we are compelled to do, become a part of our being.

Let us take an example.


These men? These men - like their fathers and grandfathers - were required by the law of their state to assemble their arms and drill with their neighbors for militia service.

They were not professional soldiers. They were not - at least at first - good soldiers. They were inefficient and unreliable. They could be cantankerous and hard to discipline. The professional's disdain for the amateur had as much cause here as in any other field of human endeavor.

But.

So long as they had something they could call their own, and the impetus to defend it, these men had a stake.They were taught from their youth that the power of life and death held by the State is ultimately in their hands, because it is through their hands that it would be exercised.They simply did not have the option of leaving it to the professionals.





Now. Look at these men and women.

They do leave it to the professionals.

Unless they have a loved one in harms way, this is what "war" means - standing in a cattle chute where they will be expected to open their belts, remove their shoes, throw away not just pocket knives, but key chains, water, and children's toys. Even joking about the absurdity of it has been made a crime. And everyone knows it won't stop when the shooting's moved on to a new theater. There no longer are any "temporary" war measures.


These people are not being taught to have a stake. They are not being taught to take responsibility and solve problems. They are being taught to follow patently absurd rules without complaint.

They are being taught to be obedient slaves.





A free people can rebuild a shattered economy, resupply a spent homeland, throw off the weight of not only one but three superpowers, and then go on to win a continent.


A nation of slaves?
Well... they can hope for a better master one day.





Rules make men.

Letters from home

So I get home from work today to see a strange box on the step.

I don't remember ordering anything that should be here now I think... then see the return address - Daddy!

Once I get inside, behold the treasure:

I have again COUNTRY HAM!!



Now... for those of you who have suffered the tragic fate of growing up outside of Dixie, let me explain the proof of God's love that is country ham.

First, imagine bacon.







....no rush, I can wait...





... okay, now. Bacon.
 

Except it's the smokiest, richest, saltiest slice of bacon you ever had.

And now, it's a whole steak of the meaty part of that bacon.


And now,  if you're really lucky, you get a slice of legbone - and if you take that bone and pop it in your mouth, you'll melt out a rich salty marrow that'll curl your toes it's so savory.

  
Now, if I was cooler, I'd be able to go on a tear of bloggy culture jokes about bacon and Chuck Norris and Assam tea and and and...

But I'm not that cool, so you'll just have to make up your own.
In the mean time, I'll just tell you it's serious noms.


Best served with collard or mustard greens, cornbread,  and buttermilk or sweet iced tea. If company's comin' on, you might want to scare up some sliced maters and pickles.

Any of y'all Anchorage folk up for a picnic? :)

Accents

Oh, this is delightful.

So you prolly saw Professor Elemental over at Breda's the other day. Which means you may well have followed the trail from this diss of Mr. B to Mr. B himself.

Here's where it gets awesome.

"Sold out to Coca-Cola / Used for a trend" means that this man -



Is this man -

Edit - drat! They blocked embedding on this one. Here's the link

... And that is just totally awesome. I mean, it makes sense that once you have the basics down fairly well at some point genre hopping can get to just be fun.

(It also drives home just how important post production is.
Yeesh. Sound people work magic. )

Here's another more vivid example. Omnia's "Fenian Men" as normally performed -



And as performed for giggles -








Ahh! All my childhood I was lied to!
What do you mean you can't base an identity off your favorite band?
How can they possibly break that veneer?

:)


People are just so fun.
... no word yet on when Enya's gonna be doing a duet with Eminem.


(but wouldn't it be cool? :P )