Year in Review

1.

'Tis the season. 2012 saw a few crazy things happen. Starting in January I tried to change the nature of the posts I placed here.

That took for a maybe eight posts, and eventually resulted in the starting of the second blog in the Caliboy Network, the Caliboy Observatory. I realized that the nature of this forum, the short-form idea release, shouldn't be focused solely on long-form literary posts.

Those posts from January are some of my favorite posts, and the ringleader is probably Maintaining on the Queen Mary.

2.

In February Corrie and I went to Honduras to visit some Mayan ruins for her birthday. I put all those posts up on the Observatory site, with a table of contents with links here. Some of the cool posts included therein are:
1) Birthday at the Ruins;
2) View from an Autobus;
3) Watching the Super Bowl in Honduras.

3.

Between March and April I started a whole series of new blogs. They covered food, sports, books and my twisted idea of what pop-culture used to be.

Some of the highlights include: 

1) From the home cooking site, Gonzo Cuisine an easy Indian food recipe;

2) From the sports site So Cal Sports Visions, Tennis Memories;

2) From the library blog Fond Memories;

4) Lastly, as an example of my pop-culture ideas, check out this about the Simpsons.

4.

The Olympics came and went this year, and I wrote some words about it after the fact.

5.

My brother Dan got married in June. Here are some of the ceremony pictures. The surrounding posts from those days have lots about the trip to Sac.

6.

I even wrote some things about some close friends. You know who you are.

7.

The post that most closely resembles a 2009 post: Phonic Discussion of Different Language Families.

8.

And then I broke my leg.

9.

I started some more blogs, one with Norm, one about flags and logos (which has turned out to be pretty popular), and one with my pops and brother. That one's called Sherwood and Sons.

It has been a lot of writing this year.

Lots...

10.

In October I tried to post something on each day of the month. I called it (after the fact) the October Folly. If you look at this--the Caliboyinbrooklyn site--for the month of October, you'll see links on almost everyday of the month, ending with the Halloween super post day: Halloween Links.

11.

Then we went on crazy adventures; Salton Sea, Joshua Tree, Arizona for Thanksgiving...

12.

Happy Decemberween; Happy Holidays; peace to you and yours.

Rekindling My Nerd Heritage

1.

The news came down recently that George Lucas sold his control of his Star Wars properties to Disney for a tidy sum. Fanboys, nerds, and regular fans of the Star Wars franchise started to imagine what having Disney in charge of the characters and universe meant in the big picture.

Surprisingly, the news was met with mostly good vibes. Really, as I told my mother when she was surprised that my brother wasn't more upset, Disney didn't invent Jar-Jar Binks, they seem to be able to make pretty good big action films (The Avengers was big hit, right?), and they seem to be able to find people who truly love the material. Did you ever get that feeling from Lucas, the High Lord of the Far Far Away Galaxy himself?

A website I follow had a movie sequel contest this summer, and in the finals were The Godfather Part II vs The Empire Strikes Back. That struck me a bit. I hadn't really ever considered The Empire Strikes Back as a great sequel before, but that's mainly due to my lack of intellectual attention paid towards the original trilogy after I became "too-cool" for Star Wars.

During my time collecting comic books, back when it was still a hobby you didn't talk about at school, I started picking up a series of Dark Horse books from the Star Wars universe called "Tales of the Jedi". It took place a thousand years before the events of the the movies, and was the last thing I think I genuinely and authentically cared about from the Star Wars universe.

2.

Summer 1976. An annoyed group of young nobody actors are busy running around Tunis, talking about some magic, er, stuff. They think they're making a science fiction movie, at least that's what they're being told, but there's also a space pirate and a guy in big dog suit and a old wizard, there are swords that are made of light (people have a hard time imagining that), and annoying robot sidekicks. The old wizard is a real actor, though, a well respected British guy.

Up until then, science fiction movies were either 2001: A Space Odyssey or Flash Gordon, with very little in between, and maybe a Planet of the Apes thrown in for good measure.

The crew and actors working on this strange project end up over budget and over schedule. The release date was supposed to be Christmas of 1976, but that's moved back to Summer 1977. Eventually, in order to avoid another movie, the release is moved up to Memorial Day weekend, at the end of May in 1977. 

All the post-production work has been finished, a whole new kind of special effect is about to be unleashed on the movie-going public, a mythology lesson is about to be interpreted anew, and the symphony will be making a triumphant return to film scores. Who knew?

3.

The filmmakers knew that if the opening of the film worked, they would have the audience. If the audience bought that first scene, the whole ride might just work. 

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...

Then the score starts. I know John Williams is a thieving conductor--this has been established--but the tweaks that he implemented on his major scores (Superman, Indiana Jones, and here, maybe the greatest of his ever) made what he was thieving so much better, turning them into icons of big-action cinema.

But the score starts, the scrolling words setting up the universe's main conceit--badguys vs rebels--and then we get a planet. A ship flies by, dodging laser blasts, and is tailed by another ship, a larger ship, a much larger ship, a ship that keeps going and going and the audience's eyes widen as it continues to fill up the screen, the dread of just how bad the badguys are starts to be crystallize.

The audience bought it. Fully.

4.

Between the sequel contest online and the news of the property rights changing hands, I decided I wanted to go and watch the original trilogy again with fresh eyes. I was going to watch them as if I knew nothing about the history, as if I grew up with none of the toys, as if I only was only aware of the sci-fi that was around in 1977.

We all know the story, right? Maybe? Lucas had a story that was too long, figured he could get the first act of his big story done, and figured he could retain the rights to his sequels if he figured out how to fund it himself. Lucas got that first installment down to two hours, the first act of a larger story.

One of the remarkable things about the structure of all three of the movies is their rigidity of form. Star Wars: almost exactly two hours. Ditto for The Empire Strikes Back. The Return of the Jedi is just a few minutes over, like maybe 126 minutes. Now, the fact that  they're only two hours each is important for this reason: act breaks.

Two hours is 120 minutes, and if you break that up into thirds, you get 40 minutes. George Lucas breaks up each of the moves into three almost exactly forty minute acts. I used to think that Star Wars, the first film, was slow. I came to this conclusion in 1997 when the newer version was released. After seeing it again, just recently, I realized that I was mistaken. The first act of the first movie gets a lot of the universe explained without having almost any direct expository dialogue.

What am I getting at? Check out Star Wars: at the exact 40 minute-mark, Luke finds the corpses of his guardians. End of Act I. He still needs to meet Han Solo and take off for Alderan, but that's structure for you. They end up in the trash heap at the 80th minute, but by minute 93, they're off the Deathstar and Obi-Wan is dead. End of Act II. And how about the end of the film? Deathstar get's blown up, they get the medals, and then the credits roll. No lingering.

Empire Strikes Back: 36th minute has Luke done with Hoth and heading to Yoda's, and at the 40th minute, Han and Falcon find their hiding spot on the big asteroid. End of Act I. At the 78 minute-mark, Han enters Bespin, the cloud city, and we're introduced to Lando in exactly minute 80. A few minutes later, at 85, Luke is leaving Yoda, against the tiny puppet's wishes. End of Act II.

Return of the Jedi: Jabba's dead and Han's rescued by minute 37. Luke heads off to meet up with Yoda while Han, Chewie, Leia and Lando go to the new rebel base. End of Act I. Guess what happens in exactly the 80th minute? Luke tells Leia they're siblings. End of Act II.

It's a pacing clinic.

5.

Star Wars went on to be the biggest money maker ever in Hollywood's history up til then. Lucas knew that now since held the rights to the sequels, he could do them how he wanted, and he knew that he could get the money he would need to make the movies he wanted to make. This sets up the sequel, 1980's The Empire Strikes Back.

How could George Lucas keep the audience intrigued and not cynical about a cash-cow movie franchise? Well, by making probably the most daring and dark sequel ever. People would have gladly paid to go see a rehash of the themes from the first movie. After seeing it they might be upset that Lucas caved and barely updated the first movie, but they would have gone.

Instead, Lucas grew the universe, then shattered it into pieces, changed the dynamic of the main characters, and dropped a bombshell. The ending didn't have a physical climax so much as an emotional one, and in any case, their universe was a far less settled one than at the beginning of the movie. That, and the entire second act itself hinges on whether or not you believe in a puppet character.

That takes a certain kind of balls to go for it like that. I respect that. The Empire Strikes Back won the contest for Best Movie Sequel, and, as I like The Godfather Part II more, this is a worthy adversary.

6.

I was four years old when The Return of the Jedi was released in 1983. I may have seen it in the theater (maybe not), but, between the toys and the VHS cassettes my brother and I had, if we were going to watch any of the three Star Wars films on a rainy weekend day, it would almost always be Return of the Jedi. The first was a little slow for us and the second was a bummer. The third wrapped up all the shenanigans, Han Solo was back, he was rightfully with Leia, Luke bests Vader, and also, Jabba the Hutt. Leia in the brass bikini slave-girl outfit? How many guys nowadays were effected by that Leia portrayal?

I can say that The Return of the Jedi was the episode that I've seen the most times (episodes II and III I've seen each only once)(well, mostly once, as I was likely pretty toasted before each one and we were late to II).

As a sequel, it again grows the universe. It again pushes forward the technology. And, if we picture the first three movies as an act each of a larger story (the redemption of Darth Vader), then Return of the Jedi is the loose-end tying uplifting third act. 

As a sequel, though, it doesn't stand up to the Empire Strikes Back.

7.

My connection to the films, like many guys my age, stems in part from the action figures and toys.

I dusted mine off for the following photos. This first is one of the older toys in this collection, a beast that wasn't actually, even though it was thought up and designed. Later on, George Lucas added it back during his remixing of his movies:

I'm not even sure what this creature was called. But check out the date on this toy--it's older than the Empire Strikes Back:

Now here's the remnants of my action figures:

How many characters can we name? There's forest walker operator, a storm-trooper, Bib Fortuna, two imperial guards (one with his robe taken off), the Rancor keeper, a version of Han, a headless Adm. Akbar, the squid-faced guy from Jabba's barge. Not mentioned yet is a Leia and a Lando, both from Bespin, the cloud city. Notice how those are the only two characters from Empire..., while all the other figures, besides the big lizard, are from Return of the Jedi? My connection to the toys...

When I showed Corrie what toys I still had, she laughed and said I was spoiled.

Here's one of the forest speeders. It originally had three or four pieces, and a button in the back that would cause it to fall apart, reminiscent of the scene where Luke light-sabers a speeder into pieces as it flies by. Pretty sophisticated:

Funny thing it, I lost those other pieces while I was still a kid playing with them regularly.

I also had two separate Luke Skywalkers from Return of the Jedi. The odd part, though, is that they're different versions of Luke wearing the balck outfit. The first is from the Jabba rescue, and the second is from the confrontation with Vader and the Emperor:

The newer trilogy makes it interesting that we should be alarmed maybe that Luke has decided to wear black. Jedis in black is not good news, right?

The older two action figures:

I did have a Luke from Hoth, the ice planet. But I through it up in the air and then I never saw it again. Don't ask...

8.

So, now, an older guy, me, sitting with his lady, pretending we know nothing about an iconic film franchise, and popping in some sci-fi movie and taking a look.

The music! It blows you away; each main character has a theme, and the themes are different but connected; plaintive longing is beating you over the head, and the badguy music is romping and stomping and chewing scenery like an aged actor. The music is almost silly in how manipulative it is.

There's a rebellion, there's a Rick Blaine-type pirate, who seems like it's just the guy named Harrison Forn playing himself. Actually, everyone seems to be playing themselves: Carrie Fisher was Hollywood royalty--she played a princess; Ford was a smug pretty boy--ditto; Mark Hamil was a wide-eyed goon--he was, eh, a wide-eyed goon...

The story's weird, romantic, and seems like its mythological archetypes are playing out in practice. Funny thing is, it works, pretty much. The technology is old and worn out, lived in. It seems like no other sci-fi movie when it comes to the shabbiness of the space crafts. (Now that's cliche: Firefly?)

The action! Wow! Who cares that space crafts wouldn't fly and operate like that in reality. This filmmaker made a space dogfight that keeps dynamic action going in ever scene with the space background. Good stuff, impressive still; impressive for anytime, really.

9.

The execution of the three movies blew us away once we were done watching them. The sets were big and baroque when they needed to be, small and shabby when that was needed, and just the right touch everywhere in between. Besides some poor "acting", these movies are more entertaining that I remember.

10.

There's a lot of talk about the lack of women in this original trilogy. This is a warranted position. Compare it with Firefly and Serenity...but that's not really fair to Star Wars, but neither is the lack of ladies.

That being said, Princess Leia is a strong woman, a resourceful leader and role model for the ladies. Even in the gold bikini that so bewitched us young boys.

11.

The only stuff that didn't work so well was the new stuff added later, that decades later meddling by Lucas and his computers. I wanted the original singer at Jabba's. I wanted the original celebration song on Endor. What can you do? That computerized graphics added later look bad, at least by today's standard. The old stuff holds up so much better than that plastic cartoony stuff.

Who'd a thought the computer graphics wouldn't fit as well as the models and blue screens?

12.

I spent a long time with a proverbial stink-eye pointed towards Lucas and his meddling in his own properties and his reboots. I ignored as much of the hype as I could, and was derisive at other times. Eventually I decided to check out the movies again, if only to point a more critical eye towards them. I found my nerd heritage being rekindled.

That was unexpected, like how much I enjoyed the movies and their universe this "second" time around.

Thinking About Football

1.

When you say "football" here, in America, what people around you think of, as long as they're fellow Americans, is either the NFL or the college version of American football. If you're in Calgary or Winnipeg and mention "football", people there understand you to mean a game we call Canadian football. If you mention "footy" in Australia, they assume you're talking about what we call Australian rules football. In London, "footy" or "football" means a game we usually call soccer.

In Dublin, the highest attended sporting event is football, but not soccer, rather, a game known outside of Ireland as Gaelic football.

An interesting thing about the term "football": in as many places as have unique games using a ball and feet in some capacity all colloquially refer to their game as simply football. 

America, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and England all have games that the locals call football, and all are different from each other. Is anyone more right than anyone else?

2.

Skipping the thousands of years of history of indigenous peoples use of games as battle practice would do a disservice to this discussion. But, a thorough discussion of those peoples and their games would take too much time. 

Believe me, almost all groups of native peoples throughout human history had games of some kind, many used primarily to keep young warriors fit and teach them coordination and teamwork, things that would help out in the eventual battles they'd end up in. Many of these games used a sphere of dense vegetation or and inflated animal bladder as the "ball".

It was this background of mobbed-sporting-event that we'll move this discussion to Europe, and, specifically, England.

3.

In Medieval England tiny villages would have game contests during major holidays. They started halfway between the towns with an unlimited number of participants ("players"), and the winner was the town that could move the inflated bladder-ball to the opposing town's abbey or church.

This "mob-ball" game was the basis for all our games today that bear the name football. In those contests, people were allowed to pitch the ball, kick it, advance it in someway that wasn't directly carrying it and running. People had loads of fun, and not too many were gravely injured.

4.

In the mid 1500s, students of the affluent and aristocratic classes went to schools instead of to work, like their poorer counterparts, in places we today "English public schools" that were in fact what we'd understand as being private schools.

As early as then, these institutions were trying to find ways to keep the kids fit and in shape, and teach them teamwork and cooperation. It was over the next two centuries that it's understood that these schools turned "mob-ball" from a day long playful battle into an organized sporting event.

The thing was, each school developed their own game (a few of which still exist). Almost all of these schools called their game football.

An interesting thing about the development of these games is their development through their limitations. For schools that had large amounts of open space, a carrying type of football game developed, where an oblong ball could be carried by hand and passed by foot, and tumbling and tackling could take place. One school that had this kind of game develop was named Rugby. 

Other schools that had less space to develop their games tended towards a kicking type of game, with less emphasis on tumbling, tackling, and holding the ball with your hands.

When rail travel made traveling easier, schools would travel and play opposing schools, playing one half of the game using one school's football rules, and the second half using the other's.

5.

In America, two specific years revolutionized the game we call football, and they involved rule changes. The first was 1880. That was the year that the Yale coach was able to implement rule changes to the version of Canadian rugby they played and convinced the schools they played against to switch as well. Not everybody switched right away, but they all ended up on the same page eventually.

Those rule changes? The establishment of a line of scrimmage and a set of downs to advance the ball a set distance before turning it over changed the strategy immensely. Now that the action stopped between advancing the ball, the game started to resemble its continuous-play rugby basis less and less. This development also started the evolution of scripted plays, something up until then was unknown.

In the football that's world known and beloved, known as Association Football, or soccer, scripted plays are reduced to set-plays like the corner kick, or the long free-kick.

The other year that made American football resemble what we see today was 1905, when the game was almost outlawed and the rules were changed to reduce violence. They made legal the play we call a "forward pass", they changed first down from 5 yards to 10, and lastly they changed the number of downs to make the yardage from 3 to 4.

A forward pass is still an illegal play in both kinds of rugby, our football's most obvious ancestor.

If you think football is violent now (it is, very much so), you should have seen it in 1905. There were some years when more than 50 players died on the field, and nearly 200 were seriously injured, like life-altering injuries. It's no surprise that they were talking about outlawing it. They were talking about making it safer then, as they are now. Nowadays, of course, the problem is brain injuries and long-term concussion issues.

6.

Canadian football is one of the three North American styles of "gridiron football". They use a different size ball than the NFL (and NCAA), they use a 110 yard field (instead of 100 for NFL), they retain the 3-down setup instead of the NFL's 4-down, and there's no limit to pre-snap motions on their backs on offense. That's a lot of words talking about the differences, but Canadian football is very similar to NFL and NCAA.

College football in America is different from the NFL, but not terribly. 

Gaelic football, the most popular football game in Ireland, is an amateur sport that resembles soccer and basketball, with players running down a field dribbling the ball like a basketball with their feet. It's hard tio explain, but fun to watch and easy to grasp what's going on.

Aussie rules football is played on a large oval, and the point is to kick the ball through uprights, or run it in; both plays have different point totals. It's exciting to watch, but takes a few minutes to tell why people hand over the ball after certain plays, and why certain players can't run, or can run...it's cool, though.

Rugby is split into two versions, and they resemble each other even if they're further apart than the NFL and NCAA. Rugby is the great-granddaddy of all grid-iron style football games, as well as those variations that use oblong balls and hands as well as feet (Aussie rules and Gaelic, et al). It is exciting, and as an American, I can see how the development of our football evolved through simple rule changes.

Association football is the world's most popular team sport. Soccer, baby!

7.

Happy Turkey Day! Thanksgiving is my favorite American holiday in the Oct-Nov-Dec-New Years holiday season. As a harvest celebration, the basis is that the earth is giving gifts to you.

And a tradition here is to have our football on in the background--or foreground--during the Thursday itself. 

Not for everybody, of course, but I hope all have a nice few days, celebrating the great American pagan harvest festival.

I Dreamt I was a Condor

1.

Soaring above the coastline, circling and circling, hoping to find some kind of grub, some carcass to get into is all I really remember. The soaring. Maybe I dreamt I was a condor's beak. That seems like a more visceral thing, doesn't it? The hooking razor sharpness tells us all we need to know about this Pleistocene relic.

The California Condor is that which I speak. This ancient scavenger once roamed the skies of the last major glaciation with impunity, back when the megafauna was plentiful and dying regularly. Many of the aboriginal California tribes have their own stories about the condor. The Wiyot believed the condor recreated mankind after the Above Old Man wiped us out with a flood. The Chumash believed the condor was originally white, but turned black by flying to close to fire. Images of condors adorn ancient cave paintings and bones have been found buried with folks.

You can imagine how many people have dreamed of being this great flying beast.

2.

We were driving home from the Salton Sea, taking a scenic route, and traveled through the Anza-Borrego State Park. It's a beautiful spot in a varied state; desert to one side and the coastal range on the other, a little mix of both nestled between bodies of water.

We stopped in at a place to look for books; Corrie got a kids book and I picked up Willie Boy, a story of the last great posse manhunt of the dying old west of 1909. We got to talking with the older ladies at the shop, and they handed us all sorts of newsletters about the park full of various odd and/or important info: when the wild-flowers bloom; how to track coyotes; brief history about the Basque settler Anza, one of the park's namesakes; and about the repatriation of the California condor. They had a picture.

Is that...is that what one of these famous giant birds looks like?

As a kid growing up in California in the 1980s, I remember the hubbub that was stirred when in 1987, the decision was made to remove the condor from the wild---they were down to something like 19 specimens---and start a captive breeding program in the hopes of returning these majestic bastards to their perch as an apex scavenger. If such a thing exists.

Later on that day, after making it home, we were unwinding after dinner and watched an instant queue documentary from Netflix on Big Sur. The condor was a star of that show as well, and the focus was on the reintroduced population's troubles on the coastal scene.

Again, is that what these birds look like? I guess so.

3.

You'd be upset too if you had a ball-sack for a chin:

Seriously, have you ever seen one of these guys up close like this before? I thought I had, but I'd imagine I would have remembered scrotum-chin bird.

4.

One of the issues facing the California condor is biological. One thing about being a Pleistocene relic is that, well, advances have come along in other species that compete with you for resources that may be prove to be favored in the current setup of nature.

In other, less confusing phrasing, turkey vultures are proving to be biologically superior at finding carrion. Granted, the girth of the condor---if they can find some food, they'll scare most everybody away (except, of course, a hungry golden eagle--badgers won't even scare them) gives it an occasional advantage, but it may be to little too late. And that's when the condor can find food.

California condors have no sense of smell. They search for carrion using their great eye sight. This probably works better in the less cloudy interior of the deserts when the dead animals were huge, or on sunny beach days when the whales were plentiful, dying regularly and washing up onshore. Turkey vultures, on the other hand, can smell molecules of carrion from miles away.

Chalk that battle up to the turkey vulture.

5.

I remember these birds as being just huge, simply gigantic, the biggest birds on the planet.

Well, not really. That's one of those growing-up-in-80s-California false notions I developed.

Obviously there are the flightless birds: ostrich, emus, cassowaries, and penguins being the most famous editions. I had to look up cassowaries. If you can imagine a kiwi bird, that's like the smallest type of cassowary; the biggest ones are heavier than emus but shorter than the ostrich. Without flying, these large birds were able to develop great sizes, and even dense, marrow filled bones.

Okay, so, what about flying birds, right? The condor's wingspan is one of the biggest, clocking in at close to ten feet, and they're pretty fat too, weighing in at an average of 26 pounds.

It turns out there are some flying giants out there. The Dalmatian pelican is the heaviest on average bird that flies, something like 40 pounds, with a wingspan of 10 to 11 feet. Then there's the trumpeter swan. This is generally considered the biggest flying bird. It's six feet long, averages in the upper 30s in pounds, and has a 10 foot wingspan. There was a reported trumpeter that weighed fifty pounds and couldn't fly.

Wingspan wise the biggest is the wandering albatross. These guys look like sea gulls to me, but probably because I've never seen one up close. They have 12 foot wings. Twelve-fucking-feet.

Let's not forget the whooping crane. The whooper is the tallest flying bird, standing at a majestic five feet. (Soft spot for these birds from Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.)

So flightless birds, pelicans, swans, albatrosses, and the whooper all have some kind of claim to being slightly more giant in some way than our giant scavenger (with a scrotum as a facial feature), but one thing I found that seemed to top out in favor of this condor: age.

I couldn't find a bird with an average longer lifespan. Maybe a parrot? California condors live for an average of sixty years.

6.

Sixty years with a ball sack for a chin. And not even a mammoth to mack. Yeesh. See, even if you have a nut-sack on your face, if that face is buried in a mammoth, or a dead saber-toothed tiger, then your ass is dignified.

Yup, dignity comes to those who eat rotting mammoth and saber-tooth tiger corpses.

7.

Vultures are one of the three types of technical Birds of Prey.

I sometimes walk to the beach and watch the pelicans dive bomb fish. Yet they're not considered a Bird of Prey, with the capital letters of an official title. Ditto for penguins, who hunt fish nearly every day of their lives.

Official Birds of Prey are broken up into three groups, and scavenging vultures make up one. They developed from an early break with another group of surprise hunters. That seems to be the official criteria: swoop-surprise hunting.

The other two groups are the raptors and the owls.

Owls, raptors, and carrion vultures.

8.

Scoring one for the repatriation efforts: the condors are up over 400 specimens on the planet, I think it's at 419, with under 200 in captivity and over 200 wild. Strange fact: to be lifted from the "Critically Endangered" list to the plain "Endangered" list, which itself would be a coup of sorts, they just need to get to 450 birds.

Well, before us science types go congratulating ourselves, I should probably say that the baby condors growing up in captivity have a very hard time successfully scavenging on their own once repatriated, as they tend to be "taught" by their human overlords.

Also, maybe this animal's design is a relic for a reason, and the fact its time of this rock is limited is not necessarily a tragedy as much as an essential characteristic.

9.

After the Big Sur documentary ended and Corrie went to bed, I started doing some research on condors. Thinking about them for a few solid hours, and then once asleep, playing around in the quantum dream land, I was freed from the shackles terrestrial travel, and soaring above the coast.

The sky above was blue, and the crashing waves below were quiet at that height, their salty violence betrayed by the altitude. Around and around I circled, and soon I think I realized I might have been just the beak.

The sharp and powerful beak of a Pleistocene relic...

I Dreamt I was a Condor's Beak

A Victory for Monsanto in California

Ugh...Monsanto spent twenty-six million dollars well enough to defeat the GMO food labeling initiative here in California. They paid off every politician in the state to go on television and complain that the proposition was flawed and sure to bring death and destruction onto the heads of every person in the state. Even Diane "time to move on to a younger set of Dems" Feinsten was against the bill.

All we wanted was for food made with genetically-modified organisms to be labeled as such.

Gloom and doom was to be our lot if it passed. All that processed garbage that sells crazy well in this state (and everywhere else) would have to be labeled.

Did you know that corn is technically listed as a pesticide by the FDA? Corn is officially a pesticide, and it's in nearly every single edible thing on the market, and if that edible thing is processed, it most assuredly has corn present.

Oh well. Times are changing. Labels will one day be labeled as they should be. If Washington and Colorado can decrim pot and Maryland joining the ranks of states that recognize rights of folks with the same plumbing wanting to call themselves "married", then someday we'll get where we we need to be.

Stupid scary Monsanto.

VOTE!

Maybe the system is jacked beyond repair.

Maybe we should start a revolution. Isn't that what all this "Occupy" bullshit's about? Like I said back in a post about the Occupy movement: we (the non-super wealthy) got screwed because the system allows us to get screwed---well, actually, no, it's designed for us to get screwed. That's how it is. Nobody studies or even pays attention to civic politics anymore, and that's how they want it.

Both of America's political parties want politics to be boring and infuriating. That way apathy creeps in, and while some folks may get upset about getting shafted, nobody's really going to get involved or expect it to get better. People simply can't imagine a world where politics is civil and out to do good for the people.

It can change by one of two ways. The first is really hard and takes a large amount of sacrifice, while the second is unimaginably harder and asks for a life-changing kind of sacrifice.

The first way is for people to take time to read up on the laws that are being submitted to vote while also keeping in contact with your elected representatives regularly. Calling them, writing them letters, showing up at their offices. Do you think if you and five of your family members, or friends, or acquaintances, or work buddies who share maybe a similar stance, were to show up at your state senator's office that person would be able to ignore you?

The first method means people must get informed. And that takes a whole lotta effort, believe me. One may think 1) there's not enough time in the day; or 2) that after a long day of work they just want to relax. To that, Method for Change 1 says: 1) turn off the television and get studying; and 2) tough shit.

Look, I'm not saying every day will be grind after grind while relaxation and rest fully evaporate, but that's realistically the kind of work involved in getting really informed and then holding people accountable when the system does the screwing.

The second method is revolution. And here I'm not talking standing-with-a-joint-in-one-hand-and-an-inflammatory-sign-in-the-other-while-chanting-in-unison kind of revolution. I'm talking the real kind.

The "we've devised a radical redistribution of resources" kind. The "time to lockup or technicolor-haircut every CEO from a Fortune 500 company" kind. Storming the castle with pitchforks and torches, baby!

And I'm down. I have ideas for that kind of revolution. What I don't have is an army...or a militia...or even a gun...or an angry mob...or even a country full of people who in their heart of hearts truly wants a revolution.

Is that really what you want? Me, I don't really have anything accept debt and a ton of blogs, so, like I said, I'm down.

And if you ever get your act together, come and get me. (I'm looking at you, you smelly oddly-mustachioed hipsters. The hippies will never fight, but you young hipsters, your world devalues humanity far more than preceding generations...)

So what do we do today? The first step to getting informed is to get involved, and getting involved means voting.

VOTE!

Time Change Conversations with Tuxedo

Daylight savings time is upon us, and it has someone in our household all out of sorts. That someone though, is our fuzzy feline, Tuxedo.

For people who aren't familiar with our cat, he has some peculiar habits that confound us to this day. As an eight year old cat, Tuxedo still, twice a day (and every single day for the last eight years) whines incessantly for his meals for at least an hour before each meal. "Whines" may not be the best word--screams and wails and howls and makes a goddamn racket may all work better.

He's a big cat, but his lungs and vocal chords are from some kind of banshee or howling beast.

After all this time, I've been able to tune him out, but it's not easy. There's simply no let up. But Tux's body clock is on solar time, while our schedule is on (mostly) artificial cell-phone time.

For breakfast, during the week, there is a high-pitched and shushy dance between Corrie and Tuxedo, and he gets fed right before she leaves. On the weekends, he's up right before her alarm would start to go off, and at first stirring he'll be an obnoxious beast until he gets food. Up until this past weekend, the alarm would start going off right around day break, meaning Tux would be anxious for grub right as the sun breaks the horizon, and then not getting fed until maybe forty-five minutes later, but definitely when the sun is up. Come weekends, he'll be starting at sunup.

One benefit to this is when an alarm fails, Tux acts like a fail-safe alarm.

But now, the old seven am is six, which gives us an extra hour to sleep. Tell that to the cat. He's up and obnoxious with the sun, which is kinda like his thing. When I started this blog back in Brooklyn, we didn't get any sun, so this wasn't really the same issue. He was obnoxious, of course, but not on the solar time schedule like now.

I thought cats were supposed to mellow out...silly me.