Category: American wilderness

Hugh Jass

Yesterday I had gotten no further than the title of this post when I came upon Kevin Starr’s delightful post on wokism. “I thought I can sit back now, he’s covered an important topic”, being “woke” versus “awake”. Here in the land of the free there is very little awakism going on. That’s always been the case.

Over a decade ago I was a fan of the NPR radio show Car Talk and its hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi. Tommy sadly died of Alzheimer’s in 2012, and NPR reverted to reruns, and then relegated the show to podcasts only. It is still thriving even as the boys talk about cars of the 90s and before. The reason: Tommy and Ray were nice, honest, and funny. As Doug Berman, the show’s founder noted on Tommy’s death, they were “diamonds in the rough.” I lived in Billings at a time when Yellowstone Public Radio would host quarterly fund-raising drives, and I would contribute, but only tagging my money to Car Talk. Then and now I wanted nothing to do with NPR’s woke news and public affairs broadcasts, smug and humorless.

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Starr Tracks: Top Albums of 1971 Ranked (Part 1 of 2)

I am very excited to welcome our old friend Kevin Starr back to the blog. My taste in music is pedestrian, right Karen and Richard? Keven is a student of rock and roll. He’s got more, much more to offer. Have fun!

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Welcome to Starr Tracks! I’m Kevin Starr, your fearless (and totally amateur) guide on a mission to rank the top-selling music year by year, starting in 1971 and going… well, until I run out of steam.

“Who is Kevin Starr?” you ask. Well, I’m not a musician, nor a professional critic. I’m 62 and have spent decades listening to music and forming highly debatable opinions.

Thanks to modern technology, we now have access to the kind of epic record collection we could only dream about back in the day. In the ’70s, before the internet was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye, listening to music required buying a big, unwieldy contraption called an LP (short for long player). These discs spun at a mesmerizing 33 1/3 RPM and played sound using a tiny needle, or “stylus”—which was basically like playing music with a sewing machine, if you think about it.

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Election oddity

Paper ballots are considered the gold standard of vote counting. Three states in the U.S. use them, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington. Other states claim to use them, but they are not reliable. Some just issue receipts repeating what the voter intended, but offering no guarantee that is what is recorded. Quite a few states offer nothing, just a smile and thank you to the voter, no assurance at all that the vote was even recorded, much less counted.

In the three states mentioned, voters hand-enter their choices on ballots, and the ballots are then run through optical scanners to tally the vote. It is not fool proof, as the scanning software can be corrupt, but the ballots are stored under lock and key for at least 22 months for recounts and perhaps study or statistical sampling. I think that 22 months storage is the law.

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The Mighty Wurlitzer

A couple of anecdotes that hopefully, at the end, will tie into this piece, which is based on my reading of Frances Stonor Saunders The Cultural Cold War. They may seem detached, and if you are reading this, I have decided they are useful. Or maybe just interesting.

First, we had a man come to our house recently to clean our wood stove. It’s a long and tedious process that requires that he walk up onto our steep-peaked roof and use various tools which only make sense in light of chimney sweeping. While he was working I asked if he would mind my looking on, as there is always much to learn about the machines and devices in a home and how they work. We talked about a wide range of subjects, including music* and the sign business. While he set the ladder for the roof ascent, I mentioned that my Dad had been in the sign business, and my Mom insisted that he take me with him on summer trips to various Montana outposts. My job was to hold the ladder. I could have been filling shopping bags with Styrofoam for all the help I gave him.

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The Pauline conversion

I was reading this morning the book mentioned in an earlier post, The Cultural Cold War, by Frances Stoner Saunders. I came upon two revelations, one from within the book, the other from without.

First, I stumbled upon the phrase  in CCW, “Pauline Conversion”, and am embarrassed to admit that having been raised Catholic to the nth degree, I did not know what it meant. Who is this “Pauline” I wondered? Is she some goddess of history who has a statue somewhere, like Joan of Arc?

No, stupid. It is who we Catholics called “St. Paul”, aka Paul of Tarsus, a contemporary of the apostles of Jesus and tormentor of Christians, who one day riding a horse was struck by a bolt of light, and thereafter converted to being a follower of Jesus.

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Waiting to catch a plane … like watching election returns?

We are sitting in our hotel room in Venice, and head for the airport at checkout time, 11AM, which is 3AM in Denver. Tonight when we arrive in Denver, it will be 10:30 there, but in our heads 2:30 in the morning. I have always had a harder time traveling west than east,  so getting back on Colorado time will take some effort. 

Sitting in our hotel room waiting to go to the airport, not wanting to get there too early, is tedious. It’s like watching election returns, which I have not done in years. They don’t have the final numbers, but need to keep you glued so you watch the commercials. So you just sit and watch. 

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No two alike

We were booked on Delta to fly to Venice out of Atlanta on Monday, but Delta could not find a gate for their plane. We ended up in B107, and left there three hours late. That meant we missed all our connections the following day, and depended on the kindness of strangers. At the train station Bolzano a shuttle driver agreed to give us a ride to the airport, even as he was off duty. We offered him twenty euro, and he only reluctantly took it, hiding it under papers on his passenger seat. Our car rental agency was closed, so we needed to get to our hotel, but no cabs were available. Two police officers, the only other people in Bolzano Airport, called all over and finally ran down a cab for us. They were very kind. Europcar the next day downgraded our reservation to a tiny Fiat since we were late getting there. I have to duck my head to lower the visor.

White guy problems? I suppose. Delta, by way of apology, gave 200 of us a free snack, airline peanuts or tiny bags of chips.

But here is the interesting thing, and I have experienced this once before. Delta announced when we finally boarded that our faces would be our boarding passes. To get in the plane we stood for maybe a second before a camera that looked at our facial plates, recognized us from passport photos, and let us pass.

My facial work is far less sophisticated, but this reinforces my notion that no two of us look alike. Take that, all you Martin Luther King/Don King doubters.

Hottest day ever?

AP News recently ran a headline claiming, actually shouting, that Monday, July 22, 2024 was the hottest day ever in Earth’s history. My questions are many, but most importantly, do they really expect to be taken seriously when making such claims? This is followed by “Do they believe their own lies?” It appears to me that these screaming headlines are designed to reach gullible people who don’t read beyond headlines and who can’t think properly anyway. That must be the target market – most Americans.

Let’s have a look of some of the many problems with this headline:

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Life in pre-evac

Look up the “Quarry Fire” on any search engine, and you will be as up-to-speed are we are, that is, wanting a little more information. The best I can usually do is information that is 11 hours or one day old. When I use the Brave search engine, it rolls  its AI down from the top and is not reliable. Yesterday it said that the fire was at 9,000 acres and was definitely caused by arson. The fire is at 450+ acres, and arson is suspected. Authorities will only say “human-caused”.

There’s a somewhat wild area to the east of us, and last Wednesday at 9PM a deputy on patrol saw something on a steep trail, one that has switchbacks. He saw a 10×10 area of fire. By morning it was at 200 acres and growing.

We’ve had no rain, no lightening. How that 10×10 area came about is under investigation, and is, according to law enforcement, “very suspicious”. That’s all we know.

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