Accelerated Christmas

 After Ginger got back from work this afternoon we went out for dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant that is on Main Street a few blocks down from the hotel. We had cocktails as we sometimes do when dining out I drank one with cilantro and pepper.

After dinner she wanted to walk up and see the film shoot I had told her about. It was still in progress. We walked past the disclaimer notice telling us that we gave permission to be filmed an recorded as part of the crowd scene. As we got up towards the bakery and the jewelers, we could see the tent where the "talent" was getting her makeup applied in preparation for the next scene.

I took quick glance in her direction. As we passed, Ginger said she recognized the star from other Hallmark movies. They use many of the same cast members over and over  It's a cottage industry. I said I didn't recognize her, but I was sure Ginger was right. I simply don't have the talent for recognizing the faces of these actresses, whom I tend to respect more than the stars of big budget Hollywood movies. They are more like us---working people, nobodies in the ecology of Hollywood. That makes them human to me.

We walked all the way Main Street to Temple Street, admiring the redevelopment of the temple across the street before turning around. As I've said before, I have nothing against the Mormon Church per se, so long as they leave me alone. As we got up towards the intersection, we passed the Santa Claus protestor we had seen the previous night. I was able to read his handmade sign more closely. It referred to this particular website. It was a bit surreal. Christmas in April What was going on?

By the time we turned around and started back towards our hotel we were already joking about "when we move to Utah."  We both agreed that we were happy to be in Arizona for now during the shutdown. 

On the way back towards the hotel, passing through the film shoot again, where the crew members were spraying foam-like fake snow onto the base of the door frames of the businesses. We marveled at the lengthening sunlight of late spring.

Back in the hotel, while I listened to a podcast updating me on the progress of the Arizona election audit, an dhow the Democrats are losing their minds over it, Ginger looked up the actress she recognized in the tent. She showed me a picture and I said she was familiar, although I could not have told you which movie she had been in. 

Ginger whined, "Aw, I have to wait until December 15 to see it."

"The Arizona audit is going to change everything," I heard over my ear bud, on the podcast I was listening to.

Lights, Camera, Hallmark

 This morning, for the second morning in a row, I left the hotel room in mid morning while Ginger was at work in an office in the high rise next door. It was my new habit, to grab a blueberry danish and a second cup of coffee at the little bakery that is on the other side of the boulevard of Main Street, about one block up from the hotel.

As I crossed the street catty-corner to the block where the bakery is located, I noticed the sidewalk going up the walk was filled with the people setting up equipment and pulling out hoses. There were fake Christmas trees standing along the street, beside large vans that I recognized as the type belonging to a film crew working on location. All of the dozens of workers were wearing masks, which was probably required of them for being on the job site.

As I walked up the sidewalk towards the bakery I saw that the windows of the businesses, even the vacant ones, were filled with Christmas decorations including large white paper snowflakes. The planters along the street were laden with white mesh cloth that simulated fake snow.

Putting it all together, I realized it was almost certainly  a location shooting for a Christmas movie on the Hallmark Channel (which turned out to be exactly correct, as I learned after querying one of the crew members). Salt Lake City is one of their favorite locations that stand in for various small towns across North America.

 I have mentioned on the blog here how Ginger and I enjoy these movies at Christmastime, and how the Hallmark Channel especially is impeccable in their props and art direction, as one would expect from their brand. I noticed that a tiny jewelers next to the bakery was especially carefully decorated with extra Christmas garlands, no doubt as part of the story.

Inside the bakery the woman asked me if I was getting something to take out. I later realized this was because they were going to use the bakery as part of the story.

While walking back from hotel (which is when I finally was bold enough to disturb one of the crew members for information, thinking that the lowest ranking ones would be the most friendly), I saw the notice that indicated that a crowd scene was being filmed, and that anyone who lingered there would be giving their legal permission to be filmed and recorded as an extra in the movie. 

For a moment I considered hanging out, just to be in the movie as an extra. It would add to my credits that include being in the audience at the TCM film festival in 2014, in a clip that is aired from time to time. 

But I know from experience of my roommate in Austin that these things can last all day. I would leave the work to professional extras. I can still watch the filming from the window of the sixth floor hotel room in which I am typing this. From time to time I look out and see the small clump of extras swing around the corner and begin walking up towards the bakery. The extras are not wearing masks. In Christmas movies, we don't want to see that.

Even though I'm not going to be in the movie itself, I'm certainly looking forward to seeing the movie next December, and will look out for the bakery and the jewelers with its April Christmas decorations.. The friendly crew member told me the movie is to be called "Christmas at the Madison."  Here is the imdb entry. It's a two-parter!  

There is Nothing Wrong with the Air

 As we sat in the plaza, enjoying the perfectness of the temperature and the light, I mentioned that ironically, my lifelong interest in music theory had started in the most unlikely of places, from a classic Hollywood science fiction movie, namely Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

"I saw it when it first came out, in 1978 when I was thirteen. We went to see it in Des Moines at the large-screen theater. My dad drove us down---me and some of my junior high friends."

One of the screens that blew me away was when they are Devil's Tower as the alien ship is landing. They attempt to communicate with the aliens via musical tones, as they have been taught by previous encounters with the aliens. 

"Up a major third...down a perfect fifth," I said, recalling some of the directions that one of the character gives. Anyone who has seen the movie would recognize the sequence of tones that it creates.

I had to know what that all meant.  When I got to Willamette and had to chance to learn about it, I relished the opportunity to do so, even though it was not my talent. Back then I didn't care so much about that. I just wanted to get a classical education, and that certainly included musical theory.

I brought out my iPhone. 

"There is another scene from that movie I have to find."

I found it on Youtube in a quick search. Ginger already knew which one I meant. She had been thinking about it recently.

Of course, as you may have guessed, I was talking about this scene.

"This is the scene that really stayed with me at the time," I said. "I've thought about this scene so many times over the years. Suddenly it seems a lot more appropriate lately."

Even when I was thirteen, it struck me how odd it was that only a few people followed him, among the ones who had been compelled to show up at Devil's Tower to meet the aliens. Most of them had stayed locked in their fear based on the lie they had been told.

After we watched the clip on my phone, I got sad a moment with reflection. I mentioned how Heather Pinecone had told me a few days ago that one of mutual friends had proudly commented on Facebook how he and his girlfriend wore their masks everywhere, even then didn't have to, in order to show their support and respect for others.

How far he and I have split apart. He was once like a brother to me. I have visited him many times over the years, as recently as 2012 at his home in Maryland, where he is a sculptor. 

"We went Devil's Tower together," I told Ginger. It was so long ago---1986.  I miss my old friends sometimes. But there is no bridging the gap at this moment, I know.

Five Beats in Late Spring

 After dinner we went out to the empty plaza of Gallivan Center and sat on a cement bench. Unlike the last time I was in Salt Lake City, despite the presence of the Santa Claus with the sign, there was no giant light-strung pole as a Christmas tree in the middle of plaza. The ice skating rink had been dismantled (it was shuttered due to the beer bug anyway, but they kept the lights on all night).

Now it was sunny in the early evening of Spring and warm enough that we didn't have to wear our jackets. Ginger let her feet dangle down and she started tapping them in rhythm on the concrete.

After a few seconds, I interjected, "ah, 5/4 time." Then I started imitating the rhythm of that time signature. She laughed at my seemingly random reference. She knew that I knew that she didn't know what I was talking about, but that it was one of my random references I like to make, pretending as if she had done something on purpose.

"Like Take Five by  Dave Brubcek," I said. Then I began tapping out the famous alternating three-beat then two-beat rhythm of that famous jazz piece, that gives it is distinctive feel.

I explained that I spent the late afternoon after my walk watching my new favorite Youtube channel, by a young British guy explaining the complexities of music theory in contemporary music, including one video on 5/4 time."

I explained that I loved music theory. I had learned chord theory years ago, when I was in college at Oregon, but that it was a subject that I could only appreciate through others. I somehow lack the ability to be a real musician. I can read music note by note, and understand the theory subject-by-subject, but when I step back and hear someone explain it who really understands it, like the guy who does those videos, I realize that it is not my natural talent. I know enough to appreciate the genius of those who truly understand it.

The same applies to musicians themselves. The idea that someone can hear the intricacies of chords and time signatures the way some people can seem like a magical ability beyond my mind to comprehend. It lets me understand how people conceive of subjects I understand, such as physics, in the same way. But it took me a long time to get that way with physics. It didn't happen overnight. It took many years.

"When I got to Willamette, I wanted to be either a music major or a physics major, because those were the only two subjects that were difficult to me. They were the only ones I couldn't. master right off the bat, I thought."

"I chose physics," I said. "I think it was the right choice," I said, looking up at the sunlit skyline of the city in the cool April air.

Don't Mess With Utah

 Last night we out to dinner at the burger joint that has become Ginger's favorite during his business visits to Salt Lake City. It is located on the south side of Gallivan Plaza. We walked past the live studios of the local CBS television affiliate. 

"Do you want to be on television?" Ginger asked jokingly, as we passed the studios. I laughed. Of course not.

We walked into the restaurant without our masks and were seated by the older Latino waiter. Ginger commented that she was determined to have a margarita this time. The last visit to the restaurant, she said, she had forgotten her id and they had carded her, refusing to serve her alcohol.

"If they card me, I'm, going to tell them I didn't bring my id, then I'm going to confess I'm only twenty years old, but please please it's my 21st birthday next week."

The waiter, wearing his mask as he must, did not card either us when we ordered our drinks. It turns out that he did so last time only because the owner was in earshot. 

As he took our orders, he suddenly said, "Too early for Christmas," while looking through the window across the street towards the small row of shops on the other side. 

It was a strange random comment. We looked up and saw a man dressed as Santa Claus walking down the street carrying a sign saying "Protect LDS Children." On the other side it read "Read the stories."

"It's a good way to get people's attention,'" I said. "to dress up as Santa Claus in April. People are intrigued, and they don't see you as a kook immediately, but something good and friendly, at least for a second or two."

As we waited for our food, I described how I had walked around downtown Salt Lake City that day, and how pleasant it was. There is no place in the whole Phoenix metro area where I like to go walking on the streets. Not a single. Here I felt so good doing so, and looking at the old buildings, and some of the new ones.

I described the new construction I saw that was going up in downtown near the old Union Station. The buildings were the mid-rise apartment buildings that young people love so much, and which have taken over the older sections of places like Portland and Denver. They were starting to do the same in parts of Salt Lake City.

"It hit me that young people love living in old industrial sections because it makes them feel like they are doing something important with their lives."

I said that I had zero sympathy for people who move to a place like Utah with the intent of changing the culture, and complain about it once they get here. The same goes for Texas, 

"Just stay away,"  I said.

The liberals feel they have to change every last place in America, because they hate things different from them and have to destroy them. If you need something different, go to Portland."

"Arizona is different," I said. "That's a place you can go and write your own story. But not here, or Texas."

The Maricopa Audit from 10,000 Feet

 I got lucky on the flight this morning. It was a full flight---all flights are full lately, and even though I was in the A boarding group in Southwest, meaning I would have my pick of a window or aisle seat, but that certainly the middle seat would be full.

I went straight to back of the plane, where most of the rows were still open and found an window seat on the right side of the plane. I could put my backpack up in the overhead compartment in a relaxed way, where the front of the plane was jammed up. I like the right side of the plane because I am right-handed, and that leaves my writing hand on the free unshared armrest, which I've learned is much more comfortable.

Eventually the plane filled up. The flight attendant announced that anyone going down the aisle should choose a middle seat. I got the bonanza. The other two seats in the row were selected by a young mother and her young son, who was no more than four years old.  She took the aisle of course and the son took the middle. I smiled at him and said hello. He said hello back. It would be a good flight.

I opened my iPad and, without an Internet connection, I listened to one of my downloaded videos, in this case a recording of the Polish version of the rosary that had been originally livestreamed from the Lourdes grotto.  They don't do the rosary in Polish most days, perhaps once every couple weeks. I had kept one of the recordings because I want to learn the rosary in Polish, even though I don't speak that language beyond a few phrases. Someday when we can travel again freely, in every sense, I intend to go to Poland to visit an old friend of mine, and I am going to visit several Catholic shrines there. 

As I began listening to this, practicing saying words in the repeated prayer, picking out a few syllables I could imitate until I could put together a word here and there, the plane took off and began its ascent up from Sky Harbor airport. 

The young boy next to me was eager to see outside. His mother apologized to me for leaning over me, and I said it was perfectly fine. Sometimes it is the easiest thing in the world to be the kindly old man, like I am channeling being Saint Nicholas.

I peered out the window a few seconds later and recognized the arenas and tall buildings in downtown Phoenix. I realized we had taken off to the west, and would turn north.

I was delighted to see that, using the familiar diagonal slash of Grand Avenue, the old Highway 60 route that ran from downtown Phoenix in the old days, I easily found the state fairgrounds and the Veterans Arena, which is the building in the photograph of my previous post, where the Maricopa Audit is being held. Perfect timing. 

Fun at the State Fairgrounds

 

(source) The Arizona State Fair Commission began planning for an "Arizona State Fairgrounds Exposition Center" as early as February 1960. The Commission envisioned an indoor facility which could be used during the State Fair as well as year-round. In 1964, Phoenix architect Leslie Mahoney, of the Lescher and Mahoney firm (designers of the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Phoenix among others) presented the commission with the final plans, and construction began that summer. Tucson architect Lew Place (son of University of Arizona chief campus architect Roy Place, and who later took over his father's firm) was also involved in the design. The structural engineering firm was T. Y. Lin International. The unique saddle-shaped, tension-cable roof, supporting over 1,000 precast concrete panels, was considered innovative architectural engineering at the time.

Hollywood went full-on Chinese Communist-sponsored woke last night. I love it. Never before has Hollywood been as important to us as this moment. They couldn't be helping our side any more than they are doing right now.

I refresh Youtube every few hours to see if this guy who lives in Tennessee, and who has been banned from three of his previous channels because of his frank discussion of the recent election, nd who has emerged as the start of the moment among our side, has uan pdated report on the Maricopa Recount. Are they going to shut it down (it is being held in the building in the photograph above). Even the AP is melting down over it. Wouldn't surprise any of us, I think, but I doubt it really matters. If not this way, then some other way.

Ginger took off for Utah today. After I dropped her off, she texted me that announcements were being made over the intercom of the terminal that arm jabs were available for free inside the airport. I texted her this related video that I had seen that morning in my feed. 

The Lost World

View from the Sandy Bottom looking NE towards the McDowell Mountains. The Saguaro is visible in the foreground, along with the Palo Verde on the left edge of the frame (the Ironwood is out of frame to the right). This was taken last December. Everything in the foreground from just past the Saguaro to the intersection at 91st street is now fenced off by a curtained chain-link fence and has been scraped clean to accommodate the supporting park and access road that will allow workers to access the storage pond being built just out of frame to the right. I am using this photo as my avatar for the Telegram social media app, where I mostly just lurk at the Reading Epic Threads group. Telegram is where it's at. It's reaching critical mass as an alternative platform (as opposed to Clubhouse which is going to die a fiery death from wokeness contamination. No point is starting alternative venues unless if you have to follow the same rules as the Establishment platforms).

 

Currently reading: The Lost World (1912).by Arthur Conan Doyle. I read almost all the Sherlock Holmes story by Doyle last year and recently saw the audio book for this available for free through my Kindle Unlimited Membership. I've been listening to it as I do most things lately---at double speed. It drives Ginger nuts to hear the rapid narration coming through the ear buds.

Maricopa: The Season-Ending Cliffhanger

The Maricopa County ballot audit that is now underway by order of the Arizona Senate, and enforced by court order, will take six weeks to complete, it is estimated.

Maricopa County is the fourth largest county in America. The counties that are larger happen to be in states that have greater population, so by itself Maricopa dominates the state of Arizona like no other county dominates any state.

It is so big that it is larger in population than most states. This is partly because it includes not only the entire city of Phoenix (which is large by itself) but all of her suburbs out to fifty miles or more in various directins. 

The audit is being conducted by the some of the same folks who did the audit in Antrim Country, Michigan, which found enormous substantial discrepancies in the actual tally of legitimate paper ballots as compared to the results reported by the voting machines. In the case of that Michigan County, the machines reported that Biden had won the country, whereas Trump had also prevailed there (not surprising since it is a conservative county in the northern part of the Lower Peninsula of that great state).

In this case in Arizona, the audit will also examine not only the machines (which are the same kind as used in Michigan) but the paper ballots themselves, for verification of the identity of individuals who voted. 

This would presumably include the ballot of yours truly, living in North Scottsdale, as well as Ginger.  We cast our ballots just across the 101 in an office park near where I had recently had my optometrist appointment. I watched as the woman fed my ballot into the machine, which is no doubt one of the ones that will be examined, along with my signature and identity.

According to the stiplation, there will be no report of the results until the audit is complete. It will be an interesting wait until then. No doubt rumors will emerge, but nothing can be verified until the audit is done. 

Until then, all seals are sealed by those conducting the audit. Any discussion of it in the media or on Youtube is speculation.

But we all know what would happen if, say, a huge number of obviously fake votes for Biden were recorded. He won here only by ten thousand votes. He barely squeaked it out. If Maricopa falls, then...well, who knows what could happen after that. Even the Lefties know this, and the media. That is why they are freaking out right now.

In the end, if the audit is conducted in a way that is endorsed by the people now doing it, and they conclude that Biden won Arizona fair and square, then I will be inclined to accept that. 

But we will have to wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. People in America used to know how to do this. We have to relearn.

The Ten-Year Trump Presidency

 Many years ago, during the height of the Cold War, when the thread of a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union was a real possibility, Congress enacted laws that allowed that President and the Executive Branch to enact plans for the continuation of the functioning of the federal government, and by extension the state governments, by the U.S. military, in the event that the military chain of command determined that the country had suffered an attack or invasion so as it to leave without an apparent legal, constitutional government.

In effect, if the existing military chain of command, including the President as Commander-in-Chief, made the decision that the country had suffered an attack or invasion that had wiped out or. crippled the civilian authority, then they could legally invoke any number of executive orders, some of them secret, that would allow for the government to continue to function until a legal government could be re-established.

One scenario would be the event when due to the wartime attack on the country by foreign powers, proper elections could not take place, and without them, the terms of officials would expire without any legal means to continue the legislative and other functions of government. 

In effect, the unified military chain of command would be allowed to stage a legal military coup that would be temporary. The role of the military in such cases would be purely as a caretaker government, as would be necessary for this idea to be acceptable under any scenario involving the bedrock concepts of American republican democracy.

The military would not be able to make policy. It would not be martial law in the sense people think of. The role of the military would be to preserve the integrity of the functioning of various civilian forms of government on the federal, state, and local level in as normal a manner as possible until the attack was repulsed enough for the constitution to kick back into gear.

Since many of the executive orders are secret, it is possible that much of this could play out without the public being aware of it. They would be aware of it only as much as they would be aware that an attack has taken place. In the event of a nuclear exchange, this public awareness would be universal, but the scenarios described above have been extended over the years in planning and policy to include more subtle attacks, such as biological attacks and cyber attacks.

The scenario of Devolution, as people have called it, is that exactly this scenario has taken place, and that most of the public is not aware of it. Nevertheless it is playing, and we are living in the midst of what some call the Strange War. 

in this case, the Devolution scenario is specifically predicated on the notion that the U.S. suffered a foreign and domestic attack on its electoral system last November, and that the military chain of command is aware of that attack. By extension, and through the executive order, the military chain of command does not recognize Biden. It has recognized no legal President of the United States since noon of January 2020.

Most of the people I know who are believers in Devolution also believe that the Strange War has already been won for the most part. Trump has already triumphed. This is because he was smarter than they were. He knew the attack they planned. He knew that they would take extreme measures to defeat him, as they did. They were so extreme as to be ridiculous.

But he did something that even none of his supporters suspected he would do. He let them win. After the election, they expected he would fight the fraud, as he did. They expected him to go down swinging and make a big tantrum about it after he left office. Instead he ceded the ground and went silent for several months.

This has destroyed them. It is the last thing they expected. But his ace in the hole was invoking the Devolution scenario. In effect, before leaving office as the last legitimate President for now, he put the current on military auto-pilot as it fought out the rest of the war, most of which was already won by the time he left office (while he could still legally command the military as the C-in-C).

It is also assumed widely that both Trump and Pence have been integrated into the caretaker military government as civilian advisors so as to function effectively in their former roles as President and Vice-President, even to the point of clandestinely meeting foreign leaders (such as Kim Jung Un) without violating the Logan Act.

One big question is this: how did Trump convince the military chain of command to invoke these most drastic of scenarios and to usurp the constitutional functions of government in wartime?

The answer: he let them watch the steal. The military monitored the server communications of the vote totals in real time and saw the steal. They saw that the true electoral returns were a Trump landslide of over 400 electoral votes. It was clear that the U.S. was under attack as dire as an invasion of its shores. It was no question that the secret orders would need to be invoked. It was clear that Biden could not legally be president (add to this to notion that it is probably manifestly proven that Biden is a compromised enemy asset).

This is partly why I believe Trump when he says there will no repeat of the electoral shenanigans next time. They have already won the Strange War. It has to play out.

One reason it must play out is that Americans need to be frightened out of their wits by the reality of what rule by the Democrats would actually mean. And I mean rule, not govern, because that is what they intend to do over us. They want to rule us. 

By the time this is over, Americans will be so sick of the Democrats and their wretchedness of mask mandates, critical race theory, mandated gender-swapping high school sports, constant riots and looting of their own cities, that they will never want to see these people anywhere near power again. the entire nation will groan when hearing the name of the 44th President or the alleged 46th. 

There is even a scenario in which Trump could take office again as legal President before 2024. This would happen if the electoral theft could be proven in court. This issue is far from over. The Trump diehards hope that it doesn't happen until January 2023, as this would mean that almost any proper interpretation of the law would allow Trump to run again in 2024 for a full four-year ,allowing him ten years in the White House.

Maricopa County's Moment

 Writing about electronics and video watching is a trivial distraction away from the proverbial elephant in the room, namely the ongoing audit of the ballots cast in Maricopa County in the recent election.

Up until this week, you had to follow a bunch of underground Youtubers who shared information on this, like this guy who goes by Behizy, and who covers all of the states' audits in progress, but I think he might live here in Arizona. Behizy works in tandem with a few other such vloggers to give nightly reports. I haven't watched most of them. I see them going by in my Youtube feed. 

It has been on and off, with the Maricopa audit. Finally it seemed as if it were on, and that it is going to be a real one.  

The national media has finally showed up. It is happening in downtown Phoenix, I think.  I have no idea what it will find. Maybe it is theater and distraction. Who knows. I trust to let the process play out in the legal way.

Trump spoke about it yesterday. I trust him on this. He said the kind of issues that made people lose trust in the electoral process in 2020 would not happen again in 2022 or 2024. He said this very clearly. I trust him.  I trust that he is in charge of things, and that things are going according to plan. I have no reason to believe otherwise.

Wal-Mart Online Debacle Follow-up

 Follow up to my previous post about buying a new television at Wal-Mart's web site and then picking it up at the local store, only to see the Wal-Mart employee almost hand the set to someone else in the parking lot (and never checking my receipt).

Ginger said she just saw a post on NextDoor (a site I have never used) of someone else in our neighborhood who did exactly this and who, upon arriving at the store, was told the set was already picked up by someone else. They were given the runaround and told at first there was nothing that could be done. Maybe they will eventually get their money back. The employee who gave out the set could not even be identified or found.

So that settles that. A multi-billion dollar corporation can't handle the simple act of checking receipts for online orders. 

I feel lucky that I actually got my set. 

The Excuse for Hate

 As I walked back from A.J.s with my groceries, having never put on a mask the entire time, I thought about some of the people who I am know personally and who, if they heard about my episode, would explode with rage and hate at me.

Of course nothing like that has much effect on me anymore, and some of them know them, but they would scream with hate anymore. They would scream because they like to hate.

Most of the people I could think of are the same ones who have, or would have, screamed with hate at me for voting for the Bad Orange Man. A couple months ago I had a breakthrough in my thoughts about such folks. Previously in my thoughts, I had gone on the assumptions that they hated me because I voted for the Orange Man.

I know that is not true. I think the reverse is true. I think they hate the Orange Man because it gives them an excuse to hate the people they already want to hate. This includes me. Most of the people who would scream at me are ones that I realize have not realized like me or enjoyed my presence for many years. But they tolerated me, and I have not given them the proper excuse to outright loathe me until now.

Now in their minds they can give free rein to that hate, not only of me, but of all the people who are the "problem with America," that they have hated for years. 

Thus for these people, there will be no political conversion that would allow them to see things my way, and to no longer hate me. Only a spiritual conversion, away from the desire to hate other people, and to blame other people for their problems and their own inner pain, would have any effect.

As I've said, I feel sad for them and pray for them. Most of them I will not see again in this lifetime. I hope to see some of them in the next life, if God has mercy on all of us, and allow us that Grace.

Mask in Pocket

 This morning found us out of English muffins or any breadstuffs for breakfast. I thinking I might fast for the day, I decided I wanted something to put into my stomach, so I got fully dressed and headed out the door to A.J.s market. 

Before I left the apartment, I retrieved a cloth mask from the hook on my coat rack where I keep the ones that Ginger's mother has made for us over the last year. I put it in my back pocket, remembering the last time I went to A.J.s and I saw the sign that masks were now "recommended."

As I walked to the market, which is only a three-minute stroll out of the security gate, which puts you right amidst the shopping center, I thought about whether I would wear the mask in the market. 

I am rarely the kind of person who takes daring provocative actions that incite passions in others. I'm mostly a follower.

But I had seen someone in A.J.'s without a mask, so I wouldn't be the pioneer. I'd be the follower.

So when I got to the door, I went through inside without wearing the mask. It was still in my pocket. I wondered if I would get any angry stares from the other customers. There were few people there in the early morning. I saw the women standing around the bakery counter, which is a magnet to the women of North Scottsdale. All were wearing masks but all were absorbed in their business.

I got my English muffins and some half-and-half, since we were getting low on that, and there are few things more disappointing to start the day at 4:30 AM than to discover than I must drink my coffee black.

At the counter the masked employee was cheerful as she chatted to me. All was normal. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Except it wasn't normal. Nothing feels normal lately.

On the way home I thought about the comments that Patrick Gunnels had discussed in the video I included in my last post. I thought about how Donald Trump had probably saved the country when he got elected in 2016, by the Grace of God, and that had Hillary been elected, the country would probably be ended as we know it by now.

All the rest of my day is gravy, as they say. 

Odysee is Where Its At

Thanks to Patrick Gunnels of Reading Epic Threads (who has been banned from Saul's underground forum) I'm now spending a great deal of time at Odysee. Youtube will remain my go-to for videos on tech subjects, RV trailers, travel vlogs, volcano updates, and liturgical streams for now. But for the real news, many of us are decamping to new premises. Odysee is the platform that will win out. Take my word for it. this is in part because it is distributed and has no central authority that can ban people from its file-sharing system. It is the way that we will get around the totalitarian control of central large companies.

 Sample. "A good explanation of why Donald Trump is endorsing the arm-shot" 

(starts at 1:08. Warning may take a while to load as Odysee is coping with its new popularity as platform):

   

 Gunnels went to the University of Texas in the late 1990s and was a math major. No doubt we crossed paths in Robert Lee Moore hall. He has the mind of a classical scholar. I sometimes comment on his live threads, so if you listen to his nightly threads, no doubt my name will pop up at times. He even read an long email I sent to him, as he does from other people. He is going to be big because he is impeccable.

Yearning for Rain

 As we drove back from the reservoir on Sunday, having stretched our impromptu get-away weekend drive as far as we could, until the paved road ended in the campground along the lake, the sky grew partly cloudy and then, surprisingly, despite the sunshine, drops of rain began hitting the windshield.

The were sporadic and meager, like small animal prints on the glass, and we had to double check that indeed they were raindrops. 

How we yearned for a good rain. It had been a long time since a good soaking, and even longer since a true monsoon. We barely got any the last few years, after having a substantial one the year we arrived. On that drive there would be no such heavy downpour, only a freshness of the smell of it penetrating the dry air, and the promise that someday the rains would return.

It's hard not to feel privileged living here, that things were relatively normal during most of the shutdown, and now things are moving back towards something feeling normal. Moreover there is a sense that we are. not going to fooled again by the people who fooled us before. There is revolt in the air.

At home in my desk, I dream of escape. But there is nowhere to go. There is a reason people are pouring into this place, despite the escalating prices. It is the sense that America is making a stand here. 

Even more surprising, there are things happens in regard to the events of November 2020 concerning specific things that put Maricopa County in the spotlight. I have to follow the underground channels on Youtube to keep up to date. The people there actually follow things.

The daily struggle is to keep up one's personal spirits despite the drag of all the media right now trying to take us down into their abyss of hate and loathing. Even without them directly, I feel their influence second and third hand. 

The End of Place

 All the young people pouring in here and into the few remaining destination-refuges in America remind me so much of myself. I was like them once I sought what many of them were looking for---a place to reboot one's life in young adulthood, to cast off the past of one's childhood, and to find a niche and place in America where one can set down roots.

But there are hardly any places like that in America anymore in part because we don't have places anymore. We just have one big place We all live online connected to each other. The physical world, including our physical location, is the shadow of this real world through which we are connected by continuous almost ubiquitous media.

It was 32 years ago this spring when at age 24, coming into full adulthood, I went down to Austin, Texas to start graduate school. I had barely been to Texas before. It was a strange and exotic idea, as it is for many Americans. The idea that I would live there had seemed bizarre. 

I drove my car down from Fort Collins, all night through the beautiful late spring darkness. The night sky was cloudless. On the big empty bridge over the Red River, in pitch blackness and solitude, I parked my car and walked to the edge and looked out over the river, throwing some loose change in my pocket into the darkness for good. This was the start of a brand new chapter for me, I decided. My last few undergraduate years in Oregon had been full of drama that I wanted to forget. I wanted to become a person that even my high school friends would not recognize. I wanted to become me. It was the year 1989.

It was a hugely success in many ways, although I learned that drama will come back into your life no matter. Still it was everything of the reboot into maturity that I hoped it would be. Later in my life I found myself looking for that same kind of successful renewal. It had had become the blueprint for that.

Austin was a great place to do that in 1989 in part because hardly anyone talked about it. This was before the Internet existed. Information traveled through the mainstream media and word of mouth. Austin, like most cities, was invisible on the natural stage. Each city was a universe unto itself. Underground and youth culture traveled around the country by slow motion, by people photocopying underground magazines in Kinkos and mailing them to their friends via the US Postal service.

Austin was dirt cheap. Apartments could be had for almost nothing. Because of the saving and loan collapse, half the city was for sale, even in the quaint old neighborhoods near campus where shacks probably now sellf for a million bucks. Back then you could pick them up for almost nothing, and everything stayed for sale for about two years before the market recovered.

That meant youth could pour in, undetected, and incubate its own culture.

None of this can happen anymore. There are no city-universes. Everything is hip all at once. There is no such thing as place, only the simulation of it. The hippest cities are the most expensive ones, not the cheapest ones. 

I feel incredibly lucky that I got to live in places like Austin, New York City, and Portland, Oregon before they became burnt up in the fire that has consumed all placeness and left us with one big place (ant throw in Colorado, where I got to grow up, and a few other places too). Youth now bounce in nomad fashion from one place to another, seeking their place and discovering all cities are now alike with the same sterile diversions that leave one lonely. Not only has true underground culture (which requires cheap rental housing) disappeared, but all the cities are becoming the same monotonous architecture inside themselves and with each other. 

Going to a new city to reboot yourself and escape drama was always an illusion. But it was an illusion that one used to be able to leverage, in the breathing space of newness, if one took advantage of it to actively change one's lie and grow in the new place, temporarily free of the burdens of the past.

But the illusion is gone. One carries one's life with one wherever one goes now. One updates one's address in one's online accounts. Amazon delivers to your new address. Your phone number doesn't change like it used to (which seems both horrifying and refreshing now to think of). 

No wonder youth neuroses are skyrocketing. Everything that was let me fumble my way through my youthful mistakes to build up a life seem stripped away. The stereotype of the Baby Boomer is one of someone who doesn't realize the profound difference between the world of their youth and the world of today, thinking that youngsters can simply follow the same steady life path they did. Nothing confirms to me more that I am a GenXer that the consciousness of this change, as those of us born after the mid Sixties know that the world that came before us was disappearing before our eyes. I took advantage I could, of that disappearing world.

I wouldn't now how to be young now. I would go mad, I think. I wouldn't know what the heck to do, or how to live life at all. I would be pulled into all the trends and phony remedies, like joining social justice political movements that create solidarity with other depressed youth, and a means to express their tantrum-like anger. I am amazed at the youth who don't succumb to this.

Arizona: the Last Refuge for the American Masses

 After we drove up to Bartlett Reservoir yesterday, we sat in the car in the parking lot of the boat ramp, perched on the bluff above the large lake below us, nestled in the high barren mountains around us. I remarked that we were only a few miles from the highway that we had often taken to drive up towards Colorado, but that to reach it would entail a fifty mile detour, as the mountains were so rugged that only a sturdy off-road vehicle might even attempt it.

With the windows down, a cool spring breeze came through the car. It was enough just to sit there and feel the coolness. Already the stirrings of the hot summer were arriving down in the valley. In another month, the days would be intolerably hot. Here in the mountains it was at least ten degrees cooler, even more so, because of the altitude.

People are pouring into the valley. Everyone knows this.  Over the past year home prices have skyrocketed. Rentals have grown scarce and pricey. Demand is far outstripping supply. When we came here five years ago it seemed cheap. Housing was plentiful.

Everything has changed and it will not change back soon. This is the new normal here. We experienced the last gasp of the relaxed version of the valley. 

People are coming here because of the reason we came here---because it felt like one of the last refuges to which one could escape and start a new life in America. California is over. Everyone knows it. It is far too expensive for most people to move there unless they already have a lot of money, or a high-paying job lined up. The era when California could welcome the masses is don. This does not count immigrants, who are far more willing and likely to live in conditions that most Americans would not tolerate, including a dozen people living in a small house. Barring some catastrophe or natural disaster, California will never be cheap again for the masses.

Colorado was a refuge for a while, where people could go start anew. But it too is priced beyond most people's means.

Arizona is as far west as you can go now without going to California. And we are also getting the refugees fleeing eastward from the Golden State. Why hassle with L.A. when Phoenix is relaxed and cheap.

The housing cannot be built fast enough here to accommodate them. 

Our apartment complex is as far outside of the metro area as you can go and rent a decent new construction unit. Last year during the shutdown, when no one could anything, it felt oddly quiet. It was deceptive. It felt like half our building was empty. It was serene in a way.

But when things started moving again in the fall, people started pouring in. The newcomers in our complex, who had also reached the edge of the rental market in the metro area, were much younger. Many were right out of college. Our complex went from the serenity of a refuge from the city to feeling like a college dorm. We used to have families and old folks around us. Now on all sides of our unit we are surrounded by pods of young people living together. The sounds of their music and video game playing booms on the walls. On some nights I have to wear ear plugs.

Traffic on Pima Road has grown atrocious. The volume has increased dramatically as people move into North Scottsdale. Insanely wealthy people drag race in their sports cars and cause accidents on a regular basis.

I am glad we came here. This was the perfect place to ride out the pandemic. Arizona was and still is a refuge of sanity. But what brought us here is now bringing in people on an unprecedented scale of growth. Phoenix has boomed before, but in those cases, construction could keep up with demand. People came here because they could get cheap housing. Now they come despite the lack of cheap housing, as they did for a while in California before it became out of reach for most people to relocate there. 

"We gotta get out of this town," I said a couple weeks ago, while muttering about the changes to the complex and the neighborhood. Cities hold no interest for me. They repulse me. But where will we go? We think about this quite frequently. We have possibilities, but long-hanging fruit of places like Flagstaff are not as appealing as they could be, because they are in the process of suffering from the same constraints of people pouring in, seeking the last refuge in America, while the construction cannot possibility keep up in the era of land use restrictions.

Fortunately we both agree that when the time comes to relocate again, there will be an obvious answer to where we will go. 

But it can't be somewhere hot. Ginger hates the heat. She needs the cool breeze, like the one in the mountains yesterday. And I like pine trees. I enjoyed having my undeveloped desert, but they have taken that from me and I detest walking on the suburban sidewalks and paths, and smiling at the joggers and thin women in yoga pants with jackets tied around their waists, who walk briskly and sometimes make eye contact. God bless them, but it not my eye of a nice stroll.

Almost Normal

 As we were walking up to the door of U.S. Egg in downtown Scottsdale this morning, for our weekly breakfast meeting with Ginger's folks, I realized that I had my mask in the car.

For a brief second I stopped in my stride, and thought of turning around to get one, but at that moment I made a split decision---I would not wear a mask going inside the restaurant.

I knew there would be no consequence. For months running, the wearing of masks by patrons as they came in the door were escorted to their table had seemed like a ludicrous theater. More significantly, for months running, the man at the front podium, whom I always took to be the owner or the manager due to his age, had not been wearing a mask although his waitresses had worn them. He had been wearing a bandana around his neck, as if ready to pull it up if necessary, but I never saw him wearing it over his mouth. Seeing him there week after week felt like a ray of hope in the madness.

Two weeks ago things stared changing in this part of Arizona. I walked over to the neighborhood grocery, A.J.'s, which is part of the extended complex in which our apartment complex is located. For nearly a year there has been a sign on the door indicating that face covering were mandatory for entry.

Now there was a new sign on the door of A.J.s. Face covering were recommended. On that day I had brought my fabric mask (one of the colorful ones that Ginger's mother had made for us in the crafts center  of their over-55 RV park). I decided that at least on this last time I would wear it, only because I wanted to be an observer and not attract any attention. 

Now, at the breakfast place in Scottsdale, I was ready to go the full mile. I did not turn around and go back to the car. I walked in the front door with a big smile on my wife. The manager-man was not there but one of the waitress-hostesses greeted us---without a face covering. We exchanged greetings as if there were nothing out of the ordinary. We told her we would find the table with the rest of our party, and as we walked through the restaurant, the tables mostly full, I saw that about half the staff were wearing mask. 

We found Ginger's folks outside on the patio. I was warm with the feeling of the normalcy of it all.

Writing this, I know that there are plenty of people who would say something the lines of "I hope you get COVID because of this!" I know this because I have read comments like this on places like the Phoenix subreddit, which dominated by the Leftist Mask Slaves opening rooting for an uptick in local cases to prove they are correct.

"You are putting us all in danger!" they should. But their replies indicate to me that they are willing to see me dead to prove they are right. That' s how much they care about me. So I give their opinions no consideration. They scream at me to take their health into consideration while wishing me death. How lovely.

Breakfast this morning felt like liberation. Ginger and I celebrated by going for a long Sunday drive, up through Crazy Far North Scottsdale as we call it (the city limits extend absurdly northward), into the saguaro-laden hills on the backroads all the way to Bartlett Reservoir, which neither of us had ever visited.

We parked at the marina store and went inside, just our of curiosity. It barely occurred to me to bring a mask, and inside we found the old woman at the counter smiling maskless back at us.

"I almost wish I liked boating," I said to Ginger. "I love the culture of these kinds of places."

Epilogue: later that day Ginger went to Costco by herself and got angrily screamed at because she set foot inside the store while in the process of putting on her mask and showing her membership card. Big corporations are going to be the last redoubt of mask tyranny. But our side is on the march.

A Telegram from Pinecone

 Over the past year I have not written much here about the "Beer Bug", as the Youtubers call it in order to avoid censorship, nor about masks and the mandates to wear them, nor about the testing nor the shots that people are taking.

This is not because I don't have opinions or thoughts on these issues. Far from it. I have many thoughts and opinions. I just don't share them here. 

This is because I know that this is a very important issue, with lots of ramifications on a personal and societal level, and mostly I feel ignorant about the important things in way that makes me reluctant to share my opinion in a way that might influence others. My opinions might be right. They might be seriously wrong. I loathe the idea of sharing ignorance.

This last point does not mean I defer to the experts that society, the government and the media proffer to us. In fact it makes me doubt them in a serious way, since I know that most of them are just as ignorant as I am. This opinion automatically catapults me into the "Camp of Suspicion" for many people. This is what I wanted to express today.

I have watched the Clown Parade in the media over the last year as it has swung wildly in telling us what the experts are supposed to want us to do.  Although things keep changing, there is one constant in all this that comes from the media and there experts, and it is:

Out there in the world, and specifically in the parts of America outside the major cities, there are people who are not listening to us and that is a big problem. They are not following the directions. They are endangering everyone. by their refusal to do the right thing.

Of course we all know whom they point the finger towards. It is always the people who voted for a certain candidate in the last election. Whatever happens with this whole thing, we know one thing for sure---the responsibility for all the bad things is because of the Bad Man and his followers. It is the thesis that will predict everything.

Yesterday I got a message on Telegram, which I have begun using because of it is being used by some followers of the Bad Man whom I follow on Youtube. The message is from a high school friend who had long since made herself ostracized from the rest of the people we once knew because of her very public advocacy for what might be called Health Freedom. Although I have always been sympathetic to her cause, and supported her rights in this regard, both in behavior and expression, she has now become one of my allies in the bigger struggle going on.

I noticed that my friend, who is the wife of one of my other remaining friends from high school, was using a pine cone as her avatar. So I'll call her Pinecone as her code name. I don't think she'd care if I shared her name, because you can google her real identity and find articles she has written for the newspaper which have earned her the scorn of other people I know. But it is my practice her to be as discreet as possible

What she sent via the Telegram app was a short video by the CEO of the organization that runs Burning Man, which I used to attend (the last time being 2014). In the video, the female CEO was stating that Burning Man attendees would be required to proof of vaccination to attend this year.

I got a big laugh out of it. Burning Man began years ago as the ultimate escape of freedom, of people going out to the desert so they could drive around shooting guns out of the car windows at targets. Somewhere along the line it became the ultimate expression in Wokeness, all the while proclaiming that it has no ideology and that you can believe whatever you want, in terms of self-expression. 

It is the natural progression of Burning Man. It's hardly worth saying that I have no plans to ever go back. In fact you couldn't pay me enough to go, even without a mandate for the shot in the arm. I'm glad I went because of the people I met, and the friendships it solidified (and also because it gave me an excuse to visit my Great Uncle Dick in Reno). But now it strikes me as the kind of debauchery that I would flee from at peril of my soul. The last time I was there I thought to myself "Lord, please do not choose this moment for Your Return, and find me dressed up in this silly costume in this vortex of wickedness." I should note that I always went with a Bible every time I went, sometimes thinking I was the only one who brought one. The last time I went, with Ginger, we posed as Icelanders, and put up and Icelandic flag, in part because it was sneaky way to display the Cross on our truck and turn it into an underground chapel.

But this isn't about Burning Man, this mandate. The proud matter-of-factness with which the Burning Man CEO announced her message is the kind of tone of voice that one here everywhere. 

It is this: we are proud to do what we are told by authority.

And there is this added part in the tone: and we will judge with harshness anyone who doesn't obey authority in the same way we do.

This is no longer just about the disease, or the shot people are supposed to take. This is a society-wide effort to train people to do as they are told, for the good of all. Let's get everyone on board. 

The underlying idea, that most people are only dimly conscious of, but with which they would agree if asked, is that if we can establish this precedent, then the sky is the limit in terms of how we can re-engineer the nation and the world for betterment of everyone, and for the Earth too. Think of what can be accomplished if people just followed the directions of authority. Think of the ills that could be eliminated. Think of the beautiful future we could achieve. We all just need to be on the same page.

The folks at the apex of the world power structure are quite open about this as a goal, although among us peons, if you point this out, you will be labeled a kook or a conspiracy theorist in the same old hackneyed way that few people even believe. The label of conspiracy theorist is just a reflexive action now. It is no longer an accusation that someone is wrong, or has a wild erroneous idea. It is the accusation that you don't have the right attitude about what is going on.

Expressing these thoughts as I have just done would make certain people I know, even remaining family members, enraged at me. How dare you! they would say. I would shrug. They need to judge me to feel good about themselves, I know. It is part of convincing themselves that they are one of the good people and that I am one of the bad people. Of course I pray for them and hold no personal animosity towards them as individuals. I still love all of them as much as I ever have.

The funniest thing is that most of them call themselves liberal. I get no end of humor thinking about that.

The Return of Blogs

 A year ago I remember telling someone that I had a blog. It felt a little awkward, like a throwback to 2002. Who has a blog anymore? The long-form of the written word is dead in the age of quick social media takes, it seemed.

Not anymore. All of a sudden everyone is talking about blogs. You need a blog was one of the new videos I watched today from one of my favorite tech channels on Youtube. Of course he meant a tech-oriented blog, not the kind of rambling free-form narrative that I do here. 

Nevertheless the Return of Blogs is startling. It makes sense to me, for some of the reason I described in my previous post. Our media patterns are changing at rates that few can accommodate in their psyches. Old reliable forms come back.

I think it has a lot to do with the ongoing implosion of social media, driven partly by the overbearing totalitarian oversight of the tech giants who limit what can be said. People are hungry for real content. Video is exploding, but it is really audio, because the spoken word of Youtube videos is actually more important than the visual.  

So the visual is shifting back to the long-form written word. 

It makes me wonder---should I start a blog? I mean, a real one that people would actually read? Is this 2003? I lose track of the year at times. Are we spiraling into some end times helix where everything goes in and out of fashion in rapid cycling manner? The youngsters are nimble at adopting new forms, but even they get behind the times before they are out of their teenage years. Who among us can stay sane through this?

Smack into the Livestreaming Revolution

 I realized this afternoon that I've been resorting to writing this blog more frequently lately because I am overwhelmed by video media on the web.

Here's my observation of the moment: we are beyond the video revolution. We are the livestreaming revolution.  In the last month, many of the Youtube channels that I follow have jumped into livestreaming. This means using various tools to interact with your audience in real time. I am blown away by how quickly this is unfolding. I get livestreaming notices from my favorite channels in a constant, overlapping notice. One can usually watch the livestreams later, as I often do, but of course one cannot interact with the livestreamer, which is often part of the appeal.

It is interesting to see veteran Youtubers, including folks who have been making videos for years and being successful at it, testing the waters and awkwardly getting into livestreaming. As I write this I am listening to two livestreams at once. They are open in separate browser tabs. I switch my attention from one to another.

This is the new world. It is both exciting and insane. It makes recorded video seem like an outdated medium. It makes regular television programming seem like something from another era. Who has use for that?

Coming here to blog is a retreat to the written word. It feels like sanity.

Meanwhile in the Real Iceland

 This was the view from our volcano-viewing device two nights ago.  Ginger is very good at keeping track of the new vents that open up.

Everything seems to be swirling around a theme lately. Somehow it involves the earth opening up and molten lava pouring forth from fissures.  I am merely a spectator. Writing about my new phone seems like a wonderful little distraction.

The Two Hallgrimskirjas

 As I learned to my surprise, my "new" iPhone, which by its version (6) is only one-half behind the current version (12), was automatically assigned the same offbeat name that I had given to the previous one---Hallgrimskirja. 

I gave it that name sometime in the distant past in honor of the church that dominates the skyline of the capital of Iceland. It is effectively the home church of the established Protestant church of Iceland, as much as Iceland is still Christian. It is exactly where I was in 2014 when I started using my old iPhone to start taking photographs, something I had barely considered as part of the reason I bought it. 

My first photographs were bland photographs of the well-lit and relatively featureless interior of the magnificent structure. By the time I left the building I had somehow figured out how cool it would be to photograph as much Icelandic language as possible, in the signs and posters in the church. This is how it all began, the obsession that dominated the next few months as we went through western Europe.

I think I gave the name Hallgrimskirkja to the phone after the trip was over, when I wanted to give it a distinctive name for tethering, which is when you use your phone as a wifi access point for your computer, so you can get the Internet via the phone's data connection over the phone network. It's something I've used when out in the middle of nowhere, or when trying to figure out why our home wifi is not working.

Every time I saw the name Hallgrimskirkja pop up in the list of available wifi points, it gave me a nice feeling of continuity to that moment back in Iceland when I started using the phone as a device to record as much of the local languages as possible in their written public form. It made me feel like I was still on a continuation of that long mission.

When I thought my old phone was dead, I figured I would be forced to give it a new name. It wouldn't be appropriate to assign it the same name.

But again I was wrong. I didn't know how things work. When I restored my files over the Internet to my new phone, it wound up with the same familiar name. In fact there were now two Hallgrimskirkjas on the network, but it was still looking for the old now-dead phone. 

What a small, insignificant thing to feel happy about, that a new phone was automatically assigned the same name as my old one. Even in my own life, I have so many other more significant things to think about, and worry about it.  Yet it is what I felt like writing about, when I sat down to write this blog entry. It is what was on my mind, that I needed to put down in words so I could go onto thinking about other things, even other things about Iceland.

Back to Life in a Technical Sense

 As I drove away from the repair shop with the news that my old iPhone was dead, I felt sad that I had lost such a nice (up until now) reliable piece of equipment that had served me well through so many years, and let me take tens of thousands of photographs of examples of so many languages.

It was just a phone, of course. It is nothing compared to serious losses. But I felt twinges of sadness thinking that the phone still had old messages on it from my mother when she was alive, and photographs of both my parents in the camera roll.

I would get a new phone, of course, but it wouldn't have these things on it. 

I was wrong, as it turned out. I upgrade my phone so infrequently that I didn't realize how things work now.

Ginger had already asked me if I wanted to have her old iPhone, as she wanted to get a brand new one. Hers was barely less old than mine, an iPhone 6 which came out just a few months after I bought mine in 2014. It was bigger and allowed for a more recent updates of support from Apple. She had treated it well but she wanted a new one.

I had agreed to this previously, although we had not acted on. A couple times she had almost gone to the Apple store on a whim to buy a new one. When I got home I told her the situation, and we agreed that she would get a new phone that day at the Apple store, and I could use her old one. 

I didn't know how things worked, with changing phones. Would my phone number work in the new one. I had never changed a SIM card before. It was time to learn how these things work.

Within a half hour, she had bought a brand new phone online and scheduled to pick it up at the Apple store in north Scottsdale, at the fancy shopping center called Scottsdale Quarter. We drove there and parked and then stood in the hot sun with our masks on (as it was required in order to stand in line). Finally her name was called and we got to go inside briefly to get her new one. 

Back home she set up her new phone. She had to call her phone company to activate the new SIM card. I used the small tool to pop out the drawer and put the SIM card inside. It worked seamlessly. I felt like I was catching up to the world.

As for using her phone, the joke was on me. All it took was putting my old T-Mobile SIM card into her wiped old phone. After a brief set-up, my old phone came back to life, complete with all my messages and the same background screen that my niece had taken doing a funny face into the camera.  It was almost too easy.

I felt silly at how much I had fretted about the transfer to the new phone. But now I was an expert. 

Give me another SIM card to install, I wanted to say.

That Day in Rotterdam

 

One of the few photographs I took that actually captured the rain that soaked me that day, getting me wet even through the REI rain shell I had purchased in Portland before we left. It is common knowledge in movie production, for example, that if you want to make a scene with rain in it, you have to make it pour buckets, far more intense than any real rainstorm.

October 24, 2014

By then on our trip it was standard practice for me to leave on a walk and come back at the end of the day having taken a thousand photographs with my iPhone, almost all of them containing some word or sentence in the local language.

Of all the non-English-speaking countries in Europe, Holland was the richest with public exhibition of its language. It is almost as publicly verbose as the United States. As rule, the further south you go in Europe, the less you see of the language. By the time you cross into Africa, you become frustrated at how little you see the local language written on signs. Words in public are the hallmark of an advanced, prosperous culture. It works this way in Mexico too. Spanish-speaking neighborhoods in the United States have far more written Spanish displayed in them than do corresponding streets south of the border.

In Rotterdam, I was sure my new phone was ruined. I could not bear to miss out on photographing anything I saw written in Dutch. At one point the screen stopped working. As it happened, it just needed to dry out. But I couldn't just put my phone away. I kept bringing it out, sheltering it with my cold rain-soaked hands to eke out a few more photographs as I obsessively walked the city.

My Dropbox has a thousand photographs from that day, at least. I took photos until my phone battery died on most days. I tried to time the battery so it would give out just as I got back to the hotel room. You never knew what interesting thing you would see in the last hundred yards.

It is interesting how memory works. Of all those images I took that day, they are nothing compared to the single imprint of standing on the side of the river, having just arrived there. The sky was foggy and a mist hung over the buildings on the island across the water. It looked like a miniature version of New York. Just then a large beautiful ferry came down the river and disappeared into the fog. The name of the ferry was the Abel Tasman, the name of a famous Dutch explorer who ventured into the southern Pacific and explored Australia. I felt overwhelmed by the appearance of the ferry out of the fog. But it went by too quickly for me to get a good photograph of it. This is the way it is. It is in my memory.

Unrepairable.

 As if on cue, another electronic device that I acquired in 2014 has come to the end of its life---my iPhone 5s. It is tiny and ancient by today's standards. I bought it because I needed a phone with international calling while I traveled in Europe. I went to the mall out in Beaverton---the same place I bought our television set---and purchased it from a T-Mobile kiosk in the middle of the mall concourse. I had never owned an iPhone before. It seemed extravagant. But buying it meant that I'd be assured connectivity while I traveled in Europe, which was necessary for my job, which was developing software remotely for a Big Textbook Publishing Company. I reasoned that my tiny MacBook Air plus the iPhone would turn me into a nomadic warrior. It did. It worked well.

The iPhone I bought was out of date almost immediately after I purchased it. My tech-savvy brother-in-law wondered why I had not waited the six weeks. But that would have been too late when we leaving for Europe in almost a few days. It was August. We were moving out of the apartment in SW Nebraska St in only a few weeks. 

I didn't mind that it was out of date. I loved that I could keep using it despite so many new versions coming out. It was about as old an iPhone as you can have, and still be supported by Apple in any way. 

Over the years I had replaced the display screen twice,  both times in quick succession in the fall of 2017 around the time that my mother passed away. I had replaced the battery once, because the old one was not up to snuff.

I probably should have left the old battery in. Last week it began doing a strange thing---it would shut down and restart itself even with a charged battery, and would come back on confused into thinking it had no battery, then showing it had a full one. I did research online, and I tried to troubleshoot it, but it didn't work. As a last resort I thought I could install a brand new battery.

I went online to the website of strip mall repair chain and booked a drop off at their north Scottsdale location for late Sunday. We would swing by after going to Costco.

The guy at the counter told me, "didn't you get my phone message?"

"No, this is my phone, and it won't go on, or at least it won't stay on."

Turns out there tech person was not available that day. I said I could wait until tomorrow and left the phone. As I handed it to him, he pointed out that there was a small crack in the screen I hadn't seen. I told him just to replace the battery for now. 

When I left there I had no phone at all. I didn't mind being out of contact. This is the way we used to live. But it meant I could not get my text messages. My uncle was in his last days, and I would want to send a message to his daughter of consolation if she texted me that he had died.

It was Tuesday morning before I came into the strip mall shop to pick up my phone. I had told them to contact me by email but I was not surprised at all that I had not received a message from them. I could tell that by the way the guy behind the counter said yes to my request.

"Unrepairable," said the man behind the counter, reading the printed report from the tech while cradling the phone. He was obviously the owner, by his age, compared to the junior employee I had seen on Suunday. 

He said that the tech had tried various things, including a new battery, but phone would not go on. He handed it back to me. The screen was now cracked visible in a large pattern.

I could tell his verdict was final. It was the end of the phone.

"...Tech noticed some water damage inside. Said that was probably the culprit."

I smiled. I already knew about the water damage.

"That day in Rotterdam, walking around in the rain, " I thought to myself. "Brushing the water off the screen and thinking it was ruined".

You've Already Been There

 Our new television is fifty inches in its diagonal. Ginger considered this to be enormous. I laughed, telling her it was on the small size for sets these days. 

The fact that it has become a live streaming device for an Iceland volcano buttresses the circular journey from 2014, which is when we bought our last set while living in SW Portland. We wound up moving out of that apartment at the end of that summer in part to embark on an extended trip through Europe that lasted through the rest of the journey. We had begun in Iceland, where we spent 8 days driving the Ring Road.

Seeing these Youtube videos of Iceland, both the live feeds as well as the recorded ones, brought back the vividness of being there.  I mean this in an almost a literal sense. The Youtube videos made me feel as if I were actually there again. 

I've noticed this about Youtube videos compared to the professionally produced television programs we were used to. The professionally produced program never made me feel as if I had visited a place before I went there. They are, and always have been, a purposely falsehood, manipulated to create a false version that is considered more entertaining or informative. This is true even with big screen LCD televisions. One knows the images aren't really "real."

Youtube videos made by amateurs are different. They seem to duplicate the experience of visiting a place in a virtual reality way. The upside is that one can visit a place without going there. The downside is that it means when you actually go to a place, it can feel too familiar, as if you have already been there many times.

Folks talk about the era of virtual reality experiences. I feel as if we are already there, but only partially because of screen technology. The more powerful reason is that we are seeing the crudeness of amateur-shot videos with editing that preserves the continuity of moving from place to place on the land. This is probably the most important thing---the lack of chopped-up editing in the brochure-like videos made by professionals. More and more I find professional videos to be boring and egotistical expressions of the self-absorbed people who made them. More and more, only amateurs are interesting to me.

Our Volcano Viewing Device

 Our new television is essentially a volcano viewing device. For the last two weeks especially, we use to show the Youtube livestream from RUV.is of the new Icelandic volcano. We also watch the daily Youtube recorded updates from Rejkjavik Grapevine.

We started watching the livestream when the volcano was just a baby volcano, like an oversize version of a science fair project. Now there are multiple cones. Last night we saw the lava burst forth like a flowing river of orangeness as the RG correspondent looked on.

We Are All of Us Edge Cases

 Once I had concluded that our old television set was beyond repair, I acted quickly to research buying a new one. This was a familiar process to me as I had been thinking about buying a new set for years, and would periodically go online and I would peruse the aisles inside Costco where the televisions are on lavish display, but in each case previously I had concluded that we could get by with our 29" set. There was no need for a bigger new one. No doubt we would still have it had it not gone out.

It took me a week after the set was dead to get around to acting about replacing it. It seemed virtuous in a Lenten way to go without a television set for a while. We had to forgo watching our curated list of Youtube videos of travel bloggers and people who make videos about camping, RVs, and bushcraft house construction. It was not a big sacrifice but eventually I felt the lack of having a television screen.

I had assumed we would use our Costco membership to buy our next tv, but after a little research, I decided to buy one that was on sale via the website of their competitor Wal-Mart. I had not used the Wal-Mart web site except for minor purchases, and being so familiar with seamless way that Amazon handles things, including its physical return policy using Whole Foods drop-off locations (which work very well and painlessly for anything you need to take back), I wanted to experience the Wal-Mart online purchasing experience as a means of comparison, as I am curious about these things.

There was no comparison. Everything about the Wal-Mart experience was confusing and vague by comparison of the crispness of Amazon, although it least was a clean and functional. 

It amazes me that a corporation that huge could have such a lackluster online purchasing experiencing. If they gave me a budget of a quarter million bucks and six months, I knew for a fact I could make a much superior one.  This is not said as a matter of pride, but simple fact.

This kind of realization is familiar to me. The U.S. government threw away a billion dollars on a piece of junk healthcare web application that I could have bested for less than one percent of that cost. Likewise the State of Oregon wasted a huge amount for their never-functioning version. All fo them useless junk, like most computer code that has been written, and most that will ever be written. Alas most of the computer code I have written, for myself and for hire, also falls into this category. The times I've written apps that turned out to be useful is rare, the best success being my participation in the creation of the fare card system for the Portland transit system.

Among the confusing things about the Wal-Mart experience was knowing exactly when and where to pick up my television set. I wasn't sure how I would be notified.Finally an email arrived and I inferred that I could pick it up at the store in north Scottsdale that I had specified for its delivery. 

I drove there in anticipation of the experience. I assumed I would have to go inside. Would there be helpful directions, or would I need to wander around the store looking for the counter, asking one person after another? 

I anticipated the latter but as I came into the parking lot I saw beautiful signs pointing towards the pickup locations for online orders, one right after another guiding me through the parking lot, as if just for me. This part of the experience was superb. 

The signs directed me to the side of the store where I saw a line of shaded parking structures (common in Arizona) serving as bays for parking. Each parking spot had a sign with a number. I parked in number four.

A sign on the side of the building indicated to call a number for pickup. I used by iPhone and called the number. The phone rang maybe.a dozen times before someone answered. The person on the side, presumably a Wal-Mart employee inside the building, asked "Can I help you?" in a vague way, as if the phone line was used for any number of purposes. Already I felt uncomfortable, as if the system was unpolished.

"I'm here to pick up order online."

"Uh..OK."

The employee asked my name and looked it up.

"Vizio television?"

"Yes."

"OK. What number are you in?" 

"Number four."

"Right, we'll have it out."

It felt like I was the first customer ever to do this.

As I spoke to the person I noticed that the door through which the employees came out from the side of the building was a small normal-sized door. It looked pathetic and wrong to be using this normal door for this purpose, but this kind of awkward repurposing is normal in this day and age, for multiple reasons.

I waited as five and then ten minutes went by. Several other cards came and went out of the other parking spaces set aside for online pickup. Wal-Mart employees came in and out of the door somewhat awkwardly while doing this. 

I began to wonder if they had forgotten me. Fifteen minutes passed and I was almost ready to call them again, when finally a man came out of the door carrying the new television set. He had to clumsily negotiate carrying it through the door.

As I saw him I made sure to have my phone ready with the QR scan code that I assumed they would need to verify the pickup of the television.

The man carrying the television walked past my car and went to a pickup truck that parked in the opposite facing row, in parking slot number eleven. Through my open window I could hear him say "Matt?"

The driver in the pickup truck shook his head. The man with the television turned and looked around confused. I got out of my car. The employee looked over at me and said "Matt?" and I said yes that's me. 

He came over with the set. I went to the back of the Ford Focus and opened up the back. He joked that it might now be large enough for the set. I sensed some kind of passive aggressive wish in his part that I wouldn't be able to fit the set inside the car, so I cheerfully brushed him saying of course it would fit, and I proceeded to lower the seats, all the while hoping that it would indeed fit and deprive him of his hopeful triumph.

Fortunately it did fit. I asked him. "So you want to scan the code?" I held up my iPhone.

"No," he said, waving me off. Then he said goodbye went back inside.

I was shaken a bit. I had not been asked for id or any kind of proof that I was who I said I was, and that I had to right to drive away with the television set. I could have been anyone. He had disregarded and had not known which parking space I told him. He went to the wrong one. 

My mind raced with all the things that could have happened. What if I had not noticed him coming out, and the person in the pickup truck had said yes to his question and driven away with the set. Then I would have to tell them that no I never picked up the television set, please give it to me, and it would be a big mess. Wal-Mart corporation wouldn't care, of course, and would give me another set but it would perhaps take days to arrive, and the employees of corporations can give you needless resistance to this help sometimes, as if the loss comes out of their own paycheck. 

Even though it had gone ok for me in this instance, my experience as an application developer tells me to always look closely at the edge cases, as we call them. It's easy to design applications for the cases when things go right---when the customer does what you think they will do. But you have to think of the cases that won't fit into the perfect scenario. You have to design for these. It is a talent to be able to anticipate them, one that is bizarrely lacking in many people in the industry in my experience. Both clients and developers frequently brush off concerns about edge cases. People won't do that, they say.  

But they will, and your app will crash for them, or won't work. I have learned not to press the issue but simply voice my concerns and plan for the moment when they will change their minds, so as to make that moment less stressful for us all.

It reminds me how I always missed out on meeting up with my friend Jean in the French Caribbean in 2007, the first time I had flown in years, because it was literally impossible for me to book a ticket using the reservation system of the only airline that would fly from Denver to that particular island. It kept rejecting every attempt I made, and each time it did, I was forced to start the entire booking process over from the beginning, selecting the flights and typing in my name by hand (back then we didn't have autofill. in the browser like we do now).

Finally I gave up and called the phone number of the airline. I thought this would settle it. The person on the phone couldn't help either. It failed for her right over the phone, stumping her as to why it wouldn't let me make a booking. This kind of thing had never happened before, she told me.

Finally we figured out that it was my address. I renting the basement apartment of my friend Sarah and Chad's house, and the official address was a "half" address, as it had its own outside entrance and mailbox. This kind of thing is very common in Fort Collins and the midwest, yet the massive airline had not seen fit to accommodate this without crashing its system. Finally the woman on the phone told me just to write that part of the address as "and a half", and we were able to book my ticket.

It was all so wrong then, and it was all so wrong at Wal-Mart for their online pickup. At least I know I'll never have to do it again, even I need a new television set. There is a reason Amazon is taking over the world. 

The End of the Beaverton Set

 About six weeks ago our television gave out. The screen went dark while we were watching a Youtube video, but the sound kept playing. The picture came back on when I turned off the television and then turned it back on, but it happened again about half hour later and I knew it was trouble. The next time we tried to use it, a couple days later, it went off and restarting it did not restore the picture.

I knew it was something in the electronics that had failed. I did some research online, including watching some Youtube videos (on my iPad this time) and determined that it was one of several possibilities, all of which were fixable in principle, by someone with the gumption to find the right part online and replace it by hand. I weighed whether I was up to the task. I decided that it was something I could do if I were determined, but it was require patience in doing it the first time, and it was not the kind of patience I wanted to expend, for this particular task. 

The television was seven years old. That was the year of the Sochi Winter Olympics. I enjoyed watching the Olympics back then, and Ginger wanted to watch the opening ceremonies especially, but we had to television set at the time in the apartment where we lived on SW Nebraska in Portland, in the Hillsdale neighborhood.

It so happened that in the run-up to the opening ceremonies, the weather forecast called for a massive snowstorm to hit Portland, which is quite rare. All the time I had lived in Salem going to college, we had gotten only light snow (with obnoxious iciness) a couple times, giving a crust to the grassy lawns of campus that stayed otherwise green all year long. But the Pacific Northwest snowstorm of 2014 was going to wallop us hard, they said.

 Our apartment in Hillsdale was in an area of Portland that was hilly, as the name would suggest. Our parking lot was downhill from the road. We thought about getting snowed in. It didn't sound good. The city was going to be a mess for a couple days at least.

That was during the days when living out of hotels was normal for me, and I still had the job at the Big Textbook Publisher writing software remotely for their online textbook publishing platform. So I suggested we check into a nice warm full-service hotel in downtown Portland for a couple days where we could even watch the opening ceremonies of the Sochi Games.

I booked us in the downtown Marriott that is along the waterfront. We drove into their parking garage, keeping our car safe from the elements and checked in. There were few guests in the hotel. They gave us a room with a riverfront facing balcony that looked down over the park. When the snow came, we saw the park turn white with the snow, including the solitary palm tree, which marks almost the northernmost point where such species can grow.

We watched the Sochi opening ceremonies in comfort while ordering room service. After a couple days we checked out and by that time the streets were someone clear. As we approached our apartment we saw the snow heaped on parked cars that were stranded by the drifts. At least the streets were melted slightly, so folks could get out in the near future. But he time we pulled into our spot, the danger zone had passed. We would not get any more snow from the storm. 

That apartment felt cold, however, as it was on the first floor with patio doors outside facing north. It had no carpets and the walls sucked in the heat. Moreover it felt too quiet. The Olympics were going on and it would be cozy to watch the coverage. 

So I drove out to Beaverton, which is the first suburb across the Portland city limits heading west from Hillsdale, where there was a  Best Buy. I went inside and without much thought or researched purchased the smallest LCD set they had, which was about the same cost as a night at the downtown Marriott.

The new set was only twenty-nine inches, the smallest flat screen they sold, I think. I didn't care about having a big television. In fact it was a matter of pride that I could cope with one so small.

t was the first flat screen television I had bought. In 2006 back in Colorado I had purchased my last cathode ray television, which I used to watch Turner Classic Movies for almost two years straight.

It was fun to bring it back to the apartment in its brand new box. I slid it out in its styrofoam jacketing. We had no television stand so we used one of the hardback kitchen chairs in the set that Ginger owned. We didn't want to pay for cable just to watch the Olympics, which were on NBC and thus being broadcast over the air. So I purchased a basic antenna for indoor use, which consisted of a flat white device about ten inches on each side, which would connect to the television by means of a coaxial cable. I had remembered the antennas from the 1970s and this looked nothing like it.

Getting television reception in the apartment turned out to be no small issue. This was despite we could see from our patio to the top of the ridge that separated us from downtown Portland, and upon which sat the various transmission towers of the local Portland network affiliates. I hiked up there to the top regularly. It was a good steep climb.

But somehow we were in a shadow of the transmission. Moreover after the 2009 switchover from analog television signals to digital ones, most of the new digital transmission towers were absurdly lower in the wattage compared to the analog powerhouses that people once depended on to radiate television signals across entire regions of states. Now it was assumed that anyone respectable was using cable. The broadcast signals were an afterthought.

Thus to get the Sochi games I had to resort to dangling the flat white antenna square from a coat hanger that was hung from the rail of the patio blinds. It had to be in just the right angle and position for us to get the local NBC signal. The coaxial cable hung down in a rigid helix to the floor and then crossed the room to where the television was propped on the chair from the kitchen set, now sitting in the living room as the center of focus.

"Russian cable t.v.," I called it, using my best accent.

The television has served us well since then, while we lived in East Portland (where the reception was much better on the third floor of our apartment building on East Burnside) and then in Fountain Hills where we had cable, and where I had TCM again for the first time in years.  But we could not use the wall mount that was already installed in the house we rented because it did not accommodate sets of twenty-nine inches but a minimum of thirty-two. 

After determining that it was behind my gumption to put fixing the set on my to-do list of projects, I decided to give it one last shot. I called up a television repair guy I found online, who serviced flat screens even by coming to your house. He had an address in North Scottsdale. I left a message and he called me back a couple hours later.

I explained the issue. I told him I had done some diagnostics using a flashlight, as I had seen online. Immediately he dismissed my troubleshooting as meaningless, telling me I probably hadn't done it correctly and thus the information I was providing him was useless. Then when I told him that it was a twenty-nine inch television, he lost his patience entirely. He went into a long-winded build up by telling me what various things would cost and I could tell that he was making the point that it was not worthwhile to fix such a small screen at this point, and that buying a new one would be much more economical.

But he was going to use the phone call as means to make it clear to me that he was insulted that I was wasting his time. As payback for my temerity, he was going to waste my time with a long-winded explanation telling me to get stuffed. Seeing this was where things were headed, I cut him and politely thanked him for his time.

I could tried another place, but I figured the luck of the draw a sign as to what I was supposed to do with it. I immediately begin researching a new set online from the retailers in north Scottsdale. I didn't want to let go of the Beaverton set because it was otherwise perfect for our use. But it's time had passed. I made a resolution that I would inaugurate any new set by loading up a Youtube video of the Sochi games.