Story Pictures

 

TV Japan Rolls Out California Market

Author: peterneibert / Published: December 05, 2009 at 10:52 am

That’s what it looks like on Technorati.com.   Want to see more?  OK, here’s the code they sent me in an automated e-mail, just in case you asked:

TV Japan Rolls Out California Market

If you click on that, you’ll see the real deal on Technorati.com.

I was bored and a little bit sleepy on Thursday afternoon, so I decided to go for a walk — out to the mailbox.  There was actually mail in the mailbox, so I picked it up and abandoned the walk.

Mostly forgettable junk mail and supermarket ads.  But one had a lot of Japanese on the outside of the envelope.  Comcast was up to something.  It wasn’t addressed to me but I opened it anyway to find they were offering a free trial of Japanese language broadcasts beginning December 3rd.  A hurried investigation revealed Thursday was in fact December 3rd.

• Damn!  I had already missed most of the first day of the free trial. 
• To find out what happened next, go to Technorati.com.
• If you do go there, then click on things, Twitter retweet, digg, whatever else you have on your browser.

Social Media Makers of the world wide web will thank you.

Silent for Thousands of Years: Now Christians and Ancient Aliens Speak for Its Soul –

The trail down the West rim of Horseshoe Canyon, to the floor 750 feet below, is not difficult in the cool of early morning. 
The Park Service says to allow 4 to 7 hours for the 6.5 mile round trip to the bottom, hike to the Great Gallery and return to the West rim trailhead.

  
The Great Gallery is the photographer’s reward.   And The Journey — I’m not sure whose reward that is.

In October-November, 6 or 7 hours is probably about right. In June, when we did it, the journey was an entirely different story.  By the time you get to the floor, you notice the air warming up.  It will go over a hundred by lunch time.     

 
But you’re not concerned about the sun and the heat because you are really determined to capture the Great Gallery and its Holy Ghost (above).

The blue rocks in these pictures – where did they come from?  In truth, they are red rocks, but the light reaching them is cold, blue.  The light bouncing from side to side of this deep, narrow canyon, is cooled enough to change its temperature from hot at the top to cold at the bottom.  Yet in summer daytime, the air down here feels like a furnace. 

The main group of characters (below) to the right of the Holy Ghost group holds an ethereal quality.   Perhaps it is the consequence of different sizes of figures with different (surviving?) saturation in the rock of the canyon wall.

As you hike from cairn to cairn (it’s a canyon – where else would you go?), you see painted figures on the canyon walls watching you — perhaps 30 to 50 feet above the floor, like this old elk hunter below:

And this complicated grouping (who is doing what to whom?).

  
Q. How did the artists get up there to paint that?

A. The Indian artists probably painted at shoulder height.  Since then, erosion has cut the floor down, say 25 to 45 feet – so, if you can guesstimate the rate of erosion at different points in the canyon, you can play archeologist and guesstimate the age of the paintings and the era when those folks lived down here.

So, how old are these pictures? The Park Service guesstimates range from 1900 BC to 300 AD.  Some sources say, no, the Great Gallery is probably more like 7,000 years ago.

Other paintings throughout the canyon were probably added more recently, say as recent as 2,000 to 4,000 years ago.  Some depict hunting scenes, some may be memorializing ceremonial events, and some may be guardians, placed on the canyon walls to protect it during the absence of its people.  In the panel below, some interpret the figures on the left as guardians, while others say, no they are hunters lying in wait for the elk on the right.
Nothing is safe from reinterpretation in the medium of the day.  At right is a “photoshopped” version of the guardians shown just above, left.  Does Photoshop’s canvas texture and other light and color adjustments achieve a more “painterly” effect?  Or is it just kitsch in comparison to the conventionally edited picture above?

Well, to get to the point of interpretation versus reinterpretation, how did the aboriginal inhabitants invent the Holy Ghost in his head piece, even before the Judeo-Christian era?  We don’t know whether they did or not. 

The Horseshoe Canyon’s Holy Ghost group has at least five members with others close by – hard to reconcile with any trinity concept.  Yet, the name of the Holy Ghost group was affixed by 19th Century, European/American visitors on their own authority.  Whatever else you might have to say about the Holy Ghost group in Horseshoe Canyon,  the name abides into the 21st Century. 
And I thought that was the whole story.

But no, just last month I saw a 2-hour presentation of Ancient Aliens on Discovery Channel that changes everything (it was broadcast again last night on the History Channel).  Near the beginning and near the ending was a picture of this Holy Ghost painting in the Great Gallery,  the presentation grouped it with many other phenomena around the world (Pyramids, Stonehenge, Easter Island mo’ai and numerous Maya and aboriginal sites in the Americas).  Indeed interviews within the presentation asserted the totality of these phenomena as scientific, factual evidence of the Ancient Aliens who visited earth and then went away into space.  We are to await their return, perhaps soon.  Some UFO buffs say perhaps they are already…

  
According to the Ancient Aliens presentation, the Holy Ghost ceremonial headpiece, is not that at all.  It is a space helmet and the squared shoulders are features of his spacesuit.

 
Well, I hate to be taken for such a doofus — that I was there, saw the Holy Ghost at arm’s length (no, I did NOT touch it) and failed to recognize his astronaut gear.  I went back to my photo files and I didn’t see any of the things that either the Ancient Aliens broadcast or 19th Century explorers are trying to push on us.   What did I see there and in these pictures?

IMHO I saw a very dignified and mysterious grouping, a part of the canyon wall, looking down on me.

I clicked my pictures, and we started the return trip.  There was no more ignoring the heat, and the sun, moving directly overhead, left almost no shade in the canyon.

  
About a third of the way back, we came to the Great Alcove. An enormous cave-like amphitheatre, naturally hollowed out of the stone wall of the canyon.  In this shade we ate, napped, and looked at the walls inside the alcove: more ancient paintings,  but also graffiti.  19th century tourists  carved their names into the ancient rock paintings.
However, since the tags are 19th century artifacts they are also protected property of the United States.  You can see one at the bottom left of this photograph of a procession on the Great Alcove wall:

You’d think that hanging out in a cave for three or four hours would be enough for the canyon to cool down.
Not really.
Climbing back up 750 feet in the heat of the late afternoon sun in June must be something of an accomplishment.  
After I got down to the canyon floor I learned there is an easier entrance from the East rim of the canyon.  You need a 4-wheel-drive vehicle to get there.

 
But get this:  I was driving a 4-wheel-drive jeep, and of course it was parked atop the West rim.   Gotta climb up the West rim – sun baked and much steeper going up in the afternoon than it was coming down in the cool of the morning.

Only a doofus…

Next time, from the East rim, new camera for new pictures of the Great Gallery.  Who would like to carry my tripod?

Cathedral Valley is noted in dusty guidebooks for its solitude, because nobody goes there.
Well, almost nobody.  I went there once.   I haven’t gone back. 

Why?  Probably because its in a tough neighborhood:  too much competition from the Great Circle’s nearby (in Red Rock Country reckoning) Horseshoe Canyon, Canyonland’s Maze and the Golden Staircase, and Capitol Reef’s own canyons, the Waterpocket Fold and the ghosts of Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch.

What we have here is a monotonous, backcountry desert of gypsum clay, with a slippery 4WD track that eventually leads you to a range of red rock cliffs. Near their foot are some tall, freestanding sandstone obelisks, resembling cathedrals.  In the mid-day sun the similarity may not be too striking.

 
Take photos in early morning or late afternoon when strong shadows are at play — interesting possibilities for black and white photography.  In either case (digital or BW) you need to arrive in the afternoon, set-up camp away from the temples (photographs including your own tent are un-cool).
Then scout out the temples with an eye to the afternoon sun and set-up your tripod position(s) accordingly — follow the interplay of light and shadows on the obelisks as the sun goes down.
When the evening light finally fades, decide where to set-up your equipment for the morning light.  If you’re disappointed in the results of the late afternoon shots, you have another chance coming in the morning.  You might prefer just to pack-up and go, but it is too dangerous to move around at night.  You’re stuck until morning whether you like it or not, so you might as well concentrate your thoughts on getting the best out of the morning light.

 

To travel into the gypsum clay desert means that you’re going to get really close to solitude.  Also, you’re going to use at least a day and a half of trip time that you could be spending in Horseshoe Canyon, the Maze, et al. 

It doesn’t rain there often but when it does, the clay becomes impassable, and you can easily lose a couple of days getting out.

When the rain water rages down through the canyons from the west, it carries red silt into the Fremont River (along  Highway 24, the southern edge of the desert).  With the sun behind it, the river boils blood red.
Cormac McCarthy wrote about a river like this in "Blood Meridian," but I didn’t believe in the image until I saw the Fremont River turn to blood.

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Spend a month here, an hour at a time.  

Morning light, midday sun and the sundown hour change the colors and shapes surrounding you in this eroded and haunting wilderness.

Take Highway 89 to Big Water and turn right:  the road into these Escalante badlands is not marked but it’s the only one.  It runs ENE along the cliffs at a distance of a mile or so.

Occasionally, the dirt road jogs around large boulders that broke away from the cliffs and tumbled out to where you are now.

Go there in the early morning.  The rising sun finds shadows among the blue seamed cliff faces and the chinle mounds.

"Monks" is one of those scenes – captured one early morning in the month of May.

 

As the cliffs turn, facing the sunrise, direct light outlines sharper shapes and brighter colors, even yellow desert flowers– as below,  shadows calling to mind the F-117, "Stealthfighters."

Carbonates in leached clay show a strong green cast in the morning light, below,"Peek."

 

Colors in the same clay change in the midday sun, like that in the"Moby Dick" photographed on a July afternoon.

Late afternoon colors emerge in the rocks, even as you see the rocks break through the surface, poised in "Attack."

Toward sunset the golden hour reveals even more subtle colors in the rocks and clays of the turning point.

 
These are the lower cliffs of the badlands below the Kaiparowits Plateau.  

If you get here from anywhere in time for sunrise, you will need to hangout in 100F heat for about 15 hours — when the colors are least interesting.  Or you can go on.
Don’t try to climb the cliffs or you risk landing under a rock slide — and become another ghost of the Escalante.

  
There are two roads up to the Kaiparowits Plateau.  One is mostly narrow switchbacks cut into the sheer face of the 1500-foot Vermilion cliff. 

Scary ride, but no one else is there.  I have the Escalante to myself.
When I look over the side, ghosts are waiting.

If you use photos in your blogs, you need Windows Live Writer (combined text editor and photo editor for blogs) — keep reading.

If you use a Mac for blogging, it won’t work for you, stop reading.

What can you say about a text editor?  It edits text, sure enough, and it’s free, Oh, boy!  But you can say the same about many other text editors.

But Wait!  An integrated photo editor that’s free, easy to use and customizes high quality pictures for the blogger’s medium – well, that’s almost enough to make inveterate Microsoft-haters stop hating Microsoft (OK, nothing’s that good).

But Live Writer is so good, you can stop using Photoshop to edit pictures for your blog posts.

Anathema, you say?  Well, Ha!

Yes, you can work from jpg’s never touched by Photoshop.  The picture editing commands in Live Writer (they appear on the right side when you click on an image in your post) are intuitively obvious.  You can

• change how text wraps around a picture
• change margins and borders (for the pictures in this post I used a 1 pixel line, but there are other borders available with a single click, including the kitschy drop shadow, if that fits your taste).
• resize and crop (in this post, I  duplicated the main photo below and cropped from it the square image now at the top left – first time through the procedure took me about a minute, second time I needed less than 20 seconds, including placement in the post).
• adjust a picture’s brightness and contrast (oops – this really is anathema to Photoshop users, and I could not steel my sensibilities to use it).  If you have a really bad picture that you really must publish, then fix it in Photoshop with levels and curves.
• And then it has a bunch of simplified Photoshop like effects e.g. convert color photo to black and white or sepia, sharpen or add gaussian blur, adjust temperature – good stuff like that.

The photo below is enlarged in Windows Live Writer beyond its original size on my website.

If you right click on either of the images, you can see and read their Alt Text, which is readily facilitated by Windows Live Writer. Search engine crawlers read Alt Text; thus, it often affects the post’s SEO ranking and retrieval.

Live Writer seems to work as well with Firefox as with Microsoft Internet Explorer. It is also said to work with many other blogging platforms, Movable Type, Blogger, and the like.

And, yes, it’s free.

Peter Neibert

“Call me Bob,” said Bob, resting on the stern rail beside me.
“Hello, Bob,” I said, as more seagulls began to gather in the aft wind above us.
“Did you ever wonder how some of the birds follow a ferry boat, like this, while others go after some other boat out on the bay?”
“Well, uh, I suppose I might have,” I lied, glancing sideways at Bob.
“Shape up meeting.”
“Shape up meeting?”

“That’s what I said,” said Bob. “Shape up meeting — every morning. Down at the garbage pier. The Boss Bird shapes up the bird crews, calls out assignments. ‘Listen up! Take your gang of California Gulls and follow the red and white tug.
‘Western Gulls follow the blue and gold tour boat’…
and so on…”

“Wait a minute,” I said, “you almost never see a gang of purely California Gulls or one of purely Western Gulls — there’s always some kind of a mix, California, Western, even a Laughing Gull or two…”
“Well,” said Bob, “I didn’t say they always get it right,”

Hmmm. Stands to reason.

Bob continued, “They’re just like us.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Come on: How else would you do it?”

Attentive Reader: What does Bob look like?

I felt bad
Because I had no shoes,
Until I met a man
Who had no feet –
So, I took his shoes
And now I feel better.
– George Carlin

Bruce Berger’s The Telling Distance, essays on feeling the deserts of Sonora and the Colorado Plateau made me wonder What’s he doing now?
Still writing?
What?

So I Googled “bruce berger” and found his website, BruceBerger.net — full of desert stories, essays and pictures. I thought Let’s see what they cost now at Amazon.com: most of Berger’s “new” books were discounted deeply by Amazon, and also, there was a button for “used” books written by him priced from a penny each plus shipping and handling.

Well, impulse made me do it — I bought one for a penny plus shipping/handling for $3.99.
Immediately I felt this is no good: I’m screwing over Bruce Berger, great man of desert conservation.
And then I got the e-mail confirmation from Amazon. It identified the seller of record, shipper and handler is actually Goodwill Industries of San Francisco.

So what’s my question?.

I am Rocky. I’ve always been Rocky, and I don’t know where this “Senior Dog” thing comes from.
It’s been three years since I moved onto the Big Doghouse in the Sky.
No sooner was I out of the house than those people began calling me different things.
Things like Rocky Senior, Old Rocky and even Dead Rocky — and worst of all, Rocky1.
Where did that come from?
Well, yes, they went out and bought (with money) a new dog that was supposed to look like me. Of course it didn’t, not a bit. It was a tiny puppy, golden retriever — but money doesn’t get you very much. It was really really tiny. And it didn’t act like me either: wouldn’t go upstairs, chewed on furniture and shit all over the house — ok, maybe I did that… And that.

But get this: they named it Rocky2.

Wouldn’t even go upstairs and yet they named it after me. I used to go upstairs, even tripped the old man down the stairs and broke his leg. Remember that?  GOTCHA!
After that, they threatened to send me to dog school.

The ignominy.

They sent Rocky2 to dog school. Oh, yeah, he’s supposed to be my Replacement Dog, but even after three years he’s still smaller than I used to be.  There is no replacement for me.
A word of advice from the old dog: when you get to be fourteen years old, you’re feeling the punies and they want to take you to the vet, DON’T GO.

Your ashes will come back in a box, and they won’t know what to do with it. So, even three years later, it will just sit there on the chest in the living room.

GOTCHA!

The question you’ve got to ask yourself is
"Do you believe in jury trials?"

Well, pilgrim, do you?

The question you’ve got to ask yourself is
“Do you believe in jury trials?”

Well, pilgrim, do you?