...I disavow my previous journal entry (on the sillyness of having a "prevent wildfires" sticker on the back of one's car). Hell, who am I to judge? (I like to think this is the product of a year's acquired wisdom.)

I saw a car yesterday with the bumper sticker, “Prevent Wildfires.” And I thought, “this is really stupid.” In the first place, how can you ‘prevent’ a wildfire? If you start it, doesn’t that make it a man-made catastrophe-in other words, not wild? (Okay, I admit that I don’t know the “official” definitions of wildfire and forest fire-which, like ( Read more... )

I'm a O88-C41-E74-A63-N93 Big Five!!

I'm reading Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution by Tyson and Goldsmith ("A major Nova special on PBS"), which starts off, as one might expect, with a blow-by-blow description of the big bang. The images it conjures are incredible and weird and managed to give me the chills despite being pretty much beyond imagination. The book doesn ( Read more... )

Isla del Sol was beautiful and very tiring-hiking up a couple hundred inca stairs at that altitude is a workout. The entire island pretty much is being used for agriculture by the 3000 or so inhabitants, almost all in terraces around the steep hillsides. Pigs, cows, donkeys, and llamas are ubiquitous (as well as small children asking for caramels ( Read more... )

I flew into La Paz for the third and final time this morning (every flight to and within Bolivia seems to connect through there) and this time actually got to descend into this incredible city, settled in and climbing the walls of a valley high (4000 m above sea level) in the Andean mountains. On the way from the airport to our hostal, our taxi got ( Read more... )

The road from Santa Cruz (the new one) is a 10-ish hour trip (if you ( Read more... )

Hola from Bolivia and bienvenidos to my first Mass Email from a Bolivian Internet Cafe. Bueno ( Read more... )

I stopped at Taco Burrito King on my way home from work last week, and saw the guy behind the counter making tortilla chips from...chopped up tortillas. I had never thought about it before. It was kind of a surreal moment ( Read more... )

There was a lot of single-sided standing and clapping during the State of the Union Address today. President Bush said, "You didn't pass my social security reforms" and the democrats stood and clapped "sarcastically" (as NBC put it)--my roommate Saran commented that it's going to be almost impossible to get approval for the reforms just because of ( Read more... )