A Month of Storms in 100 Seconds

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RoZ and I are both weather geeks, and I’m a sucker for time-lapse video. I also think the brief animation of weather photos (satellite images, radar, etc.) that we see on TV or the Internet are kind of lame.

Knowing that the satellite picture is regenerated every half hour (and that the weather was about to get interesting), I set up our computer to automatically grab the image every half hour. I let the automatic frame grabber run until the weather got boring again, and assembled the 1300+ images into the video presented below.

You’ll see the progress of hurricane/tropical storm Irene, Lee, Katia, Nate, Maria and Ophelia. In between, there’s a persistent low pressure system that whirls over the midwest.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY-HRfTEQ5c

Mourning Dove and Downy Woodpecker

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It’s time to share some pixels that finally escaped our camera today.

On the top of the page are some cattle sharing their pasture with a pair of sandhill cranes, as seen from our favorite bike trail about nine miles from home. (If you don’t see cattle and cranes, click on the title of this post.)

We have a grape vine supported by a trellis in our back yard. This year, a mourning dove built her nest in the grape vines.

A mourning dove minds its nest, nestled in a trellis of grape vines.

Today we were entertained by this woodpecker. Our bird book seems to say it’s a downy woodpecker, but we’re willing to be corrected if we’re wrong.

A downy woodpecker hunts for seeds on a tree near the La Crosse marsh.

Steve Jobs – A Pioneer in User-Friendly Design

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iSadThe news of Steve Jobs’ passing was delivered to me on the screen of my Apple computer. It’s kind of fitting, given the many ways that he has affected our day-to-day lives whether we use his products or not.

My first exposure to Steve Jobs was on an episode of Nightline in the late ’70s or early ’80s. He was a talking head guest discussing the advent of the personal computer. The line that sticks in my head to this day (paraphrasing from memory): “Just as a tool is an extension of our hands, the computer is an extension of our brains.”

(Here’s a youtube video of a young Steve describing computers as “bicycles for our minds.”)

He went on to discuss how these tools – once exclusively owned and operated by rich corporations and governments – were now accessible to ordinary people, and that this would cause the innovation and transformation that we’ve all witnessed since then.

Steve didn’t invent computers, portable music players or smartphones. What he did was to refine these products down to the most minute detail to make them not only easy to use, but a joy to use. Read on →

Sympathy for the Klutz

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We’ve all had incidents at work that we’re not very proud of, but they’re the kinds of incidents that inspire a lot of good-natured banter with our co-workers. The day the wrong file was deleted, or an armload of dishes was dropped, that kind of thing.

A utility worker in the Arizona desert had that type of experience late last week. As he was trying to fix or replace a finicky piece of equipment, he flipped the wrong switch or cut the wrong wire or something, and all the lights went out from Orange County to Tijuana to Arizona.

As much of a disaster as that was, I’m willing to cut the poor worker some slack. We’ve all had our own experiences creating disasters, but things got fixed, and now we laugh about it with our coworkers in the lunch room. Read on →

Why I’m a Conservative

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I often participate in a discussion group where someone recently asked, “Is America center-right or center-left?” It got me to thinking about labels, and how they’ve been twisted, distorted and co-opted. Many respondents criticized the use of such labels, arguing that human character is far too complex to divide into black and white categories.

I felt compelled to weigh in, and I’ll share my answer with the rest of the class:

As I can see from previous answers, trying to use labels like “left,” “right,” “liberal,” “conservative,” etc. is too simplistic, and each label carries a certain amount of baggage that it doesn’t deserve.

I abhor environmental waste, the way that our culture frivolously destroys resources that may take millions of years to replace. By the same token, I don’t think we should be frivolous with money either. I would think that those are both “conservative” positions.

I also feel that we should treat one another with respect and dignity, that we have a duty as responsible community members to look out for each other and help each other out in times of need, and that if someone else’s lifestyle choices are no harm to me then they’re none of my business. When did any of this stop being a “conservative” position?

I think much of the American public falls in line with my “conservative” positions, but the politicians and pundits who talk this way are labelled “liberal” or “radical.” Many authors have pointed out studies and polls indicating that if politicians pursued policies that the public wants, the USA would be much more like Sweden.

Scott Walker’s Opposing Positions on Biomass

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Scott Walker must think Wisconsinites have short memories.

Walker’s predecessor initiated a project to install a biomass boiler at the state-owned Charter Street power plant in Madison, where an aging coal boiler was due for replacement. Even though a biomass boiler is more expensive initially, it saves a great deal of money in the long run because the supply of biomass is more reliable and less expensive than natural gas, and it would be supplied by Wisconsin farmers and forests.

When Walker became governor, he immediately killed this project, and with it he killed a new green industry in Wisconsin and the jobs that would come with it.

Why am I bringing up a story from nearly a year ago? Because last Friday, Scott Walker was singing the praises of biomass.

Gundersen Lutheran Hospital in La Crosse has a 40-year-old gas boiler that needs replacing, and they just got a $140,000 grant from the Wisconsin Bioenergy Grant Program to install a biomass boiler. For some reason, Scott Walker believed that he was the appropriate person to personally deliver the oversized check.

So the same person who killed the Charter Street upgrade in January is now posing in front of the TV cameras in La Crosse as a champion for biomass. Setting aside the discussion of whether or not biomass power plants are a good thing, one has to wonder how to explain the inconsistencies of Scott Walker’s position.

Decennial Anniversaries

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I put up a new banner image tonight. RoZ is sitting next to the Firehole River in Yellowstone National Park in an image captured exactly ten years ago (give or take a day). At this time in 2001, we were finishing a road trip of a lifetime through the western United States, and we would soon be preparing to spend two months in Europe.

In the coming weeks and months, we will release a new project that will tell a much more complete story of this life-changing experience. Until then, the web site we published while we were in Europe is still online, but that will also be incorporated into this new project. Stay tuned.

Twenty years ago this summer, in 1991, I was living in my step-van in Austin, Texas, slowly getting back onto my feet after leaving a commune I had been with for the previous thirteen years (yet another story that’ll be told in full, someday).

Thirty years ago, in the summer of 1981, I was living in Isla Vista, California (the student ghetto of UC-Santa Barbara). I was essentially in exile from the commune, but I had my own bike, a PO box, food stamps, a place to keep my stuff, a cozy place to sleep in a secluded piece of an overgrown park, but no roof.

Even though I was essentially homeless for about six months, I have fond memories of that summer. It helps that it never rained. But I also became part of a whole community of young hippies that populated the low-rent houses of the neighborhood, and together we participated in the Diablo Canyon blockade, one of the biggest anti-nuclear actions ever conducted.

The summers of ’91 and ’81 could be considered traumatic life-changing events, but in retrospect they were memorable and enriching experiences. The summer of 1971 was spent recovering from physical trauma: a serious bicycle accident that had me in the hospital for a few days in June and licking my wounds for the rest of the summer.

I don’t know what kind of life-changing event – if any – 2011 will bring. I’m willing for this year to be the one that breaks this decennial pattern, but if something big happens this summer, I hope it’s something good.

Passing the Savings on to the Corporate Till

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The next time some corporate shill cries that raising their expenses will raise prices for their customers, or that lowering their expenses will enable them to pass savings on to their customers, know that they’re spewing bullslop.

The taxing authority of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was shut down recently, so airline passengers should have seen about a 10% reduction in the price of their airplane tickets. After all, there was no tax on those tickets. But did the airlines “pass the savings on to YOU!”? Of course not. Ticket prices stayed the same, except that the money that USED to go to the FAA was kept by the airlines.

So now we know that making products with Chinese slave labor is not to give us low prices, but to give corporations higher profits. When electric utilities get less regulation, we don’t get lower rates – the utilities get higher profits. When big corporations drive down the wages of their unionized workers, they don’t lower their prices – they fatten their profits.

So the next time some pundit is on the radio or TV saying that some policy will mean higher or lower prices for consumers, you know it’s bullslop. “Lower prices” is little more than code for higher corporate profits. We never see lower prices, but those corporations sure have great earnings reports.

Windstorm Closes Bike Trail

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We had plans to spend the weekend bikepacking overnight from La Crosse to Sparta and back (30 miles each way, camping in Sparta). The weather forecast looked good… the muggy upper 90’s would give way to dry air in the mid 80’s, with little wind. But it’s always the transition from hot to not-so-hot that creates trouble.

Friday night (July 1) a strong wind blew through the house before we could get windows closed. Fridge magnets and the stuff under them were blown all over the kitchen. A large crystal was blown off a window sill. We later learned our area had experienced winds up to 80 mph. It started hard and suddenly, then died down after a few minutes. It started to feel like deja vu from the tornado we had in May, and it lasted about the same amount of time.

We finished packing for our ride, and early Saturday afternoon we set out for the edge of town and the state bike trail, oblivious to the situation left behind by the storm. We went about 5 miles and found this…

A downed tree blocks the city bike trail on the north side of La Crosse.

A downed tree blocks the city bike trail on the north side of La Crosse.

We spoke with some people coming from the other direction, they told us that there were lots of trees down blocking the trail, all the way to Sparta. Some were large and others were small. “Too many to count.”

Just to get across that first large tree, we would have had to take the bike trailer off the bike and then find a way to finagle everything over the tree. That’s not so hard on a regular bike, but it’s nearly impossible with a loaded 10-foot bike, plus a loaded 3-foot trailer. If there were just one tree we could probably deal with it, but knowing there were a lot more of them down, we decided to turn around and go home.

Weirdly enough, we didn’t get any rain, just lots of wind and lightning. It did cool everything off though, and that’s a good thing.

RoZ adjusts gear on The Limo after we turned it around at the down tree blocking the city trail on the north side of La Crosse.

RoZ adjusts gear on The Limo after we turned it around at the down tree blocking the city trail on the north side of La Crosse.

Obbie adds: This bike trail is a major connection to La Crosse for users of the state bike trail system. I wonder how long a local highway – or even a minor street – would be allowed to remain impassible due to a downed tree.

Move La Crosse Community Theatre to the Hollywood Theatre

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This was submitted as a letter to the editor to the La Crosse Tribune in reference to this story.

I wanted to feel excited about the plans for a shiny new theatre building along the river, but the more I thought about it the less sense it made. I’m not completely condemning this idea, I just think there are better ways to spend that amount of money.

If the La Crosse Community Theatre needs more space, and if La Crosse wishes to pay more than lip service to being a “historic” city, then the LCT should consider buying the Hollywood Theatre and adapting it to its needs. For $6.7 million, LCT could probably buy the building, bring it up to code, and divide the space into a main theatre, black box, etc. The end result would be a historic jewel of downtown La Crosse brought back to life, with more seating than in the current proposal, plenty of parking in a nearby ramp, and millions of dollars left over to do other good things that this city badly needs done.

The Hollywood Theatre has been a fixture in La Crosse life for generations. LCT can build on its history and give a new generation of theatre-goers the chance to see a play in the same room where their grandparents first saw a movie together; and it can give actors a chance to perform on the same stage where Arlo Guthrie, Johnny Winter and Leo Kottke once played.

The Hollywood Theatre is a historic jewel that needs to be a performance space again. LCT needs a bigger home. For anybody who can’t connect those dots, I have a bridge to sell.