Doubly exposing Polaroid
Friday, October 24th, 2008
I mentioned to a friend that Polaroid is getting out of the film business and focusing on the new digital era. He said that there was no reason for instant cameras anymore, since digital cameras can now do anything that a Polaroid can.
I thought this was somewhat unimaginative and pointed out that one Halloween; I took photos of each group of joyful children who came to our door and as an extra treat, stuffed one picture into a kids sack from every group. Some of the parents accompanying their children were instantly delighted to see such a trick. Another development I’ve used Polaroid’s for, is to photograph some of the majestic Peruvian sheepherders, who work outdoors here every summer. This camera is so powerful, that if used right, it can help break down language barriers. Once, while pre-staging my rig out Lake Creek, an evening before hiking High Ridge Trail, I ran into a couple of Peruvians and pointed up the ridge as to what my intention was. They liked this and to breach our difficulty in conversation, I motioned to ask if I could take their photo. After handing them their immediate images, I could tell that they were delighted enough that my rig would be safe for the night, as they would be watching over it from their camp.
One of my Polaroid’s seems to have acquired a Twilight-Zone-ish aspect. I must have spilled a soda on it or something, because if I press the snapshot button very lightly the film sticks in the camera, which allows me to take double-exposures on purpose! I have heard that some digital cameras can now do this, and look forward to seeing some of these.
Early generation camera phones are average quality at bestÂ
A few days ago, my housemate and I saw some children gleefully leaping into autumn leaves. She knew the girls, so we pulled over and took two instant shots using the light button trick. We handed them their photo, which probably cost a dollar, then watched enchanted as they saw their doubled leaping images materialize onto the paper. Sometimes, I’ve taken Polaroid’s to music festivals to capture friends in festive moods. By taking a friend’s photo and then handing them the only copy, you’ve empowered them to do what they want with the gift. If they don’t like the photo, they can trash it. Â
At a Ketchum house, where I used to care take, they had a Polaroid shot of Andy Warhol, in a wild mood and sticking his tongue out at the camera. I knew this was a singular piece of art and that nobody else had captured him in that exact .15 second frame of fame.
When the day arrives that sheepherders and trick or treaters all carry duzz-all devices, I suppose this will make my high-tech friend’s argument stronger, about Polaroid’s obsoleteness. Polaroid film is still available in some places and the company says they will create enough film to last through 2009. They also would be happy to consider selling the licensing rights to another company.
However, unless somebody picks up the brand name soon, Polaroid is going to die without imagination.
U.S. Slaughterhouse ban creates new dilemmas…
Sunday, October 19th, 2008
Â
…is what I originally titled this letter to the Times-News, last winter solstice; until the editors improved it, to the more aptly titled “Horses need our protection.”Â
Here is the jist of it:
After 1986 Kentucky Derby contender Ferdinand overcame 18-to-1 odds to become champion, he was later sold to stud in Japan. Then in 2002, the victor was evidently sent to slaughter, prompting a “from winner to dinner” hearkening slogan used by the outraged thoroughbred community in its successful campaign to ban the last of U.S. horse slaughterhouses meant for human consumption.
They still kill U.S. horses for food, you know. And a bad hitch is that many of these once-beloved creatures are beginning to face horrifically longer transports to Mexico and Canada, which excludes federal jurisdiction, from our monitoring for humane treatment. Deplorably overcrowded trailers and more obfuscated slaughterhouses continuing with questionable sanitary practices are hot concerns.
 Another problem facing new West ranchers are higher hay prices which, coupled with the slaughterhouse closures, has impelled some to abandon their (mostly unbranded) unaffordable horses onto neighboring ranch and public lands.
For those who haven’t heard, it may come as a jolt to the head, that our championed horses now face even murkier final finish lines before export to lucrative overseas markets where horsemeat has long been considered a delicacy. Some horsemeat, after beyond-border-butchering, makes the long haul back into the United States for exotic animal consumption at a controversial zoo near you.
After this letter posted, we had some interesting follow up discussions. Naturally, such a sensitive subject could be easily misconstrued as my meaning, “it’s just awful to send an old crippled horse to a packing plant.†Â
Sure, there’s nothing wrong with people who eat horsemeat. As far as I can remember, the same thing goes for robust ham & buffalo-burger munchers - hidden connection between Mad Cow and misdiagnosed Alzheimer’s disease notwithstanding. Â
Friends have called me a carnivore before. If offered, I might test a tiny bit of horsemeat “to sate my academic curiosity,†like Commander Tibbets, in the spirit of inspecting dark Nagasaki this time of year, back in ‘45. On the other hand, I might change my mind at the last second and turn away disgusted from the holiday dinner table. Afraid I can’t say for sure, til it actually happens to me. Â
People from PETA poles apart (People Eating Tasty Animals and People for Ethical Treatment of Animals) might agree; that if there’s something more awful than wasting perfectly good meat; it’s the unnecessary harsh treatment, some of these animals are stricken with on their way to slaughterhouses.
Even with the large amount of questionable burgers I’ve madly consumed over the years, I still vividly remember the chapter from FAST FOOD NATION that reveals how the processing plant in Greeley, Colorado slowed production down to a safer level, on days that meat was being shipped to Europe, because they had to meat higher standards! Â
And this from Wikipedia:
One of Temple’s most important essays about animal welfare is “Animals are not Things,” in which she posits that animals are technically property in our society, but the law ultimately gives them ethical protections or rights. She uses a screwdriver metaphor: a person can legally smash or grind up a screwdriver but a person cannot legally torture an animal.
However, this is a murky issue, since there are many parameters, which define production animals, versus companion animals. I would be interested in hearing viewpoints from equestrians familiar with this issue, especially anybody who knows about the challenges that the California Humane Society must have come up against, while trying to implement regulations with such far-reaching ramifications. Â Â
State equine regulators and BLM officials fear that in this economic pinch, more Idahoans will dump their horses on rangeland rather than euthanize them. And this has been happening, ever since the closure of the last U.S. horse slaughterhouse meant for human consumption.
Some horse-lovers have wondered how an impact of several thousand horses running newly wild again on BLM lands, compares to the vastly larger number of cows grazing on Idaho Public Lands. Then again, anybody wanting to speak out against the powerful cattle industry, should probably remember the difficulty given to Oprah.
Ginormous Whale Tale
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
 
A dozen years back, a whale beached itself directly in front of my Brother David’s seashore apartment. This uncanny event occurred on one of the rare occasions that he was out of town. We considered this symbolic, since David is a top-notch wildlife protector for the State of North Carolina. While he has a rascally background, Officer Banholzer takes his job as seriously as I do mine -as if our lives depended on them.Â
           Once a whale beaches itself; that’s about it for the creature. The weight of its body, adapted to buoyancy, crushes itself without the encompassing ocean-water to buttress its gravity. Many people wonder why so many of these creatures continuously thrust themselves onto our sandy shores.Â
           Some say that whales are becoming disoriented by modern sea vessel sonar and other mitigating factors –known and unknown. Ever since TV first radiated, we have placed technology on fancy pedestals, while allowing vital nature impact studies to become mostly burning afterthoughts. After all, consider the astronomical disparities between clean oceanography research and NASA’s luxurious ships shuttling through our drone-filled skies.Â
           Could it be that the whales are sending us a bottled text- message from the once crystal seas, that they now mourn the earth we all share? Some look at their giant sacrifice as a clarion call for better caretaking, while others laugh this off as meaningless myth.Â
Occasionally I browse the North Carolina newspapers where Brother David lives. In fact, a “Mountain Xpress†comes out every Wednesday in the enlightened mountain town of
Ashville. When the entire hullabaloo came into our hollow, about a rancher in Mackay who legally shot a local man’s dogs that were chasing his cows, I found a fascinating story in this seemingly parallel paper. It shows that the ways in which we treat animals, reveals much about ourselves. (See: In the eye of the beholder / Mountain Xpress / Asheville, NC) http://www.mountainx.com/news/2000/0503cruelty.phpÂ
           After serendipitously discovering this story, I remembered a similar passage from
Carson’s / Sam’s Medicine Cards, which testifies to the loyalty of dogs:Â
“If Dog has been yelled at or paddled, it still returns love to the person who was the source of its bad treatment. This does not come from stupidity, but rather from a deep and compassionate understanding of human shortcomings. It is as if a tolerant spirit dwells in the heart of every canine that asks only to be of service.â€Â
           As a loyal Wildlife Officer, David gets to bark up all sorts of trees. In the cover of night, when citizens hear gunshots of unknown origin, police dispatchers page him first, under the assumption that poachers are out spotlighting again and David is the man who knows this territory best. Occasionally he rescues stuck deer, by gently unwinding barbed-wire fences from around their forepaws, using the same strong wrassling moves, I was only too eager to use on him, before he joined the Marines. In between teaching hunter safety courses, David occasionally captures and relocates wayward alligators away from Golf Course Links.          Â
           David has discovered that half the populace will try to take the easy way out, when they think there is no watchdog. Many do not abide by the simple rules. David says that of the potential “violators†he surveils; fully one-half eventually litter something during the course of a typical afternoon. I have often asked him about this and he says that this statistic remains stagnant.            Ironically in North Carolina, newspapers and political signage are not considered trash, even if they are stained full of things more unseemly than bloody poaching convictions; before being tossed aside into un-receptacled areas.
Imagine the sausage-like mechanisms that went into passage of a law like that. Â
           Sometimes Brother David finds fish choked in plastic, discarded from six packs. Some wormy anglers find this funny. I suppose then for them, a keg of beer gone overboard, to block up a whales blowhole, is about as good as it gets.Â
Perhaps the true reason the ocean is so saline, is that every animal on earth has been filling it with saltwater tears, trying to rinse clear their eyes from how diseased men have wrongly war-shipped good Mother Earth; ever since we tossed the first rotten apple core aside; violating that archetypical preacher’s foremost riparian area.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lAmUpKzRrg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zho0rS6m7o
One giant leap for humankind, or starving punch-drunk while on the barren moon?
Monday, October 13th, 2008
- Terence McKenna
In the summer of ‘69, as my brother David and I pigged out on potato chips and sipped Tang, we watched in astonishment, as Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong hypnotizingly bounced around on our shining Moon. Young David was five and I was nine. As our grainy black & white Zenith set fluttered otherworldly phenomena, I offered the simple explanation that the reason for the 3-second gaps in communication was, that it took time for Mission Control’s messages to reach the moon module, and then a bit more, for the astronauts radioed responses to rebound back here.Years later, David told me that he had clearly heard what I was explaining, but that it was too much back then for his young mind to comprehend what it actually meant.
Since our last Apollo returned, the comprehension required to understand inner workings of mechanisms orbiting over our heads has increased exponentially. Nowadays, NASA has astronomical plans to establish a permanent colonization base near our satellite’s south pole. From a positive engineering aspect, this extremity appears to be ice-capped and gathers abundant sunshine. For decades, there has been speculation that whoever wields power over this new Moon, will also reign supreme, lighting over Earth with military “defense†weaponry and more. Gearing up for this, our space agency is making sustained efforts to make Moon travel appealing and even promising for average Joe Spud’s like David and I. Recently the NASA website, Apollo Chronicles featured an article “Jack Skis the Moon,†comparing the Moon’s Mt. Hadley Delta to Sun Valley’s Dollar Mountain. To read about this skyrocketing ski run see: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2006/17jan_jack.htm
A prime moon-mover and dust shaker, partially eclipsed in this piece, is former astronaut Harrison Schmitt. Mr. Schmitt is geology engineer, who has started a corporation for extracting Helium -3 from the moon. In the well-crafted NASA article, readers get the playful feeling that any stuck in the mud that is not rooting for buoyant moon bounces, must be flat out against fun. The accepted wisdom is that pish-poshing un-patriotics should be made to munch on moon dust.
Ironically, it could be that this heavenly body ceaselessly revolving about us, will wind up saving us savage beasts from ourselves. In one giant leap for humankind, fusion power fueled by the Moon’s ethereal helium-3 could become the spark for transport methods of never-ending energy -an upholding solution to our self-wrought energy crisis. Scientific researchers at Princeton University Plasma Plastics Lab have speculated that over one millions tons of helium-3 could be scraped from the top of the Moon. At the going rate of $3 million a ton; if divided equally, the total would put a half-million dollars into every earthling’s back pocket.
It’s nice to imagine such a bright future, but down-to-earth-doubters point out that NASA is renowned for exorbitant cost overruns and does not put spending skycaps on such undertakings. In 2002, NASA even deleted from its mission statement the simple words, “to understand and protect our home planet .†How can the gravity of the good outweigh the bad, if we invest heavily in moon missions at a time when our country is facing $$ Mountains of debt? Here we are, potentially aiming with billions of bucks trying to turn a profitable shipping lane in the sky; meanwhile, in years of overabundance, while begging for money, most earthly food banks turn down fresh Idaho and Canadian potatoes, because they are considered too heavy for shipping.
Soon, average Joe-Spud’s will again be asked to help launch pioneering missions funded from our tax base. However, before the tide turns in a twilight seashell game to break our National Treasury for more corporate profits, shouldn’t we first invest our mountainous dollars to help waterways run to clean oceans? And determine more seaworthy transport solutions, so that food belt farmers need not in years of overabundance, shamefully plough their potatoes back into earth, under the harvest moon, with millions starving in dark Africa and even gloomy pockets of Idaho?Though some aspects of our government have lost the public trust for good, I have explained to Brother David, that I hope we will again take time to conduct wide-spectrum feasibility studies, before we skip the potato pivots over the moon and land with astronomically priced pi’s crunched on cash-vacuumed shores of tranquility in our fool-moon sky.
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2006_12_10_archive.html
Does the space program have a future? - By Gregg Easterbrook and Nathan Myhrvold - Slate Magazine
http://www.slate.com/id/2078157/
GSFC Press Release H00-79
http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/news-release/releases/2000/h00-79.htm
Telegraph News
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml
Did NASA accidentally kill life on Mars? - CNN.com
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/01/07/mars.life.ap/index.htmlÂ
Tom Waits - Rare Recordings - Drunk on the Moon
http://www.officialtomwaits.com/music/m_r_dotm.htmThe little collider that could dance
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
Friends asked me to try to determine what the secretive construction project at the old Drug Store is, so I spied up the hill, past the whirling UPS trucks and saw right away that they appear to be building an extension of the Great European Hadron Collider, in the subterranean tunnels beneath Hailey’s streets! The reasoning behind this is that European dance floors close their doors, around the same time that bands in the Western U.S. are beginning to warm up. In this manner, we will be able to transport our European partying pals here and decompress them in time, so they may buy dinner at a local restaurant, before dancing the night away.
The ambitious project will soon extend into a great zero beneath Hailey’s busiest streets and will be a positive boon for our sputtering economy. Sworn-to-secrecy archaeologists will take great care overseeing documentation of every opium pipe and historical artifact unearthed from the ancient Chinese tunnels. An extra benefit to Hailey’s Hadron collider will be a radiant heat effect, cleansing Main Street of pesky ice, while enhancing the lifesaving effects of our innovative LED crosswalks. This will also make it more suitable for waltzing around town in dance shoes.
While it’s true that we are not yet officially up to snuff for instantaneously transporting humans on a regular basis, by the time construction is complete here, say December of 2012, the greater scientific community will have by then become more enlightened of the psychical similarities between photons spiraling and angels dancing on their respective high-speed atomic pins. Â
This will become a frequent topic of pinpointed discussion at Chester’s & Jakes.
After the freewheeling Euro-spending patrons finish their nightly dancing under Hailey’s mighty stars, some will desire immediate transport over to Tokyo or Hong Kong, where the fanciest dance palaces there, will just be opening. As Hailey will mushroom into a major dance hub, entrepreneurs will demand space for more local nightclubs. Heavily pressured council members will then convert part of the mostly obsolete Friedman airport into a wide dance hall. As a backup plan, a short runway will still be made available for emergencies, such as the rare occasions when the collider might break down, to the point that replacement parts cannot be drop-shipped directly through the transporting collider, to itself. Although private aircraft hobbyists will still occasionally land at Hailey’s shortened runway, a larger portion of the old airport will transform into a Choo-Choo station, as town sentimentality for nowhere going Mountain Express trains* will win out in a hard-fought compromise.Â
Older transport methods
A strong selling point of the meteoric transmogrifying collider was that it would bring humanity some of the peaceful projects we’ve been starving for, perhaps even ending all wars! However, on the offbeat chance that our Eurasian and Eastasian conflicts will continue past 2012, farsighted City official’s should set aside specific sections of the valuable airport land for relevant projects, so our wounded warriors may one day, return full circle to their mighty dances.I have a Disc-Golf Dream
Saturday, October 11th, 2008
Ever since my friend Colt - who we sometimes call the Dick Fosbury of Disc Golf - turned me on to the sport two decades ago by showing me some thrilling trick shots, I felt that Disc Golf was going to have a great future, perhaps someday even evolving into an Olympic demonstration sport.
For those who don’t know much about Disc Golf, and would like to learn more; perusing through a few linked websites is informative; while even more instructive are several in-depth YouTube demonstrations. A common theme is that courses can be found in almost every city, with the majority accessible at no cost. Unfortunately, our area of Idaho is one of the rare exceptions. The good news for disc-enthusiasts, though, is that this could soon change, with a recent Sun Valley Online poll indicating that our community has more than a passing interest in the inventive sport.
The inexpensiveness of installing and maintaining disc golf courses makes a good argument for more recreation districts, schools and cities to embrace and construct them. A new disc-golf course would greatly complement our other excellent recreational amenities, especially our destination skateboard parks, to which world-class athletes have already flown for the singular purpose of using. Â
We local disc-golf-enthusiasts should be able to map out a handful of potential sites and then present our case to the relevant authorities. If the permit-issuing powers-that-be are indecisive, we could ask them to allow a demonstration course and then let the public use it for a season, before gathering more useful public input.  Â
Other appealing sites that visionary disc golf aficionados have suggested for potential courses are:Â
An area upsteam from Magic Reservoir
Picabo Desert Road -vicinity near the lone year round water hazard
Between the two remote East Fork campgrounds
The new Woodside Park
Some of the sites that end up not being chosen for the new airport
Near the Galena Lodge or Tornock yurts
Wildhorse Creek campground, working your way up to basket eighteen, behind the secret falls.
Pole Creek drainage, over by Smiley Creek
~Â Â Â ~Â Â Â ~Â
Footnote: Soonafter writing the above, I was able to get in contact with some authorities well versed in how permit processes for projects like this usually work. They reminded me, that a proposal like this in the SNRA (as with the recent Galena Cell Tower efforts) would likely run up against a great deal of bureaucratic red tape. Although, I was looking forward to using my multifaceted cell phone, to help keep score around the beautiful woodlands of a Billy’s Bridge snowshoe course; it probably makes more sense to kickoff a disc-golf project in a recreational area that is openly trying to attract more park-goers, such as Woodside’s brand new Keefer Park. 
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFQ8S1LcioQ[/youtube]
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