Happy New Year! As you've no doubt heard, Yellowstone is doing some very entertaining things lately. I must say, it's rather tempting to head up that way: there might be some splendid spectacle to be had, and in the worse case scenario it would be one of the less unpleasant places to be. What would you give to be a fly on the wall of the Church Universal and Triumphant right now?

If you're the type who would enjoy them, Fresh Bilge is posting frequent Yellowstone updates. We're also in his sidebar: rather generous of him, I'd say. I guess he liked my Manzano Mountains post a couple years back. Thanks! Our site meter has been non-functional and ignored for quite a while now, so I have no idea who may have been linking us. Linkers, feel free to say hi in the comments if you like.

I've finally gotten far enough with my Chinese to attempt a (very poor) translation of some easy poetry. Of necessity, this is a loose paraphrase, since the literal translation would be ungrammatical, lacking poetry, and incomprehensible.

This is the saddest thing to me:
Not waking to find you gone,
After a night spent
Composing poems on these walls,
But there on the table to see
Your wine cup, still half-full.

--Xia Zhou Yu, c. 900?

The "State" Of Idaho: The Case For Open Debate

Yep, I'm a proud member of the Cartographic Thought Police.

In a similar vein...

I'm a sucker for kemence and bagpipes, so imagine my delight to stumble upon this very interesting post by Dumneazu on Laz ethnorock and the Pontic music scene generally. Plenty of interest here. I particularly like that these folks aren't running afoul of Turkish language laws because Lazuri is not written:

Laz literature, in fact, seems to have skipped the "written literature" phase altogether and gone straight to the "hit CD" level.

And speaking of YouTube, Dumneazu has the best apologie for Internet video I've yet seen:

Youtube lets you peek in on private after dinner parties where a bunch of greek speaking turkish muslims drink raki/ouzo and just let it all hang out.

Indeed. Based on a quick look at the archives, Dumneazu's mission in life seems to be to jaunt about Eastern Europe and the Levant in search of drunken musicians and sausages. Nice work! There are a lot pork products in those archives, as well as this gem:

Two YouTubes in a row: apologies. But some things cannot be passed up:

Thank you, Rigor Vitae!

Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans

Noel Coward:

John Derbyshire has had better things to do than follow politics of late. Politics' loss is very much our gain. He and Odious seem to court the same muse.

Thursday last, Mrs. P's employer treated us to attendance at an event in that notorious naval of northern New Mexico, Taos. As a native of the state, I must say I'd greatly prefer the world to associate us with Los Alamos and atomic weapons than with the far more pernicious, if metaphorical, energy that radiates from Taos. Remember the scene in Easy Rider when Fonda and Hopper wind up in the New Mexico commune? Dirty, filthy hippies grovel about, awkward looks are exchanged, Fonda and Hopper get the Hell out. Well, that place was purchased and given a makeover by filthy-rich Texans, and Taos is what remains.

Don't believe me? We were put up at one of the town's highly prestigious resorts: to protect the guilty I'll call it the Monte Chingado. The place encapsulated what I'm talking about. Antlers and turquoise, that's the Taotian spirit:

Presiding over our room:

Ooh, can we brand the dressers?

Yay, a turquoise pillow! Thing weighs about twenty-five pounds: you could smother a spouse with no hands. Our armadillo likes it, though:

Oh, good: art. Zombie horse seeking delicious brains, above our mini-bar:

Really, this place is where both virtuous Texans and sinful New Mexicans go when they die. It wasn't all trashy. There were actually some very nice touches in the conference rooms, dining areas and other classier sections. The water feature was pretty good. The bar had an enormous snake effigy over it. But everything was just wrong, wrong, wrong. This was amply demonstrated when we came back to our room and found on our pillow not a chocolate truffle or other such welcome offering, but a rose quartz. With a pamphlet expounding its vibrational effects on our circulatory, mental and reproductive systems. But I must observe that a lodging that offers healing crystals in a room full of antlers and cowhide is unclear on basic New-Agery.

Again, that's Taos for you.The next morning at a coffee shop, Mrs. P found a notice which pretty well encapsulates the whole town:

Will trade therapeutic body work for firewood.

One more illustration? How about some more art? Also from our room:

The inscription at the bottom:

Details not provided.

Life Imitates Art, Art Imitates Jokes at its Expense

Curators of modern art have such complicated problems, the poor things. Give me a good rousing performance of 4'33" any day.

Speaking of the Alps, here is some historic Alpine poetry:

To the Matterhorn

Thirty-two years since, up against the sun,
Seven shapes, thin atomies to lower sight,
Labouringly leapt and gained thy gabled height,
And four lives paid for what the seven had won.

They were the first by whom the deed was done,
And when I look at thee, my mind takes flight
To that day's tragic feat of manly might,
As though, till then, of history thou hadst none.

Yet ages ere men topped thee, late and soon
Thou didst behold the planets lift and lower;
Saw'st, maybe, Joshua's pausing sun and moon,
And the betokening sky when Caesar's power
Approached its bloody end; yea, even that Noon
When darkness filled the earth till the ninth hour.

--Thomas Hardy

Hardy likes these grim, elliptical finishes that set you down with a hollow thud. I'm still debating whether this one does anything for me. But mountaineering poems aren't that common, particularly if you don't count free verse in the Telluride Mountain Gazette as legitimately belonging to the genre. (Yes, I know, the lines seldom reach the right edge of the page. Nevertheless...) The four and seven refer to Edward Whymper's first ascent of the peak in 1865, with its four fatalities on the way down. As the saying goes, "The summit is optional, but descent is mandatory."

From John Derbyshire's Readings page, always worthwhile if you crave a spot of verse.

Update: Here's some mighty fine Matterhorn for you.

A well illustrated and pretty readable account of the first ascent of Kang Nachugo in Nepal this September. I like the notion of "the 'Fairbanks Belay' – if you fall off one side, I’ll jump off the other." And the scale of the snow fluting and cornices on these giant mountains always blows my mind.

In other news, we alpinism nerds can look forward to Nordwand. Someone on SummitPost claims it's slated for U.S. release in December; I hope that's correct. I'm not aware of any other mountaineering movies that depict a substantially earlier era of climbing. Hob-nailed boots, wool, rope around the waist: I also hope to see some English-language articles about the making of this one.

Goodness, I've been gone long. I've been immersed in the winding path of modern tax law, et il y a une anguille sous toutes roches, as they say. Possibly.

Peculiar and jack were good enough to remember me with Stephenson's Anathem, and since I have yet to comment on the last book they gave me (Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Short version: I find your concern for the relations between goats and men disturbing), I thought I would jot down a few thoughts on this latest.

It's not his best. At the center of all his better books is a giant idea--often an idea in the Kantian sense, as something too big really to get a hold of. At this center of this book is a lot of philosophastering. To be fair, the main character and most of the others are all the sort of people who do have conversations about deep philosophical issues and then try to answer their questions with explosives, but there's only so many paraphrases of the Meno you can read before you want to shake the author and say, "I get it."

This is true. Unkind, but true.

And the science is... not good. The basics are acceptable, but his grasp of larger issues in physics seems comfused.

In its favor is the fact that even Stephenson's lesser stuff is more intelligent and engaging than just about anyone else out there. The book also offers the only convincing portrait of an active Temple of Reason I've read.

Anathem also drives home just how rare the ability to follow an argument is, and how much training it requires. The sense of when a point has been proven is a rare one, and needs much cultivation before a taste for truth (which is above all an acquired taste) is identifiable.

Finally: worth one's time, absolutely, but no Diamond Age. Which is praising with faint damns, of course.

A man eager to climb famous mountains must have the patience to follow a winding path. A man eager to eat bear's paw must have the patience to simmer it slowly. A man eager to watch the moonlight must have the patience to wait until darkness falls. A man eager to see a beautiful woman must have the patience to let her finish her toilette. Reading requires this patience also.

--Feng Zhenluan, Commentaries on the Strange Tales.

Exploring a 3,100' cave shaft in China.

"Doc, we're losin' him! He started out playing Irish, slipped into bluegrass, and now it's sounding like Nashville!"

Man plays banjo during brain surgery.

World's biggest crocodiles!

Hat tip: Where else?

(Image is my own, shot at Colorado Gators.)

Speaking of reading offline, we've probably all heard of the phenomenon in which bookworms report that reading Internet material shortens their attention spans for hard-copy literature. I'm happy to report that I've been experiencing the opposite effect. My attention span for long Internet articles is pretty limited, but give me horizontality and a chunk of dead tree in my hands and I'll go for hours.

Perhaps this is why I havn't been following Prairie Mary lately (there's certainly no other good reason). So if you're like me, get yourself a hard copy of Twelve Blackfeet Stories and dig in. That deserves Superior Scribbler status in the non-blog division.

Oh, to Hell with work! I've just stared into space for half an hour with thoughts roaming great distances from the task at hand: it's time to crack a beer and glean the teeming brain, which in my case means catching up on a little blogging.

Steve has passed along to us the status of Superior Scribblers. Well, it's only nepotism towards one of us, strictly speaking. And I'd say that scrabbling is more what we do of late. Our glory days are somewhat fled what with Odious' sarariman lifestyle (complete with landscape of cherry blossoms and a symmetrical volcano), and my creative energies mostly funneled into photography. But they may return, so the blog lives on. For a sampling of our better times, see myself on The Illinois River, Karluk, Alaska and Richard Wagner: Eco-Feminist; and sample Odious' rediscovery of the Prawne family and at his very best.

I rather dislike the chain-letter nature of these blog awardy things, so nobody ought to feel himself "tagged." But I always enjoy offering credit where it's well due, and I never mind an excuse for some links. So, here:

• Leaping instantly to mind: Larissa. She posts seldom, but it's worth the wait. My favourite ought not to be read by anyone whose involuntary laughter will perturb co-workers.


• For a different kind of scribbling, I always enjoy Kambodia Hotel.


• To step beyond our self-referential little corner of the blogosphere to include someone who has no idea I exist, I really like Utah photographer né Frenchman Guy Tal. His writings on photography are honest, sensible, intelligent and offer inspiration to improve one's photography in ways that don't involve four-figure expenditure. His Six Silver Bullets essay is an obvious example. People who like this sort of thing will also enjoy this podcast interview.


• In the same vein, Suprada Urval is doing some excellent photoblogging, the highlight being many terrific interviews with some amazing landscape, travel and wildlife shooters. Fellow herpetophiles will especially enjoy this.


• I'll save some space for Odious, if he likes. Did I mention that most of my reading is offline these days (more on that to come, I hope)? Besides, Steve took Chas and Pluvialis, and the LosAlamotians started the whole thing.

A vast, high and entirely unexplored mountain range: the only catch is that it's buried under 2.5 miles of ice.

An Antarctic mountain range that rivals the Alps in elevation will be probed this month by an expedition of scientists using airborne radar and other Information Age tools to virtually "peel away" more than 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) of ice covering the peaks.

One of the mysteries of the mountain range is that current evidence suggests that it "shouldn't be there" at all.

The researchers hope to find answers there to some basic questions about the nature of the southernmost continent, including the massive East Antarctic Ice Sheet. For instance, it is unclear how Antarctica came to be ice-covered in the first place and whether that process began millions of years ago in the enigmatic Gamburtsev Mountain range...

The scientists will eventually create a coordinated mosaic of images of the shallowest layers in the ice sheet to regions hundreds of kilometers beneath the hidden mountains, in effect creating a 3-D map of the vast and unexplored region...

Mountains of Madness, anyone? It's mindblowing just how thick the Antarctic ice sheets are: the South Pole lies at over 9,000 feet, but bedrock is thought to be near sea level.

And for those who missed it, take a look at Jack's blog. Wow, indeed. Hang in there till at least the third verse.

(Odious and Peculiar assume no responsibility for ill effects resulting from this link, including but not limited to insanity, impotence, glossolalia and Arianism.)

Odious, you managed a restaurant for how long, and never managed to implement this?

Yup, New Mexico's a stinkin' desert. Nothing to see here folks, just saguaros and buzzards. Take dawn this morning, for instance:

Nothing to see... (click for better)

William Dalrymple meets with Patrick Leigh Fermor. A collection of correspondence between Leigh Fermor and Debo, Duchess of Devonshire and the youngest of the Mitfords, is just out in England.

Well, it turns out the Colorado unicyle guy is a piker. Unicycling from Lhasa to Katmandu is the major league.

I'm glad someone out there can follow through on a great idea for a hoax, viz. a fifth branch of the Mabinogion. Also includes the splendid vocabulary word teichoscopia,

teichoscopia, a topos of heroic narratives throughout the Indo-European world, in which the heroes of an opposing army are pointed out one by one from the walls or ramparts of a besieged city. Examples occur in the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Iliad, and the Ramayana

Today I saw a small child with a t-shirt that read, "Charismatic Megafauna".

Speaking of art: on the other hand, there's this.

Odious' birthday is coming up!

If you're among our northern New Mexico readers and enjoy landscape art, you really ought to stop by the Gerald Peters gallery in Santa Fe and check out the exhibition of Tony Foster paintings. I'm generally a bit lukewarm on most landscape painting, but Foster's stuff gives me the same "I've got to go there" emotional response I normally seek in photographs. He paints on location, often at very obscure and remote locations indeed, sometimes working for a week on a six-foot piece at 15,000 feet and that sort of thing. I love his use of white space, especially in his Himalayan work. And there are some nuances that you can only see in the original, such as a Himalayan snowstorm painting where he actually scraped streaks across the finished work to achieve the effect of a violent flurry.

He's also done a lot of painting in central Idaho, particularly on the Salmon, which made it pretty much inevitable that I own his book (thanks to Mrs. P's sweetness and generosity).

Definitely worth a stop if you're in town. Runs through November 15.

To Hell with energy prices: they were pretty predictable and might eventually drive some real innovation. My issue is one which the candidates seem shamefully unwilling to address: the outrageous, skyrocketing price of beer.

Hops independence now! Brew, baby, brew!

Tardigrades can survive in the vacuum of space.

I the unlikely event any of our readers wishes to hear my thoughts on the election, well, Chas pretty much nails it. Read his link: the questions posed therein have far more bearing on my own life than anything I've heard a candidate mention.

I really don't hope for much these days in terms of taxation, liberty, shrewd foreign policy, immigration, &c. About the acme of my fondest hopes for the next administration is a Forest Service with a reasonable budget and some BLM personnel with detectable humanity. I do think Palin has a certain amount of appeal, but the crowds chanting "Drill, baby drill!" last night were decidedly a turn-off. Likewise, while I can be sympathetic to her environmental record in the context of a vast, utilitarian, Federally-owned state like Alaska, I fear her sensibilities may be less agreeable in a West with exploding population densities. I'm definitely not anti-drilling per se, but I invite anyone pondering the putative environmentally-friendly next-generation extraction technologies to drive some BLM roads near, say, Vernal, Utah and report back. And please report back from Vernal itself, recently a quiet, medium-small Mormon agricultural town, now covered in billboards advertising meth addiction hotlines and pre-employment drug testing, full of tattooed punks ranting to themselves, property taxes soaring. If we're going to drill, could we please see some long-term benefit to the drilling communities instead of rapid degeneracy and bust?

Rod Dreher, who seriously likes the Alaskan, has some intelligent things to say as well.

But I'm told that it really comes down to a culture war. As the saying goes, it's a damn shame both sides can't lose.

Ugh, that was unpleasant. Cheer up! Here's a heron eating a bunny!

Top Ten Endangered Languages, selected by a linguist. Yes, top ten lists for this sort of thing are silly, but there are some wonderful tidbits in here which it's going to be a damn shame for humanity to lose. For instance:

[Jeru] is generally believed that Andamanese languages might be the last surviving languages whose history goes back to pre-Neolithic times in Southeast Asia and possibly the first settlement of the region by modern humans moving out of Africa.

The closest relative of Nu is !Xóõ (also called Ta'a and spoken by about 4,000 people) which has the most sounds of any language on earth: 74 consonants, 31 vowels, and four tones (voice pitches).

Yuchi nouns have 10 genders, indicated by word endings: six for Yuchi people (depending on kinship relations to the person speaking), one for non-Yuchis and animals, and three for inanimate objects (horizontal, vertical, and round).

Guugu Yimidhirr (like some other Aboriginal languages) is remarkable for having a special way of speaking to certain family members (like a man's father-in-law or brother-in-law) in which everyday words are replaced by completely different special vocabulary.

Oro Win is one of only five languages known to make regular use of a sound that linguists call "a voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate". In rather plainer language, this means it's produced with the tip of the tongue placed between the lips which are then vibrated (in a similar way to the brrr sound we make in English to signal that the weather is cold).

Of course, who are we to judge? Maybe there are reasons these folks prefer to speak to their children in relatively sane and reasonable Indo-European languages. Perhaps the Oro Win found that blowing raspberries was just not as desirable a means of communication as Portuguese.

Via Languagehat.

I've just added a gallery to my photo site from my backpacking trip last week in Colorado's South San Juans. Check it out.

A pretty good food meme: The Omnivore's 100, that is, 100 foods a self-respecting omnivore should try before he dies. Not all of them are commendable, which is as it should be.

I come in at a respectable 67%. But I agree with Rod Dreher that the real fun is to add five of your own picks to the list, especially as the original list is adventurous only in a rather predictable vein. My additions:

• Marmot boodog
• Olympia beer with lime
• Whole roast suckling pig
• Yellowtail sushi
• Morcilla

Odious? Querencia folk?

Update: Hmphhh... just realized that the list already has black pudding, which is essentially synonymous with morcilla. So strike that. Instead, let's go with morels.

Lake Mead: Silt, Superposition & Whitewater

One of the most interesting parts of my recent Grand Canyon trip was floating past the usual takeout at Diamond Creek and continuing all the way to Lake Mead. I'd never seen this lower stretch before, and it was certainly very beautiful and pretty fascinating. I do not, however, recommend it in August: our daily highs were somewhere in the neighbourhood of 115 F.

The water level in Lake Mead is currently very, very low. Note the bathtub ring in the photo to the left (click photos for larger, better versions). This was well out within the theoretical perimiter of the so-called lake, and the ring represents the old average pool. This location is also at least 20 miles dowstream of where my map informed me was current's end at the Lake's historic low. Clearly, we've been breaking records for years and years! To add to the general amusement of the place, there were feral bulls wandering about on the river bank.

Unsurprisingly, the name of the game in the Lake is silt. At the Lake's historic high backwater, still well within the Grand Canyon proper, we began seeing banks of silt covering the river's true banks, and as we continued downstream they grew higher and more extensive. Not infrequently, a section would collapse in our view, avalanching dirt into the river and kicking up prodigious clouds of dust.

Once you come out of the Canyon into the flats, the silt really spreads out, into a vast plain covered in tamarisk and willow, corresponding of course to the shape of the former reservoir. The old takeout at Lake Mead was Pierce Ferry; the Pierce Ferry boat ramp is now over two miles from the river. Thankfully, things are livened up around here by a new rapid which has been forming and changing frequently for the past couple seasons. In addition to providing amusement, the Pierce Ferry rapid also provides a near perfect, small-scale illustration of the principle of canyon cutting by superposition (for a full account, read about the formation of Lodore Canyon here).

What's going on here is that, as the Lake level has dropped, the river was not left with its former basin, but rather with the new expanse of flat silt. Unconstrained by its old banks, which are now deep beneath dirt somewhere, the Colorado could meander over the plain rather freely. In many areas, the river of 2008 is far from its old channel. Of course, the current quickly began cutting down and eroding its silty bed, thus fixing its new course somewhat. But in a couple spots, such as Pierce Ferry Rapid, it hit bedrock outcrops a short ways beneath the surface. In the adjacent photo, the silt plain is clearly visible to the right; the bedrock is forming the boulder in the middle and the pourover and whitewater to the sides where the river flows over it. It's probably being eroded very fast; I'm told the rapid is seldom quite the same from one week to the next. The rapid is also much bigger than it looks in this rather dismal snapshot: for instance, the center boulder is easily 25 feet wide, and the whitewater is plenty capable of flipping a loaded boat.

One of our party running the right channel.

Definitely enlarge this one!

If you imagine a much bigger plain and a lot more bedrock in the picture, it's easy to see how a river becomes entrenched in its own course and incises its meandering path deep into stone.

Also interesting is where the river finally ends. Current's end is not a gradual process at all; it's almost as abrupt as if someone snapped a chalkline across the water. Upstream, the water is brown and cold; five feet downstream, it's green and warm. The silt is still coming, still settling in. You have to see it to appreciate fully the extent of the siltation problems facing Lakes Powell and Mead.

The Colorado comes to a halt.

A true savant in action: this guy draws most of Rome from memory after one helicopter flight.

Via Mountain Photographer.

Forgive another easy, cheap-thrills sort of post, but giant ocean sunfish are damn cool!

Update Mrs. P, who's been in a very Lovecraftian mood of late, reports the excellent line from Call of Cthulhu:

There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish...

All right, naturalists: can anyone tell me what this is? Found in our bathroom a few evenings back.

It wasn't large:

Of course it exists: Mountain unicycling.

Update: the mountain unicycling big leagues.

I'm back. With any luck I'll muster some mildly coherent verbiage in a couple days. Grand Canyon was great, as always. Above is our camp just below Phantom Ranch, Zoroaster Temple presiding (as always, click for a larger, better version).