Category Archives: New Mexico

A Matter of Curiosity, Mostly

Posted on June 11, 2012 by | 4 comments

Good morning readers:

I doubt anyone among the current readers is going to put my speculative assertions about the abundance of platinum of a few days ago to the test.  But someone who finds the blog on a search engine someday might.  It would be a lot simpler and easier today than it was a decade-or-so ago.  Not to mention cheaper.

So, for that potential reader, here’s what I’d suggest as a minor project:

Get one of these – They’re getting cheaper every day.  $100 will probably get you one.

QX5 Microscope – Digital Blue QX5 Digital Microscope

The QX5 Microscope is the upgraded version of the award-winning Intel QX3 computer USB microscope.

Explore the microscopic world with the only USB microscope that connects to a computer. The QX5 USB Microscope includes software that allows you to view, edit, animate and even measure samples, then create slideshows and videos. The QX5 USB Microscope has the mobility to come out of its base for the viewing of larger or possibly live samples in their natural habitats.

Then build one of these:

Build a high resolution spectrograph in 15 minutes

http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/light/spectrograph/spectrograph.html

Find a weathered Quaternary caldera and dig into the inside of the rim, near the top, saving the sample below about an inch deep to a foot deep in a five gallon bucket.  Carefully, carefully, carefully pan down the sample until whatever’s heaviest is all that’s left on the bottom of the pan. 

Then do direct microscopy on the sample, after familiarizing yourself with the appearance of micron platinum.  If you see some prime suspects work the sample down a lot further, but saving the spoils because you’re going to be interested in whatever else is left in the sample, and micron minerals are prone to float on the static surface of the water.

Once you’ve got it separated, use the spectrograph you built to determine whether what you’re seeing is actually platinum, and what else is in there with it.

If you don’t have a Quaternary caldera, but would still like to give it a try, go somewhere with a history of active vulcanism during the Quaternary, find a corrugated culvert 4-5 feet diameter going under a road  downstream, but as far upgrade as possible.  Crawl into the culvert with a whisk-broom and large spoon and take concentrate samples from the bottoms of the corrugations.

Then do your direct microscopy and spectograpy on the concentrates, same as above.

You could do something similar from streambeds in mineral bearing areas, but you’d need to learn to ‘read’ a channel so’s to know where to take your samples.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2012, Adventure, Nature, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Prospecting, Science

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Recapping the Lost Gold Mine Search

Posted on June 4, 2012 by | 10 comments

I think I’ve posted most of this before in earlier posts, but for those who weren’t here to read it at the time, I’ll do it again. 

A longtom sluicebox axed out of a 3 foot diameter log, a spring 75 feet above the sluice, an arrastra below.  I’d been walking past the arrastra a few years before I recognized it for what it was.  One day I was leaning against a deadfall aspen getting my breath, gazing at it, when it dawned on me that 500 pound rock had a reason for being shaped the way it was.

A burned out cabin ruin with an aspen tree growing out of the inside, bear claw marks 12 feet up, 3 hand forged nails. 

A mysterious map chiseled on the face of a 300 pound rock surface depicting the exact layout of the canyon, the cabin, the waterfall, all so accurately depicted the person had to have scrutinized the layout from the mountaintop, then scratched it on this stone 600 vertical feet below and half a mile away. 

The rock was carefully placed on the canyon wall above eye-level so it was easily seen, but only by someone looking up.

Dozens of places upgrade where the man worked the quartz outcroppings.

Symbols carved into rock faces long ago on the upper-west face of the mountain below the most heavily worked quartz outcroppings near the crest.  None of it made a hell of a lot of sense.

One day I was climbing around up there with my lady friend of the time, Jan.  Following the guy around, trying to figure out what the hell he was doing and why.  We came to a rock face with a quartz outcropping he’d been working, but stopped, obviously half-done.  Not like him at all.

I stepped back a few paces studying it, mildly confused.  Glanced at the ground at my feet and there lay an arrowhead, quarter-inch of the point broken off.  I believed I was looking at the reason he quit before the job was done.

But that long tom and that sluice were testimony the man [or men] working there were in a production mode.  They weren’t prospecting, they were processing ore.  Scrapings from the bottom surface of the sluice, burned and panned didn’t turn any signs of anything heavy.  Downstream just below the V-bottom of the canyon went 100 yards or so to a stricture might have once had a beaver dam, landslide, something clogging it so’s there was a flat bottom with maybe 7-8 feet of sediment.  Along one side a channel had been cut going through the sediment, but not all the way to the bottom of the V.  It would have been a major job getting to the bottom for sampling, never got around to it.

But from the bottom of the existing channel the pans showed a huge amount of heavy, heavy, heavy bead-like material, rusty brown.  Eventually spectroscopic assays showed what was mentioned a couple of posts ago.

And there was considerable more of it in other nearby canyons.

But we never found the source of whatever the guy was running through that longtom, what he was crushing with the arrastra.

Old Jules

10 Comments

Posted in Adventure, New Mexico, NM, Prospecting, Solitude

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Jeanne’s Bumper-Sticker Dearth/Plethora After-Action Report

Posted on June 2, 2012 by | 4 comments

This email was waiting for me when I logged on this morning, in part:

“The total bumper stickers on a 2000 mile trip was one Semper Fi, two Obama/Biden, one home made one that said Troginator or something, and one that said “ If religious groups want to get into politics they should pay taxes” which I’ll send to you re-sized sooner than the others if you want to use it. If there are certain subjects I might have taken that you’d like me to email the pic of, let me know and I’ll resize those first just to send along quickly.
 “Saw something in a comment that the new bumpers don’t do well with bumper stickers, and since almost all the cars I saw were new, I suspect people don’t want to mess their bumpers up with something that won’t come off. Just guessing.”

Jeanne might be right, of course, same as any of us might as easily be as being wrong at any given time, on any given issue we enjoy strong opinions about. 

I hate to think US drivers have become so sissy they’d quit spewing their certainties, hatreds, biases and half-baked simple solutions to complex phenomena just because of their paint-jobs.  I’d prefer to think they’ve become uneasy about what’s going on around them, sensed it enough to cause the hair on their necks bristle a bit.

The deliberate polarization of strong feelings in this country regarding politics, religion, environmentalism, ethnics, abortion, sexual preference and patriotism seem to me to have introduced the potential for having tires slit in the parking lot as a means of counter-expression.

The guy in the picture at the top today is Jack Swilling, founder of Phoenix, Arizona.  His hat was his bumper-sticker.  Someone shot a hole in it, ripped it in half so’s he had to sew it back together.

But in another sense, a person might figure, “Hell, if I’m going to be in Swilling’s neighborhood, I ain’t putting no bumper-sticker on my horse.”

The country’s jam-packed with people today who might be sneakier and more cunning than Jack Swilling, but have the same eyes developed listening to talk radio too much.  Or spending too much time in the slammer to love their fellow Americans.  Or snorting too much of this or that recreational drug. 

Jack Swilling’s still out there, but he’s wearing his hat backward most likely.  Instead of saying, “What the hell are YOU looking at?” most likely he’ll just drag his keys the length of your paintjob or slit your tires.  Unless he can catch you alone broken down on the highway.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2012, Communication, Education, New Mexico, Politics, Survival, Texas

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Escape Routes and Hideyholes

Posted on May 31, 2012 by | 10 comments

Good morning readers.  Thanks for coming by for a read this morning.

Gale had himself an appointment with the kidney-marble specialist yesterday to find out what they might do about getting it out of there.  Haven’t heard the outcome yet.  But what I’ve seen of him from the time they turned him out of the hospital until now leads me to think he’s going to be slow getting back into peak performance any way a person might view it.

This entire health event episode has hardened the realization for me that if things had played out differently I might have had to jump ship from this place with whatever cats I could take along, almost no lag-time.  Got to devote some attention to pounding a hole in the wall of the Universe that includes something besides hitching out and finding a bridge to live under, minus felines.

If the Coincidence Coordinators allow it, that 1977 Bluebird school bus might provide the answer.  I figure it’s going to take a month of stopping by there when I’m in town and nobody else buying it during the interim, but I might be able to beat him down enough eventually to be able to swing it.  But if it works the price will have allow me to fit in buying tags and liability insurance coverage.  Plus a tank of gas, cat food and a little for me to last the rest of the month from when it happens.

Once it’s out here I can work on it to make it capable of the cats and me living in it, while still working on the various things need doing on Gale’s place that he’s not going to be able to do for a while.  The wildlife management plan he promised the county he’d do includes thinning the cedar, erosion control mitigation, etc., and there’s heavy lifting with me being the only one here able to do it.

I’m fairly determined to get his first year promises done before I leave here, provided he’s alive to need them done.  If the bus works out, once I sense something complete in it, I’ll feel free to box up me and the cats and head for the sunset.

I’ve got a lot of stirrings in me churning around, telling me I need to be somewhere with more interesting rocks than a person can dig up here, the trees aren’t dying like flies, and the rivers empty into the Pacific Ocean..

The guy from up the hill told me when he was here that they’re crying for backhoe operators in the country between Uvalde and the Mexico border.  Oil field work.  So a stop out there a while to garner my resources on the way west might fit into the plan if the Coincidence Coordinators think it’s a good idea and the cats will agree to it.

Old Jules

10 Comments

Posted in 2012, Adventure, Current Issues, New Mexico, Senior Citizens, Solitude, Texas

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Gamblers, Gambling and Risk-taking

Posted on May 28, 2012 by | 5 comments

Previously blogged May 17, 2005

Saturday a recently acquired friend and I revisited one of the sites I spent a lot of time puzzling over during the search for the lost gold  mine.  The place was the focus of the ’98 search  and a good many years prior to that.  Sometimes it amazes me how many times I climbed and unclimbed the west face of that mountain, always finding something new and puzzling.  I spent most of a month camped at the top, friends coming in for a week or so, then heading back to their lives elsewhere without finding what we were looking for, but finding enough adventure, fellowship and mountain air for a while and remember as one of the good times.This was Jim’s first time up there.  We went in mainly to look at a rock pillar that’s peeling away from a cliff face.

It’s a formation that fascinated a man I’ve come to know awfully well by his work; a man I never met, but whom I followed around that mountain puzzling over what he did, how he did it and why he did it.  A man who lived and died 150 years ago, roughly.  A man who knew a gamble when he saw one, went into a canyon spang in the middle of Apache country at a time when the best he could hope for if he was a quick death, or if his luck was bad, hanging upside down over a slow fire.

I’ve been wearing the arrowhead that almost certainly killed him hanging from a leather thong around my neck for a decade or more.  The ruin a few charred logs high, a long-tom sluice he carved with an axe out of a three-foot diameter log, a 400 pound rock he chiseled down to use as an arrastra and a hundred or so signs and symbols he made on rocks, along with his various diggings are all that’s left to tell what kind of man he was.

A gambler, he was, gambling on being caught by Apaches, gambling a broken leg in a place where such a thing was sure death.  A man who believed in himself so thoroughly that in that setting that he pecked away at the base of a 50 ton pillar of rock trying to get at what was underneath until it gives a man the fantods even today to walk beneath it.

One of the things I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating as I watched Orion chasing the Pleiades across the night sky to the background music of wind in the treetops is the thought of how a man of that sort would feel about a world where low-level risk-taking is a criminal offense.

A time when edging the nose of  a vehicle onto the pavement without fastening the seat belt probably won’t get you hurt, but it will almost certainly get you a conversation with an armed pair of mirror sunglasses.  A time when risk is defined in how many years it might take you to get cancer from whatever you’re eating or smoking.  When excessive gambling is betting the grocery money at the blackjack table.

I wonder if he’d have played a wheel, or just picked a few numbers that suited him and bought a hundred tickets with the same six numbers on them, going for broke on something he believed in, the way he did in life.

One of the ways we define who and what we are includes what we’re willing to give up to travel around the sun a few more times.  That guy on the mountain wasn’t inclined to give up much.

Old Jules

5 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, Gambling, History, Human Behavior, Lottery, Native Americans, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Prospecting

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A Military Man

Posted on May 27, 2012 by | 13 comments

Previously posted August 21, 2005:

The man in this picture is my old friend Richard Sturm.

[Note:  I’m going to edit this a bit before I post it to the So Far From Heaven blog, add and subtract a few hindsights and afterthoughts.  Jules]

Richard died in December, 2004, in Port Lavaca, Texas.

Richard was a 100% disabled veteran of the United States Army. From 1964, until his death he spent his entire adult life in and out of Veterans hospitals. When he wasn’t in a hospital he was usually in a café somewhere drinking coffee and being friendly with anyone who’d give him the time of day.

Or he was with me, camping, fishing, seeing the sights, singing, passing the time. That happened less than he’d have liked, probably more than I’d have preferred in a lot of instances. Richard wasn’t an easy man to be around.   

A while back [2011] his brother and I were discussing Richard, and Vic remarked, “You never really saw Richard when he was at his worst.”  I didn’t say so at the time, but I think I spent a lot more time with Richard over the years than Vic did, or than Vic was ever aware I did. 

Aside from Richard, all those Sturms were super-achievers, and although I spent a lot of years from 1965 onward considering Vic among my best friends, he was a busy man.  People sought him out.  If I wanted to talk to him, I called him.  Over all those decades I could count on one hand the times he initiated a contact between the two of us.  “People call me.  I don’t call them,” he explained to me once when I mentioned it to him.   I’d guess that applied to Richard, same as it did to me.

But that’s digression, edited in this May, 2012, with a lot of hindsight.

Before Richard volunteered for the Army he was a patriotic youth, intelligent, dynamic, from a family of super-achievers. He graduated from high school with honors, well liked and respected by his teachers and classmates. A young man with a future. Then he joined the US Army.

In 1964, he was stationed in Massachusetts with the Army Security Agency. Without his knowledge or consent, he was selected for an experiment by the career military men who were his superiors. He was given a massive dose of LSD. He sustained permanent brain damage as a result.

Richard spent several months in a mental ward of an Army hospital, presumably under observation by the powers-that-be, to see what they’d wrought. Then they gave him is medical discharge, released him from service and from the hospital, and sent him home without confiding to anyone what the problem was and why it happened.

Several years later after he’d been examined, had his thyroid removed, given electric shock treatments, everything the puzzled medicos could think of to try and improve this mysterious condition, his brother, an attorney, came to suspect something of what had happened. The stories of events of this sort had begun to creep out of hiding and into the press.

A formal demand was made for release of his records, and finally the story came out.

Richard wasn’t injured defending his country. He didn’t get his skull fractured on some battlefield by enemies. He was betrayed by the career military men of his own country, officers and enlisted men, whom he’d given an oath to obey and defend. He served in good faith, and he was betrayed by his country.

Some have noted on the threads that I don’t have an automatic high regard for career military men. They’re correct. Richard’s just an extreme example of thousands of men who’ve been killed, injured, disabled by irresponsible, insane, and idiotic decisions by men who make a career of blindly following orders without thinking, weighing consequences, not feeling any remorse so long as they were ordered to do it.

Like good little NAZIs, Japanese, Soviets, Israelies, Americans, Cambodians, British, Africans, Chinese, Cubans, Argentinans and military men everywhere.  Just following orders. 

Support our troops.

Old Jules

2012 note:  During a conversation with Vic in 2011, I mentioned the LSD experiment and Vic replied, “It’s a shame I could never prove it.  Richards records were all destroyed in a fire at the Army Records Holding Center in the late 1960s.”  Live and learn.  Somewhere back there, I must have heard it from Richard, I came to think the records had been uncovered and it was established, official fact.

13 Comments

Posted in 1960's, Adventure, Government, Human Behavior, Liars, Military, New Mexico, NM, Politics, Texas, US Army

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The Legal Money Raffle Consortia

Posted on May 24, 2012 by | 4 comments

Previously posted in 2005:

I used to know a guy named Mike, down in Socorro.  A man with a lot of ideas.

During the mid-‘90s, about the time the Internet was cranking up big-time, Mike had the idea it would be cool to start an online raffle.

Mike had some money lying around.  Just about enough to buy a full-sized Harley, and a large RV.  But he thought he could increase the amount of money he had by taking a risk.  He’d sell raffle tickets online for a Harley and a large RV without buying them until someone won the raffle.  If he didn’t sell enough tickets, he’d make up the difference with his savings.  But if he did sell enough tickets, he’d give away the Harley and RV, and pocket whatever extra came in.

It turns out raffles are illegal at almost any level, though the cops and prosecutors look the other way if they feel the cause is a good one, or if it’s just small potatoes.  But item one for Mike turned out to be that if he went online he’d be almost certain to be prosecuted.

Item 2, was the fact he was, in effect, proposing to raffle a motorcycle and an RV that didn’t exist.  The fact he didn’t own them yet compounded the felony he would be committing.

Now what Mike was proposing to do was precisely what lotteries do.  Raffling off something that doesn’t exist…. Money that they plan on earning as interest.

But, of course, when a government-sanctioned, or government-owned administrative entity commits an act that rhymes with something that would be a felony if an individual behaved identically, all’s well with the world.

Unless they happen to have a lot of attention focused on their behavior, which sometimes happens.

Similarly, I used to know a guy named Dan, who had a lot of cash lying around doing nothing.  He dreamed up an online something he called a ‘money club’, or ‘money pool’.  Members, Dan dreamed, would pay $5 per month into the pool.  Every month the total proceeds, minus 10 percent (to Dan as operational and administrative fees) would be handed out to some lucky member by a process known as Random Number Generator…. Something nearly identical to what’s being done by lotteries.  Except it would be private enterprise….. private sector.

Dan figured the payout percentages would be so much better, the odds so much better than any lottery that it would cause players to flock to him.  He might have been right.

But there was naturally a catch.  What he was proposing was and is a herd of felonies at almost every level of jurisdiction.  Even though what he proposed was a lot better for the players involved, than the competition (the government and the various legally recognized mob) could (read ‘would’) offer.

So neither of these ideas ever came to fruition, though each represented the cleaned up versions of corrupted first-cousins we all accept as normal in the lottery systems.

It’s surprising sometimes to see people who claim to believe in free enterprise so blindly support any government monopoly.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 1990's, Adventure, America, Current Issues, Gambling, Government, Human Behavior, Internet, Lottery, New Mexico

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Morning Gratitude Affirmations

Posted on May 17, 2012 by | 4 comments

A previous blog post from April 10, 2005

Hokay.  I try to think of five particularly communistic things going on in my life every morning, every evening, during the day, to find reasons for being grateful for.  It’s a ritual I try to practice constantly, but if I begin the day with it, it’s a lot easier to remember for the rest of the day.

Soooooo.

I’m going to let the numbers on the lottery draw last night be my first, even though it’s really easy.  Those numbers did good and I have a lot of good feeling about what hit last night.  It’s cheating, but I’m going to be grateful for that anyway.

Hokay.  Number two.  It snowed last night.  It’s April, everything was budded out, and it damned well snowed.  Maybe you think I’m not grateful, but I am.  If the frost gets those buds for a third time there ain’t going to be any apples, apricots, grapes, pecans, but there’s always another year, and we need the moisture, probably more than we need the fruit this year.  It’s been a long drought and the moisture deficit isn’t entirely made up, even with all the rain and snow this winter.  Yeah.  I’m grateful.  Yes, I am.  I can feel it, reluctant, squirming, fighting every inch of the way, but grateful is emerging.

Number 3.  Tres.  I’m grateful for these affirmations.  That’s an easy one too, cheating, but they’ve had an enormous influence on my life for the past decade, and sometimes I forget to be grateful for knowing how good they are for me.  And besides, it fills a slot, allowing me not to have to confide to you what some of the ‘really communist’ troubles I’m going to have to be grateful for before I get past these affirmations in my private mind, this morning.  But those are none of your business, so I’m going to try to keep this clean and well lighted.

Number 4.  Quatro.  Lessee.  A cat just took a dump on the rug over there across the room.  Knows better than that, but did it anyway.  It means, hopefully, that the cat was communicating to me the litter box is getting too full.  I’m grateful that cat reminded me of my neglect.  I haven’t cleaned it up, but when I do I will examine the stool and make certain the cat wasn’t telling me something else, something more important.  I’m grateful a cat will tell a person willing to listen what’s going on with it, what sort of health problems might be hidden there in that pea brain, wanting to come out but not knowing how.

Number 5:  Half an hour after daybreak and the wind’s coming back up outside.  I’m grateful for that wind, that howling and clattering of things loose on the porch, the rabid windchimes, the cold air whistling in around the old wooden frames of the windows.

Maybe you think I’m not grateful for that wind, but I am.  Here’s why.

Hmmmmm.  Hmmmmmm.  I am.  Just give me a minute here.

Ahhhh..  I’m grateful for that wind because it’s going to melt the snow quickly.  Maybe even soon enough to save the blossoms and buds.  Maybe that old wind will just evaporate enough of the snow, good old wind, temperature 37 degrees F, maybe it will have all that snow gone in no time at all and the new grapevines won’t lose their buds, the apples will be okay.

A lot of people mightn’t be grateful for that wind howling to blue blazes out there, me sipping my coffee here, typing, feeling the cold air on my bare ankles, but I am.  Yes, I am.

Old Jules

4 Comments

Posted in 2000's, Adventure, Animals, Country Life, Human Behavior, Lottery, New Mexico, NM, Placitas, Spirituality

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Salt Cedar Latillas for Erosion Control

Posted on May 14, 2012 by | 2 comments

During the toughest times of the post-Y2K years the blessing I appreciated most, but enjoyed least was cutting salt cedar in the bosques, trimming it,and selling it as latillas off some busy intersection in Albuquerque.  The best bosques weren’t accessible by vehicle, were loaded with ticks, and all the bosques on the Rio Grande are home to more rattlesnakes than live in the rest of New Mexico combined.

But when nothing else was working, when they’d cut off the utilities because I couldn’t pay the bills, I’d hitch up Old Faithful, the pickup bed trailer, load the chainsaw and loppers, and head for the bottomlands for a couple of days.

The work was grueling.  Bundling them and pissanting them back to the trailer took forever and assured a person would have a dozen ticks fighting over every inch of skin, and avoiding Brother Rattler required lightning reflexes along with a wary eye.

Once I had a full trailer-load I’d bundle them, pack them down and find a busy street corner where I’d sell them for $10 per bundle.  Usually took all day, but I’d try to get back to Grants in time to reach the city offices, pay the utilities and have the power turned back on first thing the next day.

It’s a lot easier in Texas, though I doubt there’s any market for them.  Never heard of anyone in Texas using latillas.  But salt cedar’s as water-hogging, damaging, invasive and pervasive here as in New Mexico.  Grows in the grader ditch between here and the State Ranch Road 385.

I can get a truckload of it in half-hour or so, and in a lot of ways I think it might be better than juniper for erosion control.  In that particular length of driveway between Gale’s front gate and his house the last runoff bypassed some of the earlier work and cut some new channels.  The salt cedar’s easier to obtain in this instance than juniper, so I’m shoring it up with salt cedar.

I’ve built four more rock and brush dams downstream from the first one in the creek to the east, hopefully to catch whatever washes out of the main one, come next runoff event.

Hmmm an aside.  A digression.  A parenthetical remark:

The new neighbor up the hill’s got him a spanking new machine to back up his track loader dozer and his rubber-tired backhoe/frontend loader. 

It’s a lopper of the magnum variety mounted on a Bobcat with tracks over the tires.  Air conditioned, everything computerized, even got a rock rake with it.  Only $57K.

I reckons I’ll just stick with my $8 thrift store Chinese repair job loppers.

Meanwhile, on a more exciting note.

I was telling my friend Rich on the phone about weirdness and anomalies I was getting on barycentric calculations for Old Sol positions.  While we were talking he went to the US Naval Observatory site and pulled up the ‘Read Me’ file for the MICA software. 

Rich, generous, amazing friend that he is, spang right-then-and-there ordered a copy for me.

Turns out they discovered an error for multiple calculations that didn’t exist for single calculations.  They’ve released a new version, 2.2.2, with the errors corrected, along with some other improvements I’d grumbled to myself it needed but suffered silently.

Only trouble I’ve found with it is that it won’t allow me to import my hundred-or-so custom locations.  I’m having to feed them in individually, longitude, latitude, elevations, each freaking one!  The Location Manager’s designed so I can’t even copy and paste them.

And when I luckily installed it on the old machine first, just in case, it over-wrote my old location manager.  Freaking erased it spang off the damned computer.

Damned pointee-headed astronomer bastards.  Rot in hell.

Old Jules

2 Comments

Posted in 2012, Astronomy, Country Life, Nature, New Mexico, NM, Outdoors, Science, Senior Citizens, Survival, Texas

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Surveillance Weirdness

Posted on May 7, 2012 by | 8 comments

Saturday October 28, 2006  

 

This brave new century offers a lot of interesting twists and turns for the observant.  I was reading a blog this morning, someone ruminating over a friend request he’d gotten from someone, maybe in India.

I’d gotten a similar request yesterday, so it caused me to consider whether blogs aren’t being used by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, both here and abroad, to find folks with particular sets of viewpoints.

For instance, I came across a blog the other day posted by a person who called himself something like ‘dope-smuggler’.  Hmmm, thinks I, is this for real?  The blog entries and photos all involved various aspects of the use of controlled substances.

Suppose I worked for DEA, I went on thinking.  Would I throw out a trot-line or two searching for folks who’d like to admit on blogs that they were felons?  I think I might.

Or suppose I worked for Mossad  (I think that’s the right spelling), the Israeli intelligence agency.  Would I like to know as many names and locations of people who held Nazi-like viewpoints?  Would I be equally interested in folks who rabidly approve of anything Israel might do?  Probably.

And so on.  But that’s not what this blog is about.

This blog is about what’s happened with surveillance technology and general nosiness, both of government and individuals.

The technology and availability of spying equipment with amazing capabilities and invisibility at a shockingly low price is out there for anyone.

At least it was shocking and amazing to me when I found myself moved to investigate the matter.

One day I’d been sitting at a blackjack table for about twelve hours, and when I got to my car in the parking lot my cell-phone rang.  I answered and was treated to hearing a long playback of my conversations at the game-table several hours earlier.  I thought back and recalled a guy who sat next to me for a while wearing an unusual fanny-pack he kept messing with, so I figured it was him.

But his motive for doing such a thing was a mystery, and how he happened to know my cell-phone number was one, as well.

That happened several times, the casino playback thing, but I only saw that particular person once, and when he took the chair next to me I asked him if he had his equipment with him.  “Oh yeah,” he answered with a laugh.  “I always carry everything with me.”  And left the table.

During the same time-period Jeanne was in New Mexico.  We were in the living room, me standing, her sitting across the room, having a conversation.  The land-line phone rang and I answered.  Similarly to the casino experience, I had a conversation played back to me, but this time it was the conversation Jeanne and I’d just had within the past five minutes.

Someone obviously had the capability to listen to what was said in my home.  But what’s intriguing to me is that they wanted me to KNOW they had that capability.

That happened a couple more times and I could never see any signs around the house of any microphone/camera, but it was obviously here.  From then until now I’ve gotten spam emails I don’t open, but with subject lines referring to something or other that’s happened in my life, said or done, recently.

Which confirms for me that I am one helluva interesting guy.  I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would put that kind of effort, energy and expense into my life, but I do try to provide with them with some amusement in various ways.

Sometimes I figure it’s the rich neighbor kid, sometimes I think it’s the neighbor across the street next-door to my buddy, Wes, who’s generally known to be a negative busybody.  But that doesn’t quite fit the casino incidents.

I haven’t a clue. 

But after the first phone-at-home incident Jeanne and I went to a surveillance store and looked over what was out there on the open market.  After seeing it, I decided we live in a time when it’s useless to think there are any secrets, any privacy, if anyone’s determined enough to want to know, sick enough to be willing to put out a few bucks and plant a device.

Flattering, though, knowing that despite the fact I don’t talk to anyone but the cats these days unless I’m on the phone, I’m still one hell of an interesting feller.

Golly.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2000's, Adventure, America, Communication, Current Issues, Gambling, Human Behavior, Internet, New Mexico, NM, Surveillance, Uncategorized

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