Please help me control the egos of the hats, cats, chickens, deer, wild hogs, dead trees and the Communist Toyota 4-Runner.
I appreciate all you visitors who come here and the kind words many of you say about So Far From Heaven. But I’m asking a favor of all of you. Accept our gratitude, but don’t offer awards.
There are thousands of fantastic blogs on the web. Many of those great blogs are getting blog awards. I believe all of those receiving those awards deserve them, aside from the awards offered to this blog. This blog is not yet worthy of any blog award.
Jeanne and I work hard on So Far From Heaven and we’re both determined to make it better, possibly good enough to receive an award someday. But we both know we aren’t there yet. So Far From Heaven has a long way to go..
Giving blog awards to So Far From Heaven detracts from the value of the awards.
But the blog awards offered to this blog have also bloated the community ego. The cats, chickens, deer, dead trees and even the Communist Toyota have all become insufferable.
So until some time in the future when we consider the blog to have reached a better standard, please accept our thanks for the thought, but don’t nominate So Far From Heaven for blog awards.
First, at the Hospice Thrift Store in Kerrville I found these gloves with no fingertips for $1.50. When it’s cold in this cabin I go to 18 layers of longjohns and sweatsuits, Sorel snowboots and innovative headgear. But my fingers stiffen until I can only use the computer with a lot of mistakes.
I’m thinking those gloves are going to fix that one.
But on arriving back home and tuning the computer to this frequency I found to my delight that Michael had explained the solution to another one I’ve been scratching my head over longer than I care to admit.
Adventure wears a lot of disguises. In garage laboratories, in pens behind their homes, in backyards, they’re out there enduring the smiles and shrugs of the non-adventurous.
For discussion of Nikola Tesla history, inventions, and coil design and construction techniques. The physics of Tesla’s varied patents, and ideas are especially welcome, even if they generate some heated discussions.
This list is for the dissemination and discussion of all things TESLA. Since Tesla was a man of wide and varied talents, other physical phenomena discussions are possible.
All About Packgoats is a collection of interesting and insightful people who share an interest in hiking and packing with goats. With experience ranging from veteran packgoat professional to weekend hiking enthusiast, the answers to your packgoat questions can be found here.
This discussion group is devoted to the study of gravity and the physics of gravity and the interaction thereof. This forum is intended to allow all views and concepts to be entertained and evaluated by all, regardless of how traditional and fundamental or non-traditional and non-fundamental the ideas might be. Whenever possible, material submitted for discussion should include supporting data when available.
Or this:
In the Sandia mountains east of Albuquerque, New Mexico, there’s about an acre of house and museum built by a man with his own idea of adventure. It’s called Tinkertown. Above the entrance there’s a sign, “HERE’S WHAT I DID WHILE YOU WATCHED TELEVISION”.
He adventured through life creating thousands of Rube Goldberg mechanical animations just to see if he could do it.
If he couldn’t create that animation, or make a Cadillac with the outer-surface covered by pennies, he wasn’t half the man he thought he was.
“We wonder what was the inspiration that could cause a man to spend 28 years to carve a Coral Castle from the ground up using nothing but home made tools. An homage to unrequited love? Perhaps to illustrate ancient sciences that defy gravity? Or maybe just sheer, raw human determination? The Coral Castle is an everlasting mystery to those who explore it.”
Or The Perfect Man Shrine, middle of desert nowhere, Columbus, New Mexico:
Human lives don’t last long. There are plenty of candidates who consider themselves wise and willing to tell us how we ought to spend ours.
The people who built it are dead, or too old to maintain it.
But maybe when we close our eyes that last time we’d consider it well spent if we just did something, sometime while we were stumbling through it.
I’d bet not one of the people above ever voiced the lament, “I’m SO bored!”
My old friend Keith stopped into the blog a few days ago and commented on one of the posts. By doing so he reminded me I haven’t said much about a subject dear to my heart: Outrageous adventure.
When Keith and I were searching together we were both in our early 50s, both involved in careers, both plenty old enough to know we weren’t going to find that lost gold mine, though I, particularly figured we would. [I still held by the statement from my neophyte search early in the 1980s, “If I can’t find that mine I’m not half the man I think I am.”]
Keith and I plotted, planned and trekked into more canyons than either of us can remember and, while we didn’t find that lost gold mine we saw places not many human beings have ever seen, certainly not many in a longish time. We systematically explored promising locations from the Zuni Mountains, to Santa Rita Mesa, to Pelona on the south side of the Plains of San Augustin, to the Gallinas.
I don’t know how Keith thinks about all this these days, but I know how I think about it. I wouldn’t subtract one mile, one minute, one canyon of it from my life, though we never found what we were looking for.
Not from that, not from Y2K, not from flying a Cessna 140 all over the sky for a number of years, and not from this current adventure of survival that’s my life today, for that matter.
It seems to me people have become too ‘smart’ and ‘wise’ with the debunking culture to allow themselves a piece of outrageous risk with minimal prospects for any returns. It’s been that way for a considerable while. I believe it’s robbed a lot of people of experiencing a side of life that once a particular sort of individual demanded of himself.
An old man who wasn't afraid of adventure
When I say it’s been going on a long while I mean it. During the early 1950s my granddad and step-dad became the laughingstocks of Portales, Dora, Garrison and Causey, New Mexico, by injecting a piece of it into their lives. They bought a WWII jeep, equipment, and joined thousands of other similar men searching for uranium. Probably the last ‘rush’ in US history.
They were gone several months, didn’t find a thing, and when they returned they endured the jeers and snide laughs of everyone around them. But both men cherished the memories of that time as long as they lived. They had something the stay-at-home sneerers would never have because they were too smart, too dedicated to the other side of human existence to allow it into their lives.
And the venom they expressed for anyone else doing it provides a hint they probably wished they had.
Alive and safe, the brutal Japanese soldiers who butchered 20,000 Allied seamen in cold blood
Just keep it safe and simple pretending to remember something about the ‘fighting’ by Allied troops across the planet. Hug yourself with some feelgood to help you feel sensitive and patriotic.
Carefully remember today ONLY the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor carrying some vague message we should remain prepared against similar future events.
Carefully do NOT remember the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the savage treatment of Allied POWs and civilians in occupied territories of The Greater-East-Asian-Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Carefully do NOT remember the beheading of hundreds, maybe thousands of prisoners, the starvation and death by disease of a huge percentage of other prisoners compared to elsewhere, almost anywhere among the armies of either side.
Carefully do NOT remember the overwhelming percentage of that conduct was perpetrated by enlisted men and officers below the rank of captain. Men who returned to their homes to be accepted within a couple of years as allies and fast friends of the US and other nations they fought, invaded, raped, pillaged and slaughtered only months earlier.
Carefully do NOT remember the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japanese industry and infrastructure destroyed by the war, rendering much of US industry obsolete or absolescent. DON’T remember the 20,000 suicide-before-surrender Japanese cliff-jumps at Okinawa.
And while you’re at it see if you can find a feelgood argument with someone about the ethical and moral side of the atomic bomb, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Better to forget all of it than pretend to remember some of it. Crank up your Mazda, turn on the FM and listen to some oldies while you remember what it was like to have a job. What happened 1941 – 1945 had nothing at all to do with anything happening today.
You don’t remember a damned thing about anything that happened to other people. Just remember Santy’s coming to town.
Middling cold here and I’m trying to thaw some water for the cats and chickens, along with thawing my fingers enough to type.
There was something I was supposed to remember this morning but I can’t recall what it was even though I started the post and put that pic on it to remind me. That, and a pic of the Toyota sitting out across the meadow.
It’s about forty miles south of the Zuni Rez, almost in AZ.
There’s a ghost town you can barely see in the pic…. used to be a considerable community down in there when it was private land, from the mid-1800s until the 1950s, evaporating salt from the huge concrete beds. Most of the buildings are still intact, though they’re going away rapidly.
Today it belongs to the Zuni tribe, one section of land, but it’s not in the national trust as part of the Rez. Tribes have been acquiring a lot of land from casino monies and other ways during the past decades, making the lands acquired ‘tribal’, but not Rez, which puts them into an interestingly ambiguous position insofar as road maintenance and county taxes.
Salt Lake was acquired as a piece of a lawsuit against the US government involving an airplane with a hydrogen bomb aboard that crashed on the Rez, with first responders being Zunis, but which the feds didn’t bother telling them about the bomb, leaving emergency workers exposed to hazardous materials without knowing it. The tribe got a few million out of that, which they used to purchase 60k acres of land to the south of the Rez, but Salt Lake was thrown in as a bonus.
Salt Lake’s a sacred place for the Zunis, home of Salt Mother. If you are willing to risk hopping the fence and wandering around down there ….. it’s a volcano crater with a hollow secondary plug you can climb, then a spiral trail leading back down inside … that’s where most of the rituals for Salt Mother are held… but all over that section you’ll pass over various religious items from recent times you’d be well advised to leave untouched.
Salt Lake used to be the place all the warring tribes got their salt throughout history. A place where a constant truce between enemy tribes existed.
It’s also part of what the power companies would love to strip mine. The great percentage of the desert surrounding it, from north of Springerville, and Saint Johns, Arizona is government land with shallow coal deposits comparatively inexpensive to ‘recover’. They’ve already converted the desert on the Arizona side to a wasteland. Still desert, but more in the moonscape vein than the usual, regular arid country mode.
The people in El Paso and Phoenix need electricity so they can fire up their hair dryers every morning, and keep their homes refrigerated. Those places have climates uncomfortable to the human skin most of the time and they’d rather savage a few million acres of country they’ve never visited and never will than suffer a few degrees of discomfort and use a towel to dry their hair.
Which the Zuni believe would thoroughly piss off Salt Mother, with considerable resulting pain for the Zunis, and all the rest of us.
They might be right.
The Zuni and a few commie-pinko-obstructionist greenie environmentalists are the only people who give a damn, and the other desert-dwellers in the area would welcome the jobs helping ravage the country around them would bring to the area. The last time I looked the Zuni tribe was burning up a lot of tribal money trying to stop the mine expansion into New Mexico. The prospects didn’t appear promising because the New Mexico government, the feds, and the mining interests were stacked up singing songs of human progress and greater good.
Heck, it’s been a few years now. Maybe they’re already mining it. Probably easier to ask someone in Phoenix or El Paso whether the hair dryer worked this morning and if it did, assume that desert has gone to the moon.
Morning readers. I appreciate you coming by this morning.
The building pictured is on the corner of the plaza in Mesilla, New Mexico. I don’t recall at the moment what connection it has to Billy the Kid, other than the fact he hung around Mesilla. I do know the building was the center-piece for a lot more resounding events than some half-baked kid with a pistol could ever have added to, or taken away from.
That building, in 1860, was the County building where Jacob Snively, former Secretary of War for the Texas Republic, and his partners filed the mining claim for their gold strike at Pinos Altos, New Mexico. They attempted secrecy, but the word leaked out quickly. They headed back to the Gila, camped after dark, and woke in the morning surrounded by a booming mining camp sprung up during the night, home of a major gold rush.
Not much later the same building became the headquarters for Colonel Baylor and the first wave of Texan Confederate invaders of the western territories. The primary Government building for the Confederate Territory of Arizona.
Baylor recruited from there and volunteer recruits from Mesilla and Pinos Altos comprised the overwhelming part of the force of Sherrod Hunter for his invasion and occupation of Tucson. One of Snively’s partners, Jack Swilling, commanded the Confederate troops at Picacho Pass, westernmost battle of the Civil War. Swilling eventually became the founder of Phoenix, Arizona.
Jack Swilling
There it sits today, that building, proclaiming itself to be something involved with a tiny man with a big pistol, but it has a lot more to say if anyone was listening.
ERUPTING FILAMENT: Today, with little warning, a magnetic filament rapidly erupted on the sun. Between 10:30 and 11:30 UT, observers in Europe watched tendrils of hot plasma rocket away from the sun’s NW limb. Debris from the explosion is not expected to hit Earth. Images: #1, #2, #3.
Astrophysicists aren’t certain what he was shooting at, but several noted deer season recently opened. Others speculate Alpha Centauri was throwing bottles or tin-cans in the air for him.
With no flares of significance in days, the sun is strangely quiet. Nevertheless, the view remains dynamic. Rogerio Marcon of Campinas, Brasil, took this picture of the local starscape on Dec. 2nd. Using a telescope tuned to the red glow of solar hydrogen, Marco captured 20 billion sq. km of seething plasma and magnetic filaments; also included in the field is the dark core of sunspot 1364 (lower right). It doesn’t look very quiet. NOAA forecasters estimate a 30% chance of M-class solar flares in the next 24 hours. http://spaceweather.com/
Some astrophysicists noted 20 billion sq. km of seething plasma and magnetic filaments could be considered a middling lot, everything else being equal.
PHD candidates from UC Berkeley and MIT have gone on record with a theory there’s some kind of celebration going on up there. NASA space cadets believe otherwise, but refuse to elaborate except to darkly hint Old Sol’s expressing his displeasure about agency budget cuts.
Israel and the CIA aren’t saying what’s causing it, but are planning airstrikes on unnamed Central Asian targets in retaliation.
Looks as though everything’s going to be okay. Human beings have been doing a pretty good job of wrapping things up, getting things that needed doing out of the way so’s it’s going to be a quiet one.
Here and there all over the planet the people assigned to keep Old Sol happy, praying Him up mornings and praying him down evenings seem to have gotten the situation well in hand for now. Not much danger of anything falling on our heads out of the sky or jumping up out of the earth to surprise anyone.
The Emergency Box that’s caused so much trouble in the past is now securely locked away from the kinds of people who’ve been sneaking around doing monkey-tricks with it. In the US the government’s been cooperating in a world-wide effort to quiet things down.
One of the things they decided to do that might help is shut gradually down the US Post Office, which ought to give a strong shove in the right direction away from anything more happening. And not a moment too soon, either.
Those people have been creating headaches for the citizenry all the way back to Ben Franklin. If it wasn’t electric bills it was jury-duty summons postcards, registered-return-receipt letters from people trying to make things happen and shiny envelopes telling us we won a sweepstake. Or delivering some magazine about golf, or pictures of houses and kitchens and clothes. No end to it.
Generally speaking the newspapers all over the place telling people what happened somewhere are getting their comeuppance, too. All those little daily and weekly papers struggling to tell people who died and what the local rich people are doing with their private lives are sinking into the woodwork. Good riddance, says I.
Especially the part about jury-duty summons post cards and electric bills.
That Emergency Box might find itself completely detached and rusting away if we can keep at it. Without juries they’ll be able to just lock people up who need it without all the fanfare.
Everything’s going to be okay today provided nobody went to sleep at the wheel while praying up Old Sol.
74 years old, a resident of Leavenworth, KS, in an apartment located on the VA campus. Partnered with a black shorthaired cat named Mister Midnight. (1943-2020)
Since April, 2020, this blog is maintained by Jeanne Kasten (See "About" page for further information).
https://sofarfromheaven.com/2020/04/21/au-revoir-old-jules-jack-purcell/
I’m sharing it with you because there’s almost no likelihood you’ll believe it. This lunatic asylum I call my life has so many unexpected twists and turns I won’t even try to guess where it’s going. I’d suggest you try to find some laughs here. You won’t find wisdom. Good luck.
So Far From Heaven 
