Tag Archives: Human Behavior

Adventure, Imagination and Keeping the Juices Flowing

Posted on December 8, 2011 by | 14 comments

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.

Crazy Lost Gold Mine-ism

Wilderness Threats

Fiddle-Footed Naggings and Songs of the Highway

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.

Old Jules

14 Comments

Posted in 1950's, 2011, Adventure, America

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Guide: Adopt Selective ‘Remember’ BS Rhetoric With Surgical Precision

Posted on December 7, 2011 by | 20 comments

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.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-491548/Alive-safe-brutal-Japanese-soldiers-butchered-20-000-Allied-seamen-cold-blood.html

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.

Old Jules

 

20 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 2011, America, Hawaii, History

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I can’t forget but I can’t remember what – December 7, 2011

Posted on December 7, 2011 by | 13 comments

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.

Tora tora tora!

 

Maybe it will come to me later in the day.

Old Jules

13 Comments

Posted in 1940's, 2011, America, History, Human Behavior

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The Devil Take the Hindmost Religion of Human Progress

Posted on December 6, 2011 by | 10 comments
 

The Lone Psychiatrist Rides Again

 

“So,” says I to Mr. Hydrox, my second-in-command.  “Just what-the-hell do we think we’re doing?”

“Who?” Hydrox explains.

“Us.  You.  Me.  Niaid, Shiva, Tabby.  The Great Speckled Bird and the hens.  It’s coming on Christmas.  Why aren’t we gearing up?  Going on buying sprees?  Getting into the spirit of things?”

Christmas where the desert went and why

 

“Hmmm,” Hydrox frowns, scratching behind his ear.  “You’re thinking of what?  Maybe buying a few miles of lights and stringing them up?   Finding some ways of burning up some more kilowatt hours without warming the cabin, pumping water, creating anything, putting food on the table or adding anything necessary to things around here at all?”

I pulls at the suspenders to my insulated coveralls, stalling for time.  “Well, yeah.  Everyone else does it.  Remember when we lived in Placitas and the whole town got drunk and walked around the village singing?  Don’t you miss that?”

“I hated it,” Scrooge McHydrox mutters.  “So did the other cats.  Christmas.  Halloween.  Easter.  But especially Christmas.  Kids buzzing around the roads on new motorcycles trying to run one another over.  Garbage piled up around the pickup containers.  You humans are a mystery to me.  Can’t think of enough things to buy and throw away. 

“But all the while yapyap yapping about how hard times are.  Yap yapping about the cost of just staying alive.  You humans don’t even know how to eat a pound of meat that didn’t come in half-pound of plastic.”

This raised my hackles a bit.  “We’re smart.  We’re on top of things.  Every one of those empty cat food cans in that barrel over there are a sign of human progress and intelligence.  Someone somewhere dug that ore out of the ground.  Someone else smelted it and rolled it down into sheets to make into cans to hold meat someone else grew and killed and butchered so you can have a full belly.

“You eat better than the people who did all that work.  You cats eat better than the progeny of the people of the people I buy it from are likely to.”

Hydrox glared at me in a way I like to think of as put-in-his-place.  “Yeah.  And who’s responsible for all that?”

“Human progress,” I replied proudly.  “The religion of I-Got-Mine.”

Old Jules

  

 

 
 
 

10 Comments

Posted in 2011, America, Animals, Country Life, Current Issues, History, Human Behavior, Outdoors, Politics, Solitude, Survival, The Lone Psychiatrist

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This is Zuni Salt Lake

Posted on December 6, 2011 by | 24 comments


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.

Old Jules

 

24 Comments

Posted in 1990's, 2011, America, Human Behavior, Music, Native Americans, NM, Outdoors, Politics, Solitude, Wildlife

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Say It Like You Mean It [Trust me on this]

Posted on December 5, 2011 by | 3 comments

Send her roses now and then
A box of chocolates might help
She loves to hear, “I love you.”
Even if you don’t
Candy lies with chocolates and roses

When things get bad
And the secretary winks
Keep in mind
This won’t make it any better
Keep your valentines at home
Secretaries don’t come easy
And two women in your life
Ain’t a big improvement
Over one

When the embers cease to glow
Don’t forget or you’ll regret
You forgot the anniversary
There’s nothing out there better
Give her candlelight and roses
Candy lies with candlelight and roses

Old Jules
Copyright 2003 NineLives Press

 

3 Comments

Posted in Human Behavior, Music, Relationships

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The Phrase ‘Sex Addict’ as a Tool of Bullies

Posted on December 5, 2011 by | 19 comments

From 1970 until he died a few years ago I had a friend named Bill who required some getting used to in the visual encounter department.   Bill, Gale and I were part of a coffee-klatch at the University of Texas Chuckwagon.  They’d both been recently released from the military, both were Russian majors, so I suppose Bill was the instrument for my becoming acquainted with Gale, who owns this place and lives through the woods half-mile from me.

Bill wasn’t an easy man to look at.  He weighed around 250 pounds, had a huge head, eyes that didn’t look in precisely the same directions, kinky hair and teeth with a lot of distance between them.  But he was a fine, intelligent person.  Unfortunately for him, Bill also spoke with a stutter.  He was acutely, uncomfortably aware of his appearance.

At the time I met him Bill had never had sex with a woman who wasn’t a prostitute, and he confided once he never expected to.  A profoundly unhappy man whom I spent countless hours with trying to help persuade him away from suicide.  Every month or two I’d ride with him to the Chicken Ranch, the famous Texas whorehouse, and wait, chatting with the girls while he took care of his needs.  For me, one of the outcomes of those visits was the magazine article shown here:  Vietcong Seductress, et al.  For Bill the visits only provided temporary, but necessary relief.

Around the time he got his bachelors degree Bill found a woman who had a few problems of her own, and who was evidently able to see beneath his exterior into the fine human being he was.  They were eventually married and seemingly enjoyed a happy enough life.  Still, Bill and I remained close friends, talking on the phone several times a week.

One day Bill came to see me sometime in the mid-1980s with something weighing him down.  We talked a while before he confided to me that he was a ‘sex addict’.

“What the hell is a sex addict, Bill?”

He explained the concept to me, as it had been explained to him by his wife, along with various pamphlets of the feminist genre describing it in loving detail.  “I never knew this about myself,” he explained, carrying more guilt and self-remorse than I’d seen since he became a married man.

“Have you talked to a doctor about it?”

“I talked to [a mutual friend who was a psychologist].   He just laughed me off and said there’s no such thing as a sex addict.”

This brought a frown from me.  Our bud the psychologist was a pro.  If sex addiction existed, he’d know about it, and if Bill had a problem he wanted to talk about he wouldn’t brush him off.  “Did you talk to him in any detail about what makes you think you’re a sex addict?”

Bill just shrugged and stared at the floor.   “Yeah.  He said it’s just normal.  He said I’m the same as almost every other man.”

Not too long afterward Bill adopted the religious preference of his wife,  Anglican.  He became a deacon, and something of a zealot.  But he carried his guilt and his conviction he was a sex addict with him, probably to the grave.  And frankly, I never believed a word of it.

Bill had described enough of his sexual needs and practices to me over the years to convince me if he was a sex addict, so was I.  I tended to agree with our psychologist friend more than I agreed with Bill, his wife, or the feminist pamphlets where the concept was invented.

Recently The Honest Courtesan, a retired prostitute has had a couple of articles and discussions about the subject in her blog.  Not An Addiction, and Neither Addiction nor Epidemic examine the subject of the concept of sex addiction and what’s behind it in loving detail.

My general thought is that this wouldn’t work on most men.  It would require one such as Bill, a man already inclined to guilt and one already decided to let others define right and wrong for him.  Most men, I believe, would simply get a mistress or pick up a lady in a bar somewhere.  A lady who measured the sexual desires and needs of the normal man as normal.

He’ll be something else then, a ‘cheater’, and she’ll be the ‘other woman’.

And that’s normal too when terms such as ‘sex addict’ become a replacement part for ‘too tired’, or ‘I’ve got a headache’.

Old Jules

19 Comments

Posted in Human Behavior, Relationships

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Blind Chickens, Talking Diamonds and Greedy Galaxies

Posted on December 4, 2011 by | 18 comments

I’m aware some of you readers keep chickens.  If you’re having problems with blindness among them you might be interested in joining http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Free_Ranging_Chickens/ where there’s an interesting discussion going on about the problem.  This was the beginning post for the thread:

Blind Rooster
Posted: Sat Dec 3, 2011 5:47 am (PST)
Just wondering if anyone has had any experience with this. Monday afternoon, I noticed two hens on the wrong side of the fence, so went to retrieve them, and find the rest of their little band. Found all but one rooster. Couldn’t find him in any of the “regular” places, but they do have lots of room to roam. Figured I’d check again before bedtime, as he’s usually the first one in. Didn’t show up. Put everyone else in, and went hunting, for feathers if nothing else:(. Well, I found him by the fence, but inside. Just sitting there. He let me pick him up without protest, but he’s always been laid-back. Still, I knew something was wrong. Put him in a different coop, with shelves instead of bar roosts. The next day he was down on the floor, walking around, but bumping into the screening for the duck section, and sitting in corners/nests. Realized his vision was at least partially gone. Blocked him in, and started antibiotics, since I had no idea what else to do. That night he was back up on the shelf, so he must have some vision, I guess. Wasn’t eating or drinking that I could see, just walked over everything. Brought him into the Hospital Unit (a carrier in my bathrooom :). He began to drink, and finally eat. He crows (oh, swell) but his cue seems to be noise rather than light. Put him outside yesterday (in a big crate) afternoon for some sun, but he just sat there. Some of the other chickens did come scratch around him, but he seemed oblivious.
His eyes look odd, not whiteish, but the center (behind the cornea and inside the iris, where it should be black) looks “solid”, if that makes any sense.

Any thoughts?

Free_Ranging_Chickens@yahoogroups.com

Meanwhile, you readers involved in clandestine, extra-marital relationships might be well-advised to remove your diamond jewelry before checking into some seedy motel. 

In the quantum world, diamonds can communicate with each other

December 2, 2011 By Joel N. Shurkin

The vibrational states of two spatially separated, millimeter-sized diamonds are entangled at room temperature by scattering a pair of strong pump pulses (green). The generated motional entanglement is verified by observing nonclassical correlations in the inelastically scattered light. Credit: Dr. Lee and colleagues, Image Copyright Science|AAAS  http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-12-quantum-world-diamonds.html

Elsewhere in the news, the 99% movement has suffered a disturbing setback with the discovery we live in a greedy galaxy, gobbling up smaller galaxies.  http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-beast-tails.html

Barred Spiral Milky Way. Illustration Credit: R. Hurt (SSC), JPL-Caltech, NASA

The Milky Way galaxy continues to devour its small neighbouring dwarf galaxies and the evidence is spread out across the sky.

Government and Wall Street Cray computers working on the problem tentatively estimate the 99 percenters are actually 0.000000000000001 percenters galaxy-wide.  Political and financial-industry hired-guns are working three shifts to prepare television documentaries and PR campaigns to assist in correcting the error.

In a related story, multi-national corporations and Wall Street banks have hired a team of astrophysicists and astronomers to study black holes in an effort to develop more thorough strategies and techniques to solidify and expand their holdings.  Additionally, the illustration on the right suggests black holes might also provide improved methods in the use of pepper-spray.

“An optical image of the sky showing the location of the black hole, Cygnus X-1. (Right) An artist’s conception of the black hole system, showing the black hole drawing material towards it from a massive, blue companion star. This material forms a disk and jets that emit radiation. Credit: Optical: DSS; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

“Black holes are among the most amazing and bizarre predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity. A black hole is thought to be point-like in dimension, but it is surrounded by an imaginary surface, or “edge,” of finite size (its “event horizon”) within which anything that ventures becomes lost forever to the rest of the universe.”  http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-black-hole-unmasked.html

The overall optimism derived from these stories was something I wanted to share with you readers to lift whatever waning spirits you might experiencing his crisp, rainy morning.

Old Jules

18 Comments

Posted in 2011, Animals, Astronomy, Chickens, Communication, Country Life, Homesteading, Human Behavior, Politics, Poultry

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Old Sol’s Party-Animal Mood Swings Bring Mixed-Reactions

Posted on December 4, 2011 by | 8 comments

Old Sol was practicing his quickdraw:

http://spaceweather.com/submissions/pics/a/Alexandra-Hart-2011-12-03-11-22-20–

Alexandra Hart 
Image taken: Dec. 3, 2011
Location: Cheshire, UK 
 
Details: This prominence lifted off within 10 minutes, very spectacular! Taken with a Coronado PST and DMK41

 http://spaceweather.com/

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.

Old Jules

 

8 Comments

Posted in 2011, Astronomy

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December 2, 2011 – Good Prospect for Nothing Happening

Posted on December 2, 2011 by | 1 comment

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.

Old Jules

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Posted in 2011, Country Life, History

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