Desolation Wilderness/ Horsetail Falls

So, this week my son and I climbed up to Horsetail Falls in the Desolation wilderness. Though the altitude is a bit high, at around 7000 feet on the rim of lake Tahoe, it was much easier than last week. In the spring the falls are gorged with snow-melt and the result is 300 feet of fierce whitewater. Though it was 98 degrees in the valley it seemed like a pleasant 78 near the falls. This hike is a must for anyone within striking distance. It is ridiculously beautiful. Along the way you have views of other seasonal falls while you watch Lover's Leap fall behind you.

The only complications are that much of the trail involved hopping boulder to boulder, so a strained or broken ankle is a real possibility, and the fact that a substantial amount of the 'trail' has to be intuited/ made up. At one point my son asked if we were lost and I answer that it was impossible since we had a mountain on our left, the river on our right, and were still going up hill. That's all the 'trail info' there is for a good portion.

Bring a change of socks and maybe shoes as there are many small creeks (actually seasonal runnels) that have to be crossed and it is nearly impossible to stay dry. It is well worth the climb and make sure to bring a lot of water. We went through 3 liters very quickly and drank a total of 5.

Blue and Green Music and me

Blue and Green Music, Georgia O'Keefe

When I was as Berkeley I was lucky enough to get into a poetry writing class taught by Robert Hass. At that point, he was most famous as the translator for Czesław Miłosz, the Nobel Prize winner. Our class was turned over to Jane Hirschfield, because Hass had been named poet laureate of the United State. Since then, he's won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer. Anyway, I wrote the following in response to this O'Keefe painting - one of my top 5 of hers.

Blue and Green Music

Grooming with a clever hand
the landscaped sand, interior of man
pressed in grooves subordinate
to the bladed rise

a concourse, spread like rowed stones
cracked bone, the marrow thrown
against the pale plate and
cool viridian skies

Lines of light, drawn from pain
bulbous rain, the billowy plane
a musical skein of gauzy
endless space

Inchoate strokes, the figure born
concrete shorn, the white forlorn
as colors throw abstraction
into place

a quickening form that echoes life
translucent strife, the shuddering knife
creates a moment placed
beyond the screen

from misery to mystery
it gentles me, again I see
my birth and death as music
blue and green

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I got a pretty lousy reception as I recall. I was very please with myself for inventing a new rhyming scheme as well as articulating my reaction to such a stupendous, synesthetic abstraction. My fellow students were very into first person, emotive, confessional poetry. They (again, understandably) recoiled at phrases like "interior of man."

Years later I had an acquaintance who was a very gifted poet who wanted to see the picture along with the poem. Here you go Julia.

I quit writing poetry after that class - the last semester of college. By the time I graduated I had worked so hard that I was completely burnt out. Hass told us in one class that most poets have finished their best work in their early 30's (though he is disproving that point himself, isn't he). Given all the other things to do in life I don't know if I'll ever get back to it, but perhaps some day I might.

Titan Talk

A couple of people have asked me what the deal is the the link to the Titan Test in my 'cool links' section.  It's really no big deal.  The Titan test is the successor to the Mega test, proposed as a 'Super IQ Test' when it was first published in Omni magazine in the early 80's.  At that time, my friend K and I took it, but didn't send it in or anything - it was just something to do for fun.  

Flash forward 20 years, I was on the net looking for brain candy and there I find numerous successors.  The page and various discussions can be fun and Darryl is a nice guy.

http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/hoeflin.html

Anyway, my same friend, K and I downloaded the Titan as something fun to do with our downtime.  What I didn't realize was how the possibilities and power of the web changes things and how much pressure it puts on my integrity.  The questions can be very hard - some astonishingly so - and I'm pretty sure that if I used Google I'd find some answers very fast, but that's against the rules.  So there's conflict, but with something like this, if you cheat you're only fooling yourself - no one cares.

I've had two sticking points so far, the first I got through but not the second.  The first was Analogies number 24:

SWEETNESS: SUFFIX::  BOATSWAIN: ?

The Italics are on the original.  Anyway, it was very difficult and took me hours to figure out but the answer was incredibly satisfying and I felt a joy that I haven't felt in months at accomplishing it.

The second sticking point is on the sequences with number 45.

0 6 21 40 5 -504

I'm sure that somewhere out on the web is the answer to this and it's been soooo tempting to look it up - especially when I've been very frustrated.  I've spent maybe 5 hours on this problem attacking it from different directions, but no dice.  I got all the other sequences pretty quickly, and the reports show this isn't a particularly difficult one, but it is for me.

I haven't looked at the Probabilities, Interpenetrations, or Slice and Dice sections yet.  Frankly, words and sequences (Chrystallized G Problems) seem to come more easily.  I'm sure there are some in the other sections that will take so long that I won't even try.

If you see Chris Langan or Rick Rosner on youtube you'll no doubt think they come off as deeply weird (I did).  Chris, self described (and maybe rightly so) as the 'smartest man in america' got somewhere around 44-46/48 on the test, Rosner scored the only perfect score.  As I look over the test and think of Rosner's feat I find it unimaginable.  At this point I have answers for 35 and am dead certain only of 30.  Then again, I'm not even in these guys ball park when it comes to liquid G, so what do I expect? :-)

My friend, K, is just the opposite - he's slaughtering all the liquid G sections and waiting on the chrystallized G.  No doubt he'll kill those as well - he's that smart.

Anyway, something very fun to do on a long plane ride or when you simply want to use the old noggin - we don't get much chance to do so these days.

On the off chance you want to respond,

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PLEASE DO NOT POST ANY ANSWERS OR METHODS TO THE TEST
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Sugarloaf

My son and I went to another old climbing area in the Sierras. It's Sugarloaf, located near the town of Kyburtz. We didn't bring gear and instead opted to climb to the top of the mountain. It was hard work - very steep and at least 1000 or more vertical feet. The weather was perfect and we had a great time. The decent was a little dicey at points, but we got down safely. I forgot just how hard a steep decent loads your quadriceps and my legs were basically rubber by the time we got down. The rock is just beautiful California granite and there was almost no one around. I was so hungry to climb it. However, we still haven't figured out how my son can belay me safely, so we are pretty limited. Still, getting to the peak was great.

All in all, it was fantastic.

Consumnes video

Meant to put this up the other day but it wouldn't go. Hopefully it will work using firefox this time. My son's voice isn't normally that high - not sure what it happening. We'd just climbed through 2 caves (that's what he means) and I used to climb there years ago.

Crude Anonymity

I watch Martin Periard’s drumming on youtube once a day – it’s like my daily treat. Usually the comments are laudatory, but they can get vituperative. I can't help but think after seeing some of these comments that crudity is some sort of concomitant of anonymity. While there is clear value in loosening the inhibitions that accountability engenders the downside is substantial. As a culture, are we really this ridiculous?

Like all things of this sort, I tend to be curious about the 'why?' As a strategist I tend to think in terms of advantage, sort of the cui bono of a given thing. So, what is the advantage to the anonymous contributor? What is actually happening here? It seems like it is simply displaced expiation of an emotion: fear, anger, loneliness, inferiority. Is the sole contribution to allow someone to have their schadenfreude moment? Why do we tolerate this?

As much as anything, it may be a reaction to our culture’s emphasis on ‘political correctness’ in public speech and the self censoring effect that has on us all. Perhaps we are lashing out with a heightened version or our true feelings, like a scream in a closet, in the one arena we know we can get away with it. This gets weird because if political correctness has an original intent, it is to centralize those on the margins and decrease victimization. Yet, it may be having the opposite effect.

In our carpool the other day I was talking to one of the kids about how out of hand bullying is now because there is no accountability. You take a compromising picture of someone, post it, and voila! Since they can have no idea who did it there is no restraint on behavior. I suggested that in the pre-web days there were certainly rumors and bullying, but that they were constrained by the simple fact that with enough diligence, someone could always find out where they started. Even this small amount of accountability kept things somewhat in check.

So, too much liberty constrains liberty? That is, we are left in a world where you have to be very careful about what you say and do – someone is always watching. You can’t get too wild with your friends, someone has a camera phone. You can’t say something provocative – someone is always listening and recording. Information, particularly of a scandalous kind, is a valuable commodity. And there will always be those who are interested in trading on this to increase their status or simply to bring others down.

So, have we come full circle, through the tumult of the 60s and 70’s, and back to the Victorian era, where issues of ‘face’ and ‘proper behavior’ were necessary considerations for those who wish to succeed in society? Instead of ‘manners’ and ‘etiquette’ we use the term ‘politically correct’ which is just ‘etiquette’ pushed through the filter of post-modernism. People rebelled against Victorian constraints and seem to be doing so against PC ones as well.

Whatever the technology and time, people are feeling, opinionated beings. Though we would love to have a world of ‘happy shiny people holding hands’ it’s just not in our nature. Stuff happens and someone always has an axe to grind. If you think I’m wrong wait till you see the anonymous comments on this post! 


BTW, this is the event that started me thinking about some of this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/daily/jan99/district27.htm .

Consumnes Canyoneering

Great day at Consumnes River Gorge.  Used to climb there 15 years or so ago and it hasn't changed much at all except there are a lot more bolts and anchors.  Some new route development, which is great.  My son and I spent the day canyoneering up the river, over huge bolders and freezing pools.  Great fun.

fortysomething Skateboarding

I finally got my board together. I had to special order the deck from a company called Old Man Army. It's the biggest pool board I could find, 33"x10" with a 17" wheelbase. I took it out last night for a quick ride with my son to the local school. I haven't been on a board in 25 years. It was a blast.