A warning on geysers

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This is part of a warning poster on why stepping on Geysers in Yellowstone National Park is not a great idea. Many people have been killed or maimed by geysers and hot water at the park.
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Hiking along Yellowstone's Grand Canyon

Click photo to enlarge

Del, Claire, Jack, and Keelin hiking near Artist Point, along the rim of Yellowstone's Grand Canyon, at about 8,700 feet above sea level.
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Old Faithful

As far as sights and images in Yellowstone, Old Faithful was cool, but a bit of a snoozer compared to the Canyon and the many animals we saw. The other geothermal features like the bubbling paint pots and the sapphire pools were pretty stunning, but again, did not compare to the seismic and geothermal wonders of Yellowstone's "Grand Canyon."













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Poem: The Moon's In Tune

A parchment full moon
In a pale fog aurora
Struggles to clear the mountaintop

The Sea of Tranquility
Flowers in the center
The moon's in tune

She leads the wolves in song
And turns the tide
Of earth's one great ocean

Down here we cured
Polio smallpox and Hitler
But we couldn't save the Dodo.

Yellowstone, July 12, 2006
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The Grand Canyon of Yellowstone

I have never been so stunned by the beauty of a natural feature. This is not the Grand Canyon of Arizona, but a smaller, geothermal version (900 feet deep, and about half a mile across). It's free for the price of a hike.

The chemical and heat action of the geyser basin cause the rhyolite rock to become rotten (not in the sense of putrefaction, but the rock becomes easily brittle and erodible). Thermal activity still exists in the canyon in geysers and hot springs, as it does in Old Faithful, and the many springs, mudpots, hotspots, and streams in Yellowstone. In many places, sulfur fumes permeate the air.



The colors in the canyon are due to hydrothermal reactions. The rhyolite in the canyon contains various iron compounds. When the old geyser basin was active, chemical alterations took place in the iron. Exposure to the elements as well as the sometimes acidic gases that accompany the hot water cause these changes. The rocks are oxidizing; the fantastic symphony of color is because the canyon is rusting.
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President Bush Retreats

"Unable to placate the wailing child - despite all his skills of diplomacy - President Bush was forced to hand it back to its waiting mother. " Read the Associated Press story here.

When I think of it, the way he handled the baby and passed it back to the mother isn't all that different from his handling of the "war" on terrorism. He will one day hand Iraq back to itself in much the same manner.
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Poem: The Red Flag

A brown bison with dreadlock fur
Grazes alongside the sparkling river
In the Lamar Valley

His colossal head wreathed
In black flies and no-see-ums
He ambles across the meadow

At a pace to reach the other side
Hours from now
The warning signs remind me

Of his pent-up potential
Bison are a little bit crazy
And will charge for no reason

Erupting from zero to thirty
In a flash
While a homo sapien

Tops out at ten m.p.h.
He would close the gap
In a few seconds

But I am still tempted
To wave the red flag
Just to see

The lumbering beast
At full speed
Charging to impale me.

Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, July 11, 2006
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Henley's Twentieth Century Formulas, Recipes, and Processes

This is one of my favorite books. It contains "ten thousand selected household, workshop, and scientific formulas, trade secrets, chemical recipes, processes, and money saving ideas." The edition I have was published in 1912. I discovered this book when I was staying at the Flying Karamov Brothers' bed and breakfast in Port Townsend, Wash., while I was at the jazz festival there. It is an endlessly fascinating book, telling you how to make, well, just about everything there was to make in 1912.

The book tells you how to cook up just about everything. It none only tells you how to set up a lab, but walks you through creating some extremely complicated potions and concoctions. It has forty pages on adhesives alone. Aabsinthe, amalgams, antidotes for poison, beverages, celluloid, ceramics, cider, candy, cosmetics, tooth powders, dyes, essences, lemonade, mayonnaise, waterproofing, candles, varnishes, skin whitener (remember, this is still 1912), perfume, toothpastes, and embalming fluid! Blasting powder! Dynamite! Fertilizer, how to detect formaldehyde, copper, saccharine, and dozens of other substances in food, fumigants, glass, household formulas, ink, how to tan leather, how to make matches, how to make paint, dozens of recipes for photographic solutions, rat poison, rubber, soaps, alcoholic spirits, syrups, liquor. . .and about 9,950 other things!

You can usually find a copy on Amazon or EBay. I also see the book on survivalist sites, and maybe even our local nutjob book purveyor Loompanics stocks it. It was selling for $100 on some of the wacko sites.

I have been periodically dipping in and out of this book for twenty years. . .and always have fun.
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My ten favorite albums: Elvis Costello & The Attractions' Get Happy

[I'll get to the other ten albums sooner or later]

From My Aim Is True, This Year's Model, Armed Forces, Get Happy, up to Trust, Elvis Costello was a songwriting and song performing machine. These five albums are, in my booklet, the best music to emerge in those years (77-81). And they had some pretty stiff competition from Talking Heads, The Clash, The Ramones, and many others. . .I mean at that point, even Motown was still a force. Elvis is the best composer to emerge from either side of the Atlantic.

In album four, Get Happy, Elvis achieved a masterpiece. Elvis's embrace of Stax/Motown is stunning. And it had twenty songs-- a miracle on vinyl. It is a shimmering, blazing tribute to soul. It may not be his greatest album (Imperial Bedroom or maybe Armed Forces takes that prize), but it is my favorite, and the favorite of a lot of long-time fans. On the re-mastered version that came out a couple of years ago, Elvis included an incredible 30 bonus tracks, ranging from demos to alternate versions. It is a tribute to Elvis that he almost always made the right choices--I have yet to hear an alternate version that was better than the released one.

As with previous albums, this one was recorded in an alcohol-fueled frenzy. The songs tumble out jackhammer style--some of them are less than two minutes long. Nick Lowe was once again the producer and somehow he pulled it off, despite his production methods, which Elvis once said consisted of

"a fader in one hand and a vodka bottle in the other."

These songs were frequently written and recorded in canon blasts, like the boast of "Possession" being written in five minutes after an afternoon infatuation with a cocktail waitress. The Attractions' mission was to pump out as much music as possible, as soon as possible.

Album five, Trust, was another excellent album. And then things got spottier. But ten great albums, or whatever it is. . .not many can match that. Maybe only one other band. And now, I'm thinking I've been a bit hasty. . .do I really like this album better than This Year's Model, Imperial Bedroom, or Armed Forces? Well, I do today.
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Happy Belated 60th Birthday Mister President!

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things you know nothing about" (thanks for the quote, Ashley Brilliant).

Happy Birthday, Prez. I don't feel so bad about being late, since I saw the list of some of the swag people sent you..
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Alien Lore No. 78 - The Greys Are Calling Us

According to Dr. Steven Greer, SETI has recently received multiple extraterrestrial signals. For the first time ever!!!!

This news is confirmed by senior employees within the SETI program. This is pretty hairy news! This project has been going for years and years with complete silence from Out There. Does this mean that someone is trying to get in touch with us??? Wouldn't it be nice to hear from our cousins Out There?? Bring it on! Let's send a map and roll out the welcome mat. We've always assumed anyone coming here would have hostile intentions. That's because we've always had hostile intentions.

Wouldn't you think that if the Greys, or aliens, or whoever they are, came here they would have so far transcended our bellicose nature that they would show up on Earth just to save us from ourselves? Whenever I think about the arrival of our cousins, it's not about the warlike creatures we have so often imagined, but about a race of folk not unlike Klaatu from The Day The Earth Stood Still?

Maybe, I'm naive, but I've always thought they might just show up with hearts brimming with love and fellowship.


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Alien Lore No. 77: Celebrity sightings and thoughts on UFOs

Muhammad Ali: "If you look into the sky in the early morning you see them playing tag between the stars."

Jimmy Carter during his 1976 campaign for President: "If I become President, I'll make every piece of information this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and scientists. I am convinced that UFOs exist because I have seen one."

the late President Ronald Reagan: "I looked out the window and saw this white light.It was zigzagging around. I went up to the pilot and said, Have you ever seen anything like that? He was shocked and he said, "Nope." And I said to him: "Let's follow it!" We followed it for several minutes. It was a bright white light followed it to Bakersfield, and all of a sudden to our utter amazement it went straight up into the heavens. When I got off the plane I told Nancy all about it."

the Late Arizona Senator and Presidential Contender Barry Goldwater: " I can't believe that God or whomever is in charge would put thinking bodies on only one planet. So I'm a firm believer that something can fly around here that the Wright Brothers didn't have anything to do with."

Capt. Edgar Mitchell Apollo 14 Astronaut: "The evidence points to the fact that Roswell was a real incident and that indeed an alien craft did crash, and that material was recovered from that site. We all know that UFOs are real. All we need to ask is where do they come from, and what do they want?"

Astronaut Gordon Cooper addressing the United Nations in 1985: "I believe that these extraterrestrial vehicles and their crews are visiting this planet from other planets, which are a little more technically advanced than we are on Earth. I feel that we need to have a top level, coordinated program to scientifically collect and analyze data from all over the Earth concerning any type of encounter, and to determine how best to interfere with these visitors in a friendly fashion.

Sammy Haggar, former (maybe current) rock front man: "I'm a real firm believer in aliens, right? They're definitely out there. I've had contact. Yes, I have and they're smart son of a guns, man' 1967, was the summer of love. In Fontana, California. I was lying in bed, in my room. And, all of a sudden, I felt like something was going on' And I was sleeping. I was sleeping. It was 3:00, 4:00 in the morning. And I opened my eyes, my body couldn't move. And my room was pure white, I mean, like as bright as you could possibly imagine. "

Jimi Hendrix: "There are other people in the solar system, you know, and they have the same feelings too, not necessarily bad feelings, but see, it upsets their way of living for instance - and they are a whole lot heavier than we are."

David Bowie, Singer/Musician: "They came over so regularly we could time them. Sometimes they stood still, other times they moved so fast it was hard to keep a steady eye on them."

President Harry S. Truman, 1950: "I can assure you that flying saucers, given that they exist, are not constructed by any power on earth."

Chuck Clark, Author and amateur astronomer: "People need to give it some serious thought. Too many credible people have reported things that are impossible by our understanding of physics."

Jackie Gleason on a trip he said he took with President Richard Nixon: "Next, we went into an inner chamber and there were six or eight of what looked like glass-topped Coke freezers. Inside them were the mangled remains of what I took to be children. Then - upon closer examination - I saw that some of the other figures looked quite old. Most of them were terribly mangled as if they had been in an accident."

President Gerald Ford: "I have taken special interest in these (UFO) accounts because many of the latest reported sightings have been made in my home state of Michigan...Because I think there may be substance to some of these reports and because I believe The American People are entitled to a more thorough explanation than has been given them by the Air force to date..."

Wayne Green, Founder of Byte Magazine and CD Review: "The more you look into [the UFO phenomenon], and the more people that you talk to and read about that have done serious investigations, the more you know that this stuff is real."

Joe Firmage, Founder of USWeb: "We have objects in the sky. . .they have been spotted millions of times worldwide"

Sarah McClendon, late White House Correspondent: "The real danger to the U.S. and perhaps this whole planet is the government has placed such a heavy blanket of secrecy upon this issue. So much secrecy, those in government who have knowledge showing UFOs are identifiable feel the subject cannot be discussed by those in the know without serious repercussions. Others are afraid their friends and co-workers will think they are crazy if they even so much as insinuate that UFOs are identifiable as manned craft from outside the earth. This particularly applies to newspaper editors and publishers, reporters and analysts. Thus the U.S. is denying itself the chance to learn more about UFOs or to encourage research despite the fact the U. S. stands to gain from such discussions.

May Pang, "assistant" to John Lennon, describing an object they saw from Lennon's balcony in NYC: "It looked like a flattened cone with a brilliant light on top."

from John Lennon's Nobody Told Me:
"There's a UFO over New York
& I ain't too surprised,
Nobody told me there'd be days like these,
Strange days indeed..."

Dennis Weaver, a late actor: "I think there's alot of evidence that we've made contact."
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