adventures of a canoelover

I love philosophy in the strictest sense of the word – the love of wisdom. Which is why I love this Nietzsche Family Circus. I like the zen-like quality of Bill Keane’s drawings, reminiscent of early Charles Schultz, but the captions are usually insipid. So replace the insipid captions like “My dolly wears clothes just like Gramma wore when she was a baby” or whatever with something pithy from our favorite angst-ridden poster boy for a plethora of neuroses and you get something that is seriously cool.

Perhaps Philosophy profs everywhere should take a look at this, sorta like the way biz school types quote Dilbert.

http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/

Remember, boys and girls, that shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

I need to work up something that this that pairs Kirkegaard with Pearls Before Swine. That would be freaking awesome.

We finally have enough snow to get out there and kick some drifts, after a few years of snowlessness. It feels good; I’ve missed that slight pull/stretch that runs along my hips when I have to walk just ever so bowlegged.

We are really blessed here in Madison to have something so wonderful as the Arboretum so close to us. The Arb consists of about 1400 acres, an old farm that Aldo Leopold, John Curtis, Norman Fassett, and team of other conservation biologists used as their canvas to recreate as best they could the different types of ecologies found in Wisconsin. They succeed better in some areas than others, and the Curtis Prairie is a success for sure…it’s lovely.

Anyway, it’s one of our favorite places to ‘shoe as it’s less than a mile from our home, and it has places to walk where you’re not ruining ski trails. You can ski in the Arb, but it’s pretty rustic skiing, with no tracks set except by the first folks out. The snowshoeing is first-rate with large open areas to tromp, and no one really notices as skiers outnumber shoers 20 to 1.

One of the best things about the Arb is the abundant wildlife that exists in this island surrounded by city. Turkeys seem to be multiplying like rabbits rather than birds, and with the snow cover making foraging more difficult, they seem to be even more gregarious than usual. They were willing to get us get pretty close, but we did our best to not make them expend calories…they are clearly bothered by the deeper than average snow. Still, they’re turkeys, and they’ll make it through somehow.

Stephanie found a pine tree that was large enough to have a “fort” in the middle where snow hadn’t fallen, so she had to poke her head inside. “This is the sort of place I would make forts when I was little,” she said. So did I. I clearly married the right woman. In the picture it looks like a white blob covers her smile…it’s a snowflake that caught the flash wrong (or right depending on your view). I think it’s cute but I am admittedly biased.

Apparently it’s against the law to sit down. People are so terrified of one of the unwashed masses temporarily planting themselves to rest their bones that they’ve created all sorts of gorgeous ways to keep people off any horizontal surface.

Gives you the warm fuzzies, doesn’t it? At least the colors are festive…

http://www.usemenow.com/web-log/archives/the_antisit/index.html

…but the grooming sucked. Does the parks and rec folks think that no one skis classic anymore? Skate skate skate…

Still, Stephanie looks good backlit.

There were lots of little mouse tracks on top of the snow, and I always like to see them. They’re hardy little creatures, and it makes me smile to think of the hundreds, maybe thousands of mice under the crusty snow on the golf course, living as best they can for the winter.

Looks like Rutabaga is doing something right. We got some seriously nice ink in the Outdoor Business industry rag.

http://www.skinnyskis.com/PDF/OB07-Top25.pdf

It makes us sound better than we really are, but that’s the nature of PR I suppose.

Enough of this, I am going snowshoeing. There’s almost two feet on the ground and I have not yet compressed any snow, nor have I taken any pictures of any snow. This will be remedied soon enough. Then I am going to clean my basement. Then I am going to sleep in front of the fire. After that I have no idea what I am going to do. Probably some work-related stuff.

As ever,

D

I finished my hammer…I reshaped a cross-pein hammer to have a fatter pein for making leaves and other such thick-to-thin items. The bad weather made it a nice day to spend in the smithy. Good old TruValue hardware stocks hammer handles, so $6.49 buys a nice hickory handle.

It works great. Only a blacksmith gets excited about a new hammer. 800 grams of looooove….

It’s snowing, hard, and there’s an ice storm following it. Wisconsin will soon be covered with a large layer of nature’s ball bearings, so we filled the cars with gas and broke out the candles and we’ll get a fire going in the fireplace. We may or may not lose power, but it never hurts to be prepared. The scary part is the ice storm will be accompanied by 30-40 mph winds, so we’re definitely going to lose some trees.

Gracie needed some running, so I experimented with the video function of my Olympus 720 SW digital. This is the first time I posted anything on YouTube.

So I found this website that has old bad album covers (as well as a bunch of comic book covers that need to be experienced directly to be believed). It’s hilarious. This one I thought particularly poignant.

We used to tell the kids to “look it up” whenever they asked what a word means. This had the beneficial effect of a) getting them in the habit of looking up words and b) allowing us to look less stupid if we didn’t know what a particular word means. Now we no longer have to say look it up. In fact, we sometimes catch Ian reading the dictionary for fun. In this case, he has been reading Edgar Alan Poe, which is full of great dictionary words that are now anachronisms.

Ian turned around after he saw the flash of the camera, smiled at me, and returned to his browsing.

You’ll notice the Terror Alert bar to the right…right now we’re at a Level Ernie. As anyone who has been traveling for the last few years knows, we have been at Level Ernie forever. The talking head reminds us that we are at Level Orange every fifteen minutes, like clockwork.

The reason I use the Muppet Terror Alert System is because it gives the Terror Alert System the attention and weight it deserves. I am more likely to be killed by a rabid Muppet than Osama bin Whatever.

This brings me to ask several questions, and answer them simultaneously.

1) Does anyone behave differently because of the threat level?

Nope. Not from my observations, anyway.

2) Does anyone even hear that announcement anymore due to its omnipresence?

It’s background noise, along with the announcements that Passengers Smith and Callahan must report to Gate A6 for immediate departure.

3) Does our government think we’re a bunch of imbeciles to actually take this garbage seriously?

Yep. Otherwise they might consider stopping it.

4) Do they really think we are a bunch of sheep who respond to this perpetual wolf-crying?

Pretty much.

4) Do they understand that more people die of cancer and COPD in a day than have died of all terrorist attacks in the past twenty five years?

Uh, no. These are politicians, not epidemiologists. If there were more epidemiologists in positions of leadership, we wouldn’t have this problem, and we’d probably have a president who has an above-average IQ. And the rest of them, well, let’s just say that wisdom and intelligence are very different things. Dick Cheney is intelligent. The Dalai Lama is wise (and probably very, very intelligent). How about we send Cheney to Dharasalam for a heavy dose of enlightenment? While we’re at it, let’s send anyone who runs a G-8 country or pretends to.

To put it in perspective, six 747s full of people die daily of cancer and COPD. It makes no headlines, it just happens. We don’t have a department of homeland disease prevention. We do have the CDC, which will receive 8.8 billion for the entire fiscal year. To put that in perspective, Victoria’s Secret will gross 16 billion next year, and we spend $195,000,000 a day on Iraq, which means that just Iraq (not the entire Pentagon budget, but just Iraq) will spend in 45 days what we spend on public health surveillance for a year.

But, as we all know, plane crashes and terrorist threats sell papers, CNN advertisement, and gives Fox News a raison d’etre. Cancer, well, not so much.