Heat warning

I’m very excited because I’m going up to Soapstone Prairie tomorrow with the always-interesting Dr. Jason LaBelle of CSU’s Anthropology Department and two descendants of William Lindenmeier, who ranched in that area in the early 1900s and after whom the Lindenmeier Archaeological Site is named (he owned the land at the time the discoveries were made).

Would also like to point out that the National Weather Service has issued a heat advisory for tomorrow, with temperatures possibly hitting 105 degrees. Hottest day of the year, it looks like. Yeah, baby. My line of work ain’t for sissies!

Lindenmeier homestead

Car wars

I am now engaging in open combat with my neighbors who like to park their large Black’s Glass company trucks or crusty old beaters in front of our house. Apparently it’s passe to park one’s car in one’s garage (a word from the French, meaning “place where normal, civilized people who care about property values park their cars”), or, barring that, in one’s own driveway. Or even in front of one’s own house. No, there is some magic allure to parking in front of our house. It adds that, I don’t know, certain something to the viewshed.

Well, I’m working at home now too, and that means a lot of time spent looking out the windows waiting for my next big idea to reveal itself. Or to make sure the squirrels aren’t decapitating the coreopsis. I spent a whole week watching an old red Ford Mustang that seemed to be reducing itself to rust before my very eyes, parked right at the head of our walkway, never moving once. I finally called in an abandoned vehicle report, the car was duly tagged, and what do you know? Some student from across the street suddenly appeared and drove it back over to his own condo.

So my first thought was to surreptitiously scrape a flake of the red paint that delineates the no parking zone off the curb, take it to the Downtown Ace Hardware and match the color, and in the dead of night extend the strip another, oh, 50 yards farther down the road. But someone might figure that one out.

Okay, on to Plan B. Now, when a prime piece of front-of-the-house curbside parking real estate is vacated by one of my neighbors, I zip around to the garage, back out my Rodeo, and go park it on the street in the newly-available space. I am especially dedicated to blocking Mr. Glass Company Truck, who does live literally catty-corner across the street and could easily park his ugly ass truck in his own driveway, but much prefers parking it in front of my lovely flowerbed.

This simple action has given me a great deal of happiness. But it gets better! I realized that I could stake out even more territory; Carol has been riding her bike to work most days, so I’ve been adding her nice, long Toyota Tacoma pickup truck to the project. This is where it gets really fun; the whole game is to space the two cars as far apart as possible without actually leaving room for anyone to squeeze in between.  

If I can find some way to get the nose of the Rodeo up far enough that there isn’t enough room between it and the red curb zone, while still keeping the Tacoma behind it far enough to block Mr. Glass Company, then I’ll be extremely satisfied. I have never played well with others; why should I start now?

The World According to Student Bloopers

One of the benefits of cleaning out one’s office is the discovery of some buried treasure. This, looking like it had been much-copied, by Richard Lederer of St. Paul’s School:

“One of the fringe benefits of being an English or History teacher is receiving the occasional jewel of a student blooper in an essay. I have pasted together the following “history” of the world from certifiably genuine student bloopers collected by teachers throughout the United States, from eighth grade through college level. Read carefully, and you will learn a lot.”

The inhabitants of ancient Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube.

The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, once asked, “Am I my brother’s son?” God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Isaac, stole his brother’s birth mark. Jacob was a patriarch who brought up his twelve sons to be patriarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob’s sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.

Pharoah forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fought with the Philatelists, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David’s sons, had 500 wives and 500 porcupines.

Without the Greeks we wouldn’t have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns — Corinthian, Doric, and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he become intolerable. Achilles appear in The Iliad, by Homer. Homer also wrote The Oddity, in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died of an overdose of wedlock.

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks. History calls people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlics in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March murdered him because they thought he was going to be made king. Nero was a cruel tyranny who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

Coming later: the Middle Ages.

Sacrament

The first sweet corn of the season, from the Larimer County Farmer’s Market.

Shangri-la

Some photos from our camping trip west of Red Feather Lakes last weekend, July 12-13.

July wildflowers

Like most of Colorado, the high country west of us got a great deal of snow last winter and spring; it’s still quite wet up there. Upside: wonderful flowers. Downside: skeeters like you wouldn’t believe.

Rio and Molly

Pippin

One of the greatest things about camping is VERY happy (and tired) dogs. A July snow bank can be a complete amusement park:

Molly and Pippin chase snowballs

A hike up through the forest (no trail, just bushwhacking) led us to a gorgeous spot.

Mummy Range

That’s looking south toward Rocky Mountain National Park and the Mummy Range. And this is the way life should be:

My tribe

It’s all about getting in touch with your less civilized side. Getting dirty is a big part of the fun.

The fierce fire goddesses

[where:Red Feather Lakes, CO 80536]

Makes ya dizzy.

I’m curious. About this whole blogging thing. I understand that at this point in the game, a new blog is being launched every .5 seconds. I don’t know what percentage are kept up with; how many become the teenager’s diary of a generation or two ago that’s filled out for a day or so and then abandoned under the bed. Kinda like the first gardening diary I tried to keep.

But unlike our teenage diaries, all these blogs are public. We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t want other people reading what we have to say. It’s not journaling; although I’m tempted to write about my innermost thoughts and concerns (for lack of other topics), I realize that I don’t want to share that kind of stuff with any and all.

So, I take as a bit of a given, that blogging is done by those of us who want a readership. Maybe we have an axe to grind; don’t we all, at least, have a point of view? And we all have our pet issues, fascinations, rabbit holes we like to frequent. And man, you name it, someone is blogging about it. Today I came across a very interesting blog about feminist theory in media, and another one about media praxis (I had to look up “praxis,” I had no idea what it meant, but now I have a great new five dollar word to throw around). It’s all very interesting, and I don’t understand most of it, but obviously there are other people out there who do, and they’re talking to each other and forming these communities of common interest.

Which is, I guess, what I’m curious about.

What this technology allows us to do is to form these communities of common interest, no matter how esoteric. No matter what you’re interested in, no matter how “weird,” you can find who knows how many other people out there on the Internet who share that same interest.

I think it remains to be seen if this is a way to deepen our interests, or just become more entrenched in our own ways of thinking; is this a time to balkanize down to the tiniest little differentiator, or, in doing so, are we going to become even further obsessed with our perceived differences? We gotta still be able to talk to people who don’t always agree with us, vote the way we do, or share our strange fascination with 18th century French furniture, or whatever. Not that there’s anything wrong with 18th century French furniture.

I’m curious to see how this plays out. There’s a tension, I think, between forming these communities and still remaining open to the larger conversation.

Not rocket science

My colleague Brenda Martin and I are beginning to plan out our presentation for the NAI national workshop coming up in November. We’re going to talk about oral history as a primary source of information that can feed very usefully into interpretation, whether it’s a museum exhibit, a docent’s talk during a walking tour, or any way that we as “interpretation professionals” provide information to the public regarding the resources (natural or cultural) that they’re interacting with.

As I continue to explore this brave new information world that is developing within the envelope of “Web 2.0″ — this new world where we, as “authorities,” can no longer expect to just “broadcast” our information to a passive audience — it’s really got me to thinking about the relationships between “information” and “authorities” and just who is in charge here. This virtual world where there literally are no walls is a great way to imagine a real world where the actual walls of our bastions of authorities — like museums and libraries — become less the imposing symbols of Authority and become more welcoming places of collaboration and community involvement and engagement with the stories we’re all creating together.

So, are we going to go to this conference — talk about a bastion of Authority! — and stand up before our audience and deliver information to them as they sit there quietly and take notes?

It seems at best ironic; and at worst, a missed opportunity. I think oral history itself, as the voice of regular people, not Experts or Authorities or History Professors, is a subversive force all its own. It is a de-centralization of authority precisely because it gives the regular folk a say in telling how it was. That’s why Authorities discount it — it’s hearsay, gossip, and human memory is notoriously unreliable. People forget dates. They remember things that never happened. It’s not The Truth. It’s not The Facts. And it’s not in the The History Book. How can it be of any use to us?

Well, I won’t go into all that here. I’m just thinking since we’re talking about social information, really, and thinking about it as a de-centralization of authority, that it just seems strange to position ourselves as authorities (in the sense of one-way communication) and just “dump” information on our audience.

This is where Web 2.0 comes in, with its model of aggregation, collaboration, and community. What if, ahead of time, we could engage potential session-goers and have them help decide what the content of the session should be? The questions they want answered? The thoughts and experiences they might have to share? And afterwards we could continue the dialog in a wiki or some other kind of community forum?

It all depends on what you’re looking for. If you need the detailed facts of a historical event — dates, times, numbers — don’t go to oral history. If I need to know how to build a rocket, I’m not going to someone’s MySpace page, or even to Wikipedia. But if I’m looking for a way to help my audience make a meaningful, emotional connection to something — a landscape, an artifact, an endangered animal — then maybe socially-sourced information (such as a Lakota elder relating a traditional story) is where it’s at. Hopefully they all have their place in weaving a complete picture, telling the whole story. None of us can tell The Truth, as far as I’m concerned — no one owns that information, no one really knows it. We need to get over ourselves and our need to be Authorities. 

Looking for my cognitive surplus

I just read a very fascinating blog post titled “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” — a compelling pitch for the revolution in electronic participation that’s happening under our fingertips and eyes and all around us. The author’s idea centers around the concept of a “cognitive surplus,” a sudden inheritance of free time that came our way as part of the social change following WWII.

“For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.

“And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

“We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.”

But now, finally becoming restless and perhaps more importantly also finding new tools at hand, some people are getting wacky and not just sitting and watching, but are participating too. Posting videos and photos, writing blogs, Facebooking and MySpacing and all sorts of crazy stuff. “Where do they find the time?” the author wonders, then presents this amazing number: we spend 200 billion hours watching TV, yearly, in the US alone. 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads alone! So what if just a few people took a few percentage points of time away from the TV to actually participate in the stream of communication, instead of just watching it go by?

We’re seeing the beginning of something really big. Emma and Jack will tell us all about it when they’re a little older. They’re growing up with it. Adding their pictures, words, and ideas to the stream will be as natural as breathing. They’ll think we were awfully weird for just sitting and watching.

As for me, as soon as I actually locate that “cognitive surplus,” I’m going to start using it too. Scary thing is, I hardly watch any TV as it is. So where IS all that free time??