Greetings,

 I thought you’d like an update on the solar system, as I’m not blogging any more (I got tired of not getting any feedback. Blogging would work for me if I got money, adoration or hot Turkish Houseboys eager to please, but as it stands….).  You’ll be happy to hear that Radiant Engineering, the firm which designed the system, had $115k embezzled by the receptionist. That lovely lady who wrote me threatening emails claiming that her boss could do no wrong…. So that’s nice. God seems to be on my revenge team.

          I never got any satisfaction from either RE or the plumber, Bruce Gramaux at Ginnaty plumbing, and had finally written the whole thing off to being cheated, so I was heating my house by the wood stove. Lucky for me, the national forests around here are chock-full of standing dead trees just begging to be chopped down and thrown into the wood stove, since they have been infested with pine bark beetles, spruce bud worms and, – it wouldn’t surprise me – existential angst for good measure. I have oodles of firewood chopped and ready. Then I found a fellow over in near Missoula who was kind enough to slog through a whole bunch of emailing pictures and suggestions back and forth, while he tried to figure out what wasn’t working on the system.

          With Greg’s help, I replaced one valve, which was nice, but not helpful. Then I disconnected another and hotwired the boiler directly, and am now able to turn it on and make it put heat into the floor. It can only be on full blast or off, so every so often I turn it on for a few hours to keep the slab warm. One solar panel has been working its little heart out, after Mike – who seems to be a better sort of plumber than the others, but there’s time yet for him to disappoint -  took it apart and repaired it. RE and the Viessmann company insisted that that was impossible, but they were, as ever, wrong.

          In the meantime I worked with the area representative of Viessmann down in Colorado to get the other panel replaced. They said it was a good will gesture, but it didn’t work. I wouldn’t recommend Viessmann to Dick Cheney.  The negotiations for replacing the panel only took two years, but finally they came through. The hoops they made me jump through for their ‘largesse’ were such that I’m grateful for the years that I’ve practiced yoga.  Today, the second panel was finally installed, and despite my having lost some of the hardware, and Viessmann not having provided some of the adjuncts they had promised, Mike’s ingenuity pulled us through. We’ll see what THAT bill looks like soon enough, no doubt.

          Like most of the other people who know a plumbing framus from a heating gee-gaw, Mike is of the opinion that the design was hideously over-complicated from the beginning.  I did run the design by a engineering type or two before I agreed to the project, but no one had anything helpful to say then. Then was then. Do I sound bitter? Oh, good. Anyway, Mike took some pics and is going to draw up a proposal for re-jiggering the system, re-using most of the parts but eliminating a lot and replacing some to make something that will actually work. Snort. We’ll see. My financial obligations are already such that I’m learning all about beans. If only I could pay him in hand-thrown pottery sinks.

          So that’s the all the news that isn’t. Aside from that, life is pretty much bearable. Jiminy the cat left me a mouse head to discover with my bare feet. She’s so thoughtful. Allie the dog never thinks of that.

          Just in case you were wondering, there is, in fact, a compelling, logical argument for the postulation that we create our own realities.  That we do is a common refrain from numerous corners of the contemplative world like spiritual seekers and philosophers.  These types spend time wondering how it is that we exist.  Now there’s also a refrain about creating our own realities coming from those who wonder not how it is that we exist, but how we exist: scientists.  Most physicists you have the opportunity to ask would pretty vigorously deny that the contemplative types are asking the same questions as scientists are in their algorithmic world, much less getting the same answers.  Physicists’ stock and trade is in hard physical facts – unless they get into quantum issues, where the facts are physical all right, but a lot harder – to understand, anyway.  Quantum facts are hardly the nailed down, stalwart, sensible facts that make up Newtonian physics like those we know about apples falling from trees. Quantum facts hover in a cloud of probability.

          The way we generally think about probability is not very precise.  We think of it as being like chance or luck, but it’s better to think of it as a measure of ignorance.  One way to understand it is through the Monty Hall conjecture.  Picture yourself on Let’s Make a Deal, standing up there in front of doors #s 1,2 and 3. Monty tells you that there’s a car behind one of the doors, and goats behind the other two.  You get to pick a door, so you choose door #1.  Monty knows where the car is, and he says to open door #3, behind which is a goat. Then he asks you if you’d like to change your choice from #1 to #2.

          According to the Monty Hall conjecture, you absolutely should change your choice because it doubles your chances of getting the car. Most of us think, quite sensibly, that it doesn’t matter if you change your mind and choose door #2, since the car isn’t behind door #3 it must be behind either 1 or 2, so your chances of getting it are now 50/50. But that’s not true because a change in your knowledge of the system changes your expectations of the probable results of subsequent measurements of it. Your knowledge of what’s behind door #1 hasn’t changed, and the selection by Monty of door #3 to open was not random, so your chances with door #1 are still 1/3, but they’re 2/3 for door #2!

At first there was a 1/3 chance that door #3 had the car, but when the door was opened, the probability collapsed to 0. This is tricky stuff. Your knowledge about the system didn’t actually change the system:  the car didn’t leap from behind door #1 to #2 when the probability of it being there jumped from 1/3 to 1/2. There is still a 1/3 chance it could be behind #1. It’s just more probable that its behind #2, so you should change your choice.

          Another thought experiment that demonstrates how probability is a measure of ignorance is this one: You are a scientist and you have a hypothesis that you want to test. You think snow is cold. You write some grant proposals up, gather your team together, purchase some lab coats and clipboards and now you’re ready to rumble!  Your hypothesis that snow is cold has a probability of being correct of roughly 1/2. You might  find that you’ve awoken in a parallel universe where the physical laws allow objects to not have any temperature. That is very, very improbable, but it has not been ruled impossible. It’s possible you’ll find that snow has an indeterminate temperature of not-really-all-that-cold, and there are numerous other possibilities which will determine the probability that your hypothesis is correct, but its going to come out to be pretty near 50/50, so we’ll just call it that (by the way, the same holds true for the Monty Hall conjecture: there could be three goats back there because someone stole the car, but that isn’t very probable. Even so, it skews the chances away from a simple 1/3.).

          So the day comes for your experiment to test your hypothesis, and you and your team march out to a snow bank and stick your fingers in. Yep. It’s cold. The probability just collapsed to 1.  Simple enough, but you’re a good scientist, so you’re going to try to duplicate your results in another experiment. Next day you’re ready to march out there to that snow bank, but you pause for a minute to calculate the probability that your hypothesis is correct. Today, since your knowledge about the system of snow has changed, the probability that your hypothesis is correct has changed, too. It’s no longer (pretty darn close to) 50-50, but much higher. Nothing about the nature of snow has changed, just your ignorance about the nature of snow.

“Tension Simmers in the Cheese Market” –  International Herald Tribune

“Busts, bail-outs and shotgun sales are re-drawing the banking map faster than you can say collateralized debt-obligation.”  - The Economist

Headline from Eurasianet.org: “Surprise Nuclear Power Plant in Kaliningrad” They’re popping up like mushrooms after a rain. 

“The sky grows dark with chickens coming home to roost” Wish I had a context for that one.

“Socialism means social justice and equality, but equality of rights, of opportunities; not of income.”  - Raul Castro. Hmmmn, sounds like compassionate conservatism to me.

Sait Halim Paşa (1863-1921), an intellectual and bureaucrat said: “In Eastern thought, our mind always shapes things; but things do not shape our minds.”

“Life is like this: first you are temporarily immortal, then you are dying.”  - someone.

“Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket.” – Eric Hoffer

“A democracy will continue to exist until that time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.  From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by dictatorship.  Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence back again to bondage.”

                                                                                      - Unknown

Six snowmobilers found alive and hungry, which is good news for the most delicious looking one.

          - The Denver Post

Naomi Campbell, of all people, sits down with Hugo Chavez, proving once again that there aren’t too many fools on Earth, but rather that lightning bolts are improperly distributed

          -SF Gate

Aggressive coyote shot and killed near Colorado ski resort, rocket-powered ACME skis confiscated.

          -The Denver Post

Inquiry is a process of reaching a consensus on the best way of coping with the world and ‘truth’ is just a compliment we pay to the result.

          -Jim Holt in The New Yorker

Most men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.

          -Kierkegaard

          Just as the news on the international scene was beginning to look likely to drone on forever in an impossibly grim and boring list of stupidly violent and senseless acts of political prurience, relief is in sight. And in the shape of a bright pink Soviet Era tank, no less! I was really beginning to despair, since there was no possibility of unraveling the Gordian knot that is political and pecuniary relations between Gazprom, Naftogaz, Yushchenko, Tymoshenko, Puti-Poot and both Medvedevs in any gainful way. And then the North Koreans, usually a good source of material, have been spending all their time photoshopping the ever-colorful and creative Kim Jong Il into photos since he’s either too coy (hah!) or ill to step up to the tragic-comedic plate anymore. Sigh. I was starting to feel like I could really understand what today’s political cartoonists are facing, with the exit of The Shrub. The future seems an unrelieved desert of dolorously wresting water from a stone. Blood from a turnip. Irony from a cherub.

          Not so! Enter David Cerny, the Czech artist who made his name by sneaking through the inky shadows into the central square of Prague one night, and painting the tank set there to commemorate repulsing the Soviets  -or perhaps it was for repulsing the Hapsburgs, or maybe it was the Beatles, I’m not really sure, and really don’t care – pink. Two days later the army painted it green again, and then ten days after that the Deputies of the Federal Assembly (Parliament!) got together and re-painted it pink. Now that’s democracy in action. Vaclav Klaus, the current President of the Czech Republic and ardent free-marketeer who not only publicly disdains the European Union but also holds the presidency thereof for the next six months must certainly be…. proud. I mean, the market of art appreciation used it’s (not so) invisible hand to veto the army and vote pink. Or maybe pink-o? The multiplicity of ironies here is positively staggering, and I’ve always been fond of that sort of thing, haven’t you?

          Even so, Klaus isn’t, shall we say, in the pink. See, he commissioned none other than David Cerny to create a piece of art to commemorate the Czech six-month hold on EU ceremonialism, to the tune of 50k euros. And Cerny said yes, sure, he’d come up with something, collaborating with 27 artists (one for each EU country). I’m no expert or anything, but I think Klaus and his government were not perfectly prepared to do this sort of thing, since it seems there was no follow-up after that. It appears no one actually checked to see what sort of art was being perpetrated in the name of European unity. Perhaps they were overwhelmed by Mr. Cerny’s renown, and, like most of us, a little intimidated by all that pretentious art-talk about ‘visualizing the inner realm in the authentic terms of post-modernism’ and what not. Because when the sculpture called Entropa (wait for it to sink in…) was unveiled this morning in front of the EU headquarters in Brussels, it surprised everyone.

          According to Cerny’s website (http://www.davidcerny.cz/startEN.html) the project just got ahead of him, and he didn’t have time to herd 27 fractious artists around and besides, its 2009, people: can’t you laugh at yourself a little? He says:” We do not want to insult anybody, just point at the difficulty of communication without having the ability of being ironic.” ‘Insult anybody’, you ask? What does he mean by that?  Well, in the final work, Bulgaria was depicted as a collection of crude, hole-n-the-ground toilets, while the Netherlands appeared as mostly under water, with only a few minarets sticking up, and Luxembourg was represented by a tiny hunk of gold with a for sale sign on it. France? On strike.  Cerny and his cohorts did seem to have the time to come up with fictitious artists to attribute each work to, complete with a website here and there, and plenty of pulchritude in the artists’ statements about “their” work, like “It appears to be an autoerotic system of sensational spectacle with no climax in sight” next to the piece for Italy – a huge soccer field with tiny little players.

          If this is what the Czech presidency of the EU is all about, I want more. Art is important, and everyone seems to keep forgetting that, what with their wars and oil all over the place. I remember the stunned admiration I felt when I learned that in the Czech Republic the university hires poets to just be poets. They don’t have to teach, they don’t have to publish or perish, they don’t have to march around on the lecture circuit: they can just loll about poeticizing and, you know, being artsy. What is so wrong with that, I ask the dried-up, greedy, puritanical old imperialists? I have no idea how much public dross Cerny sopped up while he polished his artistic skills at biting the hand that fed him, but I hope it was a lot . I’d rather support fifteen lazy, shirking, clueless sycophantic pretenders plus one real poet or one real Einstein than none of the above.

Dear Stuart,

          I live in the snowy mountains of northern Montana, surrounded by miles and miles of pristine forest. People around here like to go snowmobiling, backcountry skiing – and the regular kind, too, at our local ski hill – snowshoeing and even dog-mushing; anything to get outside into the crisp, clean hills during the cold months. I like back-country skiing, which is like cross-country skiing, only you use heftier equipment, so you have a better range and can go in rougher country. One cold day my friend Bonnie and I decided to make a ski trip that would take three or four hours and offer us wide, sweeping views from the ridges, deep powder in the bowls and pleasant interludes of kick-and-glide through the meadows. The route we chose was about eight miles long.

          The first mile of this trail is really steep. The snowmobilers stay off of it not because they’re supposed to – it being a designated non-motorized trail – but because the snow on that part drifts so heavily it’s hard to navigate on a sled. As we toiled up the slope with skins on our skis we saw that a snowshoer had gone ahead of us. We were grateful for the tracks, where the snow was tamped down, making it easier for us. When we got to the top of the trail we encountered that snowshoer, and were surprised to find that she was an elderly woman, all by herself, with wind-blown hair creeping out from under her cap and plastic grocery bags covering her thin wool gloves. I don’t remember exactly, but it was probably 10 or 15 degrees Fahrenheit that day, with the sun shining briefly, sometimes replaced by a quick snowy squall and no sign of warming up. We talked to her for a few moments. She seemed unafraid, strong and fully capable of just about anything. Her name was Alice and she said she was about ready to turn around to go back down the steep, drifted trail to the highway. We went on our way.

          We finished our trip and went home. I was in my jammies, cooking dinner on my wood stove when Bonnie called me up at around six or seven that evening. She said that she had had a creepy feeling and for no reason at all drove up to the top of the pass, where people park to embark on their snowy journeys and she saw one lone car still parked there. She remembered Alice’s name, so she looked it up in the phone book and called her number. Alice’s husband answered. “Yes”, he said, “that’s the kind of car she drives, and no, Alice isn’t home yet.”  When I heard that, I immediately called 911 to call out Search and Rescue, but their base is an hour away, so I called a bunch of people in the area who had sleds, equipment and the willingness to help.

          We all got together, and launched a search party. We followed Alice’s trail down the mountain and saw where she had tripped and fell down a steep, snowy, drifted ledge. Or maybe she just stepped off the path in a moment of inattention. Wisely, she chose not to try to clamber back up, but to just keep going down hill, where the highway would eventually be. We followed her track in the dark, with our headlamps and snowshoes, and the crackle of county radios talking to the helicopter that had been dispatched to carry her to the hospital. Everyone was working together to get her out, and it turned out that I was the one who sat with Alice in the snow, under the bright stars while the helicopter chopped and radios crackled and snowmobiles revved around trying to navigate the difficult terrain.

          She was breathing when I got there, but then she stopped. Her skin was cool as glass. We were all alone, and there was not much I could do to help her but keep her warm and push air into her lungs. I’m not sure that’s what she wanted. Her husband and children later told me that she was an avid snowshoer and knew those mountains like the back of her hand. She was 84 years old and shoed up to the top of a mountain. That’s really all there is to say, isn’t it? Except that maybe there are worse ways to leave this world than drifting away under the glimmering stars in the soft, soft snow. It makes me appreciate every back-country trip I take that much more.

       I confess that I have not managed to read the Bible cover to cover, so I might have missed something, but from what I’ve heard, Jesus was a socialist. What I think he said was: If you want to be perfect, sell what you own, give the money to the poor and follow me. He may as well have said “spread the wealth around”. But that was thousands of years ago. I don’t think that nowadays many people have set their sights on being perfect- at least, not so as you’d notice- so Jesus’ words are perhaps not pertinent today.  I’m pretty sure Jesus never said – but I wasn’t there, mind you, and I don’t know  first hand, so don’t quote me – “invest your money in mortgage-backed securities or credit default swaps, then spend your profits on business investment targeted at job creation and let the minty-fresh monetary goodness trickle down to the poor.” I’m pretty sure that wasn’t it.  Mostly because I’m vaguely aware of him saying that ‘the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.’  Instead he said to just give it all away.  Like Santa. Heh.

          Would that either of them were around today. They’d be shocked and dismayed, let me tell you. One by the greed and the other by the avarice that are in ample evidence all over the news. Pliny the Younger may have put his finger on the source of all the senseless covetousness which we’ve seen lately in and around Wall Street, when he said an object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit. Perhaps Bernie Madoff could have benefited from that little piece of wisdom. Or Goldmine Sachs, which is paying 4.3 bln pounds to its City workers in bonuses.  Or Marc Drier, the Manhattan lawyer arrested in Canada for trying to sell non-existent bonds worth $380m.    Greed. It is a necessary foundation for laissez-faire capitalism, while socialism sees greed as a sin to be mitigated through state regulation. So maybe technically Jesus wasn’t a socialist since he had nothing to say about state regulation. He just said “follow me”, but still.  Socialism advocates collective ownership of the means of production (lets buy GM!!!) as well as the equitable distribution of resources (cap the pay of the CEOs!!!). Capitalism in its most conservative – American – form looks to socialists a lot like a Ponzi Scheme, concentrating power and wealth in the hands of a few.

           A friend of mine asserted that most of Europe is Socialist, and he said it very much like it was a bad thing. I was surprised. I think of Venezuela as Socialist, while Finland, Sweden and France with their enormous taxes and generous health, education and unemployment benefits are primarily capitalist, only with social welfare programs. The thing that struck me was that my friend clearly thought that socialism was bad; very, very bad. Taboo, in fact. He’d never want that for America. Just like what yer typical Russkie, Cuban or Venezuealan might think about Imperialist American Commercial Fascism, had you had a chance to ask them over a glass of the local ju-ju-juice. They speak the word capitalism just as my friend spoke the word socialism.

          But if socialism is un-American, so were the Pilgrims. So lets just get beyond the name-calling. What’s needed now is for the people of the US to consider where on the spectrum of capitalist/socialist ideology they want to be. Do they think its fair that a tiny percentage of its population is disgustingly, uselessly wealthy while the rest don’t have access to sufficient health care? If not, are they willing to do something about it, or are they still too busy reciting free-market mantras? There’s no use griping about ‘big government” at this point, because with each bailout  the government’s getting bigger.

           Why can’t we just get along? No one wants little children dying of hunger or diarrhea here in the US, which they are. If we weren’t so greedy for money or for our particular view of how to solve the problem, we might be able to talk. Lets talk. 

          Back in the day when I lived out on the treeless prairie I had a friend who used to say you could always tell when the winter wind was out of the north even without trees bending in the breeze or snow showing the way, because all the horses face away from the biting north wind. Today you can bet that every horse’s ass in the county is pointing north, because it’s brisk out there, compadres. It’s minus 25 right now and the wind is coming straight from Santa’s house, briskly. We got enough new snow for me to test out my new snowshoes, so I bundled up and headed out. It was fine traipsing through the forest where the wind is blunted, but when I got to the valley floor where the wind had nothing to stop it but me, it made no difference what the temperature was; all you needed to know was how many seconds it was between exposure and frostbite. My guess is 37.

          Lucky for me I’m the kind of person who, after spending a certain number of years repeating experiences like being exposed to cold under various circumstances; I learn. It only took ten or fifteen years before I wised up and began to carry something warm to cover every portion of my body every time I leave the house. I have no need to pretend the cold doesn’t affect me. It does, but I like to think that being a sentient being makes me smarter than it.  Certainly I’m a lot smarter than all those people who went up to the ski hill for opening weekend, where it’s even colder and windier than here. I did my little outdoor adventure, and then settled in next to the wood stove with a glass of wine and a movie while they keep flirting with hypothermia high above the slopes, clinging to the chair lift as the killing wind howled through them. It’s something to think about while tossing another log on the fire. It used to be that you’d only ever find me with a glass of wine and a book before said fire, but on one of those dark, dark mornings I stumbled out of bed and straight into my TV, sending it crashing to the floor. No tears were shed, since I don’t have any TV reception anyway and can always watch movies on my computer, but now I’ve got a new TV, thanks to my friends Mary and Duane.

          It’s the cutest little thing – seriously, no bigger than a bread-box. Back in 1976 it was state-of-the-art, but now it looks so anachronistic you have to wonder if you need to light the oil lamps behind the screen. At first I thought it was unusable because it didn’t have an auxiliary jack to accept input from my DVD player, but then Duane reminded me  that these things used coaxial cables. Remember back when they were da bomb? Just saying “coaxial cable” was enough for you to get an honorary membership in a futurist club. Nowadays children are surprised and charmed when they learn that your analog wrist watch does nothing but tell the time. From this vantage point it seems like coaxial cables were around when the Earth’s crust was still cooling, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that Lo! and Behold! my DVD player even has a coaxial jack! Who knew? It’s like finding a tethering ring on the front bumper of your car just in case you find a need to tether it in front of the saloon while you clatter in through the swinging doors to down a shot of rot gut while listing to the player piano.

          Will my great good fortune never end?  Pop the popcorn, because its movie time! Its such a treat to have time off just when the weather begins to impugn. Most times I’d swear that she has a direct line to my appointment book, so she can throw down a blizzard on the very day I need to travel somewhere. The only time its sunny and sweet is, in my experience, the day I have a mammogram scheduled in a busy office where the wait is long and chilly.  But for today, at least, the curse has been broken. Today I can just let it snow and blow every single btu out of the county while I sit snug in my underground mansion, watching films with subtitles. What more can I want? Oh yeah; money. Send money. Why does everyone ignore that part?

          Back in the day, I knew a Nepali guy who ran a whitewater rafting company. My friends and I hired him to take us on a four or five day trek down some raging torrent tumbling out of the Himalayas. It was so long ago I have no recollection of the guy’s name, the name of the river or even the names of most of my friends, but I do remember the time we emerged from some torrid whirlpool, soaked and disoriented, prying our white fingers reluctantly from the ropes that had kept us from being flung into the roiling, boulder-strewn moil.  Our raft was nearly sunk, full of water, and just as we were taking it all in the guide shouted “bail out!” I obediently and carefully began climbing out of the raft onto a nearby rock, which sent the guy into a raucous bout of merriment, because he meant to bail the water out of the raft, not to bail out. It was not the most embarrassing moment of my life, but since I  had just emerged from a childhood during which pretty much every day was spent being taunted and laughed at by my elder siblings, I was pretty prone to mortification, and thus the moment stuck with me all these years later.

          I do hope that the CEOs of GM and Chrysler, whether they bail out or make bail, are experiencing a similar level of discomfiture. Yeah, right. That’s like expecting a wolverine to be ashamed of its rapaciousness. But we can hope.  The argument has been made that allowing them to go bankrupt will deprive their workers of their pensions, but those pensions are guaranteed by the US government, so giving the money to GM now or later is in some sense immaterial. Another argument for bailing them out is that somehow bankruptcy will shut all operations down, and then all the suppliers and other businesses that interact with the automakers will be adversely affected, and so they would, if the automakers just sort of evaporated from the face of the planet, but they won’t. Even in bankruptcy they’ll be producing huge, useless, unsafe gas-guzzlers; they’ll just have to do it under the stern watch of the courts. And the UAW will have to change its focus from getting everything they can for their members (no one can fault them for that; its what a union is FOR…) to getting all they can for the next generation of workers as well as this one. Perhaps it’s a necessary form of shock therapy.

          An important point that isn’t getting a lot of attention in the press is that there is an ideological line of reasoning concerning whether or not to pump taxpayer money into the auto industry, and then there is a practical one. Ideologically, the free-marketeers say “let ‘em go bankrupt”, whilst the interventionists say “intervene before everyone has to go on welfare; we’d rather give ‘em the money now than later”. Practically speaking, does anyone want the US government running car companies? Methinks not. Not that the US government doesn’t have some really smart, capable and dedicated people in it, its just that their job is regulating industries, not running them, and all the bailout packages that are being discussed involve the government too intimately in the scope of the business. If you want to nationalize the industry: OK. Nationalize it. If you want industry and the government to operate separately, then don’t bail out failed companies. It seems to make sense to me, but what do I know? I’m just a card-carrying member of the peanut gallery.

          Can’t say that about the crew assembling around Prez Elect Barack Obama. Wonks ahoy! They’re saying that he’s putting together a valedictorocracy like it’s a bad thing. I’ve never understood people who think it’s a bad idea to have really smart people governing our country. Personally, I feel much safer and happier knowing that someone smarter than I am is making all the hard decisions so I don’t have to. That’s sort of the point, isn’t it? We choose people whom we trust to take on the business of state so that we can spend our valuable time and brain cells on more important things, like, you know; youtube and the upcoming rock-paper-scissors world championship. So if all those PhDs and “elite” smarty-pantses think the auto industry should either bail out or be bailed out, I defer to their greatness. It’s been so long since I’ve felt like I could trust those in charge to work for the common wheal rather than personal gain – somebody pinch me! No, wait, don’t! Let me live in the dream for five more minutes.

          Who, exactly, knows what it is like to be normal? I’d like someone to point out to me a normal person, and allow me to pose a question or two. I’d like to know what its like to be normal, but imagining what that would be like is like trying to imagine what it would be like to be smarter than you are. Besides, I don’t think there is one single human on this planet that is normal. But still, if you’ve never had a brilliant notion just pop into your head, I don’t see how you can ever really imagine what it would be like. People asked Einstein how he came up with the idea of the time-space continuum, and he said it just occurred to him. The  kinds of things that occur to me are much more likely to be that I need to buy peanut butter or that if bats really do sleep upside-down their fur must get all ruffled and itchy, since it would be falling ‘against the grain’. Those are the things that occur to me; not relativity. So I can’t really imagine what it would be either exceptionally brainy, nor what it would be like to be normal, but my day today was a smidgeon more normal -normal for me, anyway – than any have been since that fateful, portentous day when it occurred to me to build a house.

          That was an apocalyptic idea, really. Ever since then, everything has been, just, off. I haven’t skied for something like a year and a half. I haven’t thrown pots regularly for just as long. Instead I’ve been wrestling with house plans, jousting with contractors (not to mention lawyers, consumer protection activists, attorneys general and the like) when I’m not lying in a darkened room with a cool compress held to my head, listlessly formulating the outlines of a suicide note, that is. And all that time spent fretting over all those insistent various and sundries has kept me from having escapades, which means I have less to write about. But then who can have escapades sans a merry crew of fun-loving friends, and I’ve alienated all of them with my manic panics about getting stuff done, which meant that anytime anyone whose first name I actually knew came within shouting distance from this beastly house, I was asking them to help put up siding or bang some sorts of boards together. I’ve been insufferable. And exhausting.

          So it was really nice to get out and get physically exhausted today. I dragged out the ol’ skis and tromped up to Porphyry Peak for a romp, discovering, to no one’s surprise at all that I’m absurdly out of shape. I was huffing and puffing and working up a sweat on trails I used to take just to reach the trail that would mark the beginning of my intended romp. I always thought people were sort of pretending to be impressed with my athletic perseverance, but now that I’m outer-of-shape than I’ve ever been in my life (crying over ruined solar panels is not an aerobic activity, we should surmise…), I see what they meant.

           On the plus side, Allie-the-dog is in top form, which should surprise us all, since it was only a couple of years ago that she was down with a spinal injury, and the vet said she’d probably never run again. The thousands of dollars I spent on acupuncture, additive-free food, massage and a motley assortment of voodoo worked. Allie flew up that mountain, bounding through the snow drifts after rabbits outdoing me by miles. And to think that one of my excuses for not going skiing was that it would be lonely without Allie. Maybe I’m the one who needs some voodoo.

          On and equally happy note, it seems that some kindly someone did poke a pin or two into a voodoo doll of the Tubbs snowshoe company for me. Last winter, in the deepest darkness of a pre-dawn blizzard while snowshoeing to work, I blew out a strap and had a harrowing time limping along like Roald Amundsen stumbling toward the South Pole, only without the dogsleds or the daring-do. At that time I discovered that my snowshoes were so outdated that not only did they not make those straps anymore, there probably wasn’t a warehouse in all of creation that still had any. They said I’d have to upgrade – at a cost – to a newer binding, regardless of the “lifetime” warranty. Miffed, I fixed the binding using the cobbling equivalent of baling wire and bubblegum, and forgot about it. But then this winter started staring me in the eye; presenting me with the grim probability of another pre-dawn breakdown, only this time my stumble  would trigger an avalanche, which would carry me down the mountain, bouncing me off trees and tumbling me over and under boulders until I land on the icy highway below, destined to be run over by the plow truck.

          Although I expected to have to pay a bunch for new bindings, and possibly even just go ahead and buy new snowshoes, and although I dearly loved my old, old, valiantly disfigured snowshoes, with their crampons scuffed to mere nibs, the airplane-grade aluminum frame half sawed-through from the time I was cutting down trees in waist-high snow and the various pop-riveted seams popped open through miles and miles of slogging along, I gave them up to the local dealer for evaluation. Meanwhile, I went ahead and ordered a new pair on line. Perhaps it is this sort of surrendering to inevitability which wrenches the wheels of fate away from disaster, perhaps not. In any case, the day after my new snowshoes arrived, I got a call from the Tubbs dealer saying that Tubbs had gone ahead and replaced my snowshoes with brand spanking new ones, for free.

          Even more;  the ones they gave me were vastly superior not only to my old ones, but to the ones I had purchased. These shoes have steel crampons instead of aluminum ones, the fanciest, slickest bindings you can imagine and even climbing ramps (for the uninitiated, those are little frames which you can pop up under your heels so when you’re climbing steep hills your foot is more level. Tres posh.). Wish me luck. So far there isn’t really enough snow to snowshoe, so I continue to bike to work. With my helmet, goggles, puffy coat and reflective safety apparel I resemble nothing so much as a neon bug, ticking along the snowy road. Yeah, well, it may not be normal, but it beats a bumper-to-bumper commute, doesn’t it?

          It’s hard to see what’s not to like about Greenland. Once you remember that it’s the one that isn’t green. Iceland is green. Greenland is icy. Yeah, that one. Its been inhabited by Inuit forever, but been ruled by Denmark since the 18^th century because all the profitable colonies had been taken by the time Denmark got in the business. Well, that’s not really true; the Danish also had Africa’s Gold Coast, which got that name for a reason, and I suppose that if it wasn’t for the Gold Coast, Denmark couldn’t have afforded its chillier real estate in Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroe Islands and Estonia. Like it would have wanted to. Heh. Those Danish. Sheesh.

          Anyway, the Gold Coast went on to be Ghana pretty early on, but it wasn’t until the 70s that Greenland got even limited home rule. It was a sort of frozen situation (oogh). For some reason Denmark wanted Greenland, and then, well, nothing happened for the longest time. Oh, some fishing and whaling went on, a ruby here, a diamond there was discovered, and there’s talk of oil off the western coast, but so far its just talk. Finally last week the Greenlanders voted to boot out the Danish, but why, I’m not sure they even know.  It’s not like the Danish were particularly mean to their subjects. They gave Greenland something like $590m a year, and while that had to be spread out over the largest island (yes, it IS larger than Australia; I checked) in the world, there’s only 56k Greenlanders who have to share it. Without Denmark footing the bill, they’re going to have to develop those oil fields, I guess. Hard to do without young men, if you ask me, and since Greenland has one of the highest rates of suicide in the world, and boys between the ages of 15-19 top that list, I’d say… dunno. And then it costs up to $50 a barrel to extract oil in the frozen northern seas, and right now that’s almost what oil is selling for so I’d say…dunno.

          In these special times of global warming, it’s hard to predict anything about the north based on previous experiences. Why d’you think the Russkies made a point of planting a flag under the north pole? Why d’you think they’re buzzing around in Norwegian airspace and claiming various and sundry unnamed atolls (can you have an arctic atoll? Aren’t they just a tropical thing? Somebody get back to me on this…)? And just as predicatively, there go the Russkies all the way around the world to Venezuela, where Prez Medvedev is on hand to oversee the naval maneuvers with his country’s nuclear powered missile cruiser Pyotr Veliky (Peter the Great) and the anti submarine frigate Admiral Chabaneneko. Hugo Chavez is positively drooling.

          Which brings us to another tiny population being ruled by a tiny, far-away European population – Curaçao. It, being located 50 miles off the coast of Venezuela, in the Netherland Antilles, is what they call a Dutch Dependency, but nobody really, fully, absolutely knows what that means. The Netherland Antilles are, but are not colonies of the Dutch, as is Aruba. Do you really want to know more? I don’t. Suffice to say that the Dutch in Curaçao, like the Danes in Greenland, send money. And in turn, the US sends money to the Kingdom of the Netherlands (the Dutch. No, no, they can’t just have one name) for rent on the naval base called Forward Operating Location Hato, which, if you believe the Americans, is used mostly as a base for counter-narcotic missions and for sailors on R&R. Which is, of course, irony in itself since amongst the Studio 54 set, Curaçao is known as a party-hearty hot-spot, with half-naked nymphets from the entertainment industry cavorting enthusiastically for the cameras whilst licking their cocaine-numbed lips provocatively just prior to signing a book deal for an accounting of their time in rehab.

          So that’s Curaçao, just spitting distance from where the Russkies are playing with the Venezuelans upon the sea. And the theater in which Mr. Chavez gets to frame – yet again – his world view that the US is determined to invade Venezuela, kill Himself and seize its enormous puddle of oil and dominate…hey, wait a minute! This already happened, didn’t it? No, that was in Iraq. Anyway it is true that in 2006 the US aircraft carrier group held maneuvers near to Curaçao, and at that time Hugo accused the Dutch defense minister of being a “Washington stooge” for allowing it. If he’s right, that means that this time he’s a “Kremlin stooge”, doesn’t it? Meanwhile, the Dutch, who are involved, uttered a practically audible, eye-rolling sigh while stating that “There are no consequences foreseen for the Kingdom of the Netherlands” due to the Russo-Venezuelan nautical parade in their colonial back yard.

          It’s all just so exhausting isn’t it? I think I need a vacation in a tropical paradise, where I can cavort while American sailors either protect me from narcotics or plot a world leader’s demise.  Or maybe I’ll go to Greenland to cavort with seal pups and plot my own icy and beautiful demise.