Mrs. Clinton, will you please stand up?

Can we just once admit that we elected the wrong candidate, and replace him after his first, on our ticket, instead of waiting for him to get creamed by the Texas machine? 

Please, Ms. Clinton. Run. We need intellectual capacity backed by fight, determination, and a little insider nastiness.

Mr. Obama has taken the unfortunate position of being both politically unambitious and yet attempting to remain above the fray. At some point, this political pacifism is just unwillingness to fight.

This will not be recovered by a sudden election year oscillation of tactics. That would be worse. I'm seeing a campaign that will change directions every month. Every direction but head on. 

The republican candidates are idiots. Can we please run a candidate who will say that. And have a plan. A plan they will fight for. And agility.

Oh, by which, I mean a plan that's relevant. I feel a little sick now that the political capital of 2008 was expended on the health care plan, when it perhaps could have been used on structural modifications of greater significance than a health care patch that the insurance companies wrote and which now the right gets political capital pretending to fight, even though that fight is over.

More on where the sidewalk ends.

It's a little earlier in the day, and I've brought my camera to take pictures of this errant wilderness and my interaction with it. As I ride through, dessicated leaves sound like rain stick in the evening wind. I met a gentleman and his young son. The man had grown up in this neighborhood, and confirmed that this was where treated water ran from the city plant to the river. The signs bear witness to this. He informed me that it runs several miles to Martin Road and the treatment plant. I looked over it on a map and this confims that there is pathway from here to there. It also shows quite a bit more land forgotten in here than any one I knew who grew up down here knew existed. On the way in you can see signs of teenagers using it bonfire, mudding, and drinking but beyond that there are a bunch of fields to the east of the water system trail. At Hobbes Road I ran into a stream I didn't feel prepared to ford. Another day, especially since google maps shows so much more than I even realized. I wonder who owns all this? It could be a perfect greenway, and could even be made to connect with the greenway at ditto landing. On the stretch I've ventured through, there's plenty of room to create a gravel parking lot at each end, a strip of asphalt, and a removable vehicle barrier. This would undoubtedly make life a bit easier for the water plant, who's numerous fixtures likely need inspection. A greenway could provide limited vehicle access. A little more at the bike blog.Unfortunately I didn't think about charging the camera until the battery died in the field. Yeah, I know.

Where the sidewalk ends

I found where the sidewalk ends. Little white flowers were growing there.

It was 7pm, the beginning of sunset, and in the cooling air I found a path, a little piece of forgotten wetland known only to wild animals and city waterworks employees, and undoubtedly to the adventurous children of our nearby streets.

Two deer have crossed my path, prancing high and elegantly across this flattened strip of earth that separates some isolated forest from the suburban neighborhood adjacent. A snake, which I think or at least fear was a water moccasin slithered just away from the wheels of my bike, and bear tracks helped show the best way to ford a small stream.

All of this exists within earshot of neighborhood, and is accompanied by the muffled sounds of dogs barking back and forth and children's evening laughter, and the constant backdrop of the main road through town.

It's a strip of land forgotten by development, which divides the space between the suburb and the military installation adjacent. Snakes and bears lend a watchful wildness to the cicada seasoned air as late summer rain clouds shift hues in time with the rotation of the earth.

Bucket List

A Time for the Flag

From Daily Kos:

Proud of this country for the first time and/or in some time, despite the economic downturn?

It is this simple, if you have been feeling patriotic recently. Make a moment and put up a Flag. It is a good time to hang OUR flag . . . for all the right reasons. When you're done, send a picture, an email, a letter, or yell out your window inviting your friends and family to do the same.

I am ready to take back this symbol. Follow me below the fold if you're ready to bring the Stars and Stripes home for the first, second, or third time.

Jetpacks. Slightly off topic, but. . . jetpacks.

From the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7747307.stm

More:


Hereś an ingenious 6 year old kid who makes one in the back yard with bottle rocket engines. I
wasn't that resourceful.

An interesting thought occurred to me as I was sifting through many, many back issues of Whole Earth and Co-Evaluation. As I looked at the pages and pages of inventions, books, and ideas, listed along with reviews, and sifted from the millions of products which must have been available, I noticed that the format of these magazines from the 70s and 80s were oddly familiar. They we not unlike the modern internet, in paper form. Simple users reviews and links to further information or the manufacturer or publisher, very personal, organized into broad categories, and interspersed with articles and occasionally comics. Stewart Brand had fairly accurately foretold aspects of the modern internet way back in 1972, in an article about Spacewar he published in Rolling Stone. “One popular new feature on the Net is AI's Associated Press service. From anywhere on the Net you can log in and get the news that's coming live over the wire or ask for all the items on a particular subject that have come in during the last 24 hours. Plus a fortune cookie. Project that to household terminals, and so much for newspapers (in present form). Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with "essentially perfect fidelity." So much for record stores (in present form).”

This stuff hasn't really reached the masses until maybe the last 10 years, probably closer to five for wide acceptance. Turns out network bandwidth for reasonably high fidelity music was 30 years away from this article's publication, but the fact is, the vision persisted, until it was finally realized, along with far more information transfer than even the furthest sighted midnight hackers could have forseen. From the view of the outsiders, it all happened so fast, since the adoption of the internet and of computers in general happened in an exponential fashion. In 1972, two years into it's life span, there were about 20 computers connected to ARPA-net. 35 years later, it is hard to keep an accurate tally of how many machines are connected to the network, for various technical reasons, but it is in the millions or billions of connected devices.

(Image grabbed from flickr, rights unknown.)