...with this morning's coffee...


With morning coffee, this week's "Reader's Photo of the Week" in the Tucson paper:

...a reminiscence of early spring in Paris...from eleven (!) years ago...
For the 'published' source: click here.
(...and from a couple of weeks ago, and a week before that...)

Winter storm, lifting...

Yesterday morning--woke up to snow halfway down our 'backyard'-mountains...
...even a rainbow! ("snow-bow"?):

...just outside of Sabino Canyon

...storm still lingering in Bear Canyon...

...Santa Catalina mountains, covered in snow...

...the last of the rainbow...

...hummingbird resting below Finger Rock

...panorama, looking SW over the Tucson mountains to the distant snow-capped high desert...

...and for the first time in a year-and-a-half, the local Rillito river is actually flowing.

...a rainy week here in Tucson...

...out-of-town friends stayed with us this past weekend; we introduced them to our local Gaslight Theatre, Sonoran hot dogs, the ruins in Tumacácori, the 'artsy village' of Tubac, and local Peruvian food. Hoo-boy.

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Last week, I finally took my wife to go see the film Avatar.
AMAZING special effects--but also remarkable, if you scratch the hyped 3-D surface: its profound pessimism.


How interesting that for the first time in decades,
a special-effects blockbuster does not end up with humanity saving the earth,
but with humans turning on their own kind in order to save something else--an almost-lost paradise of sorts.
So different from humans (almost always Americans) saving the earth from aliens or meteors, or finding a medical way to 'reverse' mutant-zombies.
An uncomfortable result of the film is that the crowds end up cheering against themselves--
against the bad-guys, which are the evil earthlings. The only 'good' earthlings are the ones who 'go native'...

What's the reaction from gung-ho military-types, I wonder?
Yes, yes, there is the irony that the director and studio are making millions (over a billion already!) due to a film with an anti-capitalist message.
No one's crying 'treason,' but...
The film's not subtle by any means...but it's not 'stupid' either; it's rich in allusions to myth, literature, religion, and film...
Anyway. Click here for an interesting CNN article about Avatar 'blues'--seriously.


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This past Sunday--opened up the paper--aha! published again; my cheap photo-thrill: click here for the link to the local Tucson paper's 'outdoor' feature with my photo...

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...can't post without mentioning last week's earthquake in Haiti, and the continuing chaotic suffering down there...Here in Tucson we know a couple of Haitian families who've been glued to their phones,
trying to contact relatives and friends...
''Disaster-fatigue" can sometimes set in, but, man...
wordless.

(...click here for a partially insightful NYTimes column on Haiti;

I don't agree with everything in the column, but such questions should be asked...)

...from Joshua Tree National Park...& instant language

As I said in yesterday's posting, here are a few photos from this past weekend's drive through Joshua Tree National Park:

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...Joshua trees framing Mt. San Gorgonio (11503 ft.), highest pt. in southern CA.

...driving through...

--view over the Coachella valley and the mountains behind Palm Springs,CA, looking SW from Keys View overlook in the National Park. The superimposed arrows show the movement of the San Andreas fault, which is visible in the middle of the photo as a couple of darker low ridges between the arrows. The peak on the right is 10834' Mt. San Jacinto.

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Have any of you seen Avatar, the recent 3-D blockbuster? I was a bit reluctant, but then I saw it during the school-break. (I went to a 9:30 a.m. matinee to avoid seeing any of my students at the mall...) Not since Jurassic Park first came out in the early 1990's have I seen a film's special effects be so visually engrossing.

Incidentally, a linguist from USC was hired to invent a new, linguistically-sound 'authentic' language for the 10-ft-tall blue humanoid dwellers of the moon Pandora. (Remember 'Klingon?')

This L.A. Times article was fascinating.
My wife's not yet seen the film, so we plan to go tonight.

1051 desert miles:
Joshua- and Palm- trees...
...plus 'eating parties'...

Crazy distances out here in the American SW--crazy amount of miles just for a three-day 'weekend' (1051 miles, from Tucson to the L.A. area and back), and 40 miles EACH WAY for Saturday-night dinner: freeway-dependence.

Then, getting back to Tucson late Sunday night...obligatory 'bright-eyed' morning for Monday@work: ay ay ay...On the way there on Friday, we drove through the surreal landscapes of Joshua Tree National Park...and on the way back day before yesterday, through the equally-surreal landscapes of Palm Springs and the surrounding 'desert cities...'

Alas, no "Korean tacos" (see http://www.kogibbq.com/) this trip...times and locations did not intersect with our itinerary in the L.A. area...But, we did have ethnic 'eating parties,' as my mother (who was with us) refers to occasions when 'different' or 'special'  foods are present:

• Friday night: Cuban in Norco
• Saturday night: the LONG drive each way--but worth it, for Indian food in the Indian-and-Korean pedestrian district in the town of Artesia, next to Long Beach
• Sunday night:  on the drive back home, surprisingly good Hawaiian bbq (read: short-ribs, kimchee, mac salad, spam musubi !) in the 'instant suburb' of Buckeye, on the far western fringes of the Phoenician-sprawl...(another name for Buckeye: 'but why?'--as in, 'but why would you live here in this flat scrubby Phoenix ex-urb in the shadow of a nuclear power-plant that depends on water pumped in from FAR away to prevent a radioactive melt-down?' And yet it was the 9th-fastest-growing city in the US in the past decade! )

...haven't had time to upload yet, but photos coming soon...

Meanwhile, a couple of things from the NYTimes yesterday and today: 

•  random link to clever illustration-"column": (it's about the weather; click here.)
• and for this year's New York Times' The 31 Places to Go in 2010, click here.

cross-cultural lunch-time reading

...from our former home (Seattle),

from today's NY Times,

this article (click to read).

United Tastes

A City’s Specialty, Japanese in Name Only


Tucson has its Sonoran hot-dogs (click for another NY Times article) and cheese-crisps...
L.A. now has its famous Korean-taco-trucks. (click here!)
(We hope to go there this Friday!)
and Seattle: "teriyaki."
To that, I would add pho--so common in Puget Sound...
and, fortunately, present here in southern AZ as well...

staying up with chili-and-garlic...

...my wife is fighting off a recurrent cold, in bed...my mother--flew in from the East coast last night, asleep downstairs...and I, slightly insomniac, am trying to stave off a head-cold. We went to a Korean restaurant earlier tonight and had pre-emptive boiling garlicky bowls of red soup...

So, this is how 2009 will end and 2010 will begin for us here in Tucson...

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Last week, after a rainy night, I went for a morning hike in Ventana canyon, and sure enough, the peaks above had got a dusting of snow the night before:


...on the trail in, I had a little scare--I surprised a herd of a dozen or so musky-smelling javelinas. (My first sighting 'in the wild!') I couldn't help but think of the Dutch tourist a while back who got his calf muscle 'shredded' by the tusks of a not-so-little javelina. (Click here to read the article) Fortunately, the critters ran away from me, and I didn't see any parental-protection-charge-inducing babies...

( ...and this photo 'made the paper again' the other day! ;-) )
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...this past weekend, we drove over to CA to visit some friends...I'd never been COLD in L.A.before--but on my morning run in the Verdugo mountains on Saturday, there was frost (!)...At the Saturday morning farmer's market in La Cañada Flintridge (odd compound name for a tony town, eh?), we got to chat in French with a baker, a pâté-maker, and a tablecloth-vendor...and in Korean with several produce-sellers--fresh Asian pears, chirimoya (!), samples of jujube (Chinese date)-tea...

And we also got to visit, briefly, the Huntington Library and gardens in San Marino, near Pasadena. I had been once, twelve years before, but it was my wife's first time...We had only a couple of hours, so we concentrated on the large-scale 18th-c. British portraits in the main house, and the cactus and succulent gardens...A few photos:




...a beautiful place to stroll around, before driving back across the bleak Mojave desert...


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...and to sign off tonight, this just got e-mailed to me, and so I include it below:


HARPER'S YEARLY REVIEW
January 1, 2010
Yearly Review

Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth
president of the United States and ordered the detention
center at Guantanamo Bay closed within a year. George
W. Bush gave his final press conference. "Abu Ghraib was a
huge disappointment," he said. "Not having weapons of mass
destruction was a significant disappointment." A federal
appeals court in Texas ruled to permit the sacrifice of
goats. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael
Steele announced an "off the hook" Republican publicity
campaign, targeting "urban-suburban hip-hop settings." "We
need to uptick our image with everyone," Steele said,
"including one-armed midgets." When asked about the state
of the Republican party, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty
said, "It's kind of like asking whether the stock market
has bottomed out." Thirty-nine million Americans were on
food stamps, 54 percent of graduating U.S. business majors
lacked job offers, and two gunmen robbed a man of one
dollar in the parking lot of an Ohio Wendy's. A top
Pentagon official said that "cutbacks at Best Buy" made it
easier to recruit better-qualified young people for the
military. The war in Iraq turned six; the war in
Afghanistan turned eight; SpongeBob SquarePants turned
ten. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban threatened to chop
off the fingers of anyone who votes, the government passed
a law allowing men to starve wives who refuse sex.

Sea levels continued to rise, and a 40-yard-wide asteroid
just missed the earth. The Mediterranean Sea was plagued
by blobs. Pope Benedict XVI visited Africa; in Angola he
warned against witchcraft, corruption, and condoms. Papal
archaeologists in Rome authenticated the bones of Saint
Paul the Apostle, and Jesus Christ was dismissed from jury
duty in Alabama. Toxic-mining wastes in Idaho were killing
tundra swans; a man in Munich received a two-year
suspended sentence for beating another man with a
swan. Highly aggressive supersquirrels were menacing gray
squirrels in England, where the Law Lords were replaced
with a new Supreme Court whose justices wear no wigs, and
where cosmetic nipple surgery was increasingly popular. A
London taxi driver tied one end of a rope around a post
and the other around his neck and drove away, launching
his head from the car. Anglican hymns were sung at
Darwin's tomb. Two Yellowstone National Park workers were
fired for peeing into Old Faithful. Sarah Palin published
a book, and Sylvia Plath's son hanged himself in
Alaska. Scientists in San Diego made a robot head study
itself in a mirror until it learned to smile.

Newspaper circulation in the United States declined to its
lowest level in 70 years. It was revealed via Twitter that
President Obama called Kanye West a "jackass" and that a
coyote ran off with Jessica Simpson's maltipoo. The Taco
Bell chihuahua died of a stroke, and Sonia Sotomayor was
sworn in as a Supreme Court justice. Walter Cronkite,
Merce Cunningham, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy died, as
did Michael Jackson. Ariel Sharon was still alive. Hamas
and Fatah held peace talks in Cairo. Israel approved the
construction of 900 more settler homes in East Jerusalem,
and ten Florida middle schoolers were suspended for
participating in Kick a Jew Day. Chicago rats fed a diet
of bacon, cheesecake, Ho Hos, pound cake, and sausage
began to behave like rats addicted to heroin, and a
Minnesota man pleaded guilty to driving a La-Z-Boy while
intoxicated. China created a small black hole, and NASA
revealed that a mysterious streak of light spotted by
onlookers in the night sky above North America was a
fortnight's worth of astronaut urine. Physicists said
that the aural jitters picked up by a German
gravitational-wave detector may indicate that we all live
in a giant and blurry cosmic hologram. The United States,
searching for water, bombed the moon.

Permanent URL for this column:
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/12/hbc-90006317

Copyright 2010 Harper's Magazine Foundation
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...and now, on with MMX