running commentary

Appendicitis Mountain 2024 Oct 14
Journeying my way around Google Maps, as one does, I did a double-take when I stumbled across a mountain in Idaho with an unlikely name: Appendicitis.

Well, as this link describes, that's what happens when the government surveyor sent to measure the mountains gets struck by a sudden case of Appendicitis while out surveying. The surveyor, Bannon, survived thanks to a local doctor, and and its been Appendicitis Mountain ever since.

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CANS 2024 Oct 13
Explore old abandoned sites from America's westward expansion, and the thing you'll be most likely to encounter is cans. Yes, old tin cans. Why cans? This website explains why, going into the history of canning and their popularity among people living on the periphery of their civilization, and also how to identify the can's age and possible contents, if for some reason that is important to you.

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The Once-Great Salt Lake 2024 Oct 13
Utah's Great Salt Lake is going away. Like so many other salt lakes across the world, such as the Aral Sea, a combination of less precipitation, higher heat, and greater diversion of its sourcewaters to irrigation have cost the lake to the point that it's near to going away. And as salt lakes go away and leave dry lakebeds in their wake, those dry lakebeds turn into dust bowls with far-reaching harms.

It's ok, though, Utah is working on plans to save their lake. Water conservation is one obvious answer, you'd think. There's also plans to steal water from other watersheds, robbing Peter to pay Paul, basically, and some cockamamie idea to just pump in the Pacific Ocean. But Utah's favorite answer, of course, is to pray for rain:

the most common strategy echoed by the Utahans interviewed for this story: Pray for snow

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Plat of Zion 2024 Oct 11
I was previously unaware that the founders of Mormonism Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, in addition to creating their modern spin on Christianity and convincing their friends that sleeping with dozens of woman (many below the age of consent) was actually fulfilling a religious obligation, had utopian dreams of planned cities. And they're about as successful as you'd imagine: enforced in Salt Lake City despite leaving the place unfriendly and hostile to everyday folks.

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A Protest County 2024 Oct 11
Protests take many forms. But rarely, I would imagine, do protests take the form of a state legislature creating a county. Yet exactly that happened in Nevada in 1987, when the federal government planned a nuclear weapons waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Nevadans, not wanting to be the country's nuclear trash dump (understandable), used some political funny business (the legislative vote took place at 3:45am, for instance) to create a the tiny "Bullfrog County" directly around Yucca Mountain, with prohibitively high property taxes which would go directly to the state government.

Nobody actually lived in Bullfrog County, and so its county seat was placed at the far-away state capital, Carson City, and officers were appointed rather than elected, and the rules allowed a single person to sit in multiple (or all) the offices. There were no courts, no paved roads, no buildings, and almost all the land was closed to the public. And it was entirely an enclave inside Nye County. So Bullfrog County was a county like none other.

This created problems. The lack of courts created a legal paradox. As the taxes flowing directly to state government now incentivized the creation of the nuclear dump they originally sought to dissuade, there were political problems. And there were government problems, as the Department of Energy was not happy about this development (understandable) and redirected their funding to Clark County.

But mostly, Nye County residents, who existed and were not happy about this new lawless, people-less enclave popping up in their territory and potentially robbing them of the economic benefits of having a nuclear dumpster in their backyard (a federally funded nuclear dumpster, I should say), challenged Bullfrog County's very existence in court. And they were successful. The Nevada Supreme Court ruled Bullfrog County to be unconstitutional, as it had no residents and thus no representative government. And so Bullfrog County was dissolved two years after it was created, and Yucca Mountain went on to be selected as American's nuclear weapons garbage repository.

Good news, though. Due to political complications, the nuclear dump has yet to be built, and since its funding has been eliminated, maybe it never will. And so we bury our nuclear weapons trash instead two thousand feet beneath New Mexico in a salt... thing, as the Founding Fathers intended.

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Nobles Emigrant Trail 2024 Oct 11
The Nobles Emigrant Trail was a key route into California during the Gold Rush times. The trail is now preserved by the Bureau of Land Management. The very well-produced short video on the BLM website about this trail, though, goes into more than just the history, but also how the BLM researches and identifies these trails, including consulting with the Native American authorities in the area who have their own history and opinion about these "emigrant" trails.

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Why 85mm focal length is misunderstood 2024 Oct 11
Linked is a YouTube video from a long-time working portrait and landscape photographer Martin Castein, one of his series of videos about photography. YouTube abounds with this stuff (and much of it's not very useful) so why am I linking this one in particular? Because, unlike most, I feel like I actually learned something here.

I've always struggled with that 85mm field of view, but Castein breaks down in this video how to compose compelling shots at this angle, how to include backgrounds, how to go about piecing together the elements you are including and not including in the frame when using these short telephoto focal lengths.

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Fraser Project 2024 Oct 8
A fascinating collection of photography, rendering the world in bright and flat lighting and completely devoid of people.

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The Disintegration Loops 2024 Oct 8

The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right. It's been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results.

Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smoldering lower Manhattan. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose. It would become an elegy for that day. Stills from the video were used for the covers of the CDs, and eventually, the hour-long visual with sound was released on DVD.

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Atlas Fredonyer 2024 Oct 5
Doctor Atlas Fredonyer was a California pioneer who was the first to "discover" what is now known to be the northern limit of the Sierra Nevada mountains and has been named after him – Fredonyer Pass. But he was a much more "colorful" character than this basic historical geographic biography would imply.

Convicted and then pardoned (by Governor Leland Stanford) for raping his 15-year-old stepdaughter, he died around 48 years old from a failed surgery to remove a bottle he shoved up his ass. No, really.

While nobody is quite sure what Fredonyer was a "doctor" of, the citizens of Rooptown so loved him (briefly) they named their town Fredonyer City, before deciding a year later to retract such honor and name it Susanville after Susan Roop, daughter of founder and first governor of Nevada Territory Isaac Roop, who mistakenly believed his town to be in Nevada (and staged a minor war over this belief).

older!