Roughing It

If I ever get stuck in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but a pocket knife, some duct tape, and a piece of string, I want Simon and Alex with me. Here's Simon with a bow and arrow that he and Alex made from a couple of sticks.

So, how does the improvised bow and arrow actually work? Well, let's just say that grilled stray cat tastes better than you might think.

This Just In ...

Senator John McCain has just announced his vice-presidential running mate, 44-year old Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who has served all of 18 months in that position, subsequent to serving on the Wasilla City Council and, later, as mayor. Rumor has it McCain had wished to choose a Chinese gymnast but was dissuaded by advisers because the Constitution stipulates that the candidate must have been born in the United States.

Shoshone, Idaho 1972

Are You Ready for Some Football!?

Alex's flag football season started today. His team lost but he had a pretty good game, with one interception and a sack. Here he is in hot, or at least warm, pursuit of the opposing quarterback:


I guess it's good that at this age the sport hasn't become ultracompetitive. Check out the kids on the left side of this picture. It's the ol' slap and tickle play.

Pentsatze Entretenigarriak (bertsioa euskaraz)

Ongi etorri nire blogera, “Pentsatze Entretenigarriak”! (bertsio berezia euskaraz). Nire izena David dut. Literatura latinoamerikanoa profesorea naiz. Hemen gaude Euskal Herrian iaz.

Simon pilotari ona da.

Hau da nire alaba, Eva. Sei urteak ditu.

Hauek nire semeak dira, Simon eta Alex. Eta nire emaztea, Michelle. Zenbat urteak ditu? Ez dakit. Gaztea da: oso gaztea. Eta ni? Ba, oso zaharra naiz: berohegeitabat urteak ditut. Besarkada handierantz gure familia gernikan. Ez dakit euskeraz, baina ikusten ari naiz. Hizkuntza zoragarria da: gustatzen zait. Gero arte!

Deseret Island Disc: "Flowers of Evil" (Ruth White)

I don't know much about Ruth White. She was a synth pioneer back in the 60s when electronics were just beginning to be exploited by serious composers. She released just two albums, I think: "Flowers of Evil" and "Seven Trumps from the Tarot Cards." Both vinyls are hard to find these days: a copy of "Flowers of Evil" just went for $50 on eBay. But it's not hard to see why connoisseurs and historians of electronica are rediscovering White's work. "Flowers of Evil" is a tour-de-force of late 60s electronics: Baudelaire's poems provide a perfect backdrop for White's experiments. Be warned: these are not the happy-go-lucky synth stylings of Perry and Kingsley, with their assorted space-age whooshes, bleeps, and farting sounds. While there's still a bit of cheese here (at least to the 21st century listener), some of this stuff is genuinely creepy. And of course Baudelaire lends himself beautifully to this kind of thing. Here's "The Clock."





(I guess I have a thing for musical interpretations of Baudelaire. During my first year at BYU, a roommate got me into French artist Mylène Farmer's album Ainsi soit je. Here's her version of "L'horloge." Somehow it hasn't aged nearly as well as White's version, which came out nearly 20 years earlier).

No, This Blog is Not Defunct. It is Still Funct.

It's been a while since a new post and my excuse is that we've been traveling so much. Last year, of course, we were in Spain and the Basque Country from early July until mid-December. This year we've been catching up on visiting family. We made three long-ish car trips to Idaho, California, and Washington this summer. By my count that means that we put the following mileage on the odometer:

Idaho: 800 miles round trip
California: 1500 miles round trip
Washington: 1600 miles round trip

That's nearly 60 hours and 4000 miles of driving this summer, or half-way to the moon (more or less). And, of course, we picked the summer of record-setting high gas prices to do it. But it wasn't really that bad. The kids are old enough to travel pretty well now and I listened to podcats of Hubert Dreyfus' course on Division I of Heidegger's Being and Time on my iPod.

The last trip was nice: it had been three years since I had been in Wenatchee and Paul, Michelle's dad, had just retired after many years of teaching Sociology and Philosophy classes at Wenatchee Valley College (I inherited a hefty box of some of his old philosophy books. Bless you, Paul!). Michelle's siblings were there, including her brother Dan and his family, from Ohio. More pictures to come.