Magic, Ritual, and Belief

07 May, 2008
Posted at 22.34 PDT

As the years go by I find myself more and more intrigued by the political process here in the U.S. And this year, not surprisingly, I’ve been rabidly interested in seeing it develop. This year’s presidential contest is an historical step forward for us, no matter what way it’s looked at. Now I’ll admit right off the bat I’m rooting for Barack Obama. I’ve been rooting for him to run since seeing him give that famous speech at the 2004 Democratic nominations. I can still remember the goosebumps it gave me, and distinctly remember thinking, “Why can’t HE be the one running instead of Kerry?”

Still, Hillary Clinton’s bid for presidency is equally historic, being the first time a woman has been seriously considered as a front-runner. She’s always struck me as very, very smart, and (obviously) has the drive to be in the race. But I can’t support her, despite admiring quite a bit about her. This country fought a war a couple of hundred years ago, and after thought long and hard about how the government would be organized. And we broke with nearly 2000 years of Western tradition by rejecting a dynastic model of government, choosing instead a republic. It’s served us well, I’d like to think, and the influence our little experiment has had on the planet at large cannot be overstated. From France just a few years later, to the abortive European-wide revolutions of 1848, and onwards to modern time, our country’s decision to revive a republican form of government has gone on to influence nearly every country on the planet. How many monarchies are left? Democracy of some pattern or another is almost exclusively held up as the ideal towards which to strive. We should take a small bit of pride in that, despite our many failings.

Since 1981 there has been either a Bush or a Cllnton involved with the White House in some manner, either as president or vice-president. Forty per cent of Americans have never known anything BUT one of the two at the highest levels of our government. Nearly half. And for that reason alone, I found myself unable to get behind Clinton’s bid for the presidency. Bush-Bush-Bush-Clinton-Clinton-Bush-Bush-Clinton?-Clinton? No thank you. Dueling dynasties are not what I want to see in this nation. I’d rather we take our chances with someone else. Someone new. It could have been anyone. That it is Barack Obama as the viable option is, to me, just icing on the cake.

Magic, Ritual, and Belief was the name of one of the courses in the Anthropology department at the University of Central Florida. It probably still is; it’s a pretty common class to anthropology departments around the country, I assume, examining patterns of belief and behavior in human societies around the world. One side effect of studying cultural anthropology in depth, is that you can’t help but turn the lens of observation onto your own culture. It’s hard to get outside it mentally and look in, but occasionally things will stand out. Human patterns of behavior tend to follow certain trends from culture to culture, and it’s always fun to recognize things in your own culture that you’ve studied in others.

Being so interested in this election has had the direct result of me finding myself reading in depth the comments following many of the articles online concerning the election. I can’t help myself, they’re fascinating, despite the well-known phenomenon of people letting loose with the craziest vitriolic hyperbole, safe behind the internet’s anonymizing wall. It’s entertaining as all hell, as long as you can distance yourself from it, keep your temper, and simply enjoy it for the over-the-top factor of so many of the comments. (And it certainly helps to have an iron-clad will to never ever post your own comments).

But one thing in particular has gotten my attention the past couple of weeks. As it has become obvious that short of a major rejection of the will of the voters, Hillary simply can not win the nomination, many of the commenters have begun arguing their case using the dreaded ‘L’ word, attempting to claim Barack Obama is (gasp!) too..too..LIBERAL. What is fascinating to me is the utter lack of response this gets. People don’t even mention it in later comments. Even if we ignore the reality that what passes as liberal in this country would get your tarred as rabidly right-wing anywhere else in the Western world, dragging out the word “liberal” has been a staple of the conservative in the U.S. for the past twenty years or more. Until now, it has always, always, guaranteed a deep knee-jerk reaction, conservatives spitting it out like an epithet, and the democrats scrambling to distance themselves from it every time it gets trotted out. The historical reasons why this is the case are numerous, and would take a post of their own to even begin to explain why. Suffice to say it just is. This has just been one of those rules, like “the sun rises in the East.” Using the word ‘liberal’ as if it were some spooky rattle guaranteed to drive off the demons was par for the course amongst the right in this country for two decades. Its use was a ritual, the word pulled out every election cycle, a sure means of framing—and thus controlling—the argument.

It’s too early to say for certain, but I think the magic word has lost its mystic power. Like the boy who cried wolf, it just might have been used as the magic bludgeon for so long, that it no longer has the power it once had. It’ll be interesting to see if this is the case. Maybe, just maybe, we can shed some of the emotional baggage that conservatives have inserted into the word, and get back to its true meaning.

 

 

Ramblings/Politics | Permanent Link

Auto-Less in Seattle

24 Apr, 2006
Posted at 16.25 PDT

Seattle, as I’ve said more than once, has a few things going for it that appeal to me to no end. Once of those things is its electric trolley bus system. What makes it so interesting to me is, IIRC, the fact that being in the Pacific Northwest, and thus having access to the ample hydro-power around the region, allows the city to run its electric bus system—and its entire power grid—free of oil. Now this certainly doesn’t include the entire bus system, as it wouldn’t be efficient to try and string electric lines everywhere the buses need to go. Still, it’s kind of cool.

Almost since they were introduced, cars have been a symbol of freedom and independence in the U.S. To be an adult meant buying a car; it was part and parcel of the American dream: a secure job, a house with a two-car garage in the suburbs, and 1.8 children. You can thank Henry Ford in large part for that. His application of assembly line techniques (already in use, but don’t let that spoil your enjoyment of the myth around the man), brought the price of cars down low enough for the average middle-class American to purchase. As a society, we’ve never looked back.

In the thirties, Germany’s Adolf HItler looked at what we here in the U.S. were doing with our road system, and the result was the country’s much vaunted autobahn. (Yes, copied from us, not the other way around, surprisingly). We had a lot more ground to cover with shiny new highways than they did, and after Germany began feeling frisky in 1939, we had to postpone major work for a few years while the Soviets and the West showed them just how useful a highway system could be for invading armies.

At any rate, after we finally finished fighting the last of the nineteenth century wars for lebensraum, and the advent of the atomic bomb had put paid to any major power’s desire to conquer neighboring countries, the U.S. finished up its national highway system—and did so with a vengeance.

To me it’s especially cool considering that yesterday, for the first time since I was eighteen, I have taken the plunge, and am now living car-free. It feels a little strange.

 

 

Seattle | Permanent Link

The Opiate of the Masses

20 Apr, 2006
Posted at 00.23 PDT

Seven hours, 40 minutes.


That’s the amount of time the television is on per day in the average household in America. Seven hours. The mind reels, to quote Audrey Hepburn. That’s a jaw-dropping number. Americans spend nearly one third of their day with the television set turned on. Even creepier, if you assume an average day consists of at least eight hours away from the house spent at work, and another eight hours spent sleeping (and here I’m assuming the television is off, not a safe assumption, I’m sure), then that means the damn thing is on almost the entire time people are home.

Come August, it will be five years since I moved to Seattle, and five years since I’ve owned a television set. Am I proud of this? No, not really. It’s not something about which I give much thought, frankly. But TV Turn-Off Week is coming up, and running across the information on MonkeyFilter got me to thinking about it.

First, a bit of a confession. As an adult, I never did watch much television, so giving it up when I moved out here was no big deal. Come to think of it, I can’t really remember watching much television regularly at all since about 1990. I can remember there were specific shows I liked to catch, especially early on, but as the years went by, I did so less and less, and I haven’t had cable television since the eighties. My last year in Orlando, I do remember watching what seemed to me to be an inordinate amount of television, but that consisted of making sure I caught Frontline and Nova each week on PBS, not exactly a heavy habit. When I moved out here I did so with a limited budget—and a packed subcompact—so leaving it behind was a no-brainer. TVs are so cheap I figured I could always replace it if I so had the urge.

Well, that was five years ago, and I’m still waiting for the urge to show up. And as time goes by, I like the idea of owning one less and less. My disdain for it has grown to Olympian proportions. In large part this has to do with advertising. One thing I’ve noticed by refusing to watch TV is that my tolerance of ads has dropped through the floor; I hate modern advertising with a passion bordering on the absurd.

People look at you funny when you admit you don’t own a television. “But what do you do?” they’ll gasp, a horrified look of pity on their faces. If you own a television set and ask me this, you have no idea how much of an absolute and utter idiot this makes you appear to me. What I do is not spend my time staring blankly at a glowing blue pane of glass. I don’t mean to offend those reading the blog who DO watch television, I just get so damn pissed off when choosing not to do so is treated as some sort of social disease. People get so damn offended when they find out you don’t own a set.

But enough ranting. The folks over at TV Turn-Off.org have some interesting bits of information, and I think they’re fighting a noble, if pointless, battle. One of their PDFs is where I snagged that little nugget at the top of the entry. But nothing gets American’s eyes to glaze over more quickly than a list of facts and figures. The truth is boring, ladies and gentleman, especially when it’s competing with exciting, rewarding fare like reality television. You know, the stuff that really enriches the mind and improves us as human beings.

You know the biggest change I’ve noticed since giving up TV? I have a lot less fear.

One of the hallmarks of television’s early career was a belief that it would act as a benign influence, educating people, showing them our similarities outweigh our differences. I’d argue just the opposite happened. Sure, the perceived size of the world shrank, but what glues eyeballs to the box is excitement. And there’s no denying that murder, death, and horror are more exciting than peace, love, and happiness. Take your local news for instance. Sucks, doesn’t it? If you watch it regularly, what you see are local news stations salivating over every murder, the more gruesome the better, brought to you in lovingly intimate detail. The truth of the matter is, most humans aren’t evil. They’re not bad people. In point of fact most of us are good at heart, trying our damnedest to make our way in the world without stepping on the toes of others. In short, most people are like you. But if you watch television news, you’d never know it. You’ll also never see local news bothering to point out that crime is at near historic lows. Why would they? If you’re not scared, you might actually get up and go outside. And where’s the advertising revenue in that? TV teaches us to fear.

There’s a lot more to this as you might expect of any activity that absorbs one third of the average American’s day. To think such activity doesn’t have strong effects is to lift denial to a level beyond laughable. You’ve no doubt noticed recently the media have been raising the alarm about obesity, as well they should. We’re fat. Disgustingly so. I lay the blame squarely at the feet of television. You cannot spend hours every day sitting in front of the television, bombarded with unceasing ads for junk food, and fail to begin putting on the pounds. Every hour spent in front of the television is an hour robbed from doing something else (not eating, for one). Want to lose weight? Shoot the TV. I’m not kidding.

Television’s effect on American culture has been profound, to say the least. Our habits, beliefs, architecture, lifestyles, slang, have all been remolded in its image. I do not say this as some anti-television zealot. That I’m not. Hell, I download and watch episodes of Lost and Battlestar Galactica from the iTunes music store (when I can remember to, that is), and I enjoy watching them. A little teevee isn’t gonna kill ya. What I am is not a zealot, but a trained historian and cultural anthropologist (Why else do you think I’m a computer technician? You sure as hell don’t make a living as an anthropologist) Observing cultures is what I do. It’s what I find fascinating. All you have to do is observe, and think. It’s easy. You could do it too. Just turn off the TV for a week, and see how much you’ll learn.

 

 

Ramblings | Permanent Link

Crystal Mountain Spring

18 Apr, 2006
Posted at 00.10 PDT

Adapted from a recent email to family and friends:

As mentioned in the previous post, I was most fortunate on Easter Sunday to visit Crystal Mountain ski resort in the Cascades here in Washington state. It’s where I first tried out snowboarding, with initially mixed results, but also where I really began falling in love with it. As with most mad endeavors, it was close friends that conned me into it. And thank goodness for close friends. Thanks, guys!

Sunday marked Crystal Mountain’s last regular day of the season, and it turned out to be nearly perfect for it. It felt a little strange—leaving and returning with the sun still in the sky was decidedly novel for something that I’ve been associating with Winter—but despite the relative warmth of the morning in Seattle, up in the mountains it was quite chilly. Better yet, a late season storm had dumped 15 inches of fresh powder on the slopes over the previous two days, setting the stage for a fantastically beautiful day when Sunday turned out bright and sunny.

A few months ago I picked up a snowboard, an Arbor A-Frame 162, and have been thrilled with it to no end. Snowboards tend to be garishly designed, and this one, with its strong echoes of mid-century design, immediately appealed to my sense of aesthetics. Without fail, it draws comments every time I take it out.

The amount of gear needed for this sport is astounding to a Southerner.

• Snowboard Boots
• Thermal socks
• Thermal underwear, tops and bottoms
• Snow pants
• Layers of shirts
• Snow jacket
• Goggles
• Helmet
• Gloves
• Snowboard (!)
• Bindings

A shot taken from the lifts on the way up.

This is where I’m heading on that chairlift; down into the valley is where I’ll be going. The snowpack is more or less the city’s water supply, and this year has been a very good season for snow. There’s nine FEET of snow. The day was gloriously beautiful.

A shot against the back-country on a later run. That’s Mt. Rainier over my shoulder, almost entirely hidden by clouds — it’s so tall it generates its own local weather patterns. In this shot I’m currently at just under 6,900 feet. Rainier is more than twice that high at 14,400 feet. After this photo I end up descending about half a mile before catching the chairlifts back up.

Crystal Mountain, with those 15 inches of fresh powder, was sheer heaven for snowboarding, even for people like me who haven’t quite got the hang of the nuances of boarding in it. Even if you take a tumble — and I’m still taking several (note the helmet) — powder’s so soft you come up laughing. It’s like being eight years old again. And it’s much better than going superman onto hard snow when you catch the front edge of the board and are sent flinging forward. Last time I went I hit so hard I knocked the morning clear out of me. I was disoriented for half an hour, and boy did THAT one hurt. This is certainly NOT a sport for the faint of heart. I think it took me two weeks or more to recover from that incident, and my knee is still giving twinges.

Still, it had one good effect: I spent Sunday on the slopes taking much more care with my boarding. What got me in trouble last time was having a new insanely fast board with a fresh coat of wax. The tempation to point it downhill and let ‘er rip was too much for me, and I ended up finding myself at speeds beyond my skill level. Ouch. Sunday’s trip by contrast was full of pleasant surprises. It was the first time I noticed myself not getting particularly tensed up over the lifts, which are a bane to noobs on boards. I was pleased that my last trip of the season marked the first time I took no tumbles getting off the lifts. It was that, weirdly enough, which finally made me feel like I was really getting comfortable on the board. Sunday was also my first trip out to the mountains which didn’t result in any new and unsual pains from various strained bits and pieces, just pleasantly sore muscles.

No new injuries on the season’s last outing means I’ll just look forward that much more eagerly to the next one this coming winter. In the meantime, boy do I wish Summer would hurry up and get here.

 

 

Pacific Northwest | Permanent Link

SpringBoard

15 Apr, 2006
Posted at 20.50 PDT

Friends of mine have heard me say more than once that Florida has only two seasons: Summer, and Not-Summer. And though much the rest of the country may find it hard to believe, it’s already Summer in Florida. Daily highs are pushing 90°F and the humidity…well, let’s just say being outside is like walking through a big wet sponge. I speak from bitter experience.

You grow up there, and it doesn’t seem the least bit odd, naturally. Now that I’m here in Seattle, I appreciate Spring, but it still throws me for a loop. I look at the calendar and think I should be in shorts and a tee-shirt, not throwing on a jacket every time I leave the house.

Still, Spring is obviously in full swing here. Despite the need for a light jacket, the temperatures are definitely on the rise, and the plants are simply going batshitinsane. It’s a glorious time to be here, especially considering you can taste the anticipation of shorts, warmth, and three months of gloriously cloud-free skies. I love summertime in Seattle, and am practically stamping my foot with impatience for it to get here.

Which makes tomorrow’s planned adventure seem decidedly odd. For while Seattle is drowning in flowers and getting warmer every day, the mountains to the East are still—once you get high enough—quite chilly. And this weekend the region has seen a weather pattern develop unusually late in the year that is dumping crazy amounts of powder on the slopes.

So as described in an earlier post, I’m heading out snowboarding. In the middle of Spring. Très étrange. Last time I got out on the slopes I was so eager to test my limits and my new board, I ended up taking a nasty tumble that knocked my memory of the morning clean out of me, twisted my knee, and left my ribs either cracked or severely bruised. Needless to say, though excited, I am anticipating tackling the mountainside this time with considerably more…reserved…enthusiasm. At least I can count on the twinges in my ribs to remind me to curb my desire to push so hard.

Still, it is terribly exciting to be going out one final time this season. Tomorrow is the last day until next Winter for most the ski resorts around here, and it’ll be nice to get all my new gear out for one last hurrah. See you on the slopes.

 

 

Pacific Northwest | Permanent Link

Hoh Redux

12 Apr, 2006
Posted at 22.37 PDT

My friend Wesa has posted a bunch of pics over on her blog of the recent trip to the Hoh rain forest my group of friends and I took, and I mentioned in an earlier post. She’s got a much better eye (and camera) for pics than I do.

That’s me holding up the tree.

 

 

Pacific Northwest | Permanent Link

Biking

11 Apr, 2006
Posted at 21.19 PDT

Last year my friend Ben began biking to work, which inspired me to haul my own trusty Peugeot out and begin doing so as well. The first day nearly killed me, but I stuck with it, and was pleasantly surprised (as I always am when I start exercising in some fashion), at just how damn fast it got easier.

Now I live on Capitol Hill in Seattle, which tops out at over 400 feet above sea level, and is only a mile from Puget Sound, so you can imagine how steep it actually is. Luckily I only live about 300 feet up the hill, so I didn’t have quite as far to go as I might have. As you might expect, when I started biking to and from work, I ended up pushing the bike up the steepest stretches (and Seattle has some insanely steep hills). But it was most surprising to find myself biking up the Hill without once getting off the bike in less than two weeks, the improvement was that fast. Over the course of the summer I found myself putting more than 600 miles on the bike. I was extremely proud of this.

Fast forward six months. Hardcore cyclists bike throughout Seattle’s long chilly winter.

I am not one of those people. I hate cold ears.

Spring is now in the air though, and the mornings are finally getting warm enough that a light beanie under the helmet keeps the ears nicely warm, so last week I started biking in to work again. I did not have high hopes about my fitness. True, I took up snowboarding this winter (at the age of 36! Go me!), but that activity wasn’t exactly regular, so though I wasn’t completely sedentary through the winter, I might as well have been.

Day one: I bike in to work, and call it quits at the last long hill. Biking home, I do the same thing coming up Capitol Hill when I hit the nasty steep stretch on Belmont Ave—two blocks of sheer vertical hell. This does not suprise me in the least.

Day two: I bike the whole way, both to and from work.

This does surprise me. My response, as I near the top of the hill is a loud “Holy shit!” For some reason this startles the pedestrian on the sidewalk. Part of my surprise was at thinking “I can do this,” as I approached the hill. The other part was being right.

It puzzled me at first that last year it took me nearly two weeks to get fit enough to take that hill, but this year I was up to it in only two days, mainly because you always hear how quickly the human body loses its fitness when sedentary. But then I realized why this was a bit different—or at least I think this may be the reason—and that was that biking strengthens the legs just as much as it strengthens the cardiovascular system. And while I know without a doubt I’ve lost the cardiovascular fitness I’d gained from several months of summer biking, my legs have been getting used every day in my wanderings around Capitol Hill. I’m guessing that the simple act of walking around every day has slowed the loss of the muscle mass and strength gained by last year’s biking. And that’s pretty cool. Basically, I got a free pass over the winter. This year I get to start the biking season with a head start.

After only three trips to and from work, an eight mile round-trip, I am already seeing the improvements. Now I just have to finally ditch the car.

 

 

Seattle | Permanent Link

Sustainable Seattle

10 Apr, 2006
Posted at 23.27 PDT

There have been rumblings in the news lately about the Seattle city government’s desire to finalize a new growth plan for the city core, pushing ideas of mixed-use neighborhoods with higher population densities. I hadn’t paid it too much attention myself.

Well, tonight I had the good-fortune to be dragged to see Jaime Lerner, former mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, speak on sustainable cities and their planning. I’d forgotten about the talk until late this afternoon, but despite feeling a bit rushed initially, ended up enjoying it immensely. M. Lerner is a big proponent of mixed-use planning, something with which I whole-heartedly agree. If this vision is what we here in Seattle can begin to orchestrate for ourselves, I will be very excited indeed to continue living here.

Curitiba has what appears to be a rather well-deserved reputation as a near paragon of urban planning. Just reading about it makes me want to learn Portuguese and move. (And I was pleasantly surprised to just now learn it is a sister city of my old hometown, Orlando, Fla., ironically a city with a near total lack of urban-planning and plague to all the subsequent ills such a failure of foresight causes).

It was, at any rate, extremely encouraging to see such a large turnout at Benaroya Hall for M Lerner’s talk. I only hope that it portends a new commitment by my beloved, adopted city to sustainable, high-density, mixed-use development. It seems the city is always comparing itself unfavorably with Portland or Vancouver, as if we’re under some obligation to mimic their planning process, or are on some sort of timetable. The truth of the matter is that though Seattle has made some bad choices, it has an awful lot going for it as well. It is relatively compact for such a large city, and with its vital core bound on both sides by water, I think we’ll find it easier to turn our focus back from the suburbs on the outlying areas inward to the city proper where it belongs. The suburbs can fend for themselves, as far as I’m concerned.

One thing I’ve developed since moving to Seattle is a profound distaste for suburbia. What I see when I end up traveling through the ‘burbs is a horrifying waste of what used to be prime real estate: farmland. There was a time—and it is fast approaching again—when cities were closely ringed by the farms that provided them food. Cheap oil will run out. This is not open to debate. Supplies are finite, the equation closed. And when it does, there will be a mad rush to reclaim that old land, for the cities will have to have it. But that’s the future. Ten years, twenty, it doesn’t matter right now. What does matter, what creeps me out to no end, is the sheer isolation that suburban life inflicts on people. I have many friends, and have known many people, that want nothing more than the classic two-car garage house in a subdivision.

Why?

How is such isolation even remotely desirable? And I ask that question as someone renowned among my friends for my own idiosyncratic near-hermit habits. I’m a classic introvert. Get me in a crowd of people and I feel as if I have to be “on”. For every hour I spend among people, I need an hour to decompress—by myself, thank-you-very-much. You’d think I was prime material for the American dream. But it is creepy as all hell to me to think of isolating myself in my car every day, fighting traffic out of the city, all to go to my own little isolation chamber in the ‘burbs. And to what end? To sit slack-jawed and drooling in front of the soothing blue glow of the idiot box each evening? No thank you. To me, that’s a scene straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. (Have you never even noticed just how inwardly focused the modern house is? Thank the television and auto for that. Houses used to be beautiful from the front, with large porches welcoming you into them. Now most that front is given over to the garage. Must house our mighty chariots!)

Well, once again I’ve derailed myself, going off on yet another tangential rant. If you have any interest in city planning—and you should, you’re spending your life in one, you know—I recommend looking into Jaime Lerner, even if only to familiarize yourself with some interesting ideas about the future of the city. Seattle seems to be moving towards this idea of a sustainable city, and I do hope we as a city can keep the momentum up. One thing M. Lerner made clear in his talk was that small changes can have much larger impacts on a city than you can imagine. The trick appears to be figuring out where to apply the leverage, something somewhat self-evident to be sure, but it is nice to see some concrete examples of this principle demonstrated in the city of Curitiba. Lerner’s career as an architect seems to have had a positive impact on his tenures in government. I’ve now a little more hope that Seattle will head the same direction.

On a side note, one related to my earlier comment that I find Seattle a bit more willing to raise its middle finger to trends in the rest of the country, it was surprising to learn tonight that Seattle lead the way raising its finger to the Federal government by deciding to begin implementing the Kyoto protocols on global warming despite the current Republican administration’s patently hostile stance towards doing anything at all about the problem. And more importantly still, over 130 other cities have joined us.

Seattle fuckin’ rocks.

 

 

Seattle | Permanent Link

A Quirky City

06 Apr, 2006
Posted at 22.44 PDT

It’s no secret among my friends that I love my adopted city. I moved up here from Florida in August of 2001, and haven’t regretted it in the least. The Pacific Northwest just agrees with me. There are things I miss, (and I’m sure my friends here could give you the list even better than I), above all else the daily afternoon thunderstorms throughout central Florida’s endless, stifling summer (which runs more or less from the end of March through the end of October. Don’t ever let anyone tell you seasons are tied to the solstices and equinoxes, for they patently are not. Spring equinox does not magically herald the beginning of Spring. Practically speaking, it signifies the equinox happens during Spring, not causes it).

For years my favorite daily ritual was to curl up in a cushy chair with a pot of coffee, the Florida room’s jalousie windows cracked open a bit, a copy of the New Yorker in hand, and sit back and read while the house shook and windows rattled from all the lightning strikes and subsequent booms of thunder—often striking within a mile. (I especially miss the ones where the flash of light and boom of thunder were nearly indistinguishable. Talk about getting your heart thumping!) Central Florida is the lightning capital of the world, and I miss those storms more than anything else. I remember the sharp tang of ozone in the air, and that wonderful anticipation as the distant thunder would roll in closer and closer as the anvil clouds slid across the landscape. The afternoon heat could make you feel as if you were smothering in a humid, unbreathable blanket of air, and then the first breezes would reach you, preceding the thunderstorm, and the temperature would drop twenty degrees in the space of minutes, like someone threw a switch on the outdoor’s air conditioning.

But Seattle has its charms too. For one, I have yet to see a roach here in nearly five years. People here swear they exist, but they’ve never experienced the bowel-loosening terror of hearing a Palmetto bug droning around your bedroom at two o’clock in the morning like some antediluvian insect bomber searching for a mammalian target. Yech. And the damn things fly at you when you spray them. Just what you need in the middle of the night, an insect with a kamikaze complex. If anything can make one question the existence of God, it’s a giant two inch long cockroach attacking you in the middle of the night when you try to put it out of your misery. Just what was She thinking when She dreamed up that one?

None of those here, thank goodness.

Actually, the whole point of this little entry—before I ran off on all those tangents—was supposed to be an odd thing I’ve thought about often since moving here, namely Seattle’s quirky loyalty to electric trolley buses. Electric buses used to be popular in the U.S. but are now largely confined to Europe, and a few cities here on the West coast. It’s not likely Seattle will get rid of them anytime soon as they are far more efficient at climbing the city’s insanely steep hills than conventional buses.

When I first moved here what stood out most sharply for me were the overhead electric wires running over the roads everywhere in the city. And with over 140 electric trolley buses and more than 60 miles of electrified routes, you do see them everywhere here. I wasn’t too sure what to make of them at first. Many people consider them unsightly, but their appearance has really grown on me over time. In an odd way, it makes being on the streets of the city feel more intimate. They’re only wires, but you can’t help but be aware of them in the visual background, and they end up lending an air of a roof to streets, a visual demarcation between the man-made and the limitless sky.

Seattle’s a city with a ceiling, in a manner of speaking.

The nearly silent buses that run along them also add to the city’s charm and feeling of being different from other cities in the country. You’ll often find yourself catching a glimpse of bright blue light from the corner of your eye as a bus crosses a connection on the overhead wires and spits out an arc, or hearing the twang of tension singing through the wires as the buses pass by. They seem old-fashioned, but also symbolize to me Seattle’s tendency to raise its middle finger to trends in the rest of the country. Everyone else may have succumbed to the strong-arm tactics of the major auto manufacturers, but Seattle has headed off on a bit of a transportational tangent. They’re generally slow to hop onto the bandwagon here, and that is to the residents’ credit.

At any rate, longtime residents may not notice them, but as an outsider, I certainly do. Friends complain occasionally about Seattle’s public transportation, but compared to what I remember of Orlando’s, this place is heaven. In point of fact, I’d never even been on public transportation in the U.S. until I moved here. Orlando’s was that bad.

There are enough oddities to this city to fill a double dozen future posts. Maybe I’ll get around to noting them someday.

 

 

Seattle/Quirks | Permanent Link

Windows Bites (the Dust)

06 Apr, 2006
Posted at 19.14 PDT

Naturally, immediately upon Apple releasing their beta of Boot Camp, my coworkers and I had to install it and Microsoft’s Windows on our shiny new Intel iMacs. I certainly have to give Apple credit where it is due: they have taken what is to a Mac user an inherently distateful idea, and made it pretty damn slick.

Partitioning and installation of Windows XP was as painless as it could possibly be made. Several coworkers remarked it was the fastest, smoothest install of the OS they’d ever seen. I tooled around in it a bit, getting this and that up and running, then left for the day. This morning I rebooted into XP to check it out again, and within five minutes had a Blue Screen of Death. Needless to say, I rebooted into OS X and simply deleted it.

Next!

 

 

Macintosh | Permanent Link