Meg Whitman, thanks for the $140 million! signed, the California economy

Former Silicon Valley CEO and inveterate bully Meg Whitman is now badly trailing in polls in the California governor's race, despite the $140 million cash of her personal money she donated to her campaign.

Where's all that money go, anyway? I think mostly:

• Advertising media -- radio and TV stations, newspapers, websites, direct mail, printing companies.
• Transportation and hospitality -- Hotels, restaurants, bus companies, private jet companies, fuel.
• Consultants

Most of which will be staying in California. Hey, I bought stock in two different radio broadcasters more than six months ago, and it's up about 15%. Thanks for the dough, Meg! Now that's change I can believe in!

Breaking news from the paranoid front

A website called The Survival Retreat -- you know, that well-stocked fuhrerbunker that will allow you to get through the supposedly coming apocalypse -- alerts us that now is the time to stock up on ammunition.

It just occurred to me that perhaps all the zombie movies and zombie TV shows are really about our anxiety about this eventuality, where there's total societal collapse, everyone attempts to flee, and the well-stocked right-wing Christian survivalist is vindicated. (See my entry from yesterday. (Speaking of which, the title of a post from another collapsitarian blog says it all: The US Government Is Preparing For Unlikely Events Like War, Catastrophic Collapse of Society, and Even Asteroids -- Are You?.)

Related: the Seattle Times reports that it's a buyer's market for islands. Which might help protect you from zombies, who (which?) presumably can't swim, but not from the desperate marauders imagined by the apocalyptic collapsitarians whom I mentioned yesterday.

By the way, can you guess which famous 1960s musician wrote a song about this topic? None other than Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, whose 1971 song "John Henry Bosworth" imagined the same riots, flight from the cities and suburbs, and survival on a remote piece of property -- but minus the guns and with a much more truly Christian vision than the apocalyptic right-wing Christianity the survivalists apply to their fantasies.

For another optimistic alternative, see this April 2009 NYT magazine article about what was called the Transition movement, which I linked to before. It says something about the appeal of the more horrific fantasies that they're 99 percent of what you hear and read about.

Rand Paul supporters rough up Move On demonstrator

Why would anyone be surprised that far-right wing demonstrators, whose stock in trade is rage and violent images, actually resort to violence?



Via mediaite.

Updated: The man who did the actual head-stomping has been identified as a local campaign coordinator for the Rand Paul campaign. He has verbally apologized, and has been banned from the campaign.

Collapsitarian screed: You're SOL

Last month I mentioned a book I was reading, a so-called novel which described a claque of well-prepared paranoids and how they survive the total collapse of society, including riots, cannibalism, and the end of all political and economic systems, which (according to the novel) will be a swift and inevitable consequence of our current political-economic course.

If you really want a sample of the way these people think, without slogging through that ridiculous (though self-righteously humorless) "novel," take a look at this blog post. It's on the website of the author of that book, and though the post itself was not written by the book's author, it partakes of exactly the same mentality -- only even grimmer. Here's just one sentence, following a passage in which the author says that if you do make it out of the riot-torn cities, it won't do you much good to try to hunt for food because your gunshots will attract other refugees.

Deciding not to risk your life to kill what's left of God's little animals, you might innocently/ignorantly believe that you can sustain yourself and your family by foraging for wild, edible plants, but so does every other unprepared refugee who has fled to the country, and they are all scouring the countryside, grazing on everything that is green or was green or might be green someday.

The whole thing's like that, wild-eyed and detailed to a pornographic degree -- because that's what it is, pornography. It's porn for paranoid right-wing foamers.

This apocalyptic event, known to right-wing paranoids as The End Of The World As We Know It or TEOTWAWKI*, is almost as widely predicted among the gun-crazy right wing as the Rapture itself, and perhaps even more widely yearned for -- because amid all the suffering that comes with it, the well-prepared right-wing paranoid will be vindicated. Plus, he'll get to do what he's always wanted to do, and that's kill everyone in sight that's not in his little survival group. It goes without saying that the end point of this fantasy is that the only other people around will be like-minded right-wing fascists just like him. No wonder he's looking forward to it.

* I think having an acronym that's impossible to pronounce pretty much defeats the purpose of having an acronym, especially when the phrase "The end of the world as we know it" is so easy and fun to say and even has its own rock song, which you are probably already humming along with. They also refer to this event as "When the Schumer hits the fan," apparently a cryptic anti-Semitic reference and one that allows them to piously avoid saying "shit." Because when you're planning a survival strategy that requires you to kill or leave to rot every other human being who isn't as well-armed and well-prepared as you, you'd better not cuss. The post-Schumer world, awash in blood, would be a terrible place if people took the Lord's name in vain.

Why Graham Greene traveled to Africa, Mexico, Vietnam

Reading Graham Greene's autobiography A Sort of Life -- a cheap edition I got used for a few dollars -- I got to the part where he talks about a "war on boredom" that he began to fight, during a depression of what he later understood to be his manic depression condition. As part of this war on boredom, he engaged for a season in playing Russian roulette.

The first time, he was rewarded with "an extraordinary sense of jubilation" and of his renewed life's infinite possibilities. But when he repeated the experience later -- he describes having done so several times during the fall the year when he was nineteen -- he found the exhilarating effect of the experience lessened each time. Finally, when playing Russian roulette no longer had the power to give him even an adrenaline rush -- which he frankly describes as a "drug" he had come to enjoy -- he gave up doing it.

But the interesting part is at the end of the chapter when he says that this practice of using what he calls recklessness to fight his "war on boredom" is what underlies his subsequent journeys abroad:

A kind of Russian roulette remained too a factor in my later life, so that without previous experience of Africa I went on an absurd and reckless trek through Liberia¹; it was the fear of boredom which took me to [the Mexican state of] Tabasco during the religious persecution², to a léproserie in the Congo³, to the Kikuyu reserve during the Mau-Mau insurrection⁴, to the emergency in Malaya⁵ and to the French war in Vietnam⁶. There, in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver... in the lifelong war against boredom.

The references are, of course, to Greene's later books:
(1) Journey Without Maps -- actually this journey, which he undertook with a female cousin, was done on behalf of the British secret service, to assess whether Axis powers had a foothold in Liberia.
(2) The non-fiction The Lawless Roads and the novel The Power and the Glory
(3) A Burnt-Out Case
4 and 5 -- No book that I know of, but that's probably just my ignorance.
(6) The Quiet American

Esquire, attempting to do for men what Cosmo does for women

A few weeks ago I started subscribing to the Esquire magazine website RSS feed in Google Reader, and I've been kind of dumbfounded by what I've seen there. Some very representative titles of articles:

• How to Eat Like a Man Anywhere You Go
• Why is Clint Eastwood Still The Man?
• What You Can Learn from Mad Men's Season 4 Style, a feature that includes tips such as "Your clothes begin to tell a story about your character, without overpowering it. ... Start seeing your shopping habit as opportunities to invest in your character's wardrobe" and "We ladies love a good vest because it defines your torso under the jacket. It looks rakish and cool when you pull off your jacket. Please do not scrimp on quality, though, and make sure your vest fits you perfectly."

What the fuck!? Why don't they just call the magazine Tips for Clueless Guys with Terminally Insecure Gender Identity?

That "Mad Men Style" feature alone is a masterpiece of insinuation, scorn, and impossibly high standards, written by a woman who apparently thinks men spend more time thinking about their clothes than they do about pussy. In other words, apparently Esquire is a magazine for closeted gay men.

Clint Eastwood, really?? They think 35-year-old men regard an 80-year-old as a role model?

Today's fake: British MP says her blog for constituents is "70% fiction"

Here's something I was fascinated with. A British MP has a blog she uses to publicize her activities and her positions on issues -- just as most politicians now do. But after being cleared of allegations she misled Parliament on some expense account-related matters, she blithely announced that her blog is "70 percent fiction" anyway and it shouldn't have been used as a basis for the charges, which had to do with whether she spends most of her time in London or in her district.

Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, who represents a district known as Mid Bedfordshire, said:

"My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire.

I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another.

In the light of the bullying onslaught of the Daily Telegraph (which reported the claims about her expenses) I used my blog to its best effect in reassuring my constituents of my commitment to Mid Beds. My commitment is absolute and is always my first consideration regardless of where I sleep at night. However, I have always been aware that should my personal domestic arrangements become the knowledge of my political opponents, they would be able to exaggerate that to good effect. Hence the reason for my blog and my need to reassure my constituents.

Isn't it for situations exactly like this that the word truthiness was invented?

What I love about this story is that she is completely blithe and unashamed that she told lie after lie to her own constituents. In her mind, her blog fulfilled its purpose perfectly -- it told her constituents what she wanted them to believe about her positions and activities. What actually happened is totally beside the point, to her -- the important thing is that she got her message across.

Of course, it's nothing most people don't do -- obfuscate the truth to construct a larger truth, a constructed, smoothed-out version of reality. It's what we do in letters and phone calls to our parents, because (to use a now clichéd phrase) they can't handle the truth. We do it to anyone whom we feel entitled to patronize, in other words. But for a politician to be so unapologetic when caught red-handed really does expand the boundaries of shamelessness.

Frankly it's unsurprising that it's a conservative British politician, with their sense of entitlement and scorn for what the (British) CEO of BP called "the little people," who was caught at this.

Today's fake: Amazon astroturfs pro-Kindle comments

The blog Mobylives discovered some telltale similarities in comments to a post mentioning the Kindle, leading to the inescapable conclusion that the pro-Kindle comments were generated automatically by a program looking for blog posts about the e-reader.

The Mobylives blogger wonders why the behemoth would bother when the commenter names were obviously made-up monikers like Kendall Puddephatt and Sergio Rodenbough. Probably has something to do with search engines, which don't pay attention to commenter names but do pay attention to content.

I wonder if now I'll get a bunch of pro-Kindle fake comments. If I do, I'll be sure to approve them, so readers of this blog can see.

Desert sojourn, last day

After the hike on Saturday and a dinner with Christine and other friends that night, the cold I'd had for several days started to get worse, and by the following afternoon I had a fever. So the last 24 hours have been more or less wasted. Although I'm feeling a little better now and have started packing and cleaning for my departure tomorrow morning, my last days here have been subsumed in the sensations of being ill. Today when I drove to Twentynine Palms to gas up the car and to eat lunch, I looked around at the landscape, which I have gotten used to and which I won't be seeing after today, and attempted to see it with new eyes. I'll miss the views from the house.

My trip here has been a success, in that I made good contacts and I found what could be the key to the second part of the novel. It's been a failure to the extent that I haven't followed up on some leads, more or less out of shyness or laziness. There's much more I could have done. But I'm glad I came.

Speaking of parkland

Christine was just telling me about this today, while we were hiking. I didn't know it was happening already. ¡Pobrecitos!

Biologists scour Mojave in desert tortoise roundup

More than 100 biologists and contract workers fanned out across a nearly pristine stretch of the eastern Mojave Desert on Friday to start rounding up tortoises blocking construction of the first major solar energy plant to be built on public land in Southern California. On a sunny morning in the height of tortoise courting season, the biologists methodically peered under every bush and into every hole on both sides of a two-mile lane traversing the project site. Following close behind, workers bladed century-old creosote bushes and erected fencing in areas that will soon be declared a "tortoise-free zones."

The effort in San Bernardino County's panoramic Ivanpah Valley, just north of Interstate 15 and about 40 miles southwest of Las Vegas, disrupted complex tortoise social networks and blood lines linked for centuries by dusty trails, shelters and hibernation burrows.

Federal wildlife biologists said it was needed to make way for construction of BrightSource Energy's 3,280-acre, 370-megawatt Ivanpah Solar Electric Generation System. Without the roundup, an estimated 17 federally threatened tortoises -- and an unknown number of half-dollar-sized hatchlings -- in the 913-acre initial phase of the project would have been squashed by heavy equipment. A total 36 adult tortoises are believed to inhabit the project site. "We can never say we got them all out of there — these are cryptic creatures," said Roy Murray of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service desert tortoise recovery office.

Under a plan approved by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, as many tortoises as possible will be captured, weighed, measured, photographed, blood tested, fitted with radio transmitters and housed in quarantine pens with artificial burrows. The tortoises will remain in the pens until they can be transported and released in natural settings elsewhere in the region determined to be free of disease and predators -- a process expected to take several months.

Tortoise translocation is still an experimental strategy with a dismal track record. In previous efforts, transported tortoises have shown a tendency to wander, sometimes for miles, often back toward the habitat in which they were found. The stress of handling and adapting to unfamiliar terrain renders the reptiles vulnerable to potentially lethal threats: predation by dogs, ravens and coyotes; respiratory disease, dehydration and being hit by vehicles.

But project biologist and tortoise expert Mercy Vaughn was optimistic. "Our goal is zero kill," Vaughn said.

Good luck with that. Good luck, critters.

Desert sojourn, day 30

Queen Valley, Joshua Tree National Park

Christine and I went hiking in the Queen Valley area of Joshua Tree National Park (here's the official map [PDF] if you're interested) and had a great critter experience: we saw two tarantulas. Here's video of the first one:

The second one was motionless at the edge of a hole right at the spot where the first one had appeared -- they live in holes in the ground. Christine pointed out that it was mating season and that "males usually don't survive mating... Maybe she bit his head off."

After our hike, we drove a little ways to a parking area for something called Wall Street Mill, a historical attraction we didn't actually visit. Instead, we took a different, unmarked path that led to these ruins:

She said that this used to a store of some sort and that it was open as recently as the early 1970s -- or so she had heard; there was nothing to tell us what we were looking at. We had already been talking about the officially approved activities in the park -- camping, hiking, rock climbing -- differ from the things you can do in the park but which the park staff doesn't want the public to see or know about, such as precolumbian petroglyphs and other relics. She told a story about going to an officially undocumented archeo-astronomical site -- a place where the indigenous people of the area had arranged rocks to mark astronomical events (of which Stonehenge is the best known example) -- one solstice before dawn, and being detained by park rangers who literally jumped out from behind bushes to ask what they were doing there. It was very different when the park ranger assumed his or her police function, she said, suddenly they're no longer this friendly person in a Smokey Bear hat, suddenly they're a cop. And the rangers were very uncomfortable with anyone knowing about the archaeoastronomy site.

Of course, I understand why the park wants to protect culturally significant sites and objects -- they don't want them to get trashed (like, for example, these vandalized petroglyphs). Other sites, such as the Wall Street Mill mentioned above, or events such as the shootout between two crusty pioneers, fit into the Old West narrative the park wants to present.

But the ruins of the store -- if that's what it was -- have no explanatory plaque, no signs pointing to the site, no mention of it on the map. (Here it is on Google satellite.) The 1960s aren't part of the official history.

By now we were standing beside a large piñon pine tree about a hundred yards from the ruins, close by some sheltering cliffs. "There will never be," I said, "a commemorative plaque about the 7000 great acid trips that people took while lying under this tree." And Christine laughed, because that's the kind of thing we used to do.

Desert sojourn, day 29

Local news accounts are full of the story of the hiker from Los Angeles who was lost in the national park for sex days before being found. The story seems to be everywhere, so it's no wonder it's on people's minds. When I was walking yesterday afternoon -- two hours before sunset, up a dirt road not far from the house I'm renting -- a passing pickup truck slowed and stopped and the driver made sure I was okay. "I wanted to make sure you wasn't like that lost hiker guy," he said. Nope, not lost, and not nearly as well equipped, though I do have a hat and usually a pen.

Somebody should find out what kind of pen it was, and put him in its ads.

In other local news, a bar in 29 Palms burned down on Saturday in the wee hours, and it went up so quick that they're investigating to see if it's arson. The place was a sports bar favored by Marines. Most people told me to stay out of it, which is fine -- I really like the Joshua Tree Saloon much nearer, where I went to watch the first half of a playoff baseball game last night. There the guy on the seat next to me had dialed up ten songs on the jukebox, and with each one he told me why he liked it, and often had a related anecdote. Of Buddy Holly's "That'll Be the Day," he said that Holly had written the song after seeing John Ford's The Searchers, a film where John Wayne utters that line several times -- or so my new friend said.

He went on to say: "I met John Wayne twice. The first time was at Knotts Berry Farm, they dedicated the John Wayne Theater, and he was there and made a speech. He walked by the crowd and I shook his hand, and then later we went out to the parking lot where we knew his car was -- we recognized his car -- and waited for him. When he came out with the guy who drove him, he stopped and talked with us for about fifteen minutes. Oh, he was very nice, extremely friendly. The second time was when I was working at the Disneyland Hotel. He came down the hall and got in the elevator. Then when the elevator went downstairs, I went with the maid into his room and looked at his stuff. There were some cards there with his name on them -- I wish I'd taken one but I didn't -- that he gave out to people, since he couldn't sign his name because he had arthritis. And he had two toupees. Two."

Later in the day: It was warm enough today to read outside in the shade at the end of the afternoon. I happened to look up and see a long line of birds flying from west to east. At first I thought they were ravens, but then I thought, do ravens flock? After thirty birds or so had passed, it seemed like the parade of whatever it was was over. But I looked up later and saw more -- many more. Now it was clear they were turkey vultures, the species I saw a couple weeks ago. A ragged line, lower and closer this time, flew over in the same direction, just north of east. Dozens of birds, not in a straight line, but maybe between 50 and 100 feet apart. A group of twenty or thirty would fly by, and there would be a short break, and then another forty would fly by. I tried taking pictures of them, but failed.

As the sun set, they flew lower, apparently seeking out a place to roost for the night. There are no tall trees right around here and I didn't see them circling to land. When the sun had finally set, that was the end of the overflight. Majestic!

Guy finds FBI tracking device on his car -- confirmed when FBI shows up to ask for it back

From Valleywag, emphasis mine:

On Monday, a guy in California posted pictures of an FBI tracking device his friend found on his car to the social news site Reddit. Tuesday afternoon the FBI showed up at his friend's house and demanded it back.

Reddit user Khaledthegypsy posted this picture to Reddit, asking "Does this mean the FBI is after us? ... Afifi's deceased father was a prominent member of the local Muslim community and was on a federal watchlist.

The FBI left Afifi with "You don't need to call your lawyer. Don't worry, you're boring," according to Wired.

Read the Wired story, which adds:

His discovery comes in the wake of a recent ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saying it's legal for law enforcement to secretly place a tracking device on a suspect's car without getting a warrant, even if the car is parked in a private driveway.

Speaking of surveillance: This blogger says illegal surveillance by various agencies is increasing.

Desert sojourn, day 28

On my long drive yesterday -- about seven solid hours of driving, all the way from Joshua Tree to Laughlin, NV and back (click for map) -- I listened for a while to right-wing radio foamers. I usually can't stand listening to them for more than about 30 seconds, but I was kind of a captive audience -- I couldn't get anything else on the radio. Plus, it's material for my book, which in part involves characters who have adopted a paranoid view of the state of things. Man, it's all just fear, fear, fear. One guy repeated what he said he'd heard from some right-wingers in the U.K., some tall tale about Pakistani drug gangs and their enslavement of 13 and 14 year old English girls -- white English girls, of course. The American commentator repeated this blather not only without critique but as if it were an oracle of what was about to happen in the U.S. And it all comes from building mosques, he said.

Just an example. I won't waste my time even saying how stupid it is, or how classically xenophobic and racist. What struck me was not the paranoid fantasy, but the enthusiasm -- spoken in a voice trembling with fear and loathing -- with which it was repeated and the explicit prediction that this is where the U.S. is headed.

And I had to remind myself -- Obama isn't even up for re-election for another two years! What will it be like after another two years? How far can they ratchet up the hysteria? Then I realized: that's exactly why terrorists blow shit up, to stoke exactly this kind of hysteria. Thus the right-wing foamers' talk becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or at least that seems to be the only place it leads to.

Let me say one more time -- I never can stand to listen to this stuff. So it's really true that I've never heard it before, not full-force for a couple of hours. And the millions of people who thrill to this stuff listen for hours, all day every day. Kind of an astonishing moment in the history of the U.S. experiment with democracy, really. A real test of the question "How much free speech can we stand?" (Coincidentally, the Fred Phelps cult went before the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday so the court could address just that question.)

Not reading

My new favorite blog is Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?, by Bhanu Kapil, who teaches at Naropa:

I am writing this blog post very early in the morning because my son's tooth fell out; once again, pre-elk. So the "tooth fairy" had to wait for its moment (2 a.m.) before slipping the five bucks under his pillow. Is five bucks too much? I'm so sleepy. I grew up in the same house as my parents. There was never any money, no matter how many teeth fell out. I asked my dad about it, once I'd figured out the tooth fairy was meant to be him. He said: "Nobody came to pick her up from Heathrow, so she went back to Delhi."

Actually, he said Ludhiana, but the thought of the neo-industrial North with its bright white winter-time fogs and dead bodies in the canal makes me queasy. I thought about that a long time, the idea of a person failing to fully arrive: and it is one of the few things that probably made me into a person: the idea of a person, for example, exiting the airport, then immediately, after a few gulps of light blue, freezing cold air, going back in. A cup of Nescafe from a machine, with extra milk. A country as seen through the glass. Then home, with only a description of rain to show for it, for her troubles, which were extensive, though recently have sloped off. Why not? Why shouldn't things come to an abrupt end? Just look at Mr. Elk rubbing his basket of strict attention on the dirt of the riverbank, until it sheds. Until he's no longer a random attractant. Elk porn: all the cars with Nebraska plates on the verge. Thirty-seven year old men in khaki shorts clutching their cameras close to their necks, just in case.

In other news, I haven't officially given up on Handke's "Crossing the Sierra de Gredos," but I haven't exactly been hankering to get back to it. Instead I am reading a short story -- published by itself in a chapbook, by New Directions -- by Javier Marías, "Bad Nature; or, with Elvis in Mexico." It's a lot more fun, for sure. I like reading things that are fun, who doesn't?

Desert sojourn, day 27

Intersection of Calif. Hwy 62 and U.S. 95

I worked steadily on technical writing all day and through lunch, and then, conscious that everyone back in the Bay Area had gone to Angel Island for a company picnic, I took off. I drove out east of here on State Hwy. 62, which winds through the desert until it reaches the middle of nowhere and dead-ends into U.S. 95, a junction where there is exactly nothing, aside from some directional signs. But I love that drive -- it goes through absolutely unmarked desert -- no rail line, no structures, and for much of the way, not even a line of telephone poles paralleling the road. You get the full bottom-of-the-sea sweep of the desert landscape, punctuated by brown stony mountains. There's no traffic. It's the perfect drive that says "I'm in the middle of the desert and liking it."

Then I kept going to Laughlin, where I lost $25, and turned around and drove back. Thing is, it's 185 miles one way. Luckily, I was able to catch a baseball playoff game on a station out of Salt Lake City. And when that was done, there was the Giants' station from the Bay Area, broadcasting phone-in talk sports. It's all good. I'm darned tired now though.

Desert sojourn, day 26

Looking northeast across the desert after sunset

I can't get over how the weather has changed. Four days ago it was 95 in mid-day; two days ago 85; today 70 at most. A cool breeze springs up in late afternoon. When I took a walk at sunset, I wore a jacket, just as I had for my sunrise walk this morning. I took a quick little snapshot camera video of some quail crossing the road, but it was already too dark for the video to really come out.

After dark I went to "downtown" Joshua Tree (nothing more than a concentration of stores and storefronts, many of them not actually hosting going concerns, near a crossroads) to the Crossroads Cafe. It's the closest you can come to a fairly hip joint, complete with organic salads, white hipsters in dreadlocks, and wicker baskets full of small works of art and craft. And it's the place to get a really decent sandwich. I sat and eavesdropped and made notes on my book. One quote that's going to make it in: "How do you take advantage of a current that's moving against you?" I didn't hear the reply to this probably rhetorical question, but it's just as well, the question itself speaks volumes.

Sins of silence

Daniel Ellsberg interviewed in the L.A. Times, reflecting on his role in history:

Although he was attacked by political opponents for betraying his country, Ellsberg's regret is rather that he didn't leak documents earlier -- in 1964 when the conflict was still escalating.

"I'm one of a few dozen people who could have prevented the Vietnam War," he says, drumming his finger on his wooden table with every syllable. A Democratic Congress would have turned on Johnson, he thinks, if they had seen how bogus his war justifications were. "But I was very inhibited -- I felt like I was breaking my promise."

It's human nature that troubles him the most.

"Humans are herd animals," he says. "They depend very much on being part of the group, and to remain part of the group, they'll do anything. And a much larger number will go along with anything. And the broadest form of that is keeping your mouth shut."

Desert sojourn, day 25

The weather really turned today. Though the sun was, as always, hot and oppressive in mid-day, there was a constant breeze. By 5:30 p.m. when I went outside to read, I actually had to go inside after half an hour because I was too cold. I've turned off all the fans and vents; now, at 7:40 p.m., I think it's about 60 degrees out, or even cooler. Practically a 30 degree difference from this time last week.

I had sort of a critter interaction this morning, if you want to count domestic pets. While I was out on my morning walk, just after sunrise, a pickup truck came bumping along the dirt road. The driver stopped and asked if I'd seen a black and white husky that he'd lost. I said no, but twenty minutes later when I was back in my neighborhood, there was the dog. I called him, and he came over and obediently sat down while I looked at his tag. Unluckily, his only tag was from a rabies vaccination at a vet in Wasilla, Alaska. Well, he was a husky, that made sense. While I was on the phone with them and they were looking up the vaccination records, the man in the pickup came along again, and the dog jumped in the back. The man explained the dog had gotten out when someone left the house earlier in the morning.

If that's not much of a native critter sighting, one very common critter I haven't mentioned yet is the quail. They're all over the place, especially in the early mornings and late afternoons, tootling along on the ground, sometimes in the classic line formation, sometimes in a sort of squad. If they're startled they take off with a very noisy flutter, much noisier than pigeons. But generally they just putter around. They're very cute.

The other very common critter is the cottontail rabbit. They're all over, too, big ones and little ones. Very shy, but you you can't help but notice when they bolt from cover and sprint across the sand until they're out of sight.

Desert sojourn, day 24

Boulders just inside Joshua Tree National Park, near my rented house

This morning marked the fourth day in a row that it was stormy in the morning. Although it wasn't very close to my house, it did look like heavy rain in Twentynine Palms. By the time I went over there for church at 10 a.m., though, it was all cleared up.

But it did mean I skipped my walk in the morning. So after working on my book this afternoon, making up characters and researching yet another area I know nothing about -- theft of native American artifacts -- I took a small walk about an hour before sunset. As I've said before, at the top of the street, half a mile from the house I'm renting, is the boundary of the national park. And you can slip through a barbed wire fence and just go walking. That's what I did for about an hour. I only got a few hundred yards into the park at the most -- there's no trail and while it's easy to go overland, you do have to thread your way between cactus, creosote bushes and boulders while also looking out for squirrel holes (ankle spraining danger) and snakes (bite danger). Quartz litters the ground. It's gorgeous, which is why it's a national park.

Nice weekend. Glad I got some work done on my book!

Desert sojourn, day 23

No walk this morning, as it was even stormier than Thursday morning. Much more rain fell, especially between here and the town of Twentynine Palms, where I was hit by a hard rain on the highway. When I got to town, the power was out. At Denny's, they let me order coffee and pie, and then, since they quickly ran out of coffee that had been made before the power was out, they began turning people away. In fact, they couldn't even charge me. I tipped the waitress anyway.

I drove with Christine today back into the Mojave Desert Preserve, where I had gone last Saturday. It was a cooler day, and when we got out to walk around at Cima and Kelso (I didn't take any pictures today) it was much more pleasant than last week. We encountered no rain on our trip. Christine resumed telling me gossip about local weirdos. I don't think she'll ever run out of stories about them.

After we got back I spent the rest of the day transcribing yesterday's interview and researching some more today about a heinous murder that happened 100 miles from here but which might just as well have happened a few miles away. Young people, drugs and alcohol, abandoned military bunker, guns -- what could possibly go wrong?

Desert sojourn, day 22

Sky (yesterday evening)

I've started taking pictures of the sky -- just the sky, with no landscape in it. I don't know if this is because I've had some startling revelation about the nature of geographic space in the desert and the irrelevance of the land, or if I'm just bored with the sights of the neighborhood.

But! today I talked to a guy in his mid-20s. He grew up here. And his parents, who have lived here for decades, live in two old L.A. streetcars that somehow got hauled up here. Well, at least the streetcars form the basis of their house. That's one thing in the neighborhood I haven't taken a picture of yet. In the desert, you don't go around taking pictures of people's houses the way you would in San Francisco, and the reason is that you don't know who lives there. It could be an ex-con, a meth-crazed Marine vet, a guy on Megan's List, a biker on the lam from his enemies, or any number of people who live out here precisely because the extra space allows them some privacy. So you don't want to stand in the road (or, if you're really suicidal, on their property) snapping pictures of their place unless you want to be looking down the barrel of a gun.

Nevertheless, the nice family who live in the streetcar-house won't shoot me, so I'll take a picture of their house some day. But I'll phone first.

Anyway, talking to the young guy was an eye opener. Every time I start asking people about their lives here they wind up telling me crazy stories about meth-crazed villains, even though I don't really ask for them. Today's beaut was about... well, see for yourself:

Ex-Marines sentenced to prison for killing in Twentynine Palms

Associated Press, 22 Aug 2004

TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. - Two former Marines were each given three-year prison sentences for the machete death of a man they lured to an off-road area in the Mojave Desert.

Alan Patterson and Justin VanMeter, both 24, were sentenced Friday in Superior Court on charges of involuntary manslaughter. Both have been in custody for two years and probably will be released within a year, prosecutors said.

They were convicted July 6 of the August 2002 killing of Daniel Smith. Prosecutors alleged that they lured the 19-year-old to the Sugar Bowl area of Twentynine Palms and took turns hacking him with a machete because they thought he was informing sheriff's deputies about their alleged drug dealing.

The other funny thing was when I told the guy where I was staying so he could come over. "Oh, the old Garrison house," he said. Thinking he was getting mixed up, I said no, the Harrison House is across the street.* "No, I know which house you mean," he said. "It used to belong to an old tweaker named Garrison. I used to babysit there." And when he walked in the door he laughed and said, "Man, this place looks much better than it used to!"

* See my entry for Sep. 20.

Today's fake: woman faked her son's cancer to glom donations

An unemployed Detroit-area woman faked a cancer diagnosis for her 12-year-old son so she could solicit donations, including $7500 from a church fundraiser. As part of the scam, she shaved his head and eyebrows and drugged him so he would appear lethargic. She told him he had leukemia. She's facing fraud and child abuse charges.