cloudsoup

We didn’t get quite as far as Billings, Montana last year, when we visited Yellowstone last year. I had no idea tornadoes got up that far north.

Another stab at fake tilt-shift:

Andrew Sullivan’s mad collapse continues. Today, he writes:

Here’s a fascinating glimpse into how the rest of the world is reacting to the Sarah Palin selection. It’s from a classic and peerless British weekly radio panel discussion show, called “Any Questions.”

Bea Campbell:

Let’s imagine that governor Palin was indeed a man. He wouldn’t be interesting. He’d be outrageous. She is outrageous, actually.

Andrew Sullivan, What The Brits Think Of Palin

Perhaps Sullivan has been too long away from the UK to remember who Bea Campbell is, or to grasp that she has been the subject of scorn and ridicule at least since her enthusiastic promulgation of the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic in cahoots with her partner, Judith Jones, who just happened to be the leader of Nottingham Social Services Team Four. It mightn’t have taken so long for Ms Campbell to settle into the slot reserved for harmless eccentrics if she had in fact been harmless – as a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain she excused the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia.

This is a little inadequate even as an informal polling method. From where I sit, in the UK, those Brits – MSM journos aside – paying any attention at all to the Republican VP nomination have taken to Palin in the same way people in the US have welcomed her.

Where if you support Israel you are called anti-Semitic, where promoting sharia law means you support cultural diversity, where you attack a successful working mother and a pregnant teenage mother and you call yourself a feminist and where you degrade an infant with special needs and are convinced this means you care.

Ghost of a Flea, The Left

Related:

You know your political culture has become morbidly calcified. .

. . .when an unknown moose-hunting soccer mom from some obscure town in Alaska shows up with a passel of kids and thereby presents A Clear and Present Danger to the American Left, simply because she jumbles up so many cultural categories, because she is a feminist not in the Yale Gender Studies sense but the How Do I Reload This Thang way, because she is a woman who in style, history, moxie and femininity is exactly like a normal American feminist and not an Abstract Theory feminist; because she wears makeup and heels and eats mooseburgers. . . they are going to have to kill her, and kill her quick.

Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for WAR, You know your political culture has become morbidly calcified. . .

“What’s the difference between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama?”

“One is a well turned-out, good-looking, and let’s be honest, pretty sexy piece of eye-candy. The other kills her own food.”

Notice, though, that the joke relies on the comparison being made between the Democratic Presidential nominee and the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee.

Well, exactly.

Let’s put aside for the moment Sullivan’s recent hurricane of innuendo. Let’s look just at his weirdness today:

[John] Edwards was a national figure …Palin has been several time zones away in the Alaskan wilderness

Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic, A New Paradigm?

Is Andy really trying to insinuate Palin’s unreadiness because of geography? Such an early adopter of blogging and the immediate worldwide reach of communications might think twice before mentally consigning anyone living outside the Beltway to a frightening terra incognita, populated by the Anthropophagi, and men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders, and hockey moms and all the other people trying to live lives without too much time spent thinking about their betters in DC.

This outsider meme will come back to bite Mr Sullivan on his enthusiastically-employed arse. If change is what’s wanted then why not look away from Washington?

As we’re off to Denver shortly for a tour of the … what do you call the area … the Southwestern States? The Mountain States? Well, anyway, we’re probably going to be taking in bits of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona.

A couple of years ago two black bears ran right past us as we sat picnicking in the Shenandoah National Park, Virginia.

View Larger Map

And a few years earlier, I think we very nearly came across a mountain lion (cougar) when we climbed up to a fire watch tower in the Sierra Nevada, California:

View Larger Map

On the first part of the walk, before we started climbing up the rocks to the fire tower, we walked along a sandy path between the fir trees; on the way back down, there were large cat-paw prints in the sand that hadn’t been there before.

So, bears and a cougar on previous visits to the States. I’m wondering what we might encounter this time. Colorado’s a pretty wild State so I’m breaking the list up by category. First off, the Serpentes.

Venomous Snakes

Osage Copperhead

Western Rattlesnake

Eastern Massasauga Rattlesnake

Western Pygmy Rattlesnake

Non-venomous snakes

New Mexican Blind Snake

Glossy Snake

E. Yellow Bellied Racer

Prairie Ringneck Snake

Great Plains Ratsnake

Plains Hognose Snake

Texas Nightsnake

Common Kingsnake

Milk Snake

Green Snake

W. Coachwhip

Northern Watersnake

Bullsnake/Gophersnake

Texas Longnose Snake

W. Ground Snake

S.W. Black-headed Snake

W. Blackneck Garter Snake

Texas Brown Snake

Lined Snake

Rubber Boa

On my first evening in California, I was stopped by a police car – or highway patrol car, or whatever – for shooting a stop sign. But as John Staddon observes in The Atlantic Monthly,

Consider the stop sign. It seems innocuous enough; we do need to stop from time to time. But think about how the signs are actually set up and used. For one thing, there’s the placement of the signs—off to the side of the road, often amid trees, parked cars, and other road signs; rarely right in front of the driver, where he or she should be looking.

Then there’s the sheer number of them. They sit at almost every intersection in most American neighborhoods. In some, every intersection seems to have a four-way stop. Stop signs are costly to drivers and bad for the environment: stop/start driving uses more gas, and vehicles pollute most when starting up from rest. More to the point, however, the overabundance of stop signs teaches drivers to be less observant of cross traffic and to exercise less judgment when driving—instead, they look for signs and drive according to what the signs tell them to do.

The four-way stop deserves special recognition as a masterpiece of counterproductive public-safety efforts.

John Staddon, Distracting Miss Daisy, The Atlantic Monthly

So soon I’ll be driving again in the US, around Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. I’ll try to remember not to overtake yellow buses, I’ll try to bear the crawling overtake as two lanes of cars set their cruise control speeds only the tiniest fraction apart, I’ll curse the absence of roundabout and marvel at the lights strung across intersections on crossroads miles from anywhere. and I hope i wont be adding to the stats that make the US a considerably more dangerous place to drive.