Eastern Sierras Trip #4

Another day, another early start, this time to watch the sun rise at the famed Death Valley sand dunes. This time around there were less than a handful of other photographers in evidence so we had more of this place to ourselves than before. The dunes themselves are a bit of a hike from the road but that bit was fine. What killed me was hiking up and down these things to reach an interesting point from which to photograph. In all honesty, next time around I'd come in more from the west and do a better job of getting into a place where the hills in the background were less prominent, but having said all that it was still a wonderful location regardless.

While I was taking shots of large piles of sand, S was taking pictures of the local wildlife devouring each other, grabbing a great shot that I'll post at some future date showing a desert canine happily trotting off with an nice, fat early morning snack.

To recover, we headed to the nearby park gate (Stove Pipe Wells) in order that we too might grab breakfast, and for me to rehydrate too! Clambering up and down giant beaches without the benefit of drinking water was way more exercise & physical stress than I had originally planned to take at 6:30 am!

After eating we went to Mosaic Canyon. Supposedly, when the sun is up and striking the walls, the polished rocks are supposed to shine in different colours, looking like some sort of illuminated mosaic. Perhaps so, but it never worked for us. Nevertheless, it offered an interesting hike of a few miles into and out of the canyon and once again we had the place to ourselves for much of the time we spent there.

From there it was back to the hotel, checking-out and then driving onto Lone Pine in preparation for the next phase of our trip. To be continued ....

Eastern Sierras Trip #3

Having refuelled (us and the pickup) following the morning excursions, in the afternoon we headed off to Nevada to visit Rhyolite, the first of two ghost towns we'd hit on this trip.

While nothing like as large as Bodie, a place we'll hear more about later, Rhyolite was still worth a visit. Above is shown the remaining facade of Cook Bank, originally the largest single edifice in the town and still a dominant element on what remains of the main street. This was apparently quite a lavish property in its day, boasting Italian marble floors and rich mahogany panelling. Suffice to say, neither is in evidence these days, the whole thing comprising not much more than a few free-standing walls and associated steps. (Look here for a shot of how it was in its heyday.)

At the other end of town sits the oddity of a fairly new looking - but now completely orphaned - train station. In fact, it was completed in 1909 and was comprised of what must have been the latest in pre-fabricated building materials at the time, namely the concrete block! At the turn of that century there were, it seems, three railway lines this terminus served, including one that ran all the way to Las Vegas. Alas, all that infrastructure is long gone apart from one abandoned wooden rail car labelled for the "Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad", acting as a rather forlorn marker of what once must have been a bustling and lively place.

Eastern Sierras Trip #2

As mentioned, we headed back to Zabriske Point before dawn in order to photograph there at sunrise. Fortunately, sunrise was around 6:25 am and we were only a few minutes drive away so that prospect wasn't too onerous. Turns out that this is quite a popular spot with 5 other tripod-toting photographers already ranged across a large rock in front of the public viewing area. Conclusion? Definitely more of a sunrise spot than a sunset place, and well worth getting up early to see.

Next up we drove to Dante's View, a 5,500 foot peak not far down the road that offers a fantastic view across the Valley. (Here's a map for those of you following along at home.) Only downside is that it's cold and windy first thing in the morning and all of a sudden your cell phone actually gets a signal (though barely) so the real world intrudes once again if you are foolish enough to leave it switched on. Which I had.

After a quick side trip through the wonderfully named 20 Mule Team Canyon trail we stopped back at the hotel to grab an early lunch before heading out again in the afternoon.

Eastern Sierras Trip #1

Now I'm back from Japan and hence have a little more breathing space, I thought I'd post a few notes from our recent trip to the Sierras, along with, of course, some pictures!

We started out with the longest drive, taking a day to get from the Bay Area out to the Furnace Creek Ranch hotel in Death Valley. (We actually wanted to stay in their other, plusher property but it didn't open for another two weeks.)

To make the drive manageable, we opted for the shortest route, which even so meant something like 9.5 hours on the road. Still, apart from the long, dull stretch of I-5 down to Bakersfield then it wasn't too bad, offering more and more visual interest the closer one got to the mountains.

Despite the drive we still felt up to getting in a quick sunset shoot at Zabriske point, testament to a) it being the first day and b) the relative comfort of the seats in a Toyota Tacoma pickup! As it turned out I did all the driving on this vacation, but even after over 1,700 miles round trip my back was fine and really I wasn't particularly uncomfortable at all, at least not from the driving!

The Furnace Creek Ranch was a fine place to stay with a couple of restaurant choices and basic-but-clean accommodations. I'd happily go back, especially for the central location smack in the middle of Death Valley.

Next up ... Zabriske Point sunrise! (You saw that coming, right?)

From Tokyo With Love

While we were away last week I saw on the news that Tokyo was hit by a typhoon. The trains were knocked out, there were severe floods, and all this was accompanied by very high winds. I was glad, therefore, to have missed suffering through that storm by being in Japan one week later rather than earlier. Little did I know that this would be a mess I'd miss twice.

Somehow, the storm made its way across the Pacific largely intact, hitting the Bay Area coastline Tuesday of this week resulting in, you guessed it, sever flooding and strong winds. (Doubtless it would have stopped the trains too except the USA barely has any of those things worthy of the name any more. It did stop the cars though when they closed Highway 17)

This two day storm dumped some 10 inches of rain where we live and, thanks largely to falling trees, took power out for over a day. Yup, missed the whole shooting match once again by being in Tokyo, much to the chagrin of those left back at home to clean up the mess. Still, at least we had a decent period of notice and I was able to clean up the roof, gutters and gulleys before leaving, which seems to have helped us get through it reasonably intact.

Looks like this will be quite a wet winter. After all, it's only just started and we've had 25% of what we got in the entire season last year hit the ground already ....

Abandoned

Although the title applies to Bodie, a California gold rush ghost town, it could also be applied to this blog. Things have languished around here a bit of late, due largely to an overload of stuff to do at work and play.

On the play side, S and I just got back from a week in the eastern Sierras where half a day at Bodie was one of the highlights. As I get a free slot or two I'll post some more on the overall trip but suffice it to say we had a great time, enjoying 90 degree temperatures one day and ending up in a snowstorm two days later. Oh, and had three earthquakes within one fifteen minute spell just to remind us that we were still in California. Over the course of the trip we did about 1,720 miles, including some mild off-roading. (Kudos to Toyota for the Tacoma pickup because it turned out to be a very comfortable ride for the on-road bits and very capable for the off-road sections.)

Am presently in Tokyo, back at the weekend; posting will therefore continue to be a bit erratic!

Lords Of The Samurai

We finally got round to visiting the Lords of The Samurai exhibition this weekend, still running at the Asian Art museum in San Francisco. Spread over three rooms and featuring some 160 artifacts, this is as much as anything a history of the Hosokawa family whose personal inventory of objects forms part of the Eisei-Bunko Hosokawa collection in Tokyo, the primary source for this exhibition.

Overall I'd rank is as "interesting" rather than "must see" largely because of its narrow focus and hence limited ability to address any one aspect of samurai history and culture thoroughly. Personally, I'd have liked to see more of a logical progression of artifacts through either a time line or else more of a grouping of objects around different aspects of samurai life. (I'd also ding them for less-than-perfect presentation of the swords in this display, especially the tachi that were poorly lit and shown edge down, making it hard to study the hamon properly.)

For me, the most interesting section featured items relating to Musashi, the legendary master of the two-sword fighting technique and the best known codifier of the samurai Bushido through his (originally scroll-based) "A book of 5 Rings".

However, don't rush round to see any of it until you check the date. Tomorrow is the last day, and that of course assumes you are reading this on Saturday 19th September! And just to heap even more disappointment upon you, photography is banned, hence the photo above is of another artifact from the permanent collection in the same museum and not even something Japanese in origin. Bummer.

How Big's The Internet?

Right off the bat, let me start by saying a) I don't know and b) depends anyway on how you want to measure it. Regardless, if you believe what's written here then the answer is about "10 Empire State buildings".

The source of this was trying to answer the question of what it would take to print out the Internet, and as a by product to produce some very nifty graphics to represent the answer. Without knowing the basis for the analysis it's hard to argue one way or the other but let's assume it's correct. For me, this begs another question: how does that compare with the number of discrete books held in libraries around the world?

According to a recent Guardian article, the British Library alone has 650 km of shelf space holding some 150m items. (Which, according to the writer also poses a severe security challenge. Amongst over 9,000 items listed as "MIA" are such diverse tomes as a luxury edition of Mein Kampf, produced to mark Hitler's 50th birthday in 1939, and a medieval text on astronomy. Probably wasn't the same borrower who swiped both, mind ....)

Given , therefore, that just the books in the British Library already consume almost 200x what a printed version of the Internet supposedly would, it seems the printed word still has the upper hand despite the obvious rapid rise of the Internet as a new form of information distribution & storage.

How big's the Internet? "Small when compared to books", I suppose, but apparently growing much faster than any other form of human communication ever devised!

Fate Worse Than Death

From A Silicon Valley Life

There was an interesting segment on the BBC World Service I caught on the way to the office today. Triggered perhaps by the election of a new and more liberal government in Japan, the BBC ran a piece on the death penalty in that country and how it manages to be one of the most inhumane instances of a practice that is itself already deemed inhumane in much of the developed world.

As documented in a recent Amnesty International report, Japanese prisoners on death row suffer an number of additional deprivations above and beyond merely being confined and under sentence of death. Prisoners are, for example, forbidden to move around their cells except to use the toilet; they are not allowed to talk to their jailers - indeed, they are not even allowed to make eye contact with their captors. But perhaps the worst thing of all is that they do not know when they will be executed. The BBC reported that prisoners are only told on the morning of the day the sentence is to be applied that this will in fact be their last day on earth. Imagine what that must be like. Every day you wake up waiting to hear if this is it or if you have another day to live. Every morning, day in and day out, you face the uncertainty all over again as to whether or not you have a future that stretches out beyond lunch time.

It's hardly surprising, therefore, that Amnesty concludes that prisoners are basically being driven nuts by this approach, and I quote "The mental anguish of not knowing whether each day is to be your last on Earth is terrible enough. But Japan's justice system also sees fit to bury its death row prisoners in the most punitive regime of silence, isolation and a sheer non-existence imaginable."

The BBC interviewed a local writer as to how the Japanese people could allow this state of affairs to exist? His take was that a) it was literally a one-in-a-million group of individuals (120 inmates from a population of around 120 million) and hence largely ignored, b) these individuals had to had committed multiple murders and not just one and hence by definition seen as being the "worst of the worst", and c) that their crimes automatically proved that they were so far outside of society that they were beyond any such thing as inalienable human rights.

Historically, there's been no political will whatsoever to change this practice. However, it turns out that the change of government may well usher in a more open-minded approach. One of the new cabinet ministers has been an outspoken critic of the Japanese approach to handling death row prisoners, offering an opening to effect some much needed change.

McLaren vs. Ferrari

Despite the headline, we're not talking F1 (though with all that's going on in that world then perhaps we should be) but rather road cars. After having developed the iconic McLaren F1, still one of the most desirable cars ever produced, McLaren focused its energies instead on an increasing collaboration with Mercedes, ultimately resulting in the MB SLR McLaren. By this stage the road car partnership was going less than well with sales falling short of target and McLaren less than thrilled about the design limitations applied by Mercedes who wanted more of a GT sort of vehicle while McLaren were all hard-core sports car.

Now the divorce has been agreed, the two parties are off doing their respective things which, in the case of McLaren, looks to be very interesting indeed. With the specifications listed here, and given that the indicated price is indeed correct, then Ferrari had better watch out. The two companies have been locked in combat on the track for many years; looks like the fight will now be spilling out onto the road as well!

Update: Here's Jay Leno's take!

(BTW, apologies for the extended absence. Too much going on and too little time to try and get it all done. Work continues to be the curse of the drinking-and-otherwise-leisured classes.)