No.  I understand how deceptive outward appearances can be.

It has become evident from numerous discussions with my husband that I often don't even notice a person's outward appearance.  Opening a subject in conversation, he describes to me someone we met or spoke to, in terms of hair color, clothing or jewelry the person wore, facial hair, age, etc., and those things don't ring any bells for me.  Maybe if he goes on to tell me where and when we met this person, or what we talked about, I might remember who he is talking about so he can go on and tell me whatever it was he was waiting to tell me about that person.  If he recalls the person's name, that might jog my memory, or maybe not.

In general, I don't judge people. <<period  The things I observe are usually not apparent to the eye.  I pay some attention to appearances, but don't make snap judgments based on them.  Someone whose speech is slurred might be drunk, or might have a neurological disorder.  Some smelly guy in ragged dirty clothing might be homeless, or he could be on a long camping or hunting trip, or might be an undercover cop.  Someone wearing a Rolex might be rich enough to have bought it and several others like it, or it could be the only memento he has left of more prosperous times in his life, or it could have been a gift, an award for service, or something he stole.  It could even be a fake.  Not only would I not be able to detect a fake, I wouldn't even notice he was wearing a watch unless, for example, the topic of time came up and I saw him look at it.

The things I remember about people indicate how my attention was focused when I was with them.  I tend to remember what they talked about, the emotions they expressed, the judgments they made.  I suppose that focus of mine has been conditioned partially by my professional experience.  I focus on the things I need to know to determine someone's state of mind, and to counsel or advise them if that is what they want me to do.  Such a focus can sometimes be a social deficit.  Some people are creeped out or offended when a casual acquaintance fails to judge them on their carefully cultivated appearance, picking up instead on something they had been carefully concealing.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

I had been thinking for a couple of days that I need to post an update on Joshua Wade.  Last weekend, he was captured in Anchorage, following a brief standoff with police after some friends turned him in.  He has been arraigned and is being held on federal bank fraud charges for using the ATM card of missing nurse Mindy Schloss, who used to be Wade's next door neighbor.

Today on a public radio talk show, the mayor of Anchorage explained that city police had called in the feds when the state had been slow in coming to their assistance.  Lacking any evidence of kidnapping or murder, unless and until a body turns up or other evidence or testimony becomes available, bank fraud charges are the only thing keeping Joshua Wade off the street.

While I was looking at adn.com for info on the Mindy Schloss disappearance, I couldn't help noticing another story.

Body found in duct at elementary school

An update at adn.com disclosed that it was an adult male, and an alcohol container was found near the body.

Pavlov Volcano image courtesy of AVO/USGS

The Alaska Volcano Observatory placed a webcam at the FAA facility at Cold Bay, aimed toward the Pavlov Volcano.  You would need to hit a confluence of clear weather and visible activity to see anything but fog or clouds, but maybe it's worth a look.  I look several times a day, and also at the images from the Umnak Island webcam pointed toward the Cleveland Volcano.

The slope of the bluff east of the spring has big thickets of rosebushes and they are all thick with ripe hips.  I picked a few, and their absence is hardly noticeable.

Across the highway some bicycle tourists were taking a break.  Along the highway between home and the spring, we passed some State Troopers trying to manage traffic where a trailer had apparently lost a wheel, or broken free from the vehicle towing it, or both.

The seasonal shift is apparent in the stream that flows south from the spring toward Sheep Creek.

I had been thinking about blogging about my dreams, but now I can't recall the details, and this blog sorta wandered out of bounds and snowballed out of control as it is.

No, that's not precisely what I meant to say.  There are some things on which you can reliably take my word.  When I tell you about myself, my life, my thoughts and feelings, my experiences, I'm a reliable reporter.  I have nothing to hide, I'm adept at self-examination, and I put effort into accurate communication and full disclosure.  I was trying, out of fairness, to warn you that just because I criticize a book that's no reason you shouldn't read it for yourself.

This is a book I passed up many times before I picked it off the rack of paperbacks at the library.  It was published in 1991.  The lurid cover didn't appeal to me, and it was evident from the blurb that this "mystery" is a "cosy" (or "cozy"), written to a formula that apparently requires that most of the blood in the story be displayed in the cover art.  My taste runs to thrillers, and not just any thrillers, either.  If they are not well-written, I'll give them a few dozen pages to demonstrate that fact, but no more than that, before I pull out my bookmarks and return them to the library.

I would not have finished reading this book for its story alone.  Even though it won a couple of prizes for "best first mystery," the author gave away the villain too early, tried to cover it with too many and too flimsy red herrings, and gave far too much emphasis to the romance angle -- all of which faults apply in general to the cosy genre.  She actually wrote the perfect cozy, which to me means a perfectly dreadful mystery.  Like I said, I like thrillers.  The reason I read this one all the way through was that the author had done her homework and gave some vivid descriptions of the Iditarod Trail and the mushers who run it.  It would have been a better book, however, if she had paid more attention to the dogs.

The best parts of this book were the factual bits:

In real life, the race's first human fatality, in 2006, was one of those trailbreakers, Richard Strick, Jr., killed in an avalanche.  Like many of those who have traveled the Iditarod Trail, I'm addicted to it, even though I have never been on it.  I have been hearing and reading descriptions such as these of the trail and its challenges for over thirty years, and they have captured my imagination.

Rainy Pass, the highest point of the trail, where it crosses the Alaska Range; the Happy River Valley and Dalzell Gorge, where steep slopes and switchbacks are the challenges;  the long, bleak Farewell Burn with its "obstacle course of muskeg hillocks, hidden stumps, and potholes," -- these roughest sections of the trail are all in the first half of the race.  By the time a team has covered the seventy miles from Rohn checkpoint to Nikolai, "Many veterans say if you can get to Nikolai with your team and your wits intact, you've got a good chance to finish the race." (This quote is from Don Bowers's Trail Notes "Rohn to Nikolai."  Other quotes in this entry are from Murder on the Iditarod Trail.)

Martin Buser photo credit:  Melissa Laggis
I don't know how much influence his experiences on the Farewell Burn had on his choice of names for his sons, but four-time Iditarod Champion and current speed record holder Martin Buser, also four-time winner of the Leonhard Seppala Award for humanitarian dog care, named his firstborn Nikolai.  Martin's younger son, Rohn, won the 2007 Junior Iditarod and placed fourth among the older guys in the 2007 Kuskokwim 300.  Now that he is old enough to qualify, he is already signed up to compete in the 2008 Iditarod, which starts in just 177 days, right about half a year.

Seventy-seven mushers, including Rohn Buser and his dad, and 2007 Champion Lance Mackey and his brother Jason, are registered for the 2008 race.  Twenty-one of those already signed up are female, including veterans Karen Ramstead, Dee Dee Jonrowe and Lynda Plettner.   So far, 21 rookies have registered and seven entrants are from outside the U.S.

I know that the sport is controversial, that the actions of a few people have damaged the entire sport's reputation and that there are a few fanatics who think that any training or use of animals for work or sport is wrong.  Until I got to know a few mushers and a bunch of the running, pulling fiends of mixed ancestry to whom we loosely apply the name, "husky," I had my own doubts about dog racing. 

I have learned from observation that, even though you're no more likely to find perfect people or flawless behavior here than you are anywhere, the vast majority of dog mushers are dog lovers.  Exemplary dog care is what defines a winning dog team.  I have seen that abused dogs don't win races, and mushers who lose their tempers soon learn that, too.  Most importantly for me personally, if nobody had ever bred dogs to run and pull, I wouldn't have my Koji, and wouldn't have had Handout before him, or Fletcher before him.  That thought brings tears to my eyes.

What a trip!

Four nights of broken sleep, waking every hour or two, unable to get enough oxygen in without conscious effort.  How I love the times when breathing is an easy, automatic, unconscious process!  When I have to think about breathing, there's not much thought to spare for anything else.

Feverish, achy, congested, I marvel at the colors in the stuff coming out my nose.  Hey, gotta have some entertainment, something to marvel at, and when attention is focused on getting oxygen in and carbon dioxide out, the entertainment consists of whatever else goes with that.

Self-observation, the Work, is both an occupation for times when my consciousness is at its highest, and something to fall back on when I'm low.  I watch the machine, and in so doing I manage for a while to separate my being from my doing.  I experience myself as something other than a sweaty, snotty, achy lump of flesh.

Fever breaks, and endorphins that have been working overtime to keep me from shrieking and bashing my head against a wall have nothing to do except float me away on a pink cloud of euphoria.  I fall asleep again.

Next time I look at the clock, 52 minutes have passed since the last time I woke gasping for breath and looked at the clock.  Cue diaphragm... breathe in... breathe out.  Repeat as necessary.

Before dawn today, I woke again, not struggling for breath that time.  The immune system has backed off, apparently content that its job is done for now and it no longer has to make of this body a thing that nothing would want to inhabit.  Now it's up to me to clear away the neurotoxic residue, rise above the crankiness, and reorganize the tangle of sheets and blankets from which I've just crawled.

Here's something I realized during this confused episode of impairment just past:  we are halfway between Iditarods now.  I may have more to say about that later.

In my own words:

Death is part of life.  Living in fear is harder than dying.  Why fear dying?

In the words of some other people:
(In response to a Featured_Grownups challenge.)

He not busy being born is busy dying.
--Bob Dylan

Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you weep.
--Carl Sandburg

Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.
--Amelia Burr

The fear of death is more to be dreaded than death itself.
--Publilius Syrus (ca.100 BC)

Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.
--Dorothy Thompson

The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
--Elie Wiesel (Oct. 1986)

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
--Helen Keller

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.
--Isaac Asimov

Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It's the transition that's troublesome.
--Isaac Asimov

Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
--John Lennon

And thou wilt give thyself relief, if thou doest every act of thy life as if it were the last.
--Marcus Aurelius

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.
--Oscar Wilde

And now the end is near
And so I face the final curtain,
My friends, I'll say it clear,
I'll state my case of which I'm certain.
I've lived a life that's full, I've traveled each and evr'y highway
And more, much more than this, I did it my way.
--Paul Anka

In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.
--Robert Frost

People living deeply have no fear of death.
--Anais Nin

Death? Why this fuss about death. Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! ... Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.
--Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or "broken heart," is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one. 
--Charlotte Perkins Gilman    (Suicide Note, August 17, 1935)

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.
--Elbert Hubbard

Death is caused by swallowing small amounts of saliva over a long period of time.
--George Carlin

The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive.
--Robert A.Heinlein

If you live to be one hundred, you've got it made. Very few people die past that age.
--George Burns (1896-1996)

It is impossible that anything so natural, so necessary, and so universal as death, should ever have been designed by Providence as an evil to mankind.
--Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

Have the courage to live.  Anyone can die.
--Robert Cody

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
--Epicurus

Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.
--Bertolt Brecht

As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.
--Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's culture but within oneself? If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.
--Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams

Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings
and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as
taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our
blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and
as beautiful as life.
--John Muir

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
and things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art; to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead;
Therefore over the inevitable
Thou shouldst not grieve.
--Bhagavad Gita

Still scared of dying?  Let it go.  Live in Love.

The judges to whom I refer are the Xangans who, like me, participate in the StarAcademy.  Some of them, to judge by the stats, do it a lot more frequently than I do.  I pop in there less than once a week.  The activity has a challenge level for me somewhere between playing a video game (nothing at stake, but I attempt to do well at it anyway) and creative writing or capturing, cropping, and adjusting photo images, where skill is involved and not only my aesthetic sensibilities and artistic integrity are at stake but there is also the matter of my public image. 

I have enjoyed contest judging since I was in 4H and learned how to judge agricultural exhibits at the fair.  Winning ribbons in 4H judging competitions, by making judgments that matched those of more experienced judges, was as rewarding as winning ribbons for my agricultural entries.  In the Academy here, after judging an image, the judgments of those who came before me are displayed, so I can see how my judgments compare with theirs.  After a few weeks of observing this, I've reached a few conclusions.

One of the the first things I observed was that a few people give their own innocuous images a "C for caution" rating, apparently counting on that to draw attention from salacious adolescents.  I also noticed that about a third of the time, my "star" scoring (one to five stars) conforms to that of the majority, or at least to the average when the scores are spread all over the place.  In instances where my score does not conform to the majority or the average, I have noticed some patterns and can make some generalizations concerning them.

About half the people who participate in the Academy pay scant or no attention to technical or artistic merit in the photos they score, scoring them instead on content alone, using aesthetic, emotional, or other subjective criteria.  Pictures of puppies, kittens, babies, smiling groups of people, rainbows, sunsets and pretty scenery are likely to have higher overall scores than other subject matter, regardless of technical values such as lighting, composition, focus, etc.

There is apparently a core group of judges who pay attention to such things as composition and lighting, and who tend to agree with each other on most of the images and disagree with the "emotionally motivated" group when the content is inconsistent with the values of that group that prefers the kittens and rainbows.  This shows up, for example, when there is a badly framed, unfocused shot of a cute baby, with the majority of votes split between ones and fives, with sometimes a scattering of a few 2s, 3s and 4s.

I was amused to note a pattern that is fairly consistent for images that are technically excellent except for composition.  One of the most prevalent technical faults for photographers is the dead-center image.  Other faults in technique are apt to receive one- or two-star scores from the expert judges when a proliferation of five-stars shows that the image appealed to the "pretty-lovers".  This would include camera tilt or shake, for example, on images of smiling families or cute kittens.  Well-focused sunset shots with brilliant colors, and macro-images of perfect flowers, when perfectly centered, invariably have a majority of five-star scores from the pretty-lovers, but not the number of ones or twos found with images possessing different faults.   In the right-up-the-middle shots, I, and quite a few other judges, tend to comment on that particular fault by giving the image a 3-star score, right up the middle.

The unfortunate and mildly annoying result of the participation of so many otherwise indiscriminate pretty-lovers is that mediocre images remain too long alongside some truly excellent photos, and some excellent images get bumped in a hurry if just one or two people don't like the subject matter.  Today, I gave a five-star score to a beautiful and technically brilliant shot of an insect on a flower, and noted afterward that in addition to several other fives there were a bunch of low scores, presumably from people who don't like bugs.  One of my macros of the inner part of a Potentilla flower, a while back, was flying high with a number of 5-star scores, until it got shot down by one little girl giving it a one-star score and a comment of "eeeeeewww."

One place where judgments are even more widely split than usual is on the images posted by Xanga's premier plagiarist.  A blatant publicity hound, he takes images off the web, posts them to his photoblog without credit to their creators, and stars them himself so they will be featured.  They receive star scores based mostly on how people feel about the photos' content, the stories/captions that go with them, and/or the man who posts them.

Today, two of my images have been featured on Xanga's front page.  Both were posted here about four months ago.  One is an undistinguished shot of Granny Mousebreath, apparently appealing to the pretty-kitty-lovers.  The other is the skillfully cropped lucky shot I captured of two wood frogs mating, which apparently has some prurient interest, since it is not very aesthetically appealing or technically brilliant.  Some say there is no such thing as bad publicity, but if I had my druthers, I'd rather be recognized for some of my better work.

This is September's first Featured_Grownups challenge.

Maybe there's a simple explanation for life, the Universe, and everything... one, I mean, that is more than just a joke, reasonably accurate and helpful.  I put a lot of energy into finding such an explanation, in my younger years.  I don't recall precisely when that quest for a simple explanation morphed into my simply collecting an assortment of various explanations, simple and complex, reasonable and ridiculous, helpful or otherwise.

Along the way, I have encountered many other seekers who had found some explanations that suited them.  Back in the 1960s, I shot speed, smoked dope, and huffed nitrous oxide with Ken Kesey, another red-haired Virgo seeker like me.  A decade or so after that, around the time John Lennon died, Ken wrote a piece for Rolling Stone, in which he said that anyone can be adequately successful at negotiating life's twists and turns, meeting its challenges, with the Bible for a road map and I Ching for a compass.  I think that such an East-West combination has some merit, but having studied ten or a dozen different translations of the Christian Bible, having spent a few years working with I Ching, and having observed a lot of life, I think there's more to it than that.

Another thinker I respect is Dick Sutphen, who says, "Everything is Karma... or nothing is."  Now, just on the face of it, that seems to be too extreme for me, too black-and-white.  I don't see why some things couldn't be accounted for by Karma and other things by something else.  Mind you, "Karma" in Dick's reality, isn't what popular western culture has made of it, a sickeningly black-and-white, "God's gonna get you for that," synonym for divine retribution.  To him, as to me, Karma is cause-and-effect.  Just about everything I perceive can be seen to have a cause, but there is some tantalizing resonance ("the ring of truth" or at least plausibility) in the ideas of acausality and retrocausality.  I am not at this time ready to buy any all-or-nothing explanation.

I have not found any obvious holes or untruths in the Seven Huna Principles:

    1. The World Is What You Think It Is.
    2. There are no limits.
    3. Energy Flows Where Attention Goes.
    4. Now Is The Moment Of Power.
    5. To Love Is To Be Happy With (someone or something).
    6. All Power Comes From Within.
    7. Effectiveness Is The Measure Of Truth.

That does not mean that this is the one and only perfect recipe for reality.  I'm keeping an open mind.  As David Hume said, "I must confess that a man is guilty of
unpardonable arrogance who concludes, because an argument has escaped
his own investigation, that therefore it does not really exist."  My quest goes on and my collection continues to grow.  I could go on and on (and frequently I do).  I have two weeks or so in which to remember other interesting BS (belief systems) before this current challenge expires, so, for now, I will leave it at this:

My best explanation for it all:  We are All ONE.