[silk] On the Road

[Bruce A. Metcalf]

Suresh wrote:



Bruce wrote:


>> Now I need to go find something constructive to post. I don't
>> suppose anyone cares for a trip report of ... 8500 miles across
>> America by car?


The road trip, sure!


I live in Orlando, Florida, in the southeast corner of the US. I wanted 
to attend a convention in Portland, Oregon, in the northeast corner.


Fortunately, my car is a Prius that gets 47 MPG (20 km/l). Add to that 
the lowest petrol prices in half a decade and it's not all bad.


Then SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed) redefines the trip. She added a week 
at Yellowstone National Park, three nights at Disneyland, and two more 
in New Orleans. So my 6000 trip is now 7000 miles (9700 to 11,000 km). 
Add six days of driving all over Yellowstone and the total comes to 8500 
miles (14,000 km), and takes us through 20 of the 48 contiguous states.


To put this in perspective, that's five days hard driving to 
Yellowstone, two more to Portland, three to Disneyland, four more to New 
Orleans, and one big 12-hour day home. Yes, fifteen of the thirty-one 
days were spent on the road.  It's a big country.


Summer is "Orange Barrel Season" on US highways. Because of cold 
winters, most construction has to be done in the warm weather. We also 
neglect our bridges, and one 100-mile detour was needed to get around 
one that fell down.


Add the use of 53-foot trailers and triples (20 to 25m long when the 
tractor is added), and you get "Orange Barrel Slalom" where you try to 
dodge the potholes, the barrels, the trucks, uneven pavements, and the 
usual assortment of bad drivers without a collision. Sure, it's fun at 
first, but after ten hours on the road it becomes rather less so.


Yellowstone is pretty damn magnificent. Primarily the cauldron of one 
monster volcano, it has 3/4 of all geothermal features on the earth. 
Geysers, bubbling mud pots, thermal pools with rainbow edges from 
extremophyle bacteria, and thousands of steaming fumaroles. Add the 
faint whiff of excitement from the potential for another explosion that 
could blanket all of North America in ash and introduce a decade-long 
winter, and you don't even need the Grizzly Bears for excitement.


In addition to all the road hazards listed above, Yellowstone also has 
bison (aka buffalo). BIG bison. 2000 pound (900 kg) bison. Bison with 
attitude. Bison who migrate from one end of the park to the other each 
year. Using the roads. At about 2mph (3 kph). Bison who couldn't care 
less if 50 cars are backed up behind them.


When a short delay, this can be fun. When it lasts half an hour, less 
so. When one day is declared "Bison on the Road" day and one gets 
delayed five times, there's hardly any fun left at all.


And the attitude I mentioned? The week before we arrived, some moron put 
her cell phone on a selfie stick and leaned up against a bison for a 
photo. She does not have a photo. She does not have an unbroken cell 
phone. She does not have all her blood on the inside any more.


Two weeks before that, a man with years of experience in the park went 
off alone to look for bears. Not smart. He got between a cow and two 
cubs and was turned into bear food.


I mean, what part of "wild animal" do these people not understand?

Same with the thermal features. In many areas, the park has built 
boardwalks to keep tourists from burning their feet or damaging the 
fragile scenery. The pools are often at the boiling point, and sometimes 
the ground is too. On one tour, our ranger guide asked what we should do 
if we see someone tossing something into a thermal pool. She didn't much 
like my answer, "Make them go get it!" but I think she wanted to.


Portland is an interesting city. It's the center of the craft beer 
movement in the US, and that has some interesting effects. For one, I'm 
used to a multi-page wine list at restaurants with perhaps half a dozen 
beers. In Portland it's just the opposite. Not bad, but takes some 
getting used to, and I often needed help from whatever the beer 
equivalent of a sommelier is.


California's I-5 is a freeway built between the Bay Area and L.A. that 
passes through nothing. Okay, there's a gas station every 20 miles, but 
that's about it. I drove it on the first day the US enacted a 55 mph (88 
kph) speed limit. It was a bit surreal to go that slow. This trip it was 
posted for 75 mph (120 kph), which was better, but still not fast enough 
considering how little there is to look at.


Speaking of nothing to look at, we traversed 850 miles (1400 km) of 
Texas. 'Nuff said.


New Orleans is an amazing city, particularly around the French Quarter. 
It has some of the most amazing food in the country surrounded by 
sidewalks that smell worse than your average sewage treatment plant.


It also has restaurant servers who take their jobs seriously. Where 
that's a rarity elsewhere, here it's the norm. If restaurant managers 
only knew how much that enhanced a meal experience (and ultimately their 
income and retention 

Re: [silk] Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

[Bruce A. Metcalf]

Thaths wrote:


"Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a
crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim:
“Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they
may convey.” ... if different languages influence our minds in different
ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but
rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=2=1=Guy%20Deutscher=cse



RELATED



- Letters: You Are What You SpeakSEPT. 10, 2010




Interesting concepts, but the article leaves me with one large question:

"Was George Orwell right or not?"

The article seems to have it both ways.

Cheers,
Bruce

Re: [silk] On the Road

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

On 13-Sep-2015, at 11:51 PM, Bruce A. Metcalf  wrote:
> 
> Add the use of 53-foot trailers and triples (20 to 25m long when the tractor 
> is added), and you get "Orange Barrel Slalom" where you try to dodge the 
> potholes, the barrels, the trucks, uneven pavements, and the usual assortment 
> of bad drivers without a collision. Sure, it's fun at first, but after ten 
> hours on the road it becomes rather less so.

Sounds just like Indian roads - with the added “people don’t care for lane 
discipline, and there are more trucks, more potholes and even more uneven 
pavements”.  Snow too, if you know where to look :)

Come on - that looks like excellent experience for a road trip out here.

Re: [silk] On the Road

[Venkat Mangudi - Silk]

Fantastic short story. Liked the bits about Bison, blood and Bears. We get
them everywhere. Super smart people with zero cq (common sense quotient)
not to be confused with IQ.

P.S: I really hate typing on iPads. Oh, don't get me started about
selecting and deleting, this email took 8 minutes 34 seconds.

On Sunday, September 13, 2015, Bruce A. Metcalf 
wrote:

> Suresh wrote:
>
>>
>> Bruce wrote:
>>>
>>> >> Now I need to go find something constructive to post. I don't
> >> suppose anyone cares for a trip report of ... 8500 miles across
> >> America by car?
>
>>
>> The road trip, sure!
>>
>
> I live in Orlando, Florida, in the southeast corner of the US. I wanted to
> attend a convention in Portland, Oregon, in the northeast corner.
>
>
Northwest, maybe?


>
>
>

Re: [silk] On the Road

[Suresh Ramasubramanian]

On 14-Sep-2015, at 6:33 AM, Venkat Mangudi - Silk  
wrote:
> 
> P.S: I really hate typing on iPads. Oh, don't get me started about
> selecting and deleting, this email took 8 minutes 34 seconds.

“bluetooth keyboard + ipad case”

http://www.cnet.com/news/keyboarding-your-ipad-best-keyboard-cases/

Re: [silk] Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

[John Sundman]

I remember encountering Whorf’s ideas, and some ideas related to them, in 
college 1970 -74.

By “related to them” I mean other ideas in the general area of cultural 
anthropology. Ideas of Levi-Strauss. Malinowski. Boaz, Mead, Geertz, Sahlins, 
etc. 

As a 19-20 year old I  found these ideas so provocative they literally made the 
hair on my arms stand up. They kept me up reading and thinking well past my 
bedtime — which was already late enough.

Sure, some of the answers that Whorf & his contemporaries came up with have not 
withstood the test of time. But their questions remain relevant.

My undergraduate degree (Hamilton College, Clinton, NY) is in Anthropology.  I 
love that shit. 

jrs

P.S. Tangentially related: I sometimes note the absence, in English, of a word 
meaning “adult son or daughter” or the plural thereof. We say “my children”, 
when said “children” are 35 years old. That’s just wrong.  But there’s no 
alternative. Sure, there is the word “offspring” and I suppose a few like it, 
but they’re like $2 bills or $1 coins. They exist but they’ve never caught on 
and there’s probably a reason for that. They don’t feel quite right. But why? 
And what is that word I’m looking for? Why doesn’t it exist?




> On Sep 13, 2015, at 11:01 PM, Bruce A. Metcalf  wrote:
> 
> Interesting concepts, but the article leaves me with one large question:
> 
> "Was George Orwell right or not?"
> 
> The article seems to have it both ways.