Tuesday, July 08, 2003

We traveled around southeast Alaska on a small ship. I don’t really get the point of going all the way out there and then spending your time on a floating high-rise casino that lets you disembark mostly to shop the tourist traps of Juneau, but I guess some people might not like a trip built around kayaking and hikes so muddy you need special equipment (although I’m sure we can all agree that shopping for rubber boots on the Web can bring up some very interesting sites on Google).   There was plenty of mud to squelch through in the Tongass, but we had an unusually sunny week in and around the rain forest (that’s my Glamorous Italian Wife and me in the kayak). On the Fourth of July, Elijah and Sydney and their cousins and the other kids on the trip joined the parade along the boardwalk in the town of Elfin Cove (wintertime population: 8).   One afternoon we paddled in quite close to a brown bear as it munched grass in a cove by a waterfall, and watched a bald eagle pluck a fish from the water, the next day we landed via helicopter on the Patterson glacier, experiences rendered yet more remarkable by the sight of my mom in a kayak and a helicopter. We saw a big humpback whale breach the surface, almost standing on its tail, and witnessed chunks of sapphire-blue glacial ice fall into the blue-green, thousand-foot-deep Tracy Arm fjord while dozens of harbor seals lazed, unconcerned, on the drifting ice nearby.   Notes from the trip:   Favorite vegetation: Moss. Really. Southeast Alaska has some damn fine moss. Quasi-religious experiences: the long ride up Tracy Arm, and a hidden cove reached by kayak. Best lounge singer: Elijah. Don’t bother: Juneau. Read: A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. Excellent. Best meal: Dim sum at Dragonfish, Seattle. Worst airport: Sea-Tac. 6:23:25 PM    comment []

Jona Hansen: Real Patriots Talk Back. A scholarly reminder that flag-wavers don’t own the flag.   “(W)hat distinguished the cosmopolitan patriots from contemporary progressives was their harnessing of patriotic rhetoric to the cause of social and political reform…They simply did not equate "country" with a given political administration, nor with the American military.” 3:39:04 PM    comment []

frograbbitmonkey: “(T)hings began to go wrong, like people falling out of their tubes and getting dragged across trees and rocks, and cigarettes getting wet, and beer being spilled or submerged, and soon we began to speak of The River and could be heard to say things like, "The River is different every time" or "We have to respect The River because The River doesn't give a fuck about us." 2:33:13 PM    comment []

Busy having a life, Sean Gallagher made an interesting discovery: “I did not miss blogging all that much.” Word. Doc Searls may be right about the meta-message of the NYT’s information addiction article, but he’s too dismissive of its message message. Even good things can be addictive, and it felt good to rest my jones for a while.   Fortunately others are on the job, including Josh Marshall, busy transcribing and unspinning Ari Fleischer, and Monkeytime, who has been on a roll lately. 2:19:32 PM    comment []