Man I'm getting old...

After my terrific Vacation to the BWCA, I promptly got shipped off to california, Sacramento to be exact. Out here we're doing a geophysical survey to determine the geologic constituents of the levees that line many of the canals and natural rivers.

Bascially that means we're shooting electricity into the ground, the intensity of the electricity that returns helps you determine if the levees are made of sand, silt, clay, or a combination of those. Since the levees out here have been made at different time periods (some are as old as the mid-1800's) no one really knows what the fuck they are made of.

Since Hurricaine Katrina, levees have been a pretty hot topic...hence this work.

Blah blah blah.

the bottom line is that this project has been kicking my ass. I've been really tired, my back hurts, I'm experiencing muscle pain almost everywhere...

Here's a good example:





In this picture is an unending gravel road, on the right side of the gravel road you can see what looks like a really really long extension chord (the road itself is on TOP of a levee). every 15ft of this extension chord is a metal tent stake that is about 24" long. the chord is about one third of a mile long. you run a computerized electrical survey, then move the cable, reset it, and begin again.

So thats what I've been doing, laying down the cable, pounding in stakes every 15 ft and carrying electrical cables for about 1 mile per day. its heavy, continuous manual labor.

I honestly can't tell if I"m a huge wimp, or what, but at night by back has been killing me, my arms are all fucked up and I just don't have the energy that I should.

aside from my complaining here are some highlights of working in Sacramento:

1. to help with the manual labor, we've gotten some mexican laborers that work in the construction division of my company, and I've been learning alot of spanish. And by alot of spanish I mean I've been learning how to swear and how to order mexican food:

Me: "How do you say hot sauce in spanish so I can order this burrito?"

Luis: "You don't know spanish, Pinche Retardado!!!" (you fucking retard)

Me: " yeah I know by that's why I'm asking you, now stop fucking around"

Luis: "ahh, well say to the burrito man that you think he is 'Apedrear'" (you smell of shit)

The burrito guy: "fuck both of you, no burritos for you..."

Me: "thanks luis"


I've also been wearing a red terrycloth sweatband on my head...not the most fashionable thing, but try carrying an 810 foot long cable for 5 miles in 95 degree weather and just dealing with the stinging pain of sweat in your eyes without a sweatband.

Luis: "Joe you don't seem gay or anything, but you have alot of fucking gay shit, eh Puto!"

Me: "thanks luis"

Usually when I do field work there is quite a bit of Rated X language, but this last week I've been learning to be offensive in 2 languages.


2. One of the field hands, Jesse, is really into hot rods, lowriders, etc... and I've been talking about it with him. I have a decent interest in these things too, ever since my groundbreaking work on the video game "Midnight run, the Dub edition".

You see, I don't have a low rider in real life, but I've been able to create several sweet customs by playing a video game on the xbox. In the game, you earn money by winning races, and you use the money to buy parts for your lowrider. The game is fortunate enough to use the real logos and parts from companies.

So Jesse will say something like "I'm workin' in a nice '66 chevy nova with 15" giovanni's, I'm getting a new gearbox for it this weekend"

and I'll reply with "Oh shit, nice! are those the 15 spoke giovanni's and the GSM 5 speed gearbox?" (I only know what he's talking about because in teh videogame I've upgraded my '75 monte carlo with the same giovanni's and a high performance gearbox)

and he'll say "oh yeah man, and I"M fucking getting airbags too"

me: "sick man, are you ridin' the airbags on the whole suspension or are you lowerin' the front end" ( I also got airbags for my sweet virtual monte carlo)

Luis: "I"m lowerin' just the front"

me: 'sick man, SICK."

Luis: "Yeah"


so bascially I kinda sound like I've built a lowrider, even though I 1. don't own a lowrider, 2. I don't work on cars, and 3. I've just playing the video game.

If Jesse Knew I was such a poseur he might say "Te meto la verga por el osico para que te calles el pinche puto osico hijo de perra!" and don't ask me to translate that sentence, it took me like 45 minutes to remember how to say it...and believe me, that sentence is VERY graphic.

Anyway, writing this has made it alot easier to forget about the muscle pain in my body, I hope to have more soon.

One of the Best Places On Earth!

As previously posted on Cataclasite, I went to the Boundary waters for my friend Mike's Bachelor Party (Congrats again mike!).

Iv'e been going to the boundary waters pretty much on a yearly basis with some high school friends for at least 5 years now and I have to admit, Its pretty much one of the best places on earth.

Lots of people move to colorado for the outdoors, and indeed, there's alot about Colorado that is beautiful. Its one of the reasons I enjoy living here. But I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I firmly believe that there is NOTHING in colorado that can rival the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.


If you've never been, do it before you can't.

My friend Doug took a 360 view of us in a canoe at about 6 pm when the sun was starting to go down over the lake(Click for large version):



Look close at the picture, note how there is NO ONE else visible ANYWHERE. In the BWCA, if you travel in about 10 -15 miles, you will get to pristine lakes that are rarely touched by anyone, and you can spend a week camping without seeing anyone else...its fucking perfect.

Look close in this picture, you'll see

1. cool, clean lake water
2. peaceful breeze
3. a lake where our canoe is the ONLY boat, and indeed, probably the only boat around for about 3 lakes.
4. the only sounds are of Loons, wind in the trees, and the gentle sound of your paddle in the water
5. A tshirt that depicts a moose with a huge boner (yes, thats the official bachelor party uniform)

Now check out this picture of the maroon bells in colorado:



look close...you can't really see it, but behind the camera in this picture is:

1. 3 retired artists making oil paintings
2. 4 EXTREME mountain climbers who are wearing no less than $1500 in technical gear who are gonna make it to the top of a mountain that you can walk up carrying a six pack of miller light and wearing flip flops
3. 6 tourists from wisconsin, and 4 denver locals on their cell phones saying shit like "OMG guess where I am?!" and "Yeah, we totally climbed up to this crazy lake, shits fucking sweet, heh"
4. 6 sets of yuppies with shock-absorbing telescoping super-walking sticks! FOR ADVANCED WALKING CAPAbility!
5. the bumper to bumper traffic that you will sit in from Vail colorado all the way to denver. Total Mileage: 96 miles, total travel time: 7 hours


Don't get me wrong, I love colorado, I moved here because it's unbelievably fucking beautiful, but if you really ask me where I'd go for the SUPREME outdoor experience; Its in northern Minnesota, tucked away in an area that most people in the United States have never heard of.

Of Gay Men, Bears, and Big Bombs

So I haven't posted much in a long time, most all of my loyal readers must have gone on to reading other, more productive and interesting bloggers.

To be honest, I haven't really felt like posting anything lately. here's a brief rundown on what the writers of cataclasite have been doing/have been finding out:

-Hiked in Missouri, picked wood-ticks off of various parts of body, became familiar with midwestern humidity

-Hung out on an Air Force base in an old bombing range drilling boreholes - yeah, drilling holes in the ground with big machines in areas where active ordnance may still lurk, luckily I didn't blow up. Scariest thing: The Military guide who was to assess our drilling locations for bombs said on the first day of the work "I've been in 2 wars [vietnam and the first gulf war] and I've seen alot of shit, I'm ready to die, so..."

..."But Mr. Military Man, I'm not sure I'm ready to die!"

-Found out that the Man who helped to the electrical work on the man room in our house is a HUGE brokeback mountain fan. His partner is a prop-person in the big world of hollywood, and he actually wears Heath Ledgers Jacket from the movie, and yeah, he drives that tourquise old pickup truck from the movie too. He also has the Lost Ark of the Covannent (yeah, the one from Indiana Jones!) in his goddamn living room!

-Hiked around an Area near Rifle Colorado (see Picture Below), spent much of my hiking time trying to not die from a massive bear attack....I saw 2 bears, one that could easily have killed me. I'm about 160 lbs, this bear was as tall as me, because it stood up to look at me and it was my height...and I'm almost sure its probably been in more street-fights than me. I was alone, with a mapping book, a backpack, and a can of smoked oysters (which were horrible!)

Now I know what your thinking..."Joe Stop being such a big wimpy idiot...your not gonna get attacked by a bear." Here's my problem with that: when I'm out field mapping geology, I don't pay attention to where I'm going alot of times...I've walked and fallen down talus slopes before. Also, I never really say anything aloud, I'm pretty quiet... I could completely see me walking up to a bear cub, have it run up a tree and then the mother bear would come crashing through the underbrush and force me to use the Tang-Soo-Do Korean Mu-Duk-Kwan I learned in second grade.

-I'm getting ready for my vacation to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness...which is one of my all time favorite places.

Thats about it for right now! I'll post more after I have like 3 more cups of coffee.





Can you see the bear in this picture?!

I want one of the jump suits!

Human Tetris:





I think this one's my favorite:


Postworthy

NO camera...and stuck in Missouri

Today is my only day off here in Missouri, I had some crap written in my field book that I wanted to post, but I'll do it tonight. I plan on going out to play today.

"I call it the flying elbow"

Awesome.

Long Kansas Drives....

well well well.

Remember how I mentioned that the project I was working on was pretty contentious because of some lawsuits?

well, no sooner did I get out to the site in Missouri, when the lawyers shut down the work again. I drove all the way to missouri, had one 3 hour long meeting, and drove all the way back to Denver.

funny how that works out.

I did manage to get this picture though:



its the ruins of an old Lead Mining site near where the project was. Though it's completely unrelated to our job site, it looked kinda interesting.

Apparently back quite a time ago, there were significant Galena deposits mixed in with the geology I briefly mentioned before.

If I end up getting to go back out to this site, I hope to find out more.

I made it to my destination

Today’s story about the growing general weirdness of Missouri is brought to you by White Castle Hamburgers…of which I am currently not eating.

The town I will be staying in, is like a lot of random small towns: the central super Walmart is contained in a valley, with its satellite applebee’s, chili’s, and famous footwear’s all gazing back at it from the surrounding low hills.

I’m lucky enough to be at a Super8 motel right smack dab in the middle of the action!

Today’s Case in Point:

I arrived early, and the room wasn’t ready yet, so I had a few hours to kill around town. I drove around for a short time, going into the tractor supply store, the walmart, and walked along the decimated and empty “historic downtown” as much as I could.

I also stopped outside “MEGASPORTS!”…and thought I could try to find something interesting in there. Since I’m sporty, and this was MEGASPORTS! I could get all megasporty or some shit.

SO Im’ walking into MEGASPORTS, and I look over and see a kid sitting in the backseat of a chevy cavalier. I only looked for a second, and it looked like he had a display box of sweat-wristbands. He had the box in his lap, and had scattered hundreds of little packages of sweat-bands around him by accident, and now he was trying to put them all back in.

I didn’t really think about it except “damn, that’s a lot of sweatbands”…and went into the store. After spending about 5 minutes in MEGASPORTS!, which was dominated mainly by shotguns, bows and arrows, and wildlife trophies, including a fox (who shoots foxes?), I left.

When I walked back to my car, the kid in the Chevy was still there. This time I took a better look and saw, to my amazement, that the box he had on his lap was actually an ultra-case of white castle hamburgers, sliders. He was eating them and then leaving the empty boxes scattered around him. There must’ve been like a hundred hamburgers in there.

Christ almighty, I didn’t know you could buy that many hamburgers at once…and where was this kids family? Someone needed to stop the kid in the parking lot of MEGASPORTS! From exploding…but that person wasn’t me.

Fuck it, my room was ready and I had beers to drink and emails to check.

I start work tomorrow, maybe I’ll get some hamburgers.

Highways and Bibles

After a really uneventful Drive through Kansas to get here, I entered Missouri last night at about 6 pm, and drove to the Camelot Inn in Higgensburg Missouri. Which, I’m not sure yet, may just be the asshole of the west-central portion of Missouri.

I drove all day, and when I was tired, I pulled off onto a random highway exit and went into the Camelot Inn. About 10 miles previous, I saw a spectacular billboard, light up so bright it almost eclipsed the adjacent “PASSIONS: ADULT SUPERSTORE” and “I’m Glad my Mom chose adoption and not abortion” signs.

The billboard for the Camelot Inn promised free wireless internet, a pool, and most importantly for me, a lounge. I thought, “great, after 600 miles of Kansas or whatever the fuck distance it is, I’ll get a room, grab a cold beer in the lounge and drift off to sleep”.

When I arrived, I was really dissapointed. It was this busted, bullshit little motor lodge, in which the front-desk lady was sitting squarely behind bulletproof glass. “The lounge is closed until further notice”, and “Intranets?!”

I managed to pick up a 32-oz can of High Life from the next door gas station and went to my room. Now, I was told by a few people at work that Missouri is kinda mixed. There’s a Midwestern feel there, but its also mixed with a lot of southern influence. Think of the kitchy behind-the-times feeling of portions of the upper Midwest, mixed with the blissful ignorance and shallow kindness of southern baptist community.

I’m not sure if I agree with those descriptions yet, but whatever...

Anyhow, I was sitting in my room, and I noticed a few things that really bothered me right away:

1. someone had left burn marks from a cigarette on the toilet seat…not the lid for the toilet, not the tank lid either, but on the actual seat, the part where you put your butt… So think about it, someone was smoking, needed to set a cigarette down, and chose quite possibly the most disgusting horizontal surface possible. The burn mark was about ½ inch long…suggesting it had been there for a few minutes. What the fuck? If your done with your cig. Butt, why not throw it into the toilet? Or flick it outside? Why set it down such that it lays on the toilet seat and burns a little trench into the cheap plastic? And, did this person pick it back up and finish it off? Fuuuck I don't want to meet that person.

2. There was a bible out on the nightstand. It was left open to a passage…it had obviously been sitting open to this page for quite some time as the book was flat-open, and the spine was cracked. I figured it was the standard “john 3:16” page where you go up to the open bible, glance down at how jesus died for your sins, and you were supposed to think “how thoughtful and clever to leave the bible open to this page”…

When I got up close, I noticed it was not the John 3:16 page, but strangely, Songs of Solomon, Chapter 7:

How beautiful your feet in sandals, O prince’s Daughter, The curves of your thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a skilful workman.
Your navel is a rounded goblet; it lacks no blended beverage. Your waist is a heap of wheat set about with lilies.
Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle.
Your Neck is like an ivory tower, your eyes like the pools in heshbon by the gate of bath rabbim.
Your head crowns you like Mount Carmel, and the hair of your head is like purple; a kind is held captive by your tresses.
How fair and how plesant you are, O love, with your delights!
This stature of yours is like a palm tree, and your breasts like its clusters.
I said, “I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of its branches” Let now your breasts be like clusters of the vine, the fragrance of your breath like apples…..

Amazing. Why that chapter? I Have never read that before yesterday, and I sat in my room sipping my beer thinking “why this page?” Did two religious people come here to have sex and enticed each other with the bible…accidentally leaving the pages open? Did some lonesome trucker stop and read this passage like an overweight secretary reads a romance novel? Did the cleaning staff leave the bible open like this…of so, why this passage?

No matter how many explanations for leaving the bible open to this page, I can't seem to find a scenario that isn't disturbing.


Despite the completely awkwardness of my hotel room, combined with the tangy smell of feet in humid-southern-summer evening, I managed to sleep fairly well and drove off from the Camelot at 7 am.




Is this your fucking bible?

Hopefully I'll have some fun stuff to post about too...

Man. Well…I’m back on the road for a while for work. I’m working on a pretty spicy project out here in Missouri. One in which the client who we are working against is getting sued, possibly in criminal court, for some environmental damage that has already been caused.

It’s a sad tale for sure, one that could have been a lot worse had circumstances been different. Unfortunately I can’t tell you all much about in because it is under investigation and I’m not going to broasdcast the details to the legion of Cataclasite readers.

Suffice it to say that my role will be the same as almost all my roles in my job: I’ll be drilling wells, putting in geophysical lines, and doing some geologic mapping…

The job site is interesting, its situated on some Pre-cambrian rhyolitic bedrock that sat as at topographic high for much of the Phanerozoic. In short, the job site is on an island in the middle of a Cambrian ocean….so there are very old rocks there, they are VERY highly weathered, and nearby are lots of beach-deposit on-lap rocks.

I don’t know much about the site yet, since I haven’t been there, but I’m actually looking forward to it because of the geology present. I hope to have some pictures soon.

check out this picture

Check out this pic of me (on the right) with a coworker riding out at centennial cone, I smoked that fool on the uphills...




(of course he destroyed me on the downhills)

Ugh....I feel sick

Here's how much of a lazy bastard I am:

Rather than construct a real lunch to take to work today, I took a sandwich bag, filled it with oreo cookies, grabbed another bag, filled it with crackers and left.

So here I am, just jacked out on coffee and oreo cookies. shaking a bit from the sugar, nervous and extremely aggressive from the coffee.

how nutritious!

*EDIT*

yes, Karen did pack me a nice bowl of fruit, which I ate when I got here. but since eating the oreo's, I can't remember back to like 9 am.

Speaking of Long Unfunny Desolate Roads...

We ended up catching about 35 seconds of Larry the Cable Guy on comedy central last night…and let me tell you this, I’d LOVE to read a book about Larry the Cable Guy living in a post-global annihilated world forced to live on by himself…walking around looking for food, scavenging, and quietly saying to himself “alright” and “git-r-done” like a crazy bag-lady talking to her shoes as if they were her pets. Can someone find this guy on the street and give him the Nancy Kerrigan treatment please?!?!

…We clicked to comedy central, Larry commented about butt-cracks or some busted fucking 5th grade joke, and then they cut to an audience reaction shot of a prissy 40-something successful-looking woman in a business suit heartily clapping and laughing. She turned to her friend next to her and mouthed the word “ooh, Perfect”. As if Larry’s comparison of a butt-crack to the grand canyon was crafted and delivered with the sincerity and honesty of a wine-maker with a glass of his best Cabernet. “ohh Perfect”. Riiight. Fuck you larry.

It was so lame I actually choked a bit on my cheese and rosemary cracker anti-pasta and had to take a sip from my glass of imported Czech microbrew at the same time I was changing the channel. Perfect.

The Road

I finished up “The Road” by Cormick Macarthy. I haven’t read anything else by him, but I really liked The Road, despite its endorsement by Oprah’s book club.

SPOILER ALERT!

To be sure, the novel is pretty brutal…its set in the future, in a mad-max like world where everything; cities, forests, land has been reduced to a ash-drifted wasteland where the survivors of some global devastation (asteroid, nuclear war – you’re never actually told the cause of the annihilation) are forced to live in.

An unnamed man and a little boy are forced down a road, scavenging for their lives, all the time avoiding death squads and being un-trusting of anyone else on the road. They see the brutal realities of humanity starving to death, the inhumane treatment of people, the sheer desolation and destruction of the world, and they are forced to deal with their own existence. In a post-world-ending annihilation, what is the point of life?

Of course the reason I think this book earned Oprah’s endorsement is because of the relationship of the man and boy…They live entirely for each other…that is the point of their lives. The boy is dependent on the man, and the man is entirely dependent on the boy. In a future so bleak, what else is there? If you cannot depend on the people you are traveling with, if their well-being is not a reason for living, then what is the reason for living?

Towards the end of the book you worry about the boy “what if the man dies? That kid is fucked!” and “if the boy dies, the man might as well drown himself rather than spend the rest of his waking life lamenting the death of all that he loved and walking around looking for shitty canned meats”. Both are depressing prospects that left me wondering as much about what happens after the last scene in the book as what really does happen at the end.

I’ve never read anything else by Cormick McCarthy, and I really liked the bleak, blunt, and dramatic writing style..everything is short, quick and to the point. Its written like how I imagined the world he created to be…no need for long flowery descriptions of scenery or of the characters, because the earth is just dead, and the characters are faceless minions.

I read one Amazon reviewer where someone hated the book because if you turn to every page you can’t escape this list of adjectives: Dark, ashen, dead, grey, dying, and damp….but I think that’s precisely the point, how else can you describe the landscape? How more bleak and foreboding can you make it besides using these stark and repetitive descriptions? The world IS Dark, ashen, dead, grey, dying, and damp. There’s nothing else to describe, no trees, no green fields, no sunny days, no white fences, red barns and rolling country sides just dead ground. No bustling cities, no buildings, no white boats bobbing up and down on the docks, just ashen waste.


Finally, some of the discussions I’ve seen online talk about what the cause of the global destruction..if you consider for a minute that there was a HUGE meteor that hit the earth, caused global firestorms and climate change that decimated the entire world, and created the world of The Road, then how interesting is it to try and think about the meteor that killed the dinosaurs?

Is the Road similar to the Chicxulub impact 65 million years ago? Did dinosaurs face the same unending overcast skies, cold damp rains and dying plants? If you take out the characters in the road, and then put dinosaurs in there, have like 3 beers and turn the lights out while listening to GodSpeed! You Black Emperor albums, you can really imagine what it might have been like back at the end of the Cretaceous.

What if it really happens to humans - the earth is hit by an asteroid? Are we truly as susceptible to destruction as the Dinosaurs? Are our populations and technological successes, similar to the size and proliferation of dinosaurs (and indeed, much of the life during the Mesozoic), as fragile as they turned out to be? What if humanities destiny is merely to occupy a sequence of fractured strata that will be later unearthed and pondered like so many geologists now?

I went on an SEPM field trip (the 1997 trip) in the Midwest back in college and the trip was focused on an Ordovician sequence of rocks in which there are several groups of fossils present in the lower levels, and then absent in the upper, temporally later sequence. The data and interpretation presented was that there was an extinction event between these fossil sequences…I sometimes think about that sequence…it was one of the first and only times that geology was so plain, so dramatic, and so readily apparent to me. It was the first time I actually looked at rocks and what was in them and started to try and imagine and think about them as a story. Since it was so old, there wasn’t a whole lot of information about the cause of the extinction (or maybe I just don’t remember). What the hell happened to kill so many little critters?

A digression there I guess…kind of a rambling shitty post, but hey, I’m trying to get back into the swing of this shit.

Flight and Ender's Game..some reviews!

So not much has been going on in my life other than I've been reading a ton of books on the light rail, which makes me feel the need to make a little review:

MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT!

Flight – Sherman Alexie. Pretty disappointing book. The book is about a kid who affectionally calls himself zits, who in the act of perpetrating a ridiculously violent act is whisked away to inhabit the lives of other people for a brief time, including an Indian at the battle of the little bighorn, and eventually his father.

The book is short, only moderately interesting, and touches on the same themes that his previous books do - tragedy of America’s Indian policies, the social and economic disparity between modern Indians and the rest of the world, and the loss of identity that native Americans face along with the disparties, etc… In previous books I’ve read by Sherman, these themes have all been tackled with a sense of prozac humor, and some pretty gripping drama, but this book is just flabby, busted, shit.

The book actually ends with this touchy-feely hallmark ending that makes you close the back cover, look up and say “what the fuck?!”

I don’t know, Flight is a shit book by an otherwise good author. That’s all I’m gonna say about that.

Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card – This book was recommended to me by a friend, its actually really good.

In the introduction to this book, Orson Scott card mentions that he started this book as a short story based around one portion of the novel version: the battle room. That’s the thing that stuck in my head so much about it. ¾ of the book is about the battle room – a place where children learn a counter-strike-like game that is a proxy for real military training. Set in the Future when humanity is faced with destruction by an insect-like alien race, the gifted children of the world are taken to a military space station and trained to become military officers. Its great, kind of a war-games meets D.A.R.Y.L type thing...

The last ¼ of the book is a rushed add-on to the story that essentially relates ender’s military training to the real world. He finds out that much of the simulations during his training were actually real live battles. He saves the world from the aliens by directing a massive interstellar campaign that he believes is just training.

And then of course, there’s a random, completely unnecessary side plot concerning his brother and sister taking over the world by posting on internet messageboards – a task that I have already tried to accomplish myself with no avail. This was a really far-fetched idea that was 1. completely unnecessary to advance the story, and 2. wasn’t fleshed out enough to make you interested in its outcome…Ender gets done saving the world from aliens, goes home and then “oh yeah, remember your loving sister and your snotty asshole brother? Yeah…they took over the world in a non-violent coup-de-tat using nothing but fake usernames and messageboard bulletins”

There is a sequel to this book, which I think I'll pick up since I found Ender's Game to be compelling enough. hooray for SCI-FI!

A method for discussing climate change

I saw this link today, its an outline for how to talk and discuss the common misconceptions about climate change and global warming.

Its great because in addition to being a great primer on the issues associated with climate change, it can also be effective in getting stupid people to shit the hell up.

its actually pretty interesting to read.

Goodnight Sweet Prince

Christopher Hutchins gives Jerry Falwell one of the best eulogies ever.

"By The way, Its official...I can't have children!"

I'm pretty sure Saturday Night Live isn't as funny as when phil hartman was on. I'm also pretty sure Jimmy Fallon has NEVER been funny.

I did however, find this sketch to be hilarious:



good times.

Drug Tested and approved!

I went to go take a drug test today and I have to say, that I can't fucking believe it. In addition to the myriad reasons for drug testing to being a complete fucking waste of time and money, I found the experience to be really insulting.

I mean here I am, I’m over 10 years into my professional life, I’ve passed their job interviews, and I’ve amassed a respectable resume that can easily be verified by calling both references and former employers.

But they still don’t trust you with what you choose to do in your personal life. I just got done going to a piss-broker, not even a real doctor’s office. I got to stand there with my coworkers, all of us with our piss-cups standing in line:

“empty your pockets and don’t flush the toilet when your done”

“the sink has been turned off, you can wash your hands after the test is over”

There’s nothing better than getting to see your coworkers carry a warm cup of their own urine around.

“How was it Bob? Damn, you really had to go, and all that orange in there…better lay off the carrots…oh, the temperature sticker on the side says its nice and warm!”

Its also really awesome to get to stand there with the piss-broker and sign your piss vials with your coworkers

“sign and date across the seal”

You know what? Fuck you.

And don’t give me that “if your not doing drugs, you have nothing to worry about” acceptance speech anyway. Its that same fucking apathetic mentality that put a criminal in white house. Its that fucking apathetic horseshit attitude that allowed habeas corpus to be retracted. It’s the same bullshit fucking idiocy that allowed a war to be launched without close public scrutiny. Maybe this paragraph is a stretch, but acceptance of a policy that is embarrassing, invasive, and fucking asshole just because your clean doesn’t make it right. If so, you’d probably also be in favor of a morning rectal probe at the front door, hey why not right? You’ve done nothing wrong!

And if you don’t buy my bed-wetting liberal arguments, then consider this: I’ve already done the fucking work that this drug test was for. I went out in April, performed the field work and already submitted the report draft for the work. My drug test was to verify the fact that I was fit for the field work, 1 month AFTER the field work was completed. You want to talk about a waste of time and money? Your damn right I billed the time to the client, it’s costing $100’s per hour for us to be pissing in cups for work that’s already been done. I also had to take an alcohol brethalizer test. WHAT THE FUCK FOR? In case I’m drunk? What?! If you’re a company, why not just fucking throw the $250 for the test down the toilet?


Drug testing, I’m completely against it.

GREENWASHED!

So my wife and I have been trying to be more "green" in the world. WE've planted a massive garden this year, in preparation for our "edible landscaping" - a type of xeroscape where you grow vegetables.

I also take mass transit every day.

we recycle, you know we do pretty much the same shit every other yuppie couple does.

Lately, rather than just chuck our cans into the recycling, I've been keeping them and I'm gonna turn them in at the end of the year. I figure if we turn them in ourselves, we may get like $50 or $100 - enough for a nice dinner out or something.

So I take an extra bag along with me when I take the dog for a walk and pick up all the cans in the neighborhood that I find and put them in the recycling to cash in on later.

So tonight my wife and I were arguing about who was more "green" and she threw down the gauntlet and accused me of "greenwashing"...which is the idea that I'm only cleaning up the neighborhood and recycling because it has a direct cash benefit to me. Of course I protested, and said that there are multiple motives for cleaning up the 'hood...but she wouldn't have any of it.

so there you have, I've been Greenwashed. I'm just another asshole out there tryin' to make a buck....by the way...are you done with that can of beer?





just another greenwashing yuppie asshole from denver colorado.

The Rage is relentless!

There's been alot of bootlegs and hype and talk on the internets since Rage Against the machine reunited for Coachella.

Here's one such video calling for the trial, conviction, and execution of the current administraton for treason. "And this current administration is not exception...they should be hung, and tried, and shot...for Treason"

My sentiments exactly.

I'm not ready to start rounding up people and shooting them, but a trial for treason? certainly reasonable especially when you see articles like this.

Pathetic. ridiculous. sad.

Here it is, HARDCORE

I love hardcore music...lately I've been a little out of the loop, and disenchanted by the local hardcore scene, but you only have to look as far as youtube to figure out why HARDCORE is the best genre in music ever....I FUCKING LOVE IT. its in my BONES.

the shows, the energy, the feeling, the music, the message... everything PERFECT.

Here's a compilation video from youtube for Judge's "Where it Went"....one of the best hardcore songs ever written, by one of the best underground hardcore bands EVER.



DO YOU FEEL WHAT I FEEL? DO YOU FEEL THE SAME?!....."

FRiday PUNK Video!

Here's some old school punk for people that really know and give a shit:

Stiff Little Fingers - Suspect Device LIVE!



and

Bad Brains - Intro/I Awesome 80's set live track. the crowd is insane!




and finally, Gang Green - Alcohol! This version is censored...the real chorus? "I'd RATHER DRINK THAN FUCK!" "YOU GOT THE bEER, you got the time...you got the coke, gimme a line...!!!!"

OUT OF HAND.

New Municiple Waste track!

Check the song "Headbanger Face Rip" its a new song by Municiple Waste, probably one of the best thrash bands in the world right now.

They should have a new album coming out in a few months, I can't wait to download it.

my book review: The Sparrow

So while I was in AZ, I read two books. There's not alot I usually feel like doing after work in the field...I mean besides my excercise routine of running 20 miles, and then doing my usual 200 pushups.

I read In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex by Nathaniel Philbrick and The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell.

In the Heart of the Sea was great, a quick and pretty easy read about the ramming of a whaling ship by an 85 foot sperm whale, a true story that formed the basis for Moby Dick....but thats not what this post is all about.

I also read the Sparrow...and I liked it, but I hated it. It was good, but annoying.

Here's the premise (in short): A group of people, a few of them very religious, one or two of them "spiritual", discover intelligent life on another planet. They decide to go directly there and meet this intelligent life, assuming that since one of them is a Jesuit Missionary with language skills, they are the best suited, and in a religious sense, are directed there with the help of god.

They go there and get all religous, live pleasantly, hang out with the natives, and then they realize that the basic social organization of the aliens are a lot like Human's relationship to cows. There are two races on the alien planet, one that is like cows in that they serve as a herd-like animal that the other race routinely slaughters for food.

They land and first make contact with the "cow" group. Needless to say, things go horribly wrong when they figure out that the other race kills the cows. They all die except one of them, the jesuit priest, who spends the time reconciling his horrible tragedy with god.

I think the main theme of the book is that "you just have to have faith"...sometimes bad things happen to good people, and what you EXPECT from god, isn't necessarily what god has in store for you. The Book is heavily faith-based, and written in an almost nauseatingly warm-fuzzy tone: everyone gets a hug when things are good, or when things go bad, there's this naive expectation that good is in everything, and descriptions of beauty include references to spiritual experience.

So...there you have it. God is awesome, we're all filled with such love, and sometimes shit-happens, but that can't change the awesomeness of god in the heart of the faithful.

The book is a lesson in maintaining faith in the face of life's greatest tragedies.

How else can a believer in god deal with evil in the world?

There's an even easier explanation for why there's evil: There is no god. If you step back from the story for a minute and think "if good things can happen to good people, maybe there is no god". Things can just happen, the Universe just is what it is, and we are here dealing with it. Maybe because you’re a religious zealot and can’t see past the narcissistic delusion of your faith, you couldn’t notice that you were about to get sodomized by an alien.

In fact, I think if you look at the premise of the story, and say that it was religious arrogance and ignorance that directly lead to the demise of the characters.

1. They assume at least latently that somehow god was involved with this trip, and that they were doing gods work in going to the planet.

2. They assume that social and cultural values that we have on earth are also true on other planets. They also assume that there is equality and harmony with all species on the alien planet.

3. By immersing themselves within one social group on the planet, without understanding ANYTHING about the planet itself, they place themselves in direct conflict with the cows and the carnivores.

4. They assume that the killing of the cow race of aliens is morally wrong.


If you think about it for a minute: Its ignorance of the alien planet, its culture, its intelligence, the roles of different intelligent races lead directly to their downfall. Also, Their arrogance that they should just zoom right in and start hanging out with aliens as having something to do with gods plan is ridiculous.

I’m not sure if this book was supposed to reinforce or help to bring people into a spiritual life, expose and highlight the human folly when it comes to faith, or to provide a discussion on the mere existence of god, any god.

I also browsed the Amazon.com customer reviews for this book, there are more than 400 of them, and it seems that many people thought the same thing. There are comments from actively theistic people arguing that Russell has no idea what it means to be religious and faithful, and some who say that it’s a great book that all Christians should read, even though Russell is a Jewish person.

I’m still confused by it a bit, and If I had to say anything about it in short: 1. people acting on religious principles are ASKING to be slaughtered. 2. if there’s anything we should learn from history its that religious missionary behaviors lead to death of a few at the least, and fucking genocide at the most and 3. if you want to explore new planets, new cultures, new ideas, send a scientist, not a naïve, kooky group of religious bubbleheads.

Anyone else read this book and get as frustrated as me? If not, you should read it and enlighten me.

Back in Denver; survived eating Pipe Grease!

I survived the field work I was doing! hooray! And I'm sure you're all wondering what the hell I was doing so far away from home for so long. Well, here's the fruits of my labor:



Neat. It doesn't look like much, but the thick middle post in this picture is a 520 ft. deep borehole that has a big ass length of PVC pipe in it. There's a really expensive instrument that goes into that pipe that is used to measure any horizontal offset in the borehole. Assuming the borehole is completely straight when it was drilled, any offset in the borehole measured at a later time means that the actual mesa in which the borehole resides is moving....a scary prospect, but one that needs to be monitored nonetheless.

To be sure, AZ was fun. the work was interesting, and for some reason, and maybe its just me, I've come to the realization that it is almost impossible not to play with this stuff:




its joint grease that they use to grease the threads between pieces of drill pipe. its also this cool copper-metallic thick grease on a modified toilet brush that makes you want to dunk the brush into this margarine-thick (pleasantly spreadable, even when taken right out of the fridge!), and then run around smearing it on your rental car, on other people, on the ground, on someones lunch bag, etc... I also had this hard-to-resist urge to eat it...like some wierd piss-smelling kid in elementary school eating the paste off the craft tables. It tastes kinda like strawberries.

just kidding, I didn't eat it.....ok i did..no I didn't..I just tasted it...no I didn't, but I wanted to..

MIA in Bagdad!

Sorry for almost no updates here from the AZ trip. I've been moved to Bagdad AZ, and there's no internet, no phone, nothing. Since the drillers will be late by about 1 hour today, I thought I'd check in.

I'm on a random field computer out here at the Bagdad mine. tons-of-fun. Unfortunately, where we're working is nowhere near the pit, or the big trucks, or near anything else that might be considered exciting.

After thinking I'd come out here and see tons of those HUGE-ass trucks, and massive diggers, I'm sad to say that I've seen almost nothing. THe picture I uploaded in my previous post is about all I get to see out here. No trucks Nothing.

Then...just as I was feeling like GS Schaller and the snow-leopard last night, a truck crossed my path:




neat.

AZ stories,,,

I'm down here on a field job in Wickenburg Arizona, which in addition to its ridiculous density of Upper-midwestern Retirees, has more than 4 hardware stores to service its less than 2,000 person populace. Its like if people over the age of 70 took over and started a wierd cult based around the old west, chrysler luxury sedans, and national breakfast chain restaurants (country kitchen, dennys, village inn, etc...)- instead of "children of the corn" think "elderly of the joshua trees"

WHen I got here, I had some big plans for cataclasite documenting this job because its both interesting (I'm core-logging a borehole in a HUGE active copper mine). I thought I could get a bunch of great pictures, but so far I've only been able to get this:



Today, the drill rig broke down (long story there) but suffice it to say, that I ended up in town hanging out at about 2 pm today. So, I decided to find an outdoor patio-type bar, have a beer, and read my book.

Unfortunately the only "patio" was some lawn furniture outside of the local off-track betting place that also served beer. Not suprising, at 2 pm the off-track betting bar in wickenburg AZ is full of marlboro-sucking 75 year old women.

I go in, order a modelo negro, and sit down to read. About 10 minutes later, this fucking wierd-looking, busted homeless lookin' guy comes up to me and says "I was just thinkin' about getting a new motorbike".

Now. I normally hate talking to people I don't know, no matter who they are. If they creep me out, its even worse, I thought "aww...fuck this shit." but I kept my mouth shut.

Anyway, I said "thats great man...", and immediately the guy says to me "mind if I sit down?"

..So he did. In the first 5 minutes of talking to me he mentioned that:

1. He's amazed at the property prices in wickenburg
2. the motor bike that he wants to buy is a custom trike because he got in a bad car accident and has trouble holding up a motorcycle while stopped at stop-lights or stop-signs
3. his left femur bone is actually from a cadaver as a result of said car accident
4. he doesn't like '57 chevy's but he thinks that the chick in the advertisement he's pointing to is good-lookin'
5. he also doesn't like Camero's because everyone wants one...and he's already owned a few.

At this point I was moderately interested in what he was saying, and was pretty convinced he wasn't gonna shank me, so I engaged him..

"so you've owned some camero's eh?"

"Yeah, I also owned a '73 dodge charger, some trans ams, a '69 z28 camero with a 302, and a '70 chevelle SS454"

"Is that the big block?" (I don't know shit about cars, but I think I heard that 302 or 454 or something had to do with the size of engines)

"mmmhmmm, It could do the quarter (1/4 mile drag strip?) in the low 10's (close to 10 seconds?)"

This entire time I had my field notebook with me and wrote the entire conversation down, to which this guy apparently took no notice.

"sweet car, how come you don't have it now?"

"I joined the navy...plus my parents were holding on to a Dodge dart that I drove around"

"hmm"

"yeah, I also got hold of a '69 roadrunner - you know the 440 with a six pack"

"oh, you hold on to a car that cherry" (this is actually a line from the movie tommy boy, I'm glad I worked it into a conversation...I know the words to this entire movie, and its not because I watched it over and over, the reason I do know the words is a long story...)

"yeah, there were only 460 of them ever made, because the '69 came with a 383...if you wanted one with the 440, you had to custom order it"

right at this very moment, one of those car-carrier trucks came by, and on the back of it was 3 SS454 Cameros. it was probably just a fucking crazy coincidence, but I kinda got that freaked out hitchiker-in-the-desert vibe...like I was about to find out that this entire town was populated with classic car-owning elderly people wielding hand-tools recently purchased from small hardware stores, and I'd soon be chopped up.

Luckily:

him: "well, didn't mean to talk your ear off..."

me: "alright"


and then he left.

No more Music I"m listening too..

I had to delete my automatically updating "music I'm listening too" thing, because here at my new work, I don't have administrative rights on my computer so I can't install the Last.fm software. which is too bad. Being the asshole music snob I am, I always find it ineresting to think about music, and what people are listening to.

I like hardcore music, music that I think the majority of people find fucking repellent. Thats actually one of many reasons that I like it.

The thing is, no matter how obscure a band I think I know - some hardcore band from nowhereville, USA who put out 1 7" record back in 1986 - There's always someone else who has been listening. Its kind interesting to browse the last.fm site for that reason.

Take for example the band Outspoken. They released 1 full length record, and 7" records in their career, in addition to a few songs on comps and other shit. Not a hugely popular band by any means, but If you go to Last.FM and look around there are at least 6 other people that have listened to this band in the last week....and not just any outspoken song, but "Daydream" one of the best fucking hardcore songs ever written.

There's tons of people in the world, and I know that at least 6 of them listen to the same obscure shit that I do. So there may not be a way for you to see what I'm listening to anymore on this website, but I'll still post about it anyway.

what's the point of this post? FUCK CORPORATE POLICY!

Let me see what we have here...

...Nothing. How come the guy who "runs" this stupid blog never posts anymore? He's just a contributor to the massive amounts of SHIT on the internet. Just another narcississtic scumbag who goes online, spends half of a bored afternoon customizing a shitty little "blog", posts 3 times, and then lets it ROT like so much other internet crap.

Why do people abandon blogs so quickly? its a fact that most people do, and if you glance over the stats, you might say "well Joe's over the age of 29...no one that old fucking wastes time with blogs, or if they do, they've already made the commitment to post on them seriously."

I don't know about that. There's lots of loser websites that try to provide insight as to why people stop blogging. To be honest, there's alot of reasons given, most of which seem to be at least plausible.

I think there's another reason: most people's lives are really boring. I haven't posted in a few days, going on the order of more than a week now, and I think "what can I write about on my blog"? Have I seen any interesting geology? have I done anything cool? has there been a news clip that really interested me or pissed me off?

Not really. There's been some basic things happen, work is more demanding since I took a new job..thats a big thing. I've been trying to get other stuff done, and everytime I sit down at the computer, I end up playing video games or surfing bullshit websites.

But maybe I haven't really tried. I haven't fucking thought about how to express the happenings of my life into blog form - which, to be honest, I thought I'd never have a problem with, because my entire mind-set is based around short 35 second blips of interest and attention span. Case in Point: after starting this post, I'm down here in like the 5th paragraph thinking to myself "damn, wrap it up Gilbert, your not even interested in writing anymore about this"...

The bottom-line? Cataclasite won't fall into the abyss of shitty abandoned blogs. while my posts are a bit more sparse, I'm gonna make a commitment to the many readers of this site to update it...starting with this post.

Cataclasis Confessional #1

Today's Confession: Food that I really like that is really shitty:

1. Ramen Noodles. I love these. they are nutritionally worthless, cheap, shitty, garbage, but I'd eat them everyday if people would let me.

2. Mac and Cheese. Had a serious in-depth barroom discussion about this food group on saturday. its the perfect meal. fuck you if you don't like it. The Whole grain ones from rich organic food co-ops or the cheap shit ones from the grocery store, I like them all.

3. Burger King Chicken Sandwich. yeah, I said it....I like them. I liked them before dane cook worked the bk loungepiss off.

4. Hostess Twinkies. Me and twinkies go way back, and yeah, they're made with animal fat, so your loser vegan-bullshit won't work. I've even made them from scratch before.

What do you have?

what the fuck?!?!

Geology Pic - Ice Grillz!

So I've decided to just keep posting geology shit, regardless of the day, since its obvious that I can't stick to a Friday schedule with work and such.

This past week I was out doing field work in Crested Butte. One of our tasks was to dig out the entrance to this old mine adit, go in, and service a trough that was in there.

As it turned out, the mine adit was buried under no less than 15 feet of snow - completely blocked.

After tear-assing around on snowmobiles for 2 hours, and then 1 hour of shoveling we finally were able to get into the adit, and saw some really really cool ICE.

There were two main types in the adit: nice crystalline crusts on all of the overhanging adit beams, and large completely clear stalagmites of ice that apparently formed from water dripping from the ceiling of the adit.

There's a classic question in Mineralogy: is water a mineral? according to the classic definition of a mineral, Ice is indeed a mineral, it just has a melting point much lower than the ambient air temperature in many parts of the world.

Water crystallizes in the hexagonal crystal system, which means that while it may look wierd and different and that "no two snowflakes will ever look alike", Ice crystals always have six 2-fold symmetric axes.

If you look close in the below picture (as always, click to enlarge), you'll see a number of ice crystals, and they all have six sides. Its kinda cool because ice doesn't usually form nice big crystals like this, its usually snow, or frozen amorphous ice, or in random cubes slowly cooling down a gin and tonic. To be sure, the temperature of the air in which the ice crystals form has more to do with how the crystals will look than anything. Colder air will form different ice crystals than warmer air will.



Here's another pic:



The same principle is true for alot of minerals. In fact pyrite and other sulfide minerals are often associated with copper, gold and silver. in order for gold and silver mineralization to occur, groundwater has to be at an appropriate temperature and condition. So, if you want to find the gold, look for the pyrite crystals that have the right shape. The shape of crystals is called the habit. The same mineral can occur with many different habits.


EDIT: my good friend sara (without the "h") suggested that these crystals look kinda like Depth Hoar- an ice crystal morphology that I was unfamiliar with. Apparently depth hoar forms by sublimation within snowpack, and can contribute to snow instability in avalanche prone regions.

The crystals above were formed inside of a mine adit, where humidity was higher than ambient air, and the crystals formed on the cross-beams in the adit. Could these crystals have formed in the same way as depth hoar - by the nucleation of water vapor? seems both possible and likely... Thanks for the suggestion Sara!


Another Habit in the mine adit was these wierd looking amorphous clear ice stalagmites:





I'm not exactly sure how these formed, but they were everywhere. My wife told me that they all looked like "just a bunch of dildos". Not sure if thats how my Mineralogy professor in college would have classified them, but I guess the resemblance is close enough.

Cataclasite is back online!

Though the quality posts will wait until tomorrow...

On tap:

-A belated geology pic
-My ongoing un-healthy, and self-destructive anger at Denver's mass transit system
-My completely worthless opinion on professional life
-Another Geology pic

Stay tuned!!!!!

Happy Birfthday Uranus

Uranus was discovered today in 1781.......





................ANUS!

Cataclasis, back on Haitus...again!

I've got some field work for the Crested Butte Project next week, so I won't be posting for 3 days after today.

Don't worry, I'm bringing the camera, and I intend to have a "crested butte part 4" completed soon.

this time I hope to have pictures of 3 tons of water samples being jumped by a flaming snowmobile.

stay tuned...

Audio Darwin...

Related to my previous post about podcasts, I saw a link posted on boing boing this morning: a full audiobook of Darwin's "The origin of the species".

Its a large download, but I think it'll be interesting.

The best thing is that it is free and legal.

I also think I'll check out more from Librivox...looks like they have a great catalog.

Defensible Skateboarding!

I saw this post over at digg.com today. Its about little plates, rails, and concrete blocks they are putting on benches and other raised structures. In particular, the Embarcadero in San Francisco, which was an AWESOME skate spot...featured in many skateboard highlight movies, including two movies that played a pretty important role in my high-school/college days; Hokus Pokus, and Shackle Me Not (both H-street vids).

It reminded me of my friend Dave's website, where he has a regular theme called "the anti-sit".

These things are all over denver too, There aren't any "anti-sits" that I've seen, but there are plenty of "anti-skates".

Anyhow, the blogger speaks to a larger issue here. I'm certainly not the one to be able to discuss it well, Dave would be better suited, but the question is this: These things look like shit. Personally I think they look worse than long waxed and scraped up benches that skateboarders make (of course, I'm also an aging skatebaorder). But, Is this how urban planning will continue? rather than designing your city to incorporate public elements to be naturally unsuited for skateboarding or other activities like it, most cities put up these defensive elements that look like total shit.

and its not just brackets on benches, in most of the downtown parks in denver, they've replaced the polished concrete of the parks with cinder gravels to inhibit skateboard wheels from rolling down into the parks to begin with.

It'd be really cool to see new elements and city designs rather than anti-skates and anti-sits.

of course the converse question is will skateboarders and their ilk just find away to change their styles to conform to what city designers put into use?

Friday Geology Pic: Lewis, Clark, and Imbricate thrusting

I've been re-reading Undaunted Courage by Stephan Ambrose, a historical summary of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I forgot a lot of the crazy things they did: For example, Lewis was shot in the ass right at the end of the trip.

One interesting point that Ambrose makes (aside from prefacing every fucking thing with "they were the first white men to....") is that Lewis, while being an excellent naturalist, wasn't a very good geologist. Apparently, he did have a copy of Lyell's seminal text with him, but he rarely (almost never) commented on geology.

I thought this unfortunate, because of the route they took. It happens to coincide with where I went to field camp.

Field camp, or the class that teaches you the basics of field geology - the collection of geologic data, is one of the highlights of any geologists training: Love field camp, and you will be a geologist forever, no matter what...Hate it, and you may never be a good geologist.

I personally Loved field camp, and since my own field camp experience, I've been teaching assistant on 3 years of field camp at UNLV, and another 3 years of Leading my own field classes.

Blah blah blah, who gives a shit?

...Back to lewis and clark...During the expedition, Lewis and Clark needed to meet up with the Shoshone Indians near the 3 forks area of montana in order to get a guide and information about crossing the mountains out to Idaho and Oregon from the plains of Montana. Coincidentally, The three forks area in montana is where Sacagawea was from.

its also a place where some of the best exposures of Cretaceous and Tertiary-aged faulting and folding are exposed. my field camp instructors took us up and down the jefferson river valley mapping all sorts and scales of hangingwall and footwall thrust faults, folds, regional scale folding and faulting..its truely the place where I really learned about and loved structural geology. Within the side of entire mountain flanks are exposed massive anticlines and synclines, faults, joints and other stuctures.

There's a complex geologic history in the region, that is brilliantly exposed in the mountains as you travel through the area.

I took a lot of pictures at field camp, but above is one of my favorites. It was taken in the Jefferson river valley, not more than 10 miles from the 3 forks junction. In addition to showing me much younger, skinnier, and healthier, the mountain behind me is a great example of Imbricate Thrust Faults.

if you look just to the left of my head, you see a thick whitish bed of limestone that is dipping to the right side of the picture. On the left side of my head is another thick whitish bed of limestone. Then again more to the right, but less well exposed is another whitish bed of limestone. These are THE SAME rock unit that have been pushed up and faulted next to each other. Its like if you took a piece of floor tile, cut it into pieces, stacked the pieces on top of each other, and then tilted them so that when you looked at the stack edge-on they would be all leaning against each other.

Lewis recognized how great the foothills and mountains in this area, and described them on several occasions, both on the trip to the pacific, and on the trip back. Unfortunately, he didn't know the geology, Its too bad he didn't understand what he was looking at, or his passages would probably have been twice as exciting.

Take the risk!

So a friend of mine is thinking of taking a new job in another state. She’s a bit nervous about it: taking a new job far away from home can be nerve racking and tough: will you make it? What happens if….?

Her prospect reminded me of the choices I’ve made. Thus far in life, I can honestly say I’ve never really regretted any of the big moves I’ve made. And in fact, some of the most desparate moves have turned out to be some of the best experiences.

Case in point: Right after I finished college, but before I went to graduate school, I had honestly no-fucking-clue what was gonna happen to me. I had no immediate job prospect, no where to really go live, and no way was I gonna stay in River Falls Wisconsin.

In a chance conversation with this other geology grad at my school, he mentioned going out to Denver to look for a job. I didn’t know the guy really that well, but I didn’t have anything else going on and I thought “what the hell…”

I packed up a backpack of clothes, and left my apartment in River Falls, I stayed at a friends house in Minneapolis until we were ready to go, and took off.

The geologist guy who drove out there (I didn’t own a car at the time), Tim, mentioned that he knew the rugby coach for the Colorado school of mines….on the morning we actually arrived in Denver, it turned out that Tim had the inter-collegiate directory of rugby leagues, and just randomly called the coach from a pay telephone at a gas station.

Since Tim played rugby at school, he just figured in his head that the coach of the school of mines would just let us live with him – no questions asked. Amazingly, the coach actually DID. Tim was a total fuck-up, and he would only get worse as I soon found out.

We moved into a spare bedroom with the coach, slept on the guys floor, and I called S. Morrice & Associates, an oil company that I had had an AAPG internship with the previous summer. One of the geologists at the company said that while they didn’t have any job openings, we were welcome to use their office conference room, the fax machine, and a spare computer to look for a job.

(On a Side note, the people who helped me at S. Morrice were some of the nicest and best people I’ve ever met. Despite not having a job, they hooked me up with a desk, a phone, unlimited use of the fax machines, etc..)

So there I was, a week out of school, my last $200 dwindling fast, sleeping on the floor of some random guy’s house, and in the daytime, searching for a job constantly at my former employer.

I felt pretty shitty. Tim was a fucking asshole, I didn’t own a car, I didn’t have any money, and I was leeching off of someone I had never met. Tim would drive us to the office, yell a lot, and overall just be a total dick about everything.

After about 2 weeks, the Coach from the school of mines asked us to leave (can’t blame him). I had just found a job, but because of how the job worked, I wouldn’t be paid until the beginning of the following month.

At nearly the same time, Tim had threatened to kick my ass for something, and steal all my shit. I had to get the fuck away from him, but I had nowhere to go, and only about $150. Tim is kind of a long story, but suffice it to say, I had to get away from him ASAP. Now, I wouldn’t walk across the street to piss in that motherfucker’s mouth if his teeth were on fire.

Luckily, I had JUST met this kid (Rob, another person who I owe a lot to) who was working at an internship for another oil company here in Denver, and to get away from Tim, with no money, I swallowed my last bit of pride and begged this kid to let me stay on his couch until I could get paid.

This was the catch though:

I couldn’t move in until after the weekend because the guy wouldn’t be home. This meant that I was completely homeless for a weekend. I had NO money, nowhere to go, and no prospects.

The previous summer, my Denver internship only paid $3.50 per hour, and I ended up living at a long-term shelter for the poor ($11.99 per week!) That’s another long story…that was a fucking crazy summer.

Anyhow, nowhere to go, nowhere to stay, no money, no car, nothing, just me and my backpack stashed at the office. I thought if it really came back to it, I could walk back up to the shelter and stay there for a few nights.

So what did I do? I asked out the secretary at S. Morrice and Associates. I didn’t own a car, so I told her I’d meet her downtown, and we could go to the art museum (luckily, it was free on weekends). We walked around for the day, and eventually went back to her place that night, got a pizza and watched a movie (I can’t remember to be sure, but I think she paid).

I actually fell asleep on her living room floor and woke up that morning, back hurting and cramped up….but I had managed to find a place to stay for that one night, and I met someone who was and is the awesome-est person on the planet.

That morning, I felt kinda weird, because she told me she’d drop me off where I lived, but instead I think I said something like “oh I’m supposed to meet someone for breakfast”…and I had her drop me off on east Colfax street, a major street in Denver, where I walked around and waited to get into that guys house.

I managed to survive for over a month on about $200 and no where to live. I managed to find both a job and wife – I eventually married that chick that let me stay on her floor when I was homeless once.

The moral of this story: ALWAYS take the risk, don’t be afraid of the world around you. One day you might find yourself walking the street homeless, but in the end, it might help bring together one of the most important parts of your life.

And since that time, my wife and I have moved from Denver, to Las Vegas, to Minneapolis, to Mississippi, and back to Denver. Each time it seemed to be a big risk, but none of it was a mistake. Sometimes we really struggled, but lately it’s been only getting better.

I’d never in a million years change what I’ve done.

Podcast Podcast Podcast

ok faithful readers who have Ipods....let me ask you this. Do you ever listen to podcasts?

I read an article on digg.com once that said that 90% or so of ipod owners don't listen to podcasts.

Suprisingly, I actually do. most of the time its for the bus ride to/from work. Occassionally I try out new ones, ones that end up being shit, but on the whole, I really like podcasts.

here's what I regularly check out:

Dissonance
Escape Pod
Have games, will travel
science friday
Issue oriented


I don't faithfully download every episode, but I download or 2 about every week or so. hooray!

Friday Geology Pic: Lake Superior

Lake Superior from Space!



I've been talking with some friends about a possible trip this year, and we're thinking we might head towards the Lake Superior area...specifically the North Shore (the shore that borders with northern Minnesota).

The great thing about Lake superior, is that 1. Its beautiful. the waters are blue, and overlooking the cliffs and the lake shores, the water is nice and clear.

2. Its geologically great. I went college up in the midwest, and unfortunately alot of the people and professors tend to focus on the glacial history of the area. Afterall, the glaciers created Lake superior, and its the absence of glaciers that are slowly draining the lake via isostatic rebound. But I think there's an even more elegant story along its shores, one thats far more dynamic and spans BILLIONS of years of geologic time.

Lake Superior kind of looks like a finger pointing to the southwest. Its has a long linear axis that trends NE/SW. This axis is actually the trace of what geologists call and aulacogen. Its basically a valley where the old north american tectonic plate actually tried to rip itself in half...it failed of course, and left this dramatic valley on the earth's surface. Similar events are taking place in East Africa right now, you may have heard of the east african rift.

The East African Rift is home to my single favorite volcano ever, Ol Doinyo Lengai - its lava flows BLACK and cools WHITE, definately check out the fucking sweet pics here. But I digress....

...Anyhow, much later, glaciers followed along this valley, and once they melted and receded, the valley filled up to form Lake Superior.

Whenever you drive along the North Shore, or even into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, all the rocks you see are really really really old basaltic lava flows, and related sediments. these basalts formed as the plate was tearing apart, creating large fissure eruptions. Even though these flows are older than 1.8 billion years, you can still see some of their original flow features in exposures all along the shoreline.



Picture of Shovel point at tettagouche state park along the north shore of Lake Superior (its the ridge in the back). Shovel point is a thick exposure of basalt lava formed during the aulacogenic event back in the Proterozoic.

I think thats pretty cool. Most losers will only tell you about huge glaciers forming lake superior, but Lake Superior's beginning was actually Billions of years before the glaciers ever covered the land...and this lake of water, started as a valley of hellish LAVA.

BRITNEY THREAT!

So I found out today that Britney Spears used to be in a raging hardcore band that was immensly influential in the mid 80s, Britney threat:



thanks to Brent on the deathtalk board.



Original is a Minor threat picture posted in Maximum Rock and Roll back in the day:

EARTQUAKE!!!

So this kid is becoming a micro-celebrity because of his ridiculous video blogs (especially his "Last Blog Ever") posted, but I thought this one was classic:



I don't know....

Running!

Here's an interesting article about some crazy bastards running across the Sahara desert.

I started running a few years ago, running quite a bit actually, but no where near the level these guys are at.

Despite my modest running schedule, when I am running, I often fantisize about running the badwater ultramarathon . I'm pretty sure if you finish that race you earn the official title of "badass".

I actually heard an episode of "this american life" on the badwater ultra marathon...its the toughest fucking race in the world, in addition to 135 continuous miles, it starts in death valley and has a cumulative ascent of 13,000 ft. According to the radio show, people who run it often start to hallucinate, and are completely mentally drained by the end (in addition to being completely physically exhausted).

Maybe that will be my goal, the race at badwater...of course, I have alot of running to do before that.

5 things to make your blog better

Digg.com always has an article like this posted every few days. All of them forget the key thing to a successful blog: MAKING A POST to begin with!

As you may notice, I haven't made a post in awhile. Not because I haven't thought about this website much, but rather, because I've been too lazy to write anything.

Have you ever been just sitting at a computer, knowing that there's something you should be doing, and rather than just do it, you stare, get frustrated, do more staring, and then develop this overwhelming inertia that takes at least a day to get over?

Not much has been going on in life, thats another problem. Its easy to make blog posts when your life is full of colorful happenings.

To my credit, I don't live as boring a life as you think, each and every fucking day I get up is a complete adventure. Take today for example, This morning I got up, made some coffee and watched the morning news before work....and now that I'm at work I"ve actually received 4 work related phone calls! HAHAHAHAHA! just call me "Captain Fast and Furious"!!

ugh...Religious people are crazy, part 54983204

Check This out.

I mean seriously. really.

Check out this Awesome Bathroom Sink

While perusing the volumes of great geology blogs out there there, I came across this company that makes a pretty cool looking sink for your bathroom.

Friday Geology Pic: from one volcano to the next

I was fortunate enough to go see Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens a few years ago. Both are spectacular for their own reasons. If you have the means, I'd highly recommend going and spending a few days at these places.

Rainier is immense, and one of the first times I saw some really cool glacial features close up. Its also the name of a great cheap beer thats perfect for post-field mapping geology trips.

Mount St. Helens was overwhelming. I was there before its most recent activities, everything was quiet, but even with that, the effects of the 1980 eruption were still very apparent. I'd like to go back and see it now, because even today there is potential for small activity at the Mountain.

This is a picture of me from the west flank of Mount Rainier. If you click on the picture and look in the background, right on the horizon, you can see a blue-hazed out Mountain sticking up, thats Mount St. Helens.