Phone Nation

Watching the passers-by holding their smart phones in front of them as they walked was like watching a parade of monks with heads bowed over their breviaries. As night settled in, I could see the glow of the screens shining upward on the faces of their owners, who were being guided down the street by peripheral vision and the feel of the sidewalk under their feet. It was like being in one of R. Crumb’s street scenes — everyone lost in a private thought bubble, everyone walking with a private posture.

Read the rest here.

More on Jackson Hole

We posted a film showing a year in Jackson Hole a while back. I mentioned I used to head there three times a year. Considering fuel prices, I'm glad that I'm not surfing the United Airlines website looking for my plane tickets this Fall.

I have a bunch of friends that are fortunate enough to live there, and most own their own places. Looks like owning a home in Jackson will continue to get more and more difficult as "the billionaires push out the millionaires".

For more on this, here's a post on what Jackson's become, courtesy of the Mountain Culture Blog. Let's hope that in the future, that more than the rich can afford to live long term in great natural areas. I think we can check Jackson off as lost.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I may never own a home here, and I may never even own a doorknob here.

Stuff and How it has Defined Us

Orion has a good piece out called The Gospel of Consumption.

FROM THE EARLIEST DAYS of the Age of Consumerism there were critics. One of the most influential was Arthur Dahlberg, whose 1932 book Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism was well known to policymakers and elected officials in Washington. Dahlberg declared that “failure to shorten the length of the working day . . . is the primary cause of our rationing of opportunity, our excess industrial plant, our enormous wastes of competition, our high pressure advertising, [and] our economic imperialism.” Since much of what industry produced was no longer aimed at satisfying human physical needs, a four-hour workday, he claimed, was necessary to prevent society from becoming disastrously materialistic. “By not shortening the working day when all the wood is in,” he suggested, the profit motive becomes “both the creator and satisfier of spiritual needs.” For when the profit motive can turn nowhere else, “it wraps our soap in pretty boxes and tries to convince us that that is solace to our souls.”

Read it here.

Certainly malls are icons of our consumer culture. For some alternative fun with mall culture, check out deadmalls.com and the Malls of America blog , and if that weren't enough, the Mall Hall of Fame blog. Enough.

When is Enough?

I love Volvos. I had a 77 Volvo 240 DL that I drove 300K miles. It as the ultimate winter car--could cruise at 60 mph over snowpacked roads and would start after being left out at 30 below for a week. No AWD, rear wheel drive, and good Vredestein snow tires. It was a sad day when I finally sold her.

I rented a XC 70 (see pic above) on a fall trip to Jackson Hole and I was not impressed with it's performance, although it sure looked cool. Now I'm seeing these cars all over town as they seem to have become a car of choice, even though Ford owns Volvo now.

So, what do folks think of this car? To answer that, we have this several month old car review for the new XC 70, with some great commentary on why we need this overweight AWD car, or that Arc Teryx jacket. It's a good read, and tends to favor the V-70, the stripped down version of the XC. Thanks to Those Responsible for the link.

When I was climbing and in the outdoor business, we always had the best clothes and gear. But when climbers started climbing with lycra, it was the last straw for some. My friend John, an extremely talented climber, tossed his expensive technical jacket and wore a $5 golf windbreaker, the kind with the two stands of cotton cord piping along both sides of the cheap metal zipper, that he bought at a second hand store in Berlin NH, just to piss off the fashion climbers.

High tech clothes, overcompensating cars. I'm not saying that you shouldn't buy them, but ask, when is enough enough?

There more on this theme over at Fragments From Floyd.

Off Topic

Yeah this is not on topic, but here it is anyways...from the NY Times (may require login):

“Did, did you just double dip that chip?” Timmy asks incredulously, later objecting, “That’s like putting your whole mouth right in the dip!” Finally George retorts, “You dip the way you want to dip, I’ll dip the way I want to dip,” and aims another used chip at the bowl. Timmy tries to take it away, and the scene ends as they wrestle for it.

and at Clemsen University:

The team of nine students instructed volunteers to take a bite of a wheat cracker and dip the cracker for three seconds into about a tablespoon of a test dip. They then repeated the process with new crackers, for a total of either three or six double dips per dip sample. The team then analyzed the remaining dip and counted the number of aerobic bacteria in it. They didn’t determine whether any of the bacteria were harmful, and didn’t count anaerobic bacteria, which are harder to culture, or viruses.

The power of popular culture I guess.

A Note

I wanted to expand on the short yesterday about the Ipod vending machines. My point in posting that was to declare that I felt nature was far better suited to relax us than an Ipod could. And that it was a good indicator of where our culture is when the media focuses on that type of story. While the Children (People) and Nature Movement is growing, it still is not getting the media attention it deserves.

With that said, I should come clean and say I do own an Ipod, have used one at an airport, and my friends know how much much music I have on my computer (you have no idea...) to feed that Ipod. Airports nowadays are pretty hellish places, and any distraction from the chaos is welcome.

Friday Shorts

Congrats
Go to Rich Louv for winning the Audubon Medal.

A San Diego colleague of Rich's writes about it.

Wired Culture
These have apparently been around for a year now, but I just heard of them. Ipod vending machines in airports. One report I read told of how Ipods had become "tranquilizers" for a crazy world, especially at a chaotic airport. I love music, but ugghh, I'll take a sunset and some crisp fall breezes any day over tunes at the airport. But this where this culture is...

Nordic Fun
I grew up cross country skiing and learned to really appreciate nordic areas. they would groom trails and have neat trail networks to make the whole day an adventure. Cheap too, the costs are far less than downhill areas. Viking Nordic Ski Center in Vermont was one place we would go to. Check it out. They have done much to make nordic skiing appealing to kids, which is a tough nut to crack when big downhill areas are nearby. They have gotten a couple of feet of snow up that way the past few weeks.