Kirk Rasmussen

 

I'm Not Scared to Reenter Society. I'm Just Not Sure I Want To. - The Atlantic

After a year in isolation, I, at least, have gotten acclimated to a different existence—quieter, calmer, and almost entirely devoid of bullpoop. If you'd told me in March 2020 that quarantine would last more than a year, I would have been appalled; I can't imagine how I would've reacted if you'd told me, once it ended, I would miss it.

The Atlantic: 

Antelope island and the bird refuge.

 I'm writing this here because Gmail does not want me to include any images in my email.  It keeps telling me that a 15mb image is too huge, and that the world will come to an end if I try to include it.

A friend recently wrote:

Are we all living essentially the same life, thanks to the homogenizing effects of steamrollering cultural capitalism? -- 

This is a repeat of my answer above, but yes. Absolutely! I recently heard Jon Stewart say that one of the biggest changes he has seen in his career is that there used to be 7-8 positions and dozens of hot takes about any given cultural or political issue, and now there are two. Always two. What's weird about this is that we all feel like we're having our own thoughts, but we're clearly not. It's like fashion: We feel like we independently think bell bottoms look cool at the exact moment in history when they are in fashion. Clearly, we're wrong. That aesthetic is being fed to us somehow without us even knowing it. Politics are now like that. We don't have our own thoughts, clearly. We believe what some unnamable force tells us to believe. And our intellectual prison is impossible to escape from because we don't even know we're in it!

It has been a week since you wrote this, and the general tone makes me wonder if you have started experimenting with weed gummies, because it's that sort of conversation.  Part of that time I was sick with a cold, and it was unsettling how tired and immobile I was, even though it wasn't Covid.  As soon as I got better Christine took us on her previously cancelled road trip to Antelope Island, in our camping van:

The new bison calves were out:

Later, at the Bear River Bird refuge we saw a bird eat a live snake.

 

We also stopped by Willard bay, named after my relative, Willard Richards. It's essentially a square-ish parking lot filled with water, but they made an artificial beach:

Here's a random canyon you could see from this spot:

I'm struck by how many amazing sites are within three hours of our house.  We can travel north to see this stuff, or be at Capitol Reef, surrounded by Californians.  Even Rock canyon, a few minutes away, is impressive. We're actually a five hour drive from Yellowstone, and ten hours from Rushmore.

I just chose the first Rock Canyon picture in Google photos.  That was December, 2020 and I'm sort of startled by the lack of snow.

Ok, just to continue the boring travelogue, we stopped by this giant rural supply store called Smith and Edwards that was started by my Great Uncle, and used to have tons of military surplus, but now that the young people run it, it is a lot less weird. He created a business from his hoarding, which makes him my hero. There are still a few remnants of its strange past:

Eventually we made it home, after visiting my brother in Ogden who is fifty and just had both of his knees replaced. 

As I was unloading the van, I saw this young, newly married couple from our ward who probably attend BYU, pushing their new baby around our cul de sac, and I thought "Oh, I'll say hi and introduce myself to them when they approach.  I'm sure they'll be happy to talk to a ward member, impressive person that I am. How kind of me to give them this special experience."  but as they got closer they pushed their stroller off of my sidewalk, out into the street to avoid any possible interaction.  

"Whoa, that was odd, why on earth would they do that?"  

Then I took a selfie so I could see myself as they saw me:

This is largely how I viewed the older ward members when we moved here in 2005, and I was only 39, a relative child. They were all so kind, and eager to talk to the young, new couple. To be fair, BYU students are probably especially uncomfortable around any signs of low income or anyone that might distract them from their chosen path to a life of managing UVU students.

The next day I was driving up to our house and another BYU student who looked like a male model or a professional golfer, standing on our porch, all teeth, tan and polo shirt, in the process of selling alarm systems or solar cells, looking at his clipboard.  Nobody was home but when I drove by his eyes locked on mine and behind that friendly smile I could see the gaze of a predator.  It was like he knew that I lived there.

I kept driving, like a coward, turned around at the end of the cul de sac, and went to Deseret Industries and bought a book of "micro fiction," or really short stories.  When I returned home I could see him prowling the neighborhood like a handsome serial killer. I just didn't have it in me to deal with all of that self-confidence, sublimated bullying and canned privilege.  Our neighborhood has a lot of middle class retired people and I've learned with my aging mother that they are a primary target for sales operations.  She has no ability to detect scams, whatsoever and will regularly ask me if she should get her ducts cleaned, or buy a warranty for her car.

This is what a 60 point loss to my wife looks like. 

No Way to Prevent this says Nation Where This Regularly Happens

Onion link: 

"No Way To Prevent This" Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens: At press time residents of the only economically advanced nation in the world where roughly two mass shootings have occurred every month for the past eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as "helpless."

B.1.1.7 variant now responsible for most COVID-19 cases in Oregon, officials say - oregonlive.com

B.1.1.7 variant now responsible for most COVID-19 cases in Oregon, officials say - oregonlive.com

Teachable moments

Yellowstone using paintballs, flying bean bags to haze wolves that get used to people | KUTV:

He sought and received permission for rangers to ride around on snowmobiles armed with cased shotguns that could propel rubber bullets, bean bags, and cracker shells at the Wapiti wolves. They were instructed to fire on the lobos only during "teachable moments," when they'd associate the pain with their nearness to humankind. On a Monday in mid-February, such an opportunity presented itself.

"One of my guys hit him with paintballs," Smith said.

I feel like I keep returning to the same types of projects.  Right now I'm collecting, editing and publishing historical rhetoric texts on a wiki so they can be used to create ebooks and can be edited and annotated by future classes.  In a perfect world, a wiki is  a sustainable ecosystem that is portable, accessible and accessible. I'm using Dokuwiki.  Students could, if they wanted, download the entire site as a folder with html files or as an epub that would fit on their phone.  It uses flat files rather than a backend database.  I found my page on the C2 wiki which was created by Ward Cunningham, one of the very first Wiki's and have revisited it over the years, but it appears to have been taken down.  This is sad, because I would update the page every few years, i.e. "I graduated!".  My son and his friend posted on the page when he was about 10 years old and Googled my name.  Rest in peace, C2 Wiki.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190522144801/https://wiki.c2.com/?MarkCrane

June 20, 2019: Update: it appears to be back online!

Duncan Carter

One of my early mentors passed away from prostate cancer in 2016, and I just found out.

https://www.pdx.edu/english/news/professor-emeritus-duncan-carter-passes-away

Duncan Carter, along with Sherrie Gradin, introduced me to Rhetoric and Composition as a Master's student at Portland State University from 1993-1996.  There are three Duncan stories I tell all the time:

1. One of his professors who spent an hour arguing whether a window was a door or a window.  At the end of the hour he walked out the window.

2. Duncan once fell asleep in a hotel with the shower running, so he could clear out his lungs.  He woke up 12 hours later, his lungs clear, and left, the walls dripping with water.

3. Duncan once made fun of people who outline their papers in advance, so I quit outlining my papers.  It took me a while to realize that I wasn't outlining, but reverse outlining, and I eventually learned how to write again.

Twitter, Quietness and Rage

What a great title, and surprising to see something this religious in the Washington Post. I recently switched to a dumb phone because my smart phone was starting to feel like one of those potatoes you carry around in Parenting class in high school. I already have a job, and managing social media accounts, with the phone serving as a prisoner monitoring bracelet, was wearing me out. It's ok to be unloved and anonymous. It might even create opportunities for listening. I took a break from twitter and it was like taking a break from anthrax As you go through the Book of Kings, you reach Chapter 19 and learn again why the Bible remains in the sacred-text big leagues. “And behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper.” This is the greatest possibility of our quiet hours — that when we are alone with our thoughts, we are not truly alone. That one of the voices we hear in our heads — the one calling us beloved — may be more than the echo of our own desires.

So I've set up Org Mode to sync across three devices:

An old Kindle Fire
Ipad 9.6" amateur, using the Beorg app
Macbook pro, using EmacsforOSX

I used to read about the battles surrounding Xemacs, but apparently it is no longer maintained.  Nothing lasts.

If you want to know why I'm using Org Mode, it's because I hate myself.

For further insights, read The Cruel Shoes.

So I had some trouble installing Mediawiki because our server is really old and has an old version of PHP.  I installed Dokuwiki because it doesn't use a database, has lots of support and plugins, and installs easily on our old server.

It is using the following plugins:

Some of the more interesting plugins I've installed are

Poem

Markdown Page

PlainText

I'm wondering if Pandoc will create output that is compatible with the above Markdown plugin.

Today I'm going to test some Pandoc conversions and start importing texts to the wiki.

I also need to install a GFCI outlet in our bathroom and finish the drywall this evening.

So working two jobs at once.  Sabbatical!