Grilled Cheese and Tomato

We are enjoying our first ripe tomatoes from the plant on our deck here in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, and to us that means grilled cheese sandwiches on Oatnut bread, thick with Boar's Head sliced white American cheese surrounding slices of ripe tomato.

Life is good.

a wise Latina woman and a wise Anglo woman

Two wise women have a meeting of the minds in California.

Sonia Sotomayor said "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life."

Here in California, my wife recently came to paraphrase those words while discussing the legislature in Sacramento and its failure to handle the California budget crisis.

Said Shirley, "I would hope that a wise Anglo woman with the richness of her experience would tell them all to go f**k themselves."

Ah, the politics of change.

Southern Sequoia National Forest

Below are links that display two images from the Southern Sequoia National Forest in California.

The first image is taken from the Western Divide Highway looking southeast back in the general direction of Lake Isabella.

Above the Kern River

The second is of the Needles rock formation.

The Needles

Ron Artest

I, for one, do not see Ron Artest fitting in with the Los Angeles Lakers. I see him more in the role of a Terrell Owens, talented but hard to stomach and endure. I hope I'm wrong.

Woodstock Redux, the worst it has ever been

The wife and I were reading in bed the other night and when she turned out her light I decided to watch some TV. One of the VH1 channels was showing the old movie ‘Woodstock’, so I decided to spend a few moments and see if I could catch any of the old acts that had my attention back then. It is hard to fathom the degree of disregard that a channel like that can foist onto a paying cable audience. First of all they did not show it in letterbox. If you remember, that movie often has 2 or 3 frames of active images going at any one time during the film so the whole presentation is degraded and continuity does not exist. Especially when they had 2 frames going, you saw the line in the middle and half of 2 sets of images. Really disgusting and annoying. And to top it off were the constant commercials. Almost 4 minutes of commercials would buy you 9 to 13 minutes of movie time. What nerve! I quickly left VH1 for a movie channel.

I know just the payback these idiot execs deserve; they should be publicly shackled into the stocks and forced to watch their own content for hours on end until they scream for mercy, and then they get more. Perhaps then they would care about the shit they disseminate on the airways and the rudeness and disregard they show to the hapless consumer.

The 48 peaks over 4000' in New Hampshire

We seem to be a country of ‘lists’ and that trend made its way to the hiking community of the northeast as well. The White Mountains of New Hampshire have 48 peaks above 4000’ of elevation as compiled by the Appalachian Mountain Club’s Four Thousand Footer Committee (FTFC), a group formed in 1957 to establish the official criteria and maintain the list of peaks. In addition to the 4000’ of elevation requirement, each official peak must be at least 200’ above the low point of a connecting ridge leading to a higher neighbor. A hiker must climb all the peaks on the official list to request membership in the ‘club’. There are many other lists and clubs associated with the mountains of the northeast: the New England 4000 footers and the Northeast 111 to name two. The Northeast 111 includes the 4000 foot peaks of New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont, as well as the 46 peaks over 4000’ in the Adirondacks and the 2 peaks over 4000’ in the Catskills (there are 115 peaks in this list but they have kept the original name). There are also those clubs that, by the very nature of their lists, will always have just a few select members. There is the 4000 footer grid club, whose members have climbed all 48 four thousand foot peaks once in each month of the year (a total of 576 climbs), and there is the 48 in 1 winter club, where membership is gained by climbing all 48 four thousand foot peaks in one winter season.

My personal history of hiking in New Hampshire covered eighteen years, from 1972 through 1990, and it took me the first fifteen of those years to climb all of the 48 peaks over 4000’ in the White Mountains. The summits vary greatly both in elevation and terrain; the lowest peak is the wooded summit of Mt Tecumseh at 4002' and the highest point is the rocky summit cone of Mt Washington at 6288', a place famous for the highest wind ever recorded and home to the world's worst weather. When my days of hiking in the White Mountains were over, Mt Moosilauke stood as the one 4000’ summit most visited by me, having climbed that peak 20 times.

So begins my personal history with the 48 peaks over 4000'in New Hampshire. To read the complete story, follow the link below.

The 48 Summits

Laudizen