People in your neighborhood, part I

Way cooler than you'll ever be, and they want you to know it...

Photographic proof that the young male adolescent semi-sneer is in fact a universal expression.  (Though I like the fact that the second guy in from the right can't help smiling...)

Transects

Right after college, I volunteered as an archaeological assistant for a summer in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico.  A lot of what we did was field survey work, which meant running transects of a given area of the forest.  We'd spread our group out in a line with everyone 20 feet apart, following our compasses as close to due north as possible, and watching the ground for artifacts.  Mostly, we found flakes of chert or obsidian left behind from someone making a spear point about 800 years earlier - the Archaic Tewa Indian equivalent of pencil shavings.  Every once in a while, one of us would find an actual arrowhead.  Or an empty whiskey bottle from the 1920s, or an elk skull, which was always fun.

So now, if you can, imagine the top of a dusty mesa in Rio Arriba county, covered with piñon pine and juniper scrub on the top, and only reachable by a three hours' bouncing drive up a deeply rutted four-wheel Forest Service road.  The sky overhead is eyeball-achingly blue, and the nearest house is about 50 miles away as the crow flies, except that you're not a crow.  Smell the red dirt and the sage yet?  Okay, good.  That experience has Absolutely Nothing to do with the part of China that I'm living in.

For a taste of that, why not take a look through the slide show below.  The photos were all taken on October 1st, which is National Day (the anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic) here in China.  It's a bit long, so you may want to make yourself comfortable.  Grab a beer (or tea, to be more authentic) and settle down for a bit.  On our photo walk last Saturday, I took almost 300 photos, and the slide show has about 130 of them.  They don't all work equally well as perfect photos, but taken together, they make for an interesting sampling of the culture that I've been lucky enough to call home for the past two years.



Oh, and make sure you watch in full screen mode.  (should be a button on the bottom right.)  Happy transecting!

Stuff we all should know by now - Prisoners in the US

What are approximately 1 out of every 100 Americans doing right now?  Why, sitting in jail, of course!  Young black men?  That jumps to 1 in 10.  Per capita, that's higher than most places in the world by an order of magnitude, and even higher that places with less-than-stellar human rights records such as Iran and, um, the country that I'm currently living in.

People in the US aren't terribly aware of this, but many other parts of the world are, as in, for example, this clip from a UK game show.  Probably no wonder that other governments often don't take the US very seriously when it comes to accusations of human rights abuses...

For more information, and links to some of the facts in the video, click here.

Both Sides Now

Front:


Back:

Anti-Intillectuatism in America, part 647.5

Yes, we're all populists now!  I'd comment a bit more, but I think the title of the post says it all...

Harvard-Supported Harvard Grad Mitt Romney Criticizes Obama for being a Harvard-Supported Harvard Grad

Wow!!

 

Photos cropped from a kid's talent/variety show on CCTV (China Central Television), around a year ago or so.