Bush speech...Weekend retreat...
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Monday, March 17, 2003 at 07:09 PM [GMT-6]

I thought the President did a fine job tonight. Anyone who thinks he's taking all this lightly hasn't been paying attention. The stress is showing...as it should. These decisions are not easy, not nearly as easy as the second-guessing. And just because he's got strength of conviction doesn't mean he's able to ignore the implications of the hard decisions he's made and will make.

May God grant him strength, wisdom and protection in the weeks ahead, and - as he said - may God continue to bless America.

I was going to add my $0.02 about Ms. Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chump...I mean Chicks, but in light of what I heard tonight, it just seems like a waste of pixels. We've got bigger fish to fry.

I just returned from a long weekend in the Trans-Pecos region: Fort Stockton, Balmorhea, Fort Davis. We pedaled the Long Bike from the state park up to the visitor's center at McDonald Observatory, and then a few miles beyond. As always, this is a beautiful - and humbling - ride.

It's beautiful because of the sheer rugged immensity of the landscape. This year, the plentiful late fall rains have the grass eye-high on a steer, with the promise of what passes for lush in this suburb of the Chihuahuan Desert if a few more thunderstorms will pass through (like one did on Friday evening as we drove back to Fort Stockton).

Looking roughly southeast from McDonald Observatory

It's humbling for the same reason. Man's relative insignificance is obvious in that setting. We can dynamite a road into the side of the mountain, and build a 432" hexagonal mirror array optical telescope at the top, and peer into the deep recesses of space... and at the end of the day, we still have to admit that we don't know jack about squat.

The experience of bicycling up these mountains is also humbling, albeit from a different perspective. Do this once and you'll never again doubt (if you ever did) the sheer physical prowess of Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France (umm...Tour de Freedom). Of course, he never tried it on a 50 pound bike with a 10' wheelbase (AFAIK).

The Long Bike (Ryan Duplex recumbent tandem)

This weekend also afforded me the opportunity to contemplate the future of the Gazette. I was this close to shutting the whole thing down. Blogging is hard work, harder than I thought it would be. Oh, it's easy enough to throw the spaghetti against the wall and see some of it stick, but it's not art. And, frankly, I've gotten so busy with real work that it's difficult to find time to do this right.

But something came to mind, a distant memory of a book I read when I was a teen (and that's a long way back). I think it was "Stand on Zanzibar," by John Brunner, but I could be wrong. Whatever the book, it was a precursor to the cyberpunk genre, albeit pre-WWW. What grabbed my memory was the author's vision of a networked society where everyone could vote on everything, all the time. Polls were superfluous, as opinions were continually tabulated and displayed in real-time, in sort of a CNN-style crawl on the "vidscreens" that - in that future - were everywhere. Politicians knew where the voters stood (and how they vacillated); there was no guesswork about what was important.

It occurred to me that what Brunner (or whomever) was predicting was the blogosphere, or some variation thereof. We're still in the infancy of being able to index and tabulate, and the market penetration is still in the point.single.digit range, but the trend is apparent. I think it's important to be a part of that. Networked voices that can't be silenced, addressing all sides of all issues...now that's something for a dictator to lose sleep over.

So, without meaning to overstate the importance of this humble blog, there's a lot at stake, and I think I want to play my part. Doesn't mean I'll have any more time (or intelligent things to write), but it's my voice, and I'm going to use it!

I hope you'll use yours, too.