My view of the world

I decided I’d put up the daybook entrys from the 1951 river run. This is a 2 meg pdf file, it starts a couple of days before the run and ends june 20 at Lake Mead.
Click here to view Day book.

I was going through some old slides and ran across a bunch from one of the river runs.
Back in 1951 a guy named Otis “Dock” Marston put together a team to run the Grand Canyon and test the feasibility of running up the rapids in the canyon.
The team consisted of Dock Marston, Edi Juan, Gary cooper, Jimmy Jordan, Ivins Macdonald, Joe Desloge, Guy Forcier, Willie Taylor, Clinton Seymour, Danny Daniels, Rod Sanderson, Frank Poettgen, Dr. John Maxson, who was a geologist who had made a run in 1937.
Mrs. Bill Belknap and Miss Maradel Marston, daughter of Dock Marston, would join them at Diamond creek for the rest of the run to Pierce ferry.
Ivins Macdonald was along as the cook and Frank Poettgen was the radio man.

Not a ride for the nervious types
There were five boats in the expedition, three of which were 19 ft Chis Crafts with inboard motors, Marston’s boat, the “Boo,” had a 158 hp motor and the “Step-in-again” and the “Sweet Chariot” each had a 130 hp motor. The other two were 15 1/2 ft Smithcraft metal boats with Evinrude 25 horse big twin outboards.


This is how all the fashion conscious river runners were dressed.

Jimmy Jordan in the “June Bug”, Named after his wife.
The “June Bug” and the “Twin” had Kapok filled hulls.

The “Twin,” one of the boats with outboard motors

You can see how they carried the extra fuel when they weren’t actually running rapids. Behind the gas there should have been a spare outboard motor.
They left June 8th and arrived June 20th, the trip ran from Lee’s ferry to Pierce ferry then on to Boulder City.
I was told that Jim Jordan got swamped in one of the larger rapids, with the water coming from the bow, over the top of the boat and when he beached it, the boat was full of water and he still had his captains hat on his head and his cigarette in his mouth.

Dock really did spell his name with a k, like boat dock. This was not his first trip and he’s the same man who ran the first jet boats up the river and then back down in 1961.
Gary Cooper was not the actor, he was out of Lake Arrowhead and was the pilot of the “Sweet Chariot”.

This is what happens when folks get bored.
In the late 1940’s Bill Belknap, who lived in Boulder City, and was a fairly famous photographer, got bored, so he got together with a friend and decided to play a joke on someone. it’s strange how nobody I’ve spoken to can remember which friend helped him, or who was the intended victim.
But anyway, they made some small heads out of clay and hid them in a cave.
The object was to sucker a friend into bragging about the find to all comers, and then enjoy a good laugh, at his expense.
The only problem turned out to be the local rockhounds, who found them first and immediately ran to the newspaper, the Boulder City News published an article about the great find and how important it was.

Of course the first real archiologist to see them knew they were fakes and of course the paper swore that they’d been conned by the rockhounds and so on.
I never did find out how anyone discovered who did it, but Boulder City was a very small town and people will talk.
I inherited 7 of the heads and I have no idea if there were any more, but evey time I look at them, I wonder if maybe, there isn’t just one, on exhibit as the real deal in some museum someplace.

I just bought an Epson 4490 scanner and I’ve started scanning a whole bunch of old slides, mostly from the late 40s and early 50s. The resulting copy is beautiful, but scanning 4 at a time takes between 8 and 12 minutes per set.
I’m scanning them at 48 bit color and 4800 dpi and saving them as Tif files and as such they are almost 150 meg each, and the bad part is that you can see every piece of dust and every scratch or bubble on the film.

I think that at $250.00 from Compusa with a $50 mail in rebate this scanner is about all an amatuer needs, If you are going pro there are a number of better units, but the cost is astronomical, with the good low end models costing about $35k.

All I want to do is take a bunch of family photos that are currently on slide and salvage them before they completely deteriorate.

This scanner comes with a plastic guide and the Epson driver software, it also comes with a copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.
I’m using Photoshop CS2 and sometimes Paintshop Pro X, so I can’t say how well the Photoshop Elements 2 works, but several reviewers have good things to say about it, the only thing I remember reading that was less than complimentary, was that Elements wouldn’t handle 48 bit color.
On the whole I’m impressed with how much better this scanner is than my HP standard flat bed.

The Somewhat Official But Always Interesting Notable Names Database Weblog has a bunch of famous people sorted by last name and going back to the greeks. I don’t know how accurate the info is, but it’s a fun read.

The mayor of Waldron, Arkansas who is 72, has been charged with soliciting sex for money and a discounted water bill.

They’re basically shutting down playgrounds because there’s a chance a kid might skin a knee click here read what the article says and then decide whether to laugh or scream.

If your mommy has taken away your phone you can always “graffiti” in your bomb threat.

Quizlaw Don’t read this if politicians and or lawyers tend to irritate you.

I did a short piece concerning my thoughts on Las Vegas for the Las
Vegas Blog Now he’s linked to me as a source for Las Vegas History. …Open mouth, insert foot, chew well.
I’m not certain how often I’ll be posting anything on the history of Las Vegas, simply because it’s difficult to verify things I heard while growing up in this town, hell it’s tough to verify what you read in the paper or see on TV.
(For those of you who have a generally low opinion as to the veracity of the press, I was merely making a point. I tend to believe that the press in general, will publish anything they think will sell papers, and the truth be damned.)

I remember some of the old timers because they were friends of my family, but I not always certain I remember correctly or that anyone was telling the absolute truth.
Still, I hope to have a couple of articles up soon, if only about some of the lesser known characters from southern Nevada.

I just heard that the Pioneer Loan and Jewelry pawnshop here in Las Vegas is for sale.
The owners are selling each of the following separately, the assets, the building and the license, but not the name.
The same people own the Pioneer Loan Centers and want to keep the name to avoid the sort of confusion that is created by the names Pioneer Military Loans, the same folks that have registered pioneerloansucks among other derogatory names, and pioneerloan.net, a pawnshop located up north.

The first thing that comes to mind is, if the assets are separate from the license and loans are considered to be part of the assets, what happens if they sell the license first? You need a pawn license to make loans and I would assume you need the same license to let people redeem said loans since this would be part of the pawn process.

These folks have been in the pawn business since 1988 and it seems a shame that they have to change from pawns, to car title, short term and installment loans, but everything changes. I don’t doubt for a minute that the pawn business will eventually pick up again, but in the meantime, the bills need to be paid.
For now, the pawnshop is still open and doing business, with no intentions of being shut down, so I guess they’re still making money, just not as much as they’d like.

I just read an online article in the NY Times that had to do with racism.
It seems that a musician named Stephin Merritt doesn’t like rap or Hip-Hop.
In 2004 Mr. Merritt, writing in The New York Times, chose seven records for a feature called Playlist.
None of the records he chose were by black artists, prompting Sasha Frere-Jones, a music critic at The New Yorker, to conclude at the time on his personal blog that Mr. Merritt had a bias against black music, calling him ” ‘Southern Strategy’ Merritt.”
Mr. Merritt also committed the ultimate sin: He said he liked the catchiness of the song “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from the movie “A song of the south,” that many people consider to be racist. In their attacks, his critics failed to mention that he said he thought the movie itself was terrible.
Because he doesn’t like Hip-Hop, they label Mr. Merritt a racist, I guess they didn’t look at his picture. He’s a balding, admittedly gay, white dude that appears to be approaching middle age and therefore probably wasn’t exposed to any black artists, except those in the main stream.
He also dislikes, Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, while admitting he does like Abba and anybody who doesn’t like the latest attempt at bubblegum can’t be all bad.
This guy isn’t racist, he just doesn’t like the latest fashion in music, big deal.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the blog wars continue, with the attackers now labeling him a “Rockist”.
It looks like they’ve decided he’s evil and won’t quit until they find some name or other they can call him. Which, by the way, has gotten this nearly unheard of indie artist a fair amount of publicity.

Is it just me, or are people getting sillier?

There’s a new blog in town, it’s called raghands, this is a reference to those poker hands that cannot be expected to win except by divine intervention. It looks like he’s ( I assume the author is male, just playing the odds) decided that there should be a bounty on politicians, or maybe he’s just pissed because he’s not the one making bank by selling votes.
This could be interesting or it could be much ado about nothing.

I’ve started rewriting a couple of websites for some people. These need to comply with the infamous “508″ b.s.
The regulation was written to apply to goverment websites, but now it applies to pretty much everybody. The phrase “effective communications” is the one that gets you, They have some recommendations, but nowhere in this entire mess does it give any specifics.
The National Federation of the Blind is currently suing Target based on the inaccessability of their website. Since the regulations specificaly mention the “internet,” the fact that the brick and mortar stores have no tags in braile sets no precedent.
Now I get to write “alt” tags for every link and picture, I have to make certain that text readers (with no actual standards for said readers) can access the page easily, I suppose I’ll have to write a high contrast version for each page (thank God for css) and so on. Fortunately writing for SEO and writing for text browsers require a very similar page layout.
The whole thing is a major pain in the ass, and all anyone can do is try.
As far as the lawsuit against Target is concerned, you know that will take a couple of years to get to the Supreme Court, in the mean time there are more diffinitive laws floating around congress.
I know it sounds a bit trite, but wouldn’t the loss of 2 or 3 percent of the market to the competition be enough to force a change? In other words, why do we need so damned many laws, wouldn’t a series of ads on TV saying that these stores don’t care about a specific group of people with disabilities be infinitely more effective?
I guess there’s nothing left to do except make a fresh pot of coffee, have a shot of Casa Noble Extra Aged tequila and get on with it.