[TheTurtle]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Doly', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('The_sky_is_falling', '
')Try this...

Close your eyes and imagine for a second what the planet would look like if oil had never been found....

Beautiful isnt it!

[OneLoneClone]

I'm staying here in UNSIMULATED San Fransisco. We've got old buildings, with real history. All the apartments in my building have arated 'root celllar' closets (none of my neighbors know what they are for, tho), and clothes lines to the next building. Nothing simulated about it.

There are vibrant expatiate communities from Vietnam, China, Japan, India and more all within walking distance of me. I have farmers markets, a junk shop that sells cool recycled mahcine parts and community woodshop where I make stuff myself.

As long as I dont leave the city, everything is fine. Ya'll stay where you are, San Fransico sux.


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Zardoz', '
')
We're big on trading bodies. California leads the world in the importing and exporting of human beings. We should tax everybody who comes in, and everybody who leaves. Our fiscal woes would be solved in a jiffy.

[Heineken]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'T')his is my kind of [forum] Heiny. Full of regrets, recriminations, damnation and doom I had the same experience. I think it explains our simpatico.

We had two ponds in the woods, a home built raft, and an image of a little tiny fish washing on the crude log deck. It was as meaningful as any trophy fish. There was mystery in that dark water even if it was only a few feet deep. Mystery of life outside human design. Bulldozers filled it in and ripped down the woods. I turned into a jd (juvenile delinquent). Broke into the homes under construction and pissed in the heavy wooden nail barrels. Continued to break into homes long past legal excuses.

[PenultimateManStanding]

wow, a bunch of criminals! the surveyors used to put tagged stakes in the ground of the hills around my house when I was a kid and they were building houses; my hoodlum 7 year old pals and I would pull up the stakes and have swordfights! when I was ten we stole avocados and the grove owner threw rocks at us. when I was 16 we got older folks to buy us beer! btw, we didn't steal the avocados to eat them, we were after the pits. you'd take an old brass ink tube they used to put in ball point pens before they switched to plastic and pull the point off with some pliers and blow the ink out. Then take a wire coat hanger and cut out a straight piece with a curved end. shove the two ends of the brass tube into the avocado pit and break off plugs. run the wire piston through it and the plugs would shoot out hard and fast with a big pop. stung like hell to get hit by one! they didn't have electronic entertainment in those days besides a TV with 3 channels and radios with vacuum tubes. we spent most of our time outside. sometimes we just went around turning over old chunks of wood to look at centipedes. the hills were made of granodiorite outcrops with chapparal covering them. running through the swamps in the low area filled with bamboo and ancient Pepper Trees. all the hills around with hardly any houses anywhere, the larger valley down the watershed with stands of Cottonwood trees and old shacks where these strange Russian folks named Volkov lived. The hills north of our little valley had houses going up in the 60s, but downstream was all open hills pretty much all the way to Mexico about 25 miles south. chicken ranches and melon patches nearby. hot as hell in the summer: once a huge fire came close by, blown west by the dry Santa Ana winds from the big mountains 50 miles east. building tree houses. getting into fights now and then. the foothills of the Southern California Coastal Range was a grand place in the early 60s. The population was very small in this county back then. We left our doors unlocked and you used to be able to hitchhike. Does anybody do that anymore? I hitchhiked once from Santa Cruz to San Diego, about 400 miles and had no problem getting a ride, made the whole trip in one day.

[Heineken]

Good, entertaining post, PMS.

Maybe the world becomes less real as we age. Maybe that's the crucial variable that leads to creeping simulation.

Maybe children in the blandest suburban tract experience life with the same freshness and vigor as I did as a child in Austria.

But somehow I can't believe it.

[Madpaddy]

Well, I for one am sickened but not surprised by the manmade destruction of the planet. Here. in Ireland we are making majorfossil fuel driven efforts to turn the Emerald Isle into the grey and black isle. Look at the very language we use when dealing with nature.

Land is to be developed
Natural resources are to be exploited and consumed
Trees are to be harvested
Rivers are to be harnessed to produce electricity
The wilderness must be managed

I've got news for the developers though. Nature is not the passive entity we assumed. She's tired of being rutted like a 2 dollar whore and she's just about ready to give the human race the most almighty of kicks up the arse.

[Heineken]

Yes. Language, even when wielded by frauds, has a way of revealing the truth.

[holmes]

No PMS we are in a dying civilization now. OVER civilized will do what we are seeing. I remember taking a cross country trip in 1977 with my family in the yellow ford 1969 van. I was 7. I remember the encrouching death. LA area was being consumed. I rmember my uncles house had a big inground pool and the surrounding hills were barren. Coyotes. I remember seeing inthe distance the encrouching plague tho. Now that house is in the middle of the LA suburbs. drowned out. I remeber the National parks being empty in the summer! Seeing hardly a person at the grand canyon. I look back now and realize 1977 was the year that it seriously began. by 1980 it was over. The dream is over. Prepare for no future. Profits!

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('holmes', ' ')the surrounding hills were barren. Coyotes. I remember seeing inthe distance the encrouching plague tho. Now that house is in the middle of the LA suburbs. drowned out.

[PenultimateManStanding]

BTW, here's an interesting oddity for those of you who think the earth is young: the local mountains rise to 6000 feet and stretch deep down into Mexico and up to Riverside county a hundred miles away. To the east is a deep valley with elevations below sea level. Yet, there are here in the coastal areas of San Diego conglomerate sandstones, something known as the Poway Formation, that contain big red embedded pebbles of weathered, rounded appearance that have been traced to an origin deep in Arizona. Obviously the mountains rose and the Imperial Valley got stretched and lowered after those conglomerates were washed here from Arizona many millions of years prior to that. And it's been many millions of years that these local mountains have been eroding as well. Time is Large.

[Heineken]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('PenultimateManStanding', ' ')Time is Large.

[Ludi]

I remember the hills and canyons around San Diego (I was born there), Pacific Beach, and playing in the chapparal there, building forts from tumbleweeds. The place was full of rattlesnakes, there was still a lot of open space, being built up into suburbs (we lived in one)....

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ludi', 'I') remember the hills and canyons around San Diego (I was born there), Pacific Beach, and playing in the chapparal there, building forts from tumbleweeds. The place was full of rattlesnakes, there was still a lot of open space, being built up into suburbs (we lived in one)....

[Heineken]

When I was a kid in Austria, I took my toboggan-style sled to the tops of mountains on ski lifts. Then I sledded the whole way down, at terrifying speeds, on trails intended for skiers. The Austrian officials didn't know what to make of it, and barely allowed it.

One day I lost control of my sled on an icy patch, crashed through a fence, and landed in the middle of an outdoor cafe during the height of the lunch hour.

O your Heineken has known stardom. And lacerations.

[PenultimateManStanding]

I guess you're lucky you didn't go out like Sonny Bono who did a George Of The Jungle number: Watch Out For That. . . .TREE!

[PenultimateManStanding]

Part of the romance of Geology is the great times and history involved. There are sandstones in Point Loma, overlooking the Pacific that are from the times of the earliest dinosaurs. There are rocks in San Diego county that are 600 million years old. If you go back 40 million years there were great rivers bringing pebbles the size of your fist from seven, eight hundred miles away in the east. Our local mountains are fairly new, dating to the formation of the San Andreas Fault, 28 million years ago. The boulders I used to play on were molten magma deep below the surface 60 - 70 million years before. edit: actually those 600 million year old pre-Cambrian metamorphic rocks are just north of San Diego in southern Riverside county. There's nothing I know of in San Diego quite that old, and 600 million years is a real long time. Of course, in eastern Canada there are rocks 6-7 times older than that even.

[Heineken]

I guess all of us in this discussion are lucky to have survived their childhoods. Just being alive is a miracle and is accomplishment enough.

[mommy22]

I see these kinds of stories all around me in NEOhio as well. Having 2 girls, I'm fairly involved in Girl Scouts. While there aer disagreements about GS's and what they teach girls, one of the main thrusts of Girl Scouts is to teach them a level of self-sufficiency. A friend of mine, whose daughter is in our group is from Montana. She told me a very sad story the other day relating to scouts. Apparently in Montana, there was an island in the middle of a large lake that the Girls Scouts were on a 50 or so year lease for a very reasonable price. Girls from all over the west apparently came to this island to practice varying levels of self-sufficiency (primitive camping, etc...) Well, a few years ago the lease ran out, and with real estate prices rising in Montana, the Girl Scouts just couldn't sell enough cookies to buy the island, so it was sold to the highest bidder. My friend says that it is owned by an individual who has built his mcmansion, and had boats circling the island so that nobody comes close.
Pretty sad story for the next generation of Girl Scouts. And what we are giving the next generation as a whole.