split personality

Sitting on a hill in a park in Dolores Park an ambulance goes by, wailing it's rising and falling Song of Urgency. But in the dense urban city, the flat hard buildings form the audio equivalent of fun-house mirrors, echoing the siren.

Coming toward me is the single-minded and onrushing regular version. As it passes, rushing away, the doppler shift changes the tone from higher pitch to lower pitch, but the reflection off the buildings in the distance is only the echo of the original urgency.

The result - a two-tone discordant song of a split personality. Urgency ahead, lament behind.

couldn't make it this year...

I missed the Wilderness Volunteers trip to Escalante this year, and I'm sad about that. A really, really beautiful place, and while it's a "work" trip to kill the invasive Russian Olive, it's work that has good results, so that's fun. It's really the results that are so striking, how the river is profoundly changed from it's choked, invaded, on-the-way-to-ruin state, back to its native riparian biomix, the way it was 50 years ago before the Russian Olive easily escaped from where people planted backyard shrubberies. Check it out:

Upstream view before and after.












Overhead view from the canyon rim before and after.






















Gotta say - knowing what that damn plant is like up close, the choked before shot makes me twitchy and claustrophobic. The after is a big "ahhhh" sigh of the river in it's natural state before the damnable olive got a foot in the ecological door 50 years ago.

deevolution

I had given the razor a rest while out on the West Coast. But all things come to and end, so... why not take the opportunity to experiment with facial hair sculpting styles?

A blank canvas





The soulpatch meets the friendly mutton chops




Friendly mutton chops (so named because they meet (shake hands) in a friendly way above the lip



The Fu Manchu - I'm pretty sure that I can't pull this one off for real.

Was tempted to walk around for a day or so with it, just for the heck of it.



And... my most hated of them all (but inevitable result of The Fu), the boring stupid Tom Selleck 80's caterpillar lip.




And for the navel-gazers out there who like analysis of such things, have a gander at Impressions of the male personality as a function of beardedness.

yup, I'm freaked out by it too...