So every time I go down near Moab I try to stop by the T-Shirt Shop and pick out a design to remind me of the olden days when Grandma would buy a shirt for all us grandkids.

biking adventures with Gus pt II

kind of like sasquatch

So a dream came true for me on Wednesday when I was up mountian biking with my friend Gus in American Fork Canyon. We ran across one of these guys

about this color too. I've wanted to find a rubber boa for about the past 16 years or so, so I was pretty pleased when Gus managed to spot one on the trail without running it over. You can find some more info and more pictures of the boa featured above here.

making the river answer

Plastic in the water

As I've been reading Alan Weisman's book The World Without Us I've stopped several times to sit and wonder just what it is we think we're doing to the planet - most of what we're doing doesn't seem to be keeping within any kind of previously existing ecological balance. I stopped to question our behavior once again when I read about exfoliants.

"Can you believe it?" Richard Thompson demands of no one in particular, loud enough that faces bent over microscopes rise to look at him. "They're selling plastic meant to go right down the drain, into the sewers, into the rivers, right into the ocean. Bite-sized pieces of plastic to be swallowed by sea creatures."

Weisman certainly plays on the theatricality of this experience, but I have to say that the issue might merit some dramatic emphasis. For the past year and a half I've been using and enjoying a particular body wash. Today I checked the ingredients and found near the top of the list "polyethylene." I don't know where that plastic is going now that I'm in the eastern United States, but I have to believe that when I was in Southeast Asia I was contributing to the island of plastic floating around in the North Pacific Gyre.



The question for me becomes "what do we now do with all this plastic that we have and how do we live without it?"

SEND BOOKS TO KIDS IN INDIA (please)

This morning my friend Taty in Sicily asked me if I wanted to help collect books to send to a children's school in India where a friend of hers is trying to assemble a library. I'm in the humanities and consequentially am really into books, so I emailed Fr. Sibi to get some more information about what he's after. This was his response

"I would like books on subjects like science, geography, history, stories, events, encyclopedias etc. Books that is meant for children and their mental growth."

If you can think of a book you read as a child or young adult that stimulated your mental growth, or a book that would have stimulated it, I think you should do what you can to get a copy to the school. Here are a couple of options

1. Find a copy of the book(s) you want to send, write a little message on the inside cover, go to the post office and send it. Just be aware that sending heavy things to India might be pricey so

2. I recommend buying your book(s) through an online bookstore that will ship it(them) for free. The best ones that I've seen so far are Rediff Books and flipcart. The prices are in rupee but you can check the dollar amount here, just select "Indian Ruppe" and you can figure out the rest. As for the message on the inside cover, you could simply email it either to me or directly to Sibi.

I'm waiting to here back from Sibi about where exactly we'll need to send the books.

My hope is that we can add at least 100 books to their library. Help me keep track of what gets sent (also so Sibi knows what to wait for in the mail) by sending me an email or even commenting here on the blog. Thanks for reading.

San Severo - la Madonna del soccorso

This is the annual run of the bulls for San Severo but instead of bulls they line the streets with strings of very mean firecrackers and occasional bits of what must be TNT (they even managed to make a small wall collapse this year) at the approximate hight of a human head. The hight is important when you add the fact that townsfolk are supposed to run en masse in front of the explosions in effort to not get burned or maimed. The fuochi, literally meaning "fires," are the main attraction of the celebrations and this fact has not settled well with the local bishop, who would like the attention to be refocused on the namesake of the events, that is the Virgin Mary. But when this fine gentleman began insisting a couple years ago that the city do away with the explosives the citizens responded with the an iron fist. For several days the bishop couldn't leave his house without getting beat up. So the explosives stayed and the bishop stayed quiet.



The fuochi featured in these videos were some of the first to be set off and consequently they were also some of the tamest. Nevertheless they still managed to shake us to our core and make our ears bleed slightly.

dance-o-tronic

this is basically what we did for an hour while they cleaned a body off of the highway.



then we did this for the rest of the day:

reading Anna Maria Ortese

I didn't understand much of what I read in the short story La casa del bosco, but I did enjoy this sentence:

Si è parlato anche, con una certa compiacenza, dell'Apocalisse, e i Cavalieri del Cielo spesso hanno animato le notti dei più infelici che spiavvano dietro i vetri di New York, o Londra o Lisbona; ma il mio idraulico, non si è mai veduto.

I'll even give you a late-night translation:

There was also talk, with a certain satisfaction, of the Apocalypse, and the Horsemen of Heaven often stirred the nights of the most unhappy who would peer from behind the windows of New York, or London, or Lisbon; but my plumber was never to be seen.

The rest of the short story wasn't much clearer.

the where

About a month of my stay was spent in the region of Apulia, which goes from the spur to the heel of the boot. Our base camp was the city of Altamura (famous for bread and Ciccillo, the prehistoric man) in the province of Bari. By depriving Raffaella of her car for days on end we managed to visit some hit cities in every province, a few of the favorites being Otranto, Gallipoli, Torre a mare, Ostuni, Alberobello, Trani and San Severo with its unique festival for the Madonna del soccorso.

Destinations outside of Apulia included Matera and the Sorrento Peninsula, famous for the Amalfi Coast. And a trip to Italy wouldn't be complete for me without a trip up north to see old friends. We even made it out to Spain for a few days. And that was about it.