resoution #1

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Our route

Here's where the wagon trains are heading starting Saturday Nov 14, 2008 morning:


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Plane ride east, wagons west

Tomorrow I'm finally heading back to Raleigh and seeing Sarah again. It's been WAY too long. Painfully long. 6 weeks.

Southern Oregon is beautiful. No debating that.

It's also a new world for me in terms of demographics - VERY white and strange. Strange in a way I don't yet understand enough to explain sufficiently. Best way I can is by listing things I've noticed:

1. mansions next to trailers
2. house trailers for sale for $17,000 on the same street as $400,000 homes - wtF?
3. trashy places - from gross(!) grocery stores to houses that I'm surprised can be loaned on
4. not suburbia in the southern sense. I'd gotten used to new places, shiny stores, starbucks, and construction, but not so much here. Most places were built 10 or more years ago and show it
5. VERY Haves and REALLY don't have-nots. Metros and Bugatis sharing the road. It's as if upper middle class does not exist - only lower middle/lower income and upper class
6. a latent "green" spirit - people here from every socio-econommic level care about the enironment and can talk about it. that's incredibly different from east coast
7. love of wine - the layman here knows more about wine than most any southerner
8. lots of outdoorsy people
9. lots of guys with strange beards. Is it the mountains that makes you want to look like you're into building bombs in a shed?
10. Chains! I had not thought of putting chains on tires since I was @8. Here its a way of winter life.
11. hilariously boring news - no surprise, welcome to a small town
12. LOTS AND LOTS of organic food at the grocery, and lots of bulk food items

Anyways, thats enough for now. Will be posting images this week of the drive which starts tomorrow.

sad. too sad to speak much of.

I stopped eating pork almost 2 years ago.

I LOVED German sausage and sausage in foods like wedding soup. My friends in Florida actually used to give me a hard time about how much I loved summer sausage.

That was until I moved to North Carolina.

This land of God-fearing, religious people in the Bible Belt has piglet trucks that track back and forth across the state from breeders to slaughterhouses.

These are 18 wheelers stuffed with baby piglets (like Babe) who are crammed in so tight that their legs, tails, and noses stick out the side of the trailers. I started crying one day when I looked over at the truck which was passing me and saw all the cute piglets stuffed therein.

I won't be a part of it. I won't pretend I don't know it happens. In seeing those piglets I knew I could not in good faith eat pork again.

CNN has a story up about another factory farm and abuse. Why can't American's face the truth about the meat on their tables and being served them in restaurants?

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/09/16/abused.pigs.ap/index.html?iref=mpstoryview

Several excerpts:

At one point on the video, an employee shouts to an investigator, "Hurt 'em! There's nobody works for PETA out here. You know who PETA is?"
...
"I hate them. These [expletives] deserve to be hurt. Hurt, I say!," the employee yells as he hits a sow with a metal rod. "Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! Hurt! ... Take out your frustrations on 'em." He encourages the investigator to pretend that one of the pigs scared off a voluptuous and willing 17- or 18-year-old girl, and then beat the pig for it.

"At one point in the video, workers are shown slamming piglets on the ground, a practice designed to instantly kill those baby pigs that aren't healthy enough. But on the video, the piglets are not killed instantly, and in a bloodied pile, some piglets can be seen wiggling vainly. The video also shows piglets being castrated, and having their tails cut off, without anesthesia."

Why The Dark Knight was disappointing

Because I'm too lazy to retype this, here's my reasoning (from an IM with a friend):

[12:49] leetanker: you didnt like the dark knight?
[12:49] leetanker: WAH?
[12:49] leetanker: ARE YOU MAD?
[12:49] reallygreengiant: yeah I am. squandered.
[12:49] leetanker: i havent seen it yet, but i hear it rules
[12:50] reallygreengiant: 1) not enough of the Joker at the end
[12:50] reallygreengiant: 2) 3 villains - story moved too fast
[12:50] reallygreengiant: 3) why have stupid CSI scenes??
[12:51] reallygreengiant: 4) Why spend so much time on cellhpone/sonar tricks instead of us just watching batman do it??
[12:51] reallygreengiant: 5) Where was Batman's sadness at his loss??
[12:51] reallygreengiant: all in all, they did too much and should have focused on Joker v. Batman
[12:51] reallygreengiant: VERY disappointing
[12:51] leetanker: considering we arent going to see the joker again...
[12:51] reallygreengiant: and I am the only person in America who thinks this apparently
[12:51] reallygreengiant: lol
[12:52] leetanker: i hear ledger is gonna win an oscar for that
[12:52] reallygreengiant: joker was awesome, but not oscar worth - shit - he wasnt on camera enough!
[12:52] reallygreengiant: he might have been on camera a total of 30 mins
[12:52] leetanker: the guy died
[12:52] reallygreengiant: during shooting, I thought it was in pos production
[12:52] leetanker: cause he was so freaking wierded out by it
[12:52] leetanker: yeah, it was
[12:53] reallygreengiant: he died mixing too many presciprtion drugs. woops. sucks.
[12:53] leetanker: yeah, i blame the joker
[12:53] reallygreengiant: that's the tradegy - he was great, but they didnt utilize him enough!!!
[12:53] reallygreengiant: he wasn't on camera the last 30 mins

The recap and reasoning for my extreme disappointment in The Dark Knight:
1) not enough of the Joker at the end - not enough Joker at all
2) 3 villains - story moved too fast
3) why have stupid CSI scenes??
4) Why spend so much time on cellhpone/sonar tricks instead of us just watching batman do it?? We know Batman is full of cool tricks and can assume that stuff.
5) Where was Batman's sadness at his loss?? He mourned for 30 seconds

Main point: Heath was great - so why not focus on Batman vs Joker and let Heath get some screen time! Shame on you Chris Nolan. Do one story and do it superbly, and leave out Two Face, Scarecrow, and the CSI.