1. The view I get everyday as I ride my bike home. This is a low fog bank around Orcas Island.


2. I did a ski ascent of Mt. St. Helens a few weeks back. This was a lunch stop around 6000 feet. The winds were blowing hard. Mt. Hood in Oregon is in the background.


3. At the end of winter break I went on a short road trip around the edge of the Olympic Peninsula with my friends Ko and Cameron. The first night we slept in the Hoh rainforest, a few miles north of here. This is the mouth of the Hoh River.


4. That morning we saw the Roosevelt Elk herd wandering around the old growth rainforest.


Here is an article talking about the Hoh ecosystem.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008667916_wolves25.html?syndication=rss

5. We ran into some big trees on the way.


6. Hummingbirds outside the window in Seattle.


7. Logan at Christmas, hamming it up for the camera.

MTV and Pop Culture

MTV makes me sick. When I watch it, I see glorification of violence, objectification of women, and consumption as the source of all happiness.

This is a list of the effects of mass (or pop) culture, from sociologist Ernest van den Haag.

1) Life is reduced to a spectator sport.
See Tila Tequila, My Super Sweet Sixteen (Spoiled rich girls getting lots of stuff), The Hills, etc etc.

2) Mass culture appeals to base instincts, distracting people rather than enlightening them.
As above.

3) In excess, it tends to isolate people from one another, from themselves, and from experience. Real life becomes trivial in the face of vicarious experience.

4) Distracts people from their lives, which they view as boring and thus generate obsession with ESCAPE. This deprives them of autonomous growth and enrichment -- lives become even more boring and unfulfilled.

5) Mass appeal needed to make mass culture profitable deindividualizes people, seeking one artist to fit all consumers as the most profitable model.


This is disgusting. It is the homogenization and packaging of art.