the kings of corn

Before the invention of handheld video games and car DVD players, kids had to find other ways to pass time during long family road trips. Some of us had a pack of cards, others had car (miniature) versions of games like Connect Four. You could try to make a dent in your school's summer reading list, but motion sickness would inevitably end that endeavor. Many of us would simply stare mindlessly out the window with no regard to the passing sights; the only thing that kept our brains from just giving up and dying were the passionate wishes that the trip end soon.

And when, no matter how fast your dad drove, you finally resigned to the fact that you would be surrounded by cornfields forever, a billboard in the distance caught your eye: MYSTERY SPOT NEXT EXIT! WORLD'S LARGEST HORSE TURD EXIT NOW!! LAND OF GIANT LIZARDS TAKE EXIT 146 FOR A THOUSAND MILES THEN TURN LEFT!!!

For a kid bored senseless, nothing is more alluring than a billboard advertising Auntie Em's Farm of Lawn Gnomes. Consequently, lost in the excitement of possibly leaving the car for a few minutes, we would beg and plead for dad to take the next exit. While we already know what our father's response will be, we continue to pray for intercession by God and all the patron saints of useless crap until the exit has passed and we quickly return to a vegetable state. Every few hundred miles the process repeats until we either reach our destination or, miraculously, the cornfields give way to a more exciting landscape, e.g. anything.

On my way to Chicago, I passed a billboard near Mitchell, South Dakota that instructed me to exit and see one of the great wonders of the world: The Corn Palace. In an instant I was intrigued and dismissive. I knew the Corn Palace would be among the most utterly lame experiences of my life. On the other hand, the childish need to finally obey a roadside billboard led me to exit the interstate.

The Corn Palace is astonishingly amazing and equally ridiculous. The building serves primarily as an arena and facility for community events. However, the main attraction is the outside facade which is made of corn and other grains. Each year the extensive corn murals are removed and replaced by a local artist. This year, a mural of the Lincoln Memorial overlooking the National Mall, among others, greeted my arrival.

I chose not to go inside, primarily because there was an admission fee, but also because I began to feel foolish just standing outside THE CORN PALACE, so I got in my car and left. A childhood fantasy shattered in mere minutes.

Nowadays any inquisitive mind can see the Corn Palace on its live webcam.

Updated pictures here.

my lands are where my dead lie buried

In the summer of 1876, Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane sauntered into Deadwood, South Dakota. Among the first characters immortalized in frontier dime novels, Hickok and Jane both served stints as scouts for Custer and met while on a wagon train to Deadwood as the leader of the 7th Cavalry rode off into infamy. A few weeks later Wild Bill was shot playing poker in Saloon No. 10, the same saloon I now played blackjack in.

The Wild West conjures images of dusty one street towns in the Arizona desert, the Utah and eastern California settings of many John Wayne movies, and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (If I remember correctly, Doc Holliday looked a lot like Val Kilmer). However, there are no tumbleweeds in Deadwood; no buildings and faces sculpted by years of the sun's abuse. The city rests in a gulch lost among the Black Hills, distinguished only by the dead Ponderosa Pines lining the surrounding hills. Yet Deadwood is the quintessential Wild West town, inspiring even the creation of a HBO miniseries.

Deadwood was originally an illegal camp on Lakota Indian territory during the Black Hills Gold Rush of 1874. And while gambling is still the number one recreational activity, the city now caters to a less delinquent crowd: tourists and local retired folk looking to make some easy cash. I arrived the day after the yearly Mardi Gras party so the streets were mostly quiet and the bar staff greatly outnumbered the patrons.

Despite its reputation as a tourist trap, the restored 19th century Main Street, the swinging saloon doors, and the sawdust covered floors all found themselves quite to my liking. In my mind, sitting at the blackjack table with a drink in hand and chatting with some of the locals is as close as I'll get to an authentic Wild West experience. Then again I was a little drunk, which certainly is conducive to unwarranted nostalgia in places contrived to arose such feelings.

The next day I left Deadwood and drove deeper into the Black Hills. My first destination was the Crazy Horse Memorial, a literally mountain-sized monument being built in honor of the Lakota warrior Crazy Horse. Sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski began working on the monument in 1948 and, if completed, the sculpture will be the world's largest at 563 feet. To put things into perspective, all four heads of Mount Rushmore could fit into Crazy Horse's head.


Even with countless decades of work remaining, the sculpture is remarkable if not a bit absurd and has generated an enormous amount of controversy. The Lakota Indians view the Black Hills as sacred and many believe the creation of this monument is akin to carving up Mount Zion in the shape of a biblical character. What's more, Crazy Horse refused to be photographed and was buried where his body could never be found; surely he would not have supported the construction of such an enormity.

I headed next to Mount Rushmore in the hopes of seeing Nicholas Cage fall out of George Washington's nose. Alas, no such luck. Even Mount Rushmore lies incomplete, but it did give me a scale with which to measure how the Crazy Horse Memorial will look if finished. To be honest, Mount Rushmore is an absurdity itself and was created merely in an effort to increase tourism in the Black Hills. Don't get me wrong, the monument is impressive and sculptor Gutzon Borglum did a remarkable job with the likenesses of the four presidents, even giving the impression that Teddy Roosevelt is wearing glasses. However, it's saddening to think Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear, despite having good intentions, probably commissioned the Crazy Horse Monument in retaliation to the U.S. Government's own disregard for the purity of natural resources. The Black Hills are an oasis of rolling hills and Ponderosa Pines among the flat nothingness of the Great Plains, blemished by our desire to make money and to make statement.

very superstitious, writing's on the wall

If you are a superstitious person, the past day would have sent you running for cover. After two straight days of rain--in California of all places--there was a light drizzle when we left Berkley this morning.

I try to avoid using CDs or MP3 players during road trips so that I can listen to local radio stations. A great testament to the power of the Internet and domestic globalization, nearly every radio station is identical to the next from Britney Spears' latest single to the same low-budget commercials advertising Joe's Shop for Whatever. And when I'm tired of hearing about when Katy Perry kissed a girl and liked it, or when the bloviating Rush Limbaugh denounces President Obama as the Antichrist, I switch to NPR for a solid dose of pinko communist propaganda.

This morning NPR had a segment on tonight's full moon that included some obscure trivia on how the Earth is, at any one moment, half covered in light and half covered in shadow. I'm glad the producers at NPR dispatched brilliant scientific minds to uncover this mystery of the stars. What they failed to mention, however, was that a full moon is known to induce strange behavior in both humans and nature.

We drove up the north coast of California to Redwood National Park and the rain subsided. The redwood groves that stretch from San Francisco to the Oregon border are the only old-growth forests left in the United States and the last remaining redwoods in the world. Further, these forests contain plant species that have outlasted the dinosaurs. Wandering among the 300-foot redwoods and pushing aside the descendants of pre-historic ferns is the closest one can get to experiencing what life was like while dinosaurs still roamed the Earth. I half expected to see a Tyrannosaurus Rex come crashing through the undergrowth.


As we fast-fowarded to the present and began to weave through the Cascade Mountains towards Oregon, the rain returned and quickly became snow. From that point on, the weather seemed to change by the mile. The snow gave way to rain until blue skies parted the clouds for a instant before disappearing behind clouds and more rain. Fifty miles outside of Klamath Falls, the highway climbed up into the Cascades, the temperature dropped fifteen degrees and a drizzle became a blizzard. The road was quickly vanishing beneath the snow, but there were barely visible tracks and what appeared to be salt and sand preventing slippery conditions. Twenty miles later we caught up with the salt truck that had been providing the Vibe with so much traction. We followed the truck for another ten miles until the snow suddenly subsided and the roads cleared and were even dry. It was as if we had walked through a door separating a storm system and clear skies.


The sky was eerily beautiful and the brilliance of the full moon illuminated the landscape in a fluorescent light. Occasionally thin clouds would dissipate some of the light, but when the moon emerged the snow on the hillsides would light up like a white T-shirt underneath a black light. And if the day hadn't been strange enough, we pulled into Klamath Falls around eight and decided to eat at a BBQ joint that received rave reviews from the locals. While I was a little hesitant to accept BBQ in the Pacific Northwest, the food was great, better than most BBQ places in DC.

Now I'm pondering a jump in the heated pool here at the hotel. Tomorrow morning we are heading up to Crater Lake.

I only took a couple of pictures today and will update on Wednesday.

religulous

Disclaimer: If you take religion way too seriously and think unicorns don't exist because they were arrogant and refused to get on the ark, turn back now!


Think of the most ridiculous thing you've ever seen. No seriously, think of something. Got it? Now multiple that by ten. At this point you are not even close to how terrible the Holy Land Experience is. About one mile from Universal Studios sits a "re-creation" of various biblical sites and the biggest sham of religion in a country that does a remarkable job of taking religion to the extreme. My sister summed it up best: "The dumbest thing I have ever seen."

The con artists who thought up this whole enterprise must be laughing on their giant piles of money right now. Building this atrocity not only suckers money away from honestly religious people, it also gets people like me who come to laugh at the people who take it seriously.


We arrived just in time to catch a reenactment of the Passion. For those not so religiously-inclined, it's when Jesus goes to meet his maker, though technically Jesus is also his maker if you believe in the Trinity. The entire production was over the top, though my favorite part was when they flogged Jesus with a miniature version of the foam noodles we played with at the beach as kids. The Roman soldiers took turns so the one not hitting could reapply fake blood to his noodle. When they raised Jesus on the cross you could see the metal rings he was holding--obviously they wouldn't actually nail his hands to the cross--and, if you remember your bible well enough, he forgave two fellow crucifixees that weren't actually there. At one point, right when Jesus was about to expire, they were playing the theme song from Gladiator over the loudspeakers. Wasn't that a little after his time?


I almost felt bad when I started laughing and looked to my left and saw a woman crying. But when I looked to my right and saw my sister laughing, I couldn't contain myself.

When they placed the body in the tomb, smoke began rising from within and suddenly Jesus appeared on the hilltop and told everyone to chill, he was OK. Afterward I saw that Jesus' tomb not only had a smoke machine, it also had a back door. So that's how he got out! The bible leaves out many of these little details.

The rest of the park was extraordinarily lame. There was the world's "largest indoor model of Jerusalem" that looked like a classroom of 3rd graders had spent an afternoon working with papier mache and toy figurines. You could also walk into a whale's mouth and see Jonah suspended in its stomach. What is the moral of that story? That the digestive juices of a whale aren't enough to kill a man?


Also there was Moses in the midst of parting the Red Sea which you walked through as sharks and fish stared out at you from the water wondering, "WTF?!" That reminded me of when I saw a descendant of the burning bush in Egypt and I asked my sister what she thought the real story was. According to her, Moses had been doing a little too much acid with his buddies and when he wandered off into the desert they decided to mess with him. One guy got behind a bush and lit it on fire while the other guy climbed up to a cliff with a megaphone shouting "Moses! Lead your people out of Egypt!"

I personally appreciated the statue of Jesus walking on water with his hand out. There was a step so you could hold his hand and walk on water with him. Rest assured, pictures were taken and hilarity ensued. At the time I thought I had just wasted $35, but just sitting here writing this has made the whole experience worth much more than the pittance we paid.


As always more picture here.

flo-rida

My friends and I have been conditioned to hate Florida. Too much humidity, too many old people, and isn't Walt Disney World reason enough? Yet after months of not seeing the sun and hiding indoors to avoid freezing temperatures, the blue skies and blue water spread happiness like an infectious disease. My primary reason for visiting Florida is to see Charlie, my sister's dog. My secondary reason, to see the Holy Land Experience, which I will dedicate an entire entry to. My tertiary reason, to visit my sister. And if you have yet to figure out I'm an irreverent smart ass, well, good luck reading.

My brother may argue that California is the land of extremes, but I beg to differ. Florida is essentially one giant strip mall. In my sister's apartment complex, the top floor units are cheaper than the ground floor ones because old people can't climb stairs. Florida also contains some of the most rabidly conservative people on the planet. Rush Limbaugh is based in this state. At a party my sister recently attended, a couple told her that it's terrible the United States has elected a black president and that that day should never have come. Apparently when people reach the age where they don't care anymore about making racist comments in public and no longer need factual evidence to back up their statements (Because I said so!), it's time to move to Florida and allow the rest of the country to keep on truckin'.

trouble in paradise

I apologize for the lack of posts over the past day. The hostel I stayed at in Charleston last night had internet, but the computers must have built around the same time as the hostel, the turn of the 20th century. Since it took 20 minutes alone to start the computer, I moved on.

The annoyances continue, however. After a disappointing trip to Savannah, I drove to Atlanta and checked into a hostel there. The internet here is quite fast, but costs $2/minute to use. Ergo, I will have to delay any lengthy posts with pictures until tomorrow when I get to my sister's place in Daytona. I have pages and pages written, just no time to get them electronic. Be sure to check in tomorrow night. Now I'm off to find some food and booze.

do we have any salt trucks around here?

This morning I woke up to a blizzard. I went downstairs to run last minute errands and pack up the car and this is what I see.


It has not really snowed in DC since January 2007 and suddenly three inches appear the day before my trip? The roads were fine, but everyone was driving like the pavement was covered in three feet of ice. Schools closed early because they are lame, and apparently the only method of snow removal available for the parking lot of my apartment building is a maintenance guy with a snow shovel and a small salt cart that one simply pushes around. These are the moments you appreciate coming from a climate where snow is present five months out of the year and driving on slick roads is nerve-wracking yet perversely exciting because your teenage years were spent doing donuts in the unplowed parking lot of the local Mejier. 

Actually, Southeast Michigan doesn't get that much snow. Take a look at these shots from my recent trip to the Adirondacks (Yes, those are skis you see us carrying).

Imagine hailing from the Upper Peninsula or Up-Upstate New York. Those people are tough as nails. A great metaphor for Northerners and Virginians is the relationship between the vampires and humans in the Twilight book series. I can see someone from the Keweenaw Peninsula snowmobile up to a well-dressed, self-important lawyer from Northern Virginia, reach out to shake his hand and watch the lawyer wither away when their hands touch.