I’ve been following somewhat closely the story of James Kim and his family. Kim was a contributor to shows on Tech TV and he is known to some of the folks on The Well, one of my online hangouts. Kim was reported missing on November 30, 2006. According to an AP report, Kim’s wife and two young children were found alive in their Saab station wagon on a snowy road in southwest Oregon. Kim had gone for help and has not been located. They had intended to take a state highway off the Interstate to get to a lodge near Gold Beach on the Oregon coast. They missed the highway, decided to take a different road, took a wrong fork in the road and ended up stuck about 15 miles from the fork.

James Kim was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, a gray sweater and a jacket as he left the car on Saturday, and had initially planned to return that afternoon if he could not find help, according to Oregon authorities.

They said his footprints eventually dropped down into a drainage known as Big Windy Creek.

By Monday, the search included three privately chartered helicopters and a fourth helicopter hired by the state. There were also dozens of searchers on the ground.

The search today will include helicopters with thermal-imaging technology, along with dog teams, a boat and horses. Roads in the area are commonly used in the summer, but are not plowed in winter.

As a father and a lover of the mountains — any mountains — this strikes a chord. What a nightmare. It further hammers home some of the rare advice my Dad gave me. He’s normally a joking sort. But when my buddy and I were out visiting him in Colorado then about to take off on our own into the mountains, he got uncharacteristically serious and said something to the effect of, “You be careful out there; you take the mountain for granted, and it’ll kill you.”

This does serve as a reminder of how much we take our comfort and safety for granted. I’m not really speaking of the Kim family now. I don’t have any idea what their preparations or mental state were like. But I can see getting into a jam like that, simply because I have a tendency to believe that just because there is a road, it’s safe to drive on. I believe this simply because it’s a government constructed road, not through any independent evaluation of the road or its conditions. It’s a credit to our society that we feel this safe, but it occasionally leads to some bad decision making.

Like I said, that last paragraph wasn’t directed at the Kims. I have no idea of their situation. Hopefully James will turn up alive and healthy.

Update: I frequently find myself drawing odd connections between things that seem, at first blush, unrelated. With the James Kim post still on my mind, this happened once again as I was reading a post at Paul Retherford’s site, itself referencing a Kemplog post, which was in turn referencing a Washington Post article about an eco-village in North Carolina. (If I’m not careful, we’re gonna get fractal or recursive here or, god-forbid, turn this thing into an Ouroboros. Sorry, I was just getting link-happy there.)

Anyway, the Retherford post highlighted a quote from the Post article:

We live in a world we didn’t make, by rules and customs and laws we didn’t invent, using tools and technologies we don’t understand.

He goes on to elaborate:

It is partly because our production systems are so efficient that we are so removed from them. Unfortunately, if we allow ourselves too much separation from the pork we eat or the electricity we use, we lose the big picture. We stop valuing the energy, engineering, and effort that gave us the end-product. And we lose the biological connection between the life of the pig and our need for nourishment. We lose the ecological connection between the land stripped for coal and the power line running to our house.

And what, pray tell, does this have to do with being stranded in the snow on a mountain? It goes back to my Dad’s warning. If you take the mountain for granted, it’ll kill you. Nature, as they say, is a Mother. And, she bats last. As we become further removed from nature, our appreciation for its power is dulled and, we end up making decisions that are not fully informed. And the consequences can be severe.

Update #2 Damn. The AP is reporting that Mr. Kim was found dead today (12/6/06).

The gym was full of post-Thanksgiving exercisers today. It hadn’t really occurred to me when I headed out to the gym that it was the day after Thanksgiving. But, I guess folks are trying to work off their excesses. I, on the other hand, am proud of my excesses (for dessert: pumpkin pie, chocolate-chocolate cake, 2 kinds of chocolate pudding pie, a cookie, and banana pudding), but went to the gym anyway.

I saw a couple of folks reading books on the exercise bike. I can see being able to do that while you’re warming up or something. But I have to wonder how much you’re really getting out of your workout when you can read for an hour while you’re on the bike. Maybe these folks either don’t move around as much when they’re riding or have a higher tolerance for motion while reading. Probably, I’m too quick to judge.

As for myself, I think I found a workout routine that will bust me out of a plateau I was in. Sort of a pyramid scheme where I lift about 80% of a weight that I can do 6 to 8 reps. Then I do two sets at 100%, then I do two sets with quick reps at about 30-40%. We’ll see. I’m only about a week into it. But, so far I’m feeling that nice muscle ache I felt regularly when I first started lifting weights.

Just a few random thoughts.

I know Thanksgiving is, at its root, a religious holiday, and I am not the most religious sort. Nonetheless, I think it’s probably my favorite holiday (Halloween is a close second, but on a more fun, superficial level.) Regardless of my doubts as to whom my gratitude should be directed, I recognize that I have a great deal about which to be thankful. It’s good to have holiday reminding me, and everyone else, of that fact.

For starters, I have a wife I love, two healthy kids, a job, enough to eat, and a roof over my head. That’s a pretty good start. I live in a country of such bounty I have the leisure time to do something as frivolous as write in this blog while drinking an African coffee and while my daughter sits next to me, eating grapes in November. Never mind access to technology plentiful and cheap enough to make the blog work. And I live in a country where I can express my doubts about religion and speak my mind about politics without any significant fear of reprisal.

Obviously I have my criticisms of my governments’ policies, objections to the direction this country has been heading, and fears about just how much my children will have to be thankful for when they are my age, but for today, it’s worth remembering that I have much of my own for which to be thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before or just thought about mentioning it, but for anyone who was a kid and loved adventure cartoons of the 60s and 70s, particularly Jonny Quest, the Venture Brothers is probably the best show on television.

You’ve got Brock Samson, voiced by Patrick Warburton — Seinfeld’s Puddy, an ultraviolent bodyguard with a heart of gold. You’ve got the pathetic and yet disdainful Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture. The two boys – Hank and Dean. Hank is sort of Joe Hardy, Jonny Quest, and Fred from Scooby Doo while Dean is more like a geekier version of Frank Hardy and Peter Parker. The show is written by one of the co-creators of “The Tick.”

If you’ve never seen or have no use for Jonny Quest or The Tick, the show probably isn’t for you. Certainly this is not one of the shows my wife and I watch together. Actually, I can practically hear her eyes roll when I’m watching it in the other room — until I start laughing; that pretty much drowns out the eye rolls.

Great quote:

Brock Samson: Don’t you have nothing else to do but harp on Dr. Venture? Why haven’t you tried the World Domination thing, you afraid of the big leagues?

The Monarch: Please. How stupid do I look to you? World Domination. I’ll leave that to the religious nuts or the Republicans, thank you.

I had a nice little post tweaking Russ Pulliam for his column awarding Daniels a second term, but my blog keeps giving me an error when I try to post it. I’ve been getting a lot of blog errors lately when I try to post, so some kind of tweaking is probably in order.

Daniel Lee, writing for the Indianapolis Star, has an article entitled “Daniels’ Plan aims beyond uninsured.” His plan is to insure about 120,000 low income Hoosiers. Daniels argues that the plan could actually save Hoosiers money, reasoning that as it is now, folks generally get service, but they get it at the emergency room when their ailments become intolerable. This is an expensive, inefficient way to deliver treatment. The folks who get such treatment can’t pay for it, and the costs are passed along to others in ways that are themselves inefficient and expensive.

Now I’m messing around with the time stamp. Figured I’d set it to GMT. (I’ve been advised that UTC is the correct terminology, but I can’t figure out a dead simple way to get a display in that format.)

[tags]datestamp, WordPress[/tags]

I just added a WordPress plug-in that theoretically allows me to append Technorati tags on my blog. We’ll give it a try.

[tags]Technorati, tags, Masson, blog[/tags]

Apparently the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission is
accepting nominations to replace the vacancy created by the resignation of Commissioner David Hadley. The nominee is required to be someone without a Republican affiliation.