Books Lying Open
¤ The Bachman Books, Stephen King
¤ Thief of Time, Terry Pratchett
¤ Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah, Stephen King

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Herbal tea timebombs.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because food is the enemy.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your recently-refilled M&M dispenser exist solely to taunt you with brightly colored no-nos.

ince I've been toiling a great deal the last few days on editing portions of my novel, and I want to get back to it shortly, today's blog will be largely a cut and paste from the new Big Sur photo page, which I finished last night. You'll find that portion below, and it's what made all of you stuck on narrowband so annoyed at the site loading speed today. Up here you'll find a quick "what I did today" type thing, and then a news item from a couple of days ago that I didn't have room for in Thursday's blog.

So what did I do today (Friday)? Not a damn lot. It's what I'm going to do starting tomorrow that's of interest.

As related in the last couple of blogs, Malaya and me are going to embark upon a week or more of eating nothing at all, and drinking nothing but lemonade, maple syrup, and cayenne pepper. Wacky? Perhaps, but thousands of people do it for 10 or more days every year, and most of them swear by it. It's called the Master Cleanser diet, and in addition to giving people an average 1-1.5 pound a day weight loss, it has all sorts of other health benefits. Ours may not be as glowing as this guy's "cured MS and my wife's ovarian cancer" but we'll see how it goes, since we're starting Saturday morning.

The day before the fast is supposed to be the day you ease into it. No big meals, no meat or anything else difficult to digest. Just vegetables, etc. So far, I'm right on track, and I'm not even hungry, currently. And anyway, as I've blogged about several times recently, hunger mostly psychological.

Thursday we ate 2 small meals each, and had some popcorn for a snack. That was about it. We were up late (well, late for Malaya, normal for me) working Thursday night, and didn't get into bed until 6am. I didn't sleep very well; woke up several times with a head crammed full of very vivid and strange dreams in which I'd created entire fantasy worlds, none of which made any sense at all once I was awake and thinking about the small bits of them that I remembered.  But that's about the usual score for my dreams.

I got up around 1 and got right to work on the computer, after a quick morning email/surf. Malaya headed to the gym for an hour, then we worked side by side for a couple of hours before going to get a jumbo Jamba Juice each around 5. I sipped most of mine (Peach Pleasure) and held off eating until around 11pm, when I cut up the red and yellow bell peppers that were going to go bad, along with 4 remaining stalks of celery. Since neither of us are going to eat for a week+, we've been trying to eat up everything perishable in the fridge, while not buying anything to replace it with either. We're doing pretty well there too, since with those last veggies gone and the 3 eggs Malaya's going to eat later, we're down to little more than condiments.  Better than I did last July, pre-move, when I had to go buy two coolers that morning just to fit most of what I'd left in my fridge into them, since the coolers themselves were cheaper than all of the food I was putting into them.

So up at 1, big fruit smoothie that afternoon, plate of raw bell peppers and celery at midnight (seasoned with no more than the water I used to wash them) and for me, that's it. I'm finishing my Jamba off right now, and with any luck I can go the last 4 or 5 hours of wakefulness without eating anything more. In fact I can't, since we're going to start the Master Cleanser regime with herbal tea in a couple of hours, and after that nothing but lemonade in the day, herbal tea at night, and salt water washes in the morning on an empty stomach are allowed for the duration.  The herbal tea may be interesting, since it's "dieter's tea" meaning you take it and you lose some weight pretty quickly. And they're not talking about amputation or regurgitation, so you do the math.

I'm also okay with being hungry now, since they say the first 3 or 4 days of a fast/juice diet are the hard ones, when you feel hungry and want to eat. Once you get past that point your body adjusts to the lack of solid food and you feel fine. I hope so, anyway. I'll just be somewhat hungry now and get over it a day sooner than I would have otherwise, thus making me happy by Wed or Thurs, rather than Tues or Wed. Right?

Being sporadically hungry for the past few days has helped me write though, since I know if I'm lost in my work I won't think about food, and if I'm not thinking about it I don't feel hungry. A couple more weeks of starvation and I can knock this novel right out!

Oddly enough, a regular reader mailed in a few days ago. She said she hadn't visited the site for a few weeks, and when she came to catch up what was on the page but my whole Master Cleanser blog. It made her curious enough to read up on it, since she'd long wondered about lower intestine cleaning diets, and she went and bought the book and is going to try it out herself. I'll post updates on how it's going for Malaya and I, and while I can't really hope to write anything as memorably-hilarious as this UK Guardian reporter's trip to the enema resort, I'll do what I can. And I'll let you know how it goes for the site reader who mailed in as well, if she gives me a future update.

In fact, I think I'll do my diet experience as a sort of pseudo-blog. I'll write short updates every so often, time stamping them, and then post what's collected over two days. And no, every update won't be about what's collected over those two days, at least not in the sense that the UK Guardian article linked above was. *cough*

I can also imagine going on this diet/cleanse for a couple of weeks every year, and maybe making it an annual or bi-annual thing. I mean like in the future, when I am theoretically published and famous and all of that, and I would try to get site readers to try it themselves. Group peer pressure/support seems to help most people when they're trying to do something new or difficult.

For one last diet note, I posted the other day about my dismay at seeing my actual body weight, after not stepping on a scale in years. I weighed 179, which was about 15 more than I expected. The odd part was when I next weighed myself, the next morning, I was down to 172. How did I lose 7 pounds in 12 hours? And no, I wasn't doing the Master Cleanser thing yet, or even herbal tea. Since then I've weighed myself several times a day, and I've been everywhere from 170 to 177. Some of it is clothing, but I'm not hopping on there in hiking boots and a leather jacket. Who knew house pants and a t-shirt made such a difference?

I'm sure some of it is our $10 scale being less than scientifically accurate, but it's also me, fluctuating up and down in weight a lot depending on whether I just chugged a bottle of water, ate dinner, peed, etc.  Being as body weight is the opposite of penis length measurement (in both cases the man assumes the best measurement ever taken is the accurate one), I'm assuming that I actually weigh 170, at most, and that the others are bloated inaccuracies brought on by water retention, heavy clothing, or both of the above.

Although, I suppose I should actually assume the highest weight is the accurate one, so I'll feel better about weight loss on the Master Cleanser. Hell, I've lost as much as 9 pounds already in 3 days, and I haven't even begun it!

Now for one left over political type news item, before the pretty vacation photos.

¤ There's no longer much debate about how badly the post-war Iraqi situation has been screwed up by the Bush Administration's "they'll greet us with rose petals and enjoy living under our control" insanely-poor planning. But at least the actual war itself was well-fought and well-organized and reflected well upon the quality of our military. Right?

The study, titled "On Point" and aimed at "lessons learned," is at odds with the public perception of a technologically superior invasion force that easily drove Hussein from power. In fact, as the authors point out in their battle-by-battle narrative, there were many precarious moments when U.S. units were critically short of fuel and ammunition, with little understanding of the forces arrayed against them.

...

American soldiers who defeated the Iraqi regime 15 months ago received virtually none of the critical spare parts they needed to keep their tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles running. They ran chronically short of food, water and ammunition. Their radios often failed them. Their medics had to forage for medical supplies; artillery gunners had to cannibalize parts from captured Iraqi guns, and intelligence units provided little useful information about the enemy.

These revelations come not from embedded reporters or congressional committees but from the Army itself. In the first internal assessment of the war in Iraq, an exhaustive Army study has concluded that U.S. forces prevailed despite supply and logistical failures, poor intelligence, communication breakdowns and futile attempts at psychological warfare.

There's plenty more, good news as well as bad (which is which depends on your feelings about a strong US military, I suppose); I just quoted a few of the most eye-catching bits. The only part that's gotten major play in the news I've seen on Yahoo is the revelation that the toppling of Saddam's statue was stage-managed by US troops. I didn't think that was news, since I read about it on numerous blogs at the time, once people got hold of video feed photos showing that the "crowd" around the US tanks pulling down the statue was about 200 people, all grouped together on one side where the TV cameras could get them in view and make them look like a small part of a huge mob.

But as I said in my Fahrenheit 9/11 review, there's really no telling what is common knowledge, in these days of our lazy, Presidential lapdog, un-inquiring national media. And speaking of F9/11 (sort of), if the media had expended half the effort investigating and nitpicking Bush's pre-war lies as they have Moore's post-war propagandumentary, we might never have invaded Iraq in the first place.

(Honestly, I don't really believe that; it was just sort of fun to say. There was no way Bush and his neocon policy-makers weren't going into Iraq, no matter what the media said or didn't say. The 9/11 attacks and subsequent half-hearted Afghanistan adventure just delayed Operation Saddam a bit.)

The photos on this page, despite the page title, were not taken in Big Sur, but north of there, along the same stretch of coast (the one with the Pacific Ocean). The scenery is just as beautiful, and cliffs just as rugged, but it's not technically within the bounds of Big Sur. I'm calling it that anyway, since it's coast, it's north/central California, and it's beautiful. As you're about to find out.

What's this area like? The ocean is very cold and very deep, even just off shore, and there are virtually no beaches, other than a few at the bases of cliffs that probably flood at high tide, and are hardly large enough to spread a beach towel on. The entire coast is cliffs and rocks, and there is very little rain other than fog and condensation from the sea, which means the vegetation is typical low-rain California plants: chaparral, wild flowers, and weeds. No palm trees, no creeping vines, and nothing like you'd see on ocean cliffs somewhere equally beautiful, like Hawaii. It's also cool most of the year, and cold in the winter, with a very strong wind off the ocean.  Lovely to visit now, but if your boat washed up there two hundred years ago and you didn't have any food, you'd better be able to fish, shoot birds, and find shelter, or you would starve in short order, assuming you didn't die of thirst or exposure to the elements first.

Most of the photos on this page were taken with my new (as of June 2004) Olympus C-755. There are also some photos from my old camera, a Toshiba PDR-M25, presented mostly for the sake of comparison. You can read more about the differences between these cameras in the camera comparison section of the photos index page.

• Almost every photo on this page has a much larger, much prettier version, which you can view by clicking on the smaller shot you see on this page. I highly recommend this, almost as highly as I recommend taking a vacation to see the Big Sur area yourself.

Before we get to the gorgeous shots, here's one of me, taken by Malaya.  This shot was taken with the old camera, obviously enough, since I've got the new one in my hands and around my neck. The weather was gorgeous, and the wind was tremendous all day, as the back of my shirt demonstrates.

Looks like a perfect postcard view of some truly gorgeous scenery, eh? The funny part is that it all looks like this; I got out of the car on a turn out, pointed, and clicked. You literally can not take a bad photo in this area, as this page shows.

Click this for a much larger view.

This is about the only shot on this page that was taken with the new camera, and is not a thumbnail linking to a far larger shot. It's the water in this one that really makes it work for me; so blue/green and turbulent.  The rocks are gorgeous too, though.  Makes you want to dive in, doesn't it? Better get a running start; the water is at least 70 feet below the cliff top, and there's quite a bit of rocky beach to clear.

The upper shot was taken with the new camera, the lower one with the old one. The difference in light quality and detail should be pretty obvious at a glance. I didn't darken the old camera shot, it's just darker like that. Also, it can't be fixed by increasing the brightness of the shot, since the foam is already brilliant white. Turning it up more would make the cliffs lighter, but the parts that are already light would become overexposed and blur together in a white smear.

Besides, isn't the whole point of having a good camera so you don't have to go back over your every photo with Photoshop to make it look good?

Here's another side by side example of photos from the old camera (on the left) and the new one (on the right). As I describe in the camera comparison, the old shot doesn't look bad... until you view the new one. It's far crisper, showing every rock in detail, letting you see the individual grasses, the glimmer on the water, etc.

Click each photo to see them full size, and the difference is overwhelming.

This was more of a wave splash pool than a tide pool, but I thought it was pretty anyway. Click it to see the full-sized shot and get an idea of how large and far away it is.

I love the way the water washes over rocks, most of which were probably part of the cliffs, tens of thousands of years ago. The sea is gradually wearing them all down to nothing, of course.

Click this for a much larger view.

This shot aims just a big higher than the one below it. You could probably stitch together the two shots, if you had some time to burn.

These were taken next to a large valley, where the highway stretched over an impressive bridge. Just before each end of the bridge, you can see an old dirt road stretching off into the hills, beetling along the side of steep hills as it runs off into the distance, out of sight around the twisting canyon. I'd imagine coast commutes became a lot more tolerable after the bridge was built as part of the great public works projects of the 1930s.

Click the image for a much larger view.

And here's the bridge, with my dad in the foreground and me down to the right, taking the photos you see above this one. What you can't see in the picture is the wind; it was howling up from the sea. Opening a car door into the wind was difficult, hats had to be removed to keep them from flying away, and I felt safe standing on even the very edge of this 80+ foot drop, since it was almost like the wind would have blown me back if I'd slipped. On the other hand, it did make holding the camera steady a bit of a challenge, especially on zoom shots.