A Bloy and his Blog

One more entry related to my camping trip. Learning about Native American culture has been a fascination of mine for quite some time. While I was in northern Wisconsin, I visited Waswagoning, a recreated Ojibwe Indian village. They’ve got things set up there as the Ojibwe lived before the Europeans came to this area. The tour guides (from the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe tribe) do an excellent job of showing you how their people lived during that time. The folktales they told also made their culture come alive as the tour progressed. Definitely an excellent place to stop while you’re traveling through the north woods.

One of the best things about being in this area of Wisconsin are hearing the loons calling at night. There’s nothing like falling asleep while listening to that haunting wail they make. One night I woke up about 3am (my bladder was calling me). After I finished my urgent business I must have stayed awake 20 minutes or so listening to the loons. No, they weren’t keeping me awake, I wanted to just lay in my sleeping bag and listen.

I just returned from a camping vacation at the Northern Highland/American Legion State Forest in northern Wisconsin. Below is a picture from the Plum Lake Hemlock Forest State Natural Area. It’s a nice hike from where I was camping at Star Lake.

read the rest of: Star Lake camping

I signed up with a new ISP the other day. It felt a little weird as I’ve had the same ISP for seven years. Unfortunately, because of corporate buy-outs which led to bad service at inflated prices I was ready to leave. It’s a real shame. Long before the Internet was available to the mass public I was a member of Exec-PC BBS (a computer Bulletin Board Service). Even though the Internet has Flash animations, fancy graphics and a global community, somehow it was more fun reading simple text only messages and exchanging files with a local community of users. I think it was around eight years ago, they began to offer Internet service and it had the same high quality as the BBS. Five years later Exec-PC became the largest ISP in the midwest and the owner decided to sell his company (a good decision, I would have done the same). Service has been on a steady decline since. I am especially pleased about one thing though — all the sleazy, scum-sucking spammers have yet another dead e-mail address in their databases.

I definitely have not been paying enough attention to my blog lately. Sorry about that. In order to keep you thinking and out of trouble, here are some links to interesting things I’ve seen on the web recently.

First and foremost, Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian.

I must admit I do own a few albums from One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Music Collection Immediately. Although I do disagree with a few of their removal selections (especially The Joshua Tree and Sgt. Peppers), reading this is worth it for the writer’s wit alone.

Did you know you can search Google using different languages, including Pig Latin, Klingon and my personal favorite Elmer Fudd?

Finally for those of you that aren’t easily offended, The Onion’s Anti-Spam Legislation Opposed By Powerful Penis-Enlargement Lobby is a real hoot.

Over the past few days, I’ve been trying to make up my mind about what to think about Major League Baseball shutting down the all-star game at an 11th inning tie. After reading all the editorials, I’ve come to the conclusion that baseball fans are on the lowest point of MLB’s priority list. The multi-millionaire players could have cared less about finishing the game. I can’t help but imagine if this situation would have happened fifty years ago, the players would have said, “sure we’re tired, but we want to finish. Major league baseball games do not end in a tie.”

The managers of the two teams wanted to make sure all their multi-millionaire players got their chance in the spotlight, so in the first nine innings, they used 17 of the total 19 pitchers they had. To his credit, I did read that the last pitcher for the American League said he could have pitched a few more innings. The other players and officials of baseball should have let him.

In a way I almost feel sorry for Bud Selig. I believe he has been unfairly criticized on a lot of issues during his tenure as commissioner. But in this case, he made the wrong decision.

Now the baseball players and owners are arguing over how to split all the money they rake in, and the possibility of a strike or a lock out looms on the horizon. The only question on my mind is, how soon until football season starts?

Summerfest is over and I ended up going five times this year. I must admit I thought the musical line-up was a little weaker compared to years past. Some of those same old acts are definitely due for a break next year. Seeing a group like the BoDeans headline the main stage year after year is getting a bit stale. On the other hand I did see (and hear) some great concerts. My favorites this year (starting with the best) were Guided by Voices, Midnight Oil, Femi Kuti, Train, Third World, Yellowman and R&B group Christopher’s Project. How’s that for en eclectic group? Oh, and in case you’re interested, just 352 days until Summerfest 2003.