Letterboxing, Civilized Fun In Barbaric Times

Letterboxing, or Questing as it is sometimes called, is a quietly exploding outdoor gaming phenomenon that offers hope for civilized folk in this era of sterile corporate entertainment and mega-violent video idiocy. So many positive elements of human nature are at play in this unique hobby, it warrants all the attention it can get.

In essence letterboxing is a treasure hunt game, in which clues are given on-line for finding the "letterbox," which is any watertight container capable of holding a logbook and a custom made rubber stamper, and maybe an ink pad. This inspired madness began in the deep woods of Dartmoor, England, in 1854 when a tour guide named James Perrott placed his business card in a bottle, pushed it into a dirt embankment, and invited his friends to find it. Some did, and left their cards in the bottle. Today tens of thousands of sometimes obsessed letterboxers prowl the countryside of the English speaking world and beyond, following clues to find a hidden goal. They carry rubber stamps of their own, with which they will mark the book, maybe also writing an inscription. Then they use the stamp left by the placer of the letterbox to mark their own book, as proof they had been there. (That is, if they find the letterbox.)

Every aspect of the process is colored by the imagination, and often the genius, of its practitioners. The people themselves drive this hobby. The rubber stamps are usually hand carved, and can be works of art. The books themselves are sometimes quite fancy. The clues above all reflect the personality of the player. They can be humorous, poetic, plain, maddening, straightforward, or as obscure as the location of the letterbox itself. Rules are few. You don't place the letterbox in a dangerous or restricted location, and the clues offered need to actually work in reality. 

Numerous appealing factors come to mind for letterboxing.

Apart from the basic clue-chasing treasure hunt angle, the game can be customized into infinity. It is great fun for children, and makes for memorable family outings. Adult versions involve sophisticated clues, and couples might play it on dates. The game involves being out in nature, usually in a beautiful location, as opposed to the "vast wasteland" of television. Getting some exercise is part of it. The hobby is safe as long as you use your common sense. For instance, there is no danger of sexual predators using letterboxing to lure victims, because there is no way of knowing when or if a person might arrive at the site, or how many would show up. 

No corporate sponsors are involved, and none needed. In fact, very little money is needed unless you want to travel to exotic locations or use an engraved golden letterbox. (Not recommended.) The internet is not even necessarily required, if you set up your own personal networks for play, the clues can be delivered by mail or verbally. Most letterboxers in North America post their clues at www.LbNA.com/  This hobby is happening right now, in all fifty states, and around the world.

Definite social possibilities exist through the creation of teams, clubs, andever-expanding networks, or you can go out by yourself and do it. Orienteering and compass skills are part of the more advanced levels of play, but you can keep it quite simple and have a blast. 

Web sites for the game are endless, but at the top of the heap you will find - atlasquest.com, letterboxing.org/america, letter-boxing.com, and by all means letterboxingonhorseback.com/

Left at the Y-shaped dogwood tree and proceed with care. Thirty six paces and you're almost there. 

 

2008 National Indie Excellence Awards

A stunning development happened yesterday for me. That book of mine, mentioned above, won a Finalist prize in a national book competition.

Tales of Real and Dream Worlds placed as a Finalist in the Short Story Fiction category of the 2008 National Indie Excellence Awards. It's the leading award for books that originate outside of the conglomerate presses. Everyone here at Paper View Books is jubilant. This is my first book after all, and as the name of the award indicates, this is recognition at the national level. 

I have had numerous very positive reviews for the book, about fifteen of them, but they were all small media. I found it difficult to obtain reviews from the larger outlets, due to the fact that they would not acknowledge my existence. It's not easy to do business with people who will not talk to you, return letters or emails, or take a cursory look at what you have. My book could have been the single greatest book in the history of the English language for all these guys knew.

I self-published Tales of Real and Dream Worlds. Yes, this means I bear the Mark of Cain, or Mark of the Beast, or the Scarlet Letterhead, or something, but I finally saw it was self-publish or have nothing. The "traditional route" of publishing is simply dead, at least if you are a new writer.  I am not new to writing, nor can I say I am new to the business anymore, having lost more years than I care to mention offering Tales of Real and Dream Worlds and my novel to the Sphinxes of the American publishing industry. 

Imagine an industry of total silence, and of course, this is a "Communications" industry. They will not talk to you, will not respond to letters or emails. Guidebooks are published at high prices that will give you some of the requirements of the various publishing firms, and you may be able to send them a manuscript. You will wait six months for a response, which will come from an intern who "reads slush pile." That's the massive heap of manuscripts every agent and publisher has, just short of fire code dimensions, which an intern or office worker skims and rejects, or rejects without reading at all. The slush piles are real, and they are evidence that we have the worst of both worlds -- In this passionately anti-intellectual society where nobody reads, every third chucklehead is peddling a book manuscript. 

The above applies only if you can locate a publishing house that will work with new writers at all, under any circumstances, or one that is not specialized to the point of absurdity, or one that will accept material that is not "agented." 

Need an agent? Best of luck to you. They are as hard to get as the publisher itself, and they take a whopping cut of the pie. You also run the very real risk of finding only an incompetent or fraudulent agent. Literary agents are not licensed or regulated. Anybody can call himself a literary agent. Scams are in such abundance that there is a web site called Predators and Editors that tries merely to keep a running tally of them. It is the same as the situation with talent agent scams and art school scams. There is a vast division of the army of con artists dedicated solely to preying on aspiring creative people. 

I took on the odious stigma of the self-published. To be fair, the disdain for self-publishing is no longer as severe as it once was; most books in print are micro-press or self-published, and never mind the roll call of classical authors who started out self-publishing. My home town daily newspaper would not review my book because it was self-published. Likewise with the two hip-and-cool alternative weeklies. 

The ultimate blame for the state of literary life in America lies with the people themselves. They will not read books, and many cannot read above kindergarten level. The average adult American reads at the fifth grade level. Mostly we chase pixels on a screen. That is the extent of intellectual and emotional life for the vast majority of us. The small minority who will read a couple of books a year insist on the same hoary old formula-caked authors they have been reading for decades, or at least the same old formula. There are more snow leopards in the world than adventurous readers. 

Where does this leave me? Forget about that, where does it leave the truly great new writers coming of age in this environment? Where does it leave you, and the literary culture of this country? We don't have a literary culture in this country any more, and it shows. 

The award means I will crank up a new promotional effort for this, my first book, before moving on to the next one. Tales of Real and Dream Worlds by Bart Stewart is available at www.Amazon.com and www.BarnesandNoble.com, or you can order a signed copy for $12 from my web site, www.BartStewart.com. Excerpts from some of the Tales are available there as well. 

If I hit the big time you'll have a collector's item.

  

 

   

 

 

An Election Derailed By Pointless Nonsense

Dangerously high levels of cynicism fill the air as the most promising presidential candidate in a generation is being knocked out of contention by what amounts to abject idiocy. 

Senator Barack Obama, whose well chronicled life is a testament to the American Dream, and who has easily the best ideas of any of the three candidates in this race, has lost all momentum and is being overtaken by the machine politics of the Clintons. There is one, count 'em, one reason for this state of affairs. Obama is being punished for statements made by someone else.

Jeremiah Wright is the one and only reason Obama is not having a cakewalk to the presidency right now. Let's not have any pretensions that the remark about Pennsylvania voters being bitter played more than a microscopic part in this. As presidential candidate bloopers go, that was nothing. And none of his policy positions are driving his demise. They are the same as they were when he was riding high in February. No defensible reason exists for the voters' rejection of Obama. 

His preacher threw some temper tantrums at the pulpit. Three tantrums, to be precise, out of a thirty year career. Had there been more than that Fox would have shown them. As it was there were three carefully edited snippets supplied to Matt Drudge by individuals who preferred to remain anonymous. Oddly enough, some of the content of the clips was entirely correct and true, such as when Wright bellowed that Hillary Clinton does not know what it is like to be a black man and have taxi cabs refuse to pick her up in the rain, or when he hollers that rich white people control America. It is factual that Hillary does not know what it is like to be black, and that corporate fat cats of a caucasian extraction do indeed control America. 

Wright also said some inexcusably vile and wrong stuff, such as that the US government developed AIDS as a weapon. (For anyone out there harboring that urban legend in their heads, samples of AIDS-infected tissue exist that pre-date the modern era of computer science.) The main Wright blow-up is the one where he said "God damn America" after going through a long list of historical outrages that were edited out of the snippet. Obama says he wasn't there for any of these three sermons, which is believable when you consider Wright gave more than a dozen sermons a week. 

Had it been a white Republican candidate who sought the backing of an extremist fundamentalist right wing clergyman, there would not have been the slightest blip on the radar. That kind of thing is accepted. The most revered Reverend Pat Robertson routinely produces some of the weirdest malarkey imaginable, and he once came within a hairsbreadth of being the Republican nominee for president. The truly dangerous cult leader Sun Myung Moon has enormous influence over conservative American politics, through his money and mouthpiece newspaper the Washington Times. Moon has said any number of anti-American, anti-Christian statements over the years. No prob. Our "values" can accommodate all of that.

Obama has denounced the offensive statements of Wright. When Wright kept them coming recently at the National Press Club, Obama broke all ties with him entirely. What more is he supposed to do? The right wing radio demagogues are painting a picture of Obama being under the thrall of a ranting anti-American Reverend Wright, when they aren't hinting darkly that he is a Muslim secret agent, or an atheist commie. They really need to settle on one or the other, after the eight years of abuse their credibility has gone through. 

Here the situation reaches a state that is more urgent than the entire fate of the 2008 presidential campaign. This goes to the future viability of democracy itself. It is as we watch the Obama campaign sink not from honorable debate of the issues, but under irrelevant junk about Jeremiah Wright, we start to think about how frequently this kind of thing happens in American politics, and how consistently the American people are suckers for it. Which is to say, each and every time, without fail. 

The first President Bush got elected due to the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag, which some schools had stopped reciting. That, and his opponent's practice of granting furloughs to felons, which many governors of both parties do, proved to be the decisive issues for American voters in the presidential election that year. 

Son of Bush got elected the first time on a garland of warm 'n fuzzy TV image ads which told us very little about him except that he was a pious Christian. He posed as a moderate for the campaign, and as president delivered the most extreme ideological right wing government in a century. The following 2004 election hinged almost entirely on the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth.

In America the highest office goes to the candidate "you would rather have a beer with." Tabloid newspaper junk that would insult the intelligence of a hamster takes on gigantic importance. The process almost could not possibly be handled in a way that was more stupid or anti-intellectual. The disgrace to the founding principals of the country is beyond glaring, even as the claims to patriotism reach ranting levels. The latest example being the flag lapel pin. Obama doesn't wear one, you know. He is regularly castigated for this. Someone really needs to market a six by ten inch lighted flag lapel pin that plays the Marine Corps Hymn and has a little sign under it that says "I AM A PATRIOT." If you are only wearing the tiny little flag, you're suspect. 

Jefferson said democracy relies on an educated, informed, participating citizenry. In the absence of that, democracy falls, he said. What he did not have in mind was an electorate as malleable as Play-Doh to whatever psychological machinations are applied to them. 

     

I-40

The drive from Las Vegas to Charlotte was something less than epic, but still remarkable. Easily the most striking feature of the whole journey was the mind-bending immensity of open land in the western United States. Hour after hour of high speed travel through Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma revealed nothing but an unimaginably vast, empty landscape. Oddly there were no wind turbines visible from I-40 except in Texas and Oklahoma. Towns were out there, off of the highway, but let it be said that we are not hurting for space in this country (or elsewhere in the world). What is missing is water. A breakthrough in water desalination technology would change this world like nothing else, yet you never hear any mention of research work happening in this most crucial field.

This is not to advocate the sprawling of homo sapiens across more pristine land, just to point out how much land is available. Not all of it is beautiful enough to make the cover of the Sierra Club newsletter. Some of it is just empty land, unoccupied due to its lack of water. The recovery and reuse of lands already build up with abandoned constructions would be the better way to accommodate the population. But the fact remains that in the United States we have open land in a staggering abundance. 

Judging by what was coming across the radio for most of the trip we also have an intellectual desert in the United States, more barren than any stretch of the Mohave. In some sections pressing the Seek button on the radio tuner revealed six fundamentalist Christian stations in a row, and this was on the FM band. Spiritual giants were hard to come by, however, and you could make a case that actual Christians were scarce on these stations, too. Anyway, a more mean-spirited, paranoid, anti-intellectual bunch of money-grubbers would be hard to find. The level of conformity displayed in the broadcasts would be on par with that of the polygamous cult members who were in a pre-trial status for child abuse at the time, not far from where I-40 passes through. 

Some of the statements made during these broadcasts were outrageous to the point that it became clear there really needs to be an accounting for it. There needs to be a monitoring of what is being spewed out on these evangelical and political broadcasts and a reporting made of it to the larger public, who may not be aware of just how crazy it gets. Accountability is one of the things these guys howl about, so, fine. Let's have some of it for them. It is definitely tragic to contemplate the enormous numbers of Americans for whom there is no other viewpoint being offered but that of these ultra right wing programs. Maybe we can get Radio Liberty to start some broadcasts here in the States.         

The Arizona meteor crater made for a powerful few minutes. Another awe-inspiring moment occurred right before going in to see it, when the sign came into view saying that the admission ticket would be $15. 

The crater is almost a mile wide and over five hundred feet deep. It was formed fifty thousand years ago when a chunk of rock and iron calculated at one hundred fifty feet across slammed into the featureless desert doing about eleven miles a second. It mostly vaporized on impact, though some residual gravel penetrated thousands of feet into the ground. The dust cloud that shot into the upper atmosphere altered the atmosphere of the entire planet for a little while.  

An alternative theory is that the crater was carved by Noah's Flood. 

A Little Road Trip

This state of the art blog will be on hiatus for a few days as I undertake a cross-country move. After 15 years I am leaving Las Vegas (Just because 15 years is a lot of Vegas). I will be in Cape Cod for the summer, and after that ... It depends a lot on what the cat drags in.

I will let you know how the drive went and what I saw or thought about on this epic voyage across the USA. I'm taking I-40 from Nevada to North Carolina, where I will stay for a short while before heading north.

While I'm away plow back through some of those older blog entries! There's some good stuff in there!

Until next time, drive carefully, especially those of you heading west on I-40.

~ Bart

Food Inflation?

The price of food (you know food) is going up at a faster rate than at any time in the past 17 years, according to an article in the Associated Press today. Food price inflation was 4 percent for the year 2007, almost twice what it has been over the past 15 years. This is according to the US Department of Agriculture, where they are predicting that 2008 will be worse, with prices rising 4.5 percent. The political fallout from this should almost equal the reaction of Americans to the writers’ strike curtailing new episodes of their favorite TV shows. It may even approach the impact of the semi-finals of American Idol.

Or, who knows, maybe this one will become an even bigger deal than that. People living paycheck to paycheck or on fixed incomes are going to face some choices this year. Some choices will be easy, like voting Democrat instead of Plutocrat. Others will involve figuring out what to cut so there is enough money left over for food. Several tactics come to mind for getting through hard times at the grocery store. Submitted for your approval -

Eliminate the high cost of “convenience.” You will save enormously every month just by doing your own prep work and eliminating anything that smacks of “convenience.” Eat at home instead of restaurants. For variety and socializing have picnics and cook-outs. The bottom line is buy a new cookbook and start preparing your own meals. And skip the frozen “convenience” dinners. They contain very little food for what you are paying. The cost of those little veggies alongside that delicious “entrée” works out to hundreds of dollars a pound! Prepare your own frozen dinners made from scratch and take them to work in reusable microwavable plastic containers. Hot meal or not, always pack your own home-made lunch. If you don’t know how to prepare food, learn how. The money you save will be more than worth it. Besides, cooking can be fun.

Skip vending machines. The mark-up on that vending machine junk food is orbital. If you must have snacks buy them in bulk and bring some with you. Your best bet overall is to wean yourself off of sodas and sugary crap altogether. Try other kinds of snacks. Pretty much anything will beat the vending machine.

Eat less meat. You can get plenty of protein from beans and nuts and certain other veggies. Produce is cheaper than meat and at certain seasons of the year it gets even cheaper. This is not to enter the debate on vegetarianism, only to say that you can save a lot of money by eating meat only a few times a week instead of every day. Fish and poultry are cheaper than beef, and meat is cheaper if you buy it in larger pieces and do the cutting yourself. You pay a whopping premium for the supermarket or processing plant to cut your meat for you. Just by cutting it yourself you save hundreds of dollars a year!

Buy generic or “store brand” food. This store brand stuff is often made in exactly the same factory as the famous brand name. (This also holds true for gasoline.) The difference is that the big brand name has advertising, which is what made it famous. You pay for that advertising. Experiment with the store brands and see what you think of them. Many are just as good and much cheaper. Although they do not have Spiderman on the label you can see him elsewhere.

Buy day-old bread and freeze it. Bread is perfectly good after twenty four hours but it is sold at half the price. Freeze the bread and it will be good much longer than you are likely to let it sit there. (Don’t refrigerate bread, freeze it or keep it on the shelf.)

Pick your own produce! Visit http://www.localharvest.org/ to find the location of farms and food co-ops in your area where you can visit and pick your own. It is a fun thing to do (even makes a nice date) and you save immensely over the store.

Buy nonfat dry milk powder and mix it up. Depending on how much milk you use you could save a bundle.

Coupons are for real. They will save you money. The Internet has endless coupon sites. Free samples, too. Of course you usually have to register, with an email address at least, meaning you will be getting spam emails Consider setting up a free email account just for couponing. (Don’t give them your phone number or extensive personal data.) Then just enter coupon in the search engine, or maybe the name of an item for which you want coupons.

There are many varied reasons for this situation of food inflation. China and India are experiencing explosive growth in their economies and now have a demand for meat that wasn’t there before. American food exports, such as corn, are at record levels since the weak dollar has made them cheaper. The domestic supply of corn is thus reduced, meaning higher prices for us here.

The interesting factor is Ethanol. Is it the villain (super-villain?) we sometimes hear that it is? Corn Ethanol production means less corn available for the food supply, with the resulting higher prices we see. It hikes the price of meat as well, since corn is what the live stock is eating. Also soy bean acreage is being cut back to make room for more and more corn, so the price of soy is inflating.

The sky is not falling, and we have been through much worse, but reason and imagination will be required in the coming years as much as ever before.

Ronald Reagan in His Own Words

It would be interesting to know the number of times Republican candidates have invoked the name of Ronald Reagan in this election year, compared to the number of mentions they made of George W. Bush. Most likely Reagan would have another landslide win.

You could make a case that Ronald Reagan was an old time actor who was picked up by corporate America, especially defense contractors, in the 1950s and made into a mouthpiece for their interests. You could say Reagan was interested in promoting plutocracy more than anything else. You could say that his greatest accomplishment, bringing down the Soviet Union, was done more in service to his corporate fat cats than to American civilization as a whole. After all, Red China was every bit as repressive and dictatorial as the USSR, however they did business with big American companies, so they were not considered to be an "Evil Empire."

But Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator. Let him speak for himself.

"Unemployment insurance is a pre-paid vacation for freeloaders."
--California Governor Ronald Reagan, in the Sacramento Bee, April 28th, 1966.

"...a faceless mass, waiting for handouts."
--Ronald Reagan, 1965. (Description of Medicaid recipients.)

"We were told four years ago that 17 million people went to bed hungry every night. Well, that was probably true. They were all on a diet."
--Ronald Reagan, TV speech, October 27, 1964

"A tree's a tree. How many more do you need to look at?"
--Ronald Reagan, Governor of California, quoted in the Sacramento Bee, opposing expansion of Redwood National Park, March 3, 1966

"I don't believe a tree is a tree and if you've seen one you've seen them all."
--Governor Ronald Reagan, in the same Sacramento Bee, September 14, 1966

"All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk."
--Ronald Reagan, Republican candidate for president, quoted in the Burlington (Vermont) Free Press, February 15, 1980.
(It is closer to 30 tons of waste per plant per year.)

"Because Vietnam was not a declared war, the veterans are not even eligible for the G. I. Bill of Rights, with respect to education or anything."
--Ronald Reagan, in Newsweek, April 21, 1980. (Wrong again.)

"I have flown twice over Mount St. Helens. I'm not a scientist and I don't know the figures, but I have a suspicion that one little mountain out there, in these last several months, has probably released more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than has been released in the last ten years of automobile driving or things of that kind."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time magazine, October 20, 1980. (Mount St. Helens released about 2,000 tons of sulfur dioxide per day at its peak. Cars produce 81,000 tons per day.)

"Growing and decaying vegetation in this land are responsible for 93 percent of the oxides of nitrogen."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in the Los Angeles Times, October 9, 1980. (According to Dr. Michael Oppenheimer of the Environmental Defense Fund, industrial sources produce 65 to 90 percent of the oxides of nitrogen in the U.S.)

"Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation. So let's not go overboard in setting and enforcing tough emission standards for man-made sources."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in Sierra, September 10, 1980

"I've said it before and I'll say it again. The U.S. Geological Survey has told me that the proven potential for oil in Alaska alone is greater than the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia."
--Ronald Reagan, Detroit Free Press, March 23, 1980.
(According to the USGS, the Saudi reserves are 17 times the proven reserves in Alaska.)

"Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?"
--Ronald Reagan, campaign speech, 1980

"It's silly talking about how many years we will have to spend in the jungles of Vietnam when we could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas."
--Ronald Reagan, candidate for Governor of California, Fresno Bee, October 10, 1965

"I have a feeling that we are doing better in the war [in Vietnam] than the people have been told."
--Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1967

"...the moral equals of our Founding Fathers."
--President Reagan, describing the Nicaraguan contras, March 1, 1985

"Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal."
--Ronald Reagan, quoted in Time, May 17, 1976

"I know all the bad things that happened in that war. I was in uniform four years myself."
--President Reagan, interviewed April 19, 1985.
(Reagan spent World War II making Army training films at Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood.)

"We think there is a parallel between federal involvement in education and the decline in profit over recent years."
--President Reagan, USA Today, April 26, 1983

"What we have found in this country, and maybe we're more aware of it now, is one problem that we've had, even in the best of times, and that is the people who are sleeping on the grates, the homeless who are homeless, you might say, by choice."
--President Reagan, Good Morning America, January 31, 1984

"I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964."
--Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles Times, June 17, 1966

"I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at the point of a bayonet, if necessary."
--Ronald Reagan, Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1965

"Politics is just like show business. You have a hell of an opening, coast for a while, and then have a hell of a close."
--Ronald Reagan to aide Stuart Spencer, 1966

"He has the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless."
--Patricia Ann Reagan (now Patti Davis), talking about her father, in
The Way I See It.