woodlot

so chris emailed me some of the pics we took biking on the w/e. he was disappointed we didnt get many action shots... i wasnt used to his camera so i kept missing the big air. however i still think some of these capture the beauty of the terrain, as well as the work that went into some of the more elaborate stunts. some of the logrides went on forever and as you can see, often there weren't any bridges or planing or other widening efforts, just try to stay on the wet bumpy old log.







it seems hopeful at the moment that things will calm down in israel/palestine/lebanon. the cease fire has been partially kept and israel has actually begun removing troops. however none of the underlying problems have really been addressed yet, and now there is a lot of anger on both sides. as i was mentioning before, it seems like there is no real solution available. my friend shawn made an excellent point the other day that i had not thought about. it involves an interesting convergence of 2 of our sources of angst recently. one being the whole middle east/islam/US/israel situation and the other being our ever increasing environmental disregard despite the recently desperate cries of the scientific community.

shawn's point was that both of these crises could be partially resolved if we were able to give up our reliance on oil as a fuel source. if we could decrease our energy needs, and fill a majority of those needs with renewable and/or nuclear energy we could perhaps limit further damage to our environment, and also remove the fuel (ha!) from the fire in the middle east. if oil was not a major commodity would the US continue to throw their weight around half way across the world? would iran have the funds to harass israel?

hmmm... interesting convergence eh? too bad the earth will be destroyed by the time our generation is able to make some of the decisions... although maybe i give our generation too much credit.

in other news, scientists have recently realized that there may be a lot more planets in our solar system than we thought. either that or they will have to take pluto off the list and have only 8 planets in our solar system. apparently there are a whole bunch of hunks of rock like pluto orbiting in an off kilter ellipse compared to neptune. so the academy of astronomy is now meeting to decide whether we have 8 planets or 20 or 50 or ??? in our solar system. all semantics folks.