Definition of “Oof da”

Oof da is:

-trying to pour two buckets of manure into one bucket
-trick-or-treating in a blizzard
-eating hot soup with a runny nose
-discovering that your blind date is your teacher
-having more miles on your snowblower than on your car
-sneezing so hard that your false teeth end up in the bread plate
-knowing that somewhere in Minnesota is a flagpole with a frozen piece of your tongue still attached to it
-seeing non-Norwegians at a lutefisk dinner using lefse as a napkin
-waking yourself up in church with your own snoring

Dakota War of 1862

"From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"When the tribesmen appealed to Andrew J. Myrick to allow them to take food on credit, he said, 'So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry, let them eat grass or their own dung.' He made this retort while involved in a confrontation between Dakota tribesmen, the United States government, and other traders....

"Myrick was killed on the second day of fighting at the Battle of Lower Sioux Agency as Dakota warriors took revenge at the agency settlement. When his body was found days later, it was discovered that grass had been stuffed in his mouth."

Lyrical II

Old Blind Dogs
So come all ye tramps and hawker lads
I'll tell to ye a roving tale of things that I ha' seen

Guy Clark
I have been to Fort Worth
I have been to Spain
I have been too proud
To come in out of the rain

Tracy Lawrence
She was heading nowhere
I was going her way

Johnny Cash
I met her accidentally in St. Paul, Minnesota

Battlefield Band
You can bide your time
till your time runs out
So take this as fair warning

Rodney Crowell
Many a long and lonesome highway
Lie before us as we go

Stroke 9
How many people wanna kick some ass?
I would if I could
but I’m really just a
sensitive artist

Ricky Skaggs
The highway called when I was young
Told me lies of things to come

Keith Whitley
And the oldest friend I’ve got I met today

Better Than Ezra
Sleeping is easy
I used to lay in bed for hours

Counting Crows
You can never escape, you can only move south down the coast

James Taylor
Bridges are for burning

Alien Ant Farm
I watch you drive your stupid car
You go away

Gaelic Storm
I got the sky
I got the road
I got the sky
The world is my home

Bloodhound Gang
I’m the root of all that’s evil
Yeah, but you can call me “Cookie”

George Strait
She said, “Don’t bother coming home
By the time you get here I’ll be long gone
There’s somebody new and he sure ain’t no rodeo man”
He said, “I’m sorry it’s come down to this
There’s so much about you that I’m going to miss
But it’s all right, Baby, if I hurry I can still make Cheyenne”

All Lyrical

Adventuria

Posted a big lot of old photos at the Adventuria blog. Here're some...

U.K., Bermuda
nautical archaeology field school
Radigan Neuhalfen


Russia, Kamchatka, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky


Sea of Japan, Far Eastern coast of Russia


Mongolia
Radigan Neuhalfen, self-portrait


Russia, Ural
archaeology dig


Turkey, Istanbul


Ukraine, Crimea, Black Sea


Russia, Siberia, Novosibirsk


Russia, Siberia, Novosibirsk


U.S.A., Illinois
archaeology survey
Radigan Neuhalfen


U.S.A., Minnesota, Minneapolis
archaeology van


Mexico, Yucatan
archaeology course


U.S.A., Texas, San Antonio
Radigan Neuhalfen


U.S.A., North Dakota


U.S.A., North Dakota

2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota

"Calling itself the RNC Flight Crew, it aims to organize a mass exodus from the metro area the week of the national convention.

"'We’re hoping to get a minimum of 30,000 residents to simulate an emergency evacuation of the city the first four days of September,' explains Eric Stoner, one of the co-founders of the RNC Flight Crew. 'We’d like to have 15,000 refugees escaping north along Highway 61 and another 15,000 heading southwest along 169....'

"'Our objective is to recreate scenes reminiscent of the evacuation of Paris or Warsaw in advance of the German Army’s approach,' Stoner says.

"Stoner says the idea for the Convention Exodus came after he and other organizers of the RNC Flight Crew studied The Society of the Spectacle during a community education class offered at Macalester College last year. Penned by Guy Debord, a French intellectual credited with co-founding the anarcho-artistic movement, the Situationist International, The Society of the Spectacle is credited with helping incite the 1968 uprisings in Paris.

"'Essentially, the Republican National Convention – like the Democratic National Convention – is nothing more than an empty spectacle, a perfect reflection of the empty spectacle of a consumer culture that has commodified every aspect of life, including politics,' Stoner claims. 'Nothing of note, or even of minor news value, is going to occur at the Xcel Center during that time.'

"But despite that, he says, 'The RNC is going to attract a swarm of 15,000 media people and tens of thousands of demonstrators, all of them drawn like moths to the flame by the chance to be part of the spectacle – and hence make themselves feel as if they are "real." As far as we are concerned, everyone involved in the debacle is part of, rather than a solution to, the stupidity of the society in which we live.'

"'What,' he asks, 'can any sane person do except run away from this kind of craziness?'"

--http://www.tcdailyplanet.net/blog-entry/2008/08/01/what-s-best-way-respond-rnc-how-about-running-away.html

The Last Ten Years

On 1998 August 5, I began recording where I spend each night. Of the 3,655 nights from 1998 August 5 to 2008 August 5, the top twenty locales account for 3,475 nights:

1. Mongolia ... 1,184
2. U.S.A., California ... 675
3. U.S.A., North Dakota ... 467
4. U.S.A., Minnesota ... 325
5. Russia ... 182
6. U.S.A., Louisiana ... 112
7. U.S.A., Colorado ... 104
8. U.S.A., Arizona ... 75
9. Canada ... 53
10. Costa Rica ... 43
11. Mexico ... 38
12. U.S.A., Wisconsin ... 36
13. U.S.A., Washington ... 31
14. France ... 29
15. U.K., Bermuda ... 28
16. Australia ... 22
17. Panama ... 20
18. Israel ... 19
19. Pacific Ocean ... 17
20. Guatemala ... 15

EXCO, the Experimental College of the Twin Cities

EXCO, "made up of two chapters, the first chapter based out of Macalester College (EXCO-Mac) that began in 2006 and a second one based out of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (EXCO-UMN) that began in 2007," offers free classes in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.

List of classes:

http://www.excotc.org/?q=og

2008 International Snow Sculpture Championships in Colorado, Breckenridge

"We were pleased to see Cool Jazz, our prize-winning work from 2007, featured on the town's poster for the 2008 event."

--Stan Wagon, Macalester College mathematics professor, Team Minnesota

http://stanwagon.com/wagon/SnowSculptureRedirect/snowsculptureindex.html

Surly Beer

New brewery by Macalester alum in Minnesota, where the bridge fell down.

http://www.citypages.com/databank/28/1393/article15757.asp

"...in June a beer magazine, Ratebeer.com, had judged Surly Darkness, the brewery's Russian Imperial Stout, to be the best American beer in the whole entire world. ...Another magazine, Beer Advocate, also just named Surly the No. 1 best brewery in the entire U.S. of A."

"Americans don't really make anything anymore except software, movies, a few medical devices, and beer."

Surly Brewing

Age of Info

Discovered Google Earth last night.

1. Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
2. Minot, North Dakota
3. Karlsruhe, North Dakota
4. St. Paul, Minnesota
5. Provideniya, Chukotka, Russia
6. Nome, Alaska
7. South Pole
8. Baghdad, Iraq
9. Besancon, France
10. Cancun, Mexico

Subject: Mongolia

Photo and email message by Benjamin Warde:

Hey Everybody,

It has been so long since my last travel email that at this point a blow-by-blow retelling seems a bit beside the point. Instead, I am going to tell you two discreet stories about my time in Mongolia. You won't have a lot of context for each story, but that's probably OK.

Morin Khuur

I woke up at 5:15 AM, on board the train from Ulaanbaatar (capital city of Mongolia) to Orkhontuul, a small town of about 1,400 people in the north of Mongolia. With me was Tulga, a young man who I met through a mutual friend. I don't speak Mongolian, and Tulga spoke only a few words of English, but we did OK passing back and forth a Mongolian-English/English-Mongolian dictionary.

We were headed for the home of Tulga's parents. At 6:00 AM we arrived at our stop and disembarked into the dark and freezing cold. The stars were still out, and I saw the constellation Orion for the first time this year. The train station is about 20 kilometers away from the town where we were headed, and we waited in the dark for 10 minutes or so until an old Russian minibus pulled up and we, and 17 other people with luggage, piled inside. The eastern horizon turned pink and orange as we spent an hour bumping along rutted dirt tracks until we reached Tulga's village. His parents were happy to see him,and welcomed me, a complete stranger, into their two-room house, and immediately started to feed me, something which they did not stop doing for the rest of the day. I ate practically nonstop, and even so Tulga said, "My parents are worried about you, because you eat so little."

Tulga and I played pool on a home-made pool table in their front garden, and we dug up potatoes and carrots, and fed pigs. There was a school holiday that day, and all the children were engaged in a horse race, followed by wrestling. We watched the festivities, little children riding bareback at full gallop, and then throwing each other around in the grass. Then I think there was more eating. Hanging on the wall in Tulga's parents' home was a small Morin Khuur. The Morin Khuur, or Horse Headed Fiddle, is the national musical instrument of Mongolia. In the old days the sound box was actually made with a horse's skull, but these days they are usually wood. This particular Morin Khuur was hand carved by Tulga's father, and he took it down off the wall and presented it to me as a gift. At first I thought I was misunderstanding him, and when I finally realized that he really did mean to give it to me I was quite taken aback. It looked to me like the most precious thing in the home, and I couldn't possibly accept it, and yet it was even more impossible to refuse, which surely would have been insulting. I tried to be very grateful, without being excessively grateful. Mongolians seem to always be very genuine, but low-key, with their thanks, and if one is too effusive it seems to cause embarrassment. The translation might be a little iffy, but the gist of what Tulga said was that his father knew that I had had to overcome many obstacles to come all the way to his home, and that he appreciated the effort and wanted me to feel welcome.

We had to leave soon, but not before some more eating. Lots of buuz, which are small, meat-filled dumplings. Also home-made pickles, home-made yogurt, and home-made steamed bread. Actually, I can probably drop the "home-made" and you can just take that as a given, because everything was home-made, since there's nowhere that it could be store-bought. I had brought a bottle of vodka for Tulga's father, and he insisted I have a shot of that, and I brought several packages of fruit for Tulga's mother (it's very hard to get fruit out in the countryside), one of which she hid back in my bag when she thought I wasn't looking. Perhaps she was worried that Tulga and I wouldn't have enough to eat over the next couple days, as we were planning to ride horses across the Mongolian steppe to a remote 18th century Buddhist monastery called Amarbayasgalant. Mongolians often sniff each other hello and goodbye, in much the same way that we might kiss each other hello and goodbye. Like the French style of one kiss on each cheek, the Mongolians give one sniff to each cheek. When we left that night Tulga's father held my head in his hands and sniffed each of my cheeks before sending us on our way.

Singing Sands

From where I was sitting atop a 200 meter high sand dune I could see hundreds of miles of desert in every direction. I was there with Marion and Christoph, a friendly Austrian couple with whom I was traveling in the Gobi desert. Far below us, visible only as a speck, was the ger where we would be staying that night (gers are the felt tents that Mongolian nomads live in, you may also have heard them referred to as yurts). It had taken us about half an hour to walk up this sand dune. The tallest dunes at Khongoryn Els reach 300 meters in height and they call them the "singing sands."

I was sitting there trying to catch my breath after the climb, looking around at the incredible vista, and wondering what the heck "singing sands" was supposed to mean, when suddenly I heard a noise. Actually, "heard" might not be the best word. I was aware of a noise. It was so loud and so deeply resonant that I wasn't sure it was actually coming in through my ears, it might have just been humming up through my body. As far as I could tell, the entire 600 foot high pile of sand was vibrating, and felt as if it might just slide away to nothing at any moment. Since I was sitting on top of it, I don't have to tell you that it was a rather awesome and unnerving sensation. A few minutes later it happened again, but more-so.

From a September 1997 Scientific American article by Paul Sholtz, Michael Bretz and Franco Nori: "Sound-producing sand grains constitute one of nature's most puzzling and least understood physical phenomena. Large-scale slumping events on dry booming dunes can produce acoustic emissions that can be heard up to 10 km away and which resemble hums, moans, drums, thunder, foghorns or the drone of low-flying propeller aircraft. These analogies emphasize the uniqueness of the phenomenon and the clarity of the produced sound. Although reports of these sands have existed in the literature for over one thousand years, a satisfactory explanation for this type of acoustic emission is still unavailable."

Witnessing such a strange natural phenomenon so unexpectedly was alarming and wonderful. Let me also just say, when you go running straight down a sand dune as fast as you can, falling is simply inevitable, and the sand is much harder than you think it is. Also, you will (if you do not have access to a shower and clean clothes) spend the next several days picking sand out of your hair, ears, nose, teeth, shoes, pockets, etc... We sat out late that night, staring up at the most stars I have ever seen, and the next morning we watched as the family we were staying with disassembled one of their gers and packed it into a van.

And there are the stories. They do not, of course, make a complete story. For example, they fail to mention Radigan, a former Macalester student who now lives in Ulaanbaatar (because, I quote, "Mongolia is the best country in the world"). Radigan showed me around a bit, introduced me to some folks, let me crash in his apartment for a few days while he was out of town and, perhaps most important of all, came with me as moral and logistical support when I went to get a visa extension. (He also lent me his copy of "Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World.") Nor do these stories mention Ruth and Woody, two friendly British women who had just spent a month traveling around the Mongolian countryside, and who were not relishing the thought of returning to England. It was through Ruth and Woody that I met Tulga.

Then of course there was China. I took the train from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing (Mongolia and China use different gauge railways, and at the border all the train cars were decoupled, lifted up on hydraulic jacks, and fitted with new wheel assemblies). I hung out in Beijing for 12 days doing all the tourist things. Tiananmen Square, The Forbidden City, The Temple of Heaven (covered with scaffolding), acrobats. I spent a day hiking along the Great Wall, which really is pretty great. I ate lots of Peking (Beijing?) duck, which is really, really good.

Then I headed home. Well, not directly. There was the small matter of a wedding in San Francisco. In Minnesota I was very happy to see family and friends again. My former employer was kind enough to offer me a temporary position working on a very cool project. And so, for six months, I have a job. I expect to be leaving sometime around the end of June for more travel, but have not yet decided where to go. I'll keep you posted.

Take care,
Ben

P.S. Pictures! http://www.bengeance.blogspot.com/