/dev/mull

the last thing we did in shenandoah was go on a short hike to miller's head, a ridge that extends a little into the shenandoah valley, with an observation deck at the end. the hike down was rocky and steep, the footing was awful, and my bad knee was having none of it. nor were we really thrilled by having to go back up that mess; there were a couple of points where we stopped to think about whether we wanted to turn back.

but we persisted. and very surprised to find that the observation deck wasn't just a flat spot on the ground, nor even a small wooden platform, but a substantial stone structure:



i assume it's the top of the tomb of a mountain wight, like tolkien's barrow wight, just much worse. :) regardless, we were very surprised to find it, and impressed by the amount of work it took to build, since all the stone and mortar would have to be carried in down the trail.

the view, unfortunately, was very hazy, so there wasn't as much to see as could be desired:



dïe überblønde's camera did "better" with it, since it has random automagic image adjustment software:



but even its cartoons suffered from the haze.

fortunately, there were birds flying around, sometimes at eye level. and what's better than a fancy camera with a long lens to take pictures of them?





the fancy tracking autofocus wasn't doing so well, which is why the pictures are kinda blurry. it's hard to keep small, agile objects in a smallish focus zone. i probably shoulda just stopped the lens down to f/8 or f/11 to deepen the depth of field, but i didn't think of it because i was having too much fun chasing the vultures with my camera.

and as we discovered at harpers ferry, ascending steep, rocky trails is a lot easier than descending them, because we could see the "obvious" places to put our feet. oddly, the 150' climb in the steepest part seemed to go by in an instant; it wasn't the slog we'd expected it would be.

we're working on a plan to return to miller's head when it isn't so hazy, but every place in the park to sleep, including campgrounds, is already booked up until the park closes for the year in november.

it's a page from the censored version of the one FISC ruling they've deigned to declare safe for democracy. (i forgot where i got the file from, so i'm linking to my copy. the file has been rasterized to prevent easy quoting.)

other pages are better, but a lot of vital information is still censored, like what exactly the NSA is up to. however, the administration did let a few bits slip through:



there's a word for repeatedly making "substantial misrepresentation"s to a court. it starts with "p" and usually ends with a long prison term. i'd like to hope the Supremes take the administration's repeated lying to its lapdog secret court into account when granting considering EPIC's mandamus petition.

( another example of the security state out of control )