Your humble author, 4th from the left, the one with the grim visage and two weeks of facial hair. This was taken after sleeping overnight in a very cold gully on a mountainside in the Northwestern Sudan during November 2009.

In case you were wondering, yes it is entirely possible to get hypothermia in the Sahara and yes, I had the time of my life getting it.

What I saw when I was there in the Sahara can't really be captured with cameras or words, though many have tried I can assure you that they just cut around the edges of the fabric, the essential part of what the desert experience is like has barely been scratched, even by men like the writer Antoine de Saint Exupéry or T.E. Lawrence.

I had thought that between "Saint Ex" and T. E. Lawrence I had read all the artistic visions of what the deep desert was like and would recognize it like an old friend, but that was not to be the case. Frankly, they both failed miserably to capture what it was really like in words. If those two men of letters cant quite do it justice, I wont even try to attempt to describe it here. You just had to be there and even while I was actually there, I still find it hard to describe in words what it was that I did see. I saw something out there that was simply beyond my experience of life. I saw the simple majesty of life and the world we live, in brought out into the open by an expanse of barren rock and yellow sand. I thought I knew the desert, but I found that I knew nothing at all and I was deeply humbled by that fact.

I saw rock art left in caves that was left by people who died out before the last ice age ended and long before the permits were pulled for the construction of the Pyramids. yet that same rock art will still be here when I am long dead and gone and it will probably still be here when the Pyramids have dissolved into the oceans.

I saw a landscape devoid of any and all life and topsoil, just mile after mile of rock and sand, with precious little else all the way to the horizon in all directions of the compass.

I saw up close and personal what the good folks at NASA consider to be a complete working analog to the geology of Mars and I found that a lifetime living here on earth unprepared to understand just what it was that I saw. The familiar surroundings where I live in the deserts of North America and Mexico now appear to me to be a virtual 'jungle of life' by comparison to that found out on the Gilf Kebir, a place so harsh that it hasn't even the ever present life form found wherever humans camp - the common fly!

But the thing that was the most deeply moving and will stay with me forever was something I could never capture on camera much less in words.

It was the night time sky.

Out in that part of the world, its hundreds of miles just to get to the next light bulb. Towns, what of them that exist in the Libyan desert (or the "western desert" as the Egyptians call it), are hundreds of miles apart and what electricity there is goes to other uses besides lighting up the local eateries. From horizon to horizon in 360 degrees, there was no lights to mar the darkness, no glow of distant cities, no humidity to further dim the starlight, just the night time sky in all directions from the ground to the zenith, it was a blanket of stars.

As the Milky Way came up over the horizon, the brighter stars in the mist would appear the way that car headlights do out in the distance on long roads in Nevada, a pop of brightness as you would adjust to the new presence in the sky, and yet they were not the familiar headlights or street signs we are so used to in the modern world, but stars in the millions, so many that finding individual stars was pointless, each point of light was a like a blur of hornets hanging in the sky.

Even without the Moon in the sky, you did not need a flashlight to walk around or to read. I'm almost 50, and yet I felt that for the first time I was seeing the sky the way it had been seen by our species for millenia on this planet. For me it was as if I had never seen the sky at all in my entire life and now that I have seen it, it all seems rather sad to think I might have missed it.

It was intoxicating and emotionally moving all at the same time and try as I might I still haven't quite managed to capture what it was like, what it was really like to just sit at night in the dunes of the Sahara; to stare out at the sky and hear nothing but your own heartbeat and the desert wind for hours on end; to know that the closest group of other humans would be when the International Space Station passed overheard.

Its been said that explorers are always searching for something "out there" and yet they always they find the same thing no matter where they go - themselves. This fact is true of me as well. I went to the desert to see a part of the world rarely seen by others and came back knowing only slightly more about the desert but a great deal more about myself. And I wouldn't have missed it for all the world.

I am thankful that I lived long enough to see that sight; the blanket of stars above the sands of the Sahara desert. I didn't expect to see it before when I went there, but it was something I shall never forget; the sky as God always intended it to be seen and they sky the way it will be a million years from now.

Blogging, the old fashioned kind, sans vacation 'snaps' and desert drivel, shall now continue....

The Author, in Karkhul Tahl at Jebel Uwenat. This is where I spent most of November 2009; walking here on earth on what is a close geological analog to the surface of the planet Mars.

Jebel Uwenat is a unique feature in the Sahara desert, a mountain with natural springs that sits on the border of Egypt, Sudan and Libya. Rarely visited and hardly known, most travel magazine entries refer to the area simply as "very remote". I am here to testify that the word "remote" doesn't begin to describe the nature of this place.

Its out there.

Way-Out-There...

Frankly, its was just that "remote' attribute that initially attracted the place to me. Short of going to the Antarctic, this was my best chance to explore, to go someplace where no one had never been before.

You cant really see it in the first picture, but I have a big smile on my face...

More to Follow.

Sorry folks, I am out on a "hiatus" from blogging for awhile. I've decided that my time here is "short" and in the words of Chief Joseph; "I shall fight no more forever". I simply don't have the energy to chew the same old arguments anymore, I no longer find any fun in the hunt and I have found other things to do.

I will be out doing "something else" with the time I have left. I may return to blog about it someday so the site will stay for awhile longer, but you never know about the future, so don't count on it.

Now scoot, you rascals. Go do something with yourselves.

"With two thousand years of examples behind us, we have no excuses when fighting for not fighting well". T.E. Lawrence.

In other news, The estate of Truman Capote is suing Amazon for the use of Droopy Dog in the 'text to speech' option, saying that by doing so, it dilutes their "brand image".

Oh, I forgot to mention that this is satire.

One day, he caught a car and he caught it right by the hubcap as it was going about 30 miles an hour. It was a 66 Mustang, the one with the 007 hubcaps. He rolled up just like the cartoon dogs always do, but real dogs don't ( more than once,that is).

Needless to say, He never chased another car. The moral of the story is, Chasing cars is good fun and you can look great doing it but the question you need to ask yourself as a car chasing dog is "what do you do with it once you've caught it"?

I thought of that when I watched the President tonight. The poor guy has spent his whole life chasing cars and now that he's finally caught his car and he has no idea what to do with it.

Gosh, I'm sure if I think about it long enough I can come up with an example. It sure seems like we've seen that sort of thing before, right?

And I hope to hell I'm wrong...

Overhead in line at Wal Mart. A store that I found this very weekend (along with In-n-out Burger) to be filled to the brim with customers. Go figure...

As we now live in the modern age of the metrosexual, the political correct docker wearing prius driving soft and cuddly live-at-home-till-hes-30 modern male, you don't often get to see one of these in the wild in his true element. This for those of you who haven't seen one before, is a man.

I don't know who this man is but let the word go forth from me personally and sincerely, that this man will never pay for his beer for the rest of his life.

I find myself asking two of the eternal questions "where do we find these men?" and the second question " how do you walk with balls the size of cocoanuts?"

While your 401k was burning, your home was repossessed your job eliminated and North Korea threatened war, and yet another of the Presidents cabinets discovered why the rest of us hate taxes so much, let the record show that on this day the President and his wife took time to read to children.

Let the record also show that the only kid in that audience who isn't saying "When is recess?" is the one saying "I have to go potty".

That sounds pretty stimulating to me.

It seems to me that its not the spending that's at issue, but who is doing it. How does letting congress spend my money work better than me spending my own? We just blew through 350 billion in government spending and not a damn thing happened. Let's try something new this time with the second half of the TARP funding.

I think I can stimulate my own economy pretty well all by myself thank you...

2005 was the year my father died. Two months after he died, I developed a severe cough that simply would not go away. After a week of non-stop coughing, I began to cough up blood which got my attention, so off I went to my favorite medical facility for a round of specialized industrial care and medicine.

The cause of the blood in my sputum was easy enough to diagnose because with all my coughing I had ruptured my esophagus. A laser solved the immediate problem but left the question open as to the initial cause of the tear. A series of x-rays and a lot of time in the doctors office, a biopsy here and there and four weeks later I was given a clean bill of health. It was not the "big C". It was determined to be nothing more than a severe infection that lead to bigger things, but for a short time in the weeks directly after my fathers death, I was also dealing with the possibility of my annoying cough being something much worse.

The "much worse" was throat cancer which as it turns out, I did not have. Yet as it turns out, my friend and mentor, did, and died of it on the same day as my father. I knew nothing of his condition. We talked on the phone at the end of the year prior, he said nothing about his condition. Perhaps he didn't know at that time, but if he did, he didn't pass it on to me. Frankly it wasn't his style to do something like that. Where I was a "Kirk", he was a "Picard". He was gracious, classy and polite person. As engineers, we made a good team but we would have made an awful cop 'buddy" movie.

When we worked together in the 80's and 90's and his retirement plan back then was that at the end of his career he would cash in his 401k and buy a rock shop in the Oregon desert. It was never going to happen, but it used to make us laugh at the right time in meetings that had gone horribly bad. It always seemed like a great idea to me.

We had a shared background, we had grown up in roughly the same place in Sacramento, but 20 years apart. Here were two Sacramento valley kids working in a company of seriously deep Bay Area bit heads, so we stuck together. A couple of country hayseeds there amongst the cosmopolitan eggheads. We spoke each others language, the language with verbage based on a suspiciously raised eyebrow in a code review or a sigh that sounds like an air leak when someone in management says something patently stupid during a company meeting.

I hadn't heard from him in awhile, which wasn't all that unusual as the fraternity of our shared past life lives out there on a long orbit. We all come around from time to time, but not as often as we would like. All this time I assumed he had finally gone on to buy the rock shop out there in the Harney Desert. I hadn't heard from him in awhile, so I looked him up today and discovered in the process that he was no longer with us. There are times when a Google search can be like the 'angel of death' and this is one of them.

Now it seems my friend will never retire to the Harney desert and I should stop waiting for a call for lunch that will never come. And I now find myself four years late in grief to the man who once taught me the meaning of the word "crisp".

In the middle of having dentistry - let's pop in a little jab at President Bush. Sure, what could be wrong with that.

I've seen this phenomenon as well. I find that there are some people who just naturally assume that "everyone hates Bush" and therefore no knock is too low, no time is the wrong time for politics.

Jay Nordlinger writes a great piece in NR on the subject today.

As I said, this sort of thing has happened to me as well. This might surprise some of you, but I don't talk politics in public, I certainly don't talk about it at work. I never have, and I never will. I often find myself having to respond to it, and when it occurs, I usually say something like "well I was raised by wolves so you'll excuse me if I abide by the rule that says you dont talk about sex, religion or politics at work. You should respect my diversity in this matter. The real reason I don't talk about those things is something called "common courtesy" which as of late is in short supply. You should never talk about those three things for no other reason that it is simply rude. Talking about any one of those things in a public venue can potentially become an incendiary subject.

So obviously that means I'm depressed and upset about President Obama. Oh, sorry thrillseekers, I'm not. The funniest thing about this election to me is how the left envisaged that we on the right would become as moonbat crazy against President Obama as they did against Bush. It didn't happen and in my opinion, it wont happen. There will be things we like and dislike about President Obama, but I don't think we will hate him. Our negative reaction to Obama wont define who we are.

I'll come back to this later, but to illustrate my point let me relate this story. I was at the office after the inaugural when one of my liberal collegues came by to tell me how happy they were with the election and in a slip of the tongue he said "Im so proud to be an American". He was expecting anger from me but I just said "feels good doesn't it? That sudden pulse of patriotism. Welcome to the side of the angels my friend!"

He stopped dead cold. He was genuinely feeling good and he was feeling genuinely patriotic and these were entirely new feelings for him. I told him it was ok, it was a good thing to love your country but that idea just seemed to make him woozy. For the first time since I've known him, he was forced to recognize something that he had not believed possible.

That he and I, were actually on the same side. That thought doesn't bother me at all, but it bothers the hell out of some people.

When that happens, I take the accused back to the holding cell, where they are processed into the legal system. They might post bond, they might sit overnight but eventually they see a judge, who with the help of their attorney and the District Attorneys office, will determine where the accused will go from here.

So let's say that some well meaning citizenry has complained that the holding cells are incompatible with human rights. In a craven attempt to curry favor with the voting public, the City Council so decrees that the holding cells should be closed and in a blaze of camera flash - it is done!

Ok. Fine. I'm just a cop. I do my job. I get up and go to work the same way I did before this happened, right?

The problem is, what "job" do I do? Should I arrest anyone? If I do, where do I take them? What happens when they go there? You need a place to hold people as they are processed. If you close it, what do you do to the rest of the system? You take away the jail, you take away the process and without the process, there is no "system".

So now the President has "so decreed" that Guantanamo and all the "secret CIA" jails are to be closed, "In the interest of Human Rights".

I think its fine to want to close Guantanamo, but the question is, what do you do with those folks who get captured in the effort of fighting terrorism? If you don't have anywhere to take them, where do they go? If you are not going to capture them and you don't have any facilities for processing them, what do with them?

Here's the 10 billion dollar question:

"If you're a soldier in the field and you have to choose to capture a combatant (for which there are no longer any facilities or systems to hold or process prisoners, and the very act of capturing prisoners which may very well put you personally at risk of legal entanglements) or kill the combatant, which will end the issue outright. So what do you "choose" to do?"

Yeah... Me too.

The funny thing is that this whole "close Guantanamo" thing was done in the interest of protecting human rights, but in reality, something else might just have occurred. You know, the older I get, the more I'm convinced that the "law of unintended consequences" is as absolute as the law of gravity.

Update: I'm gently reminded of this scene from "A Bridge Too Far" for somewhat related reasons: