Pikes Peak and the Rampart Range were slowly being shrouded by a velvety veil of what appeared to be evening clouds as Janet drove us to our favorite restaurant this evening after Mass.
We had seen this spectical before on summer evenings and knew that it was not the classic "Thunder Boomer" storms so prevalent in the mountains this time of year.
Although it creates an interesting and at times beautiful scenic phenomenon, we knew it was being caused by smoke being carried by the winds from several wildfires on the western slopes of the Rockies and some Canadian burns.
Yes, I had my cellphone but due to traffic and shooting toward the "not quite yet setting" sun, I chose not to try photographing the drama through the windshield.
Sometimes I just like to watch the phenomenon and later try to describe it in words. Or maybe I was just too perfectionistic (or lazy or hungry) to attempt a photo.
Anyway, I started thinking that perhaps the Rocky Mountains should be renamed to the "West(ern)Smoky Mountains" 😄😁😂!
It was wonderful seeing all the beautiful ladies at our lunch last week. Many thanks to Janie for planning it! We need to do it more often. Time is passing by, and nothing feels as good as being with old friends and best friends from childhood. Even though we didn't win the lottery (Guys, we all bet on it together), we did have a win in seeing and reconnecting with one another.
I know I have probably posted shots of this building in St. Elmo, Colorado in the past, but as I was looking through some old 4-wheeling photos this one caught my attention once again.
The off road trails that go to and beyond here are quite rocky and probably not ones that I would ever be attempting in the future. However, thanks to a lot of prints, slides and digital pictures I can re-live those "glory days'" in the high country.
Over a period of maybe 7-8 years, I had photographed this place a number of times and the position of the structure was unchanged. It remains one of my all time favorite photos of Colorado.
There's always an outlier (or two) who didn't get the message.
As the sun rose above Pike's Peak on a cold July morning in 2017 with a sea of clouds below in the background, these two pine trees were well rooted in the rocks to withstand the winds at close to 14,000 feet above sea level, besting the usual timberline.
Maybe this just fascinates me because it's in my ballpark.
but quite frankly it grates at me 'cause writing is hard but noble work when sweated out honestly.
found this in my random readings:
I volunteer with our local historical society, which awards a $1,000 scholarship each year to two high school students who submit essays about a meaningful experience with a historical site. This year, our committee noticed a huge improvement in the quality of the students’ essays, and only after announcing the winners did we realize that one of them, along with other students, had almost certainly used artificial intelligence. What to do? I think our teacher liaison should be told, because A.I. is such a challenge for schools. I also feel that this winner should be confronted. If we are right, that might lead her to confess her dishonesty and return the award. — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist:
The rise of A.I. chatbots — and now Microsoft Word’s Copilot feature — is making it harder to use essays to assess candidates for scholarships, grades and jobs. In fact, because much of the workplace will soon involve prompting machines and editing their output, traditional essay writing may no longer be seen as an essential skill. One big worry about all this is that researching and drafting a paper on their own has long been one of the ways students actually learn material and form their own views about it.
Your society’s prize is no doubt meant to reward that process, not just a polished final product. And yet unless your historical society explicitly barred A.I. use, the winner might not have thought she was doing anything wrong. Perhaps she provided information about a historical site and her experience of it and then refined what the machine produced.
Before generative A.I., of course, students could already run their work through digital spelling, grammar and style checkers. Earlier still, they might have had a parent or an older sibling make improvements. Now services like Grammarly boast that they help users construct an essay interactively. “Writing is utter solitude,” Kafka is said to have lamented, “the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” For students today, it may feel more like a cozy group chat with an algorithm.
What happened this year should be taken as a wake-up call, rather than a crime scene. If you’re going to evaluate essays written without supervision, it’s wise to talk to the students and confirm that they actually understand the ideas in their papers. For now, let the teacher liaison know that many of the submissions appeared to rely on generative A.I. But I wouldn’t push for a confession from the winner. What matters is letting students know what kinds of assistance are off-limits and why producing work on their own is (as you and I believe) still worth doing.
If the contest continues in its current form, however, you may simply be rewarding those crafty enough to conceal their silicon Cyranos. I suspect that it’s time to rethink the format. That might mean shifting to supervised writing sessions or oral presentations about a site or something else entirely. The goal would still be to encourage young people to explore the past — to research, reflect and communicate. But to do that, the contest itself may need a rewrite.
What an interesting topic. I worry about my own grandkids (now 17,16, and 15 years old) and the possiblle abuses of this new technology. But they are all really good students and both mothers are, or have been teachers. So I trust that the problem won't rear it's head in their homes.
I just wish A.I. could hve been available for me when I played golf - with the likes of Tom McKeon, Steve Hodges, John Jackson and JIm Hamilton at the old Raymond Gold course out on Trabue Rd.
One fond memory with Tom, Steve, and either Jim or John (? - we played together out there several times - I forget the exact group that day);
On the first tee we four each hit our first drive almost exactly equal distance, but spread out across from the right rough, to the left rough, with two of us spaced on opposite sides of the fairway. Since we were all at almost exactly the same distance, I seem to recall we decided that I (in the far right rough) would hit my second shot first. I swung and topped the ball - it hopped and roled about 10 feet. We laughed. Then I beleive Tom hit from his lie on the right of the fairway and topped his ball also. We all laughed again. Then John (or Jim?) from his lie on the left of the fairway. He fanned and missed completely and we all laughed some more. Finally, Steve swung and completely fanned and we alll four fell down laughing together spead across the fairway and rough.
No, you're right. A.I. probably could not have helped that motley crew.
As a writer I'm nerdy about words. And I was just thinking about a person in my life who is incredibly valuable to me and has a place deep inside my heart. And the thought came to me that I am humbled by her presence in my life. It's - it's like when you see fireworks for the first time as a kid and the colors in the sky above you make you feel small - yet somehow filled to overflowing.
Just seemed interesting that those two words came up as I was thinking about her.
Her name is Denise. She's an elementary school teacher. Qualifies her to deal with somebody at my level of maturity.
had to share, given the target audience we proudly represent.
apart from that he's one of my storytelling idols.
You’re reading a column by a guy of 83 for one reason and that’s to hear him tell you: Life is good. Boomer columnists are full of dread, millennials are discouraged, Xers are depressed, and Gen Z is downhearted, but I am old enough to see the advance of progress.
Yes, there’s pain, guilt, a sense of meaninglessness — welcome to the club — but we also have Thai takeout in little white paper containers, and same-day delivery has come to seem ordinary. There are more toothpaste options now than ever. More fragrances of soap.
Cordless phones have changed everything. You used to be on a short leash and the whole family could listen to you murmuring to your girlfriend, now the cellphone gives you freedom of expression.
You can buy an electronic wristband to tell you how many steps you took. Someday it will tell you your happiness quotient.
Depression, anxiety, insomnia: Just take a pill. Back in the day, your mother said, “Go outside. Take a walk around the block and get over it.” It didn’t work. You walked and walked and you got lost because cellphones hadn’t been invented yet so you didn’t have GPS in your pocket and didn’t know where you were and you had to ask someone and maybe you were in a bad neighborhood and the person you asked had a pistol and now you were lost and down a hundred bucks on top of it.
Surgery is better. Stuff they used to have to slice you in half for, now they run a little tube up a vein, and snip snip snip, as you sit there reading the comics. Back in the day, if you had surgery, you had big scissory zipperish scars, you could never model bikinis after that. Now? No problem.
We have vocabulary today that we didn’t have back then. Totally. We never used that word. Ever. We were sort of happy, we were sort of interested. And now we’re ALL OVER IT. We used to say “very good” and now we can say AWESOME. Back in my day, awesomeness was limited to the Grand Canyon and you had to go there to be awed and now it isn’t odd to hear it applied to clothing items and personal jewelry.
I come from the era of Karens and Joannes and Mariannes, kids had similar names, and now you have Sophias, Olivias, Avas, Isabellas — even in the Midwest, boys named Aiden and Liam, Connor, Dylan, Anglo kids posing as Irish, Noah and Jeremiah and Benjamin, Baptist kids trying to be Jewish. The Garys and Larrys and Bobs are gone. Uniqueness is acceptable. A biological male who is transitioning into a non-gender status and ultimately wants to be accepted simply as a carbon-based life form is perfectly okay.
And thank goodness for me, life expectancy has increased. Old is the new young. People in their 50s can still be immature. I’m 83 and still searching for myself — I was in radio and wrote books and now I’m a singer. Not an awesome one, but not bad.
The corner bar became a wine bar where you say things like, “This Bordeaux has a deep and expressive finish, a dense palate, and a refined but approachable body with aromas of oak and damp earth, but I find the interplay of the complex acidityand the creaminess frankly unbalanced.”
I miss the corner bar where guys tell jokes. So the one guy says, “So. This guy walks into a bar with two dog turds in his hand and says, ‘Look what I almost stepped in.’” And the other guy says, “So. An old man goes into a bar and sits next to a young woman and says, ‘Do I come here often?’”
And now I’m going to sound like an old man, which, at 83, I have earned the right to do. I feel that texting is wiping out the art of small talk. You get on an elevator with a stranger on it and you notice something interesting and comment — “What breed of dog is that?” — and he says, “Shropshire shepherd.” And this leads to conversation. I have encountered young persons who treat small-talk overtures as a personal assault.
Small talk is a fundamental part of American life, the right of any person to make the acquaintance of anyone else. And I think the cellphone has created a wall between proximitous strangers. And perhaps the minimalization of awesomeness has played a part. What’s your thinking on this?
Dave, I think I was in that foursome at Raymond when we all showed our (utterly lack of) skills. I should have been forewarned because a few years earlier (at the age of 13) I swung a golf club in my back yard (at a wiffle golf ball) and my knee cap (pastella) dislocated. It spontaneously popped back into the joint after a few agonizing moments only to recur 13 years later a few days before my marriage (I stepped out of the shower and my foot knee/slipped) - the knee cap did eventually pop into where it belonged and I limped down the aisle.
An additional 13 years years later I was pulling weeds in the yard and I bent over and it happened again. This time I was taken by ambulance to the emergency room (because of my ripe old age of 39?) where the (very painful) remedy was to straighten out my leg which seemed cocked (to me) at the knee at an improbable angle.
Since that time I've been careful as my age aproached a multiple of 13 (bad luck?). But next year I will only be too careful when I turn 78.
Orthopedic problems are so common at our age - actually any age - but old injuries that cause even the minimal amount of malalingment - can often result in wear and tear over the years of the cartilage and tendons and ligaments of the joint. I'm not sure of your diagnosis and whether it is strictly a knee cap (slipped patella) problem or involves other knee structures such as medial and lateral collateral ligaments. In order to stay active as a "senior" you may want to use some kind of a hinged support device for your specific problem that would have lateral and medial stays at least when you are working around the yard or walking/hiking especially on unlevel surfaces. An orthopedist or physical therapist could probably recommend such a device that might help prevent further damage or falls that could result in the need for surgical care.
I agree with John J and JIm H in discussing orthopedic issues at our age or, as Jim H said, 'any age.' Many years ago I was working out at the gym and had terrible back pain which medication didn't help. I went to an DO and had my back manipulated - it worked. Later, I had back surgery to fuse my L4, L5, and S1 vertebrae bones. Now my knees have been bothering me (ha!). My knee caps are in the wrong place and bones are bone-on-bone. The orthodoctor told me I do pretty well considering the bad knees that I have. What has helped me is to have a gel injection in each knee every 6 months AND I am doing water aerobics 3x a week at the gym. I am trying to avoid knee surgery as best as I can. Getting older certainly isn't any 'golden years.'
SHORT ANSWER: THERE'S VERY LITTLE DIFFERENCE. I'D SAY HOITY TOITY IS JUST A BIT MORE SLANGY AND SARCASTIC THAN THE OTHER.
(ADDED LATER)
I POKED AROUND A BIT. BOTH EXPRESSIONS EVOLVED FROM THE SAME ETYMOLOGICAL ROOT: SEE BELOW
(BUT ALL IN ALL I LIKE THE SHORT ANSWER BETTER)
"hoit" is an obsolete 16th century verb whose meaning is "to play the fool" or "to indulge in riotous and noisy mirth."
"Hoity-toity" is a now a commonly used term that evolved out of that word and is a handy way to describe those who engage in thoughtlessly silly or frivolous behavior before it became more of a synonym for "pretentious."
I would guess that, decades ago, some smartass scholar invented the rhyming,singsong term we use today to describe pretentious people and things.
Jack -- I think your 5 or 6 bucks difference is rather wide of the mark. I am pretty sure hoity toity and hoi polloi are more differentiated classes than that, being almost antonyms, I'd say. The former refers to "a snooty upperclass" and the latter to what used to be called "the unwashed masses." At least that's what I've always thought. Am I wrong?
