Sorry, non-broadband readers

As promised, lots of pictures! When I left Korea, I stopped off in Hawaii for a week with my friends Chowsky and D, who were both also being reassigned back stateside. The military actually runs a very large, very nice, and very cheap resort for servicemen who want to vacation there. Your tax dollars at work, folks. Here's Chowsky headed out to sea:

And D contemplating breaking the rules:

And few others of Hawaii:




Unfortunately, after Hawaii I had to go to El Paso, which is probably the ugliest place in the United States. If you're curious about what West Texas looks like, here's a representative picture:

The best view in all of El Paso: I-10 East on your way out. As you can see, I've developed a bad habit of taking photographs while I'm driving. My old camera is filled with about 100 similar shots, taken all over the country.


The Southwest does have a sort of rugged and dramatic beauty. There are times -- when you see the sun setting over the desert, or the flowers are in bloom on the mesas -- when you can appreciate how it must have looked to the Indians who lived here or the first white settlers. Unfortunately, the landscape now is marred by about 50 thousand Walmarts.

If you go West into New Mexico, which is just a stone's throw away from El Paso, the scenery actually improves quite a bit. For one thing, New Mexico is a lot greener. I imagine this is because God has punished Texas for delivering into an innocent and unsuspecting world the blight of George W. Bush. This is from right outside of the charming town of Las Cruces:

The mighty Rio Grande. If you look closely, you can see a Mexican stealing one of our jobs!


This is from the Trinity site, where the first test of the atomic bomb was conducted. I like to think that the black mass of rock, which looks like cooled lava, is actually a remnant of the blast. But given the distances involved and the relative weakness of that first bomb, I doubt that could really be true.