Well, so far this is simply outstanding. Okay, I haven’t been playing with it for more than 30 minutes, but it’s a quantum change. If you’re using WordPress, get this sucker. And don’t judge by what you see on this blog, because what I’m talking about is the back end. I can’t believe this software is free.

And as for this blog, yes, the inline commenting is busted and has been for a while. I’m not fixing it because I’m customizing a whole new theme and structure. Plugged into this new WordPress version, it’s all kind of exciting in its own way.

No, really.

I can say “el snow” because I’m just naturally hilarious. Kind of like the builders of the miserable and apparently abandoned Texan tourist trap up in the mountains called “El Lodge,” so help me. So it’s kind of a meme, I guess, if you can have one of those with just two people.

Be that as it may, when I last checked, road crews were still plowing and salting the route my sweetie takes up to Alamosa, Colorado most weeks. Because of el snow, then, it looks like I’ll be going with her in the morning. Don’t get the wrong idea, now. She’s from Iowa, remember, and once drove a ‘65 VW Beetle all the way from Massachusetts to Des Moines in the dead of winter in the middle of a blizzard. It wouldn’t kill her to do this by herself at all, but I’d like to come along: they have curbs and flush toilets up there.

The real reason is that we’re in this together now. She has a long day of teaching ahead of her, and letting me do the white-knuckle driving lets her relax a little. Besides, the trip will be spectacular. When we get there, I’ll just chill out in the student center with Adams State wi-fi and maybe even get some work done. Later we get to go out to dinner and come back to a nice motel in the below-zero darkness.

What could be better? Key West?? Well, maybe. But the Milagros Cafe in downtown Alamosa has the most intense homemade sweet rolls on the face of the earth. The lard and sugar in just one of those could power a small town for days.

This is the West, by damn, and those hippies sure know how to cook.

The following is from a Wall Street Journal article I found today entitled “On the Street, Disbelief and Resignation” concerning the plight of the poor investment bankers, who now have nothing to do and are barely making ends meet:

Inside what’s left of Wall Street, investment bankers are doing all they can to cope with a business that is disappearing before their eyes. Yes, there are tens of thousands of people still with jobs. They just don’t have much work. Debt and stock markets are virtually shut, merger volume is down by 28%, and whole lines of structured finance are closed for good.

WSJ’s Dennis Berman tells colleague Evan Newmark that although tens of thousands of people have managed to hold on to their jobs, there isn’t much work to go around. Instead, he says, Wall Streeters are working to appear busy. Investment banking has since become a phantom realm, where everyone is busy but no one is doing anything. In this world, status is conferred by a quality meeting, not a completed transaction; a $700,000 salary is deemed generous [my emphasis]; and an apocryphal story keeps circulating of a former J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. mortgage-securities banker now driving a forklift.

This needs to be filed with the story out of Santa Fe about a man and a wife whose request for a zoning variance was denied. First of all, they wanted to build a house on top of a scenic ridge, which right there is against the law. Secondly, they wanted it to be something like 9,500 square feet, which is an awful lot of space for two people. Naturally all this got thrown right back at them, but now the couple and their lawyers are back! They’re still trying to get a variance on the ridgetop zoning, but they’ve cut the proposed size of the house down to 8,500 square feet. The wife says they need that much room “to accommodate her husband’s wheelchair.”

All you nursing home ladies and dudes, take note!

Okay, it did snow. Bah. Maybe four inches, tops. Not so bad! And it does look pretty, even if melting snow dripped a little from our skylight and stovepipe. The dirt road is lots smoother, for the time being at least, and on my first foray out this a.m., I only had one near-collision.

Taos Mountain at 9:00 a.m. from my window

Actually, it could have been a bad one. I was crossing the acequia on Vista del Valle Road when a HUGE Dodge truck driven by what looked like a 15-year-old girl came roaring down the hill so fast, it skidded across the curve right in front of me. If I hadn’t seen her coming and knew she would slide, I might not have slowed down and waited for the inevitable. As it was, she recovered and went on her way. She really needed a spanking, but a) I wasn’t that mad because I saw it coming, b) I’d never lay a hand on someone I don’t know, c) she was just a kid who won’t live much longer anyway, and d), you can’t do things like that around here without getting shot.

Nice photo, eh? Just don’t expect me to Photoshop the power lines out of every picture I take of that mountain! (I did this time…)

I am so bad: almost a week since I last updated. Life just gets in the way, y’ know? But I’m planning to merge all of this together soon. For now, you can enjoy the five images of the “Radio Free Bassanda” series starting here, and with today’s FotoFeed I launch into another short series called “Before the Storm.”

No, the sun doesn’t shine all the time.

We’re supposed to get some heavy snow and a lot colder temperatures over the next day or so. I don’t see it, frankly, but that’s the forecast. When I took my walk this afternoon, it was pretty cold, all right, and I got pelted by fast-moving wet snow near the top of the mesa. It’s very weird here when there isn’t any sun. This hardly ever happens, of course, but when it does, things get scary and strange.

I’m in a write ‘em and delete ‘em mood. Sorry for deleting your comments as well.

Anyway, I had a very weird thing just happen. I walked past the woodstove (a battered old Ashley, straight out of the pages of the original Whole Earth Catalog) and I saw the fire. So what, you say. Well, for one thing, the firebox door is closed, obviously. I walked past the side of the stove, and for just a second, I saw the fire, out of the corner of my eye.

I love it when the impossible happens, don’t you?

The following quotation is from an article in the Guardian UK about a Malaysian man who was stabbed for hogging the karaoke microphone in a club. I actually think this is more interesting. It’s certainly funnier:

Karaoke rage is not unheard of in Asia. There have been several reported cases of singers being assaulted, shot or stabbed mid-performance, usually over how songs are sung.

Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” has reportedly generated such outbursts of hostility that some bars in the Philippines now no longer offer it on the karaoke menu. In Thailand this year, a gunman shot eight people dead after tiring of their endless renditions of a John Denver tune.

Oh, man. I may never go back…

Just unpacked my first Xmas present to myself, a 49-key MIDI controller that plugs into my MacBook via USB. Jacking the Fender Twin Reverb into the MacBook and launching Garageband opens up a whole new universe of NOISE, glorious noise! I’m in heaven. There are normal instrument sounds, synthesizers, sound effects, all kinds of stuff to play with, and I just realized I’d spent the whole morning without reading a single post at Daily Kos, Huffington Post, or any of ‘em. Thank God for that, eh? And what do you know, the sun still came up anyway.

No, my wife wasn’t in the house, which is just as well, because real musicians will hate me for what I can do with this thing. Not because I’m better, oh no, not at all, just louder and stupider. Compared to what she can do with a fine piano, the sampled sounds in Garageband as played by me come off like a troupe of psychotic whores on acid. The real secret is decibels, probably. A cow mooing louder than a 747 at takeoff is something idiots like me want to play over and over (the cow sound is middle C on the keyboard, just three notes up from the bleating sheep). There’s a fabulous bugling elk sample, too, that sounds hilarious blended with seagull cries and cathedral organ!

Oh yeah, I can do strings and guitars and stuff, too. Geez, I don’t want to do website work or anything else. (Hey, I wonder if I can figure out how to play “96 Tears”??) If you have any keyboard experience at all and own a recent Mac, you have to get the MIDI thingie, less than a hundred bucks at the Apple Store. But you’re going to want a real musical instrument amplifier, unless you already have one hell of a stereo system. Now I need my own studio, a place to write and produce podcasts where I won’t drive my sweetie insane.

Life is loud and getting better.

We’re back in Alamosa for the day. I have my trusty guest pass for the campus wireless network at Adams State, and I’m camped out in a sunny corner of the student center with a nice big latte. Things could be worse.

It’s always fun to be in Alamosa, especially after Taos. The difference in topography, facilities, and general ambience couldn’t be more pronounced. I know I’ve said all this before, but it truly is striking. For one thing, from where I sit, I can see actual curbs. The houses are frame and stucco, and the yards are covered with grass. The streets are wide, paved, and clean. It really does feel like a small Midwestern college town, if you ignore (?) the jagged, snow-covered wall of 14,000-ft. mountains to the east.

Alamosa is only about 130 years old and looks like it’s been here forever, in American terms. Taos isn’t America, at least not in this context. It’s much older than that, for one thing, and was built out of mud — people who want to move here need to understand that. It affects everything. Even if you have a modern house, we’re all living in the natural dirt. This both inspires and drives one to other extremes. Alamosa, then, evokes a soothing memory of familiar civilization, the kind of thing that makes you say to yourself, well yeah, it’s kinda nice to be able to walk outside without carrying a stick.

It was glorious and stunning on the way up here, as usual. The purity of the unspoiled wide open spaces always gives me a kick in the head, something the plowed vistas of Iowa or anywhere else can never accomplish. We saw two herds of antelope (pronghorns), a couple of dozen altogether. On the north side of San Antonio Mountain, the inch of snow from last night’s cold front had gotten packed and turned to ice. This was very weird, because you couldn’t see any snow except on the asphalt, and the sun was shining brightly. I had to hold it under 55 mph to keep from getting all loosey-goosey in the wind blasts from the monster hay trucks heading south.

UPDATE: I drove us back in the dark, leaving just after sunset. On the way past San Antonio Mountain, we saw several antelope by the side of the road, ready to bolt. There was hardly any moonlight. We went miles and miles in the empty darkness without seeing another car.

It’s just all so damned bizarre. That’s over 50 miles without a latte or a gas station or any lights at night.

(But there’s at least one stupa, yow!)

Hosting arrangements for FARRFEED.COM are almost complete.

The all-new, whiz-bang, content-rich version of this blog will shortly be undergoing extensive testing on my very own staging server (actually a secret subdomain). I’ll be running the very latest version of WordPress with a heavily-customized premium theme, installed at root level this time inside its own domain — no more forwarding to JHFarr.com from GoDaddy. Don’t worry about the links, we’re gonna 301-redirect all over Creation here. Geek heaven!

As hinted at before, the new FarrFeed will be not only a blog but a digital potlatch: everything I’ve ever written, including the book, will eventually be accessible here for absolutely free. Once this is up and running, FotoFeed will be in line for conversion to a WordPress CMS. I seem to have discovered an ultimate secret of webmastery, and I’m very excited to put it all into action.