The Grotto of the Redemption

One of the best parts of my trip was renting a car and driving from Chicago to West Bend, Iowa with my two pals. We went to see 'The Grotto of the Redemption' a complex of artificial caves built out of curious minerals by Father Paul Dobberstein and a few helpers over 80 years with most of that work being done in the 40 years Father Dobberstein was alive.









It's an amazing work of art in the middle of nowhere and is made extra special because of its hard to reach location. Driving for 8 hours through soy bean and corn fields get you in the right state of mind to have the visual processing part of your brain overloaded.















It's something you should see in person. It's the homespun midwestern version of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia. I'm not Catholic or even religious but I have to admit belief in a higher power makes monumental works of art like this possible. I agree with Salvador Dali that Catholics make the best artists. You can't be a self absorbed modern artist and have the will and drive to spend 40 years of your life gluing rocks together for no financial or sexual rewards.





The church nearby was beautiful as well and had really extreme and violent scenes on the stained glass windows. There was a shrine done in the same style as the grotto but made more mysterious through clever lighting.











Bye everybody!

Utah State Fair and the drive to and from Moab

Utah was the loneliest and most beautiful place I visited on my trip. The video below I took with the movie feature on my digital still camera. I slapped the best clips together on my friend Jared's computer while visiting him in Chicago.

San Francisco

Here's Travelsaurus Rex chomping down on Alcatraz.


I went to Apple's WWDC this past week. I was very creeped out by some of the presenters and Apple engineers, some were generally excited about what they were doing but too many of them had fake enthusiasm. The sort of lobotomized, monotone voice, cliche phrase enthusiasm that turns my stomach. I heard 'We were blown away', 'It will blow you away', 'be prepared to be blown away', from too many mouths for it to be coincidence.

Computer programmers for the most part are lousy company. You would survey the crowd and see four hundred people tapping away at their laptops not paying attention at all to what was going on around them.

Most of the people there were dying to create the next killer app to simply cash in. I'm all for making bucks but when I see obese forty five year old guys with ironic t-shirts and snarky attitudes I have a hard time trusting that they're going to create something that actually improves life on this planet. What's more likely is that they'll write apps and games so they can wrap themselves in the cocoon of their fantasy of choice, so they don't have to be reminded about how lousy they are at real life.

I think the biggest thing that frightened me was when I heard the applause for a presentation on 'Twitterific' which is an iPhone application that allows you to post to Twitter and track your Twitter buddies in your area. The presenter said something like 'And with this application you will never have to eat lunch alone again!', and a roar came up from the crowd, huge applause, whistling. Why is being alone for your lunch hour a problem that needs a technological solution? That's so stupid. I think people need to be alone more so they can actually develop a distinct personality of their own. So they can learn to think and feel for themselves. This creation of a super wired-in, tech dependent society is genuinely frightening because it's not creating more empowered and educated individuals as promised by the Internet evangelists a decade ago. The internet is really starting to look like TV, or the society pages of a newspaper, with the illusion of interactivity pasted on the surface.

Okay I'm incoherent and ranting so I'll stop here.