GoT Season 2: Sex Gets a Purpose

In watching Game of Thrones Season 1 I lamented the amount of raunchy sex in the screenplay. It served no purpose to the story and was excessive. (As I noted then, I'm not prudish about sex. If this were supposed to be a story about sex, i.e. porn, well... it's dull and tedious porn.) In Season 2 sex gains a purpose. It's manipulation.

In Season 2 multiple women characters are shown using sex and sexual attraction to manipulate men into doing what they want. Multiple women characters even say on-screen that that's what they're doing. "I can manipulate anything with a dick," boasts one. "This [making you do what I want] would be easier if you had a dick," bemoans another.

So... yay? Raunchy sex in GoT is no longer gratuitous. Now it's just manipulatively preachy.

From Art & Wine to 4x4 & Hiking

A few times a year we visit the local Art & Wine Festival. It seems like the event comes around at least 10 times a year... but that's because throughout Spring, Summer, and Fall there's one somewhere in the area seemingly every weekend. So we stroll around the vendor booths at the Sunnyvale Art & Wine Festival, the Mountain View one, the Santa Clara one, and sometimes the Fremont one. Yes, there's some difference between them. There are basically two companies that run the shows.

What do we do at these festivals? Well, we literally do check out the art! We bought a piece of metal art a few years ago and we've bought framed photographic prints at least 3 times. We always spend time looking through the booths of landscape photographers. I like both photography and visiting the places to make it!

At a show in town a few months ago we found a particular booth run by a photographer whose work we're not familiar with. His subject matter was mostly from the Sierra Nevada range, so we had fun quizzing each other on "Name where this scene is!"

Bridalveil Falls at Yosemite? Easy. Columns of the Giants? Not too hard. Bristlecone Pine Forest? Getting harder.

Then there were one or two pictures we couldn't place. One was rows of natural stone columns that looked like a colonnade from Moorish architecture. But it was all natural; formed by erosion. We were stumped. It sure looked like something we'd have read about if it were anywhere near where we've visited.

"It's the columns at Crowley Lake," the photographer explained.

Yes, one of the cool things about these art & wine festivals is that frequently the artist is in the booth. I always love talking to them about how they compose their art. (BTW, when you're talking to a photographer, asking what camera they use is... unsophisticated. I strike up conversation by asking what choices they made in how to compose the photograph and complimenting their use of color, visual texture, etc.)

Well, you can imagine what happened next.



Haha, no, we didn't jump in our car and drive straight to Crowley Lake.... I mean, first we had to look it up on a map! But then we changed around our plans for our next three-day weekend trip, a few weeks later, from visiting eastern Washington and the Idaho panhandle to visit Crowley Lake and other places on the eastern Sierra Nevada instead.

It turns out Crowley Lake is not that far off the beaten path. US-395, the main route up and down the eastern Sierra, runs along its far west edge. We've been past it numerous times without knowing there's something amazing to see.

The columns aren't right by the highway, though. They're around the remote southern end of the lake. To get to them you have to drive several miles on local roads, then either hike— or drive, if you've got a high clearance 4x4 and the skills to use it— another couple of miles.



We meet the latter qualifications, so we drove to the top of the cliff. From there it's less than 1/2 mile walk down to a sandy pocket beach where there are natural columns carved out under two cliffs.



In beauty I walk. Whether it's at the Art & Wine Festival in Sunnyvale or the real thing in the wild.

Hiking to Ruby Lake

Earlier today I posted about hiking the Crowley Lake Columns; yesterday I posted about crawling through volcanic crevices at Mono Lake. I'm catching up on blogging about hikes I did in June. These have been in my backlog for ten weeks now. Okay, I did post a bit about the trip in real time. I wrote about the hotel we stayed at and included one picture from this hike. My concession to keeping up with the blog in real time was to go light on the trail notes. That's the tradeoff: I can be timely or detailed, but not both. Anyway, here it is now.



We started from the Mosquito Flat trailhead high up in the eastern Sierra Nevada. The trailhead here is at nearly 10,000'. The nice thing about hiking from this trailhead is that the car does a lot of the ascent for us. Though there's plenty of ascent left for those who want to huff and puff. The mountains in the distance rise to over 13,000'.

We've been here before. In 2018 we hiked from this same trailhead. We're hiking a slight different route today. Back then we hiked due west into the Little Lakes Valley, visiting a string of Alpine lakes. Today we'll climb up out of the valley, toward Ruby Lake nestled high in the Mono Pass. (We considered hiking Ruby Lake the second day after camping back then but chose not to.)



Not too far up from road's end the trail crosses into wilderness. These wooden signs are one of the two forms of "You are here" to my happy place.

Shortly past this wilderness boundary the trail splits. The "easy" way climbs gently into Little Lakes Valley. I quote easy because when we did it a few years ago it was still a moderately challenging trek. There's some elevation gain, and at 10,000' the thin air is hard on those of us not well acclimated. The fork to Ruby Lake, though, is the hard way as it climbs up out of the valley.



Yes, it's hard, but that just means I stop more often to appreciate the beauty in which I walk.

Update: continued in part 2!