Serious Gold Panning

My father and I went north-east from Stockton, over the first mountains of the Sierras, north-west of Lake Tahoe. High high up. There was snow on the ground, all we could see for miles was mountains and valleys with thousands of pines. We drove down down into a valley, to a town on the edge of nowhere, Washington California, population about 200. They all stared at us. We continued on to the one lane road that serves two way travel, it hugged the mountain side, and believe me, that's fantastically exciting on its own. Hairpin turns with no guarantee there isn't another car coming your direction on this one lane road next to a steep cliff with no rails. We came to a fork of the Yuba River and parked the car. We had to walk from there. Down down, to the river's edge. There had been water shooting out of the sides of the rock everywhere we drove, but now, up close, scaling this steep edge to the river below, it was much more fascinating. We could see where springs had come and gone, leaving loose rocks all roughly pointing riverwards. At the top, there were giant, maybe 15 foot high, hundreds of feet wide piles of stones, remnants of the 1849 gold rush. It was only a couple years after the gold rush that these massive piles of rocks were made, left over from the massive industrial operations on these mountains and rivers extracting gold. It was only a few years after that that California banned massive gold mining tactics like blasting and dredging, preserving the Sierras (unlike some now much uglier parts of America) and ending the gold rush. Yeah, I bet you didn't know that, the government ended the gold rush, they didn't run out of gold.

Finally we came to the river's edge. Just for the hell of it, I grabbed some loose rocks, and I panned them, using a spring that was shooting out perfect clean/clear water. I planned on just diving in the river. This water was crystal clear, and I thought the better panning area might be on the other side. Some parts of the river were about 10 feet deep, and I could clearly see the bottom. But caution got the better of me, and I checked the water first. It was ludicrously cold. I started panning close to the bank. I found gold in nearly every pan. Although it was very very little gold. Fingerprinters I called them, because they could fit between the ridges of my fingerprint when I picked them up. I came up with various names to call my gold if I should find anything larger.

Bill-payer: about $100 worth of gold. It would be enough to pay a bill.
Pay-checker: about $1200 worth of gold. This much could survive me a month.
Year-wager: $35-38K this was the first value I came up with, 1 Kilogram of gold is about $35-38,000 and would be about a year's wage.

After an hour of panning, I ate some lunch out of my pan. My lunch was a Lunchable.

I cooled off my Capri-Sun in the ice-cold river.

So at some point I was thinking, this river is too cold for frogs. If there was a frog that could tolerate this river, it'd be one hardcore fucking frog. Then I looked over and saw a small pool near the river made by one of the springs. Because it was much more shallow it was obviously a bit warmer, and it was full of moss and mold etc. I thought, now there's a place for a frog. Then I saw a frog, so I grabbed it.

Anyway, back to the river, I decided to cross it. By the time I had explored the other side and come back I was relatively wet from the waist down. I decided why not go all the way? So I jumped in the river and let it carry me downstream. I reached a broad area, where it branched. The river was shallow here, but slow, one part of the river took an extremely sharp turn, becoming very rapid, and the other part just went to a pool of moss with a couple very beautiful waterfalls coming out of the rocks.

Ice cold, and probably dying, I started swimming back. I finnally came out and warmed up a bit. Then I went back to panning. I found a rock that had gold color in it. I thought it was gold. My dad wasn't so sure.

After another hour, we were fairly worn out and unlucky. We packed up and climbed out of there.

When we got home, my father tried further techniques to identify the gold color, and couldn't. I still think it's gold. I stated that if it is gold, it would be a Sam's Breakfaster: about $3-4 worth of gold, enough for a Sam's Cafe' ham and eggs breakfast.


So altogether, we had a great time. I brought home snow and threw some at my brother, we brought home gold. I'm convinced I have a little nugget of gold. I have an unidentified species of frog. We got some photos, so I'll be putting them up here.

What I don't know

I don't write or talk about things I don't know about or understand. Or, at least what I don't know about, or think I don't understand. Or maybe what I don't think I understand.

Isn't digital its own analog? Fundamentally even analog follows patterns, bumps, digits if you very so kindly would accept? But even then I suppose digital would still be a subset of analog, as it is characteristically quantifiable in integers.

So I started noticing the number 255 everywhere, and it was annoying me, because I knew it meant something in hexadecimal. So I looked it up, and lo, it is the highest number used in hexadecimal coding for colors (this can be used in html and CSS to indicate what color something should be, for example, if I designated this page to be blue: 255, red: 0, and green:0, this page would be completely as blue as could be displayed. Note: 255 in Hex is written "FF". If you want an easy example, open MSPaint and make a custom color, you'll see the color values go up to 255.

While looking up hexadecimal I noticed a joke on Wikipedia using Hex.

"If only dead people know hexadecimal, then how many people know heaidecimal?"

This reminded me of a binary joke I learned in binary class. "There are only 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary, and those who don't."



Anyway the whole reason I wrote this is because I don't know what "tort" is. I looked it up, and I'm still confusd. Why would "tort reform" be on the mouths of people like Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart daily, when no one gives a fuck, and never has? It is simply a too encompassing term for what they really mean, which is a trillionth of what they imply. They don't want to reform the entire justice system. They want frivolous lawsuits to stop. That's like calling a grain of sand a beach.



History channel told me today that the word "pepper" is sanskrit in origin. That's cool.

To horse, you gallant princes! Straight to horse!

Stockton California. Named the second most miserable city in America this year by Forbes. It was #1 last year, and #2 the year before. It's also the only city to have such a high ranking streak. Stockton California, top of every list, violent crime, car thefts, illiteracy, home foreclosures, unemployment, etc. Stockton California, the great boiling-over melting-pot;

% of Population Foreign Born

Stockton - 31%
LA - 29.6%
San Francisco - 28.3%
New York - 22.8%

And only 1/3 of the foriegners in Stockton are citizens. Not to suggest that Stockton is bad because it has more foreigners, as I explained in much more detail in a previous blog, it's that Stockton is a storm, and California seems to just dump all its problems into this storm, and hope nothing escapes.


As I mentioned in a previous blog, 70% of Stockton's murders go unsolved. I have lost count of how many people have been murdered in 2010, but here's some news from just the past week.

There were at least 6 shootings in Stockton from Saturday to Sunday this week. 6 shootings, in 2 days. And there were many many more crimes in those 2 days, and more shootings throughout the week.

So here's Sat-Sun in Stockton California:

1. "an 18-year-old, was hospitalized in critical condition after he was shot while sitting in a parked car"

2-3. "A home in the 1700 block of West Lane was targeted by gunfire twice. Police report as many as 10 people may have been inside the home at the time of the shootings."

4. "Another shooting occurred around 8:50 p.m. Saturday. Two teenaged girls were walking on the 700 block of Sutter Street when they were approached by a black male teenager, about 17 years old, wearing a maroon hooded sweat shirt and baggy dark blue denim pants. He asked to borrow a cell phone and they complied. When the victim asked for the phone back, the suspect took a handgun from his waistband and shot her. She was struck in the lower body and taken to the hospital, where she was listed in stable condition."

5. "A 22-year-old man told police he was walking into an apartment complex when he was approached from behind by another man who asked, "what you got?"

The victim said he didn't have anything and continued walking. The second man then pulled a handgun from his waistband and fired a shot in the air before shooting the victim in the foot, police said."

6. "Later that day police responded to a report of a drive-by shooting in the 1300 block of East Harding Way. The victim told police he was walking in the area at about 10 p.m. Sunday when a car containing three men drove past. He said he then heard gunshots and was wounded in his hand."


Now what's interesting is how quick the police (and everyone else) are to write off every shooting as gang related. There is a prevailing attitude in Stockton that if you get shot, it's your fault. While Police can't solve 70% of murders, and they've solved nothing them I'm going to mention in this blog, they immediately released that two of the people shot were brothers, and therefore were probably in trouble with a gang, so of course they deserve it.


Here's some more love in Stockton:

"Three McDonald’s restaurants were robbed Monday night and Tuesday in apparently related robberies." "by a man who claimed he had a gun."

"A 49-year-old man was shot in the face Thursday night near an east Stockton liquor store." "the assailant was riding a kick scooter and was wearing a white T-shirt with bones and a cross on it. He was carrying a black backpack."

Of course Stocktonians don't just keep their fun in Stockton, increasingly I've noticed Stockton is tied in with crime all around northern California.

More recent news:

"Two teenagers were shot at the Jackson Rancheria early Sunday morning in what officials say was a gang related incident." "The shooter is reportedly associated with the Norteno gang and based out of Stockton. His name has not been released."

"Two people have been arrested in connection with two separate shootings in Concord overnight in which one man was injured, Concord police Lt. Jim Lardieri said." The gun police believe was used in the two shootings was recovered and had been reported stolen out of Stockton, Lardieri said."


==Notice here, that it took an outside force to bring in a couple Stocktonians. Left to their own accord, the Stockton Police do not do so well.==

All of these events occured in the last 2 weeks, all the events in Stockton were this week. This is not a comprehensive list of recent crimes, just what I could find in a couple minutes. This is by no means a crime wave by Stockton's standards, it is Stockton standard.


And yet, I don't have a right to protect myself? I want to be able to bear arms here. But California law demands that if I open-carry (conceal carry is illegal) the weapon needs to be unloaded. So basically I would have to advertise that I'm armed, without actually being armed. Wonderful, who do you think a criminal would shoot first? Also, the entire state of California has been experiencing a bullet shortage for over a year. And Schwarzenegger just passed a law that will make bullets extremely hard to obtain, for law abiding citizens. So while I still can, I ordered 300 rounds of ammunition online, and I'll probably order another 1,000. This is just short term though. I'm doing what I can to convince my family to get out of this city. I plan on leaving the state and/or country as soon as I'm done with college. I'm done with Stockton, and California.


In the mean time, just in case you have some illusion there are safe parts of Stockton, here is a map from Google Earth, I added red dots showing where just these most recent events occured. If you want a more comprehensive map of major crime locations, people have tried to do that, but they can't keep up with the crime. Basically it's just a completely covered map of Stockton.





Click on map to view larger. I displayed Stockton with the north to the left to fit the screen.




*All data and quotes stolen from other websites.

spacing blogs

Except for 3 wayward months. I have at least one blog post here from every month since September 2004. So that's 64 of the last 67 months. I think this is a decent, (albeit not nearly comprehensive) timestamping of my life and writing.

This is really good considering all the 3-4 months I spent at sea at a time. Many of my blogs have been written in various foreign nations, though I usually don't mention them, except rarely in an offhanded manor.

Redistricting.

One argument against term limits for congressmen is that people should be allowed to chose when their representative leaves office. Unfortunately in California, ha ha, it is not your choice! A practice so diabolical it has two names, gerrymandering, or redistricting.

Basically, political parties have become more powerful than actual elected representatives, and the parties work together, at the expense of voters, and their representatives.

In California, the Democratics and Republicans get together, and cut up California into congressional districts that give each party secured positions. The Democratics will give some conservative leaning areas to Republicans, and the Republicans give over liberal leaning areas. In this way, they draw districts that guarantee wins for both parties.

Of course they don't absolute power, and they have to sacrifice some representatives in order to achieve this. If you've ever looked up the history of a congressional district, you'll see every few years, the district is somewhere else, and this usually puts a new party in power.

I was looking up my current congressional district, the 11th, and I wanted to point out some of its travelled history.

Currently the 11th encompasses East-Bay, and swoops south then east, then swoops back up to San Joaquin County into Stockton. I should also mention, all you have to do is look at district boundaries to see they are politically drawn, not logically, in nature.



In 1912 the 11th District encompassed Imperial, Inyo, Mono, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and San Diego Counties, basically most of southern California. From 1933-1943 it was the district for Los Angeles County. Then it jumped to northern California and bounced back and forth for decades, until it came to where it is now in 2003.

Congressman Leo Ryan represented the 11th district in San Mateo in 1978, when he went down to Jonestown in Guyana because of the stories about people being forced to stay in the cult. He was ambushed at the airport and murdered by Jones' thugs. Congressman Ryan was the first and only Congressman killed in the line of duty in U.S. history.

The current Congressman, Jerry McNerney has held the seat since 2007. He is likely to win again in 2010. There was a really good challenger but he dropped out for family reasons. There are a lot of challengers on the Republican side, but no one stands out for me.

What is most likely to oust McNerney? Nothing. Fixed!

Case Closed.