You can see what I saw at Holy Trinity Cemetery by clicking here.

This was a good cemetery to start with mainly because it was so foreign to me in terms of religious beliefs (I was raised a Protestant) and because many of the stones were written in a foreign language. By the way, if you are fluent in Czech or German and can help me with some of the translations, let me know.

Anyway, have a look if cemeteries interest you.

Cole and I were driving home and were on a part of 1825 that is just one lane. To the west, there is empty space, nothing but grass and trees, near a small, man-made ditch that has water in it every time it rains. As we drove, we saw a turtle walking slowly from the grass into the road. I looked at Cole and asked, “Are we saving it?” and he said, “Yes!” so we turned into a street that leads into a housing development so that we could go back the other way.

But as I turned, we saw a tall bald man, who had also turned onto the same road, start sprinting back towards the turtle. Thinking that we could drive slowly and prevent traffic at least from the other side from encroaching, I turned back around and slowly drove back to the turtle.

Then the tall man suddenly stopped running. His shoulders slumped and he paused, then began running back towards his car, right at us. I didn’t look at his face. I was looking for the turtle.

It may sound like a cliche, or an attempt to demonize, but a woman in a Yukon who was on her cell phone ran the turtle down without even noticing it was there. She likely thought the road uneven or that she had hit a rock or something. The running man had only been a few feet away when she killed the turtle.

But she’s not important. Women like her never are. Who is important is the bald man who saw the same animal and ran like hell to save it. He matters. The world looks like it is feeding off itself and you are alone in this fight to remain human and suddenly, there is a tall bald man, running, with the same mission as you. The turtle died but people who get out of their cars and sprint to save creatures never stop getting out of their cars and sprinting. I am sure of it.

I am not a good photographer, and my latest hobby is more about knowledge than it is art, but occasionally I manage to pull off a good picture.

There is something very poignant about this stone being broken. The inscription under the hands says, “These hands will clasp in Heaven.” This is the grave of M.A Peyton, wife of W.R. Peyton. It seems so sad that the stone broke in half, but then again, the hands are still holding strong. Sentimentality for the win. (If you can’t see it clearly, click on the pic - it will take you to my Flickr account, where larger sizes can be viewed.)

Because I am not as assertive in my competence as I should be, I didn’t interfere when Cole told me he had the exact coordinates for the Old Corn Hill cemetery. I wondered why this would be easier to find than, say, the address, which I myself had, but it sounded so technical. Who can argue with the exact longitude and latitude of a location versus the vagueries of address? Well, as it turns out, and any geocacher knows this evidently, those readings are often off. As it turned out yesterday, Cole’s coordinates, obtained from the oft-faulty Internet, were off by about 12 miles.

I was nervous in the area we ended up driving around in, in the “Some redneck is going to meet us in the middle of this unpaved road and shoot us,” sort of way. My highly strung nature as of late combined with Cole’s annoyance at my annoyance caused the sort of blow out that would result in divorce in a couple less inured to strife, so we came home, I printed out a Google map, left him at home and found it myself on the first try. Which is what I should have done the first two attempts, but like I said, sometimes I question my competence. Clearly that is a mistake…

Several points:

1) Old Corn Hill is inside Jarrell proper and is not south of New Corn Hill as EVERY SOURCE ON THE INTERWEBZ INDICATED. I have irrefutable evidence that Old Corn Hill is north of New Corn Hill. Annoyed factual pedantry for the win!

2) Old Corn Hill is not a ghost town. I want to sue every source that said it is. It is simply a town that ceased to exist. It was absorbed by another town. Feh to people who don’t understand that difference.

3) Old Corn Hill cemetery is not abandoned. It has the appearance of a desolate prairie scrub cemetery until you get there and see that an entire housing development is across the street and that people drive up and down CR 313 blaring rap and country music near constantly. There are very recent graves there, it was recently mowed, and there were teenagers hanging out there when I arrived. The teenagers and I ignored each other magnificently and a mediocre time was had by all.

4) Old Corn Hill was not visually appealing and not as interesting as New Corn Hill, but there were several graves of note or historical significance, examples of some cemetery symbolism I had read about, and evidence of an extraordinarily high infant mortality rate between 1910-1913. I think I’ll research the latter to see if influenza or some other disease struck Central Texas. I took the pictures and will research diligently - maybe the situation will redeem itself as I work on it.

But overall, meh.

The New Corn Hill write up will be ready today or tomorrow.

I got to see WALL-E on Friday and I walked into the movie knowing little about it other than that it was a cute, animated children’s movie. Later, Cole read me some really negative reactions from people who find the environmental and green movements upsetting and resent any implication that Americans are far from perfect. Frankly, I think they must have walked into this film with an opinion already formed because the film, almost entirely, refuted the claims these people made against WALL-E.

Claim 1: OMG THIS FILM SHOVES AN ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE DOWN OUR THROATS AND HOW DARE HOLLYWOOD TAINT MY KIDS IN THIS MANNER!

Okay, this one is almost a slam dunk. In WALL-E, the Earth has been abandoned because overconsumption and pollution made the planet uninhabitable. That human beings are filling our planet with trash that takes a heck of a lot of time to biodegrade is almost irrefutable, but let’s forget that idea for a moment. Let’s pretend that we can actually debate the amount of trash most Westerners create.

The Earth in WALL-E is a dystopia. Dystopia in film and books is a long-used trope. It is a means of causing action, a setting that allows a greater plot of overcoming one’s surroundings. I wonder how these critics dealt with Mad Max or Planet of the Apes. Was an anti-consumption agenda being forced down their throats then? Or was it just a plot device? Sometimes a cigar is a cigar and sometimes a cute little robot who cleans trash is a cute little robot who cleans trash.

Claim 2: THIS FILM INSULTS AMERICANS BY INSINUATING WE ARE LAZY!

The Americans in WALL-E who fled Earth on a spaceship only meant to be gone a few years. Those few years turned into 700 years. The people all moved around the spaceship in mechanized, floating chairs and drank from cups. The former isn’t too hard to understand. All tasks in the dystopia of WALL-E were done by computers or robots. Think about your life now. Can many of us sew all our own clothes, can our own food, repair a toaster or tinker with the car engine if something is knocking around under the hood? No, not really, not anymore. Mechanization and specialization have stripped us of the onus of being responsible for all that. I personally am just one generation removed from a person with those skills - the people on the space craft were 700 years away from from people who walked around on their own. There was never a conscious choice to be lazy. It was just how living in a mechanized society made them and there is nothing evil about that, and if there is, then not making your own clothes is evil too.

Moreover, look at what happened when they discovered Earth was inhabitable and came back home. They got out of those chairs and learned how to do all the things they had forgotten and learned to do all the things they have never been taught. They planted crops, they built homes, they made a new world. This is not the behavior of lazy people (and you had to stay to the credits to see the full picture of what the Americans did, and I get the impression that most of those who hated the movie could not get out fast enough).

Claim 3: THIS FILM INSULTS AMERICANS BY INSINUATING THAT WE ARE STUPID!

Again, think back to all the skills many of us do not have anymore because machines and computers do so much for us. The people on that ship were not stupid. The captain of the ship, a man who had not been asked to do much in his life because robots did it all for him, came up with a clever ruse to overpower the machines when needed. Yes, he spoke of planting pizza plants, but given that he had never seen a plant before, a real plant in the dirt flowering, hoping for a pizza plant wasn’t too stupid. In the 1950s, a hoax was played on the American public, showing a newsreel of a spaghetti harvest. Long strips of spaghetti were placed in plants and people plucked them out, showing in detail a faked pasta harvest. Americans flooded the news source that played the joke on them, wanting to know how they could get their own spaghetti plant. Were our grandparents stupid? Nope. Just not exposed to how semolina was processed.

And how could stupid people rebuild the entire world when they returned to Earth?

Claim 4: THIS FILM INSULTS AMERICANS BY INSINUATING THAT WE ARE ALL FAT AND DRINK BIG GULPS ALL DAY LONG!

Well, this one is hard. Lots of Americans are fat. Lots of us are very, very fat. But in the dystopia represented in this film, people weren’t sitting around sipping sugary sodas all day. They were eating their meals. Remember how the Jetsons got their meals from pills? The people in space got their meals in cups - all food was liquid. I have no idea where the idea of Big Gulps came from, but it comes up so much from the people who hated this film. No where did I see anyone drinking soda.

The film also explained that due to generations of being in space, people’s skeletal structures shrank and their body masses increased. Of course, they could have gotten more exercise by using the pools and walking tracks on the ship, but they were in a multi-generational rut. If robots do everything for you, where is the incentive to do much of anything? It isn’t laziness - just what they were used to.

Also, please bear this in mind: WALL-E is a children’s movie and children love pudgy characters. Think of all the rotund, chubby cartoon characters that have been around, from Porky Pig to the PowerPuff girls. Kids didn’t look at those characters and say, “Hey, I feel bad about myself because I’m chubby!” They didn’t look at that and think anything more than that those people were comically obese.

WALL-E was a great film. It demonstrates the enduring spirit of humanity, how we band together and work to fix things when they go wrong. There is no bloodshed in WALL-E. All the human beings in WALL-E were so polite and kind. They were even polite to the robots. My god, what a relief it was, watching a movie devoid of sarcastic wisecracking and put-downs that populate all movies targeted for younger audiences. If you are a conservative more in line with the sort of ideas demonstrated by Ike than those of Dubya, this film could actually be seen as a conservative film.

If it seems like I read a lot into this film, think of how hard people had to work to find, and I quote, “Malthusian fear-mongering” in a film about a child-like robot who falls in love. Environazis? Possibly the stupidest term I have ever heard. Whenever anyone incorporates the word “Nazi” in their pejoratives, I snert and I suspect others do as well.

And oh yeah - Malthusian fear-mongering? You keep using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.

Go see WALL-E. It’s a lovely film and don’t read too much into it. Both sides have already done it for you. Just enjoy this sweet little film.

We have the coordinates and a plan to get to a place where one largely cannot get by car, but then we saw our electricity bill. I wanted to cry. Cole needs to get up into the attic and find out what is making our attic fan malfunction so he can order parts. And I need to clean out the garage. Corn Hill will have to wait for next Saturday. But we got plenty of content at New Corn Hill to keep me busy researching and photo editing (to my limited skills).

Doesn’t she just look like she’s saying, “Get to work now!”? I think she is. And since once one of her angelic brethren fell in this cemetery, evidence of which I will show later, I feel I should follow her heed.