SmokeSound

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them.  Even when all they wanted to do w

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. But today we act as if there were somet

Just like in the Bigger Leagues: No balls and five strikes. Add caption "I suppose he had something in mind." "Lift it!  Lift your foot one inch!" "Gotta go, gotta go, gotta go!" Faster than a speeding ball In the Hearts of His Countrymen There are body-parts that wear out, and mind-games that go, but Jerry's spirit is indominable.

It is the season!  And Mari just told me about a boy in Chicago, or somewhere, whose computer had been stolen, and of the angel who arranged to replace it. The photo to the right is not from what I am about to tell you, but it is close enough, to remind me of the time I was called an angel:  the only time, ever, I was called an angel.   I have told it before, but this is the holiday season, and angel sightings are worth repeating. Driving to the Nokomis Beach Coffee Cafe on winter morning, at a T-intersection on the southeast corner of East Lakeside Drive, I watched a young driver slide across the drive ahead of me, and up atop the snow pile made by the snow plow.  It was a beautiful job:  the car rested on its belly on the frozen heap, with no tires able to gain traction.   I stopped my big pickup just past the car, on the wrong side of the snow-covered street, and backed up close.  I had a tow cable.   I suggested I might be able to pull him off the mini-mou

"If I have told you once, I have told you a thousand times:  don't exaggerate!" That isn't what this post is about, except that is has to do with the way we use language, or how language reveals how we think.  What has been intriguing me lately is the growing habit of saying everything twice, or repeating the same idea with different words.  For example:  "When the barrage comes, it comes in bunches."  I rather imagine.  A barrage of one is such a lonely thing, by itself. Here is a list of recent examples: "for each respective team" "both teams have only one timeout, each" "there is this sort of, like. . ." "retweet it out" "but lying about the same, exact. . ." "then elevate up" "He's very good at parceing these arguments apart" "and lied, over and over and over again" And then there are just curiosities: "A man who, everything he touches, turns to g

 "It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon." Lake Wobegon is gone, now, a casualty of what someone said was a host's hand on her back.  I went to the Sweetwater Wetlands, just a mile or two from here, because it is a cool, quiet, sunny morning after just enough rain to measure and brag about.  "Maybe there will be birds!", I thought. I think I thought wrong.  There were far more birders than birds.  A couple of ornery-thologists had staked themselves out under a cottonwood tree, far enough apart to provide triangulation, and informed each other and me that there was a Baltimore Oriole up there.  I tried to see something, but my neck muscles are not made for steady vertical sightings.  I took a side path. "It is a quiet morning," I said to someone arriving just as I was leaving.  "Yes, it is," he agreed, "but you should have been here yesterday.  There was a whole busload of screaming school kids."