SmokeSound

The helmet is leather, too. "We're all professionals here, and everyone know how to do to get ready."                           --From a sports station

Shelby's Bistro:  Still there, even better! Conserving Water Minding Her Own Business Like Horseshoes Nailed over the Door I wish we had an outdoor wall for this! Mari calls this, "Where's Waldo?" Conrad calls this, "Two Waldos?"

The Cast Iron Man "Mole", he said.   Not the little lawn critter.  The National Sauce of Mexico.  "Mo-lay." He kept reciting the story of the first time Methuselah, or the Pope, or Cortes, or whoever it was had been served mole, just before he stole the recipe and Mexico.  "I can do this!", Stan said.  I have a week with nothing to do but to make a mole.   When he was not doing that, he built a fire in the outdoor fireplace, and admired the flax oil on the cast iron pots, and prepared a feast.   The Cast Iron Collection; a Partial View  The weather was as beautiful as the food, and the family that had blended itself as a consequence of the marriage of Becky and Stan lubricated itself with Oregon wine and good humor, and a promise to do this every year, so long as the sun rose in the east and Stan could collect firewood and stolen recipes.   "Hear!  Hear!" we said.  "Next year why don't we have a goose dinner,...

 Today--Thanksgiving Day--they came to say hello.   Javelinas.  They only look like pigs.  They do not have a spleen as pigs do.  That makes it obvious!   We have seen their path across the hillside but--truth be told--there is not a lot of javelina fodder back there.  However, there was a dozen of them (two of whom were very small, indeed), so there must be food somewhere.   West of us there are relatively unpopulated hills, and east of us, down in the mostly-dry riverbed, there is a stream of water recovered from the treatment facility plant, so I imagine they worry their way through the small arroyos and passages carved out by storm water--where houses cannot be built--more or less as they have done since before Noah built an ark and saved two of them for posterity.  Good old Noah:  responsible for most of the inbreeding that plagues lap dogs and cheetas to this day! But I digress.  It is all I have to do, except...

When first we moved into this house, Coyote came through the draw behind our house, probably just to see how things were going.  When I saw him, he turned south and a bit east, along the other side of the hillside, keeping his own counsel.  Tradition says that when Coyote the Creator meets Coyote who goes through the arroyo, they address each other as "Big Brother" and "Little Brother".   *   *   * The Church of England--you know, the Anachronistic Stuffiness that is the Soul of England--met in counsel with Itself and God, a day or two ago, and Itself decided that women should not become Bishops, because the Big Brother in the Sky did not really approve of Uppity Women.   The Bishops voted yes, and the Clergy voted yes, but the Ordinary Coyotes in the pew recited Scripture and voted no.   Beep!  Beep!  One for the Big Coyote! *   *   *  It is odd, but I am old enough to remember what Norway was before oil w...

Marco Rubio doesn't know how old the earth is.  A few thousand years?  Billions?  He thinks schools should teach "all of them". Rick Perry, of course, doesn't know, either.   Both of them have heard rumors that scientists say the earth is a little over 4.5 billion years old.   What was that the Republican governor of Mississippi said?  That the Republican Party should stop being "the stupid Party"?   Good luck, fellows!   Was it not Alfred E. Neuman who said, "A teacher is someone who talks in our sleep"?   Being religious is no excuse for being ignorant.  Maybe.

You see that red thing over there?  That is a potato. That flat thing?  That is a potato, too:  boiled, riced, with a little added  butter, cream, salt, sugar, and flour.  It is rolled flat, and lightly browned on a big, round hot plate. Lefse.  It is what Scandinavians ate when they wanted to jazz up their favorite fruit:  a potato.  Schmear on a little butter, maybe a little sugar, roll it up, and pretend it is a tortilla.   When we first moved into this house in Tucson, some of our neighbors stopped by, asked where we were from, whether we knew what we were doing, moving here in the middle of summer, what our names were, and generally being good and gracious people.   However, they secretly noted that we did not have a lefse pan, or those paint sticks that are needed to turn the lefse, so when they organized their annual lefse making party, they invited us to bring some red potatoes and learn a thing or two.   This w...

In Georgia, 30,000 people have signed petitions urging that Georgia secede from the Union and become an independent country.  (The "Georgia" in question is the American State of Georgia.)  And other nonsense petitions to secede from the Union are on display in many other States, in the wake of Barack Obama's re-election to the Presidency. You may not have recalled that Barack Obama is Black, but that might be a coincidence, just as racism just happens to survive best where ignorance is most prevalent.  We don't want to jump to unwarranted conclusions here, but the smell of rotten racism does seem to be most obvious where slavery died slowly.  But just to be fair, racial arrogance is a slippery stupidity, something like trying to get a grip on a slimy fish. At the time of the Civil War, the Old South was Democratic territory, politically, and Abraham Lincoln was one of those new Republicans, from up North.  When the Civil War ended, and slavery was officiall...

I don't know what kind of cactus it is!  I know what it is not .  It is not a saguaro.   I know where it is :  at the Aviary at the Desert Museum.   But every family has a relative who knows how to accessorize; you know, that the rest of us would be embarrassed to wear, and so we look dowdy while she glitters in the summer sun.   Actually, I don't think I have any relatives like that, and if any of them ever reads this post--which might be against their religion--they will be insulted.  So let me retract now, and say most plainly, that I do have relatives that resemble cacti; some of them (some of  us ), very prickly, indeed. The last time we visited the Aviary at the Desert Museum, a pair of birds had built a nest on the huge wire enclosure; half-inside and half-outside the Aviary.  One bird was captive, the other free, but . . . , Oh, you know how that happens!  And unlike Paul Harvey, I do not know the rest of the story. ...

We have been looking for local wildlife (of the non-human sort) since we moved here to northwest Tucson but, aside from common birds, we have seen only a coyote.  Today I saw a roadrunner.   He had claimed the vegetable garden I recently planted, which has already--in the rototilling of it--given me a sinus infection:  nothing since! The seeds are starting to sprout, and the roadrunner must have concluded that the disturbed soil might have bugs.  I hope that was it:  I would hate it if he liked carrots or radishes, onions or herbs or lettuce.   I am willing to share, but it was a persistent and stubborn critter, only reluctantly hopping over the fence as I came toward him, or her.  (I don't know what the vital signs are, for a roadrunner.) But there we are:  Wily Coyote and Roadrunner!  I keep my eye on the sky for falling boulders.  

Dan and Ellie, toward the end of their medical residencies in Portland, Oregon, began to notice that several years of Portland weather had caused moss to grow on their north sides, so they came to Tucson for a couple of days of dehydration.  It was inevitable that we would have our first two brutally cold days of autumn (or is it winter?).  It took all day for the temperature to creep up to 70 degrees F.   We went to the Desert Museum, and as we should have known, the cacti were huddled up together, and the mountain lions were hiding inside, nursing their arthritis.  The javelinas were out, but even they bulldozed themselves into a heap to conserve heat.  The desert fox could be seen through an indoor window, snuggled up to an electric blanket.   Only the prairie dogs seemed unfazed by the Ice Age.  They sat on their haunches, as serene as a bishop holding four aces.   Our first winter vegetable garden, on the south side of the house, where...

Who is going to beat sense into the Republican Party? They allowed themselves to be taken hostage by the Tea Party. They alienated Hispanic voters. The left-over racism of the Civil War shows in their scorn of Black voters. They have an uncommon interest in regulating women's vaginas. They regard anyone young enough to walk unaided too callow to listen to. They scorn the plight of people who work hard for inadequate wages. They still think health care is a privilege, not a universal, human right. They seem not ever to see a potential war they not not love to send someone else's kids to. What happened to the old fashioned, sensible, cautious Republicans? If they do not pay attention to newer immigrants, Blacks, women, and young people, the poor, and people in need, they might as well request early ballots now and mail them in before Thanksgiving.  They don't even have to mark them, because they aren't going to matter, anyway. It goes against Republican gr...

Of course the storm affected the election!  But more than the immediate damage it caused (Shall we call it "the legitimate damage"?  Thank you, Todd Akin!), more than that the storm demanded that we pay attention to what is happening to our climate, and why, the storm made obvious something we have been trying to deny, politically. We aren't just rugged individuals, intent on making a lot of money.  (Only a tiny fraction are.)  We aren't just families and towns and cities and States.   We are a nation!   That is to say, we have a fundamental identity, a sense of belonging, a sense of what we are that is as wide as the continent.  So when the storm devastated New Jersey and New York, it did not just damage them:   it damaged us.    What has been going on for several years now is that the Tea Party, and some fiscal conservatives, have been denying that we have a national identity.  The urge has been to deny that a nati...

As a kid, as a callow young man, I had trouble trying to understand what all that East Coast nonsense about the first thirteen colonies was all about.  All that arm-wrestling about joining, or not joining the Union, about forming a national government, was presented in the dusty, dry terms of centralization, or not, in terms of having one's own State militia, or not, in terms of Protestant or Catholic sensibilities or savageries.  It--frankly--made almost no sense to me.   I had never lived in a Colony.  I was born into the Union.   So here I am, dangerously close to becoming 81, if I survive this sinus infection--which I am beating into submission by sticking something up my nose and spraying it (which is, itself, curiously reminiscent of another, more recent revolution)--that is to say, at long last it occurs to me that all those arguments took place at a time when we were not yet a nation:  we were colonies, and it was not yet obvious to all of them...

God is punishing me for pretending to be a gardener. Last Sunday, I borrowed Stan's toto-riller--a cute little tad of a thing--that runs on a cup of gasoline and a thimbleful of oil a day.  I had been under the impression that the garden, inherited from our predecessors in this house, was already a vegetable delight, since we had been assured that coffee grounds from Starbucks, assiduously collected from Starbucks here and there, were what made the garden grow.  And it did grow!  I saw it!"  But two inches down, it was as hard as a limestone pan.   That little tiller, though--while occasionally complaining--chewed its way, as if through the parking lot at Target, and when it seemed to have found detente with what was there, I added topsoil and fertilizer, and set it back to work.  By god, we rotated a storm; a dust storm, and I looked at it and thought, "This is going to work!".  And it did. It did.  It already had.  It had buzzed up...

How can it be that full-grown people, who have been to school for at least six or eight grades, can get all the way to Hurricane Sandy and never have understood that there are some things bigger than themselves?  "My god!", they say, "that damned thing is going to destroy the beach!  And run down the street to the park, and fill the subways?"  And, "Good Lord, what happened to our car?  There is a lake over there, now!" Then they try to call 911, but it is busy.   "Why isn't the Mayor doing something about this?  Where is the Governor?" The Mayor and the Governor are under water, and when they come up, if they do, they are going to try to call FEMA, and the President, and their Senators.  "Where is the government when we need it?" The government when we need it is the same government Grover Norquist has conned hundreds of elected officials to pledge they will starve into submission, until it is small enough to drown in ...