SmokeSound

Dorling Kindersley, via Getty Images One in three Americans does not believe in evolution!  That is what the Pew Research Center reports. The article should have said that one in three Americans is invincibly ignorant.  Ignorant!  It is like saying you do not believe that the sun is hot, or that water is wet.  It is like saying, right out loud in front of people who can hear you, that earthquakes do not exist, or that it is not cold in Antarctica or hot in the Sahara. Of course the denial of evolution rests on religious grounds. Actually, it does not rest on religious grounds:  it rests on the back of the great turtle that holds up the earth so that it does not sink into the sea.  It is Turtle Talk.  The earth is flat. The next time you hear someone say that the earth was created by an Old Man about 6,000 years ago, remind yourself that the earth is about 800 million times older than that, and that the Big Bang which, so far as we can unde...

I think I shall call it a creekbed.  That is a bit like calling The Santa Cruz River through town a river, but now and then water runs in both of them, usually at about the same time. When we have our monsoon seasons-- that  is a bit like calling Noah's flood earth-large, and his ark an actual boat--water does course down through our back yard.  And it does so at a pretty good rate, too!  Our creekbed is the deepest part of the sheet of water that comes down off the hill and through our fence, headed down to the Santa Cruz.  In fact, every once in a dubiously wonderful while, it pours down, flooding great parts of the desert floor, and the arroyos become rather fearsome beasts. But mostly, our creekbed is a dry and needle-gagged reminder that there is water on the earth, here and there, now and then, and that hope endures. I have a garden-wagon load of needles and mesquite pods, and someday soon, when Jao is here and the javelinas are not here--they ...

It is four AM.  I have been up for two hours; first, because I listen politely to the Call of Nature, and second, because I have a bottle of pills that are supposed to discourage coughing.  Almost every winter I get some so-far harmless, dread disease that makes me cough until the doctor says, "Take this:  it is an antibiotic, or a placebo, or something you could buy really cheaply if you weren't so gullible." Then it occurred to me that I had a ham bone in the freezer, left over from Christmas Eve, so I chopped and wilted a red onion and put it in a pot with the ham bone, in anticipation of adding the pot of beans, already soaking in their own pot, sometime tomorrow. The best part of these darkened adventures is that the house is really quiet.  It is not silent, but it is quiet.  Perhaps even better is that I have a goofy, long-handled wooden spoon of sorts, with a bowl like a small lemon, that is wonderful for tasting things.  The wood bowl does no...

Signs That Something is Terribly Wrong: We keep electing people to governmental positions who despise government, and want to drown it in a bathtub.  To despise government is to despise our identity as a nation, and as a people.  It is beyond even a cowboy attitude.  It is to hate living where you can see smoke from your neighbor's chimney, because you do not want a neighbor.  OK, educate your own kids, take out your own appendix and, in the evenings, after milking the goats, find a cure for cancer!  If your neighbor, who is bigger, stronger, meaner, and smarter than you are, decides to use you for target practice, move to Alberta!   We are still fighting the Civil War.  The Civil War wasn't about grits and cracklings.  It was about slavery and racism.  When the Civil War ended, racism had to find a new face.  It became racial suppression, racial scorn, and economic advantage.  It became poll taxes, and separate bathrooms,...

Do you know how to say, "blåskjell"?  OK.  Can you say, "mussel"? Mari and I have spent the evening remembering our trip up the coast of Norway, and back south, again, when we stopped in Tromsø, both there and return, and stayed overnight, in order to have mussels at a restaurant on the waterfront.  Oh, god, what lovely evenings!  Not alone for the mussels, but for the people whom we had never met before who said, "Hei!", and who toasted us with raised glasses and direct gazes, because we loved beer and blåskjell almost as much as they did, and because they lived above the Arctic Circle, especially in wintertime, and who felt sad for people who did not know what it was like to live precariously, and who knew when the light came at midnight that it was a celebration. We live now in a desert, far from those northern lights, but tonight, with a kilo of mussels cooked in a cataplana, not because it was required but because we had one--Thank you, Portu...

They play two games at a time on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. One is played out on the field, wearing gloves, and everything.  The other is played by the Bucket Brigade, over by the dugout. The TOTs play year-around.  When it gets really hot in the summer, they start earlier, and when it gets brutally cold, as it is now, Jim, the Scorekeeper, and other leather-bottomed guys, line up on buckets next to Jim out in the sun, and play the Other Game. "Did you call that a fielders' choice on the ball I hit to the second baseman when he fell down and threw the ball to the left fielder?" "How can you say I struck out when the ball was so far outside that the catcher missed it?  I don't care what the ump said!" "How can you call that an error on me?  I never touched the ball!  It went between my legs, for Pete's sake!" "How many outs are there, Jim?  Four, again?" The game on the field is often interesting and exciting.  A...

His name is Jao Nathaniel Jao Montri Hubbard And he comes to our house A time or two a week So his Dad can go to work He cannot walk, Jao cannot So he runs as if pursued By a notion that the earth is large And that something is newer Than he knows, not yet What he does not know Is that it is he who is new And shall be newer still If he does not overrun it He looks at himself As we see him: something shiny Scrubbed and glad for life When he laughs at belching fish And foxes in the snow It is all new, a hummingbird A cow, a bath, a belly button Come on, Jao, we say Let's get the morning paper And he runs because He has not learned to walk Not yet

That's what happen when you start every pot of soup with one diced onion. There is no point in making a fractional soup:  half an onion, three-quarters of a carrot, maybe one parsnipette. . . . Winter demands soup.  Summer can get by on a salad or a sandwich, but winter, even in Tucson, requires a pot of soup. The whole problem is that there are only two of us.  The other part of the problem is that the refrigerator is not amenable to a large pot of soup.  Life was simpler in Minnesota.  In winter--that is to say, in months that are not spelled "July" or "August"--I just put the soup pot out on the north deck.  The lid snapped into place as if it were frozen there, the pot scrunched itself up around the contents, and the whole pot welded itself to the snow-covered deck.  When I wanted soup, all I had to do was find the crow bar, and bring the pot in for thawing. There is a 9,000 foot mountain defining the north edge of Tucson, but the truth is t...

Long ago and far away--perhaps in Middle Earth, perhaps in California, perhaps both--it was my turn to wrestle all week with what to say on Sunday morning.  The text was the story of Jacob wrestling all night with God, or an angel--perhaps both--at the River Jabbok. Jacob was a scoundrel almost on a par with his two-time father-in-law.  They took turns cheating each other.  Jacob and the angel, or Jacob and God, or maybe just Jacob wrestling with Jacob, fought all night.  And I was supposed to tell the story to a little congregation of Lutherans meeting in a Gold Rush days' Presbyterian Church building.  We rented it.  The Presbyterians had taken their gold dust and built a fine new church in a better part of town. The question I wrestled with was not so much the story of Jacob wrestling God to a standstill, but of my own wrestling match. I was a newly-minted pastor.  I knew almost nothing, except what I had been taught.  And what I had b...

This is not me, although it might have been, once upon a time. Friends and relatives:  this is where Mari and I lived for ten years recently.  And, for the same reason, that is why I almost thanking God for being back in Tucson, again.  (My hesitation is not about Tucson, but about God.)  But it is brutal here, too.  (You know what happens when global warming kicks in:  it gets colder here and there!)  And it is down to 55 degrees, or so, here in the Land of . . .  in the Land of Jesus-it-is-Cold! I have found a sweater, made in Norway, which I bought in Evanston, Illinois, while I was attending the University of Chicago; probably about in 1967 or 1968, after having spent a year in Germany, which also made a trip to Norway possible.  If you add a huge rock to the photo, above, as a kind of symbol of what Norway is, you will know what it is like to live in Minnesota when summer ends and Siberia swoops south. Dan and Ellie live in Min...

An L. Kate Deal illustration Maybe because it is the holiday season, I noticed that someone was arguing for "the Christian attitude" toward animals. Maybe because I taught in a church college for such a long time, I thought of all those arguments about whether or not there is "a Christian perspective" on what a college should be, or whether the president of the college, or the faculty, or the students, or the mathematics curriculum should be "Christian". I cannot recall whether it was Reinhold Niebuhr or his brother, Richard, who said that whatever particular case one tried to make about something being "Christian", the strongest argument one could make was that there would be some Christians who agreed.  And, or course, that probably even more would disagree. There isn't "a Christian point of view".  There are a hundred or a thousand Christian points of view.  I suspect that in Tulsa, or Amarillo, or Lynchburg there will...

"What is your inner animal?" That is what the article in Dagbladet (a Norwegian newspaper) asked.  As I was a little curious about that myself, I took the test, and the answer came back:   "Yey! Du ble en kul, søt og snill ulv!" I am a cool, sweet, well-behaved wolf!   I was pleased.  I fully expected it to discover that I was an old turkey, or maybe just an old dog.  That's what Clark Mallam used to say when we met:  "Conrad, you old dawg, you!" And that , I remind you, was a long time ago.  Per calls me, "Gamle Ørn":  old eagle.  The eagle part is an honorific, to be ignored.  The emphasis, almost everywhere, is on the "old" part:  old turkey, old dawg, old eagle.  But I know better, now.  I am an endangered specie. The danger has quite a lot to do with the old part. Were the truth to be told--And why should it be?--I am a domesticated wolf; otherwise known as a dog.  Clark was right.   I h...

The Milky Way--the galaxy we are a part of--takes about 225 million years to make a single rotation.  The last time our solar system was in about the "same place", there were dinosaurs on earth.  In a similar way, we rotate about our sun.  We call that a year.  So earth has rotated about the sun 225 million times since the age of dinosaurs. I can't handle that. This is what I can handle:  since the year 0--about the time Jesus was born and Hector was a pup--earth has rotated about the sun almost 2014 times.  Almost.  I can recall, as a school child, calculating that if I lived to be "three score and ten" (three twenties and a ten), it would be the year 2001.  It hardly seemed possible.  The year 2000 seemed as far away as the south pole!  It was like . . . like the age of the dinosaurs.  Something incredibly distant.  And now we are about to begin the year 2014!  (I am a very old turkey!) Sometimes, when the night ...

I have decided to tell people that the scar on my cheek is a shrapnel wound from World War I.  I really wanted to say that it is the result of a dueling wound, but nobody seems inclined to think that I attended a German University before World War I, or that I have ever been interested in defending my honor, particularly with a sword. The scar is, as I mentioned before, where the dermatologist excavated my cheek to rid me of a basal cell carcinoma.  That is not "basil" cell, although I wish it were.  Today I had about thirty stitches removed, along with about forty hairs from my beard, which I had not been allowed to shave while the incision healed: collateral damage. Ed asked what the bandage was all about.  I told him.  Ed has a serious case of cancer.  "Basal cell," he said.  "That is the good kind of cancer." I had not imagined that I would ever hear those words.  

Two articles in today's news stand in sharp contrast. A particularly dense star exploded and collapsed into a new black hole, about 3.7 billion light years away.  That is to say, it took the light 3.7 billion years to get to earth.  Or, to say it another way, we just saw what happened--there--3.7 billion years ago. The second article reports that the Texas Board of Education is all upset--again--that a proposed biology textbook makes assertions about science and evolution that are contrary to what it says in the Bible.  Or, to say it another way, they are still talking Turtle Talk in Texas; you know, the earth rests on the back of a turtle, or on a Mesopotamian creation myth. It becomes clearer and clearer that much of what we call, "religion", is just a recitation of how our ancestors understood the world before the birth of scientific thinking.  Coyote the Creator here, the earth floating on the back of a turtle there, gods fornicating with their human p...

Yesterday, I had an enthusiastic patch of skin cancer removed from my cheek.  The procedure involved cutting out what was obvious, then checking the sample in the lab to see if it had all been gotten.  While the lab checked, I caught up with magazines left over from World War II or III. It is late November, and I had been thinking more of convenient clothing to wear at the clinic than of staying warm, and dermatologists apparently prefer chilled patients.  Finally, I went outside to stand in the sun. "Odd!", I thought.  "The doctor keeps asking me if I spent a lot of time outdoors when I was a child."  I have the impression that I did, but that was a long life ago.  I know that she was calculating radiation damage from the sun.  "And here I am, in the middle of multiple minor operations for skin cancer, standing in the sun." "Crop rotation!", I thought.  I am just getting the next crop ready." It is difficult for someone from West...

The people who are ranting and raving about the "failure" of the computer system for the Affordable Care Act--"ObamaCare"--obviously do not know shit from Shinola about computer systems.  Anyone with any knowledge about computer systems knows that they are infernally complex, and that extremely large computer systems are guaranteed to have problems.  Whose Law was it that stated that if anything can go wrong, it will? I am fortunately old enough to remember that every large computer system began as a disaster.  They have millions of lines of code, any one of which is capable of producing an unintended data train wreck. Worse, the Affordable Care Act is dependent on interfacing with innumerable independent health care systems (the insurance companies), as well as huge, ancient government systems that have not had the funds or the opportunity to use the best systems we have:  they are starved of the funds needed to use the best computer technology and programmi...

It is because of what happened to Lee Moser that the TOTs play with two home plates.  The extra plate, a few feet east of the batter's box, is for runners coming from third.  The catcher uses the regular plate, and outs are determined by the ump's decision as to whether the runner touched home before the ball got to the catcher at the other plate.  Tagging is not necessary. Why?  Because about eighteen years ago, when Lee was catching, and focussed on the ball being thrown to him, a runner of considerable size and determination hit Lee like a locomotive.  It was ten or twelve days before Lee knew what hit him.  He lay in a coma at the hospital. The brain surgeon told Lee's sons and daughter that the collision had done terrible things to his brain, knocking it around like a bean bag.  Hoping for the best, the doctor and the family waited.  Then, finally, the doctor said, "Either we operate tonight, or Lee won't be here in the morning." ...

If you were a horse in the Northern Hemisphere, which I assume you are not, your birthday would be on January 1.  If you were a horse, and thought about it for a long time, you might realize that some one-year-old horses were 1 day old, and some were 364 days old, but that both would celebrate their first birthday together.  They would be "yearlings".  And, in another year, they would compete against each other in a race for two-year-olds, for instance. In the Southern Hemisphere, where they have chosen to have summer when the Other Half of the world has winter, horses have their birthdays on August 1.  That isn't exactly six months apart, but it is close enough for a horse.  Most horses never figure that out. And that is why people who are not horses, but only partial horses, work so hard to get their kids into the first grade as soon as possible:  they love handicapping their colts and fillies. The Tucson Old Timers--the Oldest Ball Club in the ...

It is November, and turkeys everywhere are edging over to the far side of the confine.  The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber comes to mind whenever I see turkeys in November. But that is sad.  I also think of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz,  when she turns to Toto and says:  "I don't think we're in Kansas, anymore." In spite of endless days driving from the Midwest to Arizona, I have never lived in Kansas.  Actually, once, a lifetime ago, we stopped in Liberal, Kansas, and visited the literary launching pad for Alice and her most excellent adventures. Another ad in our local Tucson newspaper reminds me that this is not Kansas, either. I cooked tripe, once, when we lived in Minnesota.  We had a party, almost every year, to celebrate one or another absolutely obscure "Day" someone had proclaimed around the end and beginning of calendar years.  I believe it had something to do with "Pepper Pot Day"--some such thing--and I had found a recipe r...

The TOTs Blue/White Night Game It might be said that the TOTs played a night game under the lights, but it wasn't very light.  At least eleven of the lights on the poles around the field were burned out.  In the photo, above, the pole to the left has exactly one of its six lights burning. "It got better after a while", one of the players said.  That is a little like saying that one can get used to being partially blind. It is a parable of government.  Not that government is dark and evil, but that a government starved of financial support cannot afford to replace the public lights when they burn out.  Government is not the problem--Thank you Ronald Reagan for starting us down that dismal, dark road!--but when government comes to be seen as the dark menace instead of the middleman of desirable and necessary services, then all of us have a problem. Who is going to put up and maintain lights for the public good?  Your local, Goober, Grub and Gadget ...

Our star--the Sun:  "Sol"--lives in a galaxy like the one at the left; on an arm, out toward the edge.  We have given our galaxy a name:  The Milky Way. I recall, as a child, trying to understand that the band of stars stretching across the sky, rather like a gauzy belt, was what our galaxy looks like when we look toward the center, which is a very nasty place to be.  There is probably at least one massive black hole there, pulling everything it can in to a crushing end of time and space, and spewing out awful radiation. All of that was a bit vague.  It still is.  What was much clearer was what our religion told us.  We understood that we were on a very special place--earth--created by God just for Adam and Eve and us.  The sun and the moon and the stars were created for us, too; light for the day and night, and to light the path to the outhouse.  Somebody had thought of everything about five, six, or seven thousand years ago.  Ou...

The Old Boys of Summer have worked their way into November; believers still that the fence is an attainable goal.  And sometimes it is, mostly as a way to keep the ball from rolling away. Tim--big, strong Tim--is the only regular threat to the right field fence but, while hope may not spring eternal in the hearts of the ordinary mortals who make up most of the team, it does occasionally raise its head. The TOTs--Tucson Old Timers--play ball the year around, moving the morning starting time up an hour in the summer to avoid midday heat, and back again in the fall to allow the sun to dry out the Park District watering schedule. Later this week, I think for the first time, the team will play a night game, just for the fun of playing under the lights.  Friends and relatives who have not reached the age when they might be eligible to join the TOTs (60), have been invited to see what baseball after 60 looks like--or more astoundingly--what a first baseman can do at 88. ...

A Google Map of Norway Norway, up in the northwest corner of Europe, is shaped something like a long, raggedy teardrop.  The first time I ever visited Norway, arriving on a ferry from Denmark, I saw its southern coast, and I remember thinking:  "It's a damned rock!" My father, and my mother's parents, were born in Norway, rather to the left side of the wide bulge below the name, "Norway" on the map; my father, right on the coast, and my maternal grandparents a bit north and back from the coast. In the middle of the wide part of the country, and farther south, is a small town, Rjukan, up in the mountains, but deep down in a narrow valley; so deep that in the winter, the sun is too low in the sky to shine down on the town.  In winter, the people who live in Rjukan have to take a tram up the mountainside to see the sun.  Until recently. Recently, the town built a complex of computer-controlled mirrors up on the mountainside to reflect winter sunlig...

The Pew Research Center has been asking people all over the world about religion; in well-more than 200 countries.  More people say they are Christian than anything else, and Muslims are the second largest religious affiliation.  Third largest are the "Nones". "Which religious group do you belong to?" "None." That does not necessarily mean they are not religious:  they might just not belong to any commonly designated faith community.  There is some evidence, at least, that many of the "Nones" do  believe in a god, or gods, but that they do not belong to a traditional religious group.  There surely are, also, a considerable number of "Nones" who simply do not believe in gods, or heavens or hells, angels or demons, or any other non-natural entities. There is the nub!  If you read the Old Testament stories, which are at the root of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, you will recognize that much of the argument there is not about ...

In the late 1970s, my daughter, Gail, and I got into our Corvair, and drove to the American South, because she was interested in going to a college or university in that region of the nation.  (I had encouraged our children to carve out their own space--which included where they went to school--and not simply follow an older sibling to a university.)  We went to North Carolina, and Duke, Georgia, the University of the South, and other schools. To put the matter crudely, the trip scared the s**t out of me because we had a car radio.  I had never heard such blatent racism from local radio stations!  The Civil War, I decided, was not yet over! Gail did go to school, in North Carolina, for two years before transferring to the University of Arizona in Tucson.  But the Civil War is still not yet over, and in many ways, the same issues remain.  It is no longer legal to own slaves in the U.S., but attitudes of racial superiority are everywhere.  Whether...

There is no reason simply to suspect the Tea Party of racism.  They provide proof of it.   John Tanton, who has said that, "Black Americans are a 'retrograde species of humanity', organized the rally.  Ken Crow, once the president of Tea Party of America, now with Tea Party Community, spoke to the crowd of Black and White attendees.  He apparently had Hispanics in mind, maybe because of the Black people in attendance.  Senator Jeff Sessions was there, to speak about his opposition to the immigration bill.  Congressman Steve King was there, also as a speaker.  Senator Ted Cruz was also on the roster.  And Mr. Crow was there, to speak of breeding:   "From those incredible blood lines of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and John Smith.  And all these great Americans, Martin Luther King.  These great Americans who built this country.  You came from them," he said.   "And the unique thing about being from that par...