SmokeSound

I had forgotten that in our house on West Westwood Place, a woodpecker, who had signed up at ChristianDiddle.com, or at Matchmaker.siding, used to use our swamp cooler up on the roof as his drum to attract the attention of female hammerheads.  I am not sure whether I am reminded of that by Anthony Wiener or by the fact that Gail sent me a tin peckerwood.   Today I finally found both a hammer drill and a masonry bit, and I did my own advertising to the female population in the neighborhood.  So far, I am ambiguous to report, I have had no responses to my stucco signals, but we do have a woodpecker at the front door.   We have real flickers in the back yard, but they--a kind of ground woodpecker--spend their leisure hours trying to steal hummingbird nectar.   We have created a kind of bird paradise here:  there are unidentified small birds at the feeder, bullied by doves to kick seed out onto the ground, where the Gambel's quail also wait.  Tiny Anna's hummingbirds hum a

I go to Tucson Old Timers' games for more important reasons, but also hoping I will see or hear something I can report to those of you who have nothing better to do than look in here, once in a while.  When there is no full-time ump behind the plate, the players put someone behind the pitcher to call balls and strikes, and to make calls that everyone else can object to.   Today, at the start of another inning, the ump realized that he wasn't properly equipped to resume play.   "Hey!", he called to the dugout, arms out like a duck coming in for a landing:  "I don't have any balls!"

(Photo: Kim Klement, USA TODAY Sports) I do not know much about Antonio Morrison, but I do know that he barked at a dog and got himself arrested.  Antonio is on a losing streak.  Last month he is reported to have punched out a bouncer at a night spot, which caused Florida University to say, "Naughty, naughty!", and things like that, and told him to go up to his room and not play football for at least two games.  But now he has barked at a dog. It was not any old dog.  It was a police dog.  Mr. Morrison is reported to have said the dog woofed first, and that he just replied, but the police do not take kindly to people who talk dog to their dogs. Apparently it got the dog all excited, and when dogs get excited they cannot do their work well, calmly, and dispassionately.  Technically, it is something like getting into a pissing contest with a skunk, I guess.   Anyway, Mr. Morrison barked at the police dog, and now the full weight of the kennel has been dumped on

Yep!   "Racism is over.  Stop talking about it!" The President just cannot seem to learn that we no longer have a race problem.  Instead, he thinks about Trayvon Martin and then has to tell us that stuff like that happens to minorities all the time. Look!  Trayvon Martin could have avoided the problem in the first place:  he could have stayed home.  Instead, he went to the store and bought Skittles and tea, and walked home, just like a regular person.  Trayvon Martin did an absolutely perfect impression of a regular person.  When a guy in a car following him, then got out of the car, Trayvon got scared.  Trayvon had no way of knowing the guy had a gun.  He didn't need to know that to be scared. Of course we should avoid the kind of language and actions that might make the death of Trayvon Martin into public mayhem and destruction!  But the patently absurd suggestion from good liberal and eager conservative folk that racism is not at issue is blind at least, and per

Old Tom Morris and Young Tom Morris, about 1870-75. From Wikipedia Golf, you know, was invented in Scotland, by men.  Real men; men who were committed to finding the least reliable way to follow a small ball around a meadow.  It would have made sense to fire the ball from a slingshot, or a loudmouth shotgun, but that would have provided some sense of direction and distance, and golf never was intended to be easy. That is why the links courses of Scotland have all those shallow wells all over the most likely places for a ball to come to rest.  In this country, we have sand traps; shallow declivities lined and manicured with sand imported from a beach in Tahiti, or somewhere.  In Scotland, they dig wells, and sometimes they line them with shaggy chunks of sod, dug from the lower levels of what they call "the rough".  The rough is pastureland where the cattle refuse to graze, since they prefer the pretty grass on the greens themselves.   It is not a coincidence that

Once upon a distant time,  while the pastor of a Lutheran church  in California--itself an anachronism:  how did Martin Luther, as germanic as kraut and sausage-- ever get to California,  as laid back  as avacado in a salad?   I was one of those 1960s good-doers. The city was as White as a liberal.   There were two Asian doctors, but in Oakland, twenty-five miles  away on another planet, it was  rumored that there were Black people willing to move to our town in order to keep their jobs at the re-located General Motors plant.  Oh, my god! I was White in those days,  as I have ever been, and must be, having grown up milking cows before school, raised on lutefisk and lefse, but I was in the majority there in Washington State, and in the majority still in California, where I learned to eat hamburgers wrapped in a whole salad of greenery  and peppery and dressery. In those days, I was a runty little Scandinavian, as I have  every been, and must always be, sin

The man at the head of the checkout lane had a few snack foods.  He started to hand the clerk money. "Sir," she said, "you have to show your Safeway card.  Your nuts are on sale." I stared at the back of the woman in line ahead of me. Then she turned around, and both of us burst into laughter.   "No, no, nothing!" she said to the clerk.  "We were just slow." 

This morning, still thinking about yesterday's sandstorm warning, I was driving all over town, looking for fresh halibut, which is no simple search, here in the Sonoran Desert, all the while listening to a carousel debate about same-sex marriage--around and around, up and down, going nowhere--and whether there even was such a thing as a same-sex marriage, or whether marriage was exclusively what might be called "a union" between one man and one woman, apparently because it was the only way to get on to the next generation.  I decided I was a union man, but not if another kid was the only reason for another union meeting. It made me think of a favorite quote, from Erasmus of Rotterdam, in which he described medieval scholastic thought:   “There are innumerable quibblings . . . concerning instances and notions, and relations and formalitations, and quiddities and  eccëities , which no one can follow out with the eyes, except a lynx, which is said to be able in the

Somewhere in the great heap of boxes we moved here a year ago, there is an almost 900 page book titled, "A Secular Age", by Charles Taylor.  I have slogged my way as far into that book as I could, before I exhausted myself with well-doing.  I concluded that the book should have been titled, "A Nostalgic Age".  Charles Taylor has indeed vacuumed up a grand heap of secular evidence, praising it ambiguously as he goes, but it eventually becomes clear that he thinks it is all useful, but unsatisfying, stuff because he has something else in mind. Charles Taylor wants  to believe in God, and he think that all of us want to believe in God because God has made us such that we have a great need to want to believe in in God.  It is tough to lose that argument:  we want to believe, therefore it is not a secular age.   That is, unfortunately, a little like arguing that there must be tooth fairies because it was really very satisfying when we believed in tooth fairies.  

Tucson is not far from Mexico; about seventy miles.  Sonoita is grasslands, uphill from here, south and east of us, closer to Mexico, still.  Sonoita is trying to become wine country, and while it still has a ways to go, it is getting there.  Just as I hear thunder this afternoon, here in Tucson, with the promise of a first real rain in a year, monsoon seasons in the Sonoran desert sometimes come with severe weather:  hail, for instance.  Hail stripped Sonoran vineyards of their grapes two years in a row, recently.   It takes an hour to drive to Sonoita, where we have fond memories--from years past--of good dinners in a town small enough barely to be able to support restaurants.  The U. S. Census says that there are about 800 people in Sonoita, 700 of whom are invisible.  When we heard that an award-winning chef from Phoenix was moving to Sonoita, and that Dos Cabezas Wineworks had proposed to introduce him to the region with a pig roast at their showroom "in town", we