SmokeSound

Every civilized country in  the world, every civil country in the world, every post-medieval country in the world provides universal health care for its citizens, and we are on the verge of almost doing that, ourselves, at long last.  A reactionary half of Congress is doing its best to stop it.   The y could not stop the enactment of the bill itself, so they are demanding that no funds be provided for health care,  or for anything else   if health care is not starved to oblivion! They threaten to shut down the government, and to refuse to pay the bills they already have authorized (the Debt Ceiling), thereby destroying the credit rating of the nation.    If we knew nothing else about the Tea Party Crusa ders, we would know enough to scorn them.  It is only partly about almost-universal health care.  The opponents of the bill refuse to call it by its legal name, but have labeled it, "Obamacare".  The opposition is mostly about that ...

She was promoting a sale of some kind.  He stopped to listen. "What is your name?", he asked. "La Jeena", she said. "Va Jeena?", he asked. " La Jeena," she said. "I was a teacher in Michigan for thirty-eight years, and I  never knew anyone named, 'Va Jeena'. " La Jeena", she said. *  *  * I didn't want to reveal that I had overheard, even though I did want to ask how she spelled, 'La Jeena'.  I didn't dare.  I headed to the parking lot.   "Thirty-eight years!",  I heard him say as I walked away.  

No, I am not talking about the U. S. House of Representatives!  I am talking about pack rats!  (The difference is that I have a soft and forgiving place in my heart for pack rats:  they are working hard to make a living.) Two or three days ago, I bought two bags of bird seed to feed my feathered free loaders in the back yard, but the press of time and my own procrastination caused me to leave both bags in the bed of the pickup.  Today I proposed to put the bird seed into two or three five-gallon buckets in the back yard, from whence I fill the bird feeder.  But the buckets out back, for some odd reason, were tipped over and emptied of what little seed had been there.  I have not solved that mystery, unless it is a deer;  something, at least, capable of getting over the back yard fence. Then I looked into the bed of the pickup.  Pack rats had chewed holes in both bags, and shoveled out more than two gallons of seed into the pickup bed.  R...

We get simple when we start to talk about politics.  It is probably because politics is often less about facts than it is about rhetoric.  Rhetoric is language intended to convince someone about something.  It is not necessarily factual, although facts can be very convincing.   For example, consider the situation in Syria.  Syria is in revolution, and it is not clear what the revolution is going to produce.  The whole Middle East is in revolution.  What has been largely a sixth century Muslim civilization is bringing itself into Muslim versions of the twenty-first century.  The serenity of iron-fisted dictatorships is transforming into messy and sometimes bloody attempts at government more responsive to the population.  One look at the absurdly straight-line boundaries of many of the nations of the Mideast (and Africa, too) reveals that the nations themselves have been artificially defined by colonial powers.   The Kurds, to use jus...

Some of those things are TOTs caps:  Tucson Old Timers.  The cap in the foreground is the one Denny Heath hauled around for about twenty years.  It marked the 25th anniversary of the TOTs:  1968-1993.  A current TOTs cap lurks in the background. The juicer?  That belongs to Mari.  It seemed to suggest the same era. The TOTs--Be honest!  How is that for an ambiguous name?--have played baseball, not softball, not slow pitch pumpkin ball, not fast pitch softball, but baseball with baseballs, for forty-five years!  Floyd, the oldest active member of the team, whose 88th birthday the club celebrated this week, was only 43 when the TOTs started playing, and even had Floyd known about the club, and wanted to play in 1968, he would have had to wait until he was 60 years old.  There are no half-baked, half-done kids on the TOTs!  It takes a full-grown man to play baseball three times a week, all year around:  start at age 60; go...

HAYING TIME AT THE RANCH The little tad loves coming to the ranch at haying time.  I hitch the wagon to myself, and Jao leads the way from the back yard to the pickup out front.  Mari hosed him off. GETTING AWAY FROM MINNESOTA ICE Joel and Susan came and discovered that things grow in the desert.  Joel got up early and terrorized the neighbors by searching for clam shells on the hillside, out back.  He followed the trail, uphill, shirtless, and confused. MONSOON SEASON  Today's newspaper reports that we have had .12" of an inch of rain in this neighborhood.  That is it, coming over the hill.   We think the clams originated at the house up there on the hill during the Seafood Era.   THE LONE RANGER This old critter has probably been deposed from the herd by a younger, stronger, nastier fellow.  He comes by occasionally, to make the case for a Social Network. A RAMADA OUT At the Desert Museum, after half a day of h...

"Four reasons why I should not exist", according to physicists?   I could not force myself to read the article.  I do not know why life should not exist.  What I do know is that we do exist.  And since nature itself produced life, it is quite likely that basic physics is the cause of our existing.   It is an absurd argument.  It is quite like all those arguments that a place like earth is so improbable that we are probably the only planet with life on it in the whole universe.  And these days, we seem to be finding earth-like planets everywhere.   That kind of irrational argumentation is usually an exercise in primitive religion; something rooted in a Mesopotamian creation myth, and cultivated in the Middle East.  Like not knowing how many planets there actually are, mostly because our tools are so crude, and our assumptions are so fine, the notion that life--and intelligent life--is improbable is simply a denial (or ignorance) of ...