SmokeSound

Apocalypse.   Ah-POCK-ah-lips.  From "to uncover".   To take the lid off.  To reveal what is there. Apocalyptic thinking is a significant part of Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought.  Jesus was apocalyptic:  he thought of himself as a prophet of the end times, when the lid would be blown off and a great struggle of the end times would happen.  No such luck. The book of Revelation is apocalyptic.  It is a hymn to the great battle between good and evil, soon to come.  No such luck. Islam is apocalyptic; not entirely, as Judaism and Christianity, also, are not entirely apocalyptic, but a significant strain of apocalytic thinking infests all three of the Semitic religions.  The Islamic State is apocalyptic.  The Messianic strain of Judaism was apocalyptic.  Christian Bible study groups love to ponder the Book of Revelation:  Armageddon, the Great Satan; all that. They are cousins, those religions!  They share genes.  Depending on where one finds oneself, in which of those

Our grandson, Jao, has a plastic John Deere tractor, large enough to sit on, and powered by a pint-sized battery.  It can be driven, if driving can be understood to be, On/Off, Forward/Back, and Sidewinder if you have learned what steering is.  Jao hasn't. His dad brought the John Deere to our house because the walls of his house weren't actually designed for crash testing, and because the block walls around his yard have inadequate re-rod, and the neighbors have said something about concrete avalanches and their kids playing in their yards when the walls come down. Our yard is under construction, partly due to the mesquite tree that came crashing down during what Midwesterners like to call, "straight-line winds", which is something tornadic unwound and aimed at your mesquite tree. And I am building a rondavel up in the extended yard, so there were 2X4s, and saw horses, tarps and plywood scraps, and most enticingly, a sand pile left over from the masons who p

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.  We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others.  He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."                   --Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories As a callow youth, I spent five seasons as a halibut fisherman in Alaska. People assumed that I knew something about fishing. I didn't; not if that meant a wimpy, little pole with a reel and a monofilament nylon line with a calculated sinking rate. I spent secular hours one summer trying to learn to fly fish.  I bought good equipment, although the pole was too long, studied manuals on tying proper kno

Climate change is brutal, sparing none of us. Every plant, beast and beauty is huddling, cuddling, and scrunching. Maybe Greenland is warm.

I have been doing what everybody knows we should not do:  climbing up (even) a short A-frame ladder and standing on the top of it.  Of course it is stupid, but that is an argument that requires a certain amount of intelligence to be convincing. I am building a garden shed, or a house for Jao, or a shrine to Nefertiti, or a silo to store grain in during Ben Carson's Years of Plenty, or maybe just something to look at in the back yard. When the big mesquite tree blew down just behind our house, it took out the back fence. It tore up the edge of the flagstones. Our very generous landlord, who has a penchant for thinking large and acting decisively, said this was a chance to rethink what the backyard should be. The house stands on an acre lot-- that is .4 decare for some of you-- so the yard is just the fenced-in area. The fence is to keep out javelinas-- that is peccaries for some of you-- and perhaps a snake or two. Thus,  a garden shed is taking shape: s

It happened without intention that I came to live in Minnesota for ten years.  After three decades in Iowa--the Hawkeye State, or better, Baja Minnesota-- it was, winter weather aside, a delightful experience to live in the Twin Cities. Now we are back in Tucson, again and, truth be told, I really miss Michele Bachmann. I know that nearly everything she says can be accessed on-line, but that is like saying that Mt. Vesuvius has erupted again: it is not next door!  It is half a world away. Our Belle, Michele, lives in some other world, you know. The people who have been trying to contact alien intelligence have been looking in the wrong place:  it is in Minnesota. I am almost sorry to say it that way. Minnesota is, for the most part, an eminently sensible place, but they did elect Michele to office, and they should have to admit it. Our Belle has been pondering the violence in the Middle East, and she knows the wars, and rumors of wars, and outbreaks of bedbu

I want to tell you how close our family came to electing one of us to the Presidency or, at least, to becoming a Republican nominee. It is necessary to begin the sad story of our near-greatness long after we began to show first signs of near-sightedness. Recently, the Honorable Surgeon Dr. Ben Carson, in what might have been a sub-conscious--or, at least, sub-historical--attempt to establish his street cred, told how near he came to stabbing one of his buddies when they were just kids fooling around with murderous impulses. Dr. Carson was no wimpy, nerdy, goody-goody kid, you know! He came from the streets, and by virtue of his own commanding urge to become President of the United States, did not allow his murderous impulses to get loose. Somebody in the newspaper business--you know, those rotten purveyors of occasional fact and high drama, looked into the matter of Dr. Carson's story. Unfortunately, it appears that only Dr. Carson remembers anything about

Maybe Leo Durocher did not exactly say that "Nice guys finish last!"  Maybe he only said that nice guys finish seventh.  He did not believe that being a nice guy necessarily won pennants. Ben Carson is a nice guy.  Everybody says so.  He doesn't get ruffled.  Excited.  Bothered.  And he is leading the race for the GOP nomination from Iowa. Dr. Carson, a surgeon, does have some unusual ideas.  For instance, he thinks that, compared to being a brain surgeon, being President of the United States is something easy to do.  An amateur at the job--that is to say, someone with no political experience--could be President, but not a brain surgeon.  He is at least half-right about that.  And he is at least half-wrong about that. Almost all Presidents have had significant political experience.   Grover Cleveland might be the best example of one who did not, although he was the Mayor of Buffalo, New York, for less than a year.  George W. Bush ran for a seat in Congress, but l