SmokeSound

Sometimes when the muck and savagery of our politics get to be too much for me I drive to Sweetwater Swamp sometimes called the Sweetwater Wetlands probably because it is where sewer water is puddled into ponds where every nutrient known sings siren songs to passing birds, paddling turtles and                                                                                               sedentary reeds and trees. The Southwest has learned to love the phrase, "Streams in the desert" from Isaiah 35:6 or as Our Rumpled Leader might say, ". . . Thirty-five Colon Six". "Sweetwater Wetlands" is to wetlands what a stream is to a desert: an odd thing, appreciated. The ponds, some of them green with life, and some gravel bare to ...

Birds are not descended from dinosaurs:  they are descended from javelinas. Proof?  I put out seed for the birds.  Some of it falls to the ground.  Javelinas come and eat the seed. If birds had descended from two-legged dinosaurs, there would be dinosaurs parked under the bird feeder. Trust me.  Those are not dinosaurs.  They do not walk on two legs.  They eat seed. Science is easy.  It is politics that is hard.  Some politicians are descended from dinosaurs, but that has nothing to do with walking on two legs:  it has to do with the development of a cerebral neo-cortex.  Or lack of.  

The Republican Party has repeatedly voted to abolish our health care bill for the last seven years, knowing without a doubt that the President would veto the bills.  They assured us that they had great plans to replace "Obama Care" with something really great that would provide better care, cover more people, and save vast amounts of money. Now they have shown us what they had in mind:  Trump Care.  The Congressional Budget Office said their plan would deprive millions of people care, cost more, and offer less.  And when, in the last day or two, it became apparent that they did not have a majority to enact their plan, they sweetened the deal:  they offered to eliminate outpatient care, emergency services, pregnancy, maternity and newborn care, prescription drugs, pediatric care, and much more. No deal!, the Republicans said.  No deal! We cannot even pretend it costs too much.  President Trump has proposed to build a big, beautiful, Berlin wall...

"He bleeds blue!", it was often said, to indicate someone's loyalty to the college.   It had nothing to do with royalty.  It smelled of sweat and shoulder pads. People at Luther loved blue.  The roof to the fieldhouse is blue.  The track around the football field was blue.  The tennis courts were blue.  Sweatshirts were blue.  And, it was often said, some people bled blue. One scarcely dared say that enough was enough. Last night, the Arizona basketball team lost a game in the NCAA tournament.  Even though I love sports, I shall have to admit that the pain did not run deep. I believe it has something to do with age, and arthritis; that I cannot even pretend to be an athlete, or that I ever was much of one, for that matter. Maybe it is that the women's softball team looks really great, again, or that the new women's basketball coach looks promising.  Or that. . . . No.  I bleed neither blue, nor red and blue.  In fact...

Mark Benson's middle name is "I Love SPAM":  Mark I Love SPAM Benson. Mark I Love SPAM also loves Anne Mousley.  They have been engaged for years, and have two children, and want to be married at the SPAM Museum in Austin, Minnesota. In April, Mark etc. and Anne will fly from their home in Halewood, England for their solemn rites at the Hormel They Love SPAM Museum, and Hormel will fly them on to Hawaii to the SPAM JAM street festival in Waikiki, Hawaii.  Hawaiians eat about five cans of SPAM, per capita, per year, more than any other state or food group. Here, at SmokeSound, we do not endorse nothing, not even SPAM, although from time-to-nostalgic-time, I find myself giving SPAM one more try, for Old Time's Sake, and because Mari grew up downwind from Austin, Minnesota, on the Iowa side of the downdraft.  We are soft-hearted, though, for a genuine love story, especially in these trying times, when canned . . . canned stuff is produced mostly in Washington...

Grandma "What did they call those things they used to beat rugs with?", I asked Mari, awkwardly. "Rug beaters", she said. My god, she is quick! That's us:  the quick, and the dead.  Something like shooting tourists at the Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone.  

"I think, therefore I am confused."  Jao was born on the Ides of March, pretty much. "Ides", to the Romans, came on the 15th of March, May, July, and October, and on the 13th of other months.  Jao was five years old just after this Ides of March,  and, as five-year-old-Romans are wont to do, wanted to go to Toys-R-Us. Toys-B-Them it was! He was particularly grown-up about it, understanding that he could not take the whole store home, nor even a whole aisle, thus rationing himself by doing a reluctant sort for what matters most in life. Alter Ego He tested his choices on Gran-Mari.  Mari has become inured to monsters, little-by-little.  God knows she has had enough training at home, in her weekly sessions of "Let's Pretend" with the same Master Monster. "Don't mess with Grandma!" Wishful Thinking Even monsters have a sweet tooth; even an unsatisfied sweet tooth, from time-to-time.  Grandpa--or Papa--was out of qu...

Something is all wrong when serious political writers advise us to stop watching the news; that we ought to ignore what is happening politically, else we will go raving mad. The man we elected President is pathetic.  He cannot tell the truth.  He skips from one subject to the next, asserting stupid foolishness, then blaming everybody else for having said it in the first place.  I don't think he began with that birther nonsense--that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and somehow managed to get his birth announced in Hawaii, which made him ineligible to be President--but he was sure of it.  He said he had investigators in Hawaii finding things they could scarcely believe.  Remember that?  Racist crap:  that's what it was.  It was dancing all around the anger that a Black man had been elected President.  Don't even pretend it had to do with anything else! The Russian interference with our election process is a stinking mess.  I do no...

It does not take a genius to know that if you exclude, or reduce the number, of young, healthy people from a health care system, it will cost the members more. Is does not take a genius to know if someone is making a profit from a health care system, the cost of the insurance will be higher than if it is a non-profit system. Is does not take a genius to know that young, healthy people, who do not want to be a part of a universal health care system, are going to go bankrupt if they have to pay the costs for themselves when something happens to them. Good health, and good health care, for everyone is to the benefit of the whole nation. Good health care only for the people who can afford to pay for it themselves is a damned fool system. We the People say that we, together will  establish justice,  insure domestic tranquility,  provide for the common defence,  promote the general welfare, and  secure liberty for ourselves and those who fol...

Rep. Steven King from Iowa “If you go down the road a few generations or maybe centuries with the intermarriage, I’d like to see an America that (is) so homogenous that we look a lot the same from that perspective. I think there’s far too much focus on race, especially in the last eight years. I want to see that put behind us,” King said. That is from the Washington Post, reported in Google news. (I am sorry about the syntax of that quote, but Steven King said it.) Steven King is a Representative to Congress from Iowa.  He wants to put racism behind him by breeding a white-skinned America.  The way he says that is to say that caucasians have to breed faster:     America can’t restore “our civilization with somebody else’s babies".   Steven King thinks that the color of his skin is what makes America great.  That is racism:  purely, damnably, and stupidly.      I am tempted to say that it embarrasses me to say that I spen...

 The new cougar at the Desert Museum has been named, Cruz. I do not know why they did not name the cat, "Stevens". Cruz is the reason we have a dog.  Our dog, Cooper, thinks lunch comes from an airtight bag.  Cruz thinks lunch walks. The Arizona Sonora Desert Museum is the real gem of Tucson.  We saddled up and skedaddled up and over Gates Pass, west of town, to show Elliot the Desert Museum for the first time.  Daniel insisted that she should see the petrified ground sloth dung.  The best defense he could muster was that it impressed him when he was a tad, and that is hard to deny. It was dark in the cave where sloth things are celebrated, so we mercifully missed Daniel's favorite entry into the world of slothdom, so Eliza showed Elliot what a Great Blue Heron looks like, instead.  Elliot may turn out OK. I used to love the aviary but, in my estimation, at least, it has fallen on spare times.  There are not many birds evident...

A year or two ago, one of the vigilantes showed up late for the gunfight at the OK Corral, in Tombstone, and in the eternal fight for law and order, peace and justice, shot one of the other vigilantes, and nicked a nice lady who was just watching the West Being Won. In the Old West, you see, there was a guy who was supposed to inspect the firearms of the boys before they snarled and said, "Draw, stranger!", and things like that, but because Lefty, or Dogie, or whatever his name was, came late, and his gun held live ammunition, not blanks.  The reports do not say why the vigilante was late, but one can suppose he came directly from Sunday School, and simply forgot he was going out to play. It is now commonly believed that the Rules Committee has tightened up its oversight of gunfire at the OK Corral, and that almost all of the volunteers have been encouraged not to shoot live ammunition when tourists are in the background. We came directly from Bisbee, and missed the ...

 Once upon an earlier time, Bisbee was the largest city between San Francisco and St. Louis.  Of course, the cities along the Mississippi and up and down the West Coast were not so large themselves, in those days. But there was money in Bisbee.  "Do the name Phelps-Dodge mean anything to you?"  Bisbee had its own appropriate version of the Flatiron Building. It has its own stock exchange, seen here when Daniel and Elliot and I stopped for a beer after a strenuous workout on the Child gym bars at the City Park.  Its big-time fiscal days behind it, it is now put to more refined use. We sat out on the patio, bordering Brewery Gulch where, later in the day, we had lunch at another soul-satisfying restaurant in another grand, old building.  Before we left Bisbee, headed back through Tombstone, of Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp fame, to say nothing of Big Nose Kate's one-time bordello and (now) restaurant, we drove to the section of Bisbee, on the othe...

 The Oregonians in our family-- I cannot say, "Oregonian" without wondering at what a strange word it is--came to see us in Tucson, not so much because the sun shines here, but because the sun keeps forgetting where Oregon is. The plane with Daniel and Eliza and our newest grand-daughter, Elliot, came into Arizona trailing fog like a crop duster, sharing Pacific Northwest humidity with the whole Southwest. Going to Bisbee was first on our agenda.  "Bisbee" is a real town, a very old town, a town once made famous for its copper ore; lots and lots of copper ore.  Today it is a thriving arts town, having taken occupation of what copper magnates built when copper was king.  The stone-working skill of immigrant miners is everywhere.  We five stayed at what had once been a grand, old hotel:  The Copper Queen. It was not in the plan, but we bounced between the downhill-side annex to the main building itself.  Renovation of the main building edged us ...

"Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. "Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman! "Yes, it’s Superman – strange visitor from another planet who came to Earth with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Superman – who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel with his bare hands, and who, disguised as Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter for a great metropolitan newspaper, fights the never ending battle for  Truth, Justice and the American Way." That is what is wrong with our politics today:  it is on Twitter.  Superman was on radio in the 1949s.  On radio, it was easy to believe in Superman.  Had The Man of Steel said, on radio, that he was going to build a big, beautiful wall around The Daily Planet, or the whole planet, we'd have believed him, and I still do; not a doubt in my mind that Truth, Justice, and the American Way were being se...

I have been looking at the information that Google provides about this blog, particularly whom the audience is, by country.  Nothing is provided about individual readers; nothing at all.  And that is good:  we ought to be able to read things without it becoming a public event. Most of the people who read this blog--the vast majority--are in the United States.  That makes sense.  That is where I am, who I am, and what I write about, mostly.  It seldom happens that anyone responds with a comment, but I am always delighted when they do.  No!   Almost always delighted.  There have been a few nonsense responses--nonsense strings of words, and what appear to be barely intelligible religious scoldings--but all-but-a-few comments have been appreciated. Here are the facts--real facts, not alternative facts: In the last month, in addition to the preponderance of pageviews in the U.S., the most activity from readers has come from France, Chin...