SmokeSound

The brown thing is a quail block, so the grey thing must be a quail. [And people say that I do not know my birds!] Joseph Langland wrote a poem titled, Sacrifice of a Red Squirrel.   In it he tells of boys with a .22 in hand coming to the woods to hunt. Red squirrel, run!  The fixed ideas are coming to hunt you down. It was what boys did, without doubting thought.  Boys hunted. The fixed ideas are dragging us down. That we are God's Chosen People. That God's chosen people are white and christian. That men are better images of god than women are. That guns, germs, and steel made us inheritors of this land. That capitalism is next to godliness. That the United States of America is better at everything than anybody else. That miracles are possible, and clean coal is proof of it. That because my Dad bought a ticket to America      and passed a six-second eyeball health examination at Ellis Island      he was different...

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amaze.com Late in my career, I switched departments, to computer information systems, largely because PCs were just being produced, and because, following Mari to a graduate program, I had learned something about information systems.   The field was still struggling to gain respectability.  Management Information Systems, for instance, was often called "mismanagement" by colleagues in other departments who then, like somebody on Hee Haw, hooted and slapped their jeans.  It seemed to me that the ability of computerized information systems, which could virtually eliminate time (electronic speed of information exchange), and space (it didn't matter how far away the information was stored), and capacity (mini, micro, nano, pico abilities to store massive amounts in tiny spaces), was going to change almost everything.   At the time, what was frustrating was that students didn't care much about any of that.  They wanted to learn to code and get paid by Micros...

The housecleaners were here, and they seem to look at me as a project beyond them, so I said to Mari that I was going to take my camera and drive to the Swamp.   It really isn't called the Swamp.  It is called Sweetwater Wetlands, where sewer water is processed, and some of which has been used to create an oasis for birds and turtles and ornithologists.  "Sweet" the water cannot possibly be, judging by the look of it, but the reeds and rushes thrive, and the turtles seem not to be fastidious.   Just to clarify that I am not a birder--I just want to take pictures of something--I shall show you the two birds I saw today. Just as I was leaving, I met a couple from Washington State, and I, a native Washingtonian, instantly knew that they would be friendly, and intelligent, and water-logged.  Besides, he had a camera lens I have been lusting after.  After learning that I lived here in Tucson, they said they had seen . . . oh, I dunno, a Harris' Hawk...

The Basking Ridge Presbyterian Church oak tree, said to be about 600 years old--perhaps the oldest white oak tree in America--is dead. General George Washington picnicked with the Marquis de Lafayette in the shade of that tree, and George Whitfield, notable preacher, preached to 3000 people beneath those branches in 1740.  That may be what triggered the eventual demise of the tree.  A tree, even a really tough old tree, can only take so much. About the time World War II was ending, our parents bought a little, scrabby subsistence farm from two Swedish brothers, in Washington State:  the Seastrom brothers, Pete and Swan.  The end of the graveled driveway into the farm circled around a well-worn maple tree that had none of the magnificence of the Basking Ridge tree in New Jersey.  Our maple tree did not defy gravity:  it hung on.  If I am not misled by age and nostalgia, it had obvious signs of brutal trimming. I do not know, but I should be ast...

becoming  A  willingness to be wrong  is basic to science.   It is not a desire to be wrong:  no one looks forward to that.  It is a recognition that what we understand, and how we understand, is open-ended.  We will come to a better understanding, some day, almost certainly.   In the real world, the world we live in, things become.  They are not what they used to be.  Our understanding is like that, too.  It becomes.   For example, think about what it is to become a human being.   We usually say, "what it is to be " a human being, but like everything else, we become what we are.  We become.  Once, there was no me.  I have become who I am.  And I will surely not remain what I am now.   That distinction screws up all of our debate about abortion, for instance.  The fiercest opponents of abortion insist that from the moment a sperm unites with an egg, it is a human bei...

Sarah Palin finally made it to the White House.  "Bring some friends with you," the President had said, so she brought Kid Rock and Ted Nugent. Miss Sarah is reported to have said that she brought the Kid and Ted because "Jesus was booked". I can hardly wait until Michele "Our Belle" Bachmann gets an invitation.  She won't get the runaround from Jesus. That will probably happen soon, if Our Belle is right about the skies falling down, and all that.  Jesus will be in town, anyway.

“We are sending an armada. Very powerful. We have submarines. Very powerful, far more powerful than the aircraft carrier, that I can tell you,” Trump said during an  interview with Fox Business Network. When that "armada" got to the China Sea, we were assured, North Korea would have to pause in its lust for war, and a nuclear arsenal. The problem was, the aircraft carrier was headed toward Australia, or Pitcairn Island, or somewhere. When I was young and greenhorn on a fishing boat in Alaska, we kept spare gear in a dory on the stern.  The dory was purportedly a lifeboat, should something likely happen, but we kept spare gear in it.  I used to wonder how long it would take to get the dory into the water. I cannot ever remember rowing a boat, as a child, but I must have, sometime, perhaps on Clear Lake.  Once, halibut fishermen all rowed boats, but that was before diesel engines.  To be unnecessarily honest, although I did fish commercia...

faculty.catawba.edu That is what America looked like, 200 years ago:  thirteen English colonies on the Atlantic coast. Now try to imagine what America will look like 200 years from now! Do you really think it will look just like it does now? We need to relax.  Sit down.  Hold off on that wall for a while.  Think about all that slavery, and the Civil War.  Think about allowing women to vote.  Think about Native Americans, and all the new Americans and what they look like.  Think about what we have become, and what we can become. It won't look like thirteen English colonies on the Atlantic coast, either.

Biography.com For those of you who think that Our Rumply President is not being treated fairly by the liberal, left-wing, lousy, losing, lopsided press, the liberal, left-wing, lousy, losing, lopsided press is reporting that the White House Easter Egg Hunt actually went pretty well, although the President almost forgot to put his hand over his heart, wherever that is. I think he was wearing his lapel flag pin, though, so no real harm was done. It is the little things that matter, isn't it?      Old Glory on a stick.      Lapel flag pin.      Never-ending tax audit.      Making sure God blesses America. The big things are harder.  Nobody knew how hard!      Honesty.      Health care.      Decency.      Thinking.      Facts.  

Forum:  Paradoxplaze.com Plainly and simply put:  it is not fair! Of course the Brits voted to exit the European Union--that is their right--but now the Europeans--a European is someone in Europe, but not an Englishman--are closing some of their offices in England, and going home.  And the newspapers report that the English are furious that they are leaving!  Why?  Why in God's name are they leaving?  If this is how the EU is going to behave, as all thinking Englishmen say, it is a good thing that Britain voted to leave first! The English are going to make England great again!  You know, "The sun never sets on the Union Jack", and all that.  Retake India!  Destroy the Spanish armada!  Put a plug in the tunnel under the Channel!  Plum pudding.  Bangers.  As our Rumply President might have said, but didn't, it is a bigly decision. [Not big:  bigly, as in "big league".]  Really bigly!  Nobody knew ho...

Our Rumply President is said to be interested in riding in a carriage when he visits England.  England, as you know, is removing itself from Europe, and wants to snuggle up to its former colonies, and President Trump, who said NATO was obsolete, until he said it wasn't, anymore, is trying to save petroleum.  And the English are used to picking up behind horses, so it may be a go. It has nothing to do with gold trim, but that said, the President's official car is pretty black, and black is not the new orange. I dare say that if we can eliminate the budget for the arts, and if we are willing to settle for a simpler, across-the-board, bare minimum health care plan, and if we take what is left of the public school budget, we could gussy up the President's plain black car with some gold, here and there, maybe even attach a team of horses now-and-then while in town, and not feel so dad-gummed plain, as Mike Pence might say if it were not so plain what he is thinking...

In a political world stitched together with alternative facts--damned lies, if you prefer-- it is authentic to watch, "The Last Alaskans", on the Discovery Channel. It is the story of a handful of families in the most northern and eastern corner of Alaska who, when the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was formed, were granted the right to continue to live there, to their grandchildren's generation. It is impossible not to admire them as human beings, even when absolutely nothing in my being wants to be one of them. Something there is in their incredible isolation-- hundreds of miles between them, mountains of ice and flooded rivers and unbounded spears of stubborn trees stretching forever-- that lets them be participants in the long, stubborn way our species has come to be where we are.  Last week, Mari and I drove to New Mexico, our neighboring State to the east, to see the Gila Cliff Dwelling where, about 800 years ago, some of the first Amer...

 Cooper is easy to travel with, so long as fine dining in hoity-toity restaurants that do not allow dogs is not your idea of travel. Our little Casita has cooking and sanitary facilities, and we rediscovered the pleasure of going somewhere, not to do something programmed, but just to be there for a while. We learned again how incredibly beautiful earth is, and how blind we have been, not just to earth itself, but to the human beings who walked here, long ago, from Asia probably, and before that, from Africa; that a rich life is not just about finding silver in a monstrous hole in the ground; that a Mimbres pot can scarcely be believed, but it is true. It is a real truth, not just an alternate fact.

By Yuchitown- Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w /index.php?curid=45030146 We are in Hohokam territory, here in Tucson.  The Gila Cliff Dwellings are in Mogollon territory, near Silver City, New Mexico. We know, from tree ring dating--counting and comparing tree ring growth--that the Gila cliff dwellings used trees cut down from 1276 to 1287, to build homes high up in natural caves on cliff sides.  We visited one open to the public, high above the Gila River. Cooper, who is an inveterate explorer, something like Coronado, I suppose, is in the habit of occasionally lifting a leg to claim territory said to belong to someone else, was not allowed to exhaust himself by climbing up to the ruins, so he stayed in a kennel at the Ranger Station. "Lucky Dog!", I think I heard Mari mumble at about 5875 feet in elevation. The Mimbres families who lived in the dwelling we saw, were there for only about twenty years.  As with other such dwellings in...

 The Mimbres Indians once lived in what is Silver City, New Mexico, although they did not call themselves, "Mimbres", since that is a Spanish word meaning "willows", found there along the stream banks.   For around a thousand years, beginning about 200 A.D., they lived lived on those copper and silver-laced hills and marshes. They made beautiful pottery, now also called "Mimbres", at about the time my ancestors were grunting and throwing stones at each other, somewhere in Europe.  About the time I was born, in the 1930s, their pottery was discovered by miners pecking and picking at everything to find silver, and the local tradition says that their pottery was used for target practice by the boys carrying firearms to protect themselves from each other. For a time, the area was an Apache campsite. The Spanish, lusting for silver and gold, did mining for copper in the area in the late 1500 and early 1600s.  After the American Civil War, settlers push...

This is not Mud Head, but he will do. I am not a conspiracy theorist--a rather elegant way to refer to a damned fool who will believe anything--but something is going on. Our neighborhood burro--a rather ordinary way to refer to Mud Head, who broke loose and went for a Most Excellent Midnight Walk on a White House lawn; who brays on unintelligibly about being watched--and events in Washington D.C., are uncannily similar. It is not just Mud Head.  There are too many odd things happening all at once.  This morning, for instance, I went back to Sweetwater Swamp, just to catch up on things in the real world, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, not one, but two, raccoons! "I am in Tucson," I said to myself, "and there is something significant about seeing two bickering raccoons." I moseyed around to the other side of the pond, to where there is a deck out over the water, and cranky noises alone indicated that the two raccoons were continuing their M...