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...

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 k...

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...

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 ...

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 Sc...

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."