Author: jono55

This being Mothers Day, we’re not going to even try to take Sarah and DJ out for dinner. Sarah says every restaurant is totally jammed on such days.

Instead we’re going to pick up the makings for a picnic and go somewhere in the great outdoors. Sarah is in charge of site selection.

We will be eating in a natural setting. It is important here to make the distinction between natural and au naturel. The latter is not allowed in this county. Or this state.

Or, in my own case, everywhere.

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For dinner we four drove a few miles to Seven Mile Creek Park. A beautiful wooded strip of land along a rocky-bottomed trout stream.

The day hit 85 degrees, but we were in a cooler forest setting most of the time. Great day!

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Last night’s motel stay was quite pleasant. Super 8s vary from You know, this is okay” to “Is this a motel or an archeologic dig?” The desk clerk was an Indian man and once again I found myself curious as to how this particular group of people became such a feature of the hospitality landscape here in the Midwest.

It could be as simple as how it was with my great-grandparents, who emigrated from Norway in the late 1880s. They came looking for a place with decent land for farming and a climate not too different from the home country. Once they had set down a single root they wrote home saying “Come,” and that was it. That part of Wisconsin became loaded with Norwegians before you could say lease. When Wisconsin filled up they sent their children on to Minnesota which is where my grandparents settled.

Friday we crossed into the central time zone, “losing” that precious hour of travel time. As seems common with older travelers we are more comfortable with driving in the sunshine than by the light of the moon. When we decided last evening to seek lodging it was coming on dark already. The first place we stopped was full, so when the desk clerk at the Super 8 said there was a room available we said “We’ll take it!” without hesitation.

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Today our goal is Mankato MN where a room has been arranged for us by daughter Sarah, who is a wonderful person with a wicked sense of humor. Mankato had a dark role to play in history, when the largest mass hanging in U.S. history took place.

The Dakota War of 1862, also known as the Sioux Uprising, the Dakota Uprising, the Sioux Outbreak of 1862, the Dakota Conflict, or Little Crow’s War, was an armed conflict between the United States and several eastern bands of Dakotacollectively known as the Santee  Sioux It began on August 18, 1862, when the Dakota, who were facing starvation and displacement, attacked white settlements at the Lower Sioux Agency along the Minnesota River valley in southwest Minnesota The war lasted for five weeks and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of settlers and the displacement of thousands more. In the aftermath, the Dakota people were exiled from their homelands, forcibly sent to reservations in the Dakotas and Nebraska, and the State of Minnesota confiscated and sold all their remaining land in the state. The war also ended with the largest mass execution in United States history with the hanging of 38 Dakota men.

Wikipedia: Dakota War of 1862

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Robin and I are taking off for 8 days of travel to Minnesota to catch up with my children. They live in different towns in the state so our week is broken into segments. There’s never as much time as we want to spend with each of them …

Today is Friday and I think I’ll post an observation each day or two.

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Poor Governor Noem. After spending the last several years as one of Cluck’s premier sycophants, she decided to write a book, perhaps to elevate her status among that sorry bunch. But being a hardcore Cluckophile she had no idea how normal people think. If she were smarter she would have shelved the book idea right there.

If that wasn’t enough she was almost immediately caught in a very large and easily provable falsehood. So easy, in fact, that she already has removed it from the book (which isn’t even published as yet).

I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all). Dealing with foreign leaders takes resolve, preparation, and determination.

Kristi Noem: No Going Back

I’m quite sure that Kim Jong Un underestimated her, because he never met her. It didn’t happen.

I get it because he underestimated me as well when we didn’t get together last Halloween at a costume party that neither he nor I attended. Turns out he’s quite the little underestimator, that guy.

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• Silent whistle that cannot be heard for two miles
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• A Governor Noem Model .357 magnum revolver by Ruger, with carved white resin grips displaying a tranquil South Dakota scene involving disintegrating the mammal or bird of your choice.

Order now, supplies are limited. We accept anything as payment, including reasonably fresh produce.

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End of the day at a Super 8 between Omaha and Lincoln NE. Not in a town. 825 miles from home. Some people say that traveling across Nebraska is endlessly boring and there is absolutely nothing to see. I disagree. There are lots of lovely things to notice while driving on Interstate 80. The only problem is that you see something interesting 20 miles before you get to it … then it gets slowly closer and closer … then it is abreast of you … then it is in the rearview mirror … then it is 20 miles behind you. And then there’s the next thing to look at. Repeat.

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I’m not a huge Francophile. As a country it is often narcissistic and arrogant and has a long and cruel colonial past (So are we, come to think of it). And as far as I know they are the only nation which ever put out an automobile made entirely out of merde.

To celebrate owning this thing, our first car since we’d been together, said lady and I drove to a pizza joint, where we ate our slices joyfully before returning to the vehicle waiting proudly at the curb outside. Try to imagine our horror when it would not start. I popped the hood and found to my disbelief that the battery had cracked in half, and apparently there is something about being in two separate pieces that raises havoc with a battery’s function. I had never before heard of anything like this happening, but it soon developed that this was an omen.

Over the next twelve months we dealt with the following:

• The doors were so thin that frost formed on the inside in Minnesota’s winter
• One could not drive faster than 45 mph because the car would vibrate so badly one’s composure was destroyed and one’s dental work was in danger of being shaken loose
• The engine got great gas mileage but poor oil mileage. It burned oil in such quantities that we needed to carry two gallons in a can in the backseat just to make it between gas stops
• The heater worked well enough to keep us warm in summer only. After that it was hopeless

When we finally sold it to a young man whose dreams included owning his very own Renault 4CV, we told him all the bad stuff and he still put his money down and drove away. I never heard from him again and always hoped that nothing untoward had occurred .

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There is this thing about French wines and cheeses. Both have been excellent since … forever. Wines eventually proved to be a poor dietary choice for yours truly, but cheeses … mmmm … another matter entirely.

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However, there is one thing French that is amazing, and that is its national anthem, La Marseillaise. A more stirring call to arms I cannot imagine. And unlike our own Star Spangled Banner, a normal person can actually sing it! A close look at the lyrics reveals that they are a bit bloodier than our own anthem, but hey, European life was stressful when it was written in 1792. (Here’s a link to the French and English words to the song).

Can’t let you go without watching a recorded performance. Here’s a dandy.

That was beautiful and makes one want to put on a tricorn hat, wave the tricolor flag, and burn down a Russian village or two. But, in all seriousness, could I really ever fully trust a country that put out the Renault?

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The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci said a wonderful thing in 1929, when Benito Mussolini had Italy under his thumb. “My mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic,” he wrote to a friend from prison. I think he meant that as long as we are alive, we have hope. I try to take Gramsci’s words to heart still today, even if not always successfully.

Daniel Barenboim

I think that this quotation from an article in the NYTimes at least partially sums up how I get through each day, having been bombarded (as are we all) by more bad news than my woodland brain was ever meant to contain. I really am better equipped to pad barefoot through the forests eating termites or whatever I can find along the way, and seeking shelter in rotted tree trunks than I am to deal with reports of one sleazy politician, one murderous spouse, one narcissistic “leader,” one greedy investor, or one wrenching war after another.

Since I have not been granted the opportunity to live the life I am genetically prepared for, now I must scuttle across the urban landscape trying to avoid being trampled by the elephants in our society.

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The time today could be described in any number of ways. You could say that it was one o’clock on Monday the 9th of May, or you could say it’s lambing time. Both would be accurate. Here’s a bunch of critters we pass on the way to the gym.

Please pardon the noise on the video. The wind bloweth.

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We are experiencing one of those weeks of colder weather accompanied by high winds followed by several days of drizzle. For a fair-weather outdoor boy like myself it is a dismal forecast. Our new toys, the sit-on-top kayaks, were not designed for windy days on the water, so they remain roped firmly onto their trailer.

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Tuesday morning we realized a couple of things. The first was that the only thing we had scheduled for that day was to exercise, and the second was that we could go anywhere do it.

One-half mile up a rocky dirt road from the store was the Bedrock Campground. which consisted of four rough-cut sites and no bathroom facilities. The Dolores River forms one boundary of the camping area, and when I walked over to check out the water I scared up a Gopher Snake about 2 1/2 feet long which immediately left the area.

No matter, we thought. we’d come neither to shower, nor to poo, nor to snake-watch, but to hike. And the trailhead for the Dolores River Trail took off from that campground.

The walk turned out to be a fairly easy one through a desert canyon whose beauty I think is easy to appreciate from the photos. Several species of lizards darted in and out of the brush as we meandered along. One very pleasant surprise was the number of varieties of blooming flowers. Way more than we would have expected for a day in April. One of our personal faves is the claret cup cactus, and we’ve included a pic in the gallery.

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BTW. This Colorado town has nothing to do with the Flintstones. Not now. Not ever. I have no idea where Fred and Wilma lived, but it wasn’t here. Besides, you know they weren’t real people, right? End of story.

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Let me pose you readers some questions to ponder. If you can, set aside the headlines and the personalities of the past several months as you compose your answers.

• Do you think that any person, no matter who, should have absolute immunity for their actions?
• Can you think of any person who could possess such freedom without becoming corrupted?
• When or if it occurred, what forms might that corruption take? (Suggestions: think Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Genghis Khan)

Frankly, I don’t see any reason to believe that this Supreme Court is up to deciding such questions. They have failed to come to grips with their own internal sleaze issues, and this notable lapse comes with far less power given them than the absolute immunity they are considering.

The integrity of this court is wafer-thin and their conduct makes one wish that members’ terms could be limited by something other than mortality.

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Robin and I just now finished We Were The Lucky Ones, a series on Hulu that deals with one Jewish family’s experience of the Holocaust. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 96% and it deserves it. Much of the strength of any story is in the skill of the telling, and this is what causes this film to ring so true.

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• Old age is not for sissies
• No good deed goes unpunished
• Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre
• In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us.
• Old age is the only thing that lives up to its reputation

While I don’t fully subscribe to any of these pithy aphorisms, as yet I have not come up with one of my own. I would like one with some snap to it. Memorable, you know.

Oh, and a bit of gravitas wouldn’t hurt.

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North and west of us about an hour, there is something called Dominguez Canyon, which is a designated wilderness study area. Robin and I have walked up that canyon for perhaps 3 miles on several occasions. Our turnaround destination at those times was a large boulder covered with Native pictographs.

Now we are making plans to go there on a backpacking outing within the next month or so, to get a look at what’s beyond that three mile marker. We’re waiting until the nights are a tad less chilly, which can be an issue in desert areas.

We can only go so far while backpacking because we need to carry along CPAP apparatus and battery. With our present equipment the most we can be out two nights, which is no serious limitation. Our days of doing anything approaching epic trips are far, far behind us. (In fact, my personal physician Dr. Maximosa Aeropuerto has suggested that I remove the word “epic” completely from my vocabulary. Her view is that having it there can only get me in trouble.)

What we do is practice our own form of ultralight camping. This means not bringing along much in the way of cooking/eating gear beyond a coffee pot and a tiny stove. It’s no big deal to eat cold food for a couple of days, and there are so many tasty ready-to-eat choices easily obtainable at any grocery store.

It doesn’t show in the photo above, but that beautiful canyon was carved by Big Dominguez Creek, which ordinarily flows all year, but is vulnerable to drying up in times of drought. Camping when it is running greatly lightens the weight on the traveler’s back, since the only water that needs to be carried is what you need to drink between stops. Water filters range quite a bit in cost, but there are excellent models available for less than thirty dollars that meet our needs and are easy to pack.

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During my years in medicine (which will really not be completely over until that last out-breath) one of my greatest interests has been in the diagnostic process. The steps are outlined classically as such:

• Listen to the patient’s complaint
• Round out the patient’s medical history via a patient exploration through questioning
• Perform an appropriate physical examination
• Compose a list of diagnostic possibilities (differential diagnosis is another term for this)
• If needed, acquire more data through laboratory or radiologic testing, ordering what is needed based on what you have learned
• Formulate your diagnosis and proceed with whatever treatment is indicated
• Be prepared to reconsider your diagnosis if the patient’s therapeutic course is not what you expected.

Part of the fascination that I felt along my professional path was realizing how many variations there are in this scheme. For instance, if your patient comes in complaining of a laceration, the history and physical are abbreviated greatly. The challenge then becomes applying what you know about cleaning the wound, checking for collateral damage, protecting against tetanus, and using what suturing skills you have to close everything up.

On the other hand, if the complaint is I Feel Tired All The Time all of the steps in the list above may need to be followed, perhaps including calling in consultants of one sort or another.

When one became a “seasoned” medical practitioner there was a trap easily fallen into, and that was to make diagnostic jumps, skipping the gathering of details. At that point you tried to shoehorn the patient into what you thought they had until your diagnosis was no longer sustainable. This delay could sometimes be to the patient’s detriment.

A man named Shunryu Suzuki wrote a book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, which was fist published in 1970. The first statement on the first page has become justifiably famous:

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.

When I first ran across this very wise statement I got it wrong. I thought, well of course the medical student always comes up with a differential diagnosis that is way too long, while I, the wiser instructor, can come up with a much shorter list and go right to the heart of the problem.

But what Suzuki was really saying was quite different. In the example above the trap for the student might be to get lost in the too-long list. But at least the true diagnosis is probably in there somewhere. The trap for the teacher is to leave too many things off, and thereby waste valuable time before when mistakes are made and they need to get back on track.

Suzuki’s tells us to keep an open mind, always. To see things as they are rather than what we want them to be, without applying labels or preconceived notions.

I tried to apply this aphorism to my professional and personal lives for decades now, with mixed success. Unfortunately I am still far too skilled in preconceived notions and labeling. My keeping the mind open muscles need constant exercising.

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The other day I was mentally comparing my own boyhood to the one available to today’s kids, and it was even more dramatic. For no particular reason I made a short list of items taken for granted today that have arrived during my lifetime.

• Jet planes
• Television
• Computers
• Internet
• Atomic energy
• Atomic bombs
• Antibiotics
• Heart surgery
• Drones
• IV pumps for hospitals
• Antidepressants
• CT scans
• Tom Petty
• MRIs
• Portable electric tools of all kinds
• Microwave ovens
• Tubeless tires
• Slow cookers
• Food processors
• Plastics for home use
• Napalm
• Cell phones
• Transplant surgery
• Ballpoint pens

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The last few years something has gone wrong on each of our first campouts that might have been avoided by a test run at home. So Wednesday night I camped in the backyard, testing backpacking tent, inflatable sleeping pad, sleeping bag, and personal resolve. Robin did not join me, but did not call in the mental health SWAT team, either. So there is that.

The evening temperature was lovely as I slipped into the sleeping bag and tried to find where the pad was located under me. Somehow every time I shifted the thing would move of its own accord to a new place in the tent’s interior. At no time during the night was I fully on top of it. This inconvenience was soon followed by the required number of zipper snags.

But I was still only slightly uncomfortable so I settled back and watched the full moon for a while. It was brilliant, and lit the yard like a searchlight. It was so bright that if you had dropped a handful of peas in the grass you could have searched for them in the light of that moon.

You don’t search for peas in the grass at night? Who raised you, anyway?

Once I had settled, the cats both wandered over and stood outside my tent, peering in at me. They did this for several minutes and I could only guess at what they might be thinking.

Willow: WTF is he doing?
Poco: I have no idea
Willow: You’ve been with him way longer than I have, and he’s not done this before?
Poco: Not once
Willow: Think this is it? The last marble has dropped?
Poco: Your guess is as good as mine
Willow: Wonder if he’s got any food in there?

Later they both ventured inside and walked around sniffing everything, especially Willow, who has a nose like a bloodhound. Once their curiosity was assuaged they left, never to return. I finally fell asleep in that lunar daylight until about three A.M., when I received the nightly call from my plumbing system and had to get out of the tent to find a place to relieve myself. In that brightness I felt that public exposure was not the order of the day, so I went indoors and used the bathroom. At that point I decided that the gear testing session was over, and I would finish out the evening on the futon.

One thing is mildly interesting. Sleeping on the ground at my time of life is not much more uncomfortable than on a bed. There are already a host of creaks and stiffnesses associated with being horizontal anywhere for several hours, and the rougher surface of the ground is only one more layer added on.

Getting up in the morning is another matter. I can roll out of a bed without too much difficulty, but climbing to my feet after several hours on the ground made me wish I had brought along a skidloader with its operator to scoop me up and set me standing.

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*Socially inhibited white people

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Not everyone I have ever met is fond of sleeping out under the stars. A neighbor in Buffalo NY had served in the Army during the Korean War, experiencing the great outdoors in the mud, snow, rain, and exquisitely poor hygiene of the Korean winter. He returned home vowing to never sleep anywhere but under a roof for the rest of his life.

Then there was the RV salesperson in Yankton SD who was showing Robin and I a hard-sided camper. His spiel included this golden paragraph which we still find amusing:

“And one other thing to keep in mind when comparing this unit to one of those pop-up campers with the canvas sides. Someone can stab right through those walls with a knife, and you never have to worry about it with this beauty.”

Oddly enough, I’ve been camping for three-score years without ever encountering a stabbing.

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Robin took a call from a grandchild in California earlier this week. The young woman, a very bright high schooler, had been given the assignment of interviewing some senior person about the Cold War. Looking for the personal side.

The call triggered some memories in another senior, me. The first memory that flashes when the subject of the Cold War comes up, at least for this armchair cowboy, is the Cuban missile crisis of October 16-29, 1962. I was in my first year of being a new medical student and new husband and definitely not looking for additional stressors.

Rumors flew, one of them being that here was going to be a massive military call-up. This was not music to my ears, what with my being 22 years of age and all. Eminently draft-able.

But then, thought I, why worry? If this was to be the big one I (and everybody else in Minneapolis) would be vaporized so fast I wouldn’t even have time to button my new army shirt and zip up my new army pants. So being drafted wouldn’t be such a big deal after all.

And then the crisis vanished, the Cold Warriors retreated, and I didn’t get that uniform until 1969, when the Viet Nam War was burning high and now there I was looking smart in my Air Force blues. But I was not fighting Cubans, or Russians, or even North Vietnamese. I was squabbling occasionally with Americans who were bringing their children to the hospital at Ehrling Bergquist USAF Hospital in Bellevue NE. Squabbling because they sometimes wanted more child care than the USAF was willing or able to provide for them.

While I was (ahem) routinely able to do the work of two normal pediatricians, I barely made it by when asked to cover for three, and the need … well … the need was for six. Another story.

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I find that I am extremely comfortable with saying “I don’t know” these days. There was an earlier time when I was impressed at how much I thought I knew, but that era has long since passed. For me, the change came with Buddhism’s relentless insistence on leaving illusion behind.

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President Biden is out there being Joe Biden. When he gets wound up in a speech, he begins to make stuff up, and the fact checkers of the world get right on with parsing his statements for the evening news. This is not a new behavior for him, but goes back decades.

The habit of embellishing one’s stories, as he does repeatedly, is a common failing and perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on him. The issue for me is that if I tell a whopper there is never any concern about dire consequences for anyone else and only my reputation suffers.

I wish for more sobriety of speech from the leader of our country. I think a new motto to be placed on the desk in the Oval Office might be: If you can’t say something without resorting to mendacity, for God’s sake shut up!

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I have been encouraged by several factors to eat more vegetables and fruits and less meats. While I haven’t converted entirely to vegetarianism, I’ve come a long way.

One of those factors is the increasingly high price of being a carnivore. Our local market has an armed guard at the meat counter who is ever on the lookout for some shifty shopper trying to slip a tenderloin into their pants to smuggle it out.

Yesterday I saw this same burly gentleman administer a proper whaling to a hungry larcenist. Other shoppers gathered ’round to watch, some cheering the guard on and some soberly thinking of how tasty that tenderloin would be and what was to become of it now that it had been retrieved from an unapproved location.

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Possibly overstating the case department

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It was a 77 degree after noon, and I had done my chores and thinking about rewarding myself. I decided to drive to Lake Chipeta, about 12 minutes from my home. It was a 20 mph breezy day, and there were about twenty other souls arranged around this small body of water, seeing if they could choose what the fish wanted to eat.

A great blue heron sailed to a rock thirty yards from me, giving me a great look at this remarkable bird. But as soon as it settled there, it was attacked by three red-winged blackbirds, who flew kamikaze missions within reach of that huge beak but were obviously discomfiting the much larger bird. The heron finally gave up and flew off to somewhere far from blackbird nesting areas.

I had that happen last year in a very different location, where I stumbled onto a sort of heedless trout “feeding frenzy” where I could do no wrong, and then suddenly couldn’t do anything at all. Like you threw a switch. It’s a pleasant experience, since most of my fishing life I’ve arrived on the scene just after that switch had been thrown.

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There is something called The List Of All The Music That Is Great And Good that I am personally responsible for maintaining, since I am its creator and curator and the only one who gets to look at it. Every once in a while I give people a peek at a small part of it but never the whole thing, because most mere mortals … well …

So when I say that you should listen to some music, you should listen. If you do, I suggest that you will find no group of people who exemplify what happens when you throw egos out the window and become servants of the music than the Tedeschi-Trucks Band. You won’t find a track or a video of theirs that isn’t looking for the soul of what is being played.

Here is a live video of these fine musicians playing Midnight in Harlem. If you watch it … this is church, people, so put away your godforsaken phones and be respectful.

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We’re going through the inordinate number of days that are required when anyone who is very very wealthy goes to trial. This is because a highly-paid lawyer’s skillset consists largely of knowing how to drag a proceeding on until everyone involved is exhausted and doesn’t give a blue fig about what is true or not but simply wants to get it over with and get on with their lives.

If the judicial proceedings of the French Revolution had been conducted in a similar fashion the first potential victims for Monsieur Guillotine’s instrument would still be waiting in gaol.

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Pediatricians, as I’m sure you are all aware, are generally mild-mannered and extremely virtuous people.* As the lowest paid medical specialty, they can only sparingly afford to travel and this limits their ability to get into nearly as much mischief around the globe. So when a pediatric leader makes the news it is an unusual event.

David Brooks got off yet another good op-Ed piece in Friday’s NYTimes as he looked admiringly at the work of a British pediatrician who has added an ingredient to the steaming stew that is the debate about how best to help kids who question their sexual assignment. The missing ingredient is sanity. The title of the piece is The Courage To Follow The Evidence In Transgender Care.

Let me say a couple of things about this noisy national and international debate:

• In general, humans are not to be trusted when it comes to areas of sexuality. Our track record is atrocious and shows few signs of improving
• If the general run of humans is suspect on this subject, when politicians and lawyers get into the act the milieu becomes even more strained and difficult. Some things do not lend themselves to legislation, which is a clumsy process at best (see Tucker’s quotation below)
• Being a physician does not guarantee that your opinion on all things is automatically to be taken as correct. One needs a good memory to become a doctor, but an M.D. degree is no guarantee against stupidity, which is a characteristic that is very democratically distributed in the general population
• Making good medical decisions in cloudy areas involving sexuality needs clear heads, open minds, and the willingness to move deliberately rather than precipitously. This approach guarantees that you will come under fire from those who want the answer NOW even if one has to make make that decision based on insufficient data.

*Full disclosure. I am a retired pediatrician, and as such my opinions are above reproach and invariably sensible

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No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

Gideon J. Tucker

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It is 1976 miles from Paradise to New York City. I looked it up after reading rave reviews of two musicals* opening on Broadway, and wondering if driving there on a long weekend were possible. Eventually I decided that even in a car as reliable as a Subaru Outback the logistics were against me.

Of course, even if the trip were feasible, there would be the searingly high ticket prices to contend with. In the old days, such a purchase could have been funded by selling one of the children into bondage, but now said offspring are all middle-aged and I have no idea what their market value might be. (There would be the additional factor of their resistance to such a maneuver.)

So instead of packing a bag I simply wailed and gnashed my teeth for a bit before settling down once again to ruefully accept that to live in such a spectacular spot meant giving up a few things. Regular attendance at Broadway shows were one of them.

*The musicals are Gun and Powder and Stereophonic.

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Brothers and sisters, we conclude our services this morning with a rendition of Neil Young’s soulful song Helpless. When the members of the Music Committee are finished, please file quietly out the side doors and don’t forget to leave something in the collection boxes as you pass. Pick up those pledge cards, too, if you will. Spirituality is a wonderful thing, but someone has to pay to keep the lights on.

Amen, y’all.

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The cicadas are coming, but not for me. The emergence we’ve been reading about for the past year is upon those who live in the areas with dots. I am being smug because none of my family members are in those areas. We will not be among those who can’t sleep because of the noise or cannot walk anywhere without stepping on bug bodies.

My sympathies go out to those who do live in affected states, but not to the point where I am willing to contribute to rescue efforts for the inhabitants. It doesn’t require much imagination to see that the states affected are also red politically, and I think that they deserve a mild calamity as a wake-up.

Mend your wicked ways is my advice to them, and maybe the insect landscape will be different the next time around.

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On Sunday, about noon, our internet went out. Only ours. Nothing was getting through. The person answering the tech line at our ISP was nonchalant and informed me that help would be coming “the next working day.” When I asked if that meant tomorrow (Monday) she was noncommittal, only repeating “the next working day.”

So Robin and I settled back, confident that we had the survival skills necessary to deal with perhaps 24-36 hours of internet deprivation. And we were wrong.

Here is a partial list of what we found ourselves unable to use to cope with a difficult and occasionally hostile world:

• checking the weather
• checking the news, especially to see if we were at war with anybody new
• no streaming movies to watch that evening, nor could we go online to see what was showing downtown at the local cinema
• no access to any cloud-based programs, which meant that our time-wasting game apps were unavailable for the duration
• couldn’t fact-check anything on Google
• none of our devices could sync with any of the others, meaning that each was now an island unto itself

One of us remembered that there used to be something called the Yellow Pages, and that we might have such a directory stashed somewhere. Once that resource was located, we called the cinema and found that one of the three movies showing was worth the trip down the hill. But then we opted instead to watch one of the handful of DVDs we actually own, choosing Grapes of Wrath, a classic. Robin and I sat on the loveseat for two hours to watch the film on the 13 inch screen of a portable computer that was resting on my lap and angled just so that both of us could watch the movie.

On Monday a serviceman arrived as promised, and he found that the line bearing our internet service entered the building, wasps had nested and chewed through the covering on the wire, causing a short. Within thirty minutes all of the problems mentioned above ceased to exist and we were back on the road to complacency once again.

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It doesn’t take a lot to interest my particular form of ADD, but here’s an item that did.

The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet

7,572,792 views Jul 12, 2019This song was recorded from a German radio station called NDR between 1982 and 1984. Search (online) has been active since the early 2000s, when the song was made available online, and to this day no one has been able to give any accurate and correct information about the origin of the song. Facts like the band’s nationality and exact year of recording are unknown, and to this day, we have not gotten any information about the whereabouts of the authors, or even the correct title of the song. Apparently there is no alternative online register/archive of this song, since the only source we have of this song is from the cassette tape that Darius recorded from the radio. Recently, a Reddit user found that in the chorus of this song, a synth called Yamaha DX7 was used, there’s a preset called Syn-Lead 5, and it’s exactly the same sound they used in the song, the Yamaha DX7 was released in 1983, so we may have a basis that the song was probably recorded in 1984, or late 1983.

Wikipedia

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My Dad smoked cigarettes by the carload. At present day prices of those tombsticks, if he were alive today he wouldn’t have been able to afford to eat or buy new socks with what was left over after a trip to the tobacconist. They eventually were what killed him.

I seem to have adopted his habit, but with a twist.

My appreciation for incense of all sorts was recently rekindled, and now you can find them smoking in more than one spot in our little house at one time. Rarely the same scent, they are in essence competing with one another. I think it got started with that article I mentioned some time ago that spoke about the elderly having their own aroma, which was part of what makes nursing homes all smell the same.

The article grossed me out entirely, and I was momentarily overcome when I had to consider that the aging process was already making me shrink, slow down, wrinkle up, and forget everything but to breathe … and now to think that I was possibly identifiable in yet another way, even to people who couldn’t see me. It was too much.

Anyway, there are now incense burners in three of our rooms, and I am shopping for a fourth. If that dreaded aroma (which I don’t know that I have) can stand up to being beaten to death by patchouli and pine sap, I will concede defeat, but not until then.

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I think it is perfect that the Arizona Republicans have shown how far off the track they are by invoking an 1864 law against abortions. This should come as no surprise, not after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The law allows no exceptions but for preserving the life of the mother. This last term has proved itself in the past to be notoriously subject to interpretation in both directions.

The conservative court opened the tent flap to the circus which we now are watching play out. While lawyers and zealots play their games in courtroom after courtroom the list of women whose lives become immensely complicated grows longer.

To me the reliance on a court decision handed down one year before the Civil War was concluded is not as lunatic as the Alabama Supreme Court’s declaration that a fertilized ovum is a child.

When jurisprudence is not prudent at all, but radical and/or misinformed , all sorts of mischief is possible.

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Our elder cat, Poco, is now almost eighteen years old. His joints bother him quite a bit so chasing his dinner out in the long grass is a practice long forgotten. He probably also has a kitty form of dementia, causing him to make decisions much more slowly.

Usually he will come to wake me at around 1:00 AM, having come to the conclusion that his happiness absolutely requires one teaspoonful of food at that moment. He can be quite insistent about it all but I humor him (as I imagine Robin humors the other 84 year-old in the house) and give him what he wants, then return to my bed.

Poco, I love you but you’re an #*+#@$ idiot. Why wake me so early?

Is it early?

Of course it is, Can’t you see that?

See what?

The big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the ten. Plain as day.

Well, you see, I can’t tell time.

Wait …

No one ever bothered to teach me how.

But …

And I have no watch of my own to employ when darkness dims the clock’s face. So I guess when we start to allot blame around here we better think it over before we open our mouths, hadn’t we? Remember that famous quote of Abraham Lincoln’s:

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Did you have a watch picked out?

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Friday afternoon we took our boats to Chipeta Lake, a small body owned by water just on the south edge of town. A lazy and warm afternoon, no one else on the water but Robin, myself, and about sixty coots.

There were fishermen scattered along the banks, and we saw a few small trout landed.

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As members tell their stories at AA meetings, what is striking is the similar tales coming out of very different people. There are those who spent time in jails, lost jobs, lost families, lost health and years of their lives. Then there are those who say these things never happened to them, but either they could see them coming or they realized that they had been rolling dice all along and sooner or later the wrong number was going to come up.

There are scads of tales of driving cars when they absolutely shouldn’t have, ending with “I could have killed somebody, and it’s only by chance that I didn’t.” Then there was the night at a meeting when a visitor spoke up and said “I did kill somebody with my car when I was driving drunk.” Unlike all of the other recitations we’d heard or given, this guy had been someplace none of us had been, and we were stunned to silence by his admission. He was sober, he was straight, he was trying to rebuild a life he’d spent tearing down. And there was an amend he was never going to be able to make to a person he had not known.

A young man named Wyatt Flores comes out of Oklahoma and plays what is called country music. His few recordings have all the twang and guitars you could ask for, as well as the sincerity that new artists often have and which established ones do their damnedest to try to hold on to. Here’s one of his about that guy at our meeting who set a somber tone indeed.

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This whole drama of her year can be a teaching lesson. We are almost daily given instructions somewhere in the media about “letting go.” Most of these admonitions deal with past traumas or difficult choices we’ve made. But letting go applies just as well to happy times and for a very few, fame. If we have a great day, and expect that we will still have it tomorrow and the day after that, we will eventually run into one that is pretty ordinary. Followed in time by one that sucks. Good to practice letting go on all of those. What does that mean? It means recognizing that both good and bad times are transitory.

Everything changes, doesn’t it? Nothing is permanent. The mountain becomes the hill. A lake goes dry. The man I was when I wrote in this blog a week ago is not here any longer. Instead, you get a slightly different version of me, and that only for today.

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From The New Yorker

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Here are the last three signs from the El Arroyo restaurant in Austin TX. My favorite of all of them is the last one. It is dark. BTW, I think after abusing the privilege of using their signs in the blog, I should at least provide you with a link to their website, which is interesting in itself. They sell photobooks of their signs, with hundreds of pix like these in each one. (If you have a clever thought, they accept people sending them suggestions for new messages.) They sell caps and tee shirts.

And, surprise surprise, they prepare and sell food. Even ship it.

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Back in 1956 there was a best-selling novel entitled “The Last Angry Man.” I read it at that time and can remember very little about it, but then I can’t remember most of what I did yesterday. However, today I nominate Garry Trudeau for “Last Angry Man of the Last 50 Years.” Don’t bother looking it up, I just invented the category.

Trudeau will be 76 in July of this year, and I am grateful that he continues to share his sharp eye and his even sharper tongue with us. Personally, I think he nails it in this one. The thing is with Cluck, you don’t have to make stuff up. He speaks in satire of himself.

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In his book Awakening the Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das quotes from one of his teachers, a very wise and very old Tibetan Buddhist monk. When the man was asked to sum up his life one day, he answered: “One mistake after another.”

Gotta love a guy like that.

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We were nowhere near the “eclipse zone,” but looking out our front door at 1:32 MDT Monday we saw this and snapped the pic. A ring around the sun that contained color. The colors were like a smudged rainbow (red, orange, yellow) and are not shown as well in the photo as they were to the naked eye. (That blue-green dot is a lens artifact.)

I googled it and apparently this an uncommon event. It’s formed by the sun’s rays coursing through ice crystals in a cirrus cloud. No matter, even if it happened every day at 1:30 PM it would still be a lovely and fascinating thing to see. Of course, I am still a person who will pull the car over for a rainbow. Almost any rainbow. My knowledge of the heavens is probably as deep as the average Neanderthal’s, and I am easily amazed.

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From The New Yorker

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More juicy bits from El Arroyo restaurant

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With a windy weekend coming up, Robin and I decided to take advantage of a quieter and very sunny Thursday to break in the new kayaks. We chose to do it on Lake Ridgway, a lovely reservoir surrounded by mountains and only 25 minutes away. The water level was down about twenty feet, which is normal for this time of year, but this meant that the spot where we launched the boats was a nasty gravelly gumbo at the water’s edge.

Nearly losing our footgear in the mud, we scrambled onto the decks and took off. It turns out that our old paddling skills worked well with these very different boats. The new ones are not nearly as fast but quite stable and maneuverable. We cruised the western shoreline where there were still patches of snow. After spending an hour going out we turned around and almost at that moment the breeze picked up to provide more of a challenge on the return trip.

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I don’t often put jokes in here, and especially not those about seniors. Mostly they are unimaginative. Except maybe this one …

One Friday night a dapper 95 year old man walked into a bar and spotted an attractive woman seated alone, sipping on a whisky.
After sitting on the bar stool beside her, he turned and said, “Hello, beautiful. Do I come here often?”

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I admire David Brooks for his thoughtfulness, openness to change, and a healthy low level of ego in his scribbling. A conservative with a modern brain, fancy that.

But I never thought of him as humorous. However, here he is affirming my own pet theory that inanimate objects are far from lifeless and are often out to get us.

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The above clickbait photo and caption caught my eye. My first thought was that there is no state more landlocked than Colorado. Even if one gets into a boat on the mighty Colorado River you run out of water long before you reach the sea.

And then I thought:

• Being a senior-friendly cruise, will there be adequate Metamucil provided at the buffet? This could be a deal-breaker.
• How good, really, is the dolphin-watching in New Mexico?
• When the norovirus inevitably hits, will we be kept on the ship, or would we be issued one of those little camping trowels along with four squares of toilet paper and put over the side?

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From The New Yorker

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There has been talk for years about building, if not an exact replica, a new version of the ship Titanic. In the stratosphere where the rich and eccentric live, it actually might happen. It’s bit controversial, especially with those who lost relatives when the original went down.

Let’s say that a modern reimagining of what is maybe the most famous ocean liner of them all does make it to being tied up at a pier somewhere. Who will get on it? The only connections with the original are the name and in the mind of billionaire promoter Clive Palmer. For the sea-going traveler there might be the smallest bit of a frisson at they walked up the gangplank, but unless one is exceptionally weak-minded, that would be about it.

There would be no Rose and no Jack. Steerage would undoubtedly be cleaned up quite a lot from those old days when you jammed non-affluent people into very close contact with one another, and paid less attention than you should as to whether they actually had a lifeboat seat to count on if things went south.

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More signage from El Arroyo

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We were to have house guests this Easter. Amy and her family were to join us on Saturday, to return to Durango the following day. But weather has intervened. Just recently Robin was trapped for two extra days on a visit to Durango by snow in the mountains, and the reverse is exactly what threatened the Hurley family if they had followed through on the plan. So those plans have been scrapped.

The mountains are beautiful, often inspirational. Daily reminders of forces at work in Nature whose power we can barely imagine. Too big for my mind to really appreciate, no matter how much i might understand the science involved.

A crack in the earth appears, and one side of that gap raises up and slides over the other at a rate so slow that one human lifetime is not enough to track the progress without very sensitive instruments. But one day … voila! … the Rocky Mountains have risen. We come along and name them, and we use them as examples of solidity, changelessness. Which of course, they are not.

Before they were even fully formed they were already being worn away by wind and water. The Black Hills of South Dakota were once bigger than the Rockies, but now the tallest peak there is 7200 feet.Thinking about this whole process makes me feel … I don’t know … less of a big deal?

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This post is a day late. Not my fault. WordPress.com was having a bad day.

I was never a fan of Ronald Reagan’s. To me he was an affable guy propped up by the powers-that-be in his party. A likable frontman for a group of largely unlikable people.

So when he left office I did not miss him. When he was officially diagnosed with dementia a few years later the news came as no surprise. But this week I became aware of a public letter that he had written in 1994, when his condition was first made public. I thought it was particularly graceful, and link to it here.

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One place where I wasn’t surprised was this week’s park bench talk from a princess. I thought that she carried it off extremely well. Dignified, straightforward, without maudlin appeals. The lady has class. (Even though class is something of which I have never been accused, I know it when I see it.)

Times like this I am glad to be a nobody and thus no one cares what I choose to make public or not. Kate’s widely broadcasted message will probably not stop the attacks from the weak-minded and the cynical, who will continue their carping no matter what. But it may be enough for the rest of us, and hopefully this family can get the room and time they need and deserve.

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This morning I ran across one of those science pieces in the Times that just make my day. Where I learn something completely new and unexpected about the biology of our planet. Today I learned that there was such a thing as an olm.

They are so careful about not wasting energy that one member of the species was observed to not move for seven years. Okay, that last bit about not moving for many years … that’s not news. There are members of congress who do that, and fail to make any contribution to the public welfare for decades. Take former Senator Strom Thurmond, for example:

Retrospectively, a Senate aide stated that “for his last ten years, Thurmond didn’t know if he was on foot or on horseback”, while a 2020 New Yorker article stated that he was “widely known” by the end of his career to be non  compos mentis.

I guess that somehow I had expected more of salamanders.

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I’m getting better at avoiding clickbait. Early on in my internet life I really thought that I would eventually see the image that had attracted me. I know now that it never happens.

Clickbait consists of a never ending loop of advertisements with a handful of images sandwiched in there which bear only the slimmest relationship to what you were looking for. Let me give an example. Here is the headline:

My experience is that the image you wanted is never reached. Eventually you slump in your chair contemplating throwing that paperweight at the cat but catch yourself before you do something you’ll regret. The cat then relaxes and goes on with her self-assigned task of pulling your perfectly good wool carpeting to shreds.

However. Every once in a great while what looks like clickbait turns out to be a chest filled with treasure. Such was the case of a notice of a restaurant in Austin TX called El Arroyo. It is locally famous for having a clever sign out front, and a host of pictorial examples were provided.

I’ve captured some of them, and will post them here in the days to come.

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From The New Yorker

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Spitting rain/snow intermittently now for several days. It’s the sort of stuff that takes away just slightly from the glory of going out the front door. Yesterday we went for lunch with a friend who was leaving for a month’s trip and which involved getting into a warm and dry automobile, a short travel, then a quick dash into a warm and dry restaurant. Instead of charging up and down the hill down along the Uncompahgre River, we walked on the indoor track at the recreation center.

I can actually stand quite a bit of meteorologic hardship when it serves a purpose or there is nothing to do but bite the bullet. For instance, on our trips into the Boundary Waters, friend Rich and I had made a pact that if it was pouring rain on the day we were to enter the wilderness, we would rent a cabin instead and do day trips in between rain showers. But if we were already out there when the rain started, we would change nothing and proceed in the soggy state which was by now a fait accompli.

How to put it another way? I do not deliberately seek to be miserable, but can accept it with something approaching good grace when it is unavoidable. If I have to, I can come up with as stiff an upper lip as anybody. The operative words are “have to.”

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The British claim to have a laser that will shoot down drones and missiles for only $13.00 a shot. This compares rather favorably with the present approach using a defensive missile to down an offensive one at two million a pop.

This is all well and good but my question is can we scale it down so that it would be useful around the home? There are many vexing problems that could use a boost with technology.

For instance, a guided anti-mosquito laser that would continually search the air around a picnic table and blast each winged terrorist as it comes into range.

Or take the example of the children who have lately been ringing our doorbell and then running off before we can catch them and tie them up while we look for their parents. They do no harm, really, but I think a response more than just standing at the door like a dummy is called for, if only to add a little spice to the conflict.

I have also thought of installing a camera that would be activated by ringing the bell, and then posting the picture of their cherubic little faces on the community bulletin board by the mailboxes with the accompanying legend:

If anyone knows the identity of this little s**t of a bellringer, would they please have a talk with them?

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In both of these instances I would be upholding the time-honored tradition of the old geezer yelling “Get off my lawn.” I think that traditions serve a useful purpose, and I would be glad to add my contribution, now that I have worked myself up to that esteemed status.

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From The New Yorker

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Robin left on Tuesday for a planned two-day visit to check in with grandchildren, but has been trapped there by an inconvenient snowstorm in the mountains between Paradise and Durango. It’s not likely that travel will be possible until Saturday, and in our conversations I remind her repeatedly that she is safe, warm, with a bed to sleep on and food to eat where she is, and doing anything riskier than staying put should not be on the table.

She chafes at this advice, and resents being held back from what she wants to do by anything as ephemeral as the weather. But we both know well that the weather is absolutely indifferent to our wishes. It holds all the cards.

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From The New Yorker

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A couple of years ago Robin and I were drawn into the air fryer universe for two reasons. One is that we didn’t want to appear to be just one more set of out-of-date senior citizens. The second is that one day we Zoomed with grandchild Elsa and she told us that she owned one and found it to be useful. That was enough for us, so we went out and purchased the exact same model that she was using.

Before plunking down the cash, however, we did a small amount of web research on fryers, and were amused to find that each review started out like this: There is no need for you to buy an air fryer if you already have an oven of any kind anywhere in your house because that’s all it is, a teeny version of a convection oven.

We did have a perfectly usable oven of large capacity in our kitchen, but went right ahead and got an air fryer anyway because we (mostly me) desperately needed to feel au courant. Sometimes you just have to go out and waste money to feel … I don’t know … alive.

But this morning I came across this article about Best Buy having to recall a quarter of a million of their air fryers, which if the stories are accurate, are the appliances from hell. Imagine having an electrical device on your countertop that can overheat, and if it does, several interesting things could happen:

• the handles could melt
• the handles could fall off
• the glass viewing window could shatter and slash you
• it could catch fire

Sort of makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, no?

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Let me finish with something that might be a bit more uplifting. It is Sunday, after all. One of the pleasures of getting into a boat with my friend Bill H. is that if the fish are not biting every once in a while he will come at you out of the blue with a question so non sequitur that you are caught flat-footed. One such exchange went something like this:

Do you pray?

Yes, I do

I know that you are an agnostic and Buddhism is a non-theistic religion, so why do it?

Longish pause.

Because whenever I do, I feel better. Not at some unspecified future date, but right away.

Longer pause.

I don’t get it, really.

I don’t either. In Buddhism there is this kind of meditation called metta, where you say repeated phrases that are just like prayers, without the expectation that there is a deity that is listening.

Still don’t get it.

Believe I have a bite!

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Leonard Cohen wrote so many great songs that I don’t even try to pick a favorite. But if I did, If It Be Your Will would be a contender. And it is a prayer.

When asked in 1984 which song, “you wish you had written?” Leonard Cohen famously replied, “If It Be Your Will and I wrote it.”

There are loads of renditions available to choose from, but one of the most distinctive is by the performer Antony, and I offer it here.

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A metta meditation for you –

May you be safe
May you be happy
May you be well
May you live at ease

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It was one of those magical unscripted moments in life. Robin and I were taking our first brisk walk of the year on unpaved paths. We climbed up a rather steep section and voila! We were greeted by a flock of about twenty mountain bluebirds.

As we continued to move forward so did the birds, fluttering up and resettling a few yards further along time after time. After a few minutes they decided to try another part of the park and at that point took off without us.

Beautiful birds with that iridescent blue plumage shining in the sun. Natural magic.

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From The New Yorker

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I am presently fermenting mushrooms and cucumbers, and am about to start some sauerkraut. Fermentation is an interesting discipline with its own lore. For me it’s a new hobby but once it was a large scale mode of home food preservation.

As hobbies go, it’s a very inexpensive one to get into. A few jars, some salt, a handful of vegetables and off you go. Wait a few days and get a (so far) pleasant surprise.

Unlike the heady aromas when I used to brew my own beers, lacto-fermentation produces only the mildest of odors, all of which are compatible with life.

One of the websites promoting this process warns that if you ferment for long enough one day you will likely get a jar that has gone off, and the odor produced is “putrid.” That is a word that doesn’t even look good on paper.

I’ll keep you posted. BTW, the mushrooms were delicious.

[BTW – that image above of the beautiful vegetables in jars on a shelf was taken from the internet to illustrate an article on fermentation. They only look like that for a day or so and then they begin to lose that bright color and appear much more subdued and dull. But it makes for a better photo.]

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Watched yet another video clip of Caitlin Clark, as Iowa beat Nebraska for the Big Ten title. It is phenomenal what she has done for not only women’s basketball but for basketball in general.

When I was a teenager and watched tournament play I would afterwards be inspired to go out in the backyard, turn on the yard light, and play a game of 1 on 1 with my brother, imagining myself as playing in the game I had just watched.

That was, of course, men’s basketball. When I was a kid the women’s game was invisible.

Today if I were a teenager and had just watched Clark play I would be out there at that backyard hoop once again. Pretending I was sinking those dropback three pointers. Just like #22 did. It’s come to this. I have a girl for a hero.

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The movie Barbie didn’t win much at the Oscar ceremonies, but let’s face it, the Oscars are a self-promotional exercise for the movie industry and why should you and I care about who gets what honor? But Barbie will be forever (which means at least until next Tuesday) remembered by me for this short speech by America Ferrera’s character. Not being a woman, of course, brings into question my legitimacy in even making a comment, but if it isn’t the truth … well … I bought it as the truth.

I thought it encapsulated the impossibilities and contradictions inherent in being a woman in America very well. I thought to myself how exhausting that life would be. How much easier to be a man, which of course has its own set of impossibilities and contradictions, but that’s another story for another movie character to tell in a movie that hasn’t been made yet.

Kudos to Barbie for telling truths and making them look so good we almost don’t notice that coloring gut-wrenching pain and sorrow a vibrant pink doesn’t mean that they hurt one bit less.

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From The New Yorker

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Back when I began to explore Buddhism, more out of curiosity than anything else, there was a recurrent theme that attracted me very strongly, and it went this way:

Wanting to be taller, better-looking, smarter, more athletic, a better dancer, more successful, and more empathetic are all just stories that you are telling yourself and they make you miserable. There is no reality to these unhappy tales that you don’t give them. So why not stop?

Now that I think about it, the way was prepared for me by reading the book The Four Agreements. Same theme. We daily judge ourselves by the laws written in an imaginary book that are read into our heads by parents, schools, churches, and random others throughout our lives. Rules and laws that are 95% wrong, but that we agreed to way before we would ever have been able to defend ourselves against them.

The book asked the same question: So why not stop?

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For gardening 2024 Robin and I will probably focus on tomatoes and various greens, which have worked out the best for us. We’ve had poor luck with spinach, but some leaf lettuces and kale have done well. I read an article just the other day about the newest candidate for “superfood” status, which is collard greens. One of the original “soul foods.”

According to the advance notices, collards are so health-promoting that they need to be ingested with care and in small doses at first. One doesn’t want to take one’s body from sad sack to tower of strength in a few short minutes.

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We have two gardening problems here in Paradise that we didn’t experience in the Midwest. The first is that there isn’t adequate rainfall, and so we have to be very consistent in our watering. Consistency, you may recall my mentioning in the past, is not my strongest suit.

The second is that there’s way more sunshine than is needed. Enough that it sometimes causes visible physical damage to the fruits of the plants. We move containers from place to place, provide sunscreens, anything we can do to run interference for the growing things. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Some days are diamonds, some days are stones.

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From The New Yorker

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Several days a week I force myself to go to the rec center and accept the many small humiliations. Yesterday I waited at one station for a 220 pound muscle at least a foot taller than myself whose t-shirt read “Combat Ready” to finish his exercise. I know his height because the message on his shirt was at my eye level. His body rippled in a myriad of places where mine has only creases.

When my turn comes at such times it takes me several minutes to lower weight and resistance levels on the machine, down to numbers that I can deal with. Numbers, if you want to know the truth, that are sort of poignantly minute. But you do what you can, as Robin tells me over and over as she whips past me on the walking track with her titanium knees. Sometimes she goes by so quickly I can smell the odor of burning Vibram.

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Let’s suppose that late in this autumn we can be blessed to be in a country where a racist fascist sexist immoral deplorable sexual predator of a candidate is soundly defeated. So badly that it wakes up the scapegraces, cowards, and fools in his party and they begin to actually act like a GOP and make this defeated person (who may or may not be an unnatural color) irrelevant.

What is obvious that even if we enter a happy day without this demented person in it there are millions of his followers who are filled with fear. Of what? Could be social change. Could be job insecurity. Could be that they really believe that there are Marxist hordes at our gates and only John Wayne Donald Cluck can keep them from overrunning the country?

Even if Cluck is exiled (0h joy, oh rapture), those millions are still here and we need to find the way to live with and work alongside one another. If not as soulmates, at least as countrymen.

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From The New Yorker

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One last thing this morning. I think that Mr. Biden nailed it on Thursday night. I especially liked when he called out the Supremes for downing Roe v. Wade. The expressions of the court’s members who were present looked like they were trying to swallow millipedes as the President spoke.

I haven’t watched a state of the union speech for years, but I found myself turning on the television with a heart full of apprehensions while waiting for the President to show up.

After the first five minutes of the speech I began to relax. This was not a doddering old fool in front of us, but a knowledgeable political warrior with way more experience than the majority of his listeners, punching hard at his opposition. And he was singing a song I longed to hear.

I am reassured. Count me in.

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Lastly, do not call me, text me, or send me an email that requires a brisk response Sunday evening . I am going to watch the Oscar ceremonies and will not acknowledge any interruptions.

I know it’s a waste of several precious hours of my life but do I care a jot, tittle, atom, or whit? I do not.

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For the longest time I have had an interest in fermented food. Of all sorts. In fact, one could say that I pursued my interest in wine, beer, and distilled beverages (which all involve fermentation) with more vigor than was good for me, and could have spared myself an embarrassment or two by being less of a fan.

But I also like sauerkraut, buttermilk, fermented pickles of all types, kefir, kombucha, tempeh, yogurt, kimchi, miso, and apple cider vinegar. And cheese. OMG – cheese!

So far neither my doctor nor the police department have shown any interest in how much I consume of this latter group of foods, which is a good thing.

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There is a remarkable woman … hold on there … A remarkable woman? … let me rephrase that. Among the many remarkable women that I have met and never met, there is one that I would like to mention this morning, and her name is Jennifer Berezan.

I was introduced to her work by a fellow AA member quite a while ago, when he loaned me a copy of her album “Returning.” It is basically a meditative song/chant that lasts the entire album, and is a beautiful thing for someone to have added to the world. Someone put the entire 52 minute recording on YouTube.

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As if that weren’t enough, Ms. Berezan put together a concert of yet another chant “In These Arms,” which is two hours long and when you have finished watching it, you have not subtracted those two hours from your life but added something special, I think. The concert is on YouTube along with some commercial interruptions.

It is a thing of joy, and the meditation that underlies the entire performance is one of lovingkindness, or metta. You’re all smart people, you can take it from there.

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Perhaps my enthusiasm has overwhelmed you, and spending hours listening to/watching someone you never heard of before seems like a bit much. Here is a three-minute version of “Song For All Beings: In These Arms”

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So far this year in Paradise we have had two kinds of days with regard to air flow. Either the air is still or it moves down the street at 40 mph or more, causing objects that belong to Robin and I to relocate into the yards of neighbors east of us. Occasionally they just vanish altogether.

Today is one of the breezy ones.

The cats hate windy days. They will stick their heads halfway through the pet door to sample the weather, and a wind velocity more than 15 mph will spin them right around and back into the house. I sympathize. If my nose was only 6 inches off the ground, I would do the same.

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But it bothered me.

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I learned this morning that our Supreme Court has revealed that they couldn’t identify an insurrection if it bit them on their robe-covered behinds.

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Once again we have learned that the only Supremes you can count on to do the right thing have Diana Ross singing lead.

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I look back fondly on yesterday, when the wind blew in up to 40 mph gusts, peppering our eyeballs with dirt and sand if we were unwise enough to venture outdoors. What?, you say. Fondly? How odd!

Let me finish. I can say that only because today the wind is still blowing but now it is colder and a sleety rain is falling as well. It is all very un-Paradisic.

So I sit looking out the window with my suite of discomforts to accompany me. A couple of weeks ago I caused injury to my lower back somehow, perhaps by picking up a dropped napkin or thinking an errant thought. You know how those things happen. You do nothing that you don’t do every single day but now you are suddenly a patient and can take care of yourself only if you don’t have to bend over, cough, or laugh.

So today I watch the rain and whine to Robin who is finding many things to do that keep her away from home just to get that annoying nnyyaaaahhhh sound out of her ears. I am popping my ibuprofen like a good boy, and Robin buzzes my complaining areas with a handheld electronic pounding device that could be used to drive fenceposts into soft ground.

One sunny day these discomforts will be gone, and my outlook on life will return to its baseline, which is a moderate level of crankiness.

Nothing stays the same. Everything changes. I have it on the best authority.

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From The New Yorker

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Moderator: Gentlemen, if you are ready then let’s begin.

Trump: I’m ready but you better wake up Joe, I think he’s nodded off

Biden: I’m more awake than you’ll ever be, you spray-painted ninny

Trump: Easy Joe, you might have a big stroke and need to be carried off

Biden: Remember your wife’s name yet, Donnie boy?

Moderator: Gentlemen! Let’s get back to debating, shall we?

Trump: Look, he’s drooling!

Biden: His Depends needs changing!

Trump: I don’t need any help down there

Biden: That’s not what Stormy Daniels said

Moderator: This your last warning. Obey the rules or we’ll shut this thing right down

Trump: I didn’t want to come anyway

Biden: Hard getting away from the “Home,” is it?

Trump: Pedophile!

Biden: Jackass!

Trump: Senile old fool!

Biden: Peckerwood!

Ad infinitum, ad nauseam

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Each year I reach a point where I am so fed up with winter that I begin to resent all that I have to do to stay alive outdoors. And that happens even in this mild climate that the Uncompaghre Valley provides. I want to put away the puffy jackets and the flannel shirts and parkas and wear shorts and camp out and … whatever.

I’m at that place this morning.

It’s a juvenile thing, I know, but I don’t give a flying hoot if it is. I find that being juvenile at this age is much easier for two reasons.

One is that my acne hasn’t come back because of the behavior. The other is that younger citizens have such low expectations where seniors are concerned that acting childish is tolerated as long as you are continent.

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From The New Yorker

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The above New Yorker cartoon uses a coarse four-letter word, which is highly unusual for this genteel magazine. Of course it’s precisely the shock value of the word that makes it funny.

The New Yorker can be risqué, but (until now) it was nevah, evah coarse.

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A tale of two jalapeños found next to one another in the same bin at City Market. Exactly the same length and firmness and color. Identical twins.

My habit when cooking with chiles is to take a very small bite at the tip to assess how hot this particular pepper is. They can vary quite a bit in ferocity, and I like to know what I’m dealing with in order to avoid the spectacle of our guests dashing from the dining table to the closest water faucet with those horrified looks on their faces.

I took that small bite of one of these and it immediately tried to burn my lips away, destroy my oral cavity, and somewhere I’m sure that I could hear the concrete slab over my grave being lifted into receiving mode. I applied various cooling agents and nostrums and within half an hour the drama was behind me.

It was the hottest chile I’d ever tasted.

It was the hottest anything I’d ever tasted.

An hour later and with much trepidation I tried the tiniest nip from the second jalapeño. It was mild enough that I could have eaten it like an apple.

My problem, of course, is that now I know that there is yet one more thing out there that wants to kill me. Or worse, something that might ruin the dish that I was preparing. And the only way that I can see to sort it out is to put my mouth on the front line as I have done for years.

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Robin and I share an appreciation for beans here at Basecamp. They have so many things going for them and very few drawbacks. You could live on just beans and rice. You might not want to, but you could.

Good things about beans

• So many varieties
• Economy
• Versatility
• Availability
• Easy storage
• Excellent nutritional values

Less good things about beans

• Flatulence
• Bad breath (see citation below)
• Fewer social invitations as a result of the first two items in this list

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When you block a fart from escaping, some of the gas can pass through your gut wall and be reabsorbed into your bloodstream. From there, it can end up being exhaled through your lungs, coming out of your mouth via exhaling.

Healthline

(Reading this short quote changed my way of looking at the world. To learn at my stage of life that not all halitosis is due to improper flossing was a mind bender and makes the thought of getting together in large groups even less appealing .)

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From The New Yorker

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Below is a great recipe for preparing pinto beans for those who are into pressure-cooking. Find the original recipe at From Valerie’s Kitchen

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From The New Yorker

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Alright, that’s about enough of this. Too silly by half.

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I took that to mean that there were fish in the pool, and I flailed about in the water for 15 minutes before I yielded the space to the heron and made my way on down the river.

By the time I got back to my car it was so dark I had to use the interior lights to take down my Tenkara rod and stow it away. I had only one small bite that evening and no fish caught. But that line of bright orange clouds against a blue-green twilight sky and that grand-looking bird fishing nearby. Ay ay ay, too good … too good.

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In 1974 I moved my family to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to a small town named Hancock. We loved it there, but by 1980 it was obvious that if I was going to help my kids with college expenses down the road, I was going to have to work in a different part of the country. My pediatric practice in the U.P. was nearly 75% Medicaid, and without boring you with a lecture on medical economics, that is a number that does not equate with survival. It means that you go broke slowly but unrelentingly.

But while we lived there, we thrived in other ways. For me personally, the forests and lakes and craggy shorelines were the sort of stuff that were manna for my soul. I didn’t even mind the fact that five months of the year my head couldn’t be seen above the snowdrifts. Well, that’s not exactly true … but it was and is a special place.

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I am still processing Alexei Navalny’s death. He joins the heroes in my personal pantheon, along with folks like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Thich Nhat Hanh, Harriet Tubman, Crazy Horse … it’s an ever- growing list. All of them people whose courage made me feel both large at sharing humanity with them and small at my own performances.

Not all of my heroes had to die to make it to the list. When I worked at the county hospital in Buffalo NY there were the grandmothers who brought babies in for well-child checks and immunizations and who had long journeys on buses involving the need to transfer twice to get to the clinic. These women were raising those kids at a time in their lives when they might have been slowing down and enjoying the shade of oak trees or putting up preserves from their gardens. Those buses traveled from and through some of the rougher neighborhoods in Buffalo, but the women came anyway and never missed an appointment.

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Thursday a Democratic candidate for the US House stopped in Montrose for what was billed as a “meet and greet.” He was here for about an hour and a half and then zoomed off to his next event in another town nearby.

His name is Adam Frisch, he’s a well-heeled fellow from Aspen, and he seemed awfully sensible. Not exciting, but sensible. He is what is described as a centrist Democrat which means you couldn’t get a feather between him and a centrist Republican, back in the day that there were centrist Republicans. He calls himself a conservative which means that every twelfth word in his short speech was “business.”

But that’s all okay with me at this point, since most of what I’ve been hearing from nthe world of politics recently comes from people who actually should be in padded cells for their own good. And ours.

To listen to someone who speaks in complete sentences with nouns and verbs and everything was a real treat. Frisch was supposed to be running against the Happy Fondler from Rifle CO, but she smelled a loss coming her way and switched districts to try to avoid it.

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Robin and I took a day trip this week to Crested Butte, which is a smallish ski town about a two hour drive from Paradise. We like CB a lot. Of course it is a touristy village, but it is unusual in that it is still quaint. Lots of pastel-painted buildings, unshoveled sidewalks, a nice little bookshop. There is a barn-like pizza joint called The Secret Stash that serves up excellent pies, and which we never miss on our trips there.

Before it became a tourist town, Crested Butte had a strong mining and ranching history, with its own versions of the cattlemen vs. the sheepherder tales. Most of those stories went like this: cattlemen occupy an area of the valley, sheepmen move in with 1500 sheep, cattlemen put on masks to ride out one night and massacre those 1500 sheep, sheepherder leaves town.

Summers there is grand hiking and sight-seeing, and some of the very best alpine wildflower viewing there is. Good place to visit, wouldn’t necessarily want to live there.

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Monday morning I woke up early and in a mood, and sitting there in the dark I thought: I’m through with writing this blog, I’m going to sign off on the damned thing and give the world a break. I’m a silly person and it is a silly exercise and what’s the point?

I even had a quote from a Cole Porter song to finish up with: It was great fun, but it was just one of those things.

And then I read what was basically an obituary of Alexei Navalny, a man who had extraordinary courage. Who rolled the dice in a very dangerous game, standing in for everyone who believes that autocracy and tyranny must be resisted wherever they spring up.

I thought – is this the time to quit? Do we need fewer voices raised in that struggle or more of them? Please don’t think for a moment that I am comparing myself and what I do with Mr. Navalny and his work. He roared while I pule. He sacrificed all and died in a prison above the Arctic Circle, while I spend a few minutes a day in a warm room with a cup of coffee and a computer.

Nope, I thought, what I do may be trivial but I can see at least two reasons to continue.

• There might be somebody out there who needs encouragement in their own endeavors and can take heart from reading this and say to themselves – By god, I can do better than this guy without even trying – and who will then pick up the banner and carry it higher and better than I ever did.
• There might be some hard-core fascist out there who accidentally stumbles onto this blog and by the time they have read a few lines and realized their error their heartburn has already acted up.

I therefore resolved to continue my whimpering.

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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

Mark Twain

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On Monday afternoon the February temperature was 62 degrees. I dug out the trusty bicycle and took off for enough of a ride that I regretted it for the last two miles coming home, as the part of me that was in contact with the saddle was getting quite tender … almost to the point of needing to stand up to pedal. Those first rides in the Spring can be a caution.

Out of town a few miles I spotted a golden eagle at the top of a bare tree, with the late afternoon sun bringing out the gold and red in its feathers. These photos are not my own, as I was not expecting such an opportunity and was without a camera, but that’s how it looked. Magnificent bird.

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Liz Cheney has coined a phrase that actually might stick when she refers to the “Putin wing” of the GOP. These people are challenging us to call them out and deal with them, with their behavior having crossed to the wrong side of the line separating out those “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” from the rest of us.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Arabian Proverb

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Periodically, I feel the need to publish this photograph, taken in 1944, just to show my readers what they are dealing with. The arrow points to myself, standing in the middle of the Second Avenue Gang, who were heavily involved in cod liver oil trafficking and neighborhood espionage.

You deserve to know everything.

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One of the least reassuring news items I’ve come across this week showed up on CNN online early Wednesday morning.

A European Space Agency satellite is expected to reenter and largely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday morning.

CNN Online

This first quotation is only mildly alarming, with only the word “largely” to wonder about.

“As the spacecraft’s reentry is ‘natural’, without the possibility to perform manoeuvers, it is impossible to know exactly where and when it will reenter the atmosphere and begin to burn up,” according to a statement from the agency.

CNN Online

Still no need to panic, I thought.

The ERS-2 satellite has an estimated mass of 5,057 pounds (2,294 kilograms) after depleting its fuel, making it similar in size to other space debris that reenters Earth’s atmosphere every week or so, according to the agency.

CNN Online

Wait … 5,000 pounds? “Largely” burning up? They don’t know when or where it will come to earth? This happens every week?

At around 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, the satellite is expected to break apart and the majority of the fragments will burn up in the atmosphere. The agency said that some fragments could reach the planet’s surface, but they won’t contain any harmful substances and will most likely fall into the ocean.

CNN Online

“Some fragments could reach the planet’s surface”? “Most likely fall into the ocean”? Does anyone see a pattern of quibbling here? I don’t think that words like “largely” and “could” and “most likely” belong anywhere near a news item about 5,000 pound things falling from the sky. Especially when even a doorknob falling from that height and onto your cranium would at a minimum make you forget where you put your car keys, perhaps forever.

Personally, I think that the people who put that up there should be a bit more responsible. We have seen that when space agencies want to know where something is going to land so they can meet it and get the pilot out, they can do that quite well. What this article is talking about is nothing more than space littering and someone being awfully careless, if you get my drift. In Colorado, if I toss a soda can out the window of my car, I can be fined from $20-$500. If the highway patrol saw me dumping out an ERS-2, the fine would almost surely be even higher.

All I know is that I’m not going outdoors until Thursday, and even then I’m going to start wearing my bicycle helmet on all such occasions. I will do that until someone in authority tells me that all of the large chunks of crap out there in space have already fallen to earth. Can one really be too careful? Really?

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I wouldn’t consider myself a hard-core Frank Sinatra fan, only buying a couple of his albums back when that was what one did in order to listen to music at home. But there are some of his songs that enriched my young adult existence. I bonded with them and I can’t imagine anyone singing them better.

It almost goes without saying that my favorite of his albums would be a collection of songs of longing. Music well-suited to someone with a melancholic disposition. A soundtrack for suffering with themes like Oh I’m so lonely or I’ve just been dumped again or Where is my perfect person? … you know the drill.

Ay ay ay … just thinking about it I can hear a certain twenty-ish angst-filled man pacing in a basement apartment somewhere in my memory. Memories of nights with this record on a turntable, on repeat play.

Maybe I am a fan after all … Type 2.b, perhaps.

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From The New Yorker archives

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The elderly patient chuckles: Doctor, when you are my age everything is trying to kill you. The cars of impatient drivers leap at you at crosswalks. Every new infectious disease that comes to town has your name at the top of its list. All of your organs are hovering on that thin line between just being able to do their job and failing. Your heart and your brain are filled with plaqued-up and narrowed blood vessels that could plug up at any minute and that will be the end of your story.

All of us run a gauntlet between dangerous things all of our lives, but when you get very old, you slow down.You slow down, but those dangerous things do not lose one bit of their vitality. They are just as swift as ever, which means that the odds of one of them catching you go up rather steeply.

So I know that I should have come in earlier and I am grateful that what I have is something you can treat. But it was never the only threat out there I had to worry about. Only one of many.

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From The New Yorker archives

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David Brooks is a thoughtful man, which makes him quite an outlier in today’s raucous social and political scene. He’s also an aging white male, which positively marks him as someone to be ignored, because that makes him a member of a group that is being held responsible for everything that is bad in the world.

But let’s keep our minds open, shall we, and allow for the possibility that this old dude might say something worth thinking about.

More of us have to embrace an idea, a way of thinking that is fundamental to being a citizen in a democracy. That idea is known as value pluralism. It’s most associated with the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and is based on the premise that the world doesn’t fit neatly together. We all want to pursue a variety of goods, but unfortunately, these goods can be in tension with one another. For example, we may want to use government to make society more equal, but if we do, we’ll have to expand state power so much that it will impinge on some people’s freedom, which is a good we also believe in. … these kinds of tensions are common in our political lives: loyalty to a particular community versus universal solidarity with all humankind; respect for authority versus individual autonomy; social progress versus social stability

Brooks, David: The Cure For What Ails Our Democracy

So why would I even bother to read his Op/Ed and recommend it to you? Well, there are several reasons, actually.

• He’s way smarter than I am
• He loves this hot mess of a country
• He refuses to make each social or policy question a matter of black vs. white, but finds the world to be everywhere shaded, and no one has all the truth on their side
• When on a televised panel he is invariably polite and respectful to everyone else, even the dolts
• He never yells at other panelists, and lets them finish their thoughts before offering his own

It’s difficult to see how we could get to the place he describes, but I agree with him that it is essential if we are to begin to get out of this poisonous stew we’re in.

I really hate to admit that, because it will mean that I have to lighten up on my strong tendency to use sarcasm and my assumption that I have always been and will always be right about everything … but, hey, if it means that the noise quiets down … might be worth it.

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Just finished a massive housekeeping chore. I was running out of storage space on WordPress with hundreds of posts going back six years or so. Those tunes and photos and videos took up a bit of room. The next step would have been to move up to what was essentially a commercial-sized cloud parking area.

Time had caught up with me because I didn’t follow my own prescribed path. When I originally thought about writing this thing, my idea was to keep it short and sweet, and delete old posts periodically. Even in my most narcissistic moments I realized that there was nothing I was going to say that was worth preserving for very long. Truth is, I traffic in ephemera. Each blog entry is a pebble dropped into a pond which causes a small ripple that spreads out and eventually disappears.

So over the past several days I took down about 500 old posts and everything that went with them as I repeatedly pressed the delete key. Needed to be done.

I feel ten pounds lighter.

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Native Americans have meaningful descriptive ways of naming full moons. The Moon of Popping Trees, for instance was the frigid December of 1890, when nearly 300 Lakota people were massacred by the U.S. Army at Wounded Knee. The “popping” was of frozen branches snapping off from bare trees.

February has been called the Snow Moon because it is the coldest and snowiest. During my student years at the University of Minnesota February could have been named the Moon of People Flying, because those gray days, frigid temperatures, and fear of spot quizzes would occasionally gang up on a sensitive student and they would jump from the old Washington Avenue Bridge into the dark cold water of the Mississippi River.

Now I had my down days while in college, but there was never a moment when an impromptu winter swim in Ol’ Man River seemed like a good idea to me. Because I knew with a certainty rarely granted to human beings that I would survive the jump and spend the last several minutes of my life astronomically more uncomfortable than I had ever been and I simply wasn’t having that.

Even when the winter dragged on and my car wouldn’t start (again!) and the pipes froze in my cheap apartment and the entire ancient plaster ceiling in the bedroom fell onto my bed and a 9/11-style mushroom cloud of dirt and asbestos and mouse poop and squirrel chewings going back to 1920 ballooned out through the bedroom door into the living room. Not even then.

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From The New Yorker

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I find YouTube to be a great resource, although these days I read a lot of sniping and sneering about it. But how else would we doofuses of the world learn how to take a bathroom drain apart to clean it? Or to properly sharpen a buzz-saw blade? Or jailbreak our iPhones? 

I now have thousands of bits of information and scores of possibly useful skills as arrows in my quiver that I did not have before YouTube came along. But be warned – there is nothing more dangerous than a half-educated man with a cordless drill in his hand.

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(In the unlikely event that my heart softened and I opened my door to him, gave him dry clothes and a cup of hot coffee … even though I knew how … I would still not make him those scrambled eggs. Boundaries, my friends, boundaries.)

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In the above scenario, if it were Mr. Cluck dripping on my doorstep, I would not even go that far. I might simply turn off the porch light and call the police to report a waterlogged trespasser. Might even sic the cat on ‘im.

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From The New Yorker

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Interesting article in the Times of New York on Monday about the company Patagonia, which makes excellent outdoor apparel that I can only afford when it is seriously on sale. I was given a Patagonia fleece pullover fifteen years ago that is cut better, sewn better, is made of better material, has a better zipper, and will probably outlive me. In addition, they have one of the best guarantees out there.

Patagonia will repair all our gear, covered by our Ironclad Guarantee, free-of-charge. Once your repair is complete, we’ll ship your item back to you with the return shipping costs covered by us. Please note, if your garment is not sent in freshly washed, you may incur a laundering fee.

Patagonia advertising blurb

(That last sentence tells me that some unpleasantly fragrant garments must have been shipped to them in the past, and they are guarding the sensibilities of their employees.)

What’s more, the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, is a promoter of simple fly fishing (Tenkara), and therefore a man after my own heart. He even wrote a book about it.

But that’s not the story the Times is talking about. That story is what they are doing with their profits, and that is to donate to projects and people that are working to better the environment. Good practice, that.

(BTW, that little jacket Yvon is wearing retails for $399.00. The waders are $699.00. I would have to be a much better fisherman to think that I needed to be outfitted in such raiment. I am much more the $100 angler than the $1000 version.)

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One of the reasons comedians do as well as they do is because we humans are such a silly lot, and often all they have to do is report on our behavior. YouTube’s algorithms served up this gentleman last Monday morning so I could start the day with a couple of smiles, and I share him with you. 

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I have a fondness for Steve Earle’s music. And since he’s quite a bit left of center politically, I admire much of his politics as well.

But there was a period in his life when drugs threatened his existence. Fortunately that hairy time is long behind him. While those addictions were active he put out a song called Copperhead Road, which is a fave of mine, and his biggest hit.

It’s the story of a young man who returned from his tours in Viet Nam to take up the family moonshining business and plans to add the illegal growing of marijuana to his portfolio.

In 1988 he was invited to do the song on the Letterman show, and a video of that performance is below. It is remarkable for two things.

One, it sounds nearly as crisp as the studio version. It is a fine rock and roll performance, with his band dressed in a motley collection of garments and everyone looking like they just got out of bed.

Two, you need to take a look at his eyes. His gaze is that of a person who is not quite in the same universe you are. Definitely not the look of a man to whom you would lend your pickup for the weekend or put out the red carpet for if he wanted to date your daughter.

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On Thursday the Supremes took up the case of Benedict Cluck’s incitement of an insurrection, and we get to watch history being made once more. One way or another.

Some people say that Mr. Cluck is a no-good lying sack of doo-doo, and that his continued existence is a complete waste of the planet’s oxygen, but I partially disagree. When, I ask you, have we had a better education in our form of government, as he has continually exploited its weaknesses at the same time he was butting his head against its strengths?

Now I happen to presently be a resident of the great state of Colorado, which has taken this matter to the Supreme Court. Some people say that it shouldn’t have been done, and that we should “leave it to the voters.” I think that’s a crock, to borrow a phrase.

When people are accused of crimes, we don’t have elections to decide whether they are guilty or not, we have trials. (Even so, there was a recent editorial on CNN which makes the case that we’ve already had a trial, where majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives already declared that there had been an insurrection and that Cluck incited it.)

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From The New Yorker Archives

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The 1928 Republican Convention opened with a prayer. If the Lord can see His way clear to bless the Republican Party the way it’s been carrying on, then the rest of us ought to get it without even asking.

Will Rogers

That line fits so well with today’s news it is uncanny.

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Steve tells stories in the best traditions of that genre. His voice has been described as the place where Tom Waits meets Hank Williams. And this is only my personal opinion, but I think he looks exactly how a serious socialist/activist/troubador oughta look.

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In the darkest hour of the longest night
If it was in my power I’d step into the light
Candles on the altar, penny in your shoe
Walk upon the water – transcendental blues.

Happy ever after ’til the day you die
Careful what you ask for, you don’t know ’til you try
Hands are in your pockets, starin’ at your shoes
Wishin’ you could stop it – transcendental blues.

If I had it my way, everything would change
Out here on this highway the rules are still the same
Back roads never carry you where you want ’em to
They leave you standin’ there with them ol’
Transcendental Blues.

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From The New Yorker Archives

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Most of my life I have been out of the loop. It explains a lot of things about me, nearly all of which aren’t interesting in the slightest, not even to me. But in my defense, at least I used to know where the loop was. That is no longer true. For example, I offer the following.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. I have never watched a Super Bowl, which makes me such a foreigner in my own country that I probably should carry a green card. Most Americans will line up in front of their television sets today to watch a group of highly paid athletes who are the playthings of a large group of billionaires run out the clock in a brutish game where the already scarred brains of many of those athletes will be further damaged by their participation on that very day. 

Next year or the year after we will read headlines involving some of these men as they lose control of their lives and minds and commit serious crimes. They may murder their wives or their girlfriends or other men after what might have been small arguments or no argument at all. Some will even murder themselves to escape their mental torment.

There are no crowds present at the commission of those crimes, but I am pretty certain that if they were being streamed, there are many who would purchase tickets for the event. And there would be commercials, you can bet on it.

This year I have read that commercial time during the big game costs 7 million dollars for a 30 second slot. They are yet another arena for billionaires to compete with one another.

Advertising agencies put out the best they can imagine for a “family” audience, and sometimes these are quite clever. The granddaddy of them all, the one that took commercials to a whole ‘nother level, took place 40 years ago in 1984.

And they wanted to have its coming out party be something special, so they made a commercial which was run only once, at Super Bowl XVIII. Here it is.

You can see that there is something strange about this commercial. You never see the product. They don’t even tell you what it is. And yet by the midsummer of 1984 I owned a Macintosh and so did millions of others. The Times of New York had a short piece dealing with the creation of the ad in Saturday’s edition.

I don’t know how many Macs I have purchased since 1984, but it’s a bunch. This blog is created on a MacBookPro which is now six years old, making it a dotard in the world of technology. It is not the biggest nor the fastest computer and it has a few highly annoying quirks, but I still love it when it does what I want it to do.

As an example of the threadbare Buddhist that I am, I cling to my Mac and thus it can make me suffer whenever it desires.

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So much this week about the two old men running for president. Mostly negative. Although CNN did round up a few older voters to ask what they thought about it. One lady of a very certain age said “Well I’m eighty and I’m on our town council and I take college courses for credit …” as proof that not every octogenarian is drooling continuously and couldn’t find their feet without a guide.

Proves nothing. In fact, call me callous, but I think the demands of being POTUS might exceed those of a small town council member. For all of the glaring differences in their politics, what Biden and Cluck share is clear evidence of the significant wear and tear that time can bring about.

For them to pretend that it isn’t happening is neither reassuring nor evidence of good judgment on their parts.

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There I was, washing up at the kitchen sink and looking out the window into the back yard. Six feet away from my nose, perched pertly on a bare branch of the ash tree, was a bird I had never seen before. It was blue and a little bigger than a robin. Suddenly there was another one in the tree, and another, and soon there were ten of them hopping from branch to branch. I had time to call Robin over to see them and marvel along with me before the whole bunch grew bored with our tree and moved next door to try the neighbor’s.

There were enough identifiers present, and I had such a good long look at these beauties, that I was easily able to identify them as Woodhouse’s Scrub Jays using the Sibley Guide to Birds of Western North America.

I consider myself a “birder,” even though I recognize that there is a great difference between me and the sort of person who deliberately plans their vacation around some spot on the globe where they hope to see a new bird species. I am the sort of birder (Type D) who, if he spots a bird he’s never seen before while reclining in a hammock with an iced tea nearby, gets excited and looks it up.

• Type A birder: will drop a baby they are carrying in order to grab their binoculars to identify a bird in the vicinity
• Type B birder: will plan a vacation trip to see a chestnut-sided tomtit and be depressed for months if they don’t find one
• Type C birder: never leaves the house without binoculars and a copy of Sibley, even if only going across the street to buy milk for supper
• Type D birder: as above
• Type E birder: regards all bird species as pests who might poop on their BMW. Cannot tell a crow from a peacock and doesn’t care.

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There are probably thousands of great books and videos about birds that I’ve never seen, but one of the most beautiful that I have viewed so far is the documentary Winged Migration. It is extraordinary. I found an extended preview for you to watch when you have the time, and if it whets your appetite for more, Prime Video will let you watch the entire film for the cheap cheap price of $3.99. 

Now if you rent it, and are anything above a Type E – your day will be improved and your life’s schema broadened for less than four bucks. That, compadres, is a banner deal.

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It was my fifth grade teacher, Miss Behrens, who turned me on to watching birds. She brought her copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America to class for us to look at, with its dramatic illustrations. I pored over that book, and still am drawn to the art even though it has come under some fire over the years because the birds were painted in postures at times that were inaccurate, and might have not even have been achievable in life.

(Audubon is said to have killed his subjects, then posed them. A common practice for naturalists of the day)

In spite of these criticisms if I were to find a copy of that big book on my coffee table later today, I wouldn’t be much good for anything else for the next several hours as I slowly turned the pages.

More recently Mr. Audubon’s name has stirred up yet another controversy when it became more widely known that he had been a slave owner and slave trader, and some of his writings have been described as racist. Although several chapters of the Audubon Society around the country have changed their names to avoid being associated in any way with these abhorrent practices, the national organization has retained the name Audubon, as has our local chapter here in Paradise.

Personally, I think a name change is probably inevitable and it would be good thing for the organization to go on and get it done.

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I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but the grand old disease of syphilis is back in style once again. It was never completely eliminated, but the incidence was low enough that a graybeard like myself only saw one case in his professional lifetime.

The CDC statistics tell the story pretty well, I think. There were 5,979 cases in the USA in 2000, and 133,945 cases in 2020. A 2,140% increase!

Some historians believe that it was Christopher Columbus’ Crew that brought syphilis back with them to Europe, since prior to his voyages it had been a disease only of the Western Hemisphere. What is certain is that when it hit Europe, every country blamed it on a neighbor, especially one they might have had hostile relations with.

So, the inhabitants of today’s Italy, Germany and United Kingdom named syphilis ‘the French disease’, the French named it ‘the Neapolitan disease’, the Russians assigned the name of ‘Polish disease’, the Polish called it ‘the German disease’, The Danish, the Portuguese and the inhabitants of Northern Africa named it ‘the Spanish/Castilian disease’ and the Turks coined the term ‘Christian disease’. Moreover, in Northern India, the Muslims blamed the Hindu for the outbreak of the affliction. However, the Hindu blamed the Muslims and in the end everyone blamed the Europeans.

NIH

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