Author: jono55

The numbers of electric bikes continue to increase here in Paradise. Most of them are being piloted by people with gray hair. My guess this is because their combination of fun and utility is attractive to seasoned humans.

They can now ride farther, faster, and the hills are largely flattened out. The other day I saw a young mom on an e-cargo bike with two smiling kids buckled in behind her. Sensible and fun all at once. Most of our days being rainless also means more riding hours are available.

Electric bikes are not without problems. Some of the cheaper models come with batteries that can explode and set buildings on fire. One of our neighbors bought a beautiful electric mountain bike, and for a while everything was great. She used it around town and could take it into the hills if she wanted to. Then some wrist and forearm issues developed and pretty soon she wasn’t riding at all. Those longer hours in the saddle gave her overuse injuries.

The number of new brands is bewildering. The old line manufacturers (Trek, Specialized, Giant, Cannondale, etc.) offer electric models, but here in Montrose they are outnumbered by machines made by companies I never heard of before.

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As I write this, sitting in a relatively cool and desert-dry backyard in Colorado, Robin is sweltering in humid California under the developing heat dome. The edges of that unpleasant heavenly structure will be here soon. So I bask while basking is possible.

For my lazing-about soundtrack I am listening to the music of the Greek electronic composer Vangelis. Beautiful stuff and a bit of a balm for a basker. I first became a fan of his in 1981 when the title tune from the movie Chariots of Fire hit number one across the country. And then there was his lovely little piece, L’Enfant, that showed up in the film The Year of Living Dangerously, in 1982. After that the score from the original Blade Runner came along, also in 1982. I was hooked from then on. This in spite of my general avoidance of electronic music up until then.

Wherever my switch for electronica was located, Vangelis’ music snaked in and turned it on.

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From the score of Chariots of Fire, which was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four.

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From The Year of Living Dangerously, another moving composition – L’Enfant. So moving.

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From the soundtrack for Blade Runner here’s that famous scene of the programmed death of the replicant Roy Batty . Rutger Hauer wrote the speech himself, with Vangelis’ music quietly playing in the background.

Aaahhhh, I’ve seen so many great films … heard so much fine music … but I have never seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion … don’t know where I was that weekend, but I missed the whole thing. Blast!

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Drove to Denver on Thursday to pick up Robin at the airport. ‘Twas an easy drive with almost no construction bother. Even the traffic was relatively light.

Our local version of the heat dome is still under 100 degrees, but just barely. Sometimes I long for the simpler weather reports of my childhood, which didn’t have terms like heat dome, polar vortex, katabatic winds, helicity, et al. Instead they were framed simply as:

• Hot or cold
• Tornado warning
• Rain or shine
• Tornado warning
• Windy or calm
• Tornado warning

We didn’t have a glossary of specialized terms tossed at us, all of which I suppose are dailyspeak for meteorologists. Somehow using their arcane terminology makes everything seem more ominous.

Heat dome? I’m staying in, thank you very much.

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A couple of days ago I was driving by a stretch of electrical wires where I have often seen American kestrels perching on those wires. I spotted one just as it plummeted straight down at some prey invisible to me. The dive must have been successful as the little falcon didn’t re-emerge from the tall grass as the scene receded in my car’s mirror.

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This morning my head is crowded with thought-threads running here and there with about the same amount of coherence that you might find if an angry dog parachuted into a cat parade. It all started with playing that very excellent music that Mavis Staples recorded. My recollections of the civil rights era of the sixties and seventies comes through so vividly in her songs.

Now, I confess that I was never, repeat – never, directly involved in any of the million brave and courageous acts, nor did I ever face any of the dangers that those activists dealt with at that time. I was always comfortably safe wherever I was, more like an observer from a Martian newspaper reporting back on the conflict. But I admired those mostly uncelebrated warriors greatly and supported them where I could.

The series Eyes on the Prize is on PBS where it can be watched for free. You like seeing heroes in action? Forget the tiresome Marvel Universe – the scenes in these videos are filled with heroes. Ordinary people doing extraordinary things. It is truly humbling to see what courage actually looks like in action.

Right now we’ve got one major political party trying to bury the history of slavery and its consequences as much as it can, while the other party has gone on to other things as if the struggle were completely over. The story here is not that America is a uniquely barbaric country because of our history, but that just about all of world history is of one group exploiting, enslaving, or in some way dominating another group, often through murder and torture.

Our takeaway lesson must be to look clearly at what has been done in our past and continue to steadily move away from such violent and harsh practices and behaviors. To accept that evils did occur and then reject the thinking that made them possible.

What to put in place of bigotry and violence? Well, compassion and mutual respect would be a couple of places to start. The Earth is not really a very big place, and we are all in this together whether we realize it or not. Whether we like it or not.

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Robin is off to California to spend time with grandchildren Kaia and Leina. Being eleven years younger than I am, she somehow worries that if she isn’t around to tend me that I will do something unacceptable, like keel over.

Being a rationalist I accept that concerns about octogenarians dropping off the planet are not unreasonable, but I respond that while our days might be numbered none of us know what that number is.

So I will send a daily text that says: I am presently alive and typing furiously.

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From The New Yorker

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GUILTY x 34

This thug of a past president is now officially a felon. Unless you live in the Fox News universe you already know that he is guilty of much worse things than this, because YOU SAW HIM DO THEM ON TELEVISION back in January of 2020. Now I believe that being a felon can be forgiven if the person sees the error of their ways, makes amends, and sincerely repents of their wicked ways.

Will Cluck spend one day in jail as a result of these verdicts? I would be surprised. Actually, I don’t think it is even called for. Prisons are not good places for anyone to be, and as good as he would look in an XXL orange jumpsuit, I think some form of probation and community service would be a better alternative. Plus there would be those innocent Secret Service personnel that would have to go wherever he did.

After all, he owes New York state big time for the costs they have accrued in putting him on trial, and I think that while it might take a while, starting to pay them back in these simple and straightforward ways would be a good first step in any attempts at his rehabilitation.

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From The New Yorker

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I am watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War for the second or third time, not sure which it is. It is a masterful thing from start to finish. I am ashamed to say that this crucial conflict was for me little more than a long list of so many dates and names until I watched Mr. Burns’ videos. He put flesh on those dry bones of the histories that I had already consumed.

This afternoon I watched the episode where Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to dedicate a new Union cemetery.

As the narrator read the famous lines tears came to my eyes. I don’t know if Lincoln was the greatest American of us all, but he gets my vote every time. We are having our problems these days with politics that are by comparison an unseemly shambling. Men and women serve in Congress who I would not hire to sit our cats. It all seems such a mess on occasion that I wish I could learn to power-spit in order to express my feelings about it fittingly.

But think of what Lincoln faced. His country had split in two, and then the dying began in earnest. Before it was over 650,000 Americans had perished. Mr. Lincoln spent agonizing years trying to find a general to lead the Union army, and time after time after time their incompetence brought him to the brink of despair. The South was better led at that period, and an overall Confederate victory seemed to be nearly within their grasp.

Lincoln finally found his man. He drank too much, was decidedly un-flashy, and did not sit a horse with the dash of a George Custer or a Joe Hooker. But in battle he bit down hard on the enemy before him and would not be dislodged until he won. The tides of battle turned and after four bitter years the war would finally be over, with the Union preserved.

Is there another Lincoln out there? I don’t know the answer to that, but what I do know is that there are better women and men than most of those we see being interviewed repeatedly on our television news programs. We need to find those capable and honest souls and quit electing one self-serving SOB after another.

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In the category of How On Earth Did They Do This Study, comes this one from the University of Michigan. The investigators estimated that eating a single hot dog took 36 minutes off of one’s life.

Thirty-six minutes. The average package of hot dogs at City Market contains 10 sausages, which translates into 10 x 36 = 360 minutes down the drain.

That means that by eating 4 packages of these homicidal tubes I would lose an entire day.

Now there have been days in my life that I wish that I could have skipped, looking back, but we don’t get to choose, going forward. I do know what I have to do to hang onto those 36 minutes. I will just re-read this article.

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Mavis Staples was a big part of the musical history in the civil rights movement. She can still carry water, as this 2007 album shows. Ry Cooder produced it and does backup guitar. I love it when a cover of a song makes it new for me, and this one does.

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Yesterday Robin and I revisited the supper tables of our families of origin. While unsuccessfully looking for a certain condiment at City Market I noticed this long and tall pair of cans taped together. It was La Choy Chicken Chow Mein.

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From The New Yorker

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I am re-reading Wherever You Go, There You Are, by Jon Kabat-Zinn. I found it to be an excellent guide to mindfulness meditation on my first read (although I’m not sure that I finished it back then). This time around I am even more impressed. The style of his writing is that of a good teacher at his work.

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We live near a golf course, not so close that one can actually see it but close enough that the fluffy seeds from its cottonwood trees soar over the houses and directly into my garage whenever the door is open even for a moment.

I may be allergic to them, for if one seed brushes my face I instantly develop the horticultural equivalent of road rage. I scratch and sneeze and think the very worst thoughts about these lovely trees. It doesn’t help that there were “cottonless” varieties available when they were planted and if a little more money had been spent , well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, for one thing.

It’s a princess and the pea sort of thing. Only we royals can truly understand.

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The best laid schemes o’ Mice and Men
Gang aft agley.

We’ve all had those days, when there seemed to be a lot more agley going on than there are schemes being well laid. Why, just the other day by noon I already had so much agley on my hands I forgot to scheme altogether.

It all made me wonder, so last night I looked up the origin of this famous quotation, which comes from a poem called To A Mouse.

All of this carried much more weight than I was expecting, while I was in my usual flippant mode. But I continued.

This poem explores the following themes:

• The heartbreaking futility of planning for the future in an uncertain world
• Extreme difficulty of life for poor people and the injustice of a world where they have so little
• Our life-enhancing, human duty to understand the importance of all life, however insignificant it might seem

BBC

Whew.

If you’d like, you can read the entire poem here, although I warn you, it was written by a Scotsman and although it is not in Scottish Gaelic, it might as well have been. Full of that “agley” sort of thing, you know.

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I have developed that most annoying of illnesses. One that makes me feel miserable but is going to disappear on its own in a short handful of days. Because of this I get not nearly as much attention as I would like, and way less sympathy than I feel I deserve.

I have a cold, even worse, a “common” one. I suffer such things poorly.

Since I stopped practicing pediatrics and thus have had much less contact with those most dangerous spreaders of all sorts of disease – children – I rarely get colds, or any other contagious illness, for that matter. While there are kids living in our neighborhood, I discourage friendly relations with them. Should one of them approach too closely * I make a face or say something mildly unpleasant and away they go to tattle on me. Better to be called “mean old man” than dealing with unnecessary episodes of my present affliction is my calculus.

Too harsh, you say? My response is that i have already gone through 1 1/2 boxes of Kleenex with no sign as yet that the disease is waning. My nose runneth, my eyes ache-eth, and my patience weareth exceedingly thin. I am quite the self-pitying mess this morning, completely deaf to pleas for logic, fairness, or compassion. Did I not tell you? I have a cold.

*Too close = less than the radius of viral spread in a sneeze. Research has shown that sneeze particles travel at 100 mph for a radius of 23-27 feet. Yes, real research.

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Bob rode a motorcycle, I rode a motorcycle. He plays straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll. I like straight -ahead rock ‘n’ roll. He occasionally has objectified women in his songs, while I blush to admit to that same fault … but only very rarely, you understand. After all, I am a card-carrying member of a benighted generation of men.

(How benighted? There was a period of a year in my life when I was a member of the Catholic Church. One of the causes of my falling away was that on Saturday evening I would go to confession, lay out my not very original sins, and receive absolution. Sunday morning I would line up for communion to receive the sacrament and then I would notice the awfully attractive legs of the girl ahead of me in line and before you knew it my mind was no longer in a state of grace and I had to go back to the pew and sit down.)

When I look back, I enjoy his music as much as or more than any other artist I’ve listened to. Bob played humble. He never suffered from the “big star” syndrome. Even when he could fill a stadium, he was still writing songs about the common man and about the life they had.

All of it good stuff. I attended a concert of his forty years ago. The auditorium was filled with fans who were totally into his music. When the band played Like A Rock and that first beautiful guitar break came along, suddenly all of the stage lights went out except for a single perfect spot playing on the lead guitarist. It was a moment.

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We are daily bombarded by bad behaviors from our leaders. So much so that a visiting alien’s takeaway would almost certainly be that humans are incapable of honesty, if their opinion was based on media reports.

Former president Cluck is the premier liar right now, and sets a new low bar each time he opens his mouth. Most of the Republican Party leadership repeats his big lie about a stolen election. But President Biden also keeps the fact-checkers busy as he stretches and embellishes in his statements. I’m not suggesting equivalence here, just that lying is a bad habit of a lot of folks.

From the University of Rochester Medical Center comes this nice summation of why lying in general is not praiseworthy, but that there are exceptions to that rule. You all know this stuff, but it’s worth reviewing from time to time.

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Since we bought those beautiful new sit-on-top kayaks a month ago, we’ve been able to get out on them only twice. Rain, wind, family events, and travel have taken from the time available. But looking ahead I can see spaces that might work for exploring with them.

We encountered a family group of eight people fishing together, further on we passed a gaggle of teen-aged boys who carried fishing rods but seemed more interested in punching and insulting one another. There was a pair of oldsters were out on the lake in small kayaks, trying to add rainbow trout to their dinner choices.

All in all a menu of small-town scenes for us to appreciate that evening.

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Robin and Jill took off to Durango on Sunday afternoon to be extras in a film Aiden is making. The plan is that they will return Monday evening, but that’s only a guess.

Meanwhile the cats and I will continue to put the home place in order, which is necessary after being away for a week. It’s the weeds, doncha know. We’re not gardening this year but these sturdy plants leap out of cracks in the driveway, between perennials in the berm, anywhere they can grab one microgram of soil as their very own.

I sometimes wonder what’s holding the plant geneticists back. It seems so obvious that to win the battle we must join them, with hybrids of half-weed and half-whatever. For instance, get dandelions and crabgrass and bluegrass together in one hybrid and stand back. You’d get a lawn that doesn’t need watering or mowing, is a beautiful blue green color, and it would blossom twice a month.

The possibilities seem endless. Let’s get on it, you sons and daughters of Burpee!

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AS IF WE DIDN’T HAVE ENOUGH TO WORRY ABOUT DEPARTMENT!

Researchers have discovered that our testes contain microplastics at an alarming level. Humans more than other animals.They make the observation that our levels are even higher than that of dogs, and “they eat off the floor.”

One postulate put forward is that this may explain why sperm counts are declining in younger generations. But that’s only a guess at present. But whatever health problems are eventually laid at the door of this finding, it is pretty certain that no red-blooded American male wants to know the he carries around Testicles by Mattel.

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My Lord, don’t I love this song … this particular performance! It sounds particularly good out here on the backyard deck, coming out of that little Bose speaker. I have it on continuous replay, so every nine minutes or so the pleasure is all mine all over again. (When you don’t have a job you have so much time that you can do this).

I will admit that as the years have passed it has gotten a little harder to understand the words when Lucinda Williams sings, but the few that I do catch make it all worth while.

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We have a local public radio station that will occasionally play an hour of tunes by Native American artists. This was one that was interesting and I made it my quest to find a copy, finally locating one for download at Reverbnation.com. Finely honed sarcasm it is.

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To me former president Cluck is like smog. He’s been poisoning the air that I breathe for years now, and I do resent it. But I am a senior citizen, so at least I can remember an America without him in my face every day, and have some sense of perspective. But what if I were twelve years old or less? This unwholesome man would have been put into my awareness by many of my fellow citizens as a worthy leader, on every day of my life. That makes me sad. He teaches no lesson that I would have my grandchildren learn.

If the man has a core at all, it is rotten. We need to rid ourselves of the national disgrace of his presence. November can’t come too soon for me.

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On our recent trip we traveled 3078 miles in 8 days. The Subaru never let us down,
but I don’t want to look at it for a couple of days.

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Listening to a song on the road home we heard the phrase “they didn’t mean a thing,” where the singer refers to some sexual liaisons he’d had “on the side.” Robin and I agreed that we are awfully tired of hearing that phrase in songs and in movies.

Perhaps an affair means nothing to the spouse who utters the words but he or she is wrong in several ways:

• Broken trust means something
• Lies mean something
• Promises count

Perhaps the writers who create the weak dialogue should work a little harder and get away from just peddling cliches.

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The following entry has nothing to do with the previous one. It’s just how my monkey mind swings.

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Back a few years ago I found myself going from blithely sailing on the Sea of Matrimony to poling a leaky pirogue through the Great Dismal Swamp.

At the time I was able to look back and realize that my captaincy had been wanting in enough respects to rival that of the skipper of the Titanic when he told his first mate; “This is so boring I think I’ll take a nap. Wake me when you see the Statue of Liberty.”

So when my crew abandoned ship I could at least partially understand why. But I was sorely wounded and had to blame somebody … so I chose the opposition lawyer. I sent him at least two letters commenting colorfully on his character, profession, and how badly his mother must have raised him. (I believe I might have even asked if that same lady was still plying her trade in that bordello in Calcutta. I can be a terrible person when provoked)

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I thought that John Oliver’s offer to Clarence Thomas was a good one. The following three quotes are from The Guardian article of 2/19/2024.

The late-night talkshow host John Oliver has offered to pay Clarence Thomas $1m annually – as well as give him a $2m tour bus – if the Republican judge resigns from the US supreme court.

“So that’s the offer – $1m a year, Clarence. And a brand new condo on wheels. And all you have to do … is sign the contract and get the fuck off the supreme court,” Oliver remarked. “The clock starts now – 30 days, Clarence. Let’s do this!”

Neither Thomas nor the supreme court immediately commented publicly on Oliver’s offer. Oliver acknowledged he could end up going on “standup tours … for years” to be able to afford paying Thomas’s retirement if the justice accepts the proposal.

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This guy is an entertainer whose stage name is Charlamagne Tha God. Quite a claim, that. He gave an interview recently which was published in Sunday’s NY Times.

I’ve watched him over the past several years as he grew more popular and more powerful, but still had that core of common sense* that first won my respect.

Good interview.

*That phrase … what to say … how uncommon what we once called “common sense” seems to be these days.

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Today we start home, stopping briefly in Sioux Falls to pick up sister Jill, who will be staying with us for several days. Yesterday we spent with Kari and Jon touring the area, stopping in at two state parks (Bear’s Head, Vermillion) to spend time looking at water and trees and rocks and wildlife, charging our batteries from the source … nature itself.

We ate … my, my, didn’t we eat. We went to a restaurant that online promised us sandwiches but in person delivered only Indian food. We sat at tables overlooking beautiful Lake Shagawa while uniformed personnel brought us fried bluegill and mushroom ravioli. We ate tiny cheesecakes the size of chocolates. My plan is to seek out any under-the-table M.D. at home who will get me enough Ozempic to take off at least the cheesecake, fried potatoes and the last two fillets of bluegill that appeared in unseemly lumps on my waistline.

It’s 4:30 am as I am typing this entry, it is raining on the cabin roof, and in an hour we will load our precious possessions, most of which sorely need a laundering, into the Subaru and take off. However long it takes to get back to this special area, I know that what is essential about the Boundary Waters will still be here, waiting as it has for millennia. All I need to do is add me.

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After skipping the news for a week, I watched briefly last evening for a short time. Stepping back a foot or two it is obvious that our world is being run by children with bad upbringing and madmen. It deserves better and so do we all.

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Started out for Ely early this morning and made it to Harris MN, a place I had never heard of. The sign on the highway had read Good Food at the Kaffe Stuge., which was all we needed to leave the interstate behind and drive the mile into town.

Three elder statesmen of Harris, decently clad in bib overalls, were having breakfast at a table, filling the air with ardently declaimed nonsense that had to do with tractors, combines, liquid manure, and the young man in town who routinely broke speed limits whenever behind the wheel.

“One of these days that sumbitch is gonna put that pretty car right through that fence and into a tree.”

“Yah, well, just so he don’t hit anyone else on his way in.”

BTW, Kaffe Stuge is Swedish for Coffee Shop.

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Reached the town of Ely MN about noon and found our way to Stoney Ridge Resort, where we will be staying. This area has so many grand associations with past visits that it has almost the status of a second home.

Today we rendezvous with daughter Kari and husband Jon. On my very first trip to the Boundary Waters Kari and her sister Sarah were with me, nearly a half century ago. In between there have been scores of visits with Robin and friend Rich Kaplan.

Each time there were changes. This restaurant had closed but another opened. The cinema was running movies or closed and waiting for a better moment to reopen. The friend who worked at a local outfitter had retired and a man who was to become a new friend had taken his place.

Today I may make my way down to the entry point at Lake One, where most of my trips to the interior began. I started to get into a mindset of “Well, maybe this will be my last trip here, blah, blah, blah.” But I caught myself and realized that – when had that not been true? Life is such an uncertain enterprise that each outing could have been the last … but it wasn’t. The only thing that makes sense is to enjoy today, anything else is really a waste of time.

There are two truths operative here:

• I am not immortal
• I am breathing

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Today we’re connecting with daughter Maja and granddaughter Elsa in the Twin Cities. It’s only about 90 minutes from Mankato to Minneapolis. A breeze. We had good long conversations with Maja this morning and again in the pm. In between we met with Elsa for lunch.

Our trusty GPS found the BnB that granddaughter Cheyenne and husband Remy are operating, and we had supper with Remy at a very good vegan restaurant. The BnB is really nice and roomy, with a big kitchen. We settled in early with an eye to an early start in the morning.

The restaurant was part of an arts community, and pretty colorful.

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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
• Eight-foot U.S .made leash constructed of the highest grade of braided polypropylene available. There is a braided handle on one end and a snap on the other. An owner’s manual is provided so that you always know which end you are dealing with.
• 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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