Tag: TRump

Whooo? Me? Cubist?

jono55

I had the good fortune this past week to attend a lecture/presentation by a polymath. Yes, a polymath, and I know what I’m talking about because I just looked up the word and now I am allowed to call myself an expert.*

A polymath is a person who knows a lot about a lot of subjects. If your friend is not only a brilliant physics student but has also published a poetry collection and won prizes at political debates, you can describe her as a polymath.

Vocabulary.com

Robin and I had been invited to a talk about small owls in Colorado by our friends, the Evanses. The local chapter of the Audubon Society was sponsoring the evening’s program. The speaker, Scott Rashid, was a slender middle-aged man in a baseball-style cap, plaid shirt, and the sort of pants one wears when camping or hiking. He seemed eager to get started, so was handed the microphone and a remote control, and off he went.

What followed might have been the single best Powerpoint I’ve seen, and I have seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, mostly of the stunningly boring kind, each image stuffed beyond measure with more information than one human being should ever have to bear. This presentation was smoothly constructed and filled with imaginatively arranged images that appeared without fail due to his mastery of the remote control. His knowledge of the four owl species that collectively made up his topic seemed encyclopedic to this rank amateur. I don’t believe he took a breath during the entire hour, keeping oxygenated somehow by absorbing gas through his skin.

Why do I call him a polymath?

  • Great fund of knowledge of his subject and related birds
  • Has created an organization dedicated to the rescue, rehabilitation, and release of injured and orphaned birds (CARRI)
  • Author of several books
  • Skilled wildlife photographer
  • And the killer is this – he is a gifted artist who paints scenes which combine principles of cubism and wildlife painting

Yep, you heard me, cubism. And the paintings are beautiful, like nothing I’ve even seen, combining several views of the same bird, for instance, in a single portrait. Like this one of the northern pygmy owl.

This art is for sale in several forms, and the proceeds help to support his work.

You might be interested in a short video about Rashid and need a link to his website, so here it is. Once there, take a look at his art work. It is extraordinary.

*When I was in pediatric residency training, the working definition of an “expert” was: an SOB from out of town with slides.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the Heartless Bastards play Gates of Dawn for your listening and dancing pleasure. Cranking the volume is allowed.


(As an aside, is this the best name for a rock band or what? Seriously!)

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Water warm as blood
Drips along the paddle shaft
Ducklings hide in reeds

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This next weekend Robin and I are driving down to Santa Fe for the weekend. The occasion is our 34th wedding anniversary. It’s the second marriage for both of us.

During the years immediately after our divorces, we both sought counseling at times. The counselor who Robin was seeing wasn’t sure about her re-marrying relatively soon after going through such a traumatic period, and expressed the view that she and I getting together was probably only a “transitional relationship.” Meaning that once she came to her senses and took a good long look at me she would toss an “Adios” back over her shoulder as she moved on to the real thing.

Well, the “transition” will be starting on its 35th year next Sunday, so either he was wrong or Robin is really slow at making up her mind. Either way, I am a clear winner.

(Here we are on that excellent day in 1992. I can hear you thinking and you are quite right … I definitely married out of my league.)

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We’ve visited Santa Fe several times before, and have enjoyed ourselves each time. For us, the town has such a pleasing vibe. Art galleries and museums galore, the Santa Fe Opera, the historic plaza, the presence of adobe buildings everywhere you look. Good restaurants, great food.

There is also the important connection with Los Alamos during the years when the Manhattan Project was operating. The small but busy office that managed access to Los Alamos and everything that was going on up there was at 109 East Palace, in Santa Fe. Before you took that rough mountain road and drove 33 miles to your new home you had to walk through that doorway. There is a bronze plaque that reads:

109 EAST PALACE
1943 SANTA FE OFFICE 1963
LOS ALAMOS SCIENTIFIC LABORATORY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 
All the men and women who made the first atomic
bomb passed through this portal to their secret
mission at Los Alamos. Their creation in 27 months
of the weapons that ended World War II was one of
the greatest scientific achievements of all time.

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Santa Fe, by Tough Country

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My Man Cuco

jono55

Awright class, put away the phones and listen up. Today we’re covering a genre of Mexican music known as the rancheras. So here is a definition:

Ranchera, or canción ranchera, is a traditional Mexican music genre that emerged before the Mexican revolution, deeply tied to national identity and rural roots. Known for its emotive, passionate, and theatrical style, it features themes of love, nature, and patriotism, heavily influenced by mariachi music.

I’ve told this story before, but when I was sixteen I came across an album by a guy named Cuco Sanchez. In spite of being the poor and starving student that I was, I bought it when I could have had one by Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry instead. I’d never heard of Sanchez, had no idea of his importance (major) in Mexican music, and I didn’t know a ranchera from a quesadilla. (Actually, at that point in my life I didn’t know what a quesadilla was, either.)

But I fell in love with the album, and here I am sitting out on the backyard deck on a ninety degree day in May with an iced coffee on the table and Cuco Sanchez playing on my excellent Bose music system*. Cuco and I have a relationship that has lasted a loooooong time now, even with him having had the poor grace to pass away 26 years ago. That original vinyl album is long gone, but there are all these other ways to listen …

*The excellent Bose music system. Weighs only a pound, goes anywhere I go if I so choose, and reproduces most of the notes played by the musicians, I think.

I bought it refurbished several years ago and it looks like it is going to outlast me and become someone else’s treasure.

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Since every song Sanchez sang is done in a foreign language (bother), I will take this opportunity to reveal the lyrics of one of my favorites, Arrieros Somos.

Arrieros somos y en el camino andamos
Y cada quien tendrá su merecido
Ya lo verás que al fin de tu camino
Renegarás hasta de haber nacido

Si todo el mundo salimos de la nada
Y a la nada por Dios que volveremos
Me rio del mundo que al fin ni él es eterno
Por esta vida nomás nomás pasamos

Tú me pediste amor y yo te quise
Tú me pediste mi vida y te la di
Si al fin de cuentas te vas, pues anda vete
Que la tristeza te lleve igual que a mí

Arrieros somos y en el camino andamos

Oh, you want it translated? Sheesh. Who cuts up your meat for you?

We are muleteers
And we walk along the way
Everyone will have what they deserve
You’ll see that at the end of your path
You will deny even having been born

If we all came out of nowhere
And to nothing by God we will return
I laugh at the world that in the end not even it is eternal
For this life no more, no more we will pass

You asked me for love and I loved you
You asked me for my life and I gave it to you
If at the end of the day you leave, then go
May sadness take you the same as it does me

We are muleteers
And we walk along the way

Cheerful little ditty, no? I give it a ten for philosophical meandering, but a zero for danceability. Never mind the details, I’m a fan.

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Arrieros Somos, by Cuco Sanchez

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Cuco Sanchez, circa 1956. Both he and I have changed quite a bit since then.

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Friday morning I threw away several hours of my life and took the Subaru in for some scheduled service. At 90,000 miles, every “scheduled service” seems to cost a thousand dollars and take three hours. While that might be appropriate for a transmission flush, I really wonder if changing the rear window wiper blade is that involved. But I am not a mechanic, and don’t understand such things very well. It’s all a gamble, isn’t it … you pays your money and you takes your chances.

I recall reading an article decades ago that when It came to car service you only had a 30% chance of getting what was needed properly done. For myself, the high (or low) point was a long time ago when I took a new Volkswagen in for its first dealer service. The mechanic saved a little time by draining the old oil but not putting any new stuff in. When I left the dealership I turned almost immediately onto the freeway, and that was when I noted the warning light on the dash board. By the time I could safely pull over, the engine was toast. Morte.

However, there is always something interesting happening in the waiting room. Across from me is an old dude wearing a cap advertising a Belizean beer. Obviously that brew holds some special significance for him, although in the thousands of beers I put away when I was misbehaving in the alcohol department, I can’t recall one that would cause me to buy a hat to celebrate it.

On the other side of the room there was an elderly lady who was receiving a speech from the service representative regarding her latest car inspection. One thing after another was mentioned as not crucial at the moment, but which needed attention very soon. As the sixth or seventh item was read, she began to laugh softly. You could tell that she had reached the point at which any further listing of automotive needs and woes was a waste of time because the part of her brain that dealt with cars was completely full and could accept no new data.

All the way across the lobby is a younger man who is wearing a tie-dyed tee shirt along with what looks like a pajama bottom whose design I can only imagine was created by a person coming down from a seriously bad trip.

But I am serene. I cannot be shaken by problems that are beyond my comprehension. I simply take them as Divine Judgement, and am grateful that they are not more harsh than they are. It is possible, even likely, that I deserve quite a bit more.

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A great Pink Floyd tune, Fearless, here covered by Billy Strings. Respect + imagination + musicianship = good music. Crank it up.

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Things to be grateful for can sometimes be nasty things indeed. For instance, we can thank the Cluck administration for making no attempt to hide its rampant corruption, making it easier for prosecutors down the road. We can thank the Supreme Court for making it absolutely clear that it is little more than a modern version of the Reich Supreme Court that became a tool of Nazi Germany. We can thank the gallery of incompetents that is our Justice and Homeland Security Departments for revealing themselves to anyone with a perfusing brain that they are neither about justice nor homeland security, but intimidation.

So when it comes time to choose, it will be an easier thing to do. This November we have our first real chance to begin remaking our republic, following the guidelines provided by our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. We can fire those Republican (and a few Democrats) toadies, and rethink how a healthier Supreme Court would look. We can start the process of removing Cluck’s fingers from the buttons that count.

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True Or False: The Sky Is Falling

jono55

It has become increasingly hard to decide whether the sky is falling or not. The bewailings of my newsfeed plus the profuse clamor in my messaging app makes it appear as if the world is composed of mostly people of the Henny Penny variety. You remember Henny Penny … right? Well, for those who don’t or who have never heard the classic European folk tale, it goes like this:

The inciting incident: Henny Penny is hit on the head by a falling acorn and panics, believing the sky is falling. 

The journey: She sets off to tell the king, gathering other farm animals (Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Lucy, Turkey Lurky) who join her quest. 

The trick: They meet Foxy Locky, who offers to show them a shortcut to the king’s palace. 

The ending: The group follows the fox into his den, where they are never seen again, and the king never hears their warning. 

There it is, simple and plain and perfectly appropriate to our times. Our problem is not a lack of warnings, it is the din of their profusion.

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Memphis In The Meantime, by John Hiatt

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It is something very close to Summer here in Paradise. Once this past winter’s not-very-hard grip on our lives had relaxed we have been seeing record warm temperatures. This week everything is in the 80s, and it is only May. Oh well …

Tomorrow’s weather forecast is: windy, hot, and dry. There is a possibility of “dry thunderstorms” as well. This is not a term that I have heard before. Is it possible that the weathermen and weatherwomen of the world have become totally bored saying the same old stuff from day to day and so they get together to coin new words and phrases to make their lives more tolerable?

When I was a lad we did just fine with the words fair, rain, windy, cold, and stormy. There were no polar vortices or dry thunderstorms or bomb cyclones back then, nossir. We made do with the simple terminology that we had and were glad to have it. My mother never sent me off to elementary school with the words “Now put your mittens in your pockets and wear those overshoes like I told you, there is a chance of thundersnow this afternoon and you want to be ready for it.”

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It’s nearly two a.m. and I have the back door open to let in some cool night air. There is a great horned owl out there in the dark who is excited about something and is letting us know about it. Some of my favorite creatures, owls. Endlessly interesting. Cruising silently in the blackness only to drop down on some unlucky small critter who never knew what hit it. Those eerie calls … the variety of habitats they occupy … just have a look at this gallery.

From upper left they are great gray owl, barn owl, boreal owl, great horned owl, and snowy owl. If I could wish for one of their attributes it would be the ability to turn my head around nearly 180 degrees to check out what’s behind me. It would be an immense help while driving my car, for one thing. And just think if you were going to try to sneak up on me from behind to cover my eyes and say “Guess who?” and suddenly there I was staring you right in the face. Unnerving, eh?

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Lipstick Sunset, by John Hiatt

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That little blue dot button over there in the sidebar may need an explanation. In the 2024 election year Democrats in the Omaha area came up with this simple image that says volumes. They were surrounded by Republicans and the idea that they were a blue oasis in a highly red district caught on.

I like the idea enough to have stolen it from the Nebraskans to apply it to our own situation here in Paradise. Two-thirds of the votes cast here in Montrose County were for a criminal for president in 2024. Two thirds. My, my, my.

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Dia De Las Madres

jono55

Well, if I needed another reason to not go on a cruise, I found one this past week, when hantivirus was added to the number of things that a person can catch on one of those floating Petri dishes. An infected ship found itself anchored off Cape Verde, with nowhere to go. The people on the mainland didn’t want to take a chance by letting any of the passengers come ashore, so those poor sick souls were restricted to the kinds of medical care that one can find on a pleasure voyage.

Three passengers have died and several others have been sickened by hantavirus on board the Dutch-flagged MV Hondius cruise ship. Hantavirus usually spreads by inhaling contaminated rodent droppings

AP News

I am pretty sure that none of the passengers was warned of the possibility of inhaling rodent droppings as they slurped and chewed their way across the Atlantic, but this is just a guess. It might be time to revive the tradition of having a ship’s cat on board. Maybe two of them.

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Mother’s Day is nearly upon us, and for once I am totally ready. When it comes to some of these “special” days, I tend to be a little bit Scrooge-y, since it is my firm belief that they were invented by the Hallmark company to prop up sagging card sales. But honoring the mothers of the world … I can easily get behind that.

Without those brave souls who were willing to put their bodies (and sometimes minds) on the line the human race would have pretty much come to naught 300,000 years ago, as the first pair of homo sapiens would have been the last. There is not a doubt in my mind that if men had been appointed to bear the children we wouldn’t be anywhere in the fossil record.

Nope, the job of bearing children was given to the right people, that’s for certain. And this year I will gratefully honor the mom who lives with me. My own mother has been gone for nearly forty years, but on Sunday I will raise a salute to her as well.

We owe the mothers of the world. Big time.

¡Feliz día de las madres!

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When I was a medical student rotating through the clerkships, I had the chance to observe some really amazing people of the genre that we were taught to refer to as “patients.”

There was the young gentleman who managed to acquire a case of gonorrhea while up in double traction for two broken femurs. There was another young man who conversed in a lively manner with us as we were interviewing him in the Emergency Room, although there was a knife sticking out of his chest which we knew from the x-ray was in his heart.

But there was one young woman, a child really, that I remember today. She was only sixteen and at term, scheduled for a Cesarean section for reasons that I have forgotten. Cesareans were not as commonplace at that time as they are now.

Her surgeon was the head of OB/GYN at the University of Minnesota at the time, and he was both quite old and a misogynist as well. He had chosen to do the operation under local anesthesia, but the injected lidocaine did not work well and the girl screamed all through the procedure. When her baby was finally delivered she slipped into semi-consciousness from exhaustion as her wounds were repaired.

I was standing outside the operating room as she was wheeled out past our group of students and the surgeon who had performed the operation. She looked up at him as she passed, lying on the gurney, and gave him what I can only describe as a take-charge smile when she said:

“See you next year, Doc.”

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I rarely use this blog to express opinions, and I am rarely dogmatic when I do (long pause while snickering subsides). But on this tenth of May 2026 I can say without qualification that the world is better off for having cheese in it. What prompted this declaration was the slow savoring of a bit of Jarlsberg as part of my lunch.

I know that there are perfectly nice people who don’t eat cheese for a variety of reasons and I am sorry for their loss. When I try to imagine a planet without the following necessities of life I begin to weep uncontrollably.

  1. Mac N’ Cheese
  2. Cheeseburgers
  3. Grilled cheese sandwiches
  4. Cheetos
  5. Cheese fondue
  6. Cheddar biscuits at Red Lobster
  7. Cheezits crackers
  8. Veal parmesan
  9. Potatoes au gratin
  10. Quesadillas
  11. Cheesecake
  12. Philly cheesesteak
  13. Fettuccine Alfredo
  14. Pizza

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera … can’t go on …

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One of the names for a group of weasels is a sneak. This pretty well describes our present government and the national Republican Party as well.

Here is an unretouched photograph of one such sneak, which includes Cluck and several members of his cabinet.

They are, quite simply, not to be trusted with anything that is dear to us.

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Zombie News

jono55

If you drive twenty miles east from Montrose on Highway 50, then make a right turn at the sign indicating the route to Silver Jack Reservoir and drive another 15 miles on a fairly good gravel road, you will come to Big Cimarron State Park. As parks go it is fairly small, with only a dozen or so campsites, but many of those campsites are along the Cimarron River and that makes all the difference.

Now, if you walk to the last campsite on the south end of the park and keep going on the narrow path you will find there, in a short while you come to one of those magical places, where the river leaves the woods and tumbles noisily past you as it makes its way toward its eventual union with the Gunnison River. There’s a pool that might as well have a sign posted in front of it declaring “Trout Present.”

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Just a couple of miles south of this campground is another one, on a small body of water called Beaver Lake. There are another dozen sites or so here that overlook the lake.

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And …. a couple of miles further along the road places you in the Silver Jack Campground, which is the largest of the three, on high ground looking down on Silver Jack Reservoir.

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On the many visits we’ve made to this lovely area, there were always many campsites available, even on the busiest summer weekends. Really, these locations taken together constitute a treasure. And I haven’t even mentioned nearby Rowdy Lake, accessible on a short but rough road, and beyond that is Clear Lake which requires that you actually get out of your vehicle and walk a few hundred yards.

On our way back to Montrose we came upon a herd of elk grazing in a patch of open forest. About forty of them, big and healthy-looking and what can I say … majestic. Robin and I are always struck by the beauty of these animals whenever we are lucky enough to find them in the wild.

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Found this photograph on Substack, and thought there should be some sort of a medal that could be awarded this young woman for pluck and wit.

I suspect that the mastophobics who couldn’t bear to be in the presence of a visible breast were not mollified by her response.

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I have great respect for zombies. From what I’ve seen of them in movies, they are not to be trifled with, and can be surprisingly resourceful at times. They are never a force for good, being basically one of the forms that evil can take on Planet Earth.

So when I say that the Cluck administration is a zombie government I don’t dismiss at all the possibility that it can still do a great deal of harm before all of its members and their adherents are successfully neutralized. But they will be corralled, they will be removed from public office, and we will then be able to go back to ordinary legislative chicanery, which is unlovely but we know how to deal with it.

Unfortunately, while we have been stewing here in our zombie universe, the rest of the free world has moved on without us. We are already so untrustworthy that intelligence services of our former allies won’t tell us anything important because we can’t be counted on to keep a secret. On nearly every front we have moved backward while the world is going forward. Climate change? Human rights? Encouraging young democracies? Useful collaboration with governments that aren’t dictatorships? There really is not an end to this sad story.

Taking into consideration all of the harm Cluck has done to our republic, and all of the sycophantic enabling of him that the Republicans in Congress have done, is there a label that will better fit this whole unseemly gaggle other than traitors? And zombie traitors at that?

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(Periodically I will have what I have called a brain fart. Where a dormant group of neurons awakens for no apparent reason and provides me with a memory. Yesterday that recollection was of a joke which I used to tell often but it has been decades since the last time I did that. Before those unreliable nerve cells go dormant again, I will share it with you. What you have to imagine is that the Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major speaks with a heavy brogue.)

A Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major comes into a pharmacy carrying a small box. Finding the pharmacist he opens the box, revealing a smaller one inside. Inside that box is yet another one and inside that one is a very bedraggled condom which he unrolls for the benefit of the pharmacist.

“How much for a new one,” says the Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major

“Twenty shillings,” was the response.

“How much for repair?” says the soldier.

The druggist is a bit taken aback but answers: “That would be ten shillings,” came the response.

The Scottish Regimental Sergeant-Major then rolls up the condom, places it carefully in the smallest box, then the next one, and finally into the largest of the three containers. He leaves the store.

The next day the soldier returns, calls the druggist over, and after opening all the boxes he takes out the condom, unrolls it, and declares: ‘The regiment votes for repair.”

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Trail Legs

jono55

Sooo … there is this genre of videos on YouTube that go like this: “If you are a senior and you do these ten exercises pretty much everything will be just great. You will look better, run faster, be unbelievably attractive to the opposite sex, and Army recruiters may mistake you for an 18 year-old.”

Or it may be five exercises, or something that requires a kettlebell or learning how to do Pilates on the wall. But all of them agree – if you don’t do something starting right now you might as well pick out your casket tomorrow and save your relatives the trouble of doing so later on.

There was one Asian gentleman who absolutely swore that if I do 50 of these and 50 of those and 50 … at this point I switched away from the guy because if there is one thing that is certain in this otherwise uncertain world it is that I will never follow any regimen that requires that I do 50 of anything.

One video did catch my eye, and I might actually follow up on it. It is called the medicine ball slam.

While there may be many excellent physiological results, like core strengthening and improved flexibility, what I can see immediately is how good it will be for the days when the world seems composed of two parts cowflop and one part thistles. Slamming that thing into the earth or the driveway … oh baby … I can already feel my spirit rising just thinking about it, tension and aggression slipping off my shoulders like raindrops on a tin roof.

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Tracy Chapman is a charter member of the good part of the human race, one of those rare people out there whose lives illuminate and support our own. Since her first album in 1988 that won all the prizes, she has created a body of work that is remarkable for its insistence on the value of each and every one of us, telling stories and raising consciousness all along her way.

This first clip is from 2015, with Chapman performing Stand By Me on late night television with a respectful David Letterman strewing compliments in her path.

The next video is from 1988, with the 24 year-old Chapman showing what all the fuss was about. Timeless and heartfelt and beautiful.

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We have now had a chance to see what happens when the Supreme Court of the land becomes completely corrupt and subservient to external power. Honor, rectitude, and a little thing called justice fly out the window and are nowhere to be found in their decisions. Except for the opinions of the minority, who came to the court believing in its role and obligations and have not lost their way.

Since most of the members of this august body have decided not to police themselves, to have even the teensiest idea of what good behavior might be, reforming the Court should be one of the first tasks of the post-Cluck era. As a first step, let’s get rid of those lifetime appointments. They are invitations to the Court becoming the festering mess we have today. Ten years … twenty years … some number that accepts the possibility that we might have made serious errors in the original selections.

Why saddle our republic with a Roberts or a Thomas or an Alito for generations? If we can’t completely stop their grift, let them take their motor homes and the stink of their decisions and ride off into an ignominious sunset. At the very least it would give us a chance to recover between bad apples.

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Fawn walks past our home
No comprehension of the
pleasure it provides

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On May first Robin and I joined in a small demonstration of “Workers over oligarchs.” Perfect day for signs and placards except for a sometimes vigorous breeze. At one one a driver pulled over and drove slowly past us shouting angrily: “Fuck You … Fuck You … Fuck You.”

Little he knew the satisfaction that it gave us knowing that our little signs were ruining his afternoon?

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Took our first hike on the burned-over area at the Black Canyon on Saturday. Perfect day for it. Interesting to be able to see so far ahead, because before the fire the Gambel oaks would have blocked our view. in most places. They were not tall plants, mostly under ten feet high, but quite bushy and leafy.

We brought our lunch with us and enjoyed a picnic at the Pulpit Rock overlook. Most people are familiar with the phrase “getting one’s sea legs,” where a person slowly becomes accustomed to the pitching and rolling of a marine vessel. There is something analogous in hiking, called “trail legs.” In this case it is the irregularity of the trail surfaces, the changing angles and composition of the earth beneath your feet. During the cold weather months most of our walking is on the smoother surfaces of the treadmills at the rec center or the trail systems of the city parks.

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Taking Names

jono55

“They are fighting with Jesus.”

Comedian John Fugelsang came up with an awfully good shtick recently regarding the hypocrisy of Cluck, JD Vance, and Mike Johnson arguing that the Pope should stick to popery and let the three of them interpret the Bible. Here’s a couple of quotes from an interview published in Good Faith Media recently.

Fugelsang believes the U.S. media frames recent social media skirmishes between the pope, President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and House Speaker Mike Johnson in an unhelpful way.

“I don’t think [the pope] is fighting them,” he said to attendees in Alexandria, Virginia. “He’s showing us all calmly and with no anger or visible outrage how to delegitimize and expose these frauds. He’s making them fight Jesus.”

and

Fugelsang also noted the challenge of what to call those who use Christianity for authoritarian goals, whether “conservative Christians,” “fundamentalists,” or “Christian nationalists.” He said he prefers the simpler term: “fake Christians.”

Couldn’t have said it better my own self.

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If you’ve been wasting your time reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I am a fan of Richard Thompson. Based on nothing, really, except that the man is capable of some of the best songwriting and guitar playing available on the planet.

I was late to join his fan club, because I hadn’t paid any attention at all to him until I read a review of the album Shoot Out The Lights back in 1982. The review made it sound interesting and when I sought out and listened to the music … I was gone, daddy, gone. I never came back.

There is a large selection of playlists that I listen to when I am involved in that most absolutely boring of activities – walking on the treadmill at the rec center. All of the music on those lists is from stuff that I own, but once in a while a piece comes on that I never actually heard before. I had bought an album for a particular cut or cuts and totally ignored the rest. I have no excuse for this reprehensible behavior but there you are. Mea culpa.

This happened just the other day, when the tune Her Love Was Meant For Me penetrated the standing fog in my brain as I was going into minute 22 of a 30 minute slog at incline #12 on the treadmill at 3 miles per hour. Whoa, said I, what kind of a fan can I be when a song this great is news to me? Especially since I own it? (Rhetorical question)

Here, take a listen, just to see what I’d overlooked.

Her Love Was Meant For Me

So what does all of this mean in the scheme of things? For dolts like myself? I dip into the past for the answer.

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When John F. Kennedy was murdered I didn’t know what to do with such horrific news. For days I was running on half my cylinders trying to make some sense of a world where one of its most important people could simply be blotted out by a nobody with a scoped rifle. Lots of water has flowed under that particular bridge since then, so when I learn that yesterday another bozo with a gun invaded a White House party I don’t miss a beat and continue eating my cereal. Life goes on, at least on the surface.

But deep down in there somewhere in my own personal dark web there is a pool of anger, cold as death. If I could learn about the murder of 20 children at Sandy Hook and still do what was required of me the next day I can certainly do the same when a group of celebrities and politicians are briefly menaced. But that lake just deepened, even with this relatively minor episode. Numb? Don’t think so. Furious? Absolutely.

If the moment comes during my lifetime when we realize we don’t have to allow this particular insanity to continue and that we have the power to stop it whatever the difficulties may be, I plan to march while carrying my end of the banner in one hand and a taser in the other. You may have heard that there are men going ’round taking names … well, some of them are ancient souls. Like me, for instance.

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Taking Names, by Josh White

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The Orcs Of Congress

jono55

A preface to this post. One of my personal mythic/reality/dreaming/challenging places is the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota. One puts a canoe in the water, steps into it and away from the land, and all is changed. You are on your own, responsible for your own life in a way that is restorative to the worn and tattered thing that urban living makes of your soul. If something breaks … there is no one to fix it but you. I have been lucky enough to visit this beautiful area more than thirty times. It is as close as I have ever gotten to the numinous.

So I am definitely taking this next affront personally. The Republicans just voted to overturn a ban on mining near the Boundary Waters. It’s another one of those billionaires versus the public good scenarios. This time it’s a Chilean conglomerate whose operation would threaten this area, whose beauty I frequently exploit to brighten the pages of this often colorless and meandering blog.

So this is a kind of particular mine that is a copper sulfide mine, and what happens is copper sulfur rock is brought up to the surface, hundreds and hundreds of millions of tons of it. And when sulfur is exposed to air and oxygen – oxygen and water, which we have a lot of in northern Minnesota, it basically turns into sulfuric acid, and then it flows into the watershed. This mine is literally a mile or so from water that drains directly into the Boundary Waters and then into Voyageurs National Park.

NPR All Things Considered: Newly approved mining in Minnesota may threaten waterways of a beloved nature preserve

I will repeat a challenge here that I made more than a year ago. When was the last time anyone heard or read about a mining company who did not damage the environment no matter what they might have said in order to be permitted to do their work? Basically it is a sad but oft repeated story, trite in its details. Rape and run. Do the damage and then let the people try to get satisfaction in order to repair the harm.

This next paragraph is for those who have read (or seen the movies) of the Lord of the Rings saga. In my view the Republicans have made themselves into Orcs wearing tailored suits. Manifestations of the worst of human impulses, seemingly no longer capable of doing anything resembling good works.

Too strong a statement, you say? Too melodramatic? Just answer this question: where is your data? I certainly have mine in abundance. Like I said at the beginning, this is personal for me. In this instance it is the GOP taking the baby out of the rear-facing car seat and tying it to the front bumper. Little good can come from such a maneuver.

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Her Love Was Meant For Me, by Richard Thompson

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All of the trails on the South Rim of the Black Canyon National Park are now open to hikers. We are cautioned not to leave the paths and tramp around on what has always been a fragile landscape and is now even more so as it is attempting to recover from last year’s fire. No problem for us. We’ve always respected those rules. If the large numbers of human visitors were allowed to roam everywhere they wanted to it wouldn’t take long for a great deal of the beauty of those trails to vanish underfoot. This trail system is moderately strenuous for us in a few places, but overall is just a great workout in a dramatic setting. We are eager to add those hikes to our attempts at maintaining something like fitness.

Really, when I hit the pillow at night I can almost hear my aerobic capacity falling away. There is nothing for me to gain by avoiding exercise but to acquire more than a passing resemblance to Jabba the Hutt.

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Speaking of his Abominable Huttness, I remember what a large deal it was when the first Star Wars film was released. Among the hordes that went to see it were son Jonnie and I. I think we went three times, and the following Christmas there were several Star Wars gifts with his name on them. It was a moment for him. One of Jonnie’s traits was that when he liked something, he dove in headfirst. Star Wars, the Lord of the Rings books, and the rock groups Kiss and Led Zeppelin were all recipients of his interest and devotion. If he was a fan of something you did, he bought all your stuff.

Jabba was one of the major heavies in that first movie, where his nasty physical appearance and poor personal hygiene were contrasted with Princess Leia’s lightly-clad attractiveness in several scenes.

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Buckle up and get ready for a two-minute assault on your memory. The unforgettable theme music.

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Someone came to the White House Correspondents Dinner last evening and fired shots, killing no one. He has been apprehended. As of this morning we don’t actually know who might have been his target, at such a dinner there are so many who have that potential. It could have been Cluck, a member of his cabinet, or a reporter who incensed the assailant for reasons obvious or obscure.

Deciding to go up against the Secret Service at a black tie event is not the hallmark of a mentally stable person. Perhaps he was sticking his head out of the metaphoric window, as Howard Beale suggests in the video below, and it didn’t make any difference to him who he killed or injured. Just to do something … . The world we occupy today tends to bring out the crazy in a person.

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Shoot Out The Lights, by Richard Thompson

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Profiles

jono55

Travel along the South Rim Road of the Black Canyon National Park is now permitted. Each year the Park Service closes it from November to mid-April. Most winters it can then be used as a cross-country ski trail, but this past year the shortage of snow afforded limited opportunity for skiing. We were eager to see what is happening in the burned-over areas of the park, and there is a short hiking path at the very end called the Warner Point Trail that is a good workout as well as offering some great views of the canyon.

Our daytime temperatures for the next two weeks will be in the seventies, which is perfect for these seasoned bodies we’ve inherited, which tend to wilt when the temperatures rise into the eighties and above. At those times if we want to exercise outdoors we do it mid-morning.

Robin and I drove the road on Monday morning and hiked the Warner Point Trail. The lack of rain showed up in a dearth of flowers and the shriveled leaves of some usually showy plants. There are no water sources up on the top of the mesa, so the resident deer have to descend half a mile to the Gunnison River to get a drink. Although the plants on the mesa are tough and hardy, they don’t waste their resources in times of drought. No water … well, let’s just wait before we toss out those blossoms, shall we?

The burned areas are starting their recovery with grasses, so that monotonous blackened landscape is becoming a greener one. The dark skeletons of the Gambel Oaks are the most obvious reminders of what happened here last year. They appear as twisted and ghostly shapes, little more than brittle stalks of charcoal that snap off at ground level.

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Hasten Down The Wind, by Linda Ronstadt with Don Henley

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The Spring brings out black
reminders of where trees had
stood for centuries

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If there is a Satan, a personification of the worst that life has to offer, his grating chuckle must be everywhere in the White House these days. Decay and rot are everywhere you look. Cabinet officers tumble like dominoes and are replaced with unskilled nobodies. The weaknesses of government by tweet can no longer be covered up. The lies pile up in the corridors as stacked obstacles to any chance of progress or redemption. The only successes, if one wants to call them that, are the fortunes being amassed by the greediest of us all.

Here’s a photo of the dust cover of a famous book, written by John F. Kennedy. It told the stories of a handful of people in politics who made very hard choices, sometimes costing them their political lives. Choices always resolved matters in favor of the common good.

If Kennedy were to write it today, the dust cover might look like this.

Unless the cancer that is Cluck and his administration is removed, there is only one destructive direction that America can move in. The past year of one disaster after another has shown us what we must do.

Who will be the courageous ones who step forward to lead? Where will they come from? How will they preserve their integrity in the melée that is to come?

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Blue Bayou, by Linda Ronstadt

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I watched the most touching documentary on Sunday evening. It covered the life of singer Linda Ronstadt. A life devoted to music. A woman who, rather than climb over the bodies of competitors, enabled their successes time after time. Someone who was given a gift of voice and then disease took it from her. Talent. Generosity. Courage. What’s not to love and admire?

The name of the video is Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. It is available on Amazon Prime Video. Here’s a trailer to whet your appetite.

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You’re No Good, by Linda Ronstadt

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Over the years my thinking about how to handle feelings has undergone evolution and devolution. Growing up in a culture of men don’t cry or show emotion it was a natural fit to emulate the John Wayne approach. Stuff ’em was the watchword. At some point I was introduced to the concept that embracing anger and grief and being softer rather than hard were preferable stances to take in life. Life provided a set of tableaux providing ample opportunity to practice whatever I thought I should be doing at any given moment..

But I was never able to completely shake the idea that sometimes, if one was going to be a professional,* you just had to stand up and wade through whatever was presenting itself. To allow oneself to melt down when there was work yet to be done … I could never fully go there. Someone had to “be strong,” and if the need arrived, I saw myself as that someone. Firemen do go into burning buildings. Physicians do face situations that are stressful and injurious to their souls. Parents do need, on occasion, to be the grownups in the room.

I have made a lot of mistakes in the past and there’s little reason to believe that I won’t continue to do so. My heart literally aches when I think back on some of those episodes, and I wish that I could say that I have learned from each one, but nope, that ain’t true. In so many of them, the teacher appeared, but the student wasn’t ready.

*professional: give it any definition you care to

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Can’t Find The Snow For The Fog

jono55

We’re going through a very chilly spell right now. here in Paradise, with freezing nighttime temperatures for several days. It’s not a predicted trend, so I’m not panicking. Spring is definitely here, although these cold evenings could be trouble for some of the prematurely blooming trees and plants around town and in the beautiful orchards around Palisade CO. Local lifelong residents tell me that this is just a normal spring for a mountain town, with these variations in temperatures the rule, rather than the exception.

Over our years together, Robin and I have evolved into two completely different creatures as far as preferred room temperatures. Robin definitely likes a cool room, while I will position myself near any radiant heat source that’s available. Our Subaru has separate temperature controls for the right and left sides of the car, which I think is a little silly in a room that’s only five feet wide. But there we go, Robin choosing 67 degrees and me pushing my button up to 74. I think it may be a placebo effect, but we’re both happier when we see such numbers on the dashboard.

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I think that our cat Willow may be coming out of her sad times since the loss of her companion, Poco. Hard to tell, it’s been just a month. Robin and I have been petting and brushing the poor thing within an inch of her life in our attempts to help her adjust to this new reality. It’s a wonder she has any fur left at all. She is spending more time outdoors now once again, and has resumed her old habits of being more active at night and sleeping most of the day.

It has been ten years since she came to live with us as a kitten and Poco was already here when she arrived, so this is quite a change for her. We aren’t looking to add any more pets to our household, so it looks like it will be two humans and one feline from here on out.

I think we’ll do just fine.

Grieving is such an irregular thing, for me. You’re walking along, you seem to have a grip on things then suddenly you’re just knocked over by a wave that came out of nowhere. And that wave just sucks the oxygen right out of your lungs. I’m dealing with the loss of a dear pet right now, but there was another dear pet years ago who died an awful death after having gotten into something she should not have. I took her body home from the vet, put her in a small cardboard box, and then buried her out in the backyard. We lived out in the countryside at the time, where such things were easily done.

Robin was away at the time and I sat on the edge of the wooden deck that evening with one song playing on repeat for hours. It doesn’t seem like it would fit, but that night it was a perfect accompaniment to the feelings I was struggling with. I was caught in one of those waves, one that battered hard and would not let go.

All Mixed Up, by Red House Painters

Honest to God, I don’t think I would have made it this far in this life without the support that music has provided. I’ve often joked when talking with others that one of the tragedies of real life as opposed to the movies was that there wasn’t a soundtrack. At a distance and looking back I can see now that there was one. But in each instance it had to be slapped together, rough as a cob and on the spot.

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Friday morning it began to snow and this continued until lunchtime, only dropping an inch or so, but hey – it’s water! By one o’clock, Robin and I were already getting cabin fever, so we bundled ourselves into the Subaru and took off driving south on Highway 550. We had planned to go to Ouray to walk around town and look at the fresh whiteness at 8,000 feet, but we had to pause at Ridgway and turn around because a combination of fog and snow produced such poor visibility. It was still a good trip, good to be out of the house.

Robin and I celebrated that day with purchased cheesecake. We may be cautious about snowstorms, but we fear no dessert.

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Lonely Girls, by Lucinda Williams

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We saw our first Hummingbirds of the year only three days ago. And that very night, the temperatures plunged down into the low 20s, which was the first of three such nights. I had wondered – how do these little birds survive such cold evenings when they return from their migration sooner than they should? So I asked the question of Google, and back came this answer, which I have now corroborated with recognizable sources.

“Hummingbirds survive freezing spring temperatures (20s°F) By entering torpor, a state of deep hibernation like sleep that lowers their metabolism by up to 95% to conserve energy. Their body temperatures plummet from over 100𝐹 to near air temperature, allowing them to survive cold nights. Yes, they can survive, if they find food quickly in the morning.” 

RIght now, hummingbird food is to be found everywhere, with the early flowers and the blossoming trees, so I will relax and let Nature do the worrying. But I like the concept of torpor, which sounds a lot like what happens to me when I find myself trapped in conversations with excruciatingly boring people. I don’t know if my body temperature plummets, but the rest all seems quite familiar.

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Some Day Soon, by Ian and Sylvia

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Scratching On Rocks

jono55

There is a CNN article which is calling this a “freakishly dry spring” in Colorado. Here in Paradise so far this year we’ve had 1.6 inches, which is less than half of normal, and our “normal” is already on the dry side. We are tentatively watering our brown lawns and hoping for the best. Unless a drastic change occurs I am looking for water restrictions by early summer.

But of course this has nothing to do with climate change, which is a well-known hoax, according to our clodpoll of a leader. He encourages us to use more petroleum products, turn our air conditioners way down until ice forms on the glassware in the kitchen cabinets, and in general behave in a way which all but guarantees that next year will be worse.

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No Expectations, by Jim Campilongo

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I’ve been reading Tracing Time, a book about the rock art of the Colorado Plateau, written by Craig Childs. While I thought that I knew a little about the subject, it is by now obvious that I am little more than a tabula rasa where such drawings are concerned. The excitement of acquiring new knowledge is in the room every time I pick it up, and that doesn’t happen every day.

All of the books I’ve read by this author are collections of stories, rather than learned recitations. He puts what he wants you to know into some character’s mouth as that person is talking to him over a low fire on a winter campout in the middle of a mountain. And after you are done shivering at the thought of sleeping on bare rock in freezing weather you realize that now you have an answer to a question that only an hour ago you didn’t know enough to ask.

Where we live here in Paradise is on the edge of a treasure trove of such art. The Fort Knox of pictographs and petroglyphs, if you will. Robin and I have explored a few of the closer collections and it only makes us curious about others. On one of our hikes that we’ve taken several times, the turnaround point is a boulder covered with such markings that is right on the trail. Unfortunately its accessibility means that some of the art is stuff like: “Rhonda + Derek.” I’ve made the assumption that such carvings are not ancient and indigenous in origin, but I suppose that there could have been a romantically inclined couple back in the year 1000 with those names, although I strongly doubt it.

One of the recurring images found in these treasuries is that of handprints. The artist dips a hand in the paint and presses it to the stone. Like a signature saying I am here. I am always moved by these. Even more than by the drawings of warriors or mountain goats. I am here.

My answer is Yes, I know you.

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My plea to anyone out there in Washington DC with an ounce of courage and patriotism is to push the damn button. Push it hard right now.

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If it weren’t for the fact that people are dying and the huge amount of physical destruction involved as well as the economic disruption worldwide, the Iran War That Is or Isn’t A War could almost have been written by Gilbert and Sullivan as one of their comic operas. It is being conducted through whims and tweets and asides at press conferences by a draft-dodging coward and a puffed-up religious dimbulb who was once a minor officer in the National Guard. A horrible joke of a war, but a joke nevertheless.

Any member of our armed forces who dies in this conflict is a life that has been wasted. The billions of dollars that have been spent already – thrown away. When you put buffoons in charge this is what you get.

Even if we toss Cluck out tomorrow and are able to put an end to this tragic chapter in American history, there is no overnight getting back our national honor, prestige, or claims to leadership. We have allowed ourselves to become a murderous third-rate country in the eyes of the world. Or perhaps fourth-rate, who knows? Post-Cluck we will have to start at the bottom and work our way up for a generation before anyone can begin to trust us again.

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Each of us
one face in the crowd
One nose pressed
against the window
One body marching
Watching

One witness out of millions
who say Enough!
We place ourselves
Between the helpless 
And the oppressors 
We are implacable

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You can find much written about the origins and meaning of this beautiful song. But when you listen you will probably find your own message, as I do. And that message may change from one moment to another. Because when you listen the second time you are not the same person as the on the first audition.

There is that very old saying that “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” When I first heard it, I thought yes, of course, the water flows past and changes constantly. Later on I realized that the man changes as well.

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East Wind From The Abattoir

jono55

I am presently re-exploring the delicious satisfactions of eating bagels. For quite a few years now they found no place in our pantry, being one of those high carb foods discarded way back when we were doing the keto thing. The keto thing went away, but for some reason bagels remained on the no-no list.

Now anyone looking at a map showing Montrose CO can see that we are about as far from a bagel-producing powerhouse as one could be, and the only choices here in Paradise are the dense things, fresh or frozen, that you can either eat or put under uneven table legs. Pale imitations, I know, of what one might find at a New York delicatessen.

But you can only eat what is in front of you, and pining for what you can’t have is lost time you won’t get back. Because even the bagels sold locally are tasty enough when you toast them up, and most of the fillings used in Gotham City are available locally.

So here I go, chomping away. I am a little puzzled about the variety called the “everything bagel,” which seems to be designed for people who are unable to make up their mind which bagel they really want. They can eat this thing and tell themselves that what they truly desire is in there somewhere.

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At an Indivisible social event this week the question was raised “Why does everybody in this room have the same color hair?” The reference to the omnipresent gray hair was completely apropos. Everyone in the group was over fifty years old, most were over sixty. One member of this pleasant gaggle mentioned a documentary he’d watched recently about the Viet Nam War protests, and everybody at those events was in their twenties. He wondered aloud “Where are the younger people today?”

It wasn’t the sort of venue in which to have a longer discussion, partly because the poor acoustics made listening difficult. But since I was marching back in 1969 and now I am marching in 2026 I can give you at least a partial “Why?”

During the troubled years of that Asian war a twenty-year old had a lot on his mind. He was learning that the government had been telling lies about the justification and the conduct of the war. He saw that thousands of men his age were being killed or damaged by being tossed into the meat grinder that is war.

And most important of all, he saw that he very well could be next one to go. That at almost any moment his body could be snatched up, suited up, and sent off to someplace with a name he couldn’t pronounce properly. He saw the unfairness of the draft, where rich white boys were often not being loaded onto those transport buses and ships, while everyone else had to take their turn. He learned not to trust authorities, finding that their goals and his were not always in synchrony.

So when the call came to take to the streets, his motives for showing up and burning that draft card or carrying that sign were not just for some lofty antiwar concept, they were self-preservative.

Now think about today’s twenty year-old. These people have never seen an American government that wasn’t openly venal, cynical, dishonest, or power-hungry above all things. Why should they believe that one could exist because some white-haired and arthritic dude says so?

I can hear some of you saying “Hey, wait just a minute, how about _______, he/she was a good one.” You’re right. There have been solid and trustworthy individuals, but the overall mass of it smells to high heaven. Reminds me of my childhood when a pungent and putrid aroma surrounded us when the wind blew in from the slaughterhouses ten miles east of our home.

Obama keeps coming up as an example of the good in government, and I mostly agree with that assessment. But when it came time for him to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, which was his right and duty to do, he was unable to get it accomplished because the Republican leadership had the power to completely block it. To not even let it come up for discussion. And this was not some singular or unusual event, but part of a standing pattern.

So how to get younger people involved? Heck of a question. What would be my first suggestion? Get rid of Citizens United. Reduce as much as possible the influence of those unimaginably large fortunes. Make it possible for someone to hold office for the laudable reason of wanting to truly serve the people they directly represent, and the larger body politic as well. To elevate the influence of character, rather than connections.

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Transcendental Blues, by Steve Earle

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This week my blog got a “like” from Edge of Humanity Magazine. I wandered over there and found all sorts of artistic treasures. One of its recent posts was a photo essay entitled “The Seduction of the Invisible.”

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The essay’s theme is the particular beauty and mystery that fog brings to a scene, where the edges of what one can see blend into something resembling infinity. Worth a read, and the photos are lovely.

I am into fogs, except when I am driving, when they make me acutely uneasy. I am way more worried about who is behind me than ahead.

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Who You Are, by Pearl Jam

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Friday evening Robin and I drove an hour to Cedaredge CO, a lovely mountain town of 2300 souls which is located in the foothills of the Grand Mesa.

We were attending the Fifth Annual Grand Mesa Arts and Event Center Film Festival. Only short films are shown, and those with some connection to the state of Colorado. That connection could be the theme of the film or one of the people responsible for making it.

We were motivated to burn some of our expensive Cluck Gas and make the drive because one of the movies being shown had been submitted by grandson Aiden. It ended up receiving the People’s Choice award on this evening. Son-in-law Neil had also come to Cedaredge for the showing, and we had supper with him at a really good Mexican restaurant in town, La Familia.

Some of the other showings were enjoyable, some were puzzling, some were just odd. But none of them were boring. Totally fun evening, but for one sobering artistic display.

And that was composed of 168 pairs of used children’s shoes arranged in a circle. They represented the 168 young people that our military, led by incompetents and madmen, killed at the start of the Iran war. The reporting on that tragedy has already vanished from the news cycle, but it should be the preface for any article written about the senseless Cluckian conflict we are still wading through. A war completely absent a rational plan. We should be seeing interviews with the grieving parents . We should be seeing biographies of the hundred and sixty-eight lives that were lost to no purpose. We should not be allowed to so easily forget what we have done.

Their deaths are yet more blood on the hands of Cluck and Hegseth. Our men in Washington.

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Illusions

jono55

Easter Sunday was a beautiful day here in Paradise. Amy, Neil, and Claire were here for a quick visit and we all took a walk around Lake Chipeta, a small body of water just on the edge of our metropolis. There were several fishermen and one fisherwoman working the water, mostly staring at quiet lines. We saw hundreds of trout swimming in the clear water who showed no interest at all in what the anglers were doing.

I had mentioned before we got to the lake that if we were lucky the pair of ospreys who sometimes hunt there would be around, and there they were! Such handsome birds. We were treated to the sight of one of them diving into the water and coming up with dinner in its talons.

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This morning I was thinking back on some old trials and as I remembered the healing that came from writing poetry I realized that I was not making present-day use of what had helped me in the past. I’m sorry, but it’s possible that my coping strategy may become your burden.

A life entwined with ours
And now it is returning
To its spirit home

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There is much to grieve these days as more and more Americans come to grips with the knowledge that their country is not and perhaps never was what they thought it was. It’s silly to think of someone my age suffering from a loss of innocence, but how else can I describe it? I thought at heart we were a good people, dedicated to the principles outlined in the Constitution and its amendments. I believed that racism, our most serious flaw, was slowly being diminished, an abscess in the body politic that was steadily being drained.

Now I am not so sure. The very fact that enough of my countrymen were vicious or dumb enough to elect someone like Cluck means that I was too much living in La La Land. But I believe that there are more than enough people who share my version of governmental and social naiveté and who can together face down this ugliness. The growing turnouts across the country in the No Kings rallies attests to that. The amazing strength that was and is Minneapolis when they braced the evil that ICE has become attests to that. But I harbor fewer illusions that this will be easy.

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No One Said It Would Be Easy, by Sheryl Crow

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A true tale. There was a very old and confused woman who had been hospitalized for weeks because she was so severely constipated. This was back in a day when someone could be admitted to hospital “for a rest.” At any rate, enemas and laxatives and the full force and variety of nursing and physician skills had been brought to bear over many days without much to show for it. Until on one momentous evening the lady, with a great deal of howling and many many curses, finally produced a monumental bowel movement.

The nurses were exhausted. The patient was exhausted. Suddenly the old woman spoke, not with her usual low-pitched murmuring, but in the loud and clear voice of a Shakespearean actor on stage:

Next time let HIM bear the child!

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Theme from Southern Comfort, by Ry Cooder

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Last evening Robin and I attended a lecture/performance by Craig Childs here in Montrose. The auditorium seats 602 souls and it was packed. He is a very popular author out here in Paradise, and has written several books on science, archeology, and the natural world. As he spoke there were photos and videos projected behind him on a large screen, all dealing with his most recent book subject, The Wild Dark.

There has been a ton published in recent decades on light pollution and the importance of holding on to all of our dark places around the globe. His talk illustrated that through the mechanism of two men bicycling out an abandoned road into the Mojave Desert on a course straight out from Las Vegas. Each night they would take readings on some sort of specialized meter, and they had to journey almost 160 miles before the lights of that city were no longer a factor.

The good news is that we are aware of this form of damage to our earth and the rhythms of our lives, and the world is slowly but steadily getting darker. Who knew? Humans capable of rational thought and action … c’est incroyable!

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Joyful Journey

jono55

Living in the Land of the Mad King forces one into a sort of unreality mental bubble. Cluck does daily what would have brought down any other President in my lifetime. Or in the history of our Republic. He remains in office through the complicity of 95+% of the political party that put him there in the first place. This larger group has completely given up on what is good for the country and the rest of the world and focuses only on what will please their diseased potentate and keep each of them personally in office. Even thinking about them disgusts me and makes my food taste bad.

So down the road when His Rabid Imperialness finally succumbs, and he finally lies insensate on the floor of the Oval Office surrounded by the jackals who have kept him in power, remember that we need to extirpate the whole snarling lot of them. Root and branch, my friends, root and branch. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

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Could We Start Again, Please, from Jesus Christ Superstar

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A few posts back I mentioned briefly that I had just discovered that I harbored a malignant growth. Since then there have been many worried days, but now there is a happy resolution to report. There are cancers that are extremely difficult and there are those that are merely annoying. Two days ago the investigations finally revealed that I have the merely annoying kind. With regular maintenance examinations I will live until I unlive from some other catastrophe, such as a piece of the Space Station falling on me, or gluttony, or … you get the picture, I think. So, no more on this topic.

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Robin and I are now viewing the last year of the series The Gilmore Girls. The level of the writing has done pretty far downhill, and the latest episode “jumped the shark” when they placed two main characters in a faux Paris just so they could stare longingly into each other’s eyes while the Eiffel Tower glowed beyond their window. The series has always been entranced with the hyper-wealthy, and now there are Lorelei’s parents (hyper-rich), Rory’s boyfriend (hyper-rich), and Lorelei’s new husband Christopher (hyper-rich). We are beginning to watch merely because we’ve already put in so much time that we are morbidly curious about what will happen in the last episodes.

But we will stick it out, looking to the smaller characters for traces of what made the series charming in the first place.

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On Thursday, Robin and I rendezvoused with Allyson, Kyle, Justin, Jenny, Kaia, and Leina, at small spa outside of a minuscule town named Moffatt Colorado. The name of the spa is Joyful Journey. It was the sort of place where you could camp in a your tent or recreational vehicle, or you could choose to stay in a yurt, motel room, or a teepee.

Meals were included in the price of lodging, as were trips to take the waters. Everything about it was pleasant and low-key and would’ve been totally relaxing if it were not for the fact that there was a wind that blew continuously all day and until well after dark at 30+ miles per hour.

After walking around in a gale like this for a few hours, one feels totally beaten up by it and we didn’t stay up late to chat as much as we would have ordinarily. We basically walked from sheltered space to sheltered space as much as possible, but at evening the breeze relented in time for us to watch a beautiful moonrise. ‘Twas a good place to spend a day or two or even more.

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I Don’t Know How To Love Him, from Jesus Christ Superstar

Robin had taken a liking to one of my old poems and posted it on our bulletin board in the kitchen. When a friend noticed it, read it, and then commented favorably without knowing who had written the thing, I could almost feel my ego puffing up. It was written forty years ago, during a particularly stressful part of my life, when living in a temporary world of pain and disruption were producing some changes in me that forced my hand. I let out the poet.

That is my pattern. When things are going well, no poetry. When the feces has hit the ventilation device, out comes this person who writes two kinds of verse. Good ones and sappy ones. By now the sappiest have been long ago purged, and it does give me pleasure to occasionally go back through the remaining few, remembering the chaos that surrounded me when I wrote them. At this distance I am in control, when I wrote them that was often not the case. Today it is safe for me to read them.

I have been a fool many times in my life. Not always the same sort of fool, mind you, there is some variety there. In AA I hear often the phrase “I have no regrets” and I think … I could never say such a thing. Of course I have regrets, principally surrounding the hurt I have done others, especially my children. I wish fervently that I had behaved differently so many times, but at this distance all I can do is to try not to repeat the same mistakes.

Though today my former Christian beliefs have undergone quite a bit of transformation, I have not lost touch with them. Easter is where it all comes together. Some of the season’s trappings are amusing, with the bunnies and the chicks and all, but underneath the dressing up in one’s finery and the ham dinners and the parades there is the most solemn of all the stories. The concept of sin, the sacrifice, the ideas of death and resurrection. Powerful.

This poem was entitled “Easter Sunday,” and was written in 1986, when my first marriage was flying apart at Concorde speeds.

A cycle  races through the countryside
White lines blur beneath the wheels
Gyroscopic forces hold us up
And keep our bodies from the road
I could have used a similar device
To guide me these past years
Whenever I was off the track
The wheel would right itself
Resisting that careen down
A painful and a witless path

No such luck was mine, or hers
We two pitched back and forth in time
Upon a vehicle already downed
I only heard the sound this year
A drawn-out grinding wail
As blood and bones of what we were
Were strewn along the road

People do survive these things
But never as they were before the crash
A part of me was left there on the ground
To dry and harden in the sun
The part of her that cared for me
Had hardened too
Out there on the road
Somewhere in territories west

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Everything’s Alright, from Jesus Christ Superstar

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Magic In The Machines

jono55

Well, Dipstick Donald got his butt handed to him in Iran. He seems to have been caught off guard when the Iranians quite unfairly started blowing up the entire Middle East and blocking off of 20% of the world’s oil shipping. Every day there has been a new justification coming out of the White House for starting the whole mess, the latest being that Cluck was coming down with a cold and was out of sorts. If Melania would have been kind enough to rub his chest with a mixture of beef tallow and Vicks Vaporub we might have been spared the whole bloody mess and the deaths already accumulated.

How pleasant it will be when he is finally stamped with the letter “P” (for pedophile) on his forehead and can be placed on a sexual offenders list. That way we can keep track of him once he’s been booted out of office.

My own preference would be to haul him to Mar-El-Lago, lock him in there and never let him out. Only adult family members would be allowed to visit, that is, if any of them want to do so. He would be assigned the duties of PLO (permanent latrine officer), with regular and rigorous inspections by that loony Kennedy over at Health and Human Services, who could thus resume his old habit of sniffing cocaine off toilet seats to his heart’s content.

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Ghost of Your Guitar Solo, by MJ Lenderman

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Thursday we received a new refrigerator. When we moved into this house the departing owners left us a nearly-new fridge, but that new one became 13 years old and about two weeks ago turned itself off. Then on. Then off. Then on. We read up on the matter and learned that the average lifespan of such an appliance is around seven years, so ours is ancient by those standards. After much pondering we decided to replace it, rather than beginning a cycle of expensive repairs that were strongly suggested were coming our way.

To me these things are still a marvel, with their automatic defrosting, in-door ice dispensers, deli drawers, and mostly awesome reliability. As a very young child I knew only the word “icebox.” This was essentially a large and very well insulated cooler. It was not electrified and thus had to be fed ice periodically to do its job.

Such ice was available from two sources, one of them being a building three blocks from our home where you put in some money and blocks of ice came sliding down from somewhere that you could put in your wagon to transport home. The other source was a medium-sized truck that made deliveries of ice to the homes, and in the summertime there was a steady dripping of melt-water behind it as it slowly made its rounds, since the truck was not independently refrigerated. On a hot July day we kids learned that if we looked pathetic enough and held out our hands the driver of the truck would give each of us a large chip of ice to suck on. For FREE!

Then came the refrigerator. Magic. Bye-bye to the ice houses and the ice trucks of the world. You now had something you could plug into the wall socket and forget about all that mess … until it frosted up. The freezer compartment would build up a thick layer of ice that ultimately brought the machine to its knees and then there was nothing for it but to take everything out and open the doors to thaw things.

Anyway, Thursday we get delivery of a new fridge, and all we had to do is come up with a couple of grand to make it happen.

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My having some surgery a few days ago means that I’m missing No Kings 3! Damn. COVID already kept Robin and I out of No Kings 2. How in the world will the revolution go forward without me there to carry my spear, raise my dudgeon, spew my vituperations? It will be a pale thing indeed if this pattern keeps up.

I’ve been gathering Old English curse words and phrases, since the sturdy old f-bombs are so over used these days. I think that some of those in the following list show real promise, but now I will have to wait until another time to use them fully. Too bad, because we have way more than our share of jobbernol goosecaps here in Paradise, and they deserve to be pointed out.

Wærloga: Meaning “oathbreaker,” which evolved into “warlock”.

Bædling: An insulting term for an effeminate man or hermaphrodite.

Fussock: A fat, lazy, or scruffy woman.

Saddle-goose: A foolish person.

Puttock: A greedy person.

Gnashgab: Someone who complains constantly.

Scunner: A loathsome or horrible person.

Fopdoodle: An insignificant or foolish man.

Whoreson: A common insulting term. 

Sard: Often cited as the Old English version of the F-bomb.

Fuccian: A weak class 2 verb, indicating an early form of sexual profanity.

Lickorous glutton: A lascivious or greedy person.

Jobbernol goosecap: A fool or blockhead.

Ninny lobcock: A foolish, clumsy person.

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An item touching on the recent death of our cat friend, Poco. A few days after his final office visit, we received this card from the veterinarian’s office. I thought it was a lovely gesture, and perfectly suited our present mood. Forever, of course, would have worked only if he could have still been young and strong and not living in pain and confusion. Loved the card, though.

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Awright … one more gallery. These images of Poco were photos taken by Robin and I that were then manipulated with ChatGPT to have a particular appearance, which they call the “Norman Rockwell”” effect. Cheating, right? But isn’t any alteration of a photo, whether by Photoshop or other editing programs, much the same? I know that this is carrying it quite a bit further, but it’s all along the same line, I think. What it means is that a rather inept guy like myself can produce interesting photo effects by clicking away without knowledge or understanding.

I am posting them because somehow these imitations of life are no longer specific to a time or place. They mean something particular to me, of course, but in a way they have become representative of the life of a tabby cat in general, and it could be one you have met, a cat who was looking out of a window or walking in fall leaves in a yard.

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Here are the originals, for comparison.

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I first heard the song Ashokan Farewell as the main theme for the Ken Burns series: The Civil War. I always assumed it was a period piece, perhaps dating back to the 1860s. But no … it was composed in 1982, by Jay Ungar. Such a lovely and wistful and evocative piece it is. One of those tunes that you’d have sworn was present, playing in the back ground, during your entire life.

Until I ran across this cover by Priscilla Herdman, though, I had not heard the lyrics. Of course they are sad. It’s a farewell, for God’s sake.

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Inner Children

jono55

I can remember too few things from my early childhood, but some of the clearest memories involve feelings. I remember when a puppy who I had bonded with was killed by a passing car on an elm-shadowed Minneapolis street. The implacability and irreversibility of the loss were things I could not process. How monstrously unfair it all was. For a time I made a mental fetish out of the puppy’s short life, and each day for weeks my thoughts swung back and forth from the crushing sense of loss to brief episodes when I forgot for a moment or two about grieving and simply enjoyed something. Anything. Then when I realized that I was actually living a “normal” life I would feel a terrible sense of being unfaithful to the absent pet. Slowly time took over and life began to ease as those feelings took their proper place, a place one could live in.

The oscillations between nonacceptance to guilt to nonacceptance to guilt ad infinitum in a landscape of misery and self-pity … I recall them very well. So this week when I found myself doing the exact same thing eighty years later I was not completely surprised. My skills of compartmentalization are much better now and I recognized that when the episodes of chest pains and flooding silent tears come suddenly I know that they are not permanent states but are of grief that will ease with time. And the guilt of surviving and being happy once again will also alchemically change into a deep respect and appreciation for the life which had been shared.

But the grieving is still an awesome force. It is the price to be paid for loving something or someone if that precious bit of life is taken away. It’s not a case of me over here and my late friend Poco over there. Our lives had become intertwined, grown imperceptibly together over nearly two decades so that his death has been a ripping away of a part of myself. An amputation. A violent lessening.

And just as when I was six years old and that puppy was killed, today I find myself crying out “This is not fair!” It seems that I don’t have to look far for my inner child at all. He is right here typing away at a Macintosh.

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Ashokan Farewell, by Priscilla Herdman

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We’re having 80 degree days this week, the forsythia are blooming hard and fast, and the fruit trees are following their lead. The stores that sell seeds and plants are already filling their shelves.

It is late at night and I couldn’t sleep so I took a cup of herbal tea out onto the backyard deck where it was a lovely 60 degrees. The slimmest sliver of a moon is nearly settled below the western horizon. The Big Dipper hangs right above my head. The heavens seem to be properly arranged. Kudos to whomever is in charge.

In the distance someone revs a car loud enough to possibly interest the local police, I don’t know. Maybe this sort of disturbance of the peace is one they let slide. Across the way from our house someone’s dog barks. Our cat Willow hasn’t come in from her evening rounds yet, nights like this one are just too interesting to her. So much night stuff going on.

During this afternoon I noticed a bunch of yellowjackets buzzing around looking for homesites. Time to get out the wasp traps. It is best if you can get them out early and catch the queens to shut down nests before they get started. Spring has sprung in full.

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Apple Tree, by Why Bonnie

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Our lives are like sweaters
Which are never finished
For as we add a row or two
Of length, to fit where we are now
A cuff or collar may unravel just a bit
And need repair

I think that sorrow is a time
When many rows are dropped at once
And slow replaced
The wind blows through the holes 
That have appeared for others
To appreciate

We stop, pull back
Repair enough to make it wearable
Then go on as before
All knitting
And unraveling
Together

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A Pillow of Winds, by Pink Floyd

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King Oscar

jono55

Well, we watched all 3.5 hours of the Oscar ceremonies on Sunday night. I was yawning by 2 hours, even though there were some entertaining moments scattered here and there. But hearing for the umpteenth time in my life about how important sound engineering is to movies has not made it interesting to me. Call me apathetic about the whole technical side of the business.

If someone has to explain to the audience why what someone else in the industry does is a big deal … well, maybe it isn’t … at least in terms of entertainment value. Of course the movie industry cares about those people and how well they perform but to most of the millions watching they are an interruption in the glittering fantasy we tuned in to see.

Why not break out the shiny beautiful people for an hour and a half, create a flashy program aimed directly at the mindless and drooling hoi-polloi (of which I am a charter member) and let those terribly important and worthy folks have their own separate, beautifully organized shindig. (BTW, I know that there already exists another such ceremony, I only suggest that it be expanded.)

Perhaps I am completely out to lunch here, but I shamefully admit that in the 70+ Oscar ceremonies that I have witnessed I can not remember the name of a single Best Cinematographer, including the person who won last night. Maybe, just maybe, there many other clots like myself out there in the audience who are the ones dropping out as the years go by.

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Travelin’ Riverside Blues, by Robert Johnson

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I went looking for why the ceremonies are called “Oscar,” and came away with the realization that no one knows, there are only attractive guesses.

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This is a sardine, and this is a story about them. They are a small, oily fish that lives in the ocean, which is a long way from where I live in Paradise. So basically the only sardines that I encounter on a daily basis are found in cans, headless and stacked in neat rows.

When I was a boy and spending time on my grandfather’s small farm in southern Minnesota, sardines and pickled herring were nearly always available. Because Grandpa Jacobson liked them, and he was one of my major heroes, I liked them, too. But when I became an adult, and tried to introduce others to the beauties of sardine-ness, I nearly always failed.

Tinned sardines available to Midwestern and Mountain landlubbers are basically headless, but otherwise they are presented as Nature made them. You take a fish out of the can and you eat it. On a cracker or a slice of bread, perhaps, or all by itself. It has a smoky flavor and very small soft bones and goes down quite easily. It also tastes like a fish. For some reason, a fish that tastes like a fish is disturbing to many Americans, and if you add that to the fact that the creature is being eaten whole, well … I long ago gave up my missionary work among the heathens in this regard.

Somehow over the last thirty years I have become a moderately overweight man, a state that I am now attempting to reverse for reasons of health and appearance. The turning point in my going from svelte youth to pudgy senior citizen was during a three-month stint at St. Paul Children’s Hospital where pediatric residents were given free and unlimited access to one of the finest hospital cuisines I have ever experienced. But that is another story.

Today a lunch of sardines on Wasa crackers is relatively low in calories and very high in calcium, protein, and those desirable Omega 3 fatty acids that nutritionists push at us at every opportunity. So I’ve added a few cans to my pantry. Robin doesn’t share my feelings bout these little finny things, but isn’t revulsed if I eat them where she can see me doing it, so our peaceful coexistence isn’t disturbed when I open a can.

I’ve added a photo of a can of King Oscar sardines for your education. These are the creme de la creme in the world of sardines. you can see that when you open the can everything is neat and tidy. They are uniform and uniformly delicious.

If you choose a budget brand, do not expect that they will look like this, but rather they will appear as diminutive victims of gang violence, irregular and thrown into the cans with little ceremony. They taste just as good, however, and are as good for you as the loftier-appearing variety. Usually at half the price.

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Travelin’ Riverside Blues, by Led Zeppelin

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Leonard Pitts Jr. writes so well … I’ve been a fan for decades. So when I found this piece on Substack this morning that was even better than his usual level of excellence I had to share it.

Title of the piece? “The Fatal Incompetence of Donald J. Trump.”

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From the ridiculous to the sublime. The production number shown at the Oscar ceremonies. Ay ay ay, what beautiful things imaginative people can bring into existence. There is a great line early on in this video, and that is: “You keep dancin’ with the Devil … one day … he’s gonna follow you home.” I will only say Amen to that, Brother.

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Writing Gibberish And Proud Of It

jono55

I just did something that I try to avoid, and that’s look at a long-term weather prediction. Long-term meaning anything beyond 48 hours. But the weather apps are fearless, and they will routinely take a shot at the next two weeks or even longer periods. Which is how I discovered that the high temperature this coming Friday is predicted to be 87 degrees here in Paradise.

Zounds … I say … zounds! There is still much of March to come! A handful of the trees in town are beginning to leaf out. Any minute now the forsythia will be blooming. The beaches will soon fill with tourists.

Merde! Wait a minute! There are no beaches here in Paradise! I speaketh gibberish!

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Every Day Is A Winding Road

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I recently had to admit to myself that I’ve never given Sheryl Crow proper respect as an artist. Which is odd, since I’ve liked almost everything she has recorded. Fortunately for Ms. Crow, there are millions of people who are smarter about that than I. My favorite album of hers so far is entitled Sheryl Crow and Friends, which was recorded live in Central Park in NYCity in 1999, and I’ve provided three cuts from it.

She is one tough lady, having survived breast cancer, a brain tumor, and Lance Armstrong.

When Crow wanted a family and a reliable man could not be located, she adopted two boys who are now young men. A strong move for a single woman in the entertainment industry. Reminds me of this feminist poster from way back then.

Leaving Las Vegas

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Cartoons to warm the heart of just about anyone with an intact soul. Love the George Washington quote.

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It’s less than two weeks now until No Kings 3. If you are anywhere near our corner of the world and wish to poke your metaphoric thumb into the figurative eye of the MAGA cultists, come and join us on March 28. We’re going to have a band, a good long honk and wave session along Highway 550, and some appropriate (but brief) speechifying. It’s shoestring grassroots resistance at its best.

There will also be a contest based on the theme: Where the hell is Congress? The winner will be anyone who can tell us the location of this important and woefully impotent body of representatives.

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If It Makes You Happy

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Saturday one more of my letters to the editor was published in the Montrose Press. I was a little surprised because it is the crankiest one yet, and there have been less fiery missives which have not seen the light of day in that newspaper. Here it is.

As we enter yet another phase of our national Trumpian nightmare and invade yet another country, the consequences of which could be very bad indeed, I find myself wondering again how anybody could support such a man.  Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt, should we?

  • Maybe they don’t know what a pedophile is
  • Maybe they don’t know what human trafficking is 
  • Maybe they don’t know what a felony is
  • Maybe they don’t understand what a traitor is
  • Maybe they can’t see grift and corruption as the enemies of democracy that they are … maybe they don’t care
  • Maybe they don’t have the imagination necessary to see the importance of living in a country based on economic and social justice and the rule of law
  • Maybe they haven’t looked up the meaning of the word degeneracy yet

So many questions come to mind. But one thing is clear.  If anyone supports this man and his cronies, they share the blame for the harm that is being done to our country and the rest of the world, and it is legitimate to make judgements as to their wisdom, their morality, and their fitness as American citizens. 

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Return to One Meat Ball

jono55

We are looking forward to watching the repopulation of the plants in the Black Canyon National Park. Readers will recall that last year there was a significant fire that torched much of the park, and has left us with fewer options on our visits. For instance, the campgrounds are closed, having suffered much damage to structures and campsites. The road down to the canyon floor at East Portal remains closed with no re-opening date set as yet. Concerns about rockslides and mudslides on this steep stretch of highway have kept visitors from having access to the Gunnison River.

But it is the plant life that I am interested in. The Gambel oaks and the serviceberries and the grasses and the lupines and the piñons … what are they going to do this coming Spring? Will they all come back? It’s a hard life for a plant up there, with rocky soil and scant water, even in good times. A story is about to unfold and I am ready to learn from it.

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One for My Baby, by Josh White

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The South Rim of the Black Canyon Nation Park has a single road of about seven miles in length that runs the length of the park. During the cold weather months the road is blocked off from the Visitor Center onward and becomes a cross-country ski trail. Each Spring there is a short period between when the narrow two-lane road is completely free of snow and when it is opened to automobile traffic. If you are lucky and can make it up there during that time, it is a wonderful and dramatic bicycle ride, completely un-bothered by cars. You have the road to yourselves.

You can ride your bikes the rest of the year, of course, but there is little in the way of a shoulder for much of the road, and there are few areas where cars can safely pass you, so they tend to pile up behind your bike and make you nervous. This makes for a lot of getting on and off the highway whenever possible just to let those frustrated drivers get on with their trip.

But that golden window is just about upon us when we have the trifecta of good weather, a dry road, and no cars. Can’t wait.

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Jelly, Jelly, by Josh White

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Robin and I have been using electric bicycles for the past four years, and really enjoy them. I don’t want to overplay the geezer card, but these machines really flatten the hills and enable us to take longer rides than we ordinarily would on non-motorized cycles. They only have two major drawbacks. One is that unless you are able to fork over more than about three grand for a luxo model you will be riding a heavier bike that weighs about 60 pounds or more. The second is that if you really want to cover a lot of ground on your ride you are limited to how far your particular bike will go on the battery’s charge. For the machines that Robin and I are using, the range is around 40 miles, depending on terrain.

The Optibike R22 Everest is presently  the e-bike with the longest range, boasting a 300-mile capacity (482 km) via a 3,260Wh dual-battery system. To acquire this technological marvel all you have to do is give the dealer something over $18,900.

I did give it just the briefest consideration but eventually decided against buying one, deciding that it was better for Robin and I to be able to eat.

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Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dyin’ Bed, by Josh White

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Josh White has been a favorite of mine since I was sixteen and first heard him sing One For The Road while I was sitting in my car and gnawing on a bag lunch on the University of Minnesota farm campus. At the time I knew nothing about him and his life, just being entranced by the voice and the guitar. Turns out that he had a fascinating life and played several important roles along the way.

White was in many senses a trailblazer: popular country bluesman in the early 1930s, responsible for introducing a mass white audience to folk-blues in the 1940s, and the first black singer-guitarist to star in Hollywood films and on Broadway. On one hand he was famous for his civil rights songs, which made him a favorite of the Roosevelts, and on the other he was known for his sexy stage persona (a first for a black male artist).

He was the first black singer to give a White House command performance (1941), to perform in previously segregated hotels (1942), to get a million-selling record (“One Meatball”, 1944), and the first to make a solo concert tour of America (1945). He was also the first folk and blues artist to perform in a nightclub, the first to tour internationally, and (along with LeadBelly and Woody Guthrie) the first to be honored with a US postage stamp.

Wikipedia: Josh White

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One Meat Ball, by Josh White

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There is a struggle going on right now between humans trying to do their best and humans doing their worst. The good in us will triumph, I am certain of that, but there will be hardships enough along the way to satisfy the most masochistic. And when those standing for compassion and justice and tolerance once again take the reins those virtues will have their moment for as long as we are willing to fight for them. For as long as we can remember that they are maintained only by constant struggle.

I recall when I first read The Lord of the Rings that at the end there were still bad guys out there, and definite suggestions that they would come out of their hidey-holes one day down the road and mess things up once again. It was part of Tolkien’s genius to see that comfort could be the enemy of vigilance, which always gave evil renewed opportunities.

He didn’t give me the unmitigated hopeful ending that I wanted. It pissed me off. Never mind that this good/evil cycle had already been repeated during my own time on the planet, I wanted the happy ever after. Eventually … but grudgingly … I forgave him for telling me the truth.

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The Eyes Have It

jono55

Scientists have wondered for the longest time how we vertebrates got our complex eyes. And the short answer is … we still don’t know for sure. But they are working hard at tracing the path from a single patch of light-sensitive cells in a very primitive, cyclopean, and brainless organism to where we are today.

Not only are the above orbs more intriguing than those of a planaria (at right), but they have all sorts of differentiation of proteins so that some cells bend light rays, some absorb light, some transfer images, etc.

If you haven’t already read the article, here’s a link. So much to learn … .

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Here’s an image of a primitive and brainless cyclopean species. Believe it or not, this one was recently elected president of a large country.

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Thursday: Yesterday I watched cranes flying overhead, but this time they were moving northward. I keep looking for the changes in neighborhood birds that declare it to be Spring, but they have been slower in coming. Birds aren’t stupid. They know that weather has its ups and downs and snowstorms are bad news for hummingbirds and waxwings and other migrating species. Come back too soon and it can be curtains for you and yours.

BTW, one of the absolute signs of Spring that I used to rely upon is no longer trustworthy here in Paradise. When the snow has hung about for months and finally prolonged warmth melts it down to the level of the lawns and ditches and the ground is everywhere damp one is assailed by the aroma of thawing dog feces for about a week. But when the rains and snows don’t come and the winter is in effect a mini-drought, those reminders of the thoughtlessness of canine owners stay largely dry and odorless.

But I am snug and warm and looking forward to something on the balmy side this afternoon. Tonight a couple of inches of snow may fall, but by Saturday we’ll be back in the sixties once again.

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Silver Rider, by Low

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Robin and I are knee-deep in rewatching the series The Gilmore Girls, as I think I previously mentioned. The show first ran from 2000 to 2007. I must have slept through that first viewing because there is so much that I notice this time that is completely new to me.

What is new, you ask? Well, the absolute repulsiveness of the parents of the main character, Lorelei Gilmore. They are rich, vain, soulless, and perfectly shallow, gloating in their privilege and not pausing for a moment in their judgment of ‘lesser’ humans. By this time I have reached the point where I no longer want them to be relegated to being written out of further episodes. No, that’s not enough. I want them to be kidnapped by Barbary Pirates and slave-chained to the oars of galleys that operate in some sweltering part of the world.

What else, you ask? Well, there is Rory, the hyper-smart daughter of Lorelei. She’s been told so often that she is more intelligent than the rest of the world that she believes it and is desperate when she comes up against the occasional reality of failure. Also, from the first day of puberty onward she spends most of her waking and non-studying hours attaching herself to one male after another. Once she is attached, she begins to manipulate said male into her idea of what a young man should be, which is essentially a replica of herself. Doomed projects all.

The men who wander into the lives of the Gilmore Girls are mostly congenial people who can’t understand why just when everything seems to be going so well they find themselves standing alone under a street lamp in a cold rain. One day they were the lover or BFF of a smart and beautiful woman and the next it is whoa, baby, I’ll call you, okay?

It is not only the men in the series who are seduced by these talented women, it is the viewers as well. We watch the series for the witty dialogue, the sharp humor, and the truths about people and relationships that are revealed. It is a sitcom with scattered tragic episodes.

Kinda like life.

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Blue, by Lucinda Williams

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Oh Joy! Oh rapturous news! DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has been fired from a job she never knew how to do and sent to a new one that was invented just for her. The murderer of protestors and puppies has had ICE, the biggest and nastiest toy in the country, yanked from her hapless grasp and given to someone I never heard of from Oklahoma.

Since her new job has no duties or office as yet, perhaps Ms. Noem may return to her home state of South Dakota, or at least to the part of the state that will have her. The 12% that is occupied by Native American reservations has been closed to her for quite a while now. She is that popular.

Yes, folks, you heard that right. When she was governor of South Dakota she did such a lousy job for the Native Americans in that state that she was barred from entry into all of their reservations, which are sovereign, self-governing territories held in trust by the U.S. federal government.

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Barroom Girls, by Gillian Welch

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One last little thing. In today’s NYTimes, there was a small piece entitled The Badlands Hold Me As I Grieve. I thought it was one of the loveliest little essays I’ve read in a long time. Part of its attraction was that I lived in South Dakota for nearly 40 years and there were parts of its landscapes that absolutely matched something in me like nowhere else I’ve lived has. That windswept loneliness, for instance, and the Badlands. Especially the Badlands.

It won’t take long to read … you might give it a minute.

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Weather Comin’ In

jono55

The human beings of this planet are presently behaving at their most awful in so many places at once it is hard to keep one’s focus. I never aimed at having this be an anti-war, anti-fascist blog, and I try to put as much purely silly and inconsequential in each entry. But I am weak, and my anger is strong, and so it goes. I apologize for my inconstancy.

I also apologize for my country, which at present is governed by madmen and thieves. We have slipped at least six spaces back toward barbarism, and there are too many Americans who are cheering that slippage. Try as I might, I am unable to adopt the attitude expressed by Jesus while on the cross: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Part of my failure is, of course, that I am not Jesus. The other part is that I think that they do know what they do, and deserve a huge karmic slap upside the head.

And now …

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Shark Smile, by Big Thief

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Now this next one might come across as a bummer, but is it not meant that way at all. Think of it as rather a note of explanation. I am a man of eighty-six years, which means I am a potential target for a variety of problems. This week I found that one of those possibilities has taken a step forward when a very plain-spoken physician informed me that I have a cancer. It could have been a heart attack, or another stroke, but nope, it was something completely different. The extent of the problem and the treatment possibilities have yet to be determined, and are not the point of this posting.

I thought about it for a while before deciding to mention this development, because … well … I have no interest in writing a cancer journal. There are many who have done so, and have done it well. Their chronicles have given meaning and hope to a great many people. However, looking ahead I can see that there may be times that having this problem will color my attitudes and opinions in ways I can’t predict today, and I thought you readers deserved to be in on the game.

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Those of us in the resistance movements here in the good ol’ US of A are beginning to gear up for No Kings 3, which is coming on the 28th of this month. Our local Indivisible group is gathering its signboards and poster paint and costumes and is making plans to SHOW UP in as grand a style as we can muster. Do we think that a national event like this one will bring down the walls of tyranny and injustice and extremely bad taste? Of course not. So … what, exactly, are we doing?

Think of an event like this one as a county fair attended entirely by the appalled and the furious. In this bit of acting as one we give strength to one another, the sort that comes from knowing you are not alone. And we also give strength and encouragement to those who are not ready yet to stand in the street with their placard and say HELL NO to the powers that be. We want them to also see that they have millions of brothers and sisters who feel just as dismayed as they do.

It also doesn’t hurt that it seems to really piss off that clot at the top whenever we do one of these.

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Change, by Big Thief

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The crowd at the rec center is undergoing the sort of thinning that mild weather brings. Pickleballers take to the outoor courts, walkers return to the hills and paths around Montrose. The number of bicyclists on the streets has quadrupled. Motorcycles all over the place. New calves are showing up in the pastures surrounding the town. Dare I say Spring is here?

In the Midwest, where I came from, saying something like that was almost certain to bring on a killer April blizzard and send some poor souls to their eternal rest. So while thinking the words was impossible to prevent, saying them was taboo. The last one of those April calamities that I personally experienced was nearly forty years ago, in Yankton SD.

It arrived on a weekend and hit us out of bright blue skies and balmy weather. Suddenly drivers couldn’t see where they were going and were sent scuttling for home and hearth. The children were gathered in, stores were closed, streets were empty.

One gentleman pushed his luck a bit, and was the last one to leave a local bar to take the short walk to his car. He got into the vehicle, but didn’t start the engine. Perhaps all he wanted to do was rest a bit, maybe sleep off a whiskey or two. But when the wind and snow subsided the next day, he was still sitting there at the wheel, parked on that major thoroughfare, frozen to death.

The day after that I was scheduled to hold a pediatric clinic on the Santee Lakota Reservation, about an hour from Yankton. As I drove in on the narrow two-lane road, I noticed many men walking on top of the drifts along the highway, poking long bamboo poles down into the snow. When I reached the clinic I was told that there was a young couple who had been working in town, and when the bad weather came they decided to try to get home, out in the rural. That was yesterday. They never arrived.

We later received the news that the searchers’ bamboo poles hit something solid just about fifteen feet off the road I had come in on. Digging down they found the missing couple, still in their car. With the poor visibility that a blizzard affords, they had gone into a deep ditch, and there they perished, quietly waiting for the weather to clear up.

So I am not saying a durned word. It’s only March 4, and of course Spring is not here. Don’t even think about it.

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I’m reading a book on pictographs and petroglyphs written by the admirable Craig Childs. It is a captivating book, dealing primarily with the drawings left behind by natives on the Colorado Plateau more than a thousand years ago. As my interest grew, I looked around for a map and found this gem, which I now share with you. Tis a beauty. Robin and I have explored only the tiniest fraction of the riches within the 150,000 square miles that constitute the Plateau.

One of the really great things about the author is that he doesn’t tell you precisely where to find the drawings. He has no interest in sending legions of boobs out to vandalize these sites, which too often happens. If we want to bust our butts and go walking in the desert among the rattlesnakes and scorpions and across waterless cactus-scapes, we are welcome to search them out for ourselves.

(FYI: when asked once where he lived, Child gave not an address you could look up, but this statement instead: “between Telluride and Utah.”)

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Stand In The Fire

jono55

Yesterday … a February picnic! Amy and Neil had been here for a lovely overnight visit, and we decided on Sunday morning that we’d all drive south to Pa-Co-Chu-Puk State Park, have a walk and some sandwiches, and then they would continue on back to Durango while we returned to Paradise. Since the temperature was brushing sixty degrees and the sun was everywhere, it turned out to be a very good plan.

A handful of magpies hung around our table waiting for handouts, which we eventually provided. They are strikingly beautiful birds, and they’ve been shown to be scary smart as well.

The common magpie is one of the most intelligent birds—and one of the most intelligent animals to exist. Their brain-to-body-mass ratio is outmatched only by that of humans and equals that of  aquatic mammals and great apes. Magpies have shown the ability to make and use tools, imitate human speech, grieve, play games, and work in teams. When one of their own kind dies, a grouping will form around the body for a “funeral” of squawks and cries. To portion food to their young, magpies will use self-made utensils to cut meals into proper sizes.

Magpies are also capable of passing a cognitive experiment called the “mirror test,” which proves an organism’s ability to recognize itself in a reflection. To perform this test, a colored dot is placed on animals, or humans, in a place that they will be able to see only by looking into a mirror. Subjects pass if they can look at their reflection and recognize that the mark is on themselves and not another, often by attempting to reach and remove it. Passing the mirror test is a feat of intelligence that only four other animal species can accomplish.

Britannica.com

After a bit the birds tired of being offered a few meager breadcrusts, and moved on to more promising-looking visitors in the park. There are people who dislike these creatures because they will raid nests of other birds. But really, if we are going to judge what other animals do to survive, how many species carry more baggage than our own?

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What was the worst time in my life? What was the best time?

There is a lot of competition for the best time, and I can’t honestly come up with just one. I’ve been a pretty lucky guy. Truly spoiled by the abundance of unearned gifts that have come my way.

But there is one clear worst time. That’s an easy one. And that was the whole process of becoming divorced from my first wife. A good measure of why it was so bad is that I was so completely unprepared for a failure of that magnitude. When I was married that first time I was … how to say it … unformed. My confidence in myself, in my decisions, in my various roles were all paper thin. And to be set aside in that way pretty much broke everything. I was dissassembled, and for the longest time did not know the way back to being whole again.

My nights and days were turbulent, regular sleep hours ignored. Drinking myself to sleep but then waking up at three AM in a hyper-alert state. I read, I listened to music, I wrote poem after poem after poem. The writing turned out to be an important way to ground myself, and yet there were mornings when I read what I had written the night before and I didn’t recognize the author.

Eventually the pieces were put back together, but not in the same way they had been before. Some of the old scraps were left on the floor and swept out with the trash, and the result was someone leaner, less encumbered and more resilient. I was still a basket case in many ways, but I at least now I knew what kind of basket I was, and that was an improvement.

Why this confessional? Perhaps there will be someone out there who is going through a similar trial, and who will read it on a day when they were feeling their lowest, maybe at the point where they are looking up gunshops and bridge abutments. They will go through this mess of literary pottage and say to themselves “Well, I’m not that loony! Perhaps there is hope after all.“

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I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain, by Beth Orton and the Chemical Brothers

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(I will share one poem from those troubled years, one written in 1989 that came from a time when I knew that I would survive and could see that there were good things I had learned while coming through the fire. I ask your indulgence of the primitive poesic skills.)

Hides

I have been tanned
I am an animal skinned out
Hanging on a cabin wall
Still recognizable
But tougher now
I’ll wear much
Longer as I am
Than what I was

I am a leaf on the breeze
Lighter than the air itself
Rising on a thermal
Settling
Sailing
Fluttering from the tallest tree of all
Towards the ground all miles and miles below

I am baking bread, rising
Pushing against the confines of the pan
Promises still unfulfilled
A bit more heat and I’ll be done
Then you can take a bite
My friends

I am an empty suitcase open, waiting
Put inside the clothes we need
And we will take that trip
The one that only now
Is possible

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Stand In The Fire, by Warren Zevon

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Deja Vu All Over Again

jono55

On Monday we attended all of the several activities available here in Paradise that were celebrating Martin Luther King day. The free community breakfast, the hour of heartfelt speeches by men and women from a wide spectrum of the citizenry, the awards for organizations that help our town be a kinder one, the ten minute march to Centennial Square and then later watching an HBO documentary of the last couple of years of MLK’s life. All in all … six hours of talking about heroes and heroism. There are worse ways to spend one’s time.

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On Tuesday we were part of a political demonstration against fascism that took place on the old courthouse steps.

(Just in case the DOJ might be wondering, we are the couple with the yellow arrows pointing at us.)

After each of these activities we found ourselves wanting to do more, to resist in other ways the insanity of Cluck and the Gang. If you have an appetite for more reading, Rick Wilson has put together an excellent paper entitled A Declaration of Independence from the Mad King.

Read it and then tell me that what we now see every day are the acts of someone who is compos mentis.

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Sons and Daughters, by the Neville Brothers

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Still too little snow to speak of here in Paradise. Mutterings among the citizenry about fears of water shortages are becoming more and more frequent. Most of Colorado is dependent on snow piling up in those beautiful mountains each winter to feed our streams and rivers as it melts in spring and summer. We are way behind this year, locally and statewide. There’s just not enough of that wonderful stuff.

Friday mid-day it started to snow the tiniest of flakes, falling straight down on an absolutely windless day. At first they melted away instantly, but by evening there was a coating of white in the valley. Perhaps only an inch, but a precious inch indeed. The climate niche Paradise occupies is entitled “semi-arid,” which translates into almost a desert but not quite.

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We’re halfway through the winter now, moving about town in what must seem unbelievable comfort to our compatriots in Minnesota, those brave souls who are carrying the fight against the autocracy in below-zero conditions. They are up against the weather, tear gas, pepper spray, and thugs with guns yet still they come out to demonstrate and sow discord in the hearts of the enemy … the enemy being other Americans who were sent to control and intimidate them.

I am inspired beyond words. And we are all learning as we watch. Learning how to confront and confound this modern version of the Nazi brownshirts.

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Sons and Daughters (reprise) by the Neville Brothers

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Alex Pretti

Murdered by ICE agents in broad daylight in Minneapolis

1/24/26

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Heroes

jono55

Something I’ve noticed recently out here in Paradise. The nearly complete absence of MAGA caps. For years they were one of the core items of Montrosian male dress. Why, on any trip to the grocery store I would see at least five men wearing them, and interestingly, they were mostly cross-looking senior citizens.

The same thing has happened with the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia , the stars and bars. I would guess that a decade ago at least five percent of pickups in town were daily flying these emblems of slavery and treason. While this might seem a small number, keep in mind that pickup trucks are the signature vehicle of our community. Five percent of a bunch is a bunch.

I don’t know the reasons for the decline, I just make observations. Those crabby-looking older dudes might just have died off of advanced constipation. The flag-waving yahoos might have actually taken a closer look at those banners and decided to be offensive in some less complicated manner. Either way, it is getting that much harder to easily identify the dim bulb segment of our community.

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Lord, this is good. Until today I thought no one would ever touch Emmylou Harris’ rendition of her beautiful song Boulder to Birmingham. Dead wrong is what I was. Here’s Jessie Buckley.

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The pickings were sooo good this past few days. Here’s a prescient prose poem from 2011. Honestly, how could we not see this coming? Terry Ehret did and put it down clear as spring water.

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Wade In The Water, by The Rigs

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ICE in 1933 (reverse metaphor)

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Heather Cox Richardson’s postings Letters From An American have been like flashlights, something to find your way with on darker days. On Martin Luther King Jr. day, Monday, she posted this beauty:

You hear sometimes, now that we know the sordid details of the lives of some of our leading figures, that America has no heroes left.

When I was writing a book about the Wounded Knee Massacre, where heroism was pretty thin on the ground, I gave that a lot of thought. And I came to believe that heroism is neither being perfect, nor doing something spectacular. In fact, it’s just the opposite: it’s regular, flawed human beings choosing to put others before themselves, even at great cost, even if no one will ever know, even as they realize the walls might be closing in around them.

It means sitting down the night before D-Day and writing a letter praising the troops and taking all the blame for the next day’s failure upon yourself in case things went wrong, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower did.

It means writing in your diary that you “still believe that people are really good at heart,” even while you are hiding in an attic from the men who are soon going to kill you, as Anne Frank did.

It means signing your name to the bottom of the Declaration of Independence in bold script, even though you know you are signing your own death warrant should the British capture you, as John Hancock did.

It means defending your people’s right to practice a religion you don’t share, even though you know you are becoming a dangerously visible target, as Sitting Bull did.

Sometimes it just means sitting down, even when you are told to stand up, as Rosa Parks did.

None of those people woke up one morning and said to themselves that they were about to do something heroic. It’s just that when they had to, they did what was right.

On April 3, 1968, the night before the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a white supremacist, he gave a speech in support of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1966, King had tried to broaden the civil rights movement for racial equality into a larger movement for economic justice. He joined the sanitation workers in Memphis, who were on strike after years of bad pay and such dangerous conditions that two men had been crushed to death in garbage compactors.

After his friend Ralph Abernathy introduced him to the crowd, King had something to say about heroes: “As I listened to Ralph Abernathy and his eloquent and generous introduction and then thought about myself, I wondered who he was talking about.”

Dr. King told the audience that if God had let him choose any era in which to live, he would have chosen the one in which he had landed. “Now, that’s a strange statement to make,” King went on, “because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around…. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough, can you see the stars.” Dr. King said that he felt blessed to live in an era when people had finally woken up and were working together for freedom and economic justice.

He knew he was in danger as he worked for a racially and economically just America. “I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life…. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!”

People are wrong to say that we have no heroes left.

Just as they have always been, they are all around us, choosing to do the right thing, no matter what.

Wishing us all a day of peace for Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2026.

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Stepping back and looking closely at this post I realize that the quality of writing is definitely improved. That’s the good news. The bad news is … (sigh) … it’s because I did so little of it.

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In The Trenches

jono55

Minneapolis is, right now, the front line of the entire country’s resistance to our fascist government and its agents. Those freezing January streets filled with people and the sounds of whistles and flash-bangs … the thousands of smartphone recordings that have been made and the thousands to come that reveal ICE’s now-naked war on America. There can be no doubt about it after the events of this past week. If you don’t see it, you never will … not until it is your door that ICE is knocking down.

Minneapolis is my old home town, where I spent the first thirty years of my life. I know those streets, recognize those addresses, have walked in areas now lit by police floodlights. Renee Good was shot and killed six blocks from my childhood home. I will never not be a Minnesotan, at least in part. This morning I can’t shake the ridiculous idea that I should be there. That I belong on that line. What is ridiculous is that I would probably be a liability to the those involved in the struggle. Someone that needed tending rather than someone who was good at carrying torches or blowing whistles.

Maybe not. Maybe I could be of some help, but no matter. The line will come to Colorado one day, who knows … perhaps even politically red Montrose will see its share of conflict because the Cluck machine is neither blue nor red. It is out only for itself, serving its masters both visible and hidden. I don’t have to travel across the country to mount the barricades … that opportunity will come to me.

My grandmother would have said: “Bloom where you’re planted.” Good advice, that. I will do my blooming right here.

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Our streets come alive
Injustice quickening cold
Fury in our souls

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How about something sweet and temperate? One of the best voices of this or any other time. Eva Cassidy singing Autumn Leaves and making it hers.

Autumn Leaves, by Eva Cassidy

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Our local recreation center has been so successful in recruiting members that it is becoming more and more frustrating to try to use its equipment. So far Robin and I have been unable to find some sweet spot in the day when the crowd is thinner and the machines we use in our respective programs are free.

Being able to move smoothly between devices is an important thing for my own training regimen, since at the slightest delay I am prone to simply leaving the building and returning home. Home being any place that doesn’t require physical effort and bulging neck veins.

The perfect venue for me, therefore, would be a large hall completely furnished with the latest and most scientifically studied equipment, with small loveseats sprinkled here and there to rest between exercises … and no one else allowed to be present when I was working out. Bank presidents, governors, and one percenters of all stripes would be shown the door as soon as I appeared.

I know, I know, there are some obvious hurdles to be overcome, but why not dream?

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Another tune from Eva Cassidy, submitted by daughter Kari. Sublime. Cassidy died in 1996 of melanoma, at the age of 33 years. Such has been the respect for and appreciation of her gifts that there have been nine posthumous albums released. Nine.

One of those albums was with the London Symphony Orchestra. A cut from the album was this version of Time After Time.

The story of Eva Cassidy and the London Symphony Orchestra is a posthumous collaboration, bringing her acclaimed voice to a wider audience through the 2023 album I Can Only Be Me, where the LSO performed new orchestral arrangements for her classic recordings, fulfilling a dream she never lived to see due to her early death from cancer in 1996, with technology allowing her isolated vocals to blend with the full orchestra.

Google AI search

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Every once in while I see a film that reminds me why we need filmmakers and darkened theaters to tell some stories. Tales so well told that you know you are a different person when you leave the theater than when you came in. You can feel it. Yesterday Robin and I took in such a performance, when we went to see Hamnet.

It was a tale of love and grief and their inseparability. Wrenching. Soulful. Beautiful.

Wore us right out. To the point where we needed ice cream right away.

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There are many emotions that today’s troubles bring up for me, and I recognize grief among them. There is such a deep sense of loss when I read the headlines, see the videos, hear the spoken cruelties. No matter that this convulsion will be over one day, with the skies cleared and some sanity restored to public life.

I have lost a certain naïveté. Once I realized the sheer numbers of my countrymen who can allow and even support horrors to be visited upon their fellow citizens as long as it doesn’t touch them personally. Who believe that the killings and torturings and imprisonments and the orphans and the lost children are likely deserved punishments. No matter that my ‘innocence’ has been clearly shown to have been always a fantasy, no matter that I now work every day with people who share my convictions, a loss is still a loss.

Music, as always, can be a balm for the wounded spirit. Here’s a bit of that.

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Vigilante Man

jono55

When I go to the grocery store, I like to think that I am a knowledgeable shopper. I’ve received a smattering of nutritional teaching in medical school, can read most food labels without referring more than three or four times to an encyclopedia, and I can tell a parsnip from a carrot without fail.

But once in a while, serendipity takes a hand in things. Such was the case a few years ago when I was standing in front of the freezer case where the frozen pizzas were stored. Too many choices, thought I, and while some of the old brands that I recognized had memories of lackluster eating attached to them, I was willing to try them again, thinking “maybe they’ve improved in the past twenty years.”

When suddenly a hand was placed on my shoulder, and when I spun around to see where the assault was coming from I found myself facing a young man with wilderness hair, a full beard, cutoffs, and a t-shirt that really needed either laundry attention or to be discarded in the sort of bag one uses to dispose of nuclear waste. This unlikely oracle then spoke: “Screaming Sicilian, man, it’s the only way to go.” He then waited a moment without saying anything more, till finally I caught his drift and reached into the freezer to extract a Screaming Sicilian Supreme, and placed it in my cart. At that moment, he moved away and disappeared. I’ve not seen him since.

At first I was going to put the pizza back, but then I thought “Why not try it? What’s to lose?”

And it turned out to be the best frozen pizza ever. Within a couple of centimeters of being as good as a freshly baked one from the parlor down the street.

All thanks to that stranger’s exclamation: “Screaming Sicilian, man, it’s the only way to go.”

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Feel Your Love, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

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We’re finally getting some snow here in the valley. It started Thursday as those tiny flakes that might as well be raindrops because they melt on contact. It fell all day, mostly melting away as fast as it came down. At 5:30 a small group of people stood out in that snow/rain and held a vigil for Renee Nicole Good, who had been murdered by an ICE agent the day before.

Most of the candles being “lit” were LEDs and were thus invulnerable to the snow, but Robin and I had traditional candles that we’d purchased ten minutes earlier on our way to the vigil. Their tiny flames were threatened by each wet flake but never went out.

Some of Good’s own poetry was read, and many heartfelt things were said about the death of one of our comrades at the hands of a government thug. She had been doing nothing but non-violently protesting the unjustified and unconstitutional ICE occupation of Minneapolis. In our hearts those of us assembled know that there will be more vigils to come, with more empty chairs at family tables, before the horror passes. We know that the possibility exists that there will be a vigil one night where they say nice things about one of us. Such is life in a Cluckian country.

The ceremony was cut a bit short because of the unpleasant weather. Nearly all of us who were there were senior citizens who really should have been at home by our fires, not out on a Montrose street corner in danger of ‘catching our death.’ But it seems to be one of those odd paradoxes where the generation whose vision is daily failing is the one that can best see what must be faced. I like to think that we are blazing a trail that younger citizens can follow when it comes time to change regimes.

(BTW, I was proud of the Minneapolis mayor, who had used some colorful language at an earlier interview and when he was later asked if he wasn’t going a bit too far with his use of profanity, he answered that if we compare shooting a woman in the face for no reason with the dropping of an f-bomb … which gave the greater public affront?)

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Helpless, by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

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Our cats don’t seem troubled by today’s politics at all. None of their habits have changed. None of their demands can be ignored lest they decide to rip open a sofa or forget where the litterbox is located. They trade purrs and snuggles for food and shelter and are content. As are we.

This snow that has fallen makes them think deeper before they venture out through the cat door to answer nature’s calls. They stare through the opening for a moment or two, and the expression on their faces is omigod … again? Were we not done with this?

One of the least lovely features of sharing spaces with cats and being responsible for their nutrition is a certain fickleness. A food that has been accepted for months or years is suddenly treated like it was nuclear waste and they walk away from it. A year from now that same dish of ‘toxic’ shreds might be just what it takes to make them ecstatic at mealtimes.

Now, the truth zone. I look at what I just wrote and realize that it applies to me as well. When Robin and I first got together she had two teenaged daughters still living at home. These three women had decided that the only meat that was safe to eat for any person who didn’t want to turn into a walking bag of suet was chicken. As a result, chicken was served at almost every meal but breakfast. After a few months of this, I had reached a point where even the mention of that medium-sized squawking bird was enough to provoke nausea and a near-seizure involving trembling of the extremities and paralysis of speech.

Once this trio was separated by time into three households and thus the influence of chicken monomania was broken, I slowly began to appreciate it as a part of a healthy diet. I can now hold a chicken sandwich without wondering where to throw it, and even occasionally order one in a restaurant without being forced or shamed into doing it.

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While I am on the subject of body weight, I am going to have to drop a couple of pounds. To my chagrin I have discovered that I have exactly the same BMI as the Pillsbury Doughboy.

What happened to me can be described by the following equation: mildly plump + Halloween candy + Thanksgiving poundage + Christmas poundage + less activity = all my clothes have shrunk.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more …

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Political cartoonists have never had such riches to work with. It is impossible for them to keep up with the daily misdeeds and outrages committed by Cluck and his gang.

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Ry Cooder has always been one of the good guys in music. This video is from 1973 and was originally shown on the BBC. Rings just as true this morning as it did then, and also as it did in 1940 when it was first recorded.

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On Saturday Robin and I drove to Grand Junction to take part in yet another rally, this time honoring Renee Good and more than thirty others who have died at the hands of ICE. An affecting bit of cold weather theater was where each of their names was held up by a member of the local Indivisible group. There was a moment where each name was read aloud to the assembled crowd, which numbered pretty close to 1000 (by our estimation).

The anger that these senseless and lawless acts of our federal government provoke was obvious in the expressions of crowd members. We were told to take that anger and let it be part of the energy we bring to our engagement, in whatever role we are playing.

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On the Road

jono55

It was noon on Sunday and Robin and I were lined up along Highway 550 as it runs down into Ouray from the north, protest signs in our hands. At times the breeze demanded a firm two-handed grip on the sign’s post. All told, there were 34 of us out there to show our opinion of Cluck’s mucking about in Venezuela.

But the amazing thing about the whole afternoon was that it was 58 degrees and sunny. In January. We had made plans to suffer for our cause in a whirling snowstorm, or at least a freezing drizzle, but nooooo, we were denied the opportunity to feel heroic. Instead, we basked.

As cars pass by, there are several types of driver responses that we have observed. Among them are:

  • The driver stares straight ahead and refuses to make eye contact with low creatures like ourselves
  • The driver extends a middle finger as a sign they see what we are doing and need to express disagreement
  • The driver revs his engine as loudly as they can to register contempt in an adolescent way
  • The driver gives us a vigorous thumbs-up
  • The driver honks joyfully
  • The driver waves happily

Overall the responses are more often positive than negative. We’ve noticed that we are statistically more likely to get a warm response from occupants of a Subaru than a pickup truck. (We noticed especially yesterday that the drivers of Land Rovers, and there were many, ignored us 100% of the time. Draw whatever conclusions you wish from this. I have my own unflattering opinions)

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We are watching the television series “Victoria,” which started out its life on PBS and is now on Netflix. It tells the story of Queen Victoria of England, beginning when she ascended to the throne at age of eighteen years. It’s a romanced version of her life, but still a great deal of fun. A very high-class soap opera, if you will.

I have only one caveat. Although Victoria is positively smitten with her husband Albert, I find his character as played is a wavy-haired pompous ass. It is irritating enough to make me want to toss pillows at the television screen when he goes on one of his broom-up-the-butt Teutonic rants.

Victoria, on the other hand, is played by Jenna Coleman, small but spirited. I never want to toss pillows when she is on screen.

There is a lovely soundtrack for the series , which I also have found captivating. (Mediaeval Baebes indeed!)

Victoria, the Suite, by Martin Phipps and the Mediaeval Baebes

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There are times when I am embarrassed for the media, especially that part tilting ever so slightly to the left. I count those among my friends, so it is especially hurtful to me whenever one of them begins to Rumpelstiltskinize on the outrage of the moment. This is where we have an event, say, like the kidnapping of the leader of another country after having invaded such country. These chatterers begin to try to turn straw into gold, postulating and pontificating in every direction about international this and international that but all they manage to do is to create an atmosphere filled with dusty golden fibers that dance in the wind they have created.

I would give an “A” and shout out a lusty “Amen, brother!” to any online ‘columnist’ who could turn their microphone on and say “You know, I don’t know squat about that, and neither does anyone else here in the room, so instead of droning on we will play some great recorded music rather than waste your time. I’ll be back when I have something to say.”

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You Pass Me By, by Lonnie Donnegan

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I ran across this post on Substack the other day, written by Sober Dude. Its title was: A Dozen Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Sobriety. The writing was warm, filled with good humor, and told some truths I hadn’t thought about in years. Especially #1.

#1. You’re about to have a shocking amount of spare time. Drinking is a full-time job. Planning it. Hiding it. Recovering from it. Apologizing for it. Thinking about it. When you stop, entire hours appear out of nowhere. Whole evenings. Weekends. Empty space. At first, this feels like boredom. Or restlessness. Or existential dread. It’s not. It’s opportunity without a syllabus. Fill your schedule early. Walks. Meetings. Gym. Writing. Coffee with humans. Structure isn’t prison—it’s scaffolding. You can decorate later.

Sober Dude

A couple of decades ago when I hung up my drinking duds for good … there I was, blinking in the full light of day and wondering … now what? All of those hours I had previously spent walking around in general anesthesia were staring me in the face and it was going to be forever before I could go to bed. And, BTW, I thought, what does one drink when one doesn’t have access to _____________ ? (You may fill in any of the following: whisky, gin, vodka, beer, stout, ale, wine, sherry, cordials, Listerine, vanilla extract, et al)

While some of these choices may seem trivial or obvious or even ridiculous to the unaddicted, they are quite real, and I can tell you that from remembered experience.

So if you know someone that you care about who has recently put down their glass and seems a bit at loose ends, you could send this link to them. It’s kind of a love letter, really.

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For What It’s Worth

jono55

Although celebrating New Year’s Eve quietly without Señor Ethanol anywhere in view rarely gives us those colorful stories to tell, we are content.

What we did do is drive to Delta CO and take a left turn out into the rural, looking for the resident population of sandhill cranes that live there all year. And we found them, in groups ranging from a dozen to fifty individuals, all feeding in picked-over cornfields. If we added them all together I would say that we saw more than five hundred birds in all. At times they were only a few yards from the car as we pulled over for closer looks.

Marvelous birds. Stately movements, smooth plumage, with that striking prehistoric voice of theirs. When new birds were coming in to land with their wings set, the scene was one of slow-motion grace, carrying serenity to the observer.

After this satisfying period of bird-watching we dropped into a restaurant in Delta and ordered some Navajo tacos that were … just okay … but which still qualified as solid comfort food. By now it was full dark for the drive back to Montrose, where we watched a couple of television programs until the call of a warm bed could not be ignored.

See, I told you, not colorful at all. But here I am, typing away on New Year’s Day. No hangover, full memory of the preceding evening’s events, and no new amends to make. Life is good.

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Screenshot

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I dunno, maybe not everybody gets off on the stories behind the songs like I do, and truth be told, there aren’t a whole lot of tunes whose history even I will pursue. But beginning back in the late 60s I began singing along with For What It’s Worth. It was at a time when every day’s news was filled with tales of protest and fires and marches and shootings and responsive brutality. I listened to the lyrics and took it for an addition to the literature of that time.

Now, it turns out that it was a protest song, but not about the Viet Nam war or the national unrest dealing with civil rights, but something else. Here’s a bit of explanation from Wikipedia:

Stephen Stills was inspired to write the song because of the Sunset Strip curfew riots  in Los Angeles in November 1966, a series of early counterculture-era clashes that took place between police and young people on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, California, the same year Buffalo Springfield had become the house band at the Whisky A Go Go . Local residents and businesses had become annoyed by how crowds of young people going to clubs and music venues along the Strip had caused late-night traffic congestion. In response, they lobbied Los Angeles County to pass local ordinances stopping loitering, and enforced a strict curfew on the Strip after 10 p.m. The young music fans, however, felt the new laws infringed upon their civil rights. 

Wikipedia: For What It’s Worth

Sooo, civil rights, perhaps, but on a narrower scale. No matter. For me, in my ignorance, its message was easily applied to those larger theaters of unrest.

In my mind I am now applying the lyrics to today’s political situation. And the fit is nearly perfect. A really good song like this doesn’t go out of style but can be recycled in new ways, new places and times. Why is that? Well, child, because we human beings keep making the same mistakes over and over would be my answer.

Here is Buffalo Springfield singing the original version, from 1966.

As you listen, think about the invasions of our cities by Cluck’s armies, about ICE’s depradations being visited upon innocents across this country. Think about a national health department made up of quacks which is promoting unscientific health practices using stuff they just plain made up, stuff that is killing people at home and across the world. Think about … we could go on and on. There’s something happening here for sure, and there is very definitely a man with a gun over there.

Here is a lovely cover version by the Del McCoury Band, from eight years ago.

BTW: just in case you didn’t know the origin f that original group’s name, here is the Buffalo Springfield steam tractor.

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I’ve been doing this thing, this blog, for nearly twenty years. I’ve gone through three software changes during that time, things that I accepted only when there was no choice. That’s my uneasy truce with change … resist as long as I can, then going along with it when the feces is just about to hit the fan.

I archive an entry for a couple of years, and then delete it. This was my deal with myself, to create something that was the verbal equivalent of a Buddhist prayer flag. To hang out there in the wind and rain and freezing weather as thread by thread was teased out to drift away, leaving less and less behind. Eventually to vanish.

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Of course, I can do this because what I write is so perishable. If there is meaning in it on a given day, that meaning is for the day alone. A man like Tolstoy writes for the ages, I write for the forenoons. And in twenty years some of what I believed so strongly at the time is in the dustbin today. My body is certainly going the way of the prayer flag, why not my thoughts as well?

At any rate, this blog is mounted on WordPress, which has been kind enough to ask me to change only once. I refused, of course, because there was an out. A back door I could use. I could maintain the legacy theme if I called it “customizing.” Perhaps one day WordPress will message me one morning and tell me that I am no longer worth their trouble and would I please choose one of the other fine themes that they offer? When that moment comes I will move on to the new with what grace I can muster. And some grumbling, spread with a veneer of profanity.

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So now the Soprano family has taken over the territory of the Corleone family. Criminals fighting among each other, while ordinary citizens stand blinking in the searchlights and the bomb flares. Just another day in Cluck’s perverted version of America.

A couple of tunes come to mind on after yesterday’s ugly news.

Lives In The Balance, by Jackson Browne
Bullet the Blue Sky, by U2

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50% Less Cluck

jono55

We are finally getting a taste of winter here in Paradise. Temperatures are down in the teens at night, although snow is still playing hard to get here in the Uncompahgre Valley. Last weekend we were supposed to rendezvous with daughter Allison in a small town named Rangely, northwest of us about three hours. But we dropped those plans when a snowstorm of about four inches came into the forecasts. Rangely is in a lonely part of the state, and services are thin up there for stranded motorists. Taking into consideration that my whole thrust in travel for the remainder of my life is to not become a stranded motorist in a lonely area in the winter, we cancelled and stayed right here in good ol’ Montrose.

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It’s New Year’s Eve and we have no plans. It turns out that senior citizens often have no plans for New Year’s Eve, so we are not alone in this. The raucous and often tipsy parties of the past have evidently lost their luster, whether one is in recovery or not. Staying up until midnight to watch a mechanical ball fall in New York City seems a scant way to spend one’s time. We are aware of the change of the years, of course, it’s just that wNewhen the ceremonies are over, there you are. Take away the calendar and December 31 is just like January 1. Not one problem or opportunity had changed one jot or tittle.

There are many New Year’s Eve parties that I would like to forget but the vagaries of memory keep them on file. Those are the ones where I learned what alcohol can do to the brain, stomach, and one’s behavior. I will not go into details, in the unlikely case that children might be reading this.

But one that I do remember in a mildly fond manner is the millennial change, 1999-2000, when we stayed up to see if the world came, not to an end, but to a colossal cluster-freak as all of the computers on the planet lost their minds. Mercifully that did not happen, but there was a good lesson in the fact that those geniuses who set up all those programs that we depended on didn’t have a clue as to what was going to happen at midnight 1999 because they hadn’t coded proper time changes into them. The geniuses turned out not to be gods, after all. Strangely reassuring.

The last New Year’s Eve Party we personally threw was more than fifteen years ago. We had several couples over and it was very nice but we found that by the time that the magic hour had rolled around everyone had left for the comforts of home and their own warm beds. By midnight every single one of the seasoned wastrels at the party was fast asleep, including the hosts.

And yet, here I am feeling all well-wishy and hoping that you all have a warm and lovely new year celebration, and a 2026 with 50% less Cluck in it.

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So Much Trouble In The World, Lucinda Williams with Mavis Staples

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Our national Department of Justice is moving right along developing its own variety of Newspeak. As of today, the definition of domestic terrorist includes just about anyone who is doing something that President Cluck doesn’t like. To the Attorney General, this definition seems tidy and is flexible enough to suit her. She knows that eventually they will run out of immigrants to abuse and be on the lookout for new victims, so creating a sizable pool of them in advance is a necessary strategy.

It pretty much goes without saying that our friends in the Indivisible organization will be on the naughty list. Almost everything this disreputable and seedy bunch does is deemed undesirable by the Cluck regime, especially their annoying insistence that the government ought to follow the Constitution in its actions. Cluck finds this document way too confining for a creative gentleman like himself, so he has tossed it into the bin and has the Department of Minions at work on a new one which will be out in Spring. Rumor has it that in the NEW CONSTITUTION the President is to be called GOD OF ALL THINGS, and worship services are to be held continuously.

Stay tuned.

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There are a thousand voices out there trying to tell the Democratic Party that business as usual isn’t working at all, and that their keepin’ on keepin’ on brings to mind the old definition of insanity: Doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

What those thousand voices haven’t come up with yet is a clear statement of purpose for the party they hope to enliven. I couldn’t help notice that the infamous Project 2025 that the Republican white-power-faux-Christian nationalists came up with gave them a real headstart once Cluck was in office. All they had to do was hand a page to each henchperson along with a sledge hammer and tell them to go to work.

Every four years at the national conventions it has been traditional for parties to draft a platform, but nothing like Project 2025 had come along before. So … what if the Democrats came up with a Let’s Be Gettin’ Down To It 2028? A clear statement from a party that hasn’t completely lost its mind and actually has clearly stated goals which include working to benefit the people who get things done. Something you don’t need a doctorate in political science to understand.

The Democrats can’t afford to wait until 2028 actually arrives, but should be hammering out their proposal right now. Or else why should we respond to those incessant calls for donations that they send out?

Donate to what? The same old same old? No thanks, guys. I’d rather fold that money into paper airplanes* and see how far they would fly in the San Juans on a breezy day.

*N.B.: The bill in the graphic is a C-note. This graphic was taken from the web, and is somewhat more generous than a typical donation of the writer would be.

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(My favorite cartoon du jour)

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Magnolia, IMHO, is magnificent. My favorite of Lucinda’s.

Magnolia, by Lucinda Williams

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Curry at Christmas

jono55

What was the most intense year of my seven years of medical school and residency? No contest! It was my junior year in medical school. This was where we were turned out of the laboratories and libraries and shoved with little grace into the middle of a hundred patients’ stories at once. Stories that had predeeded our arrival and that would go on after we’d moved on to another clerkship.

[Definition: a clerkship was a portion of the junior year devoted to a specialty in medicine. A taste of everything, at least nominally to help the student pick out the discipline he or she would specialize in as a resident. The traditional clerkships were surgery, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, and psychiatry. ]

My first clerkship was on surgery, at the ancient Minneapolis General Hospital, a structure left over from the 19th century, with soaring ceilings, twenty-bed wards, inadequate wiring, no air-conditioning to speak of, and a patient population consisting of some of the nicest, some of the hardest-working, and some of the most dangerous people in town.

I loved it.

If you were being cared for on one of those ward there was only a curtain drawn to separate you from the other nineteen patients. There were few secrets to be kept, not when one loud-voiced medical attendant after another came to move or massage or feed you.

For the bookish student that I was it was almost unbearably exciting and completely exhausting at the same time. I would be on call every third night, and be up continuously that night. Next morning I would go to the outpatient clinics to act as if I weren’t half asleep, stumbling from litter to table to bed and seeing what kind of composure I could maintain in this new and desperate life.

The house staff, consisting of the interns and residents, and who were being abused in the same way, often regarded a medical student as yet another problem to be solved. Someone too earnest to ignore but too dumb to trust.

Perhaps one personal example will be enlightening.

I was spending the afternoon in orthopedic clinic, and had been assigned to change a cast on a twenty-two year old woman who had fractured her tibia weeks before. All I had to do was cut off the old cast and put on a new one, since by that time the bones had gone a long way toward knitting. The resident had informed me that the woman in question was a “working girl.” I was actually unfamiliar with that term but a couple of questions brought me right up to speed.

I thought to myself, well, then it’s nothing more than the meeting of two professionals and things ought to go well. I introduced myself, got out the cast saw and within no time at all removed the old and unsightly plaster.

Next I applied wrap after wrap of plaster cast material up and down the lady’s leg from just north of her toes to her upper thigh. If there was a bulge or a dent in this masterpiece I was creating I smoothed it over with a bit more plaster.

And then it was done, a thing of absolutely glistening porcelain beauty on one of the shapelier legs in Hennepin Country, I thought. I stood up and stood back and asked her to walk. The patient got to her feet, tried to take a step, and suddenly burst into tears. I had made a cast so heavy that she could not move it. It might have functioned as a construction pillar for a large department store.

I scurried to get the resident, who quickly diagnosed the problem. He consoled the sobbing lady and then, before he applied himself to taking off this monstrosity and replacing it with a workable version, sent me away for the afternoon. The look on his face was so clearly “Lord, what have I done to deserve this?,” that I did not quibble.

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Only You, by The Platters

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That same year, that same clerkship … a boundary was set for me. Remember I said that I was on call and up all night every three days? Well, on the days I wasn’t on call I would hang around the hospital, looking and listening to what was going on in that great beast. I loved every minute, even those where I screwed up or ran myself into walls. It was just such a vat of ferment.

But after two weeks of that very first adventure in the surgery rotation, I came home at eleven o’clock one night and the patient woman who was my wife was waiting up for me. I can’t quote her exactly but the sense of what she said went something like this:

“You have a wife and a baby daughter who need to see you. You can’t stay at the hospital when you aren’t required to be there and ignore us. If you keep doing that, one day we won’t be here when you do decide to come home.”

At that moment a boundary was set that I knew that I would violate at my own risk. I can’t say that there weren’t a few slips here and there, but there were significant periods of time between them. The problem was that those nights in the old barn that was General Hospital were among the most memorable … ever. So seductive. Such an attraction. Such a world had opened up there.

Aaaahhhhhhh … to be 24 years old again, wearing an ill-fitting scrub suit and eating free but tasteless cafeteria food and drinking free but thin coffee at three a.m. in the company of a cadre involved in fighting some of the best fights ever. Talk about your foxhole mentality … we had it.

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This Christmas Eve Robin and I were by ourselves. We did leave the house to drive to the village of Ridgway (population 1200) at suppertime, where our favorite Thai restaurant was keeping its doors open. There are several Thai restaurants on the Western Slope where we live, but the very small one in Ridgway has an artist in the kitchen.

They are not afraid to charge what they think their food is worth, and the Mango Curry was $19.95, which is high for such a dish in this part of the world. But what a curry!

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As I left the restaurant, I grieved that I hadn’t been able to completely empty my bowl, and had left an ounce or two of broth behind. But my lips had already passed from intense capsaicin-induced pain to complete swollen anesthesia and I feared that the rest of my face would follow suit.

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You Always Hurt the One You Love, by the Mills Brothers

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We had one of the best Christmas Days this year, compliments of three good friends. All of the food dishes that Robin and I had prepared turned out well, the weather was impossibly beautiful, and the conversations ranged from the historically interesting to the nitty gritty of today’s politics.

All five of us were liberals, two being Independents and three Democrats. At some point one of the our guests said something to the effect that when things are this bad there is nothing to do but hunker down until the bad guys go away. Give them enough time and they will implode, they said.

It was at exactly that point when the patriot Patrick Henry, whose words American schoolboys have had to learn for centuries, took over my body and began to speak. I began to make statements, outline resistance strategies, and make impassioned pronouncements as to the need for and the what of such resistance using words I only dimly understood and information to which I had little claim.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775

When my mouth finally shut for a moment, there was no one more startled than I. I began to back off from what I’d said, and admit that there was no reason at all to listen to any of it because I was a known widely as a repeatedly convicted peddler of rampant nonsense. The rest of the group then settled down and lips that had tightened relaxed. When we parted amicably at the end of the evening and were still friends I silently thanked the gods for stopping me before I ruined what shreds of a reputation for probity that I still had.

But then Mr. Henry returned to say one more thing: “Well, Jon my boy, you’re a fainthearted patriot and that’s for certain. But give me a bit more time … I’ll make a bloody rebel of you yet.”

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Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, by The Platters

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