Tag: wildlife

Changes

jono55

Here is a puff piece about Robert Plant taken from an Apple Music review of his recent album. It happens I agree with it.

“It’s hard to think of another artist from the 70s classic-rock era who has aged more gracefully than Robert Plant. Rather than trying to relive past glories, the former Led Zeppelin shrieker has spent much of the 21st-century recontextualizing his formative influences – American blues, English folk, early rock ‘n’ roll, Middle Eastern classical – into more earthy and ethereal realms.”

The man has evolved in full view of all of us from basically the poster boy for the excesses of rock and roll to a mature artist who keeps putting out really interesting music. I’ve included a couple here today from the album Saving Grace. Look at those photos and marvel at what time makes of a face. From beautiful boy to a Mount Rushmore sort of gravity.

A side note. My son Jonnie was into music from early on in life, buying albums before he was ten. When he found an artist he liked, he would often save up and buy everything that man or that band had recorded. Such was the case with Led Zeppelin, the band where Plant became a legend. At the time, they meant nothing at all to me. It took a long time after Jonnie had moved on for me to catch up with his tastes.

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Soul Of A Man, by Robert Plant

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Saw a Lewis’ Woodpecker on our neighborhood walk this week, pecking away in some dead branches. Thet are pretty easy to spot, once you know they exist. I only learned about them this summer, when I saw one on a visit to Durango.

The Lewis’s Woodpecker might have woodpecker in its name, but it forages like a flycatcher and flies like a crow. It has a color palette all its own, with a pink belly, gray collar, and dark green back unlike any other member of its family. From bare branches and posts, it grabs insects in midair, flying with slow and deep wingbeats. It calls open pine forests, woodlands, and burned forests home, but it often wanders around nomadically outside of the breeding season in search of nuts.

All About Birds

The description sounds a bit like a lot of us, who wandered from home and years later couldn’t quite figure out how to get back or remember clearly how we started out. “I know I was a woodpecker in the beginning, but how was that, again?”

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There came a period in my mid-adolescence when I chafed at being expected to attend each family gathering the way I had done as a younger child. One day I flatly refused, and quite a scene ensued, with the rest of the family eventually going on without me. Harsh words, lots of pent-up resentments released on both sides.

Finding myself alone and not enjoying the solitude one bit, I made the decision to leave home. I did own a car, had a part-time job, and thought I might be able to support myself in meager fashion. So I packed the trunk of that car with all that I owned of any value. (I will tell you that it made a pitifully small pile.) And then I took a nap.

When I awoke, the rest of the family had returned, and so I resolved to wait and leave in the morning. I never learned how it happened, but somehow my parents became aware of what was stored in my car’s trunk, and my father did a very uncharacteristic thing, for him. He sat down and had a talk with me. No recriminations, no lecturing. Just letting me know that he and I were not adversaries, and that my safety and happiness were very high on his list of concerns.

The next day, I unpacked, feeling relieved. I think that over those hours I had realized that although I was now perched on the edge of the nest, I was not quite ready for flight, and was glad to have been talked out of it.

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Too Far From You, by Robert Plant

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POETRY CORNER

Over my life I have written things that for want of a better name I call poems. Thought I’d put one up here once in a while, just to air them out.

Us

Our personalities 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 illness is a time

When many rows are dropped at once

And not 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

May 1983

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I Never Will Marry, by Robert Plant

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As of this morning our government has shut down, whatever that means. This might be a good time to push it into a hole, kick some dirt over it, and start afresh. In its present iteration it serves no one well but the criminals at the top.

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Rise Up, Me Buckos

jono55

Okay, for some folks I guess it comes down to “Have you had enough, yet?” when dealing with the oleaginous monstrosity that is our present national government. We have incompetence throughout the executive branch, only half of the Senate with their wits about them, and a House of Representatives where the ability to tie one’s own shoelaces sets one apart from the herd. Add to this a corrupted Supreme Court and you have the full picture. Dismal, but full.

But we, the much-disrespected electorate, don’t have the sense to roll over and collaborate, as have some colleges and universities, CBS, ABC, and a distasteful number of our national institutions. Armed with our eighth grade civics lessons, a copy of the Constitution, a shred of decency, and a great deal of stubbornness, we persist in resisting. Go figure. There will be a nationwide rally on October 18 that calls itself NO KINGS 2.0.

It will be yet another chance to get together and see that you are not the only one who thinks our present situation is unsustainable madness. The first NO KINGS protest was massive, with more than 5 million people participating. This included 2500 souls who gathered here in Paradise, a small red town in a red corner of the state. It was peaceful protesting all the way. I have to give credit to the Cluck administration and Republican Party for doing so abysmally that it is easy to find a repellent situation to protest against. Too many to count, really. An embarrassment of riches.

My readership is spread around the globe, but if any of you are going to be in the US on October 18 you might want to drop over to Paradise and see small-town democracy at work. You can get more information at the national website for NO KINGS. Stop by, we’d love to have the opportunity to shake your hand and harangue the very beJesus out of you. (If you don’t have a place to stay we have more than a thousand square feet of floor space at our home and enough sleeping bags for six.)

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Watching the movie Out of Africa the other night at our own personal Robert Redford Film Festival, we were struck by how young and handsome Redford and Meryl Streep were in 1985. She was almost luminous at times. And then I thought … hey … forty years ago I was, if not luminous, doing okay as well. I could still run, leap without creaking, and I teetered very little.

I also owned a Honda Gold Wing at that time as did my friend Bill, and the two of us would take our motorcycles out to the wilds of a Nebraska two-lane highway and see how fast they would go. Mine topped out at 116 mph, and I have to confess that this was way past fast enough for this armchair cowboy. All it would have taken was a rabbit in the road and I would not be typing this deathless prose.

But Redford and Streep and the superstar of the show – Africa – what a trifecta that was! If you haven’t seen the film, it’s available on Prime and will cost you $3.99. Worth every penny.

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No One Is Watching You Now, by “Til Tuesday

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For those who are still silently waiting for our shared nightmare to be over, it’s time to wake up. Right now. A coup is under way. This time there is no cavalry coming to save us if we can just hold out. I keep seeing a phrase that goes with the spot we’re in very well, I think, and it is Silence is Complicity.

A quote from Elie Wiesel: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented”. 

Another, from Leonard Peltier: “Silence, they say, is the voice of complicity. But silence is impossible. Silence screams. Silence is the message, just as doing nothing is an act. Let who you are ring out and resonate in every word and deed. Yes, become who you are. There’s no sidestepping your own being or your own responsibility. What you do is who you are.“

And finally, one from Martin Luther King, Jr.: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.“

I could go on, as I too frequently do. But if I have a point, my friends, it is that it is an illusion to think that there are sidelines for any of us to stand on.

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Friday we traveled with friend Rod to Telluride, looking for fall color. It was a good day for such an outing, but the only problem was that we anticipated the leaves really looking good by perhaps a week or two. So, the trip was a failure, right?

Wrong. What we did find was a beautiful herd of elk in the valley leading into Telluride, a village that was surprisingly crowded with people who seemed as pleased as we were to be there, and a lunch consisting of the best pizza on earth (IMHO) at the Brown Dog. Not too shabby, I’d say, not too shabby at all.

I tend to malign Telluride too often, I think. To be sure, it is an easy target due to being overpopulated by the very wealthy oozing with their tiresome self-importance. But I have to grudgingly admit that not every zillionaire is a pompous ass. Some of them obviously came from modest beginnings and have managed to hang onto their souls as their treasure grew.

It all makes me wonder what would become of my ragged personality should I become rich through some windfall. I already have an overdeveloped sense of superiority in my present economic circumstances, and I suspect that there is at least an even chance that I would join the ranks of the insufferable. Saying things like “Oh, look there, Robin, a peasant. Be careful not to touch it, I’ve heard that they carry germs.”

Maybe not. Maybe I wouldn’t forget from whence I came. Not every one of my character traits is of the gold star variety, but maybe I’d still find a way to keep it real. Quien sabe?

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The Beautiful Lie, by the Amazing Rhythm Aces

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As a closer, I have not one but two day brighteners for you. The first is a piece from the Colbert show: https://substack.com/@demwinsmedia/note/c-157661556

The second is from CNN’s article on this manga pirate flag that is showing up in protests all over Asia. It is taken from a popular Japanese comic strip and flying it indicates dissatisfaction with the government. ‘Nuff said? Methinks I might need one of these. Maybe two of them.

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Nature Is Not A Place To Visit

jono55

Why go camping? Why put this seasoned carcass on a thin pad on the ground in a tent in a remote spot where one’s serenity could be interrupted at any moment by a thunderstorm, a tree falling, or the crack of a dry branch in the night as a large creature travels near the tent. Why go days without a proper bath? Perhaps the following paragraphs will provide some ragged sort of explanation.

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A long time ago I was reading … something … I can’t even recall whether it was non-fiction or a novel, but I came across this phrase which has stuck with me and become part of my DNA.

What the white man calls wilderness, we call home.

Reading it back in that dimly remembered day was one of those scales falling from the eyes moments. For I recognized for the first time that my attraction to the outdoors, the woods and the deserts and remote places, was homesickness. I was living my life in a town, in a house which was centrally heated and air conditioned. I drove a car along marked streets to grocery stores where I traded money for the food I needed, without ever producing a morsel of my own. I followed the rules of social living, became a high school graduate, a college boy, a physician, a husband and father. But I knew that I was living in a foreign country called America, when my true home was somewhere else entirely.

I am sitting by a campfire, lively breeze blowing through  giant pine trees, granite cliffs on one side, distant snow-capped mountains on the other; a stream flowing downhill over pebbles and boulders can be heard in the distance; at night the pitch black sky lights up with seemingly endless stars, somewhere far off an owl hooting….  I make a cup of coffee over the fire and converse with this wilderness…. 

Mostly we don’t think of that starry sky as also a wilderness, but it is that.  It is “wild” in the root meaning of that word, not humanly controlled or manipulated, not running by human wisdom, but by its own inner wisdom which the ancient Chinese called the Tao.  I look at the Milky Way, that fuzzy white spread of millions of stars like our sun, our galaxy, and millions of other galaxies out there whose light takes millions, even billions of years to get here….it is all so incomprehensibly and unimaginably vast, and yet in a very real way it is all our home.  Every atom of every fiber of our being was made in those stars billions of years ago…and so with everything we touch, we breathe, we eat….  In the deepest sense there is nothing “out there” that is alien to us.

The Tao of the Wilderness

The lure of leaving safety, comfort, recognizable landmarks and finding one’s own way is such a strong one. Whenever I would step off the shore into a canoe leaving on a Boundary Waters trip I had that delicious and necessary feeling of disconnection from all of the things that civilization is. Even now, at a time of life when I creak in places I didn’t even know that I had, I am eager for the next trip, the next step away from the shore.

I took many small voyages into those Boundary Waters with an old friend Rich, and for the most part we agreed on things. But there came a day when we argued (both unsuccessfully) with each other over something that we had almost no control over. Some company wanted to build a communication tower on the edge of that wilderness, tall enough that the signal could reach a cell phone anywhere out in the BW. Rich wanted it to happen, to be able to stay in touch with his family at all times. I could understand his position, at least it was the truth for him.

But as for me, I idly thought: “If they build that goddam thing perhaps I will come back and blow it up.”I was pretty sure that Edward Abbey would have my back on that one, even as they dressed me in new orange pajamas and showed me to my exclusive room at the Stillwater State Prison.

So I go camping, backpacking, walking out. These are tiny gestures, really, and if I were to be “out there” totally on my own I suspect that I would not last long at all. Within a month or two the porcupines would be gnawing the leather belt on my pants to extract the salt they crave. But as poet/naturalist Gary Snyder put it:

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

Gary Snyder

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Ends of the Earth, by Lord Huron

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From The New Yorker

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The fire in the Black Canyon National Park is not done with us yet, but has slowed and is being contained. No loss of life. No homes burned. The Visitor Center preserved. But the residents of the area are not yet being allowed to return to their homes.

Photographs started to become available once the media was given an official tour, while the general public is still denied access to the area. Something like 14% of the park area has burned. Here are some pix taken from our local newspaper.

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What a rotten caricature of a human being we have at the helm. Each day we are given a reminder of the values of honesty, uprightness, and mercy as we follow the slime trail of a man who possesses none of those virtues. He has the power to hurt so many people and is using it full-time to do just that, while the country is run as if it were a garage sale rather than a sovereign state.

Ahhhhhhhh … the waiting for the end of this particular time of tribulation is a difficult thing. Hard times … hard times … come again no more.

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Hard Times Come Again No More, by Gangstagrass

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Triviality

jono55

Robin and I started with a new physician this week. The doc we’ve had since moving to Paradise is retiring, and we wish her well.

The new MD is thirtyish, asks all the right questions, gives lots of solicited advice, and has definite opinions about things she should have definite opinions about.

I like her.

I don’t mind at all being ordered about by a female physician, it fits well with the pattern of the rest of my life. It turns out that I do better at taking orders from women than my own gender because, in general, those orders have a higher sensible/thoughtful score and rank lower on the bluster/buffoon index.

(Actually I’d rather not take orders at all, but that part seems unavoidable.)

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I mentioned a couple of posts back that our house has been recurrently invaded by three young raccoons.

They’ve been back several times since that first visit and I’ve been straining my brain trying to figure out how to get them to stop coming in without harming them. Then I remembered that farmers and gardeners have been using the urine of predators sprinkled around their trees and plants to discourage deer and small animals (including raccoons) from eating or damaging them.

So we left the cat door open as it’s always been, but I’ve started putting the T-shirt that I’ve worn during the day right by the door at night. Interestingly the raccoons have not come in since.

I don’t know if they’ve given up on us or if they’ve just decided to wait me out, but our home is presently raccoon-free. I feel that I should add for the sake of propriety that there is no urine involved in this operation. None whatsoever.

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Last evening Robin and I watched a 2016 concert on PBS where some of the stars in the country music world paid tribute to Kris Kristofferson. People like Willie Nelson, Reba McIntire, Martina McBride, etc. It was nicely done, and the performances of KK’s songs were excellent.

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Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down

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Kristofferson’s music has played its part in both of our lives, starting long before we met and I’m pretty sure that it will continue through the rest of our personal stories. What stands out in his writing is truth and honesty. If he’d only written Me and Bobby McGee, just that one tune, he’d be on our fave list. But there is so much more.

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Loving Her Was Easier

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The irony of one of this week’s events on the political stage … you couldn’t make this stuff up, honey. When a man avoiding an international arrest warrant for criminal acts of war comes to Washington DC to announce that he has officially nominated President Cluck for the Nobel Peace Prize.

My, my, my. Another chapter in the malignant fantasy that is Cluckland.

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The two friends in the header photograph have moved on to camping and paddling in another part of the cosmos. I wonder how the scent of woodsmoke registers there.

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Psychedelia

jono55

One more tag-end to our recent trip. On the return leg we overnighted in FairPlay CO. I believe Fairplay, Colorado might be one of the least gentrified communities in the entire state. Perhaps the entire country. We sought advice from the motel desk clerk and went to Otto‘s for supper. Otto’s was located in one of my favorite sort of venues, a simple wooden-frame structure whose bathrooms were approached by going out the side door and around the back. The kitchen was very busy with young men working hard at preparing a large number of their signature dishes which are fried chicken sandwiches.

Robin and I each ordered one of those and sat down at a table to wait. The music coming at us from the small Bose speaker in the corner was straight out of a late sixties psychedelic playlist.

It was all wonderful stuff, but there was one particular song that came on which I had never heard before and admired greatly. I went to the desk where we had ordered our food to ask the gentleman if he knew what was playing on the overhead. He immediately came up with the answer, which was Fearless, by Pink Floyd, from their album Meddle.

I have included that gem in today’s post.

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Fearless, by Pink Floyd

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From The New Yorker

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Robert Reich reposted a message a couple of days ago that I wish I had written. It brings together what was an inchoate mess of thoughts ricocheting around in my own cranium and then organizes them. It calls for action by all of us who are sickened by current events, and does not at any point suggest that we sit back and watch in bemusement.

It especially calls for the leaders in the Democratic Party to be … well … leaders. To leave their comfort zones so far behind they can’t remember where the keys are and really dig in while digging is still possible.

As the graphic indicates, democracy is not a spectator sport. The house is on fire, friends. The next right thing to do is to grab a bucket and join a brigade!

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From The New Yorker

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It’s a bit after one a.m., and while I am computerscribbling in my office I hear a scuffling noise out in the kitchen area. The pet door is open to the outdoors, and rarely another feline will wander in to sample whatever we’re feeding our own cats. So I walk quietly to that room and discover not one, but three young raccoons, each the size of a small kitty.

They took poorly to being discovered and went out the door, across the yard, and over the board fence in a dignified hurry.

That’ll be about that for a while, I say as I button down the cat portal. I do like these intelligent critters, but only outdoors. They are quite good at probing human defense systems, and it is likely that our home is now on their list of good places to visit.

Oh well.

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Bruceland

jono55

Well, of course I bought it. If Bruce Springsteen can bring out an EP that just might piss off president Cluck, I am all in. It contains the now famous introductions that the world has heard, emanating from concerts in Manchester, England. Music to my ears, they are. The EP is called Land of Hope and Dreams, and retails for $4.95.

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Introduction to Land of Hope and Dreams

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My way of looking at it is that for a very modest sum I can send Cluck one more mosquito to stab at that thin skin. It’s a small and petty thing to do, but I never claimed to be anything else, now, did I?

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Introduction to My City of Ruins

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Bruce finishes the EP with a cover of what some folks think is Bob Dylan’s masterpiece, Chimes of Freedom. It’s one of those rare songs will never go out of style, principally because freedom can never be taken for granted, but must be earned and re-earned by one generation after another. (NB: if you live long enough you may get to re-earn it more than once)

Chimes of Freedom

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And in our present day here in America …

  • when you can’t see the way forward
  • when it all seems overwhelming
  • when the voices of hate threaten to drown out the music
  • when just getting out of bed in the morning seems a struggle

It’s all just like the man said – every step you take forward is a little victory.

Little Victories, by Bob Seger

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It is 82 degrees in Paradise, no wind, humidity 17% , Wes Montgomery playing Down Here On The Ground over the little blue Bose speaker. I’m out in front on the patio with a can of Spindrift. A couple of the neighborhood teenagers are hunched over the handlebars of their bikes, unsure of their next move. They are pretty good kids, so our lives and property are probably not in jeopardy.

Now in the background it’s Ali Farka Touré playing Soukora. Perfect.

Since I am at the time of life that I am, it behooves me to take little for granted. Not an interesting cloud, not a new flower out in the berm, not a single strawberry is ignored.

Soukora, by Ali Farka Touré

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It tickles me that a columnist for the citadel of conservative fiscalism, the Wall Street Journal, came up with an acronym that apparently does not please His Tangerine Sublimity. It is T.A.C.O.

Translated, it refers to the crazy ups and downs of Cluck’s tariffs. Trump Always Chickens Out is what it stands for. How exceedingly droll and perfectly disrespectful.

The T.A.C.O. Meme has exploded on the web. I gathered a handful for your enlightenment.

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Chicken Train, by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils

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Today Robin and I hiked on the Upland Trail at Black Canyon National Park. Halfway through the walk I saw a large red fox with a world-class bushy tail. He ran into some scrub oaks and disappeared in a second. First fox we’d seen in the Park.

We had driven up shortly after breakfast because the forecast for the day was to hit the low 90s. Since senior bodies tend to wilt in the heat we took our hike when and where it was cooler.

One unexpectedtreat was the discovery of many small clumps of Claret Cup cacti. They like rocky outcroppings and their brilliant red flowers are exquisite. (For reference: these blossoms are only about 1.5 inch across)

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When Authority Always Wins …

jono55

There’s a person who posts on Substack as “Rosie the Resister.” On Thursday she came up with the beauty at right.

My comment on Rosie’s post is that America wasn’t ready for Cluck. Too many didn’t believe that fascism could happen here. Next time someone like him comes along, hopefully, we will smell them coming in time.

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The first election that I ever voted in was in 1960, when the question was “Is America ready for a Catholic president?” There were pamphlets placed on public buses in my hometown of Minneapolis suggesting that if JFK were elected we’d all become subjects of the Pope, and after that it would be all fish on Fridays and burnings at the stake and everything.

Well, Kennedy was elected and, mirabile dictu, that particular nightmare never happened. Turns out that our society makes progress by fits and starts rather than smooth transitions. On Monday being Catholic was an obstacle, but on Wednesday it’s a fading line in the sand. It’s what we do.

My first choice back in the 2020 election season was Amy Klobuchar (woman), and my second was Pete Buttigieg (gay). Both lost. Really, as if sex was the most important thing to consider when it comes to choosing leaders. How quaint. The all-male game is doomed to die an ungainly death and all one has to do is check the numbers. Within a generation women will make up an overwhelming majority of educated persons. Add to that the fact that they have always been better at networking and it’s Katie bar the door for bearers of the Y chromosome.

My own opinion is that this will change the sum of political life very little. For instance, by taking a close look at some of the women already in Congress we can see that stupidity, inanity, and cowardice are not exclusively male virtues. We can also see that steadiness, compassion, and common sense can be brought into the mix no matter what our genders might be.

After the present season of Cluck, I will be ready for almost anything and anybody as an improvement. Perhaps, since humans have brought this chaotic circus into existence, we should be considering other primates as candidates for public office.

I would have no trouble voting for the fellow at right, for instance. He has what is now in short supply on the national stage – an intelligent gaze.

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From The New Yorker

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There seems to be something about being the wealthiest people in our country that makes them insatiable. There is never enough of anything for them. Whatever machinations that Cluck is doing today to shovel more and more of our nations’ treasure into their bank accounts, all but a few of them seem to want more. An even more monstrous share.

They live in a completely different world than the rest of us, which would seem to make them unqualified to make the rules that we live by, but that’s not what happens. Right now our social safety net (which has never been up to the job at best) is being in danger of being completely shredded. Hundreds of billions of dollars are scheduled to be removed from health insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid, for instance, if the Republican budget bill is passed. Money is to be taken from children’s food programs to be funneled into the pockets of billionaires.

Unfortunately many of us will perversely persist in becoming ill even if our health insurance is taken away or cut back severely, and too many will eventually become unable to work or support our families or take care of ourselves. Well, I guess we should have planned better, is the refrain echoing down Republican halls. Even though history has repeatedly shown this only means that small problems will become larger ones as people are forced to prioritize, and more immediate needs like food and shelter must be met.

Even as I type this stuff, eventually I have to take a break because too much thinking about our present circumstances is just that dreadful an enterprise. I have no idea why I don’t have a feeling of hopelessness, even though I admit that I can’t see a clear way out of the godawful mess Click and his troupe of bozos have created. Maybe we’re like John Mellencamp’s protagonist … too dumb to know when we’re beaten and should just give it up … instead we turn up our collars against the wind, put our heads down, and soldier on.

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Yesterday we took a very nice bicycle ride, thank you very much, into the countryside. It was a total bird show. We heard but did not see a Gambel’s Quail. Meadowlarks provided glorious background music for our trip. A huge, and I mean HUGE, Great Blue Heron had been hunting in a small creek when it took off right in front of us.

And then along came a large Red-tailed Hawk, at first flying just a few yards over our heads, giving us a great look at the patterns of its feathers, and then it began to ride the thermals, rising in lazy circles without so much as a wing flap until it was no longer visible.

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Where The Hawkwind Kills, by Daniel Lanois

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Yesterday was the 33rd wedding anniversary for Robin and I. To repeat an old story, after our respective former spouses left us for what they thought were greener pastures, she and I began to “date” and one thing led to another and a wedding became imminent. The counselor that Robin was seeing told her that making such a move might be unwise, that it was too soon after her divorce. He told her that this new relationship was a “transitional” one for her.

We have obviously been very slow about the whole thing, because it’s now 33 years on and we’re still transitioning. I’m not sure we’ve enough years left to make it to whatever the next level is supposed to be.

Oh well. One does what one can.

We celebrated quietly with supper at a new Italian restaurant in town. The food was delicious. I had the carbonara and Robin the mushroom tortellini, and our waitress couldn’t have been more pleasant.

Really, she couldn’t have. Would I lie?

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From The New Yorker

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When asked a question several years ago, the present Dalai Lama responded with the famous line: “My religion is kindness.“

This week the Senate is considering one of the unkindest budget bills in a long, long while. It strips money from health care, food programs, and childhood enrichment programs to pass the funds along to the very wealthy in the form of tax cuts. It is so blatantly unwise and unfair that it is a nightmare caricature of what a thoughtful government might do.

There is still time to telephone our senators and ask them to do the right thing. For some of them, our call might be just the nudge they need.

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On Perspiring

jono55

We’re coming on the time when temperatures will get high enough that people begin to think about turning on their air conditioners. I’m not one of those that waits until the last minute to do so. At the first bead of sweat on my forehead in the middle of the day, I’m reaching for the switch on the cooling system.

I’ve had friends in the past who made it a point each year await absolutely as long as they could to turn on the air conditioning in their home. This wouldn’t have been so bad, but they also made a point of telling every single person they were doing it, including myself, as if this was some sort of public virtue.

I call this delay in accepting the blessing of air conditioning as comfortus interruptus, and classify it under mental aberrations. Why someone would have air conditioning that could make them comfortable and keep them from sweating and becoming rancid and not use it I doubt that I will ever completely understand. All I know is that I will never be an entry in the sad race to be the last person to turn on their AC in Montrose County. In fact, I may well be the first.

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There are times, however, when sweat is admirable. Desirable. Delightful in the recalling. And it all has to do with s.e.x. My personal favorite movie that intricately weaves enough perspiration to fill a pool with the slip-slap clash of testosterone and estrogen is Body Heat. It’s a noirish kind of thing with sweat-stained shirts and ceiling fans galore. Here’s a scene that is an illustration of why prudence and chastity require air conditioning.

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Surely by now the Republicans who have fastened themselves like ticks to Emperor Cluck are wetting themselves regularly as they see their political futures becoming cloudier and cloudier. His latest offense against taste and ethics is that he wants to accept an airplane from Qatar. A really BIG airplane.

I keep forgetting … how do you spell putrescence, anyway? This is way beyond ordinary corruption.

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There was an article in Monday’s Times of New York that brought a smile. For those who have not heard of Rhiannon Giddens, she is a woman who has spent her adult life bringing music to us all. And she does it with class and humor and scholarship and style. The news that she has recently started a festival is the point of the article. The gathering is called the Biscuits and Banjos Festival, and it took place in Boone, North Carolina. A high point was the reunion of members of the group Carolina Chocolate Drops.

You know when you see those pictures from space of the earth at night and there are these points of light? Giddens is one of those points. She contributes, contributes, contributes. That’s a very nice thing to see in an era when so many are subtracting, subtracting, subtracting.

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Cartoon du Jour

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Today’s entry in the chucklehead sweepstakes is an article at CNN online entitled: “Why men are shaving off their eyelashes.”


From stopping dust and dirt getting into the eyes to prompting our blink reflex, eyelashes do more than just look pretty. Which makes it hard to explain the social media trend of men trimming down — or even entirely shaving off — their eyelashes in a bid to look “more masculine.”

CNN Online, May 13

Staggering. To look more masculine we need to cut away a major protector for the only two eyes we’ve got? I know that as a group we males aren’t too bright, but … does being “masculine” require that much stupid?

Now, I know that to take any advice on personal adornment from a man who still thinks cargo pants don’t look all that bad may not be the wisest course. But please, if you know someone who is considering eyelash-shaving, try to talk them into doing something else just as ridiculous but less harmful. Like wearing elephant pants. I did that in 1972 and lived to tell about it.

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On our camping excursion last weekend we saw two creatures that were new to us. The book says that neither of them is a rarity, but no member of our party had seen them before.

The Long-nosed Leopard Lizard.

(Say the name out loud. Sort of rolls off the tongue.)

The Great Basin Gopher Snake. Harmless. Beautiful coloration.

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Two of a Kind, by John Kay

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The Birds

jono55

The hummingbirds are back at the feeders! I’ve been putting fresh sugar/water out there for the past three weeks or so, watching every day, and Sunday afternoon the first black-chinned traveler showed up.

You can clearly see a purple bib in this pic (not mine) below the black chin.

***

The black-chinned hummingbird (Archilochus alexandri) has a pretty distinct migration pattern:

Spring Migration (northward): They leave their wintering grounds in western Mexico (especially along the Pacific coast and parts of central Mexico) around February to March. They move north through the southwestern U.S. and reach their breeding grounds by late March to early May.

Breeding Range (summer): They breed mainly in the western United States — places like Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, California, and into southern British Columbia.

Fall Migration (southward): By late August through September, they start moving south again toward Mexico for the winter.

Wintering Grounds: Mostly western and central Mexico, but some may overwinter in southern Texas along the Gulf Coast.

AI generated text in response to the query: Describe the migration pattern of the black-throated hummingbird.

***

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Transcendental Blues, by Steve Earle

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It was well known that director Alfred Hitchcock had a thing about casting blonde women as heroines in his films. The quintet at left is (clockwise) June Howard-Tripp, Janet Leigh, Kim Novak, Tippi Hedren, and Eva Marie Saint. There were others.

As far as Hitchcock was concerned, blonde was all there was to say about female beauty.

This obsession led him to cast Hedren in The Birds. Now I’ve seen this movie a couple of times, and although I have absolutely no credentials as a critic, It appears to me that Ms. Hedren could not act her way out of a paper bag, whatever other sterling qualities she might have had.

The Birds, for younger readers, was a film where the ornithologic fauna of a small seaside town turned on the humans, pecking them in all sorts of horrible ways (the eyes … why did they go for the eyes?). While being pursued by murderous titmice wouldn’t be too scary, when the bird in question is the size of a big seagull or raven, the grim possibilities were more obvious.

Here Hedren is shown expressing abject terror, which is almost the same look as she had in the photo above where she was smoking a cigarette in a diner. Although there is an errant lock of hair in the attack photo she reveals not a wrinkle or a squint in either one.

But back in 1963 when the movie came out, one could easily overlook her limitations and allow oneself to actually ponder what it would be like if terror came fluttering from the skies to seek you out. Yes, even hummingbirds. Those little beaks are ever so pointy.

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Who You Are, by Pearl Jam

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We have a family of garter snakes that lives under the concrete platform outside our front door. Even though I know that they’re there, occasionally I am still startled when a nearly three-foot long member of the family comes undulating by me a few inches below my feet. Neighbors have told me that I could just fill the small hole that is the entrance to their burrow and it would be goodbye snakes.

Problem is that there is no way for me to know if any members of that family are at home should I decide to mix up a little concrete and pour it in. And trapping any of them in there would be completely unacceptable.

If there is a creature in this universe that offers less harm to me than the garter snake I don’t know what it would be.

It’s quite the other way around, actually. The small patch of grass that is our front lawn is one place that the snakes hunt for food. Unfortunately I learned this by accidentally killing one with the lawn mower, as it was invisible in the grass in front of me. Now when I mow the area I move as slowly as the machine will go, watching carefully for blades of grass that start waving suspiciously.

At one point in my kid-ship our family lived on an acre of land a couple of miles out of town. Next to our home was a grass-covered vacant lot. Our dog at the time was named Sandy. He was a very goodhearted dog of uncertain parentage that my father had taken in. Sandy loved to wander in that tall grass next door, and every once in a while would come up with a garter snake in his mouth that he would carefully bring unharmed to our lawn, where he released it. Catch and release, like a trout fisherman.

One day as I was up to no good at all reading Mad magazines, I heard my mother scream from somewhere outside the house. The horror registered in that outcry brought the entire family to the scene, where we found Mom with a full laundry basket in her hands, standing under the clotheslines, and surrounded by at least fifteen snakes that we could count. Sandy had been busy.

Bravely I waded in to her rescue, clearing away all reptiles from her path back to safety. I don’t remember her ever thanking me for that good deed, perhaps she took umbrage because I was laughing so hard.

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People have been trying to write rock’s obituary ever since its birth. Already in 1957 the group Danny and the Juniors felt that they had to offer up the defensive tune Rock And Roll Is Here To Stay. Gaslighting critics clamp themselves like barnacles on to the shiny next thing and off they go, leaving the supposed corpse of the genre behind. And yet here we are, new bands continuously arising. Some we become aware of, others just as worthy, perhaps, never get out of the bar scene. But rock obviously means something to its audience. It is music that resonates.

Within that genre there are jam bands. Goose is the latest to come to my attention, and when I played that first cut on Apple Music there was an instant connection made. I looked through their albums and Perfecto! They have an album called “Live At The Capitol Theater,” which contains 53 songs. Who would have the nerve to do such a thing but a jam band? And a concert film on YouTube that is three hours long? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQSavJ-sULs . What can I say?

Give It Time, by Goose

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A day brightener … sorta …

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Eyewash, Brainwash, Hogwash

jono55

There is a continuing puzzlement in the world of birds and their admirers. When it was discovered that John James Audubon was not only a slave owner himself but a dealer in slaves the National Audubon Society had to do some soul-searching vis-a vis the name of their organization. Two years ago the national group decided they would maintain the name as is.

But they set up a problem for themselves, because many of the individual smaller groups under their big umbrella have been repulsed by the knowledge of Audubon’s misdeeds and renamed themselves.

John James Audubon.

Dealer in slaves and painter of birds.

It seems a shortsighted move on the part of the National Audubon Society to keep a name that honors a man who we now know to have trafficked in human beings. I think it inevitable that they will make the change one day, but by then they may have lost connection with these smaller organizations who have been more progressive in this regard. All of those will have new names of which they may have grown fond.

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From The New Yorker

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Biloxi, by Rosanne Cash

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Most of those who are reading this paragraph thought they were Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Greens when they got up this morning. But in reality, there are really only two political parties in this country at present. There is the party of Trump and there is everybody else.

I am only one voice. One person has very little power, but two people have twice as much, four people four times as much … you get the picture. For the longest time I sat on my posterior expecting the Democratic Party to fight my battles and to look out for my interests as a citizen. That was a mistake. I am looking for new banners to march under now, new allies in the struggles for a better world.

Why do anything? Why not let it all play out on its own? Well … I have a short list for thee:

  • We are now cohabiting with Communists rather than consulting with long-time friends in our international relationships.
  • We have dropped connections with the World Health Organization when we are the epicenter of avian flu. The CDC is being reduced to a shadow of its former self, and is run by people using hearsay rather than science, people who suggest vitamins rather than vaccinations in the worst measles epidemic in generations.
  • Offices that we depend on such as Social Security, Veteran’s Affairs, the Department of Education and many others have become a total mess because of intrusion by people given license by Cluck to do whatever damage they can.
  • The DOGE workers are not really as interested in to achieve economies as they are trying to produce chaos, because small men like Trump and Musk profit in times of chaos.
  • The hard working men and women in our government need a sane atmosphere in which to do their work, but sanity is in very short supply.
  • When the people in charge of our nuclear arsenal and stockpiles are fired and then have to be sought out and hired back something is seriously wrong.
  • When the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is already underpowered, has its staff diminished by thousands of members and cannot keep our promises to our veterans, something is seriously wrong.
  • When the guardians of our national parks are reduced in numbers by the thousands at a time when they already are too few, something is seriously wrong.
  • When all of this is being done to be able to offer more money to a very small group of people who already have more wealth than they know what to do with, something is seriously wrong.

Remember when I said “the party of everybody else?” Well, this amorphous party dwarfs the Trumpian grotesquerie in numbers, and if it can be awakened and shown the way to use its power I believe that much of the harm that has been done could be repaired. We could even go so far as to strengthen our institutions against intrusions by future crops of lowlifes.

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You Pass Me By, by Lonnie Donnegan

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From The New Yorker

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How about a few quotes to get the old brain focussed on a Sunday morning?

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.

Isaac Asimov

We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Louis D. Brandeis

Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on.

Thurgood Marshall

Ahhhh, that felt good. There is more than enough knowledge out there that could be used to build a society where we could live in mutual respect and develop just relationships, while largely saying goodbye to fear and want.

If you dig through the accumulated wisdom of humankind you come up with a conundrum. If we know what to do, and have been offered clear instructions for thousands of years as to how to do it, why do humans find themselves in one pickle after another? Why do we keep making such eminently bad choices? Why is it so easy to exploit us and pit us against one another?

(Please note the absence of anything coming from me that approaches being an answer to these questions.)

**

I do have one positive suggestion to offer. Remember the story of the old woman at her 100th birthday party? She had been married to her husband for seventy years until his passing a few years back. An interviewer asked her how she had maintained a happy marriage to one man for that long. Without a pause she answered: “Low expectations”.

That might sound like a rueful or negative answer, but isn’t it really a re-statement of Mr. Voltaire’s aphorism: “Don’t Let The Perfect Be The Enemy Of The Good.” The phrase reveals the pitfalls of perfectionism.  The pursuit of perfection can lead to inaction or the abandonment of valuable, but imperfect, solutions. 

The lady in the story recognized this and took her man for what he was rather than exhaust herself in making him into someone he might never be. Perhaps she kept the small hope that he wouldn’t chew his food with his mouth open or wear stripes with plaids, but she was willing to wait it out while enjoying his company.

A society could do the same thing. Pick the good stuff out of the mess in front of it, and accept that as a beginning. Then move forward in a process of continuous and methodical improvement rather than have some pre-formed idea of a perfect final product and fight over how to get there.

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At present we have a set of socio-political problems that don’t lend themselves as well to the gradual approach outlined above. May I offer a poor example of a parable?

A farmer looks out his window and sees that his fields need some serious tending or the crops will wither and die, but there is a grizzly bear in the yard between him and the fields. He knows what he needs to do to save his grain, but first … he needs to deal with the bear.

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Angel Dance, by Los Lobos

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Each year large flights of Sandhill Cranes pass near Paradise on their migration north, and spend an evening on a small reservoir near a very small town an hour away from our home. The local Audubon Society sets up spotting scopes in several places near the water and invites the public to come for a viewing. Friend Rod and I drove out Saturday morning and did just that.

We only saw nine cranes, which apparently were the vanguard of a much larger flock coming tomorrow and Monday. No matter. The ones we saw were big and beautiful.

The host birders also found a golden eagle sitting on some irrigation equipment and a nesting pair of bald eagles for us to look at.

At noon a livestock association served up a free meal for the public. Free. Food. Took a few photos.

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Goosed

jono55

There is a wonderful film out there called Winged Migration that I can recommend highly. If you have never seen it, perhaps your library has a copy to borrow, or you can rent it on Amazon for less than four bucks. It documents the truly amazing journeys of many species of birds around the world. The hardships they face, sometimes overcoming and sometimes … well … you have to see the film to appreciate them, I think.

One overarching theme is how long these epic flight paths have been in existence, and what changes have gone on in the world beneath their larger family over time. But the earth turns, the birds fly, and even if our own species eventually self-destructs, the migrations will go on and on. They are ancient, much more durable than humans and their dramas. What is obvious is that we rarely have a positive influence on the natural world. We are more of an insult.

But enough of this light-heartedness, let’s get serious for a moment. I don’t know if you can call it courage as we define it in our own lives, but these migrations seem courageous endeavors to me. If I could flap my arms and once travel even ten miles to a new location, I would be crowing about it for the rest of my life.

We have a tendency to denigrate the achievements of other species, our calculations somehow always making us come out at the top of the heap. It’s just instincts, we say, implying that these “lower” animals don’t put much thought into what they are doing. (Birdbrains, we call people who are missing a card or two in their deck.)

One of our problems in understanding other species is that we keep using our yardsticks to do the measuring. We prize problem-solving, so any creature that seems limited in that way is lesser. We are enamored of our houses, our tools, and our intellectual achievements. Never mind that our evolution to a “spiritual being” has resulted in widespread murder and injustices as our history reveals members of one group after another happily plotting the bloody demise of the other groups.

Nope, if I want to look for models of good behavior for a citizen of this planet, I have to look outside of our species. Take the greylag goose, for example. Both sexes care for the young, they travel in flocks where some members stay vigilant while others rest. They mate for life, which is something humans talk about but fail to do a great deal of the time. Up to 20 per cent of greylag geese are homosexual, which doesn’t seem to upset the other members of the flock one bit. And greylag geese have never ever committed genocide.

So I keep an open mind, because being called “silly as a goose” may not be such a bad thing after all.

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Flying, by The Beatles

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Think about it for a moment. We can’t fly, can’t breathe underwater, have relatively poor eyesight and sense of smell, couldn’t grow a fur coat if we tried, and our top speed is not quite as fast as a hippopotamus. 

A tiger would smell us before we came into sight, spot us way before we could see it, and would be drooling at the finish line with a knife and fork in hand and a napkin tied neatly under its chin.

Add to this humbling scenario the fact that our young take more than a decade before they can fend for themselves and you wonder how we got this far as a species. If we hadn’t developed tools and weapons we would probably be no more than another case of scratchings on a Siberian cave wall that said Glorg Wuz Hear.

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I’m A Song, by Stephen Wilson Jr.

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It’s starting to get interesting (as in the curse: May you live uninteresting times). We may have a recession coming at us, which if it does, is clearly the work of only two men and their party. Usually recessions are a bit more nebulous in origin, but if this one arrives it will be the Truskcession for certain. Of course, if it weren’t for a spineless Republican party, they couldn’t mangle our economy the way they are doing. Have to give credit where credit is due.

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Wind Behind The Rain, by Jason Isbell

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Urbane Cowboy

jono55

The lightest dusting of snow fell during the night. January is being its usual self, cold and gray and not playing well with others.

One of the bleakest sights is that of a winter sun, trying to shine through the frosted atmosphere. A round image with fuzzy borders, nearly white, with little of the sun’s usual gold or red tones, and little or no heat in it.

Just looking at it sets the marrow to tingling. Pass me that cocoa, would you please?

.

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I confess that I subscribe to the New Yorker to impress the easily impressed with my worldliness and sophistication. Of course, that doesn’t work with you guys who know that underneath my polished and urbane surface I am nothing more than a country cracker and s**tkicker of the first magnitude. But I love having access to the magazine’s cartoon archives, and plunder them mercilessly. When that bill comes due I will be looking to resettle in a country that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with the U.S.

But this week there is an article that amazed even the most jaded part of my psyche. It dealt with the memory facility that some species of birds have in recalling where they buried seeds in storing them for the cold weather months. The title is: The Elephantine Memories of Food-Caching Birds.

The author starts out with his own problems with a lost beard trimmer and a misplaced pair of pants. He then moves on to the almost unbelievable feats of memory that these birds perform every winter to accomplish that most important piece of business … staying alive.

But his personal trials pale before those that Robin and I deal with every day. Most of our conversations now start with the words: Do you know where I put my ______? This query is then answered by the phrase: Don’t worry, it’ll turn up. While that used to occasionally be the case, it is no longer tue. When I can’t find something after a five minute search, I know that I will never see it again. It is gone. Vanished. Scotty has beamed it up and it resides in some other galaxy. Its molecules have left the building.

Several times each day Robin and I pass one another as we wander through the house with identical furrowed brows and frustrated facial expressions, she on her latest quest and I on mine. We don’t have time to commiserate what with all the opening of drawers and looking under sofas. When we empty the vacuum cleaner into the trash we now pick through the contents of the dust-bag and often find things that we didn’t even know we’d lost yet.

So it is yet another case where other animal species have skills and talents that homo sapiens can only dream of. I do admit that when I begin to regard woodpeckers as paragons, I just don’t know where it is all going.

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From The New Yorker

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Waggoner’s Lad, by Bud and Travis

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Even though I reside in The state of Colorado, which is filled with mountains and ranches, I am neither mountaineer nor cowboy. I am a transplanted flatlander from the Midwest and will never be able to shake the prairie dust from my shoes and soul. I’m not even trying.

Being a newcomer, though, has its benefits. I am continually gaping in awe at the beauty of the surrounding countryside. Whenever the moment allows I am poking my nose around mesas and over passes to see what is on the other side. My curiosity leadeth me.

What I have found is that often after I have lived in a new location for a few years I often know more about the immediate surrounding territory than some lifelong residents do. It’s almost as if when one grows up in Paradise, one takes for granted that Paradise will always be there to explore whenever they want to do so, so why not wait until next week or the week after that? Whereas the newcomer may realize that life is a collection of transient moments, and that they had better take advantage of opportunities as they come along.

That’s my take on it, any way. The most striking example I’ve run up against personally is when I moved to the village of Hancock, Michigan. That town only had a population of 4700 or so, and one could easily drive across it in two minutes.

Trying to find a part-time childsitter for our kids, I was interviewing an elderly woman who ultimately declined to take the job. When asked why, she simply stated that she’d never been that far north and was uncomfortable thinking about it. From where the good woman lived on the south side of Hancock it was only a distance of a mile or so to our home. I was dumbfounded, but accepted that one mile or a hundred, she wasn’t budging in our direction. Apparently there is such a thing as too much north.

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From The New Yorker

[Lord, I do love this cartoon.]

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In a previous post I sneaked in a folk artist who may have been new to you, at least he was to me, although he has recorded five albums and apparently has a strong following.

We have a local radio station, KVNF, which plays all sorts of excellent music, and several times a year introduces me to artists that I never heard of but instantly adopt. Such was the case when I learned about the existence of Jake Xerxes Fussell.

Unflashy, unpretentious, without a moonwalk to his name. He is the genuine article.

Here’s one more track.

When I’m Called

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A few decades ago I realized that in some aspects I was a mobile tabula rasa. Whenever I reside in a new area, even if it is for a relatively short time, I find myself speaking with local accents. If I make a new friend from a different part of the country, let’s say Alabama, the same thing happens. This happens without any intent on my part, as if I were little more than a tape recorder.

Lately, and to my dismay, I have begun imitating myself. Not my speaking voice, but the written one. I will be talking to a friend and realize that I am dictating paragraphs rather than using casual speech. I am verbally blogging instead of conversing. Any day now and I suppose that I will begin saying things like What a nice day it is comma do you have any plans for this afternoon question mark?

I begin to suspect that there is a diagnosis here, but I don’t know what it is. Parrot syndrome? Magpie disease? Dictaphrenia?

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Returning to the ongoing and seemingly never-ending story of vaccine disinformation, there is an op/ed in Saturday’s NYTimes entitled I’m the Governor of Hawaii. I’ve Seen What Vaccine Skepticism Can Do that I can recommend heartily. Well written, heartbreaking, anger-producing. Makes me want to find a pointed stick and begin some serious poking .

Pair this with one from last November entitled I’ll Never Forget What Kennedy Did During Samoa’s Measles Outbreak and I can just about guarantee that your blood pressure will rise ten points, so remember to take your meds and sit in a comfortable chair before reading them. If you can find someone to rub your neck … even better.

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No Expectations, by the Black Crowes

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Moving On

jono55

A bit about our family story. Every family has its tales, and this one is about geography. I moved from Michigan to South Dakota with my former wife and four kids. This was in 1980. Within seven years all had fled the state but me. My children ended up in a variety of places, including Minnesota, North Carolina, Missouri, China … but none of them anywhere near where I was living.

After a few years of bachelorhood I married Robin, and took up residence with her and her three children. Robin was 11 years my junior, so her children were still in school in Yankton SD. But within a decade that trio had also packed up and left, this time headed for Colorado.

Robin and I had good friends in South Dakota, so stayed right where we were. Until a new crop of grandchildren started to appear, that is, who were all out there in the Rockies. Eventually those small creatures proved to be very powerful magnets, strong enough to draw us out to the mountains. We triangulated and chose to live between these pockets of kids, who were located in Denver, Steamboat Springs, and Durango. The closest to us was a 2.5 hour drive, the furthest was 6 hours away.

Today those grandchildren live in North Carolina, California, and Texas, with only one still here in the Columbine state. That last survivor is still in high school, so who knows where she might choose to settle once she graduates? It’s a common story of familial mobility, with nobody presently living anywhere near where they grew up, including Robin and I. There is no “old home place” for anyone of us to return to, except for the one we carry with us in our minds. Our blended family empire now stretches from Washington DC to Walnut Grove, California. Making in-person contact with everyone, every year, has not been always been possible, especially as the years pile on.

But I do have some small sense of what those mothers and fathers felt long ago as they watched their children walk up gangplanks onto ships that would take them to the New World, when the possibility of never seeing them again was always present. Those wharfside moments must have been some serious tug on the heart.

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Wooden Ships, by Crosby, Stills, and Nash

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Some new birds showed up on the berm in our front yard this week. I identified them as a pair of lesser goldfinches. Very pretty coloration, although not quite as showy as the variety of goldfinches who came to our feeders in South Dakota. They were picking through the dried heads of the black-eyed Susans for seeds that other birds had missed.

Jabbering clouds of yellow, green, and black Lesser Goldfinches gather in scrubby oak, cottonwood, and willow habitats of the western U.S., or visit suburban yards for seeds and water. These finches primarily eat seeds of plants in the sunflower family, and they occur all the way south to the Peruvian Andes.

All About Birds

(The black eyed Susans we saw them chomping on out front are in the sunflower family, just like the book says they should be.)

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Drift Away, by Dobie Gray

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From The New Yorker

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One of the joys of streaming television is locking on to a program that enriched you in some way, and then being able to revisit it down the road whenever you want to. Taking the same lessons away that you originally did, or finding new ones because you are not the same person you were then.

Robin and I are revisiting Call The Midwife. A series that ran for 13 years. One of those rarities where you could believe in all of the characters as they grew older or grew up. It begins in London, in a neighborhood named Poplar. A part of town that is about as far from posh as you can get.

A small group of nuns operate a public health nursing/midwifery service, being assisted by young female nurses who are laity. Many other characters round out an excellent ensemble.

The timing of the series begins in 1957, when the last of the rubble from WWII has barely been cleared away. There are sentimental stories mixed in with large doses of the profound grittiness that is life in Poplar. None of them rings false. Some nights, like last night’s episode about the harms perpetrated by the old London workhouse system, can be a hard watch, actually.

The people who put this series together did their research. Seeing what was available as medical/nursing care in 1957 in a poverty-stricken area and watching this evolve over more than a decade was very engaging for me.

It’s a series where no one is omniscient and mistakes are sometimes made, but the major characters have one thing in common, and that is devotion to helping people. The show has a beating heart.

On Netflix.

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Rank Stranger, by Crooked Still

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From The New Yorker

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Oh me, oh my. The company that kept me alive for five years has gone under. Is kaput. Those yellow trucks will no longer be rolling up rural driveways bringing real food to malnourished bachelors. I am, of course, talking about the Schwan’s company.

When my first wife had taken her Le Creuset cookware and moved on to better things, I found myself in a medium large house with a full kitchen but without the will to cook anything. I gave up on meal planning altogether and allowed the package to determine what supper was going to be. One of my favorite dodges was to buy a package of hot dogs and eat that every evening until it was gone. Eight dogs in a package eaten at the rate of two dogs a night meant that four days were covered. I was not fool enough to believe that I was eating healthily, since I knew that one cannot live on fat and pig lips alone, but that reckoning was for some future day and I was hungry right now.

Bread would go moldy, anything in the fridge in Tupperware became a culture medium for some of the most colorful fungi I have ever seen. Works of art, really. I had acquired a microwave oven for the first time, but had not taken the time to learn how to use it properly. It worked well for heating water, but when I would put anything that was meat into it what came out was more suitable for making shoes than for eating.

And then I discovered Schwan’s. An entire yellow truckful of deliciousness would show up in my driveway and all I had to do was to pick out what I wanted and give the man some money.

No waste, no steady streams of hot dogs, no interesting growths in the refrigerator. Instead I could eat chicken cordon bleu and it was pretty darn good for frozen food. Plus I now found something to do with that microwave sitting useless on the counter.

So I experienced a tender moment this morning when I read about the company’s struggles over the past decades, and their painful decision to retire the fleet. If it means anything to them, I am here typing this only because they fed me when I was a man in need.

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When The Student Is Ready …

jono55

This afternoon I was brushing our older cat, Poco, whose coat requires frequent attention. He can no longer keep himself tidy due to old age and arthritis. But he seems to very much appreciate the help we provide with brush and comb, purring and doing that rubbing thing cats do.

When this particular grooming session was finished he and I found ourselves staring at one another. I wondered – what would life have been like these past 17 years without him as a companion?

You know that old adage: “When the student is ready the teacher will appear?” That has been true for me on many fronts, but never more so than with the pets I’ve had.

I had to slow down the pace of my life before I could truly begin to notice what the smaller critters of the household had to teach me.

The most important lesson that I’ve learned from Poco? I think that it was this. When life spins out of control in the myriad ways that it can, there is enormous comfort in having another living creature just sit with you in the room, quietly, not speaking, perhaps not even understanding. Just being there.

I don’t know how it happens, but I am a witness to its power.

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Birds, by Neil Young

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Just in case that you haven’t yet had your fill of reminiscing about Kris Kristofferson, here’s a link for when you have 45 minutes to spend. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xdZo_eMeGvg

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For the first time since we’ve lived here in Paradise, I have a problem with the local dove population. This year one of them has picked out a branch high in the ash tree that is directly over my chair at the table on the backyard deck. When said creature relieves itself, it leaves a mark on exactly that chair. Each day there is fresh evidence of its presence, and each day I must clean the chair before sitting down.

You might ask – why not move the chair? Aren’t you afraid of being bombed while occupying it? Questions like these are entirely appropriate and my answer to both is that it’s my chair and my space and bird be damned if I’m going to change either one of them.

If the dove wants war, it can continue its reprehensible behavior. I am slow to burn but once I get started, well, that little shitter better watch it is all I have to say.

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King of Birds, by R.E.M.

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Amy and Claire were here over the past weekend. The weather was lovely and we found many things to do to pass the time. Friday the three ladies toured our shopping establishments. Durango is actually much less of a shopper’s paradise than Montrose, believe it or not, and whenever these two come for a visit, there is at least one raid on the local Target.

Saturday we rented e-bikes for our guests and the four of us pedaled the bicycle/walking path along the Uncompahgre River. It’s a really pretty ride, six miles in length, and we did the twelve miles out and back without breaking a sweat. We stopped for lunch at Shelter, a brewpub which is right on the path and overlooks the river. Those hours passed delightfully.

There were quite a few people enjoying the path, brought out by the excellent weather, I suppose. We were in no hurry. It was a day to be sipped, not chugged.

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This Bird’s Gonna Fly, by Los Lobos

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A bit more about the National Audubon Society’s decision to keep its old name even after learning about the ugly history of John James Audubon and his family, who were not only slave owners but traffickers to boot.

This Science Friday podcast talks about this decision and why it might have been a poor choice. In an era when vestiges of systemic racism are being identified and removed one by one around the country, it does seem puzzling. So I googled the National Audubon Society and looked at the photos of the members of its various boards. What is striking is the underrepresentation of people of color.

When we know how sneaky racism can be, and how in so many ways it is the sea we all swim in, it makes you wonder if these boards looked a bit more like America that the vote would have been different.

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Finally, this photograph won the Wildlife Photograph of the Year competition in 2024. It is of tadpoles in a lake on Vancouver Island and was taken by photographer Shane Gross. So beautiful it almost looks unreal.

Hypnotic

jono55

There is a pair of American Kestrels that is often found perched on a power line that we pass en route to the recreation center. They were absent for a while this past summer but have been back at their old posts this Fall and Winter.

You ask: How do you know that they are always the same birds? Both sexes look much alike and all members of the species are feathered similarly. Could it not be any passing kestrel?.

I answer: Well, if you knew them you would just know. (I like to keep my responses succinct. And as meaningless as possible.)

They are a beautiful little bird, about the size of a Robin. When I was a kid and new to birding, I learned a different name for them, which I actually prefer: Sparrow Hawks. For whatever reason, seeing them perched on that high wire always lifts my spirits. Anytime I encounter close-up a piece of wildness that remains wild, I am cheered, and these small and fierce creatures are just that.

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I’ll Be Home For Christmas, by Vince Gill

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On a walk a few days ago, I came upon this falling-down shed.

As I looked at it I realized that the patterns of decay had left behind a sort of mural on the rotting wall boards. It was like looking at cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde through a lattice of two by fours.. Here’s a close-up to show what I mean.

Now it’s possible that this is no rustic self-created mural at all, and you might not see anything. Or care. Obviously it doesn’t take much to intrigue me. I live a quiet and sheltered life.

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Mary, Mary, by Harry Belafonte

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Robin added something to our Yule decorations yesterday. It’s a small battery-powered object which is turned on all day now at our house. A Holy Family snow globe thingy that never quits, at least until you switch it off or the battery goes dead.

At first I smiled condescendingly at her purchase, but now I am hypnotized by it. I cannot walk by the thing without stopping to stare. Those shiny little flakes keep fluttering, glittering … and the voices that speak to me … in Mandarin, I think …

I really should ask Robin if she hears the voices as well, but there are some things that you have to think about very carefully before sharing them with your spouse. Some cats you can never put back into the bag …

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Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming, by Ane Brun

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Colorado has decided that they don’t want the Orange and Odoriferous One to be on the ballot next year. Some phrases in that pesky Constitution that say it really is a bad idea to allow traitors to hold office in the country they have already tried to tear apart. 

Omnipresent expert Chris Christie has told us that the courts shouldn’t decide things like this, only the voters. Anything else will be a big problem. I think Chris (who I suspect of being a politician) is skipping one important point here, and that is the principle that no one, not even an ex-president, is above the law. That is not a thing that should go to the ballot box.

But he is right in saying that this is a big problem already, one that evades non-painful solutions completely. But you and I didn’t create the situation. We’ve just been given the job of fixing it. I believe that we’re up to the job, even if it is akin to doing brain surgery with a sledgehammer and a stone chisel. Perhaps we can’t count on this most disappointing of Supreme Courts to do its job without following a badly skewed agenda. Maybe the ballot box is the only place where sanity and a reclamation of national direction can ultimately be achieved. 

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All Through The Night, by The Kingston Trio

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It’s Christmas Eve, 1947. 

I am eight years old and superstoked for opening presents tonight, but the afternoon can’t go fast enough and maybe if it weren’t pokey old Perry Como playing in the background but something peppier we could speed things up and get down to what the day is really all about and oh god no we don’t have to really eat supper first do we and crap we have to do the dishes too I might not make it to the gift opening but just perish here and what a tragedy that would be only eight years old and everything if you loved me we’d be out there in the living room opening presents right this minute NO don’t answer the telephone it’s probably a wrong number and even if it isn’t who cares who is so stupid they are calling on Christmas Eve that’s it I am dying here and won’t ever get to know what it in that big package with the tag that says From Santa to Jon let’s not do them one at a time but let’s open them all at the same time life is just too short for this yes yes we’re really finally totally going to get it done oh dang what is this … clothes!!!! … aaaarrrrrggggghhhhh …

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From The New Yorker

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I confess that I have to believe in a lenient Santa Claus because otherwise I’d never have received a single present – ever.

Merry Christmas to all. 

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