Matt first posted back in August on the story of an 8-foot alligator that was found in Lake Machado in the Harbor City area of Los Angeles. It was obviously a released pet, and was a two-week media sensation in the city. People came out to the 54 acre lake to try to see the …
Month: December 2005
Attack Chihuahuas
A police officer in Fremont, CA was attacked by a pack of vicious chihuahuas while making an arrest. He was taken to the hospital, treated for ankle-bites, and released. It’s tough out there!
William W. Howells, RIP
William Howells, a giant in physical anthropology, has died at 97. He was a stalwart of the “second generation” of anthropologists in this country. Anthropology as a modern social science was founded in America by Franz Boas, a German immigrant, who established a department at Columbia University in the 1890s. He trained the first generation …
Seasons Change
Here in Southern California seasonal changes are a lot more subtle than most of you are used to – certainly much more than I was growing up in Tennessee. I have joked to Steve and Matt that I sometimes have to check the latest Cabela’s catalog to see what season I’m in. One of the …
The Bible in Gullah
Gullah is a Creole English dialect spoken by the descendants of slaves in the Sea Islands of Georgia and in low coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina. I remember learning about this dialect (called Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Georgia) when I took intro linguistics at Tulane. This tells the story of …
Beale Street Bordellos
Having grown up in Memphis, I was intrigued by this account of historic archaeologists uncovering the remains of houses of prostitution off Beale Street there. These date from around 1900-1915, when Beale Street was a cultural and entertainment center for blacks in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. It played a key role in the development …
Long Term View of Climate
You may recall a couple of weeks ago, I complained that most reports on climate in the mass media took too short a timeframe to be meaningful. Yesterday the New York Times finally produced one of very few articles I have ever seen in the popular press that does put current temperature data in a …
Norman Vaughn, RIP
Norman Vaughn passed away over the Christmas weekend. Vaughn did so much in Arctic and Antarctic exploration – back to the Byrd expeditons in the 1920s – it’s hard to believe he is gone at age 100. I mean you have to admire any man who completed six Iditarods after age 70! You can read …
Santa Rosa Island and Channel Islands National Park
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the formation of Channel Islands National Park and the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara news media are carrying a number of pieces on issues related to the Park’s history and management. This is a fairly thoughtful article on Santa Rosa Island (see above map). The most discussed and …
No Love for Wolves
This LA Times piece carries a paradoxical message: the reintroduction of the wolf into areas of Idaho, Wyoming, and Oregon has a been a raging success biologically, but this has come in the face of unremitting hostility from locals (see above bumper sticker). The wolf has been one of the success stories of the Endangered …