The one above shows the pack’s canine condo in the background.
Month: March 2006
Missing
We have been missing in action for a week– cooking, cooking, eating, eating, and (though I rather hate its use as a verb) “partying”. To quote from a letter I sent to the Alpha Enviro: “We have spent most of the week cooking for the two day end- of- the- season hunt and party of …
Random Beach Art
I think a lot of art-oriented people live around here. While walking at the beach where we sighted the infamous driftwoodman, we saw some new installations the other day. This one was rectilinear. This one incorporated several holes. The dogs were convinced there were gophers down in them and I had to shoo them away …
Reading Bourdain
I’m reading Anthony Bourdain as suggested in this post by Steve. Herein Bourdain, a classically trained chef with an eclectic, hair-raising resume, recounts an insider’s life in his trade. In this sense, Kitchen Confidential is like The Hungry Ocean by swordboat captain Linda Greenlaw. Or The Undertaking by—yes, undertaker—Thomas Lynch. Like Lynch and Greenlaw both, …
Dancing Neanderthals
This study is a very different approach to understanding early human (and pre-human) social behavior. It stresses the valuable role that dancing and singing would have played in enhancing group solidarity and communication in hominid bands during the Pleistocene. These researchers feel it was so important that it left genetic markers. A sample of contemporary …
Spring Poppies
These California poppies (Eschschalzia californica) are in bloom where we’ve planted them under our mail box. It is the state flower and a sign of what passes for spring here in Southern California. Our climate is so temperate that spring isn’t so much a sign of warmer temperatures as it is a change from a …
Crash – Not the Movie
Two nights ago my dog Sadie and I were driving to Petco to shop for dog supplies. I had just gotten off of the 101 Freeway and was driving through a green-lighted intersection when a young lady driving the opposite direction ignored the red left-turn arrow and turned in front of me. I couldn’t stop …
Not a Tomb After All
The new tomb discovered in Eqypt’s Valley of the Kings, anounced last month turns out not to be a tomb, but a mummification room. The original announcement was made prior to their entering the area and analyzing the remains. Still a cool find.
Hunted by Giant Hyenas?
Christy Turner, the eminent anthropologist who is famous (or infamous) for demonstrating conclusively that the Anasazi practiced cannibalism, has been working for years now in the Altai mountains of a bigger “Four Corners”, where Siberia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Xinjiang come together. He has been looking for the answer to a riddle: why did humans “hang …
Dog Stuff
Much good material up, some in response to my coursing screed, some not. Here, the Alpha Environmentalist registers his always pungent opinions on the coursing controversy– I particularly like “pooping pompoms”. A friend of Matt’s who breeds whippets adds via email: “The possible mindset of some of the greyhound adoption groups, those supporting passage of …