Sinagua

Of the prehistoric Southwestern archaeological cultures the one that I have the least personal experience with is the Sinagua. The Sinagua were located in the Flagstaff, Arizona area from about AD 1100 – 1400, and were a sedentary agricultural people. They were located physically between the three great Southwestern cultural traditions, the Hohokam, Anasazi (Ancestral …

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Firefighters at Rest

On the way into work this morning I took this picture ……..and this one of slurry bombers that the Forest Service has based at the Santa Barbara Airport. These P-3 Orions spent the early part of their lives patrolling for Soviet submarines, but have been extremely busy lately fighting the Day Fire in Ventura County …

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Return to the Trail

Regular readers may recall a post I put up in June, where I told of a frightening accident my dogs and I had on a local trail. My Australian Shepherd pup Sadie, fell off of the trail nearly 20 feet down into a creek bottom but was miraculously unhurt. Saturday afternoon I took the two …

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When You’re in Love With a Jersey Girl

Guest contributor Jacob Sewall recounts his first experiences in the pigeon fancy (glory days?), set to the music of Bruce Springsteen: The Jersey Girl © Jacob Sewall, 2006 “The year it came out, my father got the Springsteen boxed set, Live 1975–1985, on LP and my lifelong (thus far) love affair with Springsteen was born. …

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A Way I Have of Driving Off the Spleen

“…Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong …

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Dr. Hypercube

Introducing (exposing?) John Pittman, doing-business-as “Dr. Hypercube” in various post comments here. Says Steve: “…Our frequent commenter, like Pluvi before him, has been shyly concealing a GREAT blog : http://www.hawkdog.net/wordpress/“ We’re adding John to the blogroll today!

Bat Blogging

A few weeks ago, Connie and I were hiking on one of our Santa Barbara urban trails during the middle of the day. We were walking through this unremarkable overpass when we noticed chirping sounds coming from expansion joints that were running the length of the bridge. Closer examination showed these piles of bat guano …

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Fernando Librado and Falcon 2

In 1976 as a Bicentennial Project and as a Chumash cultural revival item, a team of Chumash and anthropologists used Harrington’s notes and Librado’s canoe to build a replica tomol. Appropriately enough, it was named Helek, and was paddled out to the Channel Islands by a Chumash crew. The file photo above shows Helek in …

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Fernando Librado and Falcon 1

I was recently reading Helen MacDonald’s (familiar in these parts as Pluvialis) wonderful book Falcon (well reviewed here) when I was struck by this sentence: “In the early twentieth century, Fernando Librado related how the crew of a Chumash sea canoe were all saved through the intercession of the captain’s dreamhelper, the peregrine, during a …

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