Beginning Training

Took Shunkar (usually known as simply “Bird ” or “Birdbrain”) out today for his fist lesson on the lure. He spent a lot of time just staring, amazed, but he was hungry and got to the lure eventually.

Sunday Links

A roundup of usual suspects, more, and worse… Derb is on the evo beat– the book he recommends sounds like a winner, and I have put it on my Wish List. But “Intelligent” Design shows no sign of going away– the bill he opposes here just passed. Are bananas about to disappear from our breakfast …

Read more

Heller

Maybe– 2 1/2?– cheers for the Heller decision. A lot of people still want to load it with enough restrictions to make it meaningless, but at least the principle is affirmed. Funny how so many people want the WRONG interpretation to be kept– even though most scholarly opinion, including that of such honest liberals as …

Read more

Steampunk?

Could this be the new counterculture? Someone born before 1970, help me out, here. I’m too young to have known the last one. They call it steampunk, an aesthetic and a subculture “that simultaneously embraces burlap and iPhones.” Whatever it is, I kind of like it. This more-than-retro computer keyboard first caught my eye. Then …

Read more

No-so-undiscovered tribe

The news we passed along a couple weeks ago regarding the “discovery” of an unknown rainforest tribespeople turns out to have been fabricated, somewhat. In fact, the people are real, but their existence and location have been known for 100 years. Evidently, the photographer felt it was time to give rainforest protection another PR shot …

Read more

Friday Feeder Friend

Squirrelus americanus. This poor fellow was quite frustrated trying to get into the squirrel-proof feeder. But judging from the chewed up cones under our pine trees, he’s doing okay in the pine nut line.

Bookride

Don’t know how I hadn’t found it before (or for that matter exactly how I did) but Bookride may be the best bibliophile site I have ever seen. It is written by a long- time bookseller with a shop in Charing Cross Road, for people like me– people who in the words of Albuquerque bookman …

Read more

Woodland Park

I kept forgetting to post this picture of a great antler arch we saw in the town of Woodland Park while on our way to the Florissant Fossil Beds some days back. Also, great views of Pike’s Peak from Woodland Park.

Caffeine Addicts Rule

Wonderful news for us coffee junkies that long-term coffee drinking does not appear to increase a person’s risk of early death and may cut a person’s chances of dying from heart disease. Between the recently documented benefits of drinking coffee and red wine some of us have a good chance of living to 150 or …

Read more

Lake Ontario Shipwreck from 1780

The deep, cold fresh waters of the Great Lakes seem to provide the best environment for the preservation of old shipwrecks. The latest example is the 1780 wreck of the British warship HMS Ontario recently found at the bottom of Lake Ontario. According to this report the ship is the oldest wreck ever found in …

Read more