The Interior Department has announced that the brown pelican is coming off the endangered species list. Total population is up to 650,000 and this is a success of the DDT ban and the Endangered Species Act. One of my favorite sights on the beach is watching pelicans “fold up” and dive for fish.
Month: November 2009
Telegram from Steve
Imagine a dusty, one-post-office town on the high plains of central New Mexico, half a day’s ride west of Socorro. A telegram arives…
Chicharrone
Saw this sign the other day up in west Denver, and it made me think of Steve.
Times are Tough
Here in Colorado, the state budget crisis has reached such proportions that the legislature is planning to revoke the tax exemption on sale of bull semen.
Happy Friday
These two look sweet, but when we try to pet the puppies, they growl and act grumpy. The three pups now have their eyes open, and spend a good portion of the day wrestling and knocking each other over. They definitely have livestock guardian dog personalities. The two dark pups are boys and the white …
Modern Man is a Wimp
Says an Australian anthropologist. And he’s absolutely correct – our species has been getting decreasingly robust over the last 10,000 years or so with changes in adaptive pressures. What I found new and interesting in this article was the analysis of running speed from some 20,000 year-old fossil footprints. Very cool.
Ritual Deaths at Ur
One of the most famous archaeological finds of the 20th century, was the discovery of the royal cemetary at Ur. Leonard Woolley made the discovery of the 4,500 year-old tombs in the 1920s in southern Iraq. The burials showed fabulous sophistication in rich gold work and jewelry. One of the gold headdresses is shown in …
Claude Levi-Strauss, RIP
Claude Levi-Strauss, a French cultural anthropologist, died earlier this week at the age of 100. He was a giant in cultural anthropology and was much in the mode of the stereotypical French intellectual. He was one of the founders of Structuralism, and did much to show that the sophistication and elaboration of the mythologies and …
Dinner Guests
Late Sunday afternoon this fellow dropped by the house for a visit. I was on the deck and had to shoot through the trees, so you can see some of the limbs in the picture. He brought his lady friends with him. We got 22 inches of snow earlier in the week, and I’m sure …
Lift: A Memoir
The respect of your peers is great. Writers crave that. Praise from a mentor is even better. But nothing beats a star in a national review. Congratulations to our friend Rebecca O’Connor for the following starred review in Publisher’s Weekly—and of course for penning the memoir that earned it. From PW: Lift: A Memoir Rebecca …