A very strange word list

This may only interest writers and other word- mad wretches.. But I recently unearthed a 1940 postcard of the Tokyo Olympiad (?) written on but never sent by Virginia Huntington, Betsy’s mother and the bishop’s wife.We NEVER made any sense of it- creative interpretations encouraged. (She was also a rather awful, but published, poet, if …

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My other side

I was asked by email if I knew anything about the history on my Italian side. Not from books is my answer. Bodios (and my grandmother on that side, Sylvia Arzeni) came most recently from Ispra on the east shore of Lake Maggiore a few miles south of the Swiss border; a village called Bodio …

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A fishy coat of arms

A month or two ago David Zincavage, who is both an old friend and a sort of dog relative (his Uhlan is Ataika’s nephew) emailed me asking if I knew anything about my mother’s family, the McCabes. In fact I did, but mostly family folklore; that though they came to the New World (the Canadian …

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Some Cold War Birds

Back in the summer we were up doing some fieldwork on a project in eastern Oregon. We drove past the airport in Ontario several times and I noticed a couple of Cold War-era military jets from the road. Later I got to stop by and saw there was a small collection of these around the …

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Quote #2

“Qualifications for a Traveller. – If you have health, a great craving for adventure, at least a moderate fortune, and can set your head on a definite object, which old travellers do not think impracticable, then – travel by all means. If, in addition to these qualifications, you have scientific taste and knowledge, I believe …

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Quote #1

“I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it, and one is the feeling that I haven’t been just sitting on my ass all afternoon.” — William F Buckley, Jr. I have not been blogging because I have been working getting my two books up to speed, so …

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Albert Einstein’s Office

I am posting this picture as a public service for anyone (like me) who catches grief about having a messy office.

Pre-Clovis Mastodon Kill

Yesterday afternoon, NPR had this interesting story on the reanalysis of material from a mastodon kill site in Washington state that was originally excavated in the late 1970s. The reanalysis was conducted by the Center for the Study of the First Americans at Texas A&M and they found that the kill dates to 13,800 years …

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