Still Staggering…

A  reader below, in comments, worries about my current photo. It is a crop from this one of me with Shiri and hounds: I replied: “It is part of a cheerful photo of me with a dog– may publish. Health? I am 65 with Parkinson’s and rheumatoid srthritis, as healthy with those as I can …

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New Discovery Pushes Date of the Oldest Stone Tools Back 700,000 Years

Up until last month, the oldest known hominid-manufactured stone tools dated to approximately 2.6 million years ago and came from a site at Gona, Ethiopia.  In April, Science Magazine reported on a conference paper announcing that tools dating to 3.3 million years ago had been discovered at a site near Lomekwi, Kenya. This is a VERY …

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Survived

Catherine and Jean Louis Lassez are back in the states, and Catherine is back at Muleshoe Ranch, after being right in the middle of the Himalayan earthquake. Much to be said, much of it serious and some harrowing, but the trip was not without its whimsical moments… UPDATE: English bird and nature writer Conor Jameson, …

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McGuane at the Strand

As promised. These have generated a lot of email (personal, off blog, though I would encourage them here) enough that I might start looking for such interviews. I will put some thoughts in reaction below (above?),  probably tomorrow… OK, in-stream commentary to friends edited only for a minimum of sense and coherence: “Living in the …

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Tom McGuane on writing and reading

The always intelligent McGuane on what made him a writer. “I read like a son- of- a – bitch” was an early statement of his that helped confirm my vocation– in my youth I wrote at best in spasms, but read everything. That includes books he mentions he read but alludes to as as “non- …

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Doggage

Micaela’s Lublub from Finland, one of my favorite dogs, reminding us that at 13 she can be elegant as well as comic; the third, used here before, reminds us of the comedy. She did that herself with no human help…

Black Marmots

This dark marmot lives in Grand Teton National Park, and the more typical colored one below lives 100 miles north in Yellowstone National Park. A melanistic population of yellow-bellied marmots have persisted in the Tetons for more than 80 years, with 15-23% of the population consisting of these “black marmots.”