If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man –Mark Twain
Author: Reid Farmer
Feeder Friends
Returning from California, I finally got my act together and placed a couple of bird feeders on my deck, something I’d been meaning to do for some time. We’ve been enjoying our visitors and I have been having fun trying to get pictures of them. Like this downy woodpecker… this black-headed grosbeak …. …and these …
Bottom of the Barrel
This Denver Post article tells us that United Airlines and US Airways, who are in merger talks, are the two lowest rated airlines in customer satisfaction in this country. I wasn’t asked to vote, but having to fly both of them fairly frequently out of DIA, I wouldn’t disagree.
The Shroud
When I was a young man I was fascinated by the Shroud of Turin, mostly I think because of the striking image that it carries. In the late 1980s the game seemed to be up on its status as a religious relict when radiocarbon assays on cloth fibers from the Shroud showed it dated no …
Groundstone
We’ve just finished the current phase of fieldwork out in the Imperial Valley and I’ll try to do some catch up posts to talk about some of our finds. My apologies for my long pause in posting. We found quite a few groundstone artifacts on our survey. Above you can see a mano (hand stone) …
Seaweed at Monte Verde
The NY Times has a piece today on seaweed quids that have been discovered at a 14,000 year old level at the site of Monte Verde in Chile. Monte Verde is about 50 miles from the coast, so this shows that there was travel to the coast or trade with people who lived there. Tom …
Those Aggressive Swedes
The New York Times reports that an exhibit entitled “War Booty” at the Royal Armory in Stockholm (including these two beautiful Polish helmets) has roiled nationalist passions in Scandinavia. The NTY expresses astonishment at this development in “peaceable” Sweden. One should reflect that the histories of Swedes who went viking and terrorized Europe in the …
Ladies, Be Seated
I just wanted to make sure no one missed this news item about a woman in Wichita who spent two years sitting on the toilet in her boyfriend’s house. As someone once said, you can’t make this stuff up.
You Can’t See Me
My crew members from Colorado grinned when they saw this camouflaged cell phone tower in Imperial County.
Prehistoric Trails
One of the things I have found fascinating about archaeology here in the Yuha Desert are the prehistoric trails that criss-cross the area. They are quite common and easily distinguishable from trails made by modern vehicles. As with the lithic scatters and pot drops I posted about earlier, it’s astonishing how long things can stay …