Sanliurfa

The Kurdish Peshmerga from Iraqi Kurdistan are gathering in the southern Turkish province of Sanliurfa, south of the ancient city once known simply as Urfa, less than forty miles north of the border, looking south, and southeast, where a Kurdish Syrian town is besieged by an ancient enemy with a new face, one seen on …

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Quick Links & Pics

Not a hornet. Thagomizer Thagomized! Chorus: “Allosaurus shoulda had FEATHERS.” Southwestern petroglyphs and hallucinogenic plants. Cave art and auditory illusions. “Do you write, Mr. Faulkner?” Sounds like William Gibson has his best novel in a long while. I’m ordering it! It is a shame that one of our greatest living writers must resort to crowdsourcing …

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Predator

Cooper’s hawks, quintessential Accipitrine stealth predators, transform themselves from hidden to active in an instant. Dan Gauss gets it here. But how did Audubon do something nearly identical about 175 or more years ago? I will try to find but this is better a search in books than in the electrosphere, books I assume that …

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Arroyo hounds

Don’t try this on unfamiliar ground (see comments on Blaze below). But if your hounds are as well conditioned as Riss and Tavi…

Breakfast Club

Recently– last winter- an odd mix of ranchers, cowboys, artists, medical workers, teachers, and even less classifiable types started having Sunday brunch at Tita Dixon’s brief version of the Bear Mountain Cafe. It was so much fun that when Linda Rael Mansell and Kelly Kent opened a good cafe at the old Magdalena Hotel it …

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Random Doggage

Daniela tells us that Blaze is not coursing marmots; he is just diving off a steep slope– an arroyo?– in hot pursuit…

Progress

Rio, or “Guero” (Whitey or Blondie as opposed to Tavo’s little black Gyr MERLIN Negrito) is making progress. Photos by Shiri Hoshen, training by Octavio Cruz… UPDATE: The little guy has brains too! Tavo writes: “Last night Güero flew off after chasing two rabbits. I got him back right after dark. “He flew back to …

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Image

Leon Gaspard was a Taos painter of the early 20th  century, with an eccentric style that makes him marginally less popular than some of his straightforwardly impressionist colleagues. He was a Russian who traveled in the the Soviet Union in the 20’s. Like his predecessor , the poet and novelist Lermontov (grandfather Scot “Learmont”), his …

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St Giles Cathedral

Guy Boyd was in Edinborough, and captured not only the cathedral but its amazing animal carvings. Says Guy, “… When they’re visiting, I wonder if these folks contemplate their long tradition of  partnership with the animals depicted here in contrast to current restrictive laws.”