Helen recently drew readers’ attention to a startling (maybe terrifying) essay on what it means to live in Los Angeles by Geoff Manaugh, writing at BLDGBLOG. Helen quotes the opening passage at plenty length to give the gist. But read the whole thing here. It’s very good. What do I know about Los Angeles? Not …
Category: Uncategorized
Dzien dobry from Polski…or something
As a so-called ‘foreign’ correspondent, yours’ truly feels a very mild need to be odd, to be, as it were, foreign. At first, this seems a very easy thing to be in Eastern Europe, specifically, in rural Poland. Gone, for sure, is America, and gone, even, is the cosmopolitanism of Istanbul, which has the grace …
Indian Peaks
On Sunday of last week, Connie and I went with our friends Jeremy and Monica and their two children (plus one friend) up to Boulder County for a picnic and hike in an area just east of the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area. This is a shot of the Indian Peaks from near where we parked. …
More Kapuscinski
Following Steve’s lead, here’s another quote from Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Travels with Herodotus: “A journey, after all, neither begins in the instant we set out, nor ends when we have reached our doorstep once again. It starts much earlier and is really never over, because the film of memory continues running on inside of us long …
Neanderthal Range Extended
Nicholas Wade, working the paleoanthropology beat for the New York Times, reports again on Neanderthal DNA research. Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (where Steve’s friend Laura Niven works) has recovered Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA from bones excavated from two sites in Central Asia: “One is Teshik Tash, in …
More Southern Illinois Salukis
Steve posted last month about his delight at discovering that the mascot of the Southern Illinois University athletic teams is the Saluki. We’ve since found more SIU Saluki stuff like this picture of a guy in a saluki suit who prowls the sidelines at their football games. Apparently local saluki owners take turns bringing their …
The Ranch
We often speak of “The Ranch”– Lee Henderson’s acreage of miles of high desert grassland, canyon, and foothill, located on La Jencia Plain under the Magdalenas and not touching pavement on any side. It is an idael place to run dogs and fly falcons. I thought you might like to see a few pix. Here …
Last “Bleg”
Still hoping someone somewhere has an “extra” Goshawk–!! Facts: no more permits available for NM birds until next year. Colorado won’t let its birds out. I don’t have a vehicle that would make it to, say, Idaho even if I had no obligations. I haven’t enough money to buy a breeder’s bird outright (though I’d …
What Remains
Or “Culling II”. I find the specificity of (very diverse) categories left in what I must call my “nature” section fascinating. Before there was so much stuff in there that it would have been hard to see categories beyond that vague term. Maybe negative as in “not too much botany or herpetology” though both exist …
Culling the Library
In a recent discussion with Chas he spoke of culling his library and I recoiled in horror. I do so in an ongoing context, and I thought there was no need to do any more. Then one restless and sleepless night I was prowling my library and realized that there was a corner I had …