While I try to get “things” done– not just fun things, either– O & P have been digging up things to delight their readers. Peculiar tells us how certain parts of Mt. St. Helens have been growing four to five feet a day! Meanwhile, Odious has encountered a song about Genghis Khan’s genetic legacy: When …
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Loved to Death
The LA Times also brings the sad report today that the fabulous Peruvian archeological site, Machu Picchu, is showing signs of wear from the thousands of tourists who come to visit it each year. Visits are up since the end of the Sendero Luminoso rebellion. There’s not much you can do to prevent this unless …
Communication with the Future
I found this piece in the LA Times on the burial of radioactive waste in a salt mine in New Mexico fascinating from an anthropological point of view. How do we warn people 100,000 years from now that what is buried in the mine is dangerous? They obviously won’t speak our language and what are …
Porumbeii
Palomas, palombe, palumbus….. a Romanian pigeon site. Because Romanian IS a Romance language. Someone told me this was “Portuguese”. I went to it and more or less understood a lot, having French and some Latin, Spanish, Italian. But it looked… weird. Then I saw the “ro” in the url…. The “Carunculat”– the pigeon in the …
Iraq Iran
Re Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Con, a remark from Alan Dershowitz: “History may well conclude that America and Britain fought the wrong preventive war against a country that posed no real threat, and that fighting that wrong war stopped them fighting the right preventive war against a country that did pose a danger to world peace.” …
New Chernobyl?
David Satter wonders if another Chernobyl is possible in Russia, given their technology and a persistent culture of secrecy and unaccountability. Of course, in a fascinating book, Mary Mycio argues that Chernobyl’s effects were more complex and less simplistically devastating than the pop press or Greenpeace might have it (the area is now a vast …
Puppy Numbers
Mothers-to-Be How many pups will our Girls have? Steve and Val Kaeppler, fellow NM breeders, found a database based on 2080 saluki litters. 1 pup: 89 litters2 pups: 1043 pups: 1364 pups:1975 pups:3146 pups: 4197 pups3588 pups: 2669 pups: 12310 pups 5111 pups: 1812 pups: 413 pups: 1 Lash had six lurcher pups so I …
Redtail
Rebecca has a savage, lovely pic up, a wild redatail with a grosbeak right outside her window. “I try to replay it in my head and realize that even though I was looking, I experienced the moment rather than seeing it, too primal of an instant to do anything but react. I only saw red …
Real Dogs
Is there still a place for real dogs in our world? Yvonne McGehee contemplates the prospects. She is a borzoi breeder who lives in Idaho, still running the dogs the in the way that they shoould be run, and found, on a visit to Hungary, a single dog with the old fire: “… my beliefs …
Plus ca Change
Tom McIntyre found this NYT essay by Verlyn Klinkenborg comparing the blogosphere to the paleo- alternative media described by Catholic populist and controversialist Hilaire Belloc in the early Twentieth century. Update: have found it is now behind the Times’ subscription firewall. Still worth looking for if you subscribe.