I’m reading Anthony Bourdain as suggested in this post by Steve. Herein Bourdain, a classically trained chef with an eclectic, hair-raising resume, recounts an insider’s life in his trade. In this sense, Kitchen Confidential is like The Hungry Ocean by swordboat captain Linda Greenlaw. Or The Undertaking by—yes, undertaker—Thomas Lynch. Like Lynch and Greenlaw both, …
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Dancing Neanderthals
This study is a very different approach to understanding early human (and pre-human) social behavior. It stresses the valuable role that dancing and singing would have played in enhancing group solidarity and communication in hominid bands during the Pleistocene. These researchers feel it was so important that it left genetic markers. A sample of contemporary …
Spring Poppies
These California poppies (Eschschalzia californica) are in bloom where we’ve planted them under our mail box. It is the state flower and a sign of what passes for spring here in Southern California. Our climate is so temperate that spring isn’t so much a sign of warmer temperatures as it is a change from a …
Crash – Not the Movie
Two nights ago my dog Sadie and I were driving to Petco to shop for dog supplies. I had just gotten off of the 101 Freeway and was driving through a green-lighted intersection when a young lady driving the opposite direction ignored the red left-turn arrow and turned in front of me. I couldn’t stop …
Not a Tomb After All
The new tomb discovered in Eqypt’s Valley of the Kings, anounced last month turns out not to be a tomb, but a mummification room. The original announcement was made prior to their entering the area and analyzing the remains. Still a cool find.
Hunted by Giant Hyenas?
Christy Turner, the eminent anthropologist who is famous (or infamous) for demonstrating conclusively that the Anasazi practiced cannibalism, has been working for years now in the Altai mountains of a bigger “Four Corners”, where Siberia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Xinjiang come together. He has been looking for the answer to a riddle: why did humans “hang …
Dog Stuff
Much good material up, some in response to my coursing screed, some not. Here, the Alpha Environmentalist registers his always pungent opinions on the coursing controversy– I particularly like “pooping pompoms”. A friend of Matt’s who breeds whippets adds via email: “The possible mindset of some of the greyhound adoption groups, those supporting passage of …
Coursing Redux
Yes, I AM beating you over the head with this. As (I think) Trotsky said of war, you may not be interested in the California coursing controversy, but if you are a hunter or a champion of or user of working animals, it is interested in you. An op- ed by one Eileen Mitchell in …
“The New World” and Reconstructed Languages
This article in the New York Times is an interesting read on efforts made to reconstruct the extinct Algonquian language spoken by the Indians who interacted with the English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. This work was funded to support the filming of Terrence Malick’s movie, “The New World”, that portrays the John Smith …
More Pleistocene Hunting
I am in the midst of reading what I am coming to believe is an extraordinary book, The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie. It is not just an “art” book – it uses art as a window to look back into the Pleistocene to learn about extinct animals, human social systems, religion, …