About this time last year I posted on the tough fire season Southern California was having. Two years ago was one of the wettest in the area for the last 150 years and this past year was about the driest, making for lots of dry fuel. Today’s NY Times reports that this situation has made …
First of the Season
Our first snow storm of the season hit early Sunday morning and left us with 6-7 inches of wet snow. This view of the deck gives you a little better idea of how much accumulation we had. It really was very wet snow. The peach trees on the east side of the house still have …
A Few from Almaty
I couldn’t make it to the Primitive Breeds Conference in Almaty Kazakhstan this year, which is too bad because many of my friends did. Here are two friends, saluki man and Arabist Sir Terence Clark and Vladimir Beregovoy, who is now based in Virginia. He is a biologist, an expert on primitive breeds, and a …
The Pups
Some of our pups at a few months more than a year. John Burchard’s Tigger in the field in California. Sherri Beregovoy’s Clio has a false pregnancy and is hoarding toys which she treats as pups. Sure looks like her mother (below). Clio’s sister Larissa, who we kept, at the ranch. Monica’s Nemrah, another NM …
Absent?
In the past two weeks I have finished 4000 words for a forthcoming book on the art of Tom Quinn, had the Peculiars as guests for a week, and screwed up my back by hiking up a canyon with a yielding floor of washed- out gravel. Now four books have arrived in the mail to …
The void, two views
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 …
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 …