In an email exchange following my post on Meet Mr. Grizzly, Gregg, Steve and I wondered whether such dogs as Stevens describes could be made today. Your opinions invited and welcome! Matt: “My question is: Without the lifestyle (ranching, cowboy-ing, big game hunting on horseback, life pre-electric and pre-internal-combustion) setting the challenge and the training …
Orson Scott Card on American Car Culture
Find linked at 2Blowhards a column by sci-fi writer Orson Scott Card pondering the elephant in the garage: how car culture impacts us, literally, and how a different sort of American landscape might look. Steve, Reid and I are all sci-fi fans of various pedigree. We spend a lot of time puzzled about how things …
Meet Mr. Grizzly
I’ve been dreaming of deadlines, typing memos and organizing items on my desk in my sleep. This has made of Matt a dull (or duller) boy. But like the time, three weeks after my twins were born, when I ate six grapefruits in a sleep and vitamin-deprived orgy of gorging, I’ve just devoured the book …
Excuses & Around the Web
Bear with me a bit, dear readers! I have just begun my eagle book, mentioned below, and am stll shaking down a schedule. Also doing last reread of my collaboration- in translation of Cherkassov’s 1865 Notes of an East Siberian Hunter with Vladimir — a labor of love that will not be an easy sell! …
Roseann is back!
Three Martini Lunch returns!
The Barnsdall-Rio Grande Service Station
I’ve always admired the architecture of this old abandoned service station, located on West Hollister Avenue in Goleta, out west of Santa Barbara. It was built in 1929, and must be one of the few, if not the only, remaining example of a service station built in the Mission Revival style so popular in the …
More on the Antikythera Mechanism
The latest issue of New Yorker has a longish piece on the Antikythera Mechanism that I posted on last fall.
Feasts in the Wild
You don’t have to eat junk food in hunting camp. From my fellow New Mexico hunter MDMNM at Sometimes Far Afield: “The best bottle of wine I had last year was uncorked on a grouse hunt (it was a Casa Rodena 1998 Cabernet Franc, if you were wondering). On this last trip, dinner the first …
Wondrous Feathers
Reader, falconer, and birder Stacia Novy, in the military in Honduras, sent a photo of herself with the central tail feathers of a motmot that she picked up. She wrote: “I found this pair of molted, central tail (deck) feathers from a Turquoise-browed Motmot the other day while hiking along a stream bed on base. …
Ancestry and Reversion
Lots of good thinking about the evolution of domestic animals this week. Odious started out with a post on Heck cattle, the Hagenbeck brothers’ attempt in pre- WW II Germany to breed a reconstructed aurochs. Comments came in from Chas and Doc Hypercube, who was also interested enough to post on Darren’s theories about dog …