Introducing (exposing?) John Pittman, doing-business-as “Dr. Hypercube” in various post comments here. Says Steve: “…Our frequent commenter, like Pluvi before him, has been shyly concealing a GREAT blog : http://www.hawkdog.net/wordpress/“ We’re adding John to the blogroll today!
Bat Blogging
A few weeks ago, Connie and I were hiking on one of our Santa Barbara urban trails during the middle of the day. We were walking through this unremarkable overpass when we noticed chirping sounds coming from expansion joints that were running the length of the bridge. Closer examination showed these piles of bat guano …
Fernando Librado and Falcon 2
In 1976 as a Bicentennial Project and as a Chumash cultural revival item, a team of Chumash and anthropologists used Harrington’s notes and Librado’s canoe to build a replica tomol. Appropriately enough, it was named Helek, and was paddled out to the Channel Islands by a Chumash crew. The file photo above shows Helek in …
Fernando Librado and Falcon 1
I was recently reading Helen MacDonald’s (familiar in these parts as Pluvialis) wonderful book Falcon (well reviewed here) when I was struck by this sentence: “In the early twentieth century, Fernando Librado related how the crew of a Chumash sea canoe were all saved through the intercession of the captain’s dreamhelper, the peregrine, during a …
Good Reads Elsewhere
Both Peculiar at O & P and Heidi have been producing an inordinate amount of good bloggage lately and you should really read all of it. But a few highlights: here, Peculiar writes an essay on the late Steve Irwin that is far better than my brief commemoration below, going as he does into what …
One More Religion Post
Not a subject I want to get into often here, but this essay on The New Republic’s blog ( by a writer who is a secular Jew)seemed to have some small- l liberal things to say about the Pope controversy. Money quote: “By my human standards “No man comes unto the father but through Me” …
Jolly Good!
Merrie Olde England–the one with guns and fieldsports–may be gone (or going), but a few good souls refuse to let her die. Enter The Connaught Square Squirrel Hunt. You may recall a couple previous stories we shared, wherein British citizens lampooned the Hunting Act of 2004 (which outlawed, among other things, encouraging your dog to …
Puppies Like to Chew
……..all sorts of things, including cell phones. Here is mine (thank you, Sadie!) and believe it or not it still works. I’m sure Steve can relate.
Fire Season II
Back in June, I posted on the beginning of fire season in this region. Believe me, it is still going strong here, with a monster fire, called the Day Fire, raging east of here. The LA Times had good run-downs on it yesterday and today. It really slapped me in the face over the weekend. …
DNA Research and the Chumash
This interesting article appeared in the LA Times while I was out of town. It discusses the work Dr. John Johnson of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and others are doing with mitochondrial DNA in living Native Americans and prehistoric remains and what it has to say about the peopling of the New …