Gullah is a Creole English dialect spoken by the descendants of slaves in the Sea Islands of Georgia and in low coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina. I remember learning about this dialect (called Gullah in South Carolina and Geechee in Georgia) when I took intro linguistics at Tulane. This tells the story of …
Beale Street Bordellos
Having grown up in Memphis, I was intrigued by this account of historic archaeologists uncovering the remains of houses of prostitution off Beale Street there. These date from around 1900-1915, when Beale Street was a cultural and entertainment center for blacks in Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. It played a key role in the development …
Long Term View of Climate
You may recall a couple of weeks ago, I complained that most reports on climate in the mass media took too short a timeframe to be meaningful. Yesterday the New York Times finally produced one of very few articles I have ever seen in the popular press that does put current temperature data in a …
Norman Vaughn, RIP
Norman Vaughn passed away over the Christmas weekend. Vaughn did so much in Arctic and Antarctic exploration – back to the Byrd expeditons in the 1920s – it’s hard to believe he is gone at age 100. I mean you have to admire any man who completed six Iditarods after age 70! You can read …
Santa Rosa Island and Channel Islands National Park
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the formation of Channel Islands National Park and the Los Angeles and Santa Barbara news media are carrying a number of pieces on issues related to the Park’s history and management. This is a fairly thoughtful article on Santa Rosa Island (see above map). The most discussed and …
No Love for Wolves
This LA Times piece carries a paradoxical message: the reintroduction of the wolf into areas of Idaho, Wyoming, and Oregon has a been a raging success biologically, but this has come in the face of unremitting hostility from locals (see above bumper sticker). The wolf has been one of the success stories of the Endangered …
Happy Holidays
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from all of us here at Querencia blog!
Steve’s Return
Steve writes that he is safely back home from Turkey and in his words, “…ALMOST un- jet lagged.” He warns that blogging will be light for a while due to his continuing computer issues. He says, “Meanwhile 106 Turkish photos of all manner of things– dogs,domestic pigeons, landscape, ibises, flint cores– are in the big …
Now Here’s a Strange One
A trout with two mouths caught in a Nebraska lake. I’ll leave all the bad puns to you guys.
Another Set of Prehistoric Footprints
Archaeologists in Australia have discovered a set of prehistoric footprints that date to the late Pleistocene (19,000 – 23,000 BP) on a lakeshore in New South Wales. There are over 450 footprints, another “frozen moment” in the past. They sound very interesting, ”We see children running between the tracks of their parents; the children running …