The Time of Your Life

The average age of conception over the past 250,000 years is apparently 26.9. Let's round it down to 25. 

Think of your birth mother. Hold her hand. Imagine her holding hands with her mother. Within 4 people, you're back in time 100 years, and it's an intimate family dinner. Just after WWI. Add another 16 people, a small party of 20, and you're in the 1500s. Double it, twice, and you're at 80 people. Your family would fill a restaurant, and you're at the height of the Roman empire. 

At 100 people, Confucius is alive but Socrates has not yet been born. 100 people. That's a medium sized wedding. A small lecture theatre or concert. 

200 people, probably the biggest party i could ever hope to host, takes you back 5,000 years. The guests at your soirée of parents would be contemporaries of the Egyptian and Indus Valley civilisations, although you'd probably be too busy fixing drinks and nibbles to talk to all of them. Just imagine it. 200 of you. That's all it takes to get back 5,000 years. And we could go further.

1,000 people, a decent sized concert, a large high school, and we're at the end of the last ice age. Your ancestors are comparing their pink floyd vinyl with music played on instruments carved from wood or bones of long vanished species. Wander through the crowd. See your own features and phrases and gestures refract out like a kaleidoscope. What would they make of you? What do you make of them? 

Why does it feel so unfair  that even that first 100 years — that small family dinner of four — is out of your grasp?

Everything Eats Everything

Moss and mushrooms eat wood, beetles and slugs eat mushrooms, and everything is stardust headed for a black hole. 

We are within the black hole’s event horizon, the boundary of no escape which fools us all because it produces no locally detectable change. We have always been within the event horizon.

Frederick Douglas Escapes to Freedom

On this day in 1838, Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland to New York City. He disguised himself as a sailor and obtained freedom papers from a freed Black sailor. Douglass then boarded a train and reached New York City the next morning, where he reached freedom.

Coming Down and Coming Up

Rain and wind, with mushrooms coming up, and a few branches coming down.

Richard Stratton Has Died at Age 94

Richard Stratton was a lover of Pit Bulls and — arguably — knew more about the type than anyone alive.

Writing in the December 2010 edition of “The Sporting Dog Journal,” Stratton note of two Peter Paul Rubens paintings shown here:

“Locked fast on the back of a large wild boar is a dog that could win a modern ADBA show!”

Yes indeed.

Stratton asks:

“Why did depictions of dogs doing the same type of thing for which our dogs are so renowned look just like our modern-day dogs?”

And how could that be when there were no terrier breeds at all 400 years ago?

Stratton notes that in Elizabethan England “terriers” were not a canine taxonomic category, but a canine TAX category:

“It is important to understand that the term terriers was not well defined in the writings about dogs of the 19th century. In general, the dogs that went after vermin in the ground were called terriers. These were generally the dogs of the lower classes. In Elizabethan times, there was something of a caste system. Generally, it was the people of royalty who owned land, and they were the only ones. Other people lived on the land, but as game became more scarce with the increase in human population, desirable game, such as deer and wild boar, were not supposed to be hunted by the general population, as these animals belonged to the king (or some other royal person), and the peasants were forbidden to hunt them. Often, they” were even forbidden to own hunting dogs. However, they could own terriers, as these dogs were useful in keeping the rat population down or in hunting less desirable game.

“But what were terriers? Normally, they were just small dogs with a strong prey drive.”

Stratton notes that because bulldogs were taxed and regulated as hounds (and prohibited from ownership by commoners), calling a smaller bulldog a terrier was a common dodge.

The Slave Catcher’s Dog

The Pit Bull is a dog with a known history.  It started as a stock catching and fighting dog in Britain, whose antecedents go back to the fighting and war dogs of the Romans.

Molloser dogs, called “Alaunts “ were brought to the New World by Columbus, who had to stand trial in Spain for feeding live native women and babies to his beasts.

The descendants of these dogs and their progeny became the famed “Cuban Bloodhound” made famous by slave catchers in Cuba, Brazil, and the southern US.

These catch dogs saw a regular infusion of canine blood from Europe, as Irish and other immigrants came to the US.  While some catch dogs were used to round up feral hogs and cattle, and others became farm and house guardians, the dog we know today as the American Pit Bull always had another career, as a fighing dog and a slave-catchers dog.

A common line of nonsense from the Pit Bull community is that these dogs werd bred to be “dog aggressive but not people aggressive”.

It is, in fact, bunk. 

These were slave-catchers dogs, and their history here is well-documented in law, journal, and even the Congressional Record.  No putative “ breed” of dog in the U.S. maims and kills people more than the Pit Bull.

See >> https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Heidi-Nast/publication/284170655_Pit_bulls_slavery_and_whiteness_in_the_mid-_to_late-nineteenth-century_US/links/564dbeb308ae1ef9296acaa0/Pit-bulls-slavery-and-whiteness-in-the-mid-to-late-nineteenth-century-US.pdf?

Milo and Leo and Golden Gate Bridge

Tracy Chapman :: Stand By Me

Daughter, Grandkids and Son-in-Law

The Math Checks Out

You Have a Right to Be An Asshole

Dolly Parton :: Shine

Wee Wolves With Bee Hives and Amanita

Avoid Private Equity Veterinarians

See the searchable map and database. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

https://privateequityvet.org

“Private equity is an ever increasing presence in US veterinary care. In 2024, it was reported that over 30% of general veterinary practices are under corporate ownership up from 8% just over 10 years earlier. When it comes to specialty care which includes vets that provide 24/7 emergency care it is estimated that over 75% of practices are now under corporate ownership.

“Our disastrous experience with a recently acquired private equity owned practice in Berkeley, California where our beloved dog ended up paying the ultimate price led us to researching more about this growing trend. We built this site to help draw further attention to this growing industry trend….”

The Circle Unbroken

“Of course Black Lives Matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter?” — Dolly Parton

 Dolly Parton was that rarest of things. I mourn her passing, and yet the baton has been passed. We lost John Prine, but gained Jesse Welles. We lost Tony Rice, but gained Billy Strings. And now we have lost Dolly Parton, but we have gained Taylor Swift. May the circle be unbroken. ❤️

—————————

Over on Facebook, this missive resulted in a host of know-nothings riding in to bash Taylor Swift.  Here’s what they missed, and why the comparison is poignant:

▪️Taylor, age 36, has won 14 Grammy Awards (out of 58 nominations), and is the only artist in history to have won Album of the Year four times.  

▪️Taylor has won 12 Country Music Association (CMA) Awards out of 28 total nominations, and has won the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year award twice.  

▪️Taylor has also earned at least 70 top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, which is the second-most of any artist in chart history.

▪️Taylor Swift's Eras Tour shattered global entertainment milestones, becoming the first music tour in history to surpass $2 billion in ticket sales, drawing over 10.1 million attendees across 149 shows, and setting the all-time record for the highest-grossing concert film.

▪️ Taylor Swift has donated over $100 million to charity.  See >> https://www.billboard.com/lists/taylor-swifts-charity-donations-gifts-timeline/

▪️Taylor Swift has refused to allow Trump to use her music in any form, and her lawyers are all teeth.  As Wikipedia notes, “Swift is pro-choice, an advocate of gender equality, LGBTQIA+ rights and gun control, and a vocal critic of racism, white supremacy, sexism, homophobia, and police brutality. She condemned Trump's presidency, accusing it of racism and fostering violence during the George Floyd protests, criticized the policies of the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn and the overruling of Roe v. Wade, and supported the Equality Act, the creation of Juneteenth as a national holiday and the removal of Confederate statues. She endorsed the Democratic tickets of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the 2020 United States presidential election, and Harris and Tim Walz in the 2024 election.”  See >> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_impact_of_Taylor_Swift

The Big Grift

Illegal to Help: The Veterinary Lobby’s Invisible Hand

“A pharmacy technician can give your child a flu shot in all fifty states. In Texas, a trained animal shelter worker who gives your dog a rabies shot is breaking the law unless a veterinarian is standing on the premises. Rules like that were not an accident. NAVEC’s fifth research report reads fifty years of bills, campaign filings, court records, and the associations’ own publications, and names the machine that wrote them.”

Read the whole report from the North American Veterinary Ethics Council.

August Shadow

Keeping Mice Out of the Tractor

The Grandkids Are Getting Big!

The Enemy Within

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." ~ H. L. Mencken 

The Struggle Is Real

 

Waterlilies Along Carroll Creek

Downtown Frederick, Maryland.

Willie Nelson :: Grave Digger

Gravedigger

When you dig my grave 

Could you make it shallow

So that I can feel the rain…

Law and Odor

Donald Trump is a 34-count convicted felon, a self-confessed sexual predator, an adjudicated rapist, a serial fraudster, and a pathological liar.

Here he is being cheered by an all-white cadre of Nassau County, Long Island police academy cadets earlier this week.

They are cheering for racism, because that’s one of the core organizing values of American law enforcement.

——————————————————

Trump: And we've essentially killed DEI. Isn't that nice? No more DEI.

(APPLAUSE)

Trump: I don't see the people behind me big on DEI. Were you big on DEI, anybody?

Crowd: No!

Trump: That's not a DEI group, I can tell.

(LAUGHTER)

Trump: It never was, by the way.

——————————————————

If you think law enforcement can be reformed, you’re not reading this room.

These police cadets are cheering for a RAPIST.  

They are cheering for a PEDOPHILE.  

They are cheering for a repeat FELON.

They are cheering for a FRAUDSTER

They are cheering for RACISM.

They see themselves in Donald Trump:  unrepentant liars and racist bullies who are immune from all accountability.

New Clothes, No Callouses

This one is dedicated to all the folks in their new camo and new boots.

We see you.

How ironic.

Learning Through Consequences

Operant conditioning (i.e., learning through consequences) is found in nature. The apple tree provides a reward to returning deer, the porcupine walks around with punishment on his back, and the rock is almost always practicing extinction.

The First Red

Wee Wolf happy with a Black Gum leaf. Black Gums are the first leaves to turn bright red in late summer.

Fogerty & Seeger :: Who Will Stop the Rain?

Graham Nash & David Crosby :: Lee Shore

This song was written on, and inspired by, David’s sailboat, Mayan.  

Mayan was a 59-foot (LOD) wooden schooner designed by the great John Alden, and built in Belize in 1947. 

Crosby, who was broke, bought the boat with a $25,000 loan from Peter Tork of The Monkees in 1969, and sailed it from the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, to California.

The Monkees are an interesting intersecting node on rock history. 

David Bowie, for example, was born David Jones, but had to adopt a stage name to avoid confusion with Davey Jones of The Monkee's.

Jimi Hendrix and The Jimi Hendrix Experience were the opening act for The Monkees in July of 1967.

Michael Nesmith of The Monkees wrote a number of great songs, including "Different Drum" which propelled Linda Ronstadt and the Stone Poneys to fame.

The great Carole King, in turn, wrote several songs for The Monkees, including "Pleasant Valley Sunday," which peaked at No. 3 in 1967.

Stinky Squid

A “Stinky Squid” (Pseudocolus fusiformis) stinkhorn mushroom near where I was stacking firewood this morning.

Thylacine?

I think someone over-paid. I suspect this is a South American Bush Dog with glass eyes pulled from a taxidermy bits box (they don’t make commercial Bush Dog eyes).

Most Women Are Better Than Most Men

Stacking Yesterday’s Oak and Pine Sections

The bar is two meters tall.