Category Archives: Uncategorized

Skiing is Wrong, says Jack

It’s been a snowy winter here on Hardscrabble Creek: a good thing too, since we are still in a drought overall. By the end of January, according to a nearby ranch wife who had been keeping count, we had had 32 inches (81 cm) of snow, although it comes a little bit at a time, and most melts away between storms.

Thus far in February, some 22 inches (56 cm) more has fallen, and twice this month it has been possible to go skiing out the front door, instead of having to drive into the higher mountains. I go for the “Camp Hale” look close to home: baggy olive-green pants, ex-Army white skis, and perhaps the last bamboo ski poles in use in the state of Colorado.

LEFT: A World War II ski trooper from the 10th Mountain Division, during training at Camp Hale, near Leadville, Colorado. (Photo courtesy Denver Public Library)

But there is one problem: Jack, our Chesapeake Bay retriever. Like all good Chessies, he loves water in all forms: rain, rivers, swamps, ponds, fog, and snow. But, evidently, for his people to travel by skis is wrong, completely wrong. Every winter we go through this: Mary and I ski, and Jack runs alongside barking at us. The hills and ridges echo with his bark. The other dogs run too–they think that it’s all good fun–but somehow Jack takes skiing personally. Double-poling is worse than a diagonal stride in his view.

The only solution is to keep skiing until he gets tired of barking. Mary and I need to get away and up into the higher mountains.

Kennewick Man Update

The saga of Kennewick Man, the 9,200-year-old Caucasoid (which is not the same as “Caucasian”!) skeleton found in Washington state in 1996, continues. An federal appeals court panel has ruled in favor of reseachers who want to continue to study his remains, now stored at the University of Washington, and against the tribes that wanted to rebury him. Go here and here for more background on the controversy.

He was a tall, strongly built, middle-aged warrior who probably died a violent death. The question “at whose hands?” produces all sorts of fascinating speculation. Those speculations tie into theories of “diffusionism,” once discredited as ridiculed as “racist,” but now enjoying a bit of a quiet comeback.

Norse-tradition Pagans, led by Stephen McNallen claimed him as a European forebear, part of their argument that Heathenism was the natural spiritual path of today’s Euro-Americans. Some anthropologists suggested that he (and other, anomalous, non-Mongoloid skeletons found over the years) suggested that long-ago Polynesians also came to this continent, but were, perhaps, exterminated by the ancestors of those people now designated as Natives.

The Covill, Umatilla, Yakam, and Nez Perce tribes claimed the rights to rebury the skeleton as one of theirs, generally speaking, because he was found where they lived in historical times, from the 18th century onwards, at least. Their attorneys are not happy with the judges’ strict reading of the North American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, as described here in Native Times.

The tribes’ argument does not convince me either. We cannot assume that the population 9,000 years ago was the same as now/. It’s possible, but we know that tribes did change homelands–the Kiowa moving from Wyoming into the Southern Plains, to give just one example. NAGPRA was passed to repatriate the remains–thousands of them–of more recent skeletal remains, whose removal from their graves by scientific researchers had embittered many American Indians over the past century. But to claim a 9,200-year-old skeleton as “ours” is just too much of a stretch.

Kirk Mitchell’s mystery novel, Ancient Ones, was inspired by the battle over Kennewick Man’s remains. For more on the whole genre of “American Indian mystery novels,” go here.

Nature blog

The students in my “Nature Writing in the West” class have started blogging. Read their thoughts at Nature Blog.

Now to crack the whip over them: more posts! more links!

I am adding Natureblog to my links list.

What is Wrong with a Moon God, Anyway?

The fun-loving gang at Chick Publications have a new one, Allah had no Son, which offers evangelical Christians Chick’s comic-book take on the notion that Allah was originally an Arabic Moon god, which, I suppose, makes Islam a sort of failed polytheism. Thanks to Allah himself for the link.

You will find a bibliographic essay on the “Was Allah a Moon God?” issue here, which cites most of the dubious texts out there. (It’s a Christian apologetics site.)

The ubiquity of Chick’s little booklets once led Tim/Otter/Oberon Zell of the Church of All Worlds and Pete Davis of the Aquarian Tabernacle to create their own small series of Pagan anti-tracts, done in the same style and format. The first, The Other People, took the approach that since most Western Pagans consider themselves to be neither literal nor metaphorical “children of Abraham,” all those Middle Eastern holy books simply do not apply to us.

Chick also champions the anti-Wiccan, anti-Masonic writer Bill Schnoebelen, dealt with effectively here.

A strike against spammers

Here is some good news on the anti-spam front: a group of Nigerian and Beninese (Beninian?) spammers nailed in Amsterdam. But, reading the article, I was surprised to learn of the hoodwinked Swiss professor, which damages my stereotype of the Swiss–educated ones, at least–being financially canny.

Think your look is unique?

Think again.

A common Anglo-Saxon name

This (third name on list) is not me. I do not write poems about my toes. Or maggots. Not that I’ve got anything against maggots.

The Rosvellov Incident

Now the story can be told . . . in Pravda, apparently taking its journalistic lead from the supermarket tabloids, which, as we all know, are staffed Florida-loving expatriate British journalists fired from their UK jobs for excessive-even-by-Fleet-Street-standards drunkeness:

In the beginning of August 1987 five soldiers of Leningrad Military District went to the North of Karelia region on a special mission. They were required to guard the object of unknown origin. It was found on the territory of another military unit near the town of Vyborg. The item was 14 meters long, 4 meters wide, 2.5 meters high.

Read more

His name’s not George (unless it really is)

Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.

Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.

But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.

They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.

For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?

His name’s not George (unless it really is)

Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.

Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.

But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.

They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.

For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?