My farriers are Amish, and I went by their shop to schedule a farm visit to trim Mister Buckles. I found them in their butcher shop, father and sons, and stayed to chat a while.

I have no respect for religious belief, faith, but I have much respect for the Amish, and would convert, except for the god stuff, and all that hard work. Everything else, I'm good to go.

This respect has roots from junior high years, from passing through Eastern Elkhart County, and being completely subsumed with awe by the Amish farms and life I saw there.

And in the early 80's, there was an article in Rolling Stone. In those, and earlier years, Rolling Stone wasn't just a music mag, making a RockStar out of Annie Lebovitz. Incidentally, the last I heard, Annie was facing default on a $24 million(!) loan, that day. And it wasn't just the money. As collateral, Annie had posted rights to all her work, past, present, and future. The equivalent to mortgaging your soul.

In those years, the magazine had a social consciousness, long since gone, from society and the magazine. In the day, they gave Hunter Thompson his best voice, and printed a blazing expose' of the fraud Evel Knievel, by Joe Eszterhas. Joe went on to write screenplays, including the smashes Flashdance and Basic Instinct, probably best known for the view of Sharon Stone's mommy parts.

And the mag published A Quiet Killing in Adams County, documenting the killing of 8-month-old Adeline Schwartz on August 31, 1979.

This is the best piece of journalism I have ever read, and it drove a stake in my heart that remains.

Four turds were driving around Berne, Indiana, throwing broken pieces of clay tile at "Clapes", clay apes, Amish. Two were in the cab and two in the bed of a pickup, and they chucked some tile at a buggy where baby Adeline was a passenger. Here's a good time to remember some high school physics, where the velocity of an object thrown from a moving vehicle travels at a speed equal to the acceleration of the throw and the speed of that vehicle, that pickup.

The Schwartzes, when they got home and found Baby Adeline murdered, contacted Adams County Sheriff's Department, and the human garbage was apprehended almost immediately. Subsequently, the Schwartzes refused to participate in legal proceedings.

The four shitstains in the pickup were found guilty of numerous previous attacks on Amish, yet none did time for the murder of a baby. A judge, found competent by the majority of those who cast votes in Adams County, Indiana, ruled that guilt could not be determined between the two submorons winging lethal projectiles at defenseless people.

Justice served.

Become familiar with the Amish concepts of god's will be done and bible-mandated forgiveness. Witness the 2006 Amish school slaughter in West Nickel Mines, PA. Funds sent to the Amish were regifted to the family of the shooter.

I was troubled by this. As a non-believer I am more an eye-for-an-eye type, and don't hold with divine forgiveness. And I had sent a sizable (for me) donation, and I would sooner dig up the shooter (Charles Roberts, if you're keeping score) and shit in his skull than give money to his family.

Another, and for me, much, much larger difficulty with this spirit of forgiveness, fueled by the bible, and respected by local authorities, comes with "respect" for the closed community, and a hands-off attitude towards possible crimes.

The death of Krystle Danae Gingrich, late on a very cool night in June, 2009, stinks on ice. Krystle was a most beautiful 14-year-old, and chose tackling a semi to going into her home.

I visit her often, as the Amish ignore the buried, which is very convenient when your fucking "faith" makes you forgive a murderer in your house. And her death must have been a relief to a most troubled household.

There was a hawk perched on a fencepost behind the shop, and Mr. Otto called it a "chicken hawk", and it was most surely a sharp-shinned hawk.

And Ed asked me what he could do about a hawk after his chickens and I said "Take a very deep breath and yell 'Hey!' as loud as you can."

Yesterday we went to Pearson's Mill SRA. Some of the worst litterers, from Slim Jim wrappers to dead bait, are bank fishermen. I am baffled as to why someone can enjoy a few hours in outdoor sport, then soil and spoil the very spot you enjoyed.

So there is a a dead-fish deposit at the ramp-end at Pearson's Mill, and my puppy got into it the last time we were there. It is a stink you cannot believe, and almost impossible to get out of a long-haired dog. And the drive home is just too, too far.

I put a collar with a leash on Sun through the area, and Abbe took the challenge, and found the offal, and dove into it.

I took a towel and jammed it with snow and wiped her down, then used six hand-wipes on her, and she stunk up the truck cab past tolerance. So, instead of going home across Red Bridge, I retraced SR 13.

And perched on the roadsign for Mier, barely six feet off the ground and six feet off the highway, was a most gorgeous red tail. So very close I could fully appreciate the gold mottling in the white breast without glass, and surely as close as I've ever come to a red tail.

He sat stolidly, and was most surely the hawk I saw on the other side of the highway, on a speed-limit sign, a bit higher, a couple weeks ago.

I am absolutely amazed with what the surgical team did for me. Awesome is worn, but useful, and surely apropos. And I rejoice two and three times a day that I can walk again, for it's been the most enjoyable part of my day for years and years.

But you don't really need to get out of your car to see wonderful, beautiful, wildlife.

Just slow down. See those kestrels on wires, those red tails on the posts and power poles, in roadside trees.

You will surely feel blessed.

How many times have you heard "Be careful what you wish for"?

Because I recently lamented the dearth of cottontails and coyotes, and, now, this:

The Mississinewa Battlefield, the beginnings of the end of the Miami tribe and the usurping of land from our native Delawares, is at the headwaters of the reservoir, where the Mississinewa is still a river. There is a road runs for a few miles along the east side of the river, the genesis of which would surely be 18th Century, certainly earlier. It is a lovely place to walk, much of the road canopied, and often practically deserted.

There are three access points to the road, and I took the middle, to walk a more open section in hopes the footing would be best.

On the way back, I heard beagles, then a 12-gauge shotgun report.

Abbe left for the truck, as she cannot tolerate loud noises.

A bend in the road (river) blocked the rabbit hunters, who drove in behind us.

My puppy went 'round the bend in full collie song, and I worried he would be shot. But for who knows why, he responded to my screams of terror and came back.

We came on two hillbillies, really good guys, one nearly my age and the other great-grandfatherly, a certain octogenarian (okay, he said). They were hunting from the road, for sure in deference to the man's years. It is illegal to hunt from a road in Indiana (this is primarily to protect deer from spotlighters - they literally freeze in the headlights). But the law isn't that specific. And I don't know if they were licensed, or had signed in, both requirements to legally hunt IDNR-managed land.

Then again, a hillbilly with a shotgun is a bona fide killing machine, so I skipped all the legalese and made nice.

They noted that Abbe had gone by at a fast trot, and didn't even look at them.

The younger man held a dead cottontail in his right hand, so I finally got to see one.

Oh, goody.

There is another trail, on the south or west side of the river, that runs, about 50% true, from Marion to the confluence with the Wabash River a few miles east of Peru. This is the Slocum Trail, named for Frances Slocum, taken by Delawares from her family at Wilkes-Barre, PA at the age of five and raised as a Miami in the Mississinewa area. After the most extensive, exhaustive, intensive "manhunt" in the history of the known world, her brothers found her some 59 years later, completely assimilated, named Maconaquah, living on a ridge five miles from the schools since named in her honor. And you can visit her there now, at the Frances Slocum Cemetery. Good luck defining the "ridge", but hang in there, you can do it.

At Jalapa, directly across the river from the battlefield cemetery, there is a ford in the river. You can see it most of the year, large slabs of limestone that amount to a near-bridge, and for much of the year you can wade it and not get your cuffs wet.

The Slocum Trail passes through Jalapa, and this ford creates a link with my much less well-defined trail. Further, at winter (low) pool, now, you can look upstream from the SR 13 bridge and see a road that ran butt up against the river, my trail.

You don't need to accept my trail, but know this: "my" trail is the access road to the Frances Slocum Cemetery, and I'll bet dollars to dimes Maconaquah knew "my" trail very, very well.

We were headed west on the Slocum Trail, about a mile past Red Bridge, this afternoon, when I noticed a red pickup pulled in to a Sign In/Out station. There were dog boxes in the back, and stretched out on the tailgate, a coyote.

Perfect.

In the late spring and early summer, coyotes can look mangy, as they shed that winter coat for the summer. This one was resplendent in a luxurious deep-winter coat of copper, auburn, rust, and burnished gold.

Resplendent, except for the dead part.

Why in the fuck would anyone shoot a wild coyote? They are harmless, beautiful, and a true joy to sight and watch. This legged turd keeps dogs, which are genetic Xeroxes of coyotes. Maybe he's one of those walking condoms crammed with vulture vomit who keeps his dogs in unheated cages in the farthest corner of his yard. If the dogs are that lucky.

Okay, here's a genuine proposal: except in cases of thoroughly documented depredation, hunted game must be limited to what the hunter eats. Period.

You can bet those hillbillies ate that rabbit.

This brainless shitstain may have the coyote mounted, either in taxidermy lexicon, or in the colloquial sense, and I'll pick the latter, although the odds are likely about equal, but it ain't food.

The wonderful people who bred my superdog Addie had a neighbor who was twice caught in his neighbor's goat barn. Everyone in this story should have relocated far, far away from one another. And, as an unnecessary aside, the goat packer was married. At least after the first time.

I am so full of crap I come across as having an answer for everything. But why shoot a coyote? And why do we allow it on our state property? Doesn't that mean these are our coyotes, not IDNR's, not hunters'? The Coyote has a revered status in American Indian culture and religion, known variously by many honorifics, such as The Trickster (a being of unmatched wit, wile, and guile), and God's Dog. Given the opportunity, I would have shot the genetic dead-end before he shot the coyote. There would have been purpose in that.

A guy who never, ever should have fathered two children lives on a corner in the next block north, and keeps beagles in elevated cages in the backyard. Which fits, as a cage adjoins rabbit hutches. This should be some excitement for the rabbits, as every time the hounds bay, it must boost the bunny heart rates to Indy speeds.

In the 15 years I have lived here, to the best of my knowledge, these dogs have never, ever been out of these hutches. The guy has no beagle boxes in his truck, and I would bet my house forensic scientists could not find a dog hair in the cab.

If this is livin', I'd be dyin'.

Cardinals Paint the Snow

Okay, I've always been a sucker for a pretty face, and have made a fool of myself enough times to think it's a gift, and remain a fool, as I seem to be very good at it.

With every ounce of respect to my new pedestal dwellers, the Eastern Bluebirds, I was walking through the pine woods on the new trail when I saw a Northern Cardinal thirty yards on, below eye level on a deadfall branch, and was renewed in the glory and majesty that is a most regal red cardinal in the snow.

And there were others about, maybe to remind me that every one is a snowflake, with distinctive coloring, yet another proof that unless creationist god attends the birth of each male cardinal, Darwinian selection is at work, constantly searching for that most perfect of reds.

I saw a male last week almost burgundy, beautiful, but not even near that royal scarlet, or blood red, either. And he had a mate, which shows who was doing the selecting, not creationist god, not Darwin himself. Because with nearly every species in birdworld, the male is most glamorously appointed, while the female is often bland, and nearly indistinguishable to all but the most intent observers.

Girls rule, boys drool. Many stag beauties, but the drab females are all mated up, with much local fighting for the subservient position.

And that burgundy color? May persist, may not. Because just like you and me, baby birds get a full set of X's, half a set of Y's. Again, girls rule, boys spit in the ocean.

I once read that some birdwatchers in England (okay, never "birders" here. Sounds like hunters) would travel to the US to see a cardinal in the snow, as there are no such creatures in the U.K.

Some more about "birding". Kenn Kaufman makes this point in "Kingbird Highway" about his thumb ride crisscrossing America to establish a new record for species identified in a year: that he never actually "watched" the birds.

I can't help but believe his epiphany came when a late-season spring ice storm wiped out a sizable percentage of the Myrtle Warbler population on the Outer Banks of North Carolina as he stood most helplessly by. Whatever, subsequent to his "record year" of bird logging, Kenn began to observe, and become a sanctuary manager, producer of a top-shelf field guide, and a collaborator with others in print.

As mentioned before, "birding" is mostly checking a list, with distinctive calls or songs serving with visual recognition as positive identifications.

I had a friend, a wildlife biologist, who was paid to drive a prescribed route and count species at prescribed locations. This was useful, as someone paid him to do this chore.

Birdwatching?

Hardly.

And birders who recognize songs or calls and check a list are not birdwatchers.

I have had two hanks for years, one red, one blue. The red one has considered its lot in life, and disappeared. So I found "bandannas", and bought a four-pack.

My affair with snotlockers may be disgusting, except this: when I got these hanks (sorry, bandannas, or, rather sorry bandannas) home, I looked at the label: "Falls Creek".

Except there is no location on the label, only "Made In China", and the same on the bandannas: "Made in China".

It is so easy to admit I know nothing about International Trade that it seems I'm proud of my ignorance.

Of course I'm not. So will someone tell me when we began to allow China to free-market in the US? I surely missed that boat. And Google was no help, identifying "Falls Creek" as a Chinese Company.

Again, I've never known any country could free-trade on US markets. So we pick somebody, and it's fucking China?!

We have hogshit better regulated than goods from China. And they can hang a rack of snotrags, and much other shit, too, in the Marion Meijer? WTF?

Something I've noticed these last several days is a few American Kestrels overwintering. And an oddity: in the summer, unless you drive by at 80 mph (and who doesn't?) kestrels leave the wire, circle, and return, usually to that same spot. In the winter, they sit tight, one with back to the road scanning a snowy, picked cornfield, with stalks up, and two others watching the road, the last couple days.

One hand says the short flight would warm one up.

The other sees a waste of heat, of energy.

Whether intuitively, instinctively, or knowledgeably, birds and animals manage energy so much better than we, one wonders why we abandoned research.

It was because no one listened.

SR 18 crosses Taylor Creek on the east side of town, as the road to the Converse Cemetery, and to Mier (pronounced "mere", for physical reasons, but mostly because we're just stupid. Like everyone who insists on pronouncing Favre "farve") splits to the north.

On a wire north, set back because of the intersection, sat a male red tail, who I've seen in and around since summer. Oh, sure, how can I tell? Well, never in my lifetime, but they are territorial, and there's been one in this territory for about eight months, and counting.

His plumage was resplendent, gorgeous, a healthy glow as we emerge from over three weeks in an icebox. The door opened today, with temps above freezing, but not enough to lift much snow, as the sunshine was was just above the low clouds.

You have wintered well to date, lovely friend.

We were up the road to Pearson's Mill.

Into the SRA, the road goes downhill to the south, then turns abruptly on the dolomite cliff, 15 - 25 feet above the lake, and follows along it west to the boat launch area. (Dolomite is much the same as limestone. The difference is the major element - mineral - in limestone is calcite, and dolomite features magnesium. Yellow to brown, while limestone is grey.) The road west hasn't been plowed, and I've been parking at the bottom of the county road and walking back to the launch area, then back and up the grade to the entrance sign, a very good exercise, with the elevation changes.

Walking in today I came on a clester of grey birds, dozens, working and swarming the trees ten, twenty and thirty feet uphill. Dancing in the trees.

They had those beautiful orange breasts.

Last summer I got hung up on a little grey bird with an orange breast for several days, then saw it fly down a swale.

Eastern Bluebird.

It is confusing, as females can display this grey coloration. But the larger consideration is the angle of observation (you are officially spared the term "incidence", which means so many things, and I lack the energy to describe this usage), and like the decidedly blue bird I finally saw last summer, they all hid blue except for the occasional minute flash, which I couldn't believe.

What gave these hidden beauties, all three or so dozen, away wasn't a break in the clouds, but those little lilly-white butts.

Only a naturenut can appreciate a bird for its butt.

Even stashed under three inches of crusted snow, my puppy managed to find stinking rotted fish, which infuses everything near it with a godawful stench, doesn't wash out, and makes the trip home in a little truck cab unbearable.

And there were two deer carcasses the dogs found, left by fuckheaded slaughter assholes who field strip the animals and leave the carcass in a ditch.

Hunter-gatherers began to be displaced about 8000 years ago by farmers. The few extant today are found in the most remote areas of the tropics, where an abundance of vegetation and wildlife can support them. Ain't much of that. Ain't many of them.

And the myth of the American hunter is truly a myth. Lewis & Clark's fabled expedition was nearly starved to failure because the hunters they hired flat couldn't hunt.

The people who denuded our prairies, here in Indiana and west, cleared land and plowed and planted. Most didn't own a gun. The forest and grassland they levelled held no game, anyway.

Check it: there are more whitetail deer in Indiana now than in 1830.

Which presents wildlife managers with a dilemma: how accommodate the five million people using land available only to wildlife 180 years ago?

Uhm, kill the the animals.

This is the only answer found acceptable by IDNR managers, who choose to allow slaughter in Indiana State Parks, supposed sanctuaries for all of natural Indiana, because they can't manage the herds they created.

And that perpetuates the fuckskulls who throw carcasses in ditches.

And walking brain-disease breeding laboratories who don't track the animals they shoot. I find dead deer, see them, or my dogs come up with parts all winter.

Seriously, what are these stains on humanity about?

There are many, many people who hunt responsibly, who view a day outdoors as time well spent. But what about the "people" Robert Twigger writes of in The Extinction Club? Those who spend tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot endangered species, and more, much more, in hope of killing the last of the species?

Hunting is a dying fetish in this country, and should be. There are better ways to manage wildlife than just fucking kill it.

Hunting will outlive me. So I'll always have decaying animal matter to enjoy.

How do you like yours?

One of my very favorite places to walk my dogs is cemeteries. The occupants are quiet and never complain, visitor traffic is sparse, and the atmosphere is quiet, almost peaceful. Except for all the dead people.

I've been walking at the Converse Cemetery for at least 12 years. Tuesday evening, after supper, the west wind (been there for at least three weeks) made the walk nearly unbearable. And then, a thought: there is a hedgerow along the north (long) border of the grounds and a wooded creek on the west side. Every time I had walked here, I had walked clockwise, with no fore- or after-thought. Should I reverse directions, fully half the tour would be shielded naturally, and the wind would be at my back that last long stretch.
I tried it Wednesday afternoon, with mixed ratings. But better.
And there was something else: I saw most of the markers from the other side for the first time.
In the northwest corner, an old part of the cemetery, was a stone engraved "Clester".
The very first thing I thought was "clester feck".

Taylor Creek provides the western border. It's like a twenty-foot cliff. The reason is the natural contour of so many cemeteries has been backfilled to provide a more-or-less level "planting" area. In the mid 90's, Elwood moved the main sewer up out of Duck Creek with a $7 million grant from the feds. A thousand feet was relocated into the City Cemetery. The excavations piled mounds of old-time backfill 25 to 30 feet in the air. These piles were full of 60 - 75 year-old bottles, in various conditions.
Note that before plastics, bored into the skull of consumer America by "The Graduate", dumps were routinely fired to reduce waste piles, usually on an undesirable edge of town.
As towns grew, that "undesirable edge" became ultra-thin.
When the dumps were fired, sport was available for children, as the rats tried to flee. This also provided diversion for too many dim-witted adult males, who in an unholy alliance with some devil, found time to reproduce. You know them. Stand still in a box store for ten minutes, at your extreme peril. Earn a Merit Badge in "Quasi-Human Exploration".
Another by-product was the surviving rats, most necessarily the vast majority, found routes into all the new homes crowding the "undesirable edge".

An aside that helps delimit my tolerance: I will trade each rat in my home for a Duroc Hog, and pay all the difference.
I do not like rats.
And at some point, probably now, smoke and stench must be mentioned. There. It was. Because the downwind people welcomed the fresh smell of burning plastics.
The Fifties! What a great time! No A/C, so choose which is the least offensive, blowing through your screen on a swampy July night: burning rotten animal flesh or dioxins!
Aw, the 50's. Great music. Except you wouldn't listen to any of it for more than about eleven minutes.
Try the first three or four Stones albums (admittedly, the 60's). the very best rock band ever, and you're, WTF?
Because all these rock monsters were learning, and rock really exploded in '68, and most before is known only because it was recorded.

I was shuffling through the snow on the cliff edge, the cemetery overshadowing Taylor Creek, looking for my Abbe. Who was surely looking for open water in the creek, the temperature in the low 20's, to cool her heels, or just because she really, really likes to splash water.
The trees in the creek bottom are ten - fifteen feet high, and I saw what I thought was blue, and, as I watched, there was a clester of Bluebirds. Just totally gorgeous. And not the first time this winter I thought a bluebird in the snow was the most beautiful bird in existence.
And these Bluebirds jumping around in these tree tops, at eye level, flashing that beautiful blue in every light, and every bird a distinguishable hue, and the orange throats onto the white, was a spectacle to keep forever.

I am so glad I didn't have a camera, because I could never, ever, with tons of time and tons of film, capture the splendor of these few little birds dancing through these humble trees.

My sister has taken medical teams and supplies to Haiti for at least (so, so sorry if I shortchange this selfless effort) fourteen years, and these people are the poorest people in the Americas, and as besieged as any country in Africa.
For years Haiti was ruled by Papa Doc and then Baby Doc Duvalier, who never troubled themselves with Haiti"s Constitution, the earliest in the Americas, and wrung every cent out of every inch of people and land.
Now comes two days of earthquakes, and here's my new candidate for "Dumbest Motherfucker on the Planet", Pat Robertson.
I was gonna post his crap, but will not soil my blog.
Here's a link, if you want to know what a piece of shit that Americans support with much moola says:

Americans United Condemns TV Preacher's Callous Statement on Haitian Earthquake

Sorry. I have the strongest stomach in Indiana (size matters!) but I can't post this shit.

Know ye: Bluebirds, and Northern Cardinals, are hanging around, and available to the casual observer, and who's more casual than me?

Went on my longest trip since surgery to Sheridan, IN today. Wallace Feeds mixes a perfect sweet feed for my horse - 10-Os - 10% protein, oat based, and I made the drive. Less than 80 miles, but wore me way down.

Filled the feed barrel, and I cut up some Granny Smith and Macintosh, threw on 2# of fresh sweet feed, then stood in the cold while Mister Buckles ignored me, and shied away from my touch.

Studies have repeatedly shown horses don't think (okay, there are about 5 billion humans, with over 17 billion pounds of brain matter, who don't either) but they do remember. Horses have incredible memories, and, should you think elephants do better, you can observe several for a life-time and not prove it.

So after Mister Buckles let me know he wasn't happy with my extended absence, he started nuzzling about while he was treating himself

What I live for.

The pure psycho Sarah! created a void when she found that the totally befuddled Republican

"Party" (serious, now: how far away from a party can you get?) adored her, grew too big for a mere governor's job (think: there are only 50 in the nation) that she abdicated that elected duty after only two and a half years. She took with her the title of "Most repugnant and repulsive slaughterer of useful and harmless wild life on the planet".

Into the gap jumps this buttbrain:

"Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer Brags About Buffalo Slaughter".

You can read it all at www.bfc-media@wildrockies.org but see if you can stomach this:

"No governor in Montana history has sent more bison to slaughter than this governor," Schweitzer said.
Okay, I need Murine to get the red out, but I'm not retyping.

I got an e-mail said, in part, Muslin gynecologists can't look at mommy parts, but must examine such with a mirror.

Be a good job for PeeWee Herman. Remember when he (Paul Rubens) got arrested in a Miami jackatorium - XXX theatre- loping his mule? How could anyone have been the least bit surprised? He hosted a kids show with mirrors on his shoes. How in hell does that happen?

By the way, has internet porn put all those sticky floor movie rooms out of business?

When I was at Pearson Mill SRA recently I heard a loud commotion I was sure were turkeys. Mississinewa Lake has hundreds, a very successful reintroduction program. But it was a flock of ducks, quite belatedly heading south for open water. I consulted my duck book (okay, I don't really have a duck book, but I do have about a dozen bird field guides, all with ducks and geese, so I put on a dust mask and actually opened one) and found the only duck listed with a suitable range of calls is the male mallard. The female just quacks.

I have no idea what all the racket was about, unless they were all bitching at whoever's idea it was to stay this far north this late, or cussing some slackers who were skipping their turns on point, hanging back in the draft.

The woods didn't allow much view - I heard them before and after I saw them - but it's worth your while to observe a flight long enough to see the vee roll out and re-form, as the leaders peel back for a bit of rest. Is there a duck school teaches that?

I was carping about all the women shortchanged of recognition for their contributions to the sciences, like Rosiland Franklin. One who received due recognition was Marie Curie (nee Skłodowska - she was Polish, not French). She coined "radioactivity", a field of study which modernized (and terrorized) the world. She also discovered radium and polonium (named after her birthplace).

She was decorated with the French Legion of Honor. She received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, the first woman to be awarded a Nobel. In 1911 she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine, the first person to merit two Nobel Prizes.

Madame Curie paid the price for working with radioactive materials. One cannot imagine the pain that accompanied her lingering, last years.

Less compensated were the thousands of young women who painted radium numerals on watch faces to "glow in the dark". Four hundred or so "Radium Girls" employed by a contractor for the US Army were told the stuff was harmless. So they painted the watches, painted their fingernails, even their teeth. But the killer was the very small numbers that required a very fine brush. The women were constantly wetting the camel hair with their lips to firm it up for each application.

The "Radium Girls" are famous because they brought a lawsuit, and won. There were thousands of others with the same job - notably, with Timex - who also sickened and died.

Sad story, but repeated lately by W. R. Grace who mined vermiculite, an asbestos product with an insidious, unfilterable crystal structure, notably in Libby, Montana, and continually reassured workers, saying the stuff was harmless. Now about the whole town has incurable lung diseases.

And what happened to W R Grace? Well, Mr. Grace is on sit-down-to supper terms with the Bush family, particularly Herbert Walker (41), so, essentially, nothing. Billions buys better lawyers than yours. And judges, too, with G H W Bush on your team. And Jr. (43) never rocked that boat.

And speaking of billions, the US has spent all of that removing asbestos from schools, hospitals, and other public buildings. But asbestos is still for sale. In every form. Whether your house was built 50 years ago or yesterday, there is asbestos in it. Some, or a lot, but unless you paid to have it removed, you still got it.

Why?
Why, indeed.

The managers at Mississinewa Lake hit a home run when they cut a half-mile trail through a pine woods for the annual foot-race. What a pleasant place to walk. I was actually sad to see the road. Three deer cut across the trail about forty yards in front of me, really loading up my sightings checklist. Throw in a pair of Cardinals, a couple of nuthatches, a bluejay, and call it a success.
In the woods, I was recalling my writing that cottontails were rare, and it occurred coyotes are rare, also. The populations are inextricably linked away from settled areas, as coyotes have become very successful scavengers (and first-rate cat harvesters). I only saw one last year: contrast with three fox, always more shy, reticent.
On the (closed) road, towards the car, what do I see but a coyote track.
I am no, not even, a tracker, and couldn't track a slow snake through wet paint.
Coyote prints are the same as a dog's, which you would expect, as they are genetically indistinguishable. But a dog makes side and side prints, while all four coyote paws fall in a straight line.
If hearing a bird call serves as a sighting, then I'll surely count coyote tracks in fresh snow.

Today is Sir Issac Newton's Birthday. He was the founder of all things physics, true genius, but all accounts I've read depict him as a weird fucker, so Happy B'Day, Ike.
The 2 greatest scientific discoveries of the (19)50's and 60's were J. Tuzo Wilson's explication of plate tectonics in 1964, and Watson and Crick's Double Helix of 1953. (Aside: Watson received his doctorate from Indiana University in zoology. Okay, WTF? I don't know what zoology is, but assume it's the study of zoos? I can see a BS in that, but a PhD in zoos? Fucking zoos? Only in Indiana.)
Contrary to my previous post, we are much better educated than I had presumed. Nearly 75% of Freshmen graduate High School. (The drop-out rate for teens aged 15 - 19 is only 6%. Something sinister is happening to 1 in 5 high schoolers.)
So I must assume everyone is familiar with the Double Helix. Watson and Crick, and a guy named Wilkins, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962 for the model.
Largely ignored until rather recently was Rosiland Franklin. Watson and Crick had rendered several models of the structure. They used Franklin's radiological photographs (conveniently, without her permission) to identify the correct model.
Franklin died in 1958, aged 37, and, as the Nobel can only be awarded to the living, it was easy to ignore her contributions entirely.
That kind of crap would wear a soul to sand if one started finding each instance.

Okay, as sure as I am that most people are aware of the double helix, I am doubly certain that the vast majority of them cannot explain its significance.
Class?
Anyone?
The double helix provided the structure with which an entire yard (yep, three whole feet) of DNA pairs could be crammed into each and every cell in the human body.
There are anywhere from 10 trillion to 100 trillion cells in the human body (from subsequent Google replies), each with the complete human genome, the complete array of chromosome pairs. Each with three feet of DNA, and, if stretched, enough to make three round trips to the sun. Right there in little old you, and every one you know, except for conservatives, who lack a substantial amount of DNA coding for brain cells.
Without the Double Helix, there was no way to guess that the yard of DNA, which pioneer geneticists (well, maybe not Gregor Mendel, who starved an abbey full of monks growing sweet peas in the gardens) already had. But they could not posit how to get that damn much (again, three feet!) of the material in a single human cell. Into every human cell.
The Wright Brothers spent years carving wooden propellers, trying to find the right pitch for the blades to pull an aeroplane through the air. All trial and error. Hundreds of error.
Who knows when, if ever, Watson and Crick, and what's his name, would have found the correct of their models to pack three feet of DNA into a human cell? Paired, mind you, as every one knows the strands must be paired, for a single strand is just goo. Maybe years, maybe never, without the excellent crystallographic X-ray images prepared by Rosiland Franklin.
Rosiland Franklin never knew that Watson and Crick had access to her work.
Bastards.
As a footnote, this post also completely shortchanges Ms Franklin's work. For instance, she discovered there were two distinctly different strands of DNA, A and B, but could not put them together, could not pair them, without the double helix.
That was left to Watson and Crick, and that other guy, to steal her singular images and fit them to one of an array of models.
Crick has gone on to hell. Fuck Watson.

This is an atonement post for yesterday's "What I Did Today" blah fest. "Nothing" would have told the story.
According to a Harris Poll conducted the first two weeks in November, 32% of US believe in UFOs, while a whopping 42% believe in ghosts.
The US is easily the most educated nation in the world, mandated to provide free schooling for everyone grades K - 12. And college is available to anyone who wants it.
Just about every nation on four continents educates most of their populations (except, you know, freedom-loving shitholes like Saudi Arabia, where women don't need no schoolin'), and provide degrees for the gifted.
But the US provides for all, even the challenged, and we damn well should be the smartest people on earth.
So how can nearly half the best-educated people on earth believe in ghosts? My guess is fewer than 1% of the US claim interaction with a ghost. That's the flagship for this raft of believers?
UFOs are more plausible. My skepticism lies in the majority of sighting are reported from the backwoods, swamps, and deserts, while the visitors shy from lights, which would seem what attracted them to the third stone.
The same Harris Poll claimed 45% approve Darwin's theory of evolution, but no one has ever given a satisfactory rendition to me. Other references cite as few as 25% adherents, but I'll stay with the Harris' percentile, which means over half of US refute what is self-evident. In keeping with my simplistic understanding of rudimentary science, I give you the sparrow.
Birds of Eastern North America, by Sterry & Small, lists 23 species of sparrows, living east of the Mississippi.
23!
That is an incredible amount of variation for the smaller half of the continent, and it defies any other explanation.
So why do nearly as many people in the US believe in ghosts as accept Darwin's Theory, which even I can prove as irrefutable with an example everyone but cavedwellers see every day?
Maybe no one's looking.

A cold day, and much of my time was spent nursing the woodstove, trying to heat three rooms with it, happy for one warm.

Burning logs are mood pieces, relaxing, romantic to watch, devoid of significant BTUs.

Splitting down, and down, is the way to go, the only way to heat, but I haven't much been up to the task. It is cold outside, and bringing wood in to split donates too much effort to the floor. Need that irresistable force (mostly) of concrete outside.

My blood is 40-weight S.A.E. and I can't move in the morning chill. That's the morning chill in the house.

Thus it was after noon before I got out, getting on up to Pearson's Mill SRA. Sunny cold and windy - not much wind, yet enough to take the windchill below zero.

I did a short loop, skipped the boat ramp because of footing, or possible lack thereof, and made the trip up to the top lot, above the facilities.

Then back out on the road to climb the hill to the marker for the SRA.

Just down the road, I looked up to see a raptor cross the road south, towards the lake, then wheel back east along the cliff (okay, twenty feet) away from me. She (probably) stayed at eye level, as the trees along the road are necessarily low. The raptor showed much white, but I didn't make out head or tail, and surely not back. She alit in a tree about halfway to where the road breaks from the clifftop and turns up the hill.

I knew the hawk would fly again, and hoped to see her before she did, but the icy footing kept my neck bent and she was in the air before I saw her, eastbound, upstream.

Again, so much white, and because of her size and the way she flew (not the flap-flap-flap-glide of an accipiter) and the iced over reservoir (ospreys only feed on fish, and are long gone) I'm sure she was a red tail.

I've seen one up (east) the lake on the same shore a couple of times, so there's no surprise.

And immediately a pair of orange breasted birds I so wanted to be bluebirds, except, you know, they weren't blue, and were probably nuthatches, because of a noticeable crest, and wonderful, too.

Just before the turn up the hill, there were two woodpeckers, about forty yards apart, working very slowly. I couldn't find either.

Up the hill, and at the top a bitter breeze.

Don't know if there's a connection, but since my surgery my hands are cold. No gloves help, and I'm working them constantly. Feet are fine, core is toasty, while my hands stay cold. And get colder.

My big dog Abbe wasn't at the top of the hill, was nowhere to be seen. About halfway down, here she came out of a dump in a gorge at the bottom of the hill.

She came most of the way up, then found interesting dog stuff to do.

And there was water involved, because she came to the car with black decomposed organic goo up to her knees.

Homework.

Tonight there was an airing of Nature (PBS) featuring two of my very favorite animals - raptors and canids - gyrfalcons and wolves in the Artic summer.

My puppy scored a first, barking at the images of wolves on TV. My dogs have watched some tube, have sometimes reacted to a few sounds, but this was the first reaction to images.

Did McLuhan foresee this, too?