The Life in My Years

Sliming Abe Lincoln

Paulie

February 17, 2019

170815-grove-President-Duterte-tease_tak4rc

This post is a bit of a departure from the usual. It’s a rebuttal to an article that was introduced to me some time ago which I found to be historically flawed, overflowing with innuendo and quite frankly does a disservice to a great American President.

“At the age of 16, I already killed someone. A real person, a rumble, a stabbing. I was just 16 years old. It was just over a look. How much more now that I am president?” Rodrigo Duterte, November 9th, 2017.

It’s been a couple months now, I was mindlessly scanning Facebook and ran across a post that stopped me in my scrolling tracks. Well there it was, right in front of Mark Zuckerberg and God (some might say they’re one and the same) and everyone; a picture of Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte side by side with Abraham Lincoln and a link to an article entitled A Vulgar President. “Well, well, what have we here?”

I knew right off which president in the picture carries a reputation for vulgarity but what in the wide, wide world was Lincoln doing there? The poster had entered a short two words, “Please read.”

“Okay you got me.”

Friday Fotos – Drying Out

Paulie

9 comments

February 15, 2019

Cover photo: A tree reflects through debris and points of sunlight in a park puddle.

Here in Northern California we’ve been having some prodigious rainstorms. According to the weather guy on TV (who is quickly becoming one of my least favorite people not living in Washington DC) we’ve been hydrologically pulverized by an atmospheric river and the pineapple express. My dear old dad would’ve stated it in plain English – “It’s raining like a bastard.” Thanks dad.

Yesterday we got a brief respite, the clouds parted, a strange bright orb appeared in the sky and things dried off a bit. It was the perfect opportunity to celebrate a little drying with a little photography.

A friend on Facebook exclaimed with glee “I love the rain!” Tell that to our neighbor who woke up to this yesterday morning.

The saturated ground surrendered this palm tree to the wind gusts.

Yellowstone III – Upper Geyser Basin

Paulie

10 comments

February 13, 2019

Yellowstone’s geyser basins; bubbling, spounting, spewing, steaming, gurgling, roaring, scalding, shrieking and stinking. You walk along paths and boardwalks past crystal clear pools, bubbling mud pots, scalding springs and screaming steam vents. It might be a light warm spray of breeze blown mist from Old Faithful that dampens your skin, the steam heat from a bubbling pool, the wail of steam from a vent that pierces your ears, the noxious sulfuric smell of a mud pot or the bright, brilliant azure of a pool or the multicolored thermophiles, heat loving bacteria that thrive in an environment that flash cooks any other living thing. The geyser basins are a varietal stimulus to the senses.

Squeezed into two square miles of the Upper Geyser Basin are one fifth of the world’s geysers. It’s the home of the one and only star of the spouting show, Old Faithful which erupts not quite like clockwork but pretty darn close for a hydrogeological phenomenon. Being a celebrity she can be capricious about when she chooses to repeat her performance. It might be 35 minutes or it might be two hours but when showtime arrives Old Faithful leaves the standing room only crowd oohing and awing. More about Old Faithful later.

Steam rises from Upper Geyser Basin Canon EOS 60D 1/400 sec. f/11 79mm ISO 100

Kaiser and the Bird Box Challenge

Paulie

14 comments

February 8, 2019

Imagine taking your car into the shop. You know the “shop?” The shop is the generic name for the place that takes temporary possession of your car and permanent possession of the contents of your wallet. Your car is running in fits and starts so you take it to the shop. The mechanic tells you that he’d like to start by changing the oil and, “we’ll see what happens from there.” Okay, you tell him with a little tremble of doubt in your voice.

You bring the car home and nothing’s fixed and so you bring it back. “Let’s try flushing out the transmission and if that doesn’t work we’ll change out the plugs.”

“Okay, you’re the expert, let’s do it.”

Couple days later and you’re back at the mechanic who, with a bewildered scratch of his head, offers, “Well let’s hook it up to the diagnostic and see what’s going on.”

“Huh? Why didn’t we do that from the start?”

Most mechanics don’t work that way and those that do usually find themselves in another line of work. Normally they do a diagnostic at the start, find the root cause and fix it. If they didn’t follow that protocol you’d be outraged. Doesn’t it seem reasonable to expect the same treatment when something in your own physical body goes a little south?

If your healthcare is in the hands of Kaiser Permanente that isn’t necessarily the case. Take my shoulder – please.

Nature’s Majesty – Yellowstone Part II

Paulie

13 comments

February 5, 2019

When nature drew up her blueprint for Yellowstone she included a wealth of wonders. Would you like waterfalls? We have hundreds. Rivers? Aplenty. Wildlife? A magnificent lake? You’ve got ’em. Canyons, geysers, hot springs, forests and sprawling valleys tucked beautifully into majestic peaks? Yeah, we got those too. About the only missing ingredient is an ocean.

Cora and I entered the vast park from the south, the west and the north and still only scratched the surface. From the parkside town of West Yellowstone we explored the Gibbon River.

Americans Need a New Holiday

Paulie

13 comments

February 4, 2019

To a large segment of the American public today is a dark, if not the darkest, day of the year. Today is the Monday following the Super Bowl marking the end of the football season and about a six month drought until the beginning of exhibition games in midsummer – it’s the sports equivalent of the end of days. Many will satiate their sports drought with basketball or hockey or the impending advent of baseball. Others will weep over the dark season and go through severe withdrawal and depression, satisfied briefly by player trades and the college draft. The final outcome of the game has given the people of New England a slight celebratory reprieve but once the shine wears off they too will descend into their athletic apocalypse.

Today is also the day that America will suffer an epidemic of declared illnesses ranging from sore throats, to coughs to pulled muscles to back spasms to the ever convenient “under the weather” – about 17 million of them. In an amazing fluke that would normally stump medical science all of these different claimed ailments can be traced to the same cause – overdoses. A national overdose of pizza, hot dogs, bean dip and a mishmash of alcoholic beverages. There is no scientific name for this epidemic, just the common designation – Super Sick Monday, or “I had too much to eat/drink yesterday.”

nfl stadium field full with crowd watching the game during daytime

Photo by Robert Villalta on Pexels.com

In Los Angeles, home of the losing team, a fair number of those calling in sick are actually healthy. They’re just observing a one day period of mourning oftentimes with more alcohol.

Friday Fotos – The Succulence of Succulents

Paulie

3 comments

February 1, 2019

We’re drought prone here in California and there are some years when we’re under water restriction. Now I understand that there’s a fellow over on the other side of the country who doesn’t buy that whole drought thing and he’s put forth the proposition that the problem with California is that we keep diverting rivers so that they flow into the ocean – shame on us.

Well despite that interesting notion I’ve decided to err on the side of droughts so we’ve let the lawn die and we’ve been turning over our garden to succulents and drought tolerant plants. Not only less water but less maintenance.

This week I cruised the garden and discovered that drought tolerant not only doesn’t mean boring it can mean colorful and vibrant. Continue reading

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