Our Weird English Language

Gas Money

 

Caucasian Born

 

Sunday afternoon...  and, all is well or as best as it could be given the circumstances of age and the current political environment...

I visited New York City a while back to spend some time with a relative and walking out of the LaGuardia airport, I asked a passerby what was the time that was on his watch and his reponse was:  "What do I look like a frigging clock?"

New York City has never been the same to me as a result of that encounter...  perhaps, he was having a bad day or perhaps that was just his personality or perhaps he noticed my southern accent...  none of it matters anymore but it bothered me a the time and as I recall I just ignored his comments...

I have never encountered someone like that below the Virginia/North Carolina border...  which is why I am a Southern Boy (as the song goes) which is underscored by the fact of being born in North Carolina several decades ago.

I am Caucasian Born and would not have it anyother way and not because I am white and you may or may not be...  but because I am who I am and I don't apologize for being who I am...  nor do I want to be anyone else...  alhough, at one time I wanted to be an architect.

I don't fly the Confederate Flag from the back of my pickup truck because I don't own a pickup truck and never plan to own a pickup truck, although there was a time when I considered buying a cheap pickup to carry our kayaks...  but, we sold them several years ago.

I don't chew tobacco, smoke, or drink alcohol although I have been known to drink a glass or two of red wine at dinner or to be sociable...  I don't own a firearm and don't plan to ever own a firearm but I am not opposed to others owning firearms...  which is the same as having an abortion...  this is fine with me as well, although I would never have one.

I am a Vietnam Era Veteran but do not believe in WARS, especially those being waged outside our borders...  I became a veteran because I could not find suitable employment back them if I did not have my military obligation out of the way...  otherwise, I would have moved to Canada...  and, I am glad I did not do that, because it is frigging cold up there.

I am not lazy but I do not go out of my way to find work, especially the kind of work that involves manual labor...  however, there was a time that I walked around the community with a sledge hammer and wedges offering to split wood for free.

I am not bald but my hair is thinning out or falling out but it is not all gone yet and I will never shave my head to offset the fact that I am losing my hair...  nor will I grow a beard to prove that I am still a macho male even though I can no longer get an erection...

Life winds itself around your legs like a snake wraps itself around its prey, squeezing the life out of it, until dead, so it can be eaten...  however, once we die, I am not sure if anything or anyone will eat us unless it is the heavens into which we will dissipate. 

My spirituality is obviously rooted in the various mythologies and philosophies of several religions that have evolved over the centuries in the hopes of explaining why we were given life and what is our purpose outside of eating, defecating, fornicating, fighting, and dying.  Life's legacy is always death.

The interesting thing about mythologies is that from one side of our earth to the other side of our earth is thousands of miles and yet all these mythologies have similiar stories...  how is this possible?  There was no such thing as air travel back then...

That will blow a bit of uncertainty up your ass...

Underwater

 

Returning Elk

In the not-so-distant past, red wolves and bison roamed the Great Smoky Mountains, passenger pigeons flew en masse overhead, and Carolina parakeets chattered in the welcoming branches of American chestnut trees. 

Today, every one of those species has disappeared from the Southern Appalachian landscape — hastened along the way by the arrival of European settlers, new diseases, and new hunting and farming practices that dramatically reshaped the region’s flora and fauna.

Among the largest and most conspicuous species lost to human activity were eastern elk, a regional subspecies that vanished in the 1800s. 

But now, thanks to an ambitious project launched 20 years ago in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the resonant bugling calls of elk can be heard echoing across North Carolina’s Cataloochee Valley.

“The great pie in the sky would be to have one large, contiguous population throughout the East Coast again,” said Wildlife Biologist Joseph Yarkovich. “But that’s still way, way down the road.”

Yarkovich has spent much of his career with the National Park Service working to ensure the success of the elk’s reintroduction to the Smokies, mostly on the North Carolina side of the national park. 

After two decades of accumulating small wins, the park service is now looking to make the new herd more resilient and improve standard practices for tracking and managing reintroduced wildlife.  READ MORE

Classic Sunday Newspaper Cartoons

 

Oldest Known Forest

The fossilized web of a 385-million-year-old root network has scientists reimagining what the world's first forests might once have looked like.

The picture they have painted couldn't be more different to what now sits in its place. Near the small town of Cairo in upstate New York, under an old highway department quarry, scientists have reconstructed the remains of what was a mighty and mature old-growth forest – home to at least three of the world's earliest tree-like plants.

Some of these initial tree 'wannabes' (known as cladoxylopsids) would have looked like large stalks of celery, shooting 10 meters (32 feet) into the sky. Others resembled pine trees, but with hairy, fern-like fronds for leaves (Archaeopteris). The third long-lost plant would have taken after the palm tree, with a bulbous base and canopy of fern-like branches (Eospermatopteris).

Seven parallel cross-sections of the Cairo site have researchers thinking these primordial trees were quite old and large. As such, they were not packed densely together, but were relatively scattered across a floodplain that ebbed and flowed with the seasons.

Dry periods were a regular part of the cycle, and yet the Cairo forest, which traced the Catskill river, seemed to host primitive trees we once thought could only survive in swamps or river deltas. These tree-like plants belong to the genus Eospermatopteris, and they look sort of like tall ferns standing on bulbous stumps.

Because these towering plants have shallow roots that don't branch, they probably didn't cope well in drier conditions - so their presence in the ancient floodplains of Cairo is confusing.  READ MORE