The Last Word

By: | September 29, 2012

24 – 28 September

In which Cameron informs us that gull poop carries drug resistant bacteria that infests beaches, lakes and even dumps. Delightful stories abound of the falcons and dogs that have been dispatched to chase them off. But that makes me wonder: after they’re chased off, where do they take their pestilent cargo?

Do stricter gun laws make safer societies? Findings have been inconclusive, says Cassie.

Christie wonders if we are going to lose our tangible memories to the cloud.

Tom says life extension is BS, not because we don’t have the technology (we don’t) but because it will engender an eternity of middle age.

If you’re getting down about losing your youth, your mementos or your life, take comfort in the exquisite rock balance sculptures Michelle has hunted down: they are, as one commenter put it, a monument to impermanence.

See you next week!

The Right To Bear Arms

By: | September 28, 2012

Last week, I left New York and headed for my home state of North Dakota. The plan was to fly to Minneapolis and then ride the rest of the way with my dad and stepmom, who were driving in from Wisconsin. Just before I headed to the airport, I sent my dad a text.

I’m not a hunter or a gun fanatic, but I thought it might be fun to shoot something. I envisioned us blasting beer cans off fence posts — father-daughter bonding. Instead we aimed at a cardboard box. I killed it dead. Turns out I’m kind of a crack shot despite my awkward stance. Apparently the skeet shooting I did in college as part of hunter’s safety paid off.

While I find guns thrilling, I also recognize that they’re designed to be deadly weapons. Just last month, an army veteran shot and killed six people in a Sikh temple just outside Milwaukee. Two weeks before that a gunman murdered 12 people in a movie theater in Colorado. Gun violence isn’t as rampant as it once was, but it’s still a serious problem. In 2009, 31,347 people died of gun-related deaths. That’s slightly fewer than the number of people killed in car accidents. So what’s the solution? Would curbing access to guns prevent gun deaths? It’s a loaded question. (Pun intended.) Continue reading →

Poo Fighters

By: | September 27, 2012

I have been trying to discourage my older son from chasing birds. For a while it worked—he couldn’t say much and was easily distracted by food (a family flaw). But now he’s a better conversationalist than I am, and of course the first thing he asks is, “Why?”

I tried to explain something about how it can stress the birds—when you see a group of already-skittery sanderlings speed up their tiny feet, it makes your own heart pound—and then that can make them not do very well. This does not sound very convincing in my sleep-deprived vocabulary. Continue reading →

Lost in the Cloud

By: | September 26, 2012

My mother sent me an old letter recently. It was a handwritten note scrawled across two pages that she’d written to her sister more than 30 years ago. My family had just moved to West Germany, where my dad was stationed in the Air Force, and in the letter Mom describes for her sister the tiny Eiffel village where we’d taken up residence. The letter’s contents are interesting in their own right, but its three-dimensional nature is what struck me first.

The letter was a physical object — a piece of paper that she’d scribbled upon and then neatly folded into an envelope and sent across the ocean to her sister in Kansas. It was a relic from a bygone age. In the age of email and text messaging, most correspondence no longer lives on scraps of linen that you can feel in your hands, but in the “cloud,” that nebulous modern ether. In fact, the letter Mom sent me was not the object itself, but a scan of it. I read it first on my phone, though I felt compelled to print it on paper for the second reading. Continue reading →

When you’re in Manitoba, you’re never speeding

By: | September 25, 2012

Something surprising happened last week: I heard a new song, and I liked it. Liked it enough to want to find out who sang it, and how I could hear more. Once, that would have been utterly unremarkable. For a good part of my twenties and thirties, I was a music junkie. I went out to see live bands—rock, mostly, in all its forms and allied genres—at least twice a week, and often more. Wherever I lived, I sought out the smaller clubs, and the music no one else had heard yet. I had my perennial favorites, of course. But as my record collection swelled to nearly a year of round-the-clock listening time, the thrill of hearing something new remained a major part of the experience.

Now, as I inch towards 50, I’m lucky if I find one new band I like in a year. But I don’t think it’s just my age, or that I’m stuck musically in some former time—I’ve largely stopped listening to music altogether, unless it’s background accompaniment to drown out less desirable noise. I’m starting to think I’ve simply saturated my music receptors, and, unable to experience the thrill of the new any longer, have moved on. Without meaning to, or really noticing as it happened, I’ve let one of the major passions and cultural experiences of my life simply slip away.

No one aspires to middle age, the broad-bottomed flyover country of life stages. Continue reading →

The Pursuit of Balance

By: | September 24, 2012

My neighborhood, as I’ve mentioned, is an interesting place: At our weekly potlucks, we speculate on everything from the number and sex of the next batch of goat kids (money’s on two girls) to the efficacy of bourbon as mouthwash (not promising, sadly). Last week, a guest announced that he was on his way to a stone-balancing celebration in Flagstaff, Arizona. Was this a competition, we asked? No. Just a bunch of people stacking stones? Well, yes, but it’s more fun than it sounds. Do you leave the stacks for other people to find? Yup.

“Just Google it,” he finally said, giving us a beatific smile.

Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | September 22, 2012

17 -21 September

The forbidden crystal sounds like an Indiana Jones sequel, but it’s real. Ann tells you about an expedition “to find something nature made that we didn’t know it could make.”

Heather explains honey guides, honey badgers, and why honey was likely the fuel that gave us our big brains.

Three-time guest posting superstar Erik Vance describes the “nuclear-powered hyperactive killing machines who will destroy anything that runs from them” and why they might be Yosemite’s last hope. But at what price?

Heather makes the case that fire was cozy for Neanderthals, too.

And Jessa asks what a country should do if it wants to be at the forefront of science and technology.

The Sweetness of Human Evolution

By: | September 20, 2012

Quite by accident last week, I came across something, an ethnographic detail really, that captured my imagination, and that has clearly delighted and puzzled anthropologists and even contributed to a new theory of human evolution. The detail concerned the Hadza, 1000 or so modern hunter-gatherers who speak an ancient click language and who live in the woodlands around Lake Eyasi, Tanzania, not far from Olduvai Gorge.

The Hadza, as I discovered, prize honey above all else in their diet. Hadza mothers wean their young on liquid honey, and during the wet season, particularly the months of February and April, Hadza families gorge for weeks on its sticky sweetness.  The men possess an expert knowledge of bees and bee behavior, giving the honeys produced by different species different names. Those who forage for honey figure prominently in Hadza mythology.

And there is indeed something almost magical about the way that Hadza collect honey.

Continue reading →