Maggie's Farm

Mountains are gorgeous!  Not used to Spring greenery out here in the Sierras.  Some rain, which is  blessing - the Pacific currents re now favoring us! 

The photo is the largest clump we have seen in many decades of the rare Snow Plant (Sarcodes sanguinea) which grows in the thick humus of coniferous forests between 4,000-8,000 feet after the snow melts.  We saw these at 7,100 feet on the road to our cabin.  It is a root parasite, fleshy and nonphotosynthetic!

“Few plants attract the attention of visitors as much as the fabled snow plant does.  Can anyone with a camera resist taking a photo?  This root parasite has specialized roots that invade other species through associated mycorrhizal fungi and obtains its nutrients from them.” - Wildflowers of California

"Vanya Shivashankar and Gokul Venkatachalam are National Spelling Bee co-champions." -- CNN

Was The final question "Spell your opponent's name"?

An oldie. Best line: "Bruce wanted me to work on my triceps.  I don’t have any triceps!"

This is dedicated to every woman who ever attempted to get into a regular workout routine:

Dear Diary... For my fiftieth birthday this year, my husband (the dear) purchased a week of personal training at the local health club for me.  Although I am still in great shape since playing on my high school softball team, I decided it would be a good idea to go ahead and give it a try.  I called the club and made my reservations with a personal trainer I’ll call Bruce, who identified himself as a 26 year old aerobics instructor and model for athletic clothing and swim wear.  My husband seemed pleased with my enthusiasm to get started.  The club encouraged me to keep a diary to chart my progress...

About a month ago, I illuminated old expressions that have become obsolete because of the inexorable march of technology. These phrases included don’t touch that dial, carbon copy, you sound like a broken record and hung out to dry. A bevy of readers have asked me to shine light on more faded words and expressions, and I am happy to oblige:

Back in the olden days we had a lot of moxie. We’d put on our best bib and tucker and straighten up and fly right. Hubba-hubba! We’d cut a rug in some juke joint and then go necking and petting and smooching and spooning and billing & cooing and pitching woo in hot rods and jalopies in some passion pit or lovers’ lane. Heavens to Betsy! Gee whillikers! Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat! Holy moley! We were in like Flynn and living the life of Riley, and even a regular guy couldn’t accuse us of being a knucklehead, a nincompoop or a pill. Not for all the tea in China!

Back in the olden days, life used to be swell, but when’s the last time anything was swell? Swell has gone the way of beehives, pageboys and the D.A.; of spats, knickers, fedoras, poodle skirts, saddle shoes and pedal pushers. Oh, my aching back. Kilroy was here, but he isn’t anymore.

Like Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle and Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, we have become unstuck in time. We wake up from what surely has been just a short nap, and before we can say, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle!” or “This is a fine kettle of fish!” we discover that the words we grew up with, the words that seemed omnipresent as oxygen, have vanished with scarcely a notice from our tongues and our pens and our keyboards.

Poof, poof, poof go the words of our youth, the words we’ve left behind. We blink, and they’re gone, evanesced from the landscape and wordscape of our perception, like Mickey Mouse wristwatches, hula hoops, skate keys, candy cigarettes, little wax bottles of colored sugar water and an organ grinder’s monkey.

Where have all those phrases gone? Long time passing. Where have all those phrases gone? Long time ago: Pshaw! The milkman did it. Think about the starving Armenians. Bigger than a bread box. Banned in Boston. The very idea! It’s your nickel. Don’t forget to pull the chain. Knee high to a grasshopper. Turn-of-the-century. Iron curtain. Domino theory. Fail safe. Civil defense. Fiddlesticks! You look like the wreck of the Hesperus. Cooties. Going like sixty. I’ll see you in the funny papers. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Heavens to Murgatroyd! And awa-a-ay we go!

Oh, my stars and garters! It turns out there are more of these lost words and expressions than Carter had liver pills!

This can be disturbing stuff, this winking out of the words of our youth, these words that lodge in our heart’s deep core. But just as one never steps into the same river twice, one cannot step into the same language twice. Even as one enters, words are swept downstream into the past, forever making a different river.

We of a certain age have been blessed to live in changeful times. For a child each new word is like a shiny toy, a toy that has no age. We at the other end of the chronological arc have the advantage of remembering there are words that once did not exist and there were words that once strutted their hour upon the earthly stage and now are heard no more, except in our collective memories. It’s one of the greatest advantages of aging.

We can have archaic and eat it, too!

Money is difficult to acquire and easy to get rid of.  All I really need to know is how good this Pagani is on snow and ice, and where to fit in the kids, dogs, skis, and luggage.

I located a truck from a Pagani dealership in the Gold Coast of Connecticut this weekend (middle insignia on the lower row):

From last week. I blame climate change:

Missile Guidance: How Does That Work Again?

Re our post on memory this week, this from the WSJ:

VERBAL MEMORY
The rapper “50 Cent” has written roughly 100 songs, with an average of about 60 lines apiece.  Assuming that he can remember each of these perfectly, that makes for some 6,000 lines of text that he can recite from memory.  Compare that to the Greek poet Homer. “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” have a total of 27,803 lines -- and those are just the poems that made their way down to us.  For another benchmark, take the guslar tradition of Serbia and Montenegro, in which medieval poets performed epic tales of the Slavs' struggle for independence.  The tradition continued into the early 20th century, allowing scholars to meet some of the last guslars. One, an illiterate butcher named Avdo Mededovic, recalled an astonishing 58 epic tales.  The scholars were able to record 78,555 lines of verse from 13 poems Mr. Mededovic recited to them.  The total number from all 58 poems would likely have reached more than 350,000 lines.

The MSM are in a twit about 16 Frenchmen.  Well and good, but thanks to The List of Islamic Terror Attacks from 2014 you can see that, in 2014, they killed 32,004 people, or 88 a day. I copied it to a spreadsheet and there are 3,000 incidents.

Why no fuss?  It is brown people killing other brown people. The killers "don't know any better" because they are brown and therefore judged under a different, lower standard. The victims don't count because they too are brown and the MSM can't pronounce their names. 

Remember how we ignored the Cambodian holocaust?  Brown vs. brown.  I thought when Jews spoke of their Holocaust and said "never again" that they meant no more holocausts.  Nope - the media in NYC were silent about killing 3,000,000 Cambodians; I guess "never again" meant no more killing Jews.  Good idea for certain, but a far smaller scope.

Now THAT is racism!!

Somebody mentioned a Moose going into a car through a windshield. Here's a variation on that theme.

 Re "just hit the damn deer"

WSJ (paywall): Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric Cline

A Brief List of Old, Obscure and Obsolete U.S. Navy Jobs

Photo is a Powder-Monkey

We were fortunate not to have sustained any property damage to our family's summer place in the Sierras. 

Here's a story about September's King Fire:  1600 YARDS TO FREEDOM

Despite the California drought, our swimming hole in the Sierras still had its usual 8' of water in August.

An annual reposting, now at the beginning of duck hunting season.

And a nice muskrat portrait below the fold -

Time to pick up the dekes and head back to the lodge for cocktail hour

Two pics of duck blinds below the fold -

The last mile of our long drive from Winnipeg north to the lodge. Plenty of Ruffies in those woods.

Photo below the fold of the same driveway in an Oct snow