Just overnight, our juncos are gone, headed south for the winter.
Dark-Eyed Junco
One day there were a lot of them about, gleaning seed from under the feeders; the next day they were gone. Juncos are one of our last summer birds to leave in the fall. Friday is the first official day of autumn, but our brief Great Land summer has already given way; we had our first hard frost Monday night, it’s raining more, the leaves on the birches are turning, and the fireweed is all come up in red.
Winter is coming! Next month we’ll start getting snow, if things go as usual, and that’s fine. Our winters are every bit as beautiful as our summers. We have a full heating oil tank and two and a half cords of firewood put away. We’re ready.
Housekeeping note: Since my Wednesday links posts have always been long, and are getting longer, I’m going to try sticking the actual links below a “Click to Read More” tag. This will help me to keep my already crowded front page a tad less cluttered while I consider how to go about a more involved revamp of the site. I’m still using the 2014 theme for WordPress, and while I like the looks of it, it may be time to update. It’s been almost ten years since the last major site revamp, so we’ll see. And, of course, please do let me know in the comments if you like/dislike and changes or have any other comments.
Last Monday was, of course, Labor Day, and while I tend to shy away from too much serious discussion on holidays, I did come across a good piece on some disturbing trends. I thought it was worth highlighting here.
Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that working-aged men are not doing well at all. Across the board, they are suffering a generational decline in quality jobs and falling out of the labor force in staggering numbers. These problems have grim consequences, not just for men, but for women, children and our nation as a whole.
Read the whole thing. Give it some thought. Now then…
Bob Dylan, America’s Songwriter, has crossed a lot of genres in his sixty-plus year career. Folk, rock, gospel, even country (see his album Nashville Skyline) and more, the Maestro covers them all.
One of my favorite bits of his work almost takes the form of a hymnal, that being the 1967 song I Shall Be Released. Here, then, is that tune; enjoy.
We have family visiting from the Lower 48, so the weekly links may be a bit on the thin side. But we’ll try to make sure that, even if the quantity drops off a little, the quality remains the same!
I’ve been a fan of Bob Dylan since the mid-Seventies, when my hippie brother first got me listening to his older acoustic work. What a lot of people don’t realize about America’s Songwriter is that he’s still working, still touring, and still turning out some pretty great music. In 2012, he released the album Tempest, which included the fun, rollicking tune Duquesne Whistle. The video is pretty fun to watch, too. Here it is; enjoy.
Special programming note! Tonight I’ll be live-blogging the first GOP Presidential primary debate with some of my colleagues over at RedState, from 9PM to 11PM EDT (5PM to 7PM here in the Great Land). Join us over there for the best blow-by-blow coverage!
I’m not sure what to say about this song, except that the song got a lot of radio play back in the mid-Eighties, and MTV, back when they were actually about music, played the video a fair bit. OMC was, as I recall, a one-hit wonder, but How Bizarre at least was catchy. Here it is, then – enjoy.
I’m going to do something I haven’t yet done, and that’s feature one of my own RedState pieces here: 2 US Navy Sailors Arrested for Selling Intel to China (also linked in my RedState section below). Give it a quick read. I’ll wait right here.
Back? OK, then, now that you see what I’m talking about, I’ll just say something that RedState’s editorial standards don’t allow: Fuck those shitheads, both of them. I hope that if we can’t get them executed, that they at least rot in damp, shitty jail cells for the rest of their natural lives.
In better news, grouse season opens here in the Great Land tomorrow. With a bit of luck and cooperation from the weather I’ll get out to shoot some toothsome sprucies this weekend.
Not only was Frank Zappa a dozen different kinds of musical genius – he carved his own initials deep into rock & roll, he endlessly parodied other artists, his own music was never played the same way in any two concerts, and oh, by the way, he wrote and conducted his own symphonies – but he also did some amazing covers.
Now, everybody who’s anybody in music has covered the 1971 Led Zeppelin hit Stairway to Heaven. It’s one of the greatest rock & roll songs ever produced, and it’s been covered endlessly. But Zappa, in his 1991 live album The Best Band You’ve Never Heard In Your Life, did the best cover of Stairway ever done, anywhere, ever. Here it is – enjoy.
In this, our third summer in the Great Land, we’re still getting used to how short the warm season is. Here we are on August 2nd, where most of the country is sweltering (and it’s supposed to hit 77 here, which is pretty damn warm for the Susitna Valley) and we’re going to be moving into cooler, wetter weather soon. The swallows are gone, the trees are turning from the bright, vibrant green of late spring and early summer to the darker, dustier green of late summer. We may see snow as early as six weeks or so from now.
That’s Alaska, and we love it here more every day, long, cold winters and all.
I should have put this up before now. I’ve written on the topic of Jason Aldean’s tune over at RedState, and so has my friend and colleague Brandon Morse. Read both articles.
Jason Aldean makes a great point in this song. This shit may fly in the big cities. It won’t fly out here in the hinterlands. We won’t put up with that shit, and we have the gear and the determination to stop anyone who tries it.
And, in case you’ve forgotten, old Bocephus had much the same message forty years ago.
Boy howdy, have we made up for our cold, wet, rainy early summer over the last few days with unseasonably warm temperatures; at least the sun is out.
Tomorrow:
Yeah, yeah, I know. A friend of mine lives in Arizona, and he has been regaling me with tales of triple-digit temps. But this is Alaska. 74 is hot, dammit. We moved up here to get away from warm weather. I know, I’ll get back to you in six months when it’s twenty below.
Tony Bennett was one of the all-time greats, and his passing at 96 last week was saddening. While he’s probably best known for I Left My Heart in San Francisco, the state of that formerly-great city today has kind of soured me on the whole thing.
Instead, here’s another great Tony Bennett tune: What The World Needs Now, from his 1969 album I’ve Gotta Be Me. We’ll miss you, Tony!
In fact, the only reptiles found in Alaska are sea turtles, namely, the Green, Loggerhead, Leatherback and Olive Ridley. Now when I was a little tad back in Allamakee County, we had timber rattlers. The Old Man and I once killed one that was damn near six feet long. A snake like that can kill a grown man.
So, if you live in the lower 48, watch where you put your feet.
If you look up “noodling for catfish” and “adorable” on an internet search, you’ll find Hannah Barron. Her vivacious attitude, entrancing Southern drawl, zest for the outdoor life and skill at pulling huge catfish out of muddy river bottoms make her well worth watching. Here’s a sample:
Wow. Think apex predators today are weird? Have a look at this guy:
Anomalocaris canadensis
This is Anomalocaris canadensis, a top predator of the Cambrian, about 500 million years ago. Kind of a big death-shrimp, running up to two feet long. It very likely chased around soft-bodied critters in the Cambrian seas, skewered them with those big spiky grabbers on its front end and slurped them down.
One wonders how they’d taste, but you’d need a big pot and a lot of drawn butter.
I’ll be brief here: The summer I was eighteen, I had a ‘liaison” that lasted about two months, with a divorcee who was exactly twice my age. This was before the term ‘cougar’ was coined to describe this sort of thing, but boy howdy, if that ain’t exactly what she was. I spent a few Friday and Saturday nights (overnights, that is) at her apartment, but her ex kept coming around with bunches of flowers, trying to patch things up, and that was awkward. So the relationship kind of unraveled, although we stayed friends until I eventually moved away from Iowa for good a few years later. I don’t know where she is now, and she’d be pushing eighty. Wow.
I will say I learned an awful lot that summer…
Anyhoo… The pack of miscreants and ne’er-do-wells I called my friends teased me a fair amount about this liaison, and regularly greeted me when I showed up someplace by singing this song; if you remember the 1967 film The Graduate, you’ll understand why.
