YOU LIVE IN OREGON IF ACCORDING TO JEFF FOXWORTHY

This is actually a few years old but it is still funny. 

HERE IS WHAT JEFF FOXWORTHY HAS TO SAY ABOUT ‘LIVING IN OREGON’…

• If someone in a Home Depot store offers you assistance and they don’t work there, you live in Oregon.
• If you’ve worn shorts, sandals, and a parka at the same time, you live in Oregon.
• If you’ve had a lengthy telephone conversation with someone who dialed the wrong number, you live in Oregon.
• If you measure distance in hours, you live in Oregon. Also Washington and almost any state west of the Mississippi. 
• If you know several people who have hit a deer more than once, you live in Oregon.
• If you have switched from ‘heat’ to ‘A/C’ and back again in the same day, you live in Oregon.
• If you install security lights on your house and garage but leave both doors unlocked, you live in Oregon.
• If you can drive 75 mph through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching, you live in Central, Southern or Eastern Oregon. Or you are driving 75 mph and the local smoky bear blasts past you. 
• If you design your kid’s Halloween costume to fit over 2 layers of clothes or under a raincoat, you live in Oregon.
• If driving is better in the winter because the potholes are filled with snow and ice, you live in Oregon.
• If you know all 4 seasons: almost winter, winter, still winter, and road construction, you live in Oregon.
• If you feel guilty throwing aluminum cans or paper in the trash, you live in Oregon.
• If you know more than 10 ways to order coffee, you live in Oregon.
• If you know more people who own boats than air conditioners, you live in Oregon.
• If you stand on a deserted corner in the rain waiting for the “Walk” signal, you live in Oregon.
• If you consider that if it has no snow or has not recently erupted, it is not a real mountain, you live in Oregon.
• If you can taste the difference between Starbucks, Seattle’s Best, and Dutch Bros, you live in Oregon.
• If you know the difference between Chinook, Coho and Sockeye salmon, you live in Oregon.
• If you know how to pronounce Sequim, Puyallup, Clatskanie, Issaquah, Oregon, Umpqua, Yakima and Willamette, you live in Oregon. Extra points if you know the first three cities are actually in Washington.
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• If you consider swimming an indoor sport, you live in Oregon.
• If you know that Boring is a city and not just a feeling, you live in Oregon.
• If you can tell the difference between Japanese, Chinese and Thai food, you live in Oregon.
• If you never go camping without waterproof matches and a poncho, you live in Oregon.
• If you have actually used your mountain bike on a mountain, you live in Oregon.
• If you think people who use umbrellas are either wimps or tourists, you live in Oregon.
• If you buy new sunglasses every year, because you cannot find the old ones after such a long time, you live in Oregon.
• If you actually understand these jokes and forward them to all your OREGON friends, you live or have lived in Oregon.

FIVE HUNDRED YEARS

Robert Heaton was a Quaker and my great grandfather seven times removed. He sailed to the New World with his family aboard The Lamb in the fall of 1682. His branch of my family hailed from Yorkshire mostly. Dad's line, if accurate, can be traced to a gentleman with the given name of Adam Deheton born in the county of Lancaster sometime after 1100. And while Ancestry usually lists him with the Deheton surname he was probably Adam Fitz somebody. He died in Yorkshire. And in Yorkshire my ancestors remained, off and on, for five hundred years. Until Quaker Robert said the heck with this religious persecution bit and followed William Penn.

Five hundred years minus a couple of generations in the shire of Lincoln. Mostly around the same little town. Still exists. Name of Kirkheaton. In old English heah is a high place. Tun is a village. And kirk still means church in Scotland. The village in a high place built next to a church.

Five hundred years, give or take a few. That's twice as long as this country has been called the United States. Not look too united right now but, it does put things into perspective. Plague, the rebellion called the Pilgramage of Grace, the reformation, the English Civil War and finally exile. Must have hurt to leave so much behind. Hurt, it must have almost torn their hearts out. You had to have a damn good reason to uproot your whole family and cross the ocean.

I have mixed feelings about the possibility of running into great grandfather Robert in my spiritual journeyings. I can almost hear him. "We risked bad food, bad water and possible ship wreck. Others suffered typhus, scurvy and small pox. We came searching for religious freedom and to build a better life for ourselves and our families. And a fine mess you've made of it. Daughter we expected better of our children."

And if I did run into him, damned if I'd have an answer for him.

And I still don't have an answer for him.

BLAST FROM THE PAST

I originally posted this a few years back Before tRump ended up in the White House. I've run across another poster. Basically says "Do unto others and let ME sort it out. God."

SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE FROM A PAGAN POINT OF VIEW

All this manufactured hoo haw over insurance companies paying for birth control for women even if the outfit they’re working for is church affiliated, got me to thinking. Dangerous I know. And it is manufactured. If the editorial in the Register Guard is accurate over half the states in the country require insurance companies to cover contraceptives. So, gentlemen, please take your outrage elsewhere.

I wrote this a few years back. I believe it still works for today. I haven't gone anywhere. Just kind of blah I guess

Recently picked up a little volume on women in church history; Catholic church history so you know there is a bit of an inbuilt bias. The first is Prisca or Priscilla who worked with Paul. One of the early churches was in Ephesus, located in what is now Turkey. Ephesus was also the site of a major temple of Artemis with a well attended festival held every year. And every year the silver smiths did a land office business in little silver images of Artemis. Not content to mind their own souls, the church in Ephesus went after the pagans for their “obscene” images. The church, successfully minding other people’s business for nearly two thousand years.

Jump forward to the late fifth century. Newly converted to the Roman branch of the church by his wife Clotilde, Clovis of the Franks sets out to share the joys of his new faith with the people he rules; at the point of a sword. Here’s to you great great grand dad, four dozen or so times removed. You can choose your friends. All you can do with your ancestors is to try not the repeat their mistakes. Clovis was one of the original “my way or the highway” missionaries.

Surprising how many worshipers of the Old Gods chose the highway rather than convert, or kept as many of their old customs as they could for nearly a thousand years. No wonder the church made attending mass mandatory. At least many of the old ways did survive until they were caught between the hammer of the Reformation, the anvil of the Counter Reformation and the general you’re either with us or against us of European nation building. Even then, some folks on the fringes of Europe, the western highlands of Scotland and the western Isles, kept fragments alive well into the nineteenth century.

We don’t usually look at it from the pagan point of view, but I’m guessing that many of my unnamed and unknown pagan ancestors would have appreciated a little separation of church and state in their own time.

VITAMIN D OR MELANIN DEPRIVATION

When I was a kid my folks took the Reader's Digest condensed books. One volume contained My Life in Court by a lawyer named Louis Nizer. Once chapter detailed a libel suit by a writer named Quentin Reynolds against a virulant columnist named Westbrook Pegler. One of Pegler's claims was that Reynolds had lied about his time as a WWII correspondant in Egypt. Reynold's countered not only with testimony of fellow correspondants but medical records. He had been treated for sun poisoning. Reynolds was an Irish, freckled, red head who literally had to stay out of the sun for the sake of his health. Was never quite sure why until he met the army doctor who asked him where his parents were from in Ireland. I forget the name of the county but this is literally cloudy or foggy more than three hundred days a year. Hence the very fair skin.

This is a round about way to an idea. Most folks with fair skins come from northern Europe through  Central Europe,the Balkins, and northern Russia. Taking emigration into account. Theory. Caucasians are not superior because they have fair skin. They have fair skin to limited amounts of sun available during late fall, winter, and early spring a chance for their bodies to produce vitamin D. Not sure where the blond and red hair and blue eyes fit in this theory.

Of course it doesn't matter so much in an era of decent diet and kids not having to go into the factories or down the mines in the developed countries. Next time somebody claims his fair skin and blond hair make him or her superior to everyone else just remind him or her about vitamin D.

Studying evolution, geography and physical Anthropology just might allow some folks to come to this conclusion themselves. No wonder some Republicans believe that higher education isn't good for the country.

Reynolds won his libel suit and later wrote a pretty decent autobiography titled By Quentin Reynolds. The Internet Archive library has a copy last time I checked. Pegler's allegations covered more than the time in Egypt. Actually pretty nasty from a man who was once one of Reynold's friends.

THE GREAT TURTLE

At one time Mitch McCellan reminded me of a Victorian dowager who had just sucked  a lemon. A very big, very sour lemon. Lately reminds me of a turtle. A big old basking turtle trying to pretend he is a snappin turtle. Whatever. He has also acquired a couple of nicknames. Moscow Mitch because he has apparently accepted contributions from a Russian oligarch. At least one. Andhe  totally refuses to release the full Mueller Report. Heck, we paid for the damn thing we ought to have the right to read it. He also refuses do consider any actions to make our elections more secure from foreign interference. And has allowed the federal elections commision to basically go out of business becuase it does not have enough members to function.

Mitch doesn't like that nickname and wants us to stop. It isn't fair.  Maybe he would prefer Massacre Mitch. Picked that one up because he refuses any action on gun control. Nothing at all.

He has this power because he is the the Senate majority leader. This position was created in the 1920's. It is not in the constitution like the position of Speaker of the House. Near as I can tell the positions of majority/minority leaders were created as houseeping positions as more states were added and the senate became larger. And nowhere in the constitution is the power for him to block bills from being considered. This power may have been created over time to cater to the prejudices of individual members but it is not in the constitution.

Vote this turtle out. Send him back to Kentucky with his ill gotten gains and our disgust. Abolish the majority/minority leader positions, and require that all bills passed by one house be at least considered by the other house. If the bill is tabled requite a vote to do so. Don''t allow one or two members of congress to just block a bill the other house passed.

BREAD

Hello. Still knocking around, adjusting to another med that leaves me not confused, just kind of disconnected. The ideas get sort of stuck in a ball of cotton.

I'm a kind of "how did early individuals come up with an idea" kind of person. Bread. Who put together harvesting wild grains crushing or grinding the seeds or grains, adding water, and baking the results? If they started out just toasting the dough over coals who accidentally used a hot rock and discovered that bread without added charcoal tasted better.

The Nile valley has evidence of mortars and pestles used nearly seventeen thousand years ago. Probably used to grind barley and early forms of wheat.

The Egyptians may have invented the oven. Where did someone get the idea? Beats baking your dough on a hot rock. Records show evidence of thirty varieties of bread, usually some form of a round loaf. Bread even accompanied the dead into the afterlife. A tomb opened in 1936 had loaves over three thousand years old.

The Romans may have produced more than sixty varieties and bread was so basic the word was used to mean food of any kind.

Mosaic showing a Roman wood fired oven. Fire below, oven above. Some ovens use the fire in the oven and move the coals aside to bake. Usually have to turn the loaves to avoid overbaking or scorching.

For centuries you dipped pieces of bread into a common pot or used a chunk of bread as a plate and ate the "plate" afterwards. A loaf you could slice like we do now is relatively new. If you wanted thin bread you baked thin bread.

Bread still comes in all shapes. Flat, thin, round (with or without a hole in the middle) short, long. Made with wheat, rye, barley or other grains and seeds. Leavened or unleavened. And how did somebody discover yeasts in the first place?

Source The Book of Bread by Judith and Evan Jones.

GREAT CANADIAN RIVERS

Discovered a series on Amazon Prime. Dating from the early 2,000's it's called Great Canadian Rivers. Covers three seasons and has film of over three dozen rivers. Big ones. Small ones. From the east coast to British Columbia. From the border with the United States to the Arctic. Fantastic video, out its the product of Canadian producers.

Different music for each film, which they have the good sense not to use ALL the time. But different for each episode. Good film of birds and wildlife. With plenty of birdsong. I just wish they had labels. I recognize some. Discovered the call of the bald eagle. And it it's not what you would expect. Sort of a crk, crk, crk. Interviews with First Nations tribes that lived on the land long before the Europeans showed up.

My only real complaint is that the episodes jump around the country. However a map is used to show where the river is. Some of the rivers are the great ones like the Columbia. Some are very small. All are beautiful. Some are small. All are wonderful. Some are largely unchanged. Some are threatened. All are precious to us.

 Worth a watch if you can find it. And reminds us how dependent many of those rivers depend on the glaciers and snows of the high mountain ranges.

CARL SAGAN AND THE PALE BLUE DOT

As the Voyager space craft left the orbit of Neptune the craft was turned towards the sun for last pictures of the planets. Just below the rings of Saturn is a pale blue dot. That is earth. What Carl Sagan said about our little dot in space then echoes even more strongly now. Our spaceship earth.

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar. Every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, live there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagine self importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity-in all this vastness- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and if I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known..  

FIFTY YEARS AGO

This week marked the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the moon. Al Jazeera English had an entry on FB. Which brought out the usual it's all a hoax crap. However many of them had Arabic sounding names. Some with enough flaws in English to suggest this was an actual real person.Also try this Wickipedia entry.

But you go on the page and there isn't much there. Somebody spending all their entries changing their profile pictures. Real person or a bot? Heaven knows there is a lively conspiracy industry claiming the lunar landings never happened. Along with flat earth, crisis actors at shootings, 9/11, and so on into inanity.

Read some of the goofy comments. And there it's no changing closed minds. But I watched those landings take place. There were monitoring stations all over the earth including Jodrell Bank observatory in England.

And there is reentry. The capsules landed within sight of an air craft carrier and their support ships. A C130 prop driven plane can get to 30,000 feet. Unloaded. I believe someone would have noticed the command module being dumped out the rear of b the plane. Total shrug here. Somebody who was part of the hoax filmed on a soundstage would have written a book by now and made a mint.

Funny

If we could harness all that energy. BTW. Even the Vatican has an official astronomer. Although he has to work at an observatory in Arizona these days. Less pollution and a lot less light.

CHUM IN THE WATER

In his latest Tweet Storm the current occupant has suggested that the four women of color in the house should go back where they came from and stop criticizing him and our f***ed I'll up immigration policies. Three of the ladies in question were born in the US and the fourth is a naturalized citizen.

Now like everyone with more than three brain cells to rub together I was more then a little pissed off. Today I got to thinking. We are being played like a cheap violin.

His used to be good buddy and fellow target in at least one lawsuit, Epstein, has been arrested and the decor in his mansion is disturbing. To say the least. Also his catalog of under age women. It seems more than a few of his long term associates are ducking for cover.

Mueller is due to testify under oath before the house. What better way knock those stories off the front page and off the popular searches then a good old fashioned racist, woman hating, Muslim bashing, patented Trump Twitter melt down. Only  one question? Did he come up with this on his own or was it the result of some carefully planted suggestions?

Whatever. It worked like a charm. The base is eating it up. Their messiah is sticking it to those uppity females again. The media is responding like sharks in a feeding frenzy. Crazy? Like a rabid hyena. A pack of them.

THE CRAB NEBULA

Image is a mosic from NASA and the European Space Agency. M1 Charles Messier's list. Known as the Crab Nebula, we now know it is the remnant of a super nova explosion. First seen in the eleventh century it is more than six thousand light years from earth. The spectrum shows oxygen and sulpher to be present and the blue glow is from the neutron star pulsar in the heart of the cloud.

The nebula can be found in the constellation of Taurus, the Bull. The cloud can be seen, sort of without the aid of a telescope. Shot can be found in NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Glorious isn't it?

LEAVE THEM A FLOWER

I have posted this before. However in the rush to extract every last resource on the planet and the hell with the next generation it won't hurt to post it again. Comes from the seventies. The author was Willie Whytton. My favorite version was done by Ed Ames.

And yes this has something to do with astronomy as we rush to make the sky too thick with pollution to even see the stars. Or even have anyone left who cares to look at the stars. 

LEAVE THEM A FLOWER

I speak on behalf of the next generation.

Our sons and their daughters, their children to come.

What will we leave them for their recreation?

And oil slick? A pylon? An industrial slum?

Chorus:

Leave them a flower, some grass and a hedge row.

A hill and a valley. A view to the sea.

These things are not ours to destroy as we want to;

A gift given once for eternity.

We plunder. We pillage. We tear and we tunnel.

Trees lying toppled, they finger the sky.

Building a land for machines an computers.

In the name of progress, the farms have to die.

Chorus:

Fish in the ocean, polluted the poisoned.

The sand on our beaches all stinking and black.

We and our tankers and banks and investsments

They never worry, the birds will come back.

Chorus:

When the last flower has dropped its last petal.

Then the last concrete is finally laid.

The moon will shine cold in a nightmarish landscape.

Our gift to our children. The world that we made.

ISLAND IN THE SKY

NASA has an archive of pictures taken, one per day, of objects in the sky ranging from stars, galaxies, comets. sunsets and storm cells. This is the galaxy known as M31 in the constellation Andromeda.

The M is for Charles Messier, a French astronomer whose primary goal was discovering comets. Along the way he spoted other objects that looked like they might be comets but didn't act like comets. Basically what could be seen either by the naked eye or with the telescopes available at the time. It wasn't until years, if not decades, later that we realized that many of these objects were not in our home galaxy. This shot is composed of a mosaic of shots taken over a ninety hour period.

Approximately two million light years away astronomers believe our Milky Way looks much like M31.