My 1990 year-end letter where I describe the ordeal of being trapped for two weeks in a small room with eleven other jurors.
Head naturalist at Siuslaw National Forest’s Cape Perpetua Interpretive Center
My 1989 year-end letter about an unconventional vacation on a tropical island, the Cartoonist Association’s annual cocktail party, and forest fire fighting in Hells Canyon.
On a donkey in the Dominican Republic
This is the year-end letter I sent in 1988 about a fire crew’s life after a major fire.
My Fire Crew
The internet? Friend or foe? Now I need not limit myself to boring friends and family with my year-end letters. I can now bore complete strangers. And why settle for posting only one year-end letter when it’s almost as easy to post two, three, five, or even twenty-five? This month I’m planning on posting one letter a day until Christmas. This is the first year-end letter I wrote after my first summer as a forest firefighter in 1987.
Setting a Back Fire
The Skin Man
I passed at least 20 on my morning dog walk. I feel sorry for them, but I am also have a morbid fascination with them and often examine what’s left of them. That’s not surprising since when I lived in Washington D.C. in the 1980s and 90s one of my favorite haunts was the Walter Reed Medical Museum. Among other things it had very graphic displays of reconstructed faces after they’d been mutilated in various wars, the leg of a Civil War general who ordered a medic to preserve what was left of it after it had been severed by a cannon ball, the bloated leg of someone who had died of elephantiasis, lots other diseased, abnormal and normal body parts in jars, the bullet that killed Lincoln, and what I believe was the worlds largest collection of human embryos. Obviously it was not a museum suitable for everyone. Then again, I’m not suitable for everyone since the only thing I found gross in gross anatomy was the smell of formaldehyde. Continue reading
Last week I led hikes for a Road Scholar (formerly known as Elderhostel) on trails in the Sisulaw National Forest in Oregon. Here are a few photos I took.
T- and Sammy at Sweet Creek
They don’t do justice to the magnificent scenery. Going through them now I realize I didn’t even take a single photo of the 500-year-old trees we walked under on the Gwynn Creek trail. That’s because I don’t want to see the world through a teeny lens. Consequently, I rarely take photos. Continue reading
License Leaf Blower Cartoon 9326
Get it printed on stuff at CafePress or Zazzle
She was absolutely compulsive when it came to yard work and seemed to rake our leaves more often than I bathed, and I’ve always been pretty compulsive about that. I’ve never understood the purpose of raking at all, and I’m even more confused why if one is going to go through all that work, people don’t wait until all the leaves are down before pulling out the plastic bags. Of course, having the reputation I have, it’s pretty hard to convince people that this isn’t the justification of a lazy lout who doesn’t want to rake. Continue reading
Central coastal Oregon, a continent and ocean away from the fighting, had soldiers camped there. They were logging Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), the lightest, strongest wood for its weight and was used to make airplane frames. It only grows along a four-mile (1.2-km) fog-shrouded band on the coast from northern California to Alaska. Before the war spruce was viewed as good for nothing but making fish boxes.
I’m afraid soon I’m going to read a statistic stating more people believe there’s a chance they could be eaten by a shark in a tornado than believe in global warming.
One of my favorite statistics is that you have a better chance of being killed by a soda machine than a shark. The cans in a soda machine are in its upper half so they roll down to you. People sometimes shake a machine to try and get a stuck can out and the whole unbalanced thing falls on them. You’ve got to love natural selection. Continue reading
I just listed this item on eBay: one used copy of The New York Times Ferocious Crosswords: 150 Hard Puzzles edited by Will Shortz where I’ve already done 100 of the puzzles. Starting bid: $15
Here’s why this copy is worth at least $5.05 more than it sold for new in 2009.
You see an intriguing man or woman in the airport or on the subway, a man or woman you want to get to know better, a man or woman you want to impress. How do you go about it? Walk up and say, “I graduated summa cum laude from Harvard and Apple made me a seven-figure offer for my app.” Continue reading
