She sent me this email from sunny Mexico, which served to allay the biting cold weather of Michigan for the moment.

I'm in Puerto Vallarta with the girls.  They took me out for a birthday dinner celebration last night.  I had 2 margaritas and seafood then we went back to our condo for chocolate cake.  Best birthday ever.

Up on the 5th floor I've been able to see whales and dolphins at a great distance.  The dolphins clearly had a destination and leapt on their way, showing their backs and fins.  The whale cavorted in one spot, flicking its tail up over and over for 15 minutes.  He had a two-color tail--black on one side, white on the other, reflecting the sun.

Early in the week, while we lounged at a remote beach, eating our seafood, a man appeared with a huge iguana.  He put it on Evanne's head.  The tail reached all the way to the ground.  The iguana appeared immune to the indignity.  Top that!

Ha ha dozens of naïve American tourists fall for that old iguana scam every year.  Oldest trick in the book.  I guess you didn't win the contest after all.

The iguana won.

Those iguanas.  They never lose. --D

 
I don't remember a winter as cold as this.  Of course I say the same thing every year.

This professional meteorologist serves as my current desktop background.
Click to expand.  I think she has a broccoli tramp stamp, but I'm not sure.
Vegetables are important in times of physical stress.

Centigrade	Fahrenheit
-32	-25.6	This morning's WIND CHILL
-30	-22	The actual temperature on Friday
-28	-18.4
-26	-14.9
-24	-11.3
-22	-7.7
-20	-4
-18	-0.4
-16	3.1
-14	6.8	The temperature right now
-12	10.3
-10	14
-8	17.6
-6	21.2
-4	24.8
-2	28.4
0	32	Water freezes
2	35.6
4	39.2
6	42.8
8	46.4
10	50
12	53.6
14	57.2
16	60.8
18	64.4
20	68
22	71.6
24	75.2
26	78.8
28	82.4
30	86
32	89.6
34	93.2
36	96.8
38	100.4	Highest temperature last summer
40	104

 

Stay warm.  And remember to wear clothes today.

The last time we had a mass extinction, quetzalcoatlus died along with the dinosaurs.  Everyone glorifies tyrannosaurus rex, but no-one dignifies the flying reptile with the terror and majesty he deserves.  Quetzalcoatlus was really freaking huge.

Pterosaurs existed from about 225 to 65 million years ago, that is, for 160 million years.  They lived worldwide in all environments, and in wingspan ranged from 50 cm to 13 meters (39 feet).  Quetzalcoatlus weighed over 250 kg (550 lb), making him the biggest flying animal of all time.  His wingspan was greater than that of a fighter jet.

Quetzalcoatlus is named for the Aztec winged serpent god.  In the air, they were adept fliers, and not clumsy gliders as once thought.  The shapes of their skulls tell us their brains are in some ways similar to other active fliers -- birds and bats.  Their wings were complex structures with many specialised layers of tissue that would have allowed them to perform well in the air.

Bigger than quetzalcoatlus?
While working in Mexico, paleontologist Eberhard Frey of the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany, discovered the footprints of a pterosaur with a wingspan of at least 59 feet.  Frey's colleague David Martill, of the University of Portsmouth in England, unveiled the find at the British Association for the Advancement of Science this year.  The footprints, combined with new fossil finds and a study of older samples, present a new picture of the winged giants.  The creature possibly jumped to get airborne, Martill said, noting that its pelvis was constructed much like a frog's.

It is not clear whether these new giants represent a new species in the pterosaur family.  But it is agreed that when pterosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago, they left no descendants.

Which is unfortunate.  I sure wish I had a pet quetzalcoatlus.  Don't you?

I went to the Rainbow Peoples Party in the 1960s.  Well, it was more a political party, or maybe I should say anti-political party.

This Detroit area group of riffraff began as the White Panther Party.  (The Black Panthers were a thing back then.)  Soon the White Panthers needed to change their name, because they were being mistaken for segregationists, thus the Rainbow Peoples Party was born.

Under the direction of John Sinclair, they formed a thrash band named the Motor City Five (MC5).  Sinclair wrote a book of poetry called Guitar Army.  John Lennon once wrote a song about him.  Why am I telling you this?  Dunno, it seemed interesting.

I met John Sinclair once, and the memory is still vivid.  He and MC5 were renting a house on the Michigan campus next to my sister's apartment.  One day he sauntered over to my sister's to gab.  He announced that he was high on mescaline, and the mescaline was really great.

He talked about rock and roll, I talked about a blues band I was in.  I put on my Junior Wells album and played him a couple of cuts.

"Yeah, wow, but you gotta hear MC5, really high energy music."

I talked about finishing college.

"What for man, and then what?"

"So I'll get a job in . . ."

"Man, you don't have to work, you know. No. Nobody needs to work."

Strange philosophy, eh?  I think he meant you don't need to punch a clock.  But we know he was writing, and managing MC5, and also dealing weed.  A whole lot of weed, enough in fact, to get the attention of the state police.  He was jailed several months after this conversation, and that is when John Lennon wrote his batty tribute.

Ah, the sixties.

 

"Things must change for our government. Look at it. It isn’t too big to fail. It’s too big to succeed! It's too big to succeed, so we can afford no retreads or nothing will change with the same people and same policies that got us into the status quo. Another Latin word, status quo, and it stands for, ‘Man, the middle-class everyday Americans are really gettin’ taken for a ride.’ That's status quo, and GOP leaders, by the way, y'know the man can only ride ya when your back is bent. So strengthen it. Then the man can't ride ya, America won't be taken for a ride, because so much is at stake and we can't afford politicians playing games like nothing more is at stake than, oh, maybe just the next standing of theirs in the next election."

Says Bill Maher, "If Sarah Palin suffers a stroke, how will we know?"

 
The massacre in Paris will be debated for a long time.  My friend D e-mailed me a response to my previous post.  She is a writer and reporter.

7:30 PM 1-13-2015
Ah, but John Oliver is missing an important ingredient in the culture and ontology of these extreme Arabs.  He’s using western values and logic, wherein a cartoon and a cold pizza fall under an equally low bar.  Cartoons per se are not the issue.  Cartoons are a western invention.  The light laughter they provoke in the west does not translate for these fanatics. For them, the issue is that Islam is being taken to the cleaners, and it’s being done publicly.  Remember that the crime of theft in Saudi Arabia is punishable by having your hand cut off.  Their culture follows a totally different set of values.  Innocent till proven guilty doesn’t exist.  Life is cheap. Defending Islam from detractors is probably a high calling.  I’m not defending the killers, but a fact for John Oliver and the civilized world is not the same fact in their belief system.  Just sayin’.

- D

---

Jan 14 at 9:19 AM

Dear D,
The terrorist attack in France was not about radical Islam, says Chris Hedges, but the dispossessed.

The terrorist attack in France that took place at the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo was not about free speech.  It was not about radical Islam.  It did not illustrate the fictitious clash of civilizations.  It was a harbinger of an emerging dystopia where the wretched of the earth, deprived of resources to survive, devoid of hope, brutally controlled, belittled and mocked by the privileged who live in the splendor and indolence of the industrial West, lash out in nihilistic fury. [ HEDGES LINK ]

---

D replies:

Jan 14 at 1:31 PM
Thanks for this.  I’m glad Hedges dug into it further, and has the credentials to support his POV.  When I was in college we studied Algeria and South Africa.  One thing I got out of it was admiration for France for accepting so many immigrants.  Their doors were open earlier than most in Europe.  But in the end accepting and integrating were not the same thing.

- D

---

Jan 15 2015

Dear D,
I went to the French TV site France24 within hours of hearing about the massacre.  I've learned it is necessary to have links like this available whenever the mainstream media seems to have its head up its ass.  Which is frequently.  Other good resources are www.dw.de (Germany), telegraph.co.uk, www.abc.net.au (Australia), america.aljazeera.com and democracynow.org.

I've come to value Rachel Maddow on msnbc.com.  Yes she is predictably left-leaning, but she always manages to place an event in historical context.  She is even remarkable.  After Charlie Hebdo, she listed these recent events:

1989 fatwa on Salman Rushdie results in the stabbing or death of 40 translators, publishers, bystanders
2004 madrid train bombing
2005 Jyllands-Posten (Danish newspaper) firebombed
2005 london subway bombing
2012 a motorscooter guy kills 7 in france
2013 boston marathon bombing
2013 may, 2 guys kill soldier in uk
2013 kenya mall attack
2014 may, guy kills 4 at jewish museum in brussels
2014 boko haram kidnapping
2014 a guy stabs 2 cops in melbourne
2014 cop killed in quebec, cop killed in ottawa
2014 sydney hostage scene, 2 dead 4 wounded
2014 145 dead in Peshawar school massacre
2015 12 dead in paris

Her list gives us a context, placing Hebdo in perspective.  It is not so much the body count that shocks us here, but the assault on press freedom.  And note that the list is glaringly incomplete:

1) Boko Haram attacked a town named Baga two days later, killing approximately 2,000.
2) The Algerian War of Independence was not mentioned, where as many as a million were killed.

 

 

Everyone has heard about the Clovis culture, the paleoindians of New Mexico who killed mammoths using those big, clever spearpoints.  Now there is an article in the National Geographic Magazine about the people who arrived earlier than Clovis.

Click to expand

The earliest, earliest Americans (left) were risk-taking pioneers, and the toughest men were taking the spoils and winning fights over women.  As a result, their robust traits and features were being selected.  More than half of the men have injuries caused by violence, and four out of ten have skull fractures.  The wounds don’t appear to have been the result of hunting mishaps, and they don’t bear telltale signs of warfare, like blows suffered while fleeing an attacker.  Instead it appears that these men fought among themselves — often and violently.

The women don’t have these kinds of injuries, but they’re much smaller than the men, with signs of malnourishment and domestic abuse.  They lived twenty-five years or less.

The unsettling hypothesis is due to archaeologist Jim Chatters, co-leader of the team that investigated the Hoyo Negro cave in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.  It is speculative, of course.  We picture a gang of murderous thugs who stole and enslaved women.  Call it perhaps the huge testicles theory of migration.

 

I got my Xanga membership renewed until June 2016.  That's right, for a year and a half.  Must be a clerical error -- but I'm not complaining.

Here are a bunch of interesting podcasts if you need them.  Podcasts will keep your mind busy while walking or jogging or driving.

the-bugle with John Oliver
lexicon valley
radiolab.org
on the media
aisha tyler girl-on-guy podcast
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The Nerdist with Chris Hardwick
kcrw bookworm Santa Monica
guardian book of the week
free library of philadelphia
from our own correspondents, bbc
the environment show australia

 

USA midterm elections are coming up November 4th.  If you are in Canada or Mexico or Trinidad, you are American too, of course, but I wasn't talking to you.  I wasn't talking to you specifically.  But yeah, you should vote too in your own funky alien elections ha ha.  If I knew the word for "people living in the United States of America," I would use it.  USAians?  Yankees?  Murcans?  Self-important Douches?

My point is that I already voted.  An application to vote by absentee ballot arrived in the mail on Monday.  I didn't ask for it, but there it was, thanks to the diligent work of the Democratic National Committee.  And despite the news stories about voter suppression and gerrymandering, I wasn't suppressed at all.  I filled it out, mailed it in, received the ballot Thursday, and I voted by mail Friday October 24th.  Voting has never been so easy.  I voted for -- well, against the bums.

Of course, absentee voting only works if you're sixty years old or disabled.  Plus you have to be registered already, which is automatic if you voted in 2012 -- and if you live outside of certain states requiring weird voter ID cards.  In Texas, North Carolina, and Ohio, access to the polls is deliberately made difficult for poor voters and young voters.  If this happens to you, be sure to file a challenge at the election site.

My inbox has been filling with friendly personalized messages from Joe Biden.  Do you get them?  It seems Michelle and Barack and Elizabeth Warren also miss me.  Michelle writes,

Barack needs a Congress that will work with him.  This election will decide if he gets one.  Our work on the ground in the next few days will truly determine how much of our agenda will get done over the next two years.

We have all the votes we need to win these races if -- if -- we get folks out to vote this fall.  It's on us.

It is miraculous that the First Lady took the time to write to me personally.  I must be awfully cool.