Category Archives: People are weird

Crossing Paths

I put the book down and brought my head back into the 21st century. I’d been reading 19th-century correspondence about explorations in the far Northwest by some of the most important people to document the biological diversity of Alaska and western Canada. I’d just finished a long letter from 1864 by Robert Kennicott to R. McFarlane, a Hudson’s Bay Company factor.

This was in William Healy Dall’s 1915 biography of Spencer Fullerton Baird, who was the first curator at the Smithsonian Institution and later served as Assistant Secretary and then as Secretary.
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The Boombah Haulage Company

The Boombah Haulage Company, president, CEO, and sole employee.

All those artisanal, hand-crafted heat candies created in the woods behind our house (the Boombah) have to travel to the wood shed somehow to realize their purpose. Yes, they’re pieces of dead trees, but they’ve been diced up into 16-inch lengths for a reason. I generally cut the trees as soon as possible after they die, so they are usually still green and the pieces of future firewood are heavy. So I stack them in the woods for a year or so to begin the drying process. Like a squirrel with little food caches scattered about, I can usually remember where the piles are. I haul them out on a network of foot trails one load at a time on my shoulders. It’s a great workout. I peck away at it when I feel like it.
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The Ninja from Beringia (Internet security)

The U.S. government has given the green light to your internet service providers to sell your data. Yep. Your privacy is for sale, and you have nothing to say about it until your next chance to vote for new representatives in Congress. But there is a series of fairly simple things you can do in the meantime to improve your life and make your data crap for those wishing to sell it.

I am not an expert, but I can figure things out and see that they work, and most people just naively do nothing and hope everything will be alright. It won’t be. So protect yourself. Feeling brave, the “I’ve got nothing to hide!” bravado? Get past this, or you and your secure accounts (like your bank) are more likely to get hacked. Plus it just feels good to improve your internet experience and give a big ol’ one-fingered salute to the greedy bastards who want to sell your data and the assholes who decided to let them.

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Healthy Trails, Roads, Footpaths, and other Euphemisms

Our esteemed employer recognizes that investing in preventive medicine is a good thing, saving bigger money down the road. So they contract with an esteemed health-care provider to bombard us with emails about our shitty health habits. They don’t actually know (or aren’t supposed to, anyway) that we have shitty health habits. But, hey, going by statistics of the average American population and adding up the healthcare expenditures for this insured pool, they can make some pretty good guesses. And, shoot, emails are cheap.
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