One for the road

Yeah, yeah, I said this blog was taking a bit of a vacation, but I couldn't resist posting yesterday's shot of a gray squirrel that frequents my backyard bird feeder. If you can stand the bandwidth, click on the photo for the full 10.2 megapixel version.

Beached

Starting today, this blog is going on hiatus until about mid-May. I'm presently under tow to the shipyard for heavy repairs. There the shipwrights will winch me onto the beach for a careening to scrape off rust and torch out corrosion from the keel. Once that's done, they'll replate, reweld, rerivet and relaunch.

Then I ought to be good for a few more voyages as well as further abuse of nautical metaphors.

Three for Earth Day

Some fruits of patient stalking with a long lens from a lawn chair in the tangled thickets of my suburban back yard:


House sparrow


Common grackle


Mourning doves

All three were taken with a Pentax *ist DS and a Sigma 135-400mm zoom. The lawn chair is a generic green plastic model from Home Depot.

Yooper food down under

The pasty, an iconic Upper Peninsula survival ration, was also exported to New South Wales by immigrant Cornish miners.

An air letter postmarked March 16 arrived today from June Allen, a reader in Fairy Meadow, Australia, a suburb of Wollongong about 1 1/2 hours south of Sydney. It had been sent to Robert Hale Ltd., my United Kingdom publisher, thence to my literary agent in New York, and finally to me. Quite a bank shot.

And what do you know? The pasty -- the "portable potpie stuffed with diced beef, potatoes, carrots, rutabagas and onions about the size and shape of a softball and four times heavier" that is all by itself one of the major food groups in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan -- is a staple for Aussies as well as Yoopers. Ms. Allen writes:

"I read A Venture into Murder and enjoyed it very much. This is the first book I've read which is set in Michigan so that was new and interesting for me.

"Steve [Martinez, my deputy sheriff sleuth] eating a pasty made me laugh. I'm 76 and pasties have always been part of my life as a treat. Today I could walk up the road and buy one from any bakery hot and ready to eat -- or frozen from Woolworths.

"This pasty has the same history as yours -- Cornish miners -- and the same ingredients, but a different shape. We begin with a circle of flaky pastry about the size of a man's hand outspread. The filling goes on one half, then the pastry is folded over, the edges crimped to make a handle or sometimes a plait of pastry is added. It looks like a solid capital D."

(Truth to tell, Yooper pasties are also D-shaped as well as softball-thick. We wash ours down with Molson's while Aussies doubtless employ Foster's for that purpose.)

Small-town New South Wales, Ms. Allen went on to say, "is a wonderful place to live, rather like Porcupine County."

Thank you, Ms. Allen, and I hope you invite me for a pasty supper someday.

Not with a bang but a whimper

Ice Out has finally arrived in Porcupine County, but with all the zip of a wet firecracker. In fact, the departure of the ice from the Ontonagon River in Upper Michigan's real Ontonagon County occurred Wednesday, many hours before I posted the April 16 item below wondering when it would happen.

(See the April 10 blogpost for the full backstory of Ice Out.)

Steve Sundberg, this blog's chief Ontonagon County correspondent, emailed me late Wednesday that the ice had disappeared from upriver of the new M-64 highway bridge without having made a sound. Thursday morning, he said, the county road commission, which watches for the event, was reluctant to make the call of the official date and time of Ice Out. "They want to know if a Big Kahuna of ice jams is still up the river waiting to come down, or if it had melted away resulting in the paltry excuse for Ice Out Wednesday."

This morning Steve emailed that radio personality Jan Tucker had announced the commission had decided to use the time when the ice left from under the new bridge as the official instant of Ice Out 2008. That was Wednesday, April 16, at 12:33 a.m.

Six minutes later this follow-up email: "Jim Jessup, prosecuting attorney and president of Ontonagon's Rotary Club, just called Jan's show with the Ice Out contest winner, Lynn Walters of Ontonagon, who guessed April 16 at 1:13 a.m., 40 minutes after the official time. She won $474."

Steve sums up the 2008 Ice Out as "a most disappointing turn of events. A long, hard winter leaves in a whimper instead of the flash-bang crash of a real Ice Out. Oh, well, on to blackfly season."

At least spring officially has come to this blessed western corner of Upper Michigan.

Too much information

This morning's New York Times carries a story on how some folks undergoing a divorce battle are blogging and YouTubing about the sins of their scorned mates, unleashing a caustic torrent of slime. One woman says she hasn't had sex for ages, yet her about-to-be-ex-spouse hoards Viagra and condoms.

What in hog hominy hell is going on in these people's heads?

Maybe it's just my advanced age showing, but I think they have no class, no class at all. It is one thing for immature adults to air their indiscretions on Facebook and even display videos of their sexual encounters on Xtube, but it is another to violate the privacy of other people. Maybe the lawyers can't do much -- it's a free-speech issue -- but for godsake, what about common decency as well as common sense?

We Americans have always had an unfortunate tendency to let personal things hang out that should be hidden, as Europeans will gently remind us. It has gotten worse as the Internet has helped foster a melding of indiscreet openness and political nastiness -- a combination that sooner or later is going to bite a lot of people in the posterior.

Even if their intentions are pure, many unsophisticated bloggers proudly -- and stupidly, in my view -- promenade online photographs of their families as well as detailed descriptions of their doings. This is dangerous in an age of identity theft and child snatching.

That is why you will not find anecdotes or photographs of my children and grandchildren on this blog, although once in awhile my Lady Friend will appear, and only with her permission.

Jeez.

Crackberried books beckon

Read a book on a cell phone? Maybe only the Japanese would do that, but at least one American is reading heavy-duty literary novels on a BlackBerry -- and loving it.