Something C. S. Lewis Said

—Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

—Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

—There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.

The Mountains of Montana

(I originally posted this in June of 2010.  I have had no time for writing for the last two days and am reposting this blog because it is one of my personal favorites.)

Montana’s plate is set with a staggering relief of sixty-seven clearly identifiable mountain ranges, some flaring up, almost inexplicably, at center of vast and thoroughly encompassing plains.

Within Montana’s far-flung ranges, nearly six-hundred peaks scramble to elevations above 10,000 feet above sea level.  The lofty Beartooth Mountains, located in the southeastern part of the state near Red Lodge, are far and away the altitude kings, having some twenty-seven stony peaks that scrape clouds well above 12,000 feet.  As a point of fact (one that often evades the folks in western Montana) the only peaks in the entire state that rise above 12,000 feet are those within the Beartooth Range near Billings.

Interestingly, some of our more dramatic chains—those that seem freshly axed from stone and on the verge of toppling over due to imbalance—lack utterly any peaks above the 10,000 foot mark.  The Swans, the Missions, and even our Front Range, three of the most rugged and arresting strings, are included in this.  These ranges do, however, offer some of the greatest relief.  The most relief can be found in Glacier Park, where some mountains climb a full 7,000 feet from valley floor to powder horn peak.

The theatrical ambitions of our mountains ends with neither the handsome nor the enterprising climbs and runs of landscape.  These vertical ranges both breed and grapple with stormfronts.  The peaks continuously bat clouds back and forth.  Chill winds spill down into the warmer valleys from ice fields.  Ranges gobble up entire lightning storms.  Water leaps down from chevron plates and overhanging shelves and shreds down toward creeks and rivers below.  Whole forests of trees sway in unison.  Herds of elk flow into meadows like tide waters into open bays.

Implausible differences in annual rainfall can be found in the vicinity of our mountains.  The highest summits might claw from the stormy skies up to four-hundred inches of snow in a single season, while the long valleys below remain mostly empty and dry.  This, wedded with wildly unpredictable summer rains often accounts for improbable variance, ranging from a total of sixty inches of rainfall per year in the peaks, to well below fourteen inches of annual moisture on the plains.  A drive of only thirty miles might take you from landscapes that gather fifty inches of rain each year to land that survives on merely a dozen.  Here in Helena, where I live, we average just slightly less than a dozen inches of rain.  Conversely, the deep green forests just off Lake McDonald, in Glacier Park, is the furthest inland rain forest in the West.  Certain locations within that small area receive over two-hundred inches of rain a year.         

I find the isolated ranges at center of plains, the so-called island ranges the most fascinating.  And they are, in nearly every sense, like an island, rising in stark clarity from our extended plains—blue castles massed above blonde oceans of grass.   These islands hold in isolation conifer forests and elk and wolverine and moose and bear.  They generate and sustain their own weather.  You have to hold in awe anything capable of that.

 — Mitchell Hegman

Hunting Season

We had quite a hunting season out here in my normally quiet corner of the known universe.  During the daylight hours, trucks filled with hunter orange almost constantly prowled our roads.

Almost daily during the rifle season, as I rounded blind hills and blind corners, I came upon trucks at a dead stop in the middle of our country road.  Inside the trucks were folks scanning the countryside for deer.  My neighbor, Kevin, actually came upon a truck that a hunter virtually abandoned smack in the center of the road, still idling, presumably left there at the initiation of some manner of “game chase.”  Kevin was forced to take the ditch to get around the rig.

Kevin also found a “gut pile” just off the road when he took an alternate route leaving our mix of open prairie and hills with scattered stands of timber.

I found litter on two occasions.

But the most irritating occurrence, by far, was the shooting of several road signs.

Irritating and dangerous.

I have posted photographs of one of the signs.  It may be difficult to make out from the photograph with the entire background, but the road appears in several locations behind the sign.

Nice shooting, right?

— Mitchell Hegman

Shock

I must admit, ever since famed Olympic decathlete Bruce Jenner suddenly became Caitlyn Jenner, nothing else has been able to appropriately shock me.

— Mitchell Hegman

Paradise Lost

Just in the last few days, the Camp Fire in Northern California was designated as contained.  The Camp Fire virtually devoured the town of Paradise.  According to the most recent estimates, the Camp Fire utterly destroyed some 13,972 homes and 528 commercial structures.  The death toll presently stands at over 80.  But hundreds are still officially unaccounted for.

This was an actual town lost—a city of 26,000 people—nestled into a pine forest.

We have some smaller towns just like that here in Montana: Lincoln, West Yellowstone, Big Fork, and more.

Montana has had some bad fire seasons recently (and it is a natural season).  2017 was our worst in history.  That year, Montana saw 1.4 million acres scorched within her borders.  This included the 270,000 acre Lodgepole Complex Fire that swept unchecked through mostly grasslands and ranches in Eastern Montana.

We are pretty smart, standing here at the thin edge of this century.  We now have the capability to compute our way through skyscraper-sized columns of mathematical formulas in nanoseconds.  We can flick spacecraft to Mars and beyond.  We trick tomatoes and cucumbers into thinking they are dimension lumber and first cousin to insecticides.  We have turned sound into a tool that can see the complex insides of once impenetrable solid objects.  We fashion heavy metals into fluff.  But old-fashioned range fires can still kick our ass.

Paradise is a cautionary tale.

 — Mitchell Hegman

Talking with Mother

Last evening, that girl drifted from room to room within the house while talking with her mother on a cell phone.  I heard only bits and pieces of the conversation whenever she wafted near the living room where I sat.

I think we all use a different tone when talking with our mothers.  I was fascinated as I listened to the sing-song dialogue advancing and receding throughout the house.

I had forgotten that careful tone—my mother gone for over thirty years now.

 — Mitchell Hegman

In the Mirror

When I was an infant, being held by someone was enough.

Today, as I stared at the aging reflection of me in the mirror, the lines on my face running out of room, my hair silver and thinning, I saw an infant.

— Mitchell Hegman

A Half Closed Door

Last night, on a long-past-midnight trip to the toilet, I found the bathroom door half closed.

More than a dozen years ago, I buried in the raw earth at the edge of a sage and juniper hill near my house, a small and playful cat female named Soda.

Soda often spent her nights scampering around the house, opening all of the lower kitchen cabinets, opening the bi-fold closet doors, and hiding under throw rugs.  She also liked to sneak behind the bathroom doors—leaving them swung half closed.

When I reached the bathroom door last night, I thought:  “What if I try to push open the door and Soda runs out from behind?  What will I do?”

I actually stopped there for a few moments, contemplating. 

— Mitchell Hegman

My Thanksgiving Day Thanks

I am thankful that disco music did not survive the 1980s.

I am thankful my pants have not recently fallen down around my ankles while I was in a public place.

I am thankful for my oldest friends and my newest friends.

I am thankful for LED lighting.  Seriously.  I am an electrician, people, you need to expect this kind of stuff from me.

I am thankful for the founders of this great nation.  And, by the way, they were not all “fathers.”

I am thankful for the Constitution of the United States.  As I sit writing this, I can see my very own copy of this great document propped face-out on one of my upper bookshelves.

— Mitchell Hegman

Lightning Bolt

A rather lively song by Jake Bugg.

— Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCiQXsvPr1M 

Sunset on Lake Helena

The other night, on our drive home from working on the cabin flooring, that girl, her sister, and I happened upon Lake Helena at the peak of a spectacular sunset.  I and several other cars around me, swung off to the side of the road and stopped so photographs could be taken. 

Posted are four of the images I captured with my smarter-than-me-phone.

— Mitchell Hegman

The “Bruce” Board

I think it’s possible to miss someone you never met.  I miss the actor Robin Williams and the rock star Tom Petty, for example.  And I miss Brother Bruce—at least I’m certain I missed-out—because he passed before I met that girl and all her family.

As I hear it, Bruce was highly intelligent, industrious, playful, and more than a little bit devious.

Yesterday, that girl and her sister helped me install a section of the circular-sawn fir flooring at the cabin.  The girls picked out boards for the desired pattern and helped me force the tongue and groove boards into place so I could nail them down.  As we worked along, we developed a pretty good rhythm.

“Bruce would have loved this.”  One of the girls remarked after we finished a row of boards.

“You know,” I said, “This cabin and my house are both filled with notes and messages inside the walls and under finish things.  I think we need to install a ‘Bruce board’ in the next row.  Why don’t you pick out a board and write something on the back of it for Bruce.  We will place it where it will always be visible.  He can be a part of this, too.”

I have posted a couple photographs of the girls writing notes to Brother Bruce on the back of the board they chose for him.  As it turns out, the board has one beautiful and conspicuous knot at its center, but is otherwise clear.  The Bruce board is now at the center of the cabin’s kitchen.

We missed you yesterday, Brother Bruce.

— Mitchell Hegman

The Bell Curve

Children of single mothers, as proven in many case studies, might be jeopardized by their lack of having two parents.  This rings particularly true regarding their social outcomes later in life.

Consider this for starters: The vast majority of single mothers in America spring forth from the lower two IQ groups as they arrange on the Bell Curve.  And if, as it is currently hypothesized, forty to sixty percent of IQ is heritable, these children are often hobbled at the starting line.

Furthermore, studies reveal that a huge majority of criminals, of high school dropouts, of the chronically poor, of malnourished children originate from households with single mothers.

I imagine you can hear some conservatives clapping in the background at mention of these proven results.  Such statistics vindicate their long-embraced view that divorce, single-parent adoptions, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy are an abomination.

Of course this does not serve as an indictment to all single mothers.  Far from it.  But we shall give conservative thinking a point here.

But sociology, as all things plumbed through with statistics, allows information that might shake up the most ardent conservatives to pump out along other statistical lines.  A case in point is a study looking into the sharp decline in crime throughout the latter part of the 1990's.

That study landed on a most unexpected conclusion.

Researchers came up with what they saw as a very direct link between Roe versus Wade (legalized abortion) and the dropping crime rates.  They saw that far fewer (than is statistically normal) crimes were being committed by those under the age of twenty-five.

This is a statistical anomaly of some import.

The researchers, noting that most of the unwanted abortions in the 1970's were those of young single mothers who comprised the danger group—low IQ, poor, often minority—concluded that many potential criminals were, therefore, aborted before falling into their expected patterns.

No point given here.

Strange and maybe even ugly if true.

— Mitchell Hegman

Sunrise, Sunset

Thursday provided those of us living in my region of Montana with a spectacular sunrise followed by (at the close of the day) an equally spectacular sunset.  Posted today are photographs I captured with my smarter-than-me-phone. Those from sunrise were captured on a drive to Bozeman.  I captured the sunset at home.

— Mitchell Hegman

Perhaps We Shall Perish Softly

Perhaps we shall perish softly, fading exquisitely, like glacier lilies come early, come radiantly, now slumping into the greening grass below snowdrifts drawn long across grassy flanks and timbered steeps.

There, the grass will hold upright our last vestiges for the entire summer, celebrating how we emerged first—the bold and the beautiful.

— Mitchell Hegman

Buffing the Surface of the Clouds

The days now short.

The sun diminished.

But the wind is not always unkind,

not always pushing from behind.

Consider how sometimes the elements gather

only for the purpose of buffing the surface of the clouds,

to send them scudding over us

as armadas of sailing ships

and prairie schooners heading in improbable directions

and polar bears on icy shelves

and white carnations without stems.

— Mitchell Hegman

Perfect Words

Kaypo warrior’s words when he parleyed with his enemy to discuss peace: “I am trying to untie the knots inside the heads of your chiefs.”

— Mitchell Hegman

Cells Marching On

By what magic does the single cell divide in two?  How do two viable cells become twelve-thousand in a common scheme?  And then, how do some cells gallop off into a flow of blood while others gather as the liver?  How does function come to form?  How arrives the decision that marshals some cells to march off and become toenails while their neighbors march off to become the brain?  Why species?

Darwinian theorists are now concluding that evolution—regressing all the back to the very spark that lighted the fires of life, to the simplest form of what we call life—might be based upon blind errors, the mis-combining of things already at hand.  So, in grossly oversimplified terms, we have over the years walked forth from the simplest crystals of clay in a warm bath.

Once the first “true” forms of life came into being, the process became increasingly divergent.  Through RNA and subsequent DNA reproductions, basic accounting mistakes and copying errors were made and then introduced into the next generation of plant or beast.  In other words, certain genetic codes were botched prior to handing them down through replication.  Some of these mistakes made by combinate RNA and DNA became, by default, corrections and improvements.  Genetically coded bumps on one beast gradually became arms; on another: fins.  From oddity to improvement.  These random improvements (and the life forms enjoying them) found success in practice, became accepted.  The random improvements then clustered into certain locals, into species.

Consider this: In this operating theory, to err is to improve.

— Mitchell Hegman

Dog Weather Forecast

Nights can get pretty dark in the Montana countryside.  This is especially true if a star-blocking snowstorm descends onto the valley floors from the nearest mountain range.  On occasion, the darkness might become so complete you don’t even notice a righteous blizzard is upon you as you sit in your well-lighted rooms.

Such was the case last evening when that girl and I attended a dinner with some of her family near Three Forks.  While we sat at the dining room table playing a game of Exploding Kittens (yep, it’s a real game) following dinner, that girl’s nephew released his dog out into the night so the dog could relieve himself.

When the dog scampered back inside the house only a couple minutes later, we knew right away we were against a heavy snowfall.

— Mitchell Hegman

Old Enough

Dammit, you guys, I’m old enough to be treated as an adult now.  Never mind how old I act.

— Mitchell Hegman

Something Mark Twain Said

— It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

— The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

Three Apps I Would Like to Have

1. An app that will filter political ads and turn them into ads for products made from huckleberries.    

2. An app for freezing annoying people in place just long enough that you can draw a smiley face on them with a sharpie and send them along the way.

3. An app for drawing perfect smiley faces.

--Mitchell Hegman

One More Thing

I discovered one more thing I am not good at.  More like incapable of doing.  This particular task lands somewhere between changing the transmission in a truck and opening a new pack of napkins—two other tasks at which I flounder.

Here it is: I cannot fold sheets.

Yesterday, while that girl left me here unsupervised at the house, I pulled out some bed sheets she had in the dryer and tried to fold them.

I first tried to fold them against the sofa in the living room.

Not good.

For a time one of the throw pillows threw itself into the bedding as I worked.   After I ejected the pillow I folded down again and ended up with what looked more like a crumpled wad.

Not enough room on the sofa, I determined.

I then dragged the sheets back to the spare bedroom and slung them across the bed as first step to the folding process.  At this point, in fairness, I would like to note that we have a California king.  These are some pretty big sheets.

Once again, I tried folding halves into halves.  No soap.  Stray ends and crooked lines appeared everywhere. 

I unfurled the sheets and tried again.  And again.

When that girl came home, I said to her (after our usual greeting pleasantries), “We have a problem.  Well, I do.  Follow me to the bedroom.” 

Together, we walked back to the bedroom.  Once there, I pointed at an ugly pile of sheets.  “I gave my best to fold them.  I can’t do it.  I’m guessing I have some kind of genetic shortfall here.”

She laughed.  “Thank you for trying,” she said.  “I will take care of them.”

--Mitchell Hegman

Sam Ballard ate a Slug

I must admit, I have eaten slightly more than my fair share of bugs.  Some accidentally.  Think of riding a bicycle or motorbike with an open mouth here.  Some bugs (more than I would like to admit) I ate on purpose.  There was a stretch of time (I like to refer to it as high school) where I captured and purposefully ate live flies and moths just to be weird.

It totally worked. 

I was weird.

More recently, I have tried both coconut worms and crickets for dinner.

Not bad, actually

I bring this up in light of a sad story I read the other day.  The story was about a young man from Sydney, Australia, named Sam Ballard.

Back in 2010, Sam was your typical 19-year-old rugby player type.  One night, while Sam and some of his buddies were drinking outside on a concrete patio, a slug slowly made is way across the concrete.

That’s interesting…a slug.

One of the boys, Jimmy Galvin, asked, “Should I eat it?”  Before he could answer for himself, Sam Ballard leapt to action.  He swept up the slug and gulped it down.

At his age, I would have done that…just to be weird.

Shortly after eating the slug, Sam became weak and complained of severe pain in his legs.  As his illness intensified, he was taken to see some doctors.  At this point, Sam admitted to his mother that he had eaten the slug.  She responded, “No one gets sick from that.”

Not long after Sam’s mother made that statement, a group of doctor’s contradicted her.  Sam, they determined, had contracted rat lungworm disease as a direct result of eating the slug.

Slugs can be a vector for the rat lungworm disease.  The disease, as the name might suggest, is caused by a parasitic worm that attacks the lungs of rats.  The parasites are also found rat excrement.  If a slug should happen to eat some of the rat’s pellets and then a human should happen to eat such a slug…well you know where this is going.

Rat lungworm larvae can successfully survive in humans.  Once inside humans, however, the worm larvae tend to get lost in unfamiliar territory.  In the case of Sam Ballard, the larvae migrated to his brain and remained there. 

Sam quickly fell into a coma that lasted and astonishing 420 days.

Though Sam climbed his way out of the coma, he woke to being virtually paralyzed.  To survive from then on, he required 24-hour care. 

Sam’s friends and family continued to rally around him, but his survival was a constant struggle.  The other day, some eight years after Sam ate the slug, he died.

I am here to tell you, I could have easily been Sam Ballard.  It’s the smallest weirdest things you do that might get you.

--Mitchell Hegman

You can’t go wrong with Food

Many of my friends—from all political spectrums—have been seeking and gradually drifting to intake only television “news” they agree with.  They end up watching a single channel.

I generally flip around the channels and watch a bit of everything.

I have never considered news to be something I should necessarily agree with.

Recently, just for fun, I hunted through my television channel options to see if I could land on something I agreed with.

I gave it a good shot.

As it shakes out, Food Network programming is as close as I can get to anything I regularly agree with.

--Mitchell Hegman

20 Pounds of Breakfast Time

If you live with a cat, you may be under some duress at present.  Cats, you see, don’t submit to most of our silly human notions.  This idea of setting our clocks back by one hour, in particular, is not settling well with my 20 pounds of house cat.

As far as my cat is concerned, breakfast time is breakfast time.  In the name of daylight saving time, we can set our clocks to any old time we want, but he expects me feed him at the same time I fed him last week and the week before.

Surprisingly enough, one of my idols, Benjamin Franklin, first entertained the idea of setting clocks ahead each spring and back each fall in an essay entitled “An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.”  The essay was published in 1784.  Obviously, Franklin did not consult his cat while writing the treatise.  The idea was largely ignored for the next 100-plus years.  Finally, in 1916, the British Parliament introduced “British Summer Time,” the very idea Franklin had suggested.

Again, no housecats were consulted.

In 1918, the U.S. House of Representatives voted in favor of seasonally adjusting our clocks.  I won’t go into all of the details, but a lot of public outcry followed.  The American polity rejected the notion of tinkering with “God’s time.”  Eventually, the federal government allowed state and local governments do decide on adopting or rejecting daylight saving time.  In 1966 Congress enacted the Uniform Time Act.  The idea was to encourage states to uniformly observe the time change.  Even given that, Hawaii, Arizona, and some U.S. territories still take exception and leave time unchanged.

So here we are today.  The time change has pulled the rug out from under my 20 pounds of housecat.

He is definitely a “God’s time” sympathizer.   

--Mitchell Hegman

Sex Robots

Having worked in the electrical industry for most of my adult life, I learned to be somewhat cautious about adopting new technologies.  Often, the first generation of a new thing is plagued by pesky engineering shortfalls.  Additionally, the initial cost is somewhat elevated.

LED lighting sources are a perfect example of this.

Same for solar photovoltaic systems.

I held back a little before fully embracing both of these technologies.  But am all in now.  As I write this, I am bathed in the warm 2700 Kelvin light provided by LED retrofit bulbs.  Somewhere near half the energy I presently use is provided by my own solar PV system.  

So, let’s talk about sex.

I have been seeing articles in more than a few news outlets about the rise of sex robots.  Japanese men have so embraced (pun intended) sex dolls, some researchers fear it has led to that countries current decline in birth rates.

Okay, that’s a little weird.

One thing is certain: The dolls are on their way to becoming full-fledged robots.  Artificial intelligence will soon be a standard feature for the robots. 

I am not quite ready to crawl into bed with a compendium of servomotors and silicone.

There is a pretty big gulf between lighting up my room and lighting up my life.

Just to be creepy, I have posted a video (no sex involved) featuring Harmony, the sex robot.

--Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orBH_Qnw3eY

An Brief, Ugly Autumn Poem

Outside, autumn’s bare trees sift through wind

with a dismal grace only bare trees can afford.

Your neighbor’s cat pounced upon the last remaining songbird,

a meadowlark,

and now a string of feathers tumbles eastward

across your tawny grass.

This is not a pretty picture,

but you and the sun stopped being judgmental at the end of August.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Lithium Ion Battery Explosion

Energy storage may well be the next big thing in the electrical world.  In particular, considerable effort and change is taking place in the arena of storage batteries.  Energy density in battery cells has increased dramatically (and continues to do so).  With that, comes an elevated potential for catastrophic failure.  Posted today is a video of two lithium ion batteries forced into thermal runaway.  Watch this video to the end so you can get some idea of just how much energy we are seeing in our small batteries.

Keep in mind that thermal runaway can be triggered by overheating, overcharging, or physically damaging some battery types. 

 

--Mitchell Hegman

Video Link:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08BoXebt_pk&t=1s